<Begin Segment 15>

MN: Before we go there, I wanted to ask you a little bit more about, you got there, you're with Captain Crossfield, you're going to the front lines, and you saw your first dead Marine? And how did that make you feel?

RW: Actually, yeah, I saw a dead enemy before, and I would just casually think, wow, he's just laying there and nobody's doing anything about it, and he must have a family, this and that. But what really struck me was when Captain Crossfield and I were going up there another time in the jeep, well, we were going along this road and he says, "Watch out, be ready to jump off because this is where I got some incoming yesterday." So sure enough, a few minutes later here come these shells exploding towards us, and he slams on the brakes, we jump in a ditch, and soon as it was over then we just took off and went to the front line. As we got there he stopped at one of the tanks that was on the side of the road to talk to 'em, and so I got out, walked over to look, I saw somebody layin' on the tank, so I went up to see, and there was a Marine layin' on the back of the tank. I looked close. There was a little hole in his neck, side of his neck, and they weren't treating him or anything, so I figured he was dead. Right then the first thought that came to my mind was, here I am looking at this dead Marine, he has a family somewhere back home. It's the middle of the night there, it's the middle of the day here, they don't know. They're just sleeping. They don't know he was killed. They won't know for a while. I was so sad, it was a sad feeling to think that way, and I don't know why I thought that particular way, I ran across other bodies and I would think of their families, their parents, maybe they got a wife, and they don't know they're dead but I do. I wish I could tell 'em. Nowadays, in today's war, Afghanistan, I understand these guys are in touch with their cell phones and they can talk to each other on the phone and all kinds of stuff like that, so if somebody gets hurt or gets killed it's instant they can find out. But then in those days it was not like today, so somebody was hurt or killed, the family wouldn't know for a long time.

MN: And it sounds like you had similar feelings for the dead enemy bodies that you saw.

RW: Yeah. If I saw an enemy soldier body I would think the same way. When I was transferred to a tank and we were on this hill firing across this valley at this opposite hill where there were some machine gun bunkers up there, and this one guy must've been North Korean or Chinese, was running up the hill. They just yelled, "Throw high explosive in there, get an HE in there," and we fired and the guy's gone. The gun on the tank just blew him, blew him all to pieces. And then I thought about that and I thought, gosh, we had to do that 'cause if we let him go he's gonna go up there and fire the machine gun and maybe he's gonna kill some of the Marines, so it was our job to protect 'em. But I thought, I felt for his family, but I didn't feel for him. I felt like, sort of like payback time. It was payback, you know? That doesn't bring Madrid back, but it was, for my heart, it was a payback to really just actually kill somebody that I wasn't in combat on the ground and fighting in the trenches to be able to say, here, this is for Madrid, but I did finally feel a little bit of a payback on that day. But I still felt, well, his family is probably gonna suffer because they don't know what happened to him, and on the other hand, Madrid's family is gonna be sad and unhappy too because they're not gonna see him again. So it's an exchange. Not a fair one, not a fair exchange, but life for life.

MN: Now, you were in the tank unit. Had you done hand to hand combat, and you're having these, you're very sensitive about the family of the soldiers, could you have killed somebody? Could you have killed the enemy?

RW: Well, I have to say that this is the way it is with all guys in fighting and combat, is that you fight and kill somebody, it's because it's him or you. If you don't kill him he's gonna kill you, so which is more important, his life or yours? In my opinion my life, this Marine or this U.S. soldier's life is more important than the enemy's life, and the more you can kill of them the less chance there are of them killing our guys. Yeah, I would, I would say to protect myself I would not hesitate, like none of the other guys hesitate, other guys like Hershey Miyamoto. He didn't hesitate to kill people and protect his guys. Do it for protection. You do it to protect your own life and protect the lives of your fellow soldiers. And I think that's why you're there fighting.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.