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Mr. Coleman No, we didn't do that because they would have to set it up. It was a controller plane. They
didn't care about us jumping, as much as they cared about our tactics on the ground, at that
point. And they would give you a certain objective, and they would give somebody else an
objective to defend it. And you'd have a little red ribbon or a blue ribbon depending on w hat
side you were on. They would be there with a hat, like that. And they would be identified
with a white ribbon. They would be standing there dead. Your whole platoon would be
wiped out. I thought we could play games. It really was good. They didn't pay attention to
the individuals as much as they did tactics and minutes used. In other words, if some platoon
leader made a mistake, they w ould just wipe out the whole damn platoon. Even though that
probably would not have happened. So you played those games night and day.
Mr. Cox Did you use any blank ammo or did you use live ammo, or did you use any ammo?
Mr. Coleman We used blank ammo just for the fact of getting you kind of psyched up. The officer put
restrictions on that because, a lot of the stuff, well, you were too close. You couldn't do that.
If you sneaked up on a truck parked somewhere, or a guy in a jeep, and you run up behind him
and stuck a gun in the back of his head, you didn't want it to accidentally go off. It was not a
game in the sense that there was no physical contact. You did as much of that as you could
possibly get away with. Your frame of mind was that this was the enemy. There were no
good old boys out there. It was really like a little wNar. I guess some of the guys got kind of
upset about it and just w ouldn't let it happen. and w ouldn't buy into it. But I was right there.
I thought it was fun. a real war - all over east Tennessee. I got separated from my outfit in the
little town of (?????) Tennessee. They were gone, and it was night. They had walked off in
the dark and I was still sitting there talking. And when we got through talking, we were the
only ones there. It w as cold and raining. And I remember going to the Sheriff, to the jail, and
asking him if we could spend the night in jail. He said, yeah. And we did. The next day, of
course, we took off and finally got back. Several years later when I went to Law School, I
went to school in Lebanon, Tennessee. I went down and met that same sheriff. I had no idea I
was going to wind up there ever, but I did. Tennessee was miserable. The only good thing
about Tennessee was at night you could kind of sneak off from your outfit. If you saw a
farmhouse lit up, five or six of you would sneak over there, knock on the back door, and the)
w ould come. You knew they had a still out there. The lady would have a little bottle with
cotton for it, and a cotton dress on. And just be the nicest people you ever saw. We would
say, "Could we sleep in your barn tonight on your haystack?" And, of course, they all said
yes. I never was treated so welcome in my life. All over Tennessee, I slept in a million barns
in the haystacks. And then, the next day, they would invite you in for breakfast. And, of
course, breakfast to us was a K-ration, a biscuit. We didn't have cooks. We had those K-
ration boxes. We'd have eggs, ham, biscuits, real biscuits, and coffee, real coffee. And they
would just treat us like we were their own children, sons. Every farmer, every place was like
that. Every Place. You'd want to say, "Could we pay you for this?" But that was an insult
So we finally got to where, we didn't have any money really, we'd just take a dollar and slide
it under the plate and say nothing. The people were so into that war, and into what we were
doing, they w ere used to the maneuvers and the soldiers; and they knew what we wNere doing
and how we were living in the wringing wet and cold. And it was a great American thing that
they wxere doing for us. So, we slept in barns w hen we could. Otherwise you just slept under
a bush or something.
Mr. Cox They had pup tents. Did you have pup tents as part of your pack?
Mr. Coleman Yeah, wxe did. We sure did. Of course, we'd have a half a tent, and wxe'd snap them together.
And you'd have two guys in a tent. That was all theoretical too, because if y ou w ere fighting,
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