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Holcomb explained it was the battalion commander himself who insisted my platoon lead again, since we had been the last ones in contact with the enemy and therefore knew his location better than anyone else. I still felt misused but didn’t trust myself to say anything.
    We struggled off in the attack after hastily jamming down a cold K ration breakfast. This time, as we headed for Le Mesnil Herman, we at least could see where we were going and didn’t have to stick to the road. The tankscut straight across the hedgerows behind which the Germans had been the night before.
    Rifles and machine guns opened up on us at once with an angry clatter. My men ran over the rough field as fast as they could to get behind the tanks, and they fired their rifles back at the hedgerows whenever possible. They panted for breath, and their faces were flushed.
    Each tank had two machine guns and one 75mm cannon, and they let go with all weapons blasting away as they drove ahead. The enemy were so well pinned down they didn’t even lift up enough to fire their panzerfausts at our tanks. Soon our combined firepower was too much for them, and they began to wave white handkerchiefs. I learned later that over two hundred prisoners had been taken in this attack, and I’m sure glad I hadn’t known there were that many of them around. Some of them, I think, must have come from beyond the small fields we fought in.
    The Germans usually were very good at taking care of their dead and wounded. After burials they stuck a bayonet on the man’s rifle and jammed the rifle in the ground at the head of the grave, with the soldier’s dog tags hanging on the stock and his helmet on top of the butt.
    We did pass about ten new graves, obviously dug during the night, and this must have been the toll of our grenades. There was no way of knowing, of course, how many additional might have been wounded.
    As we continued forward a frightful, almost inhuman scream came from the hedgerow close by on my left. I jumped through and found a wounded German bellowing in terror. He lay in the cart trail that ran down the middle of the hedgerow, and he was right in the path of one of our tanks. The tank was buttoned up, and the driver probably couldn’t even look down to the road through his vision slits.
    I instinctively jumped in front of the tank, waved it to ahalt, and dragged the wounded man to the side. His eyes showed me gratitude far better than words—for I wouldn’t have understood words anyway. I couldn’t help wondering whether a German would have helped me the same way, but somehow a helpless wounded man didn’t seem like an enemy.
    As we finally came to the first buildings on the edge of Le Mesnil Herman we began to pick up some sniper fire and had to hit the ground and then run from cover to cover. We moved quickly from house to house and found that most of the enemy had fled.
    As we crossed one street my radioman was shot by a sniper hiding in the upper floor over a store. I had crossed the road myself running hard, with the radioman following. It seems he had dropped a K-ration box, roughly the size of a carton of cigarettes, in the street and stupidly went back to pick it up. When he bent down to pick it up, the sniper got him.
    Our platoon medic rushed out to pull the radioman back, but he was already dead. Before the medic could run back, the sniper shot him in the side—even though he wore on chest and back the big red cross on white background that is supposed to give immunity. The medic was able to drag himself back to shelter, where he calmly dressed his own wound and stayed in action. He would have evacuated a rifleman with a similar wound, but he knew how badly he himself was needed.
    To my mind, the medics were the unsung heroes of the war. Their duty was so routinely hazardous that it was hard to tell when they went beyond its call. Most important was their deep effect on morale; we just knew that if we ever got hit, a medic would come out to