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16
It was pretty boring out there, you were just out there, and of course you'd be on radio
watch. We decided one day we'd go hunting. We walked and about two or three miles from
this, where we were at this bridge was a village. It had a wall around it. We went up and,
you know, Marines, we're gonna do whatever we want to do. We went in the village, there
were, I don't know, two, three hundred people maybe in it. And I never will forget this and
I talked to, I told my wife about this the other day. There was a red headed boy in there
about that big, and they all kept making fun of him. He was red headed, and you know
what that meant. Somebody, his mother, somewhere there'd been a whatever, and they
kept making fun of him. And I told my wife, we saw something on television, it was
talking about things, how people get picked on and so on, but he had lived with that in
that place and I'm sure it wasn't a good experience for him.
They had a mule that they said we had shot in the leg. There were I think half a dozen of
us or so in the party, and a corpsman was with, their corpsman was with us, and a
gunnery sergeant. And then me as a radio man. And I don't remember how many of us,
but anyway we went back and the corpsman told them he'd bring some medicine back.
We had, I don't know what it was, it was purple in color that they used to put on if you had
jungle rot, you had all kinds of stuff. This gunnery sergeant, Bobish was his name, and
the corpsman went back that afternoon and took this medication. As they got up close to
the village, the corpsman said there was some old man came out and motioned for them
to go back. Well, they kept on walking of course. They started firing at them. They hit the
gunnery sergeant and the corpsman, he took off, and I could hear the shots, I was a long
way off, but I could see him running, and he came running in and told us what had
happened, so the lieutenant had me get on the radio and call the battalion and they sent,
the only way you could go back and forth was on a train. So they sent up a platoon and two
or three officers came out that evening. It was pretty hot around there, there was about
thirty, thirty-five of us, and this platoon, and nothing happened that night, but we were
on full alert all night long.
The next morning they went over there and found the gunnery sergeant's body, and they
had taken his weapon. There wasn't anything in the village, there wasn't anybody there,
but the thing is, and this was going on all the time, they had bandits that would travel in
bands, and they would come in and do what they wanted in a village and take food and
then just move on. It could have been that, or it could have been the Chinese Communists.
We never did know who it was.
They brought the gunny's body in and took it back on the train. There was an article in
the paper, that I brought with me, telling about it, it was at Bridge Twenty-one at Lutai,
is what they said, about this gunnery sergeant Bobish being killed. And our concern
was, now we did this voluntarily, is that gonna be called, is his wife gonna be able to get
his insurance. We were very concerned about that. And was the lieutenant gonna be in
trouble because we'd gone off and left our post there. Well, nothing ever occurred, I mean,
that we knew of. That was worked through. So everything did come out, it did come out
okay, and what happened to him, he was buried there, I assume, hat's all we ever knew.