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MN: And then before we move on to France, I was wondering, when you folks were in Italy, what contact did you have with, say, the Italian civilians?

KM: Very little contact in Italy because we were always in a combat zone. Especially for the artillery, we would be in the front longer than the infantry, the infantry would have rest periods. After being up there for one week, somebody else would be replacing them. But the artillery will be there all the time in support until the entire regiment got the relief, then we would have a period of, a rest period when the entire combat team would be in a so-called rest area and we would regroup. Any training to be done, like I mentioned on the ammunition, unfortunate incident, things like that will be done during this week. And one of the most cherished things that we did was, you know, up there, there was no bathing facilities. We would take a bath with our helmet, and that's how we took a bath. Or if there was a pool nearby or swimming, river or whatever, which wasn't that often, we could. But when, these so-called rest periods, there would be bathing facilities, they will be portable baths that would come within the area, we'd go to that area where there was  makeshift tents, showers and you will get in line and you drop off your clothes at one end of the tent, get through the line, and they would be, we'll give you five minutes to take a shower and clean yourself up, soap yourself up and move on. And next, five minutes to rinse yourself and you get out and then you get new clothes that's waiting at the end of the line. But this was a pleasurable experience usually, about after a month of being up in the front. And it was something that was a great relief. Of course, your PX supplies would come in there, too. Although PX supplies would invariably come no matter where you were, within about every two weeks it was, we would get PX supplies. And one of our favorite pastime at that time was reading pocket books. And my favorite was... and we'd all fight for the cowboy books right away. And the other maybe ten, fifteen books or maybe, for a battery, there would be about twenty different types of books. But everybody would be picking the, looking for the cowboy books. I got to know quite a few of the cowboy book authors. To this day I remember the authors of these western books.

MN: And then I also was curious, I've heard of men who, during their time in Italy, acquired a taste for Italian food, say, spaghetti. How about in...

KM: The infantry boys had, when they were in the rest area, they had more leisure, and I think they had more opportunity to mingle with the civilian people. But the artillery, we didn't have that many occasions. Once in a while we're out in the farmlands, we would come across farmers who still... wartime, especially in Italy, the farmers never left their homes. They would be there until a battle comes and they would evacuate temporarily. When the battle is over, they're right back into their homes. And so when the battles were over, we would be able to have an opportunity to meet the farmers' family and some of us... not everybody, small groups would have opportunity to bargain with them for chicken, eggs and whatever. But in return, we would give chocolate and coffee grounds and whatnot.

MN: And how would you folks prepare the chicken and eggs?

KM: You know, you'd be surprised how... well, eggs, everybody just either fried or boiled it. It was a luxury item which... although you know we had all these powdered eggs and everything for breakfasts, because the artillery was fortunate, we always had, almost all of the time we had warm food. Mess hall always caught up with us, and we will have at least one day, one meal we would have warm food brought up to us. Every battery had a mess hall and the food would be brought up to us. But in the infantry they had more lines of K rations, which was ready-made. But in the artillery, we were very fortunate to have warm meals at least once a day. And people always had, some of them always had a supply of shoyu and things like that, surprisingly. We did receive care packages from home, you know. Yeah, we would receive care packages, various types of... and so invariably, cooking supplies were part of the care packages that everyone would get.

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