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MN: But before you go there, you were at headquarters, and you work with Captain Crossfield?

RW: Yeah.

MN: What were some of your duties and how did you help your captain, Crossfield?

RW: Well, Captain Crossfield was the operations officer, so he was always going up to the front lines for different things, and if he was going he'd always call me to go with him. And sometimes if he thought we were gonna need the interpreter then they would take the interpreter, but they used me to talk to the interpreter in Japanese 'cause he spoke Japanese, and then I would tell them in English what he said. I'd say maybe forty percent of what was relayed was accurate. [Laughs] And the other sixty percent was guesswork. Captain Crossfield would just maybe call out, say, "Wada, grab the Thompson --" it's a submachine gun -- "Grab the Thompson. Let's go." So I'd grab my helmet, and then we'd go in the jeep up to the front line. And it was during that period, that one time we were up there, we went all the way up to the trenches of Hill 749 and he went up there because, I guess we were controlling the tank fire and stuff, and that one day we were there up in the trenches and then of course we got shelled a few times, and when we were finished and we came back down and got in the jeep, start heading back toward battalion headquarters, and that's when, as I was looking at the guys along the side of the road, the Marines were sittin' on the side of the road on a short break, and of all the Marines sittin' there I spotted Bat. And I yelled out, "Bat," and Captain Crossfield stopped the jeep and said, "Who's that, your compadre?" And I said, "Yes, Sir. That's my buddy from back home." He says, "Well go talk to him. I'll wait for you. They're gonna hit the hill next." I said, "Thank you, Sir," and I ran over there and talked to Bat and asked him where my brother was. He pointed back to a ravine back and said, "They're coming from behind us." I don't know why I asked him such a dumb question, but I asked him, "How do you feel? Are you scared?" And he said, "Well, I wasn't worried until we found out we're gonna be the point platoon," which is, obviously, the first guys to make an attack and get the enemy to shoot at you to find out where they're at 'cause you don't know where they're at until then. Well, a few hours after that when they launched their attack, then he was killed, of course, I didn't know that for probably weeks, 'til I saw the casualty list. And then I saw another casualty list and I saw my brother's name on there as wounded, so that was a double shock for me.

MN: And this was September 13, 1951?

RW: September, yeah, he was killed September 13, 1951. Yeah.

MN: And your brother, Hank, was also injured on that same day.

RW: On the same day, same battle, same, same time, yeah.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.