Childhood and call to service

First meal in the Army

Training and duties for Third Field Artillery Observation Battalion at Fort Bragg

Trip to Europe prior to D-Day, and the scene after

Unit's movement across France to Zweibrucken, Germany

Rapid promotions

When Sergeant Hoyle quit and rabbit stew

Unusual wound

Compassion for the enemy and 'the little red wagon'

The horrors of Dachau

Where he was when he heard the war in Europe was over

'Der Deutchen Muhter'

Interview with Jack Vernon Hoyle

Interviewer: Nancy Potts Coward

Photographer: Kim Lambert

Audio/Video: Curtis Lambert

Transcript: Kim B. Lambert

Interviewer: Mr. Hoyle, I've read your book, A Place to Call Home and I'm fascinated by your account of what life was like growing up in the mountains of Western North Carolina. Will you describe that part of your life?

Vernon: Well, it's hard to say where-where to start-where to begin. It was much different back then to what it is today. We walked everywhere we had to go. Dad and Mother moved every whipstitch. We were never in one place very long at a time. But I remember when I was just a teenager and radio came along, we didn't have radio at home, and I would walk from Addie to the head of Weychona Saturday night just to see-not to see but to -to hear the Grand Ole Opry, Grandpa Jones and all that outfit. But it was a life like that.

I: Tell us about your call to service and your induction into the army at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. And may I remind you not to forget your physical examination before you went, and your first meal in the army.

V: I was drafted in Nineteen Forty One, and back then we was- we went into the army just for one year, to get one year's training and..but Dr.. Hooper in Sylva gave me my examination. He was my daddy and mother's family doctor. Well, Doc Hooper didn't pay much attention to me. He wore glasses, and had a thing that when he 'd kinda look straight at you, well, he 'd crinkle up his nose and push his glasses up.

He 'd crinkle up his nose, and he 'd look kindly under them at me and said, "There ain't 't nothing wrong with you, is there son?"

Course I said no, and that was my examination before they sent me to Fort Jackson. So...I didn't have anything wrong with me. I was tough as a pine knot, the way we had to live, making cord wood, getting wood at home for the cook stove and the fireplace and...that's when we got to Fort Jackson-on the way down I'll tell you one little incident that happened.

There was a boy from — I think he was from up on  Savannah on the bus with us and he — they — some of them was drinking beer, and I think he 'd had a few, but he-he got to getting right serious about it.

He says, "Boys, I just don't see how I can go; I haven't planted my corn yet. "

And everybody laughed, but just a whole lot of things like that happened along the way. When we got to Fort Jackson, we got there late in the afternoon, late in the evening, late after most people-most of the soldiers had had their evening meal. But we unloaded off of the bus and some others unloaded off of more buses and it was just guys everywhere. This is before we got uniforms; we hadn't even been sworn in or anything. But they lined us on up and was rushing us along to get to the chow hall before dark. He gave us a mess kit and the lid and a tin cup. Took that mess kit and went down to the chow line. They had the...containers of food, must have held about ten gallons, about this high (gestures) I guess. And they were up on a bench; we couldn't see what was inside-couldn't see what we were getting and I just held mine up there like the guy in front of me did, you know, and they ladled out ever what was in that bin.

An he d say — they'd say, "Do you want some of this?"

I Had no idea in the world what it was, but yeah, we 'd been all day hadn't had much to eat. So they filled that mess kit.

Got down there the last guy said, "You want dessert?"

Yeah, he ladled out my dessert. I pulled my pan down, looked in it — I had roast beef, mashed potatoes, green beans, in the bottom. They had poured brown gravy all over the top. And my dessert was two apricot halves laying in the gravy right on top of the mess kit. I didn't know whether to eat it or throw it away. But I ate it. That was-I'll never forget that first meal, in the Army. My first meal as-well, I wasn't even a soldier then, but that was the first meal there.

I: Describe for us your training at Fort Bragg, (interruption) when you were assigned to the Third Field Artillery Observation Battalion; what the duties of such a battalion were.

V: They put me in a training-put everybody in a training-basic training center when you go into the Army. And..it's mostly to make you learn to stand at attention, learn how to salute and..they taught us communication. And I maybe thought that's what I'd be doing something with radio or telephone. We learned to lay telephone wires and use a field telephone in the basic-in our basic training. When the basic training was over, they moved us over in the-on the main post, and they formed a new battalion. I don't know whether this was new for the Army at the time. I kind of think that it was. We were a flash and sound-ranging battalion and...our main purpose was to get a ..to...well, shoot... to locate enemy artillery from the flash of the gun or the from the sound of the gun. Weill ended up in the flash section. And we had to take instruments; telescopes that you could look through and it had a round base plate that had graduated in mils instead of degrees like surveyors use... it was a French instrument. And we would look through that out over the field in front of you, and when an enemy gun fired they always make a flash at the muzzle, and we would zero in on that flash, and we would have three to four observation posts on hills, up trees, on house tops, or anywhere we could get up high to look over the trees or out-all the way out in front where say the enemy would be, you know, and we'd zero in on a particular gun. All of us could talk to each other either by radio or by telephone. They'd lay field-field wire and wire us up with telephones. And that was the purpose of our Battalion. I was called an Observer. Started out as an observer on an observation post.

I: Probably the most memorable thing that happened during your time at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, didn't take place there at all but rather in Clayton, Georgia on October twenty first, Nineteen Forty Six. Tell us about it.

V: (chuckles) Okay, that's when I got married I 'd met this little girl out in Lovesfield upfront Sylva and just fell head over heels in love. I don't know whether she was in love with me or the uniform. But anyway we-we went to Clayton, Georgia and got married and while I was in Fort Sill, Oklahoma. But she never did go back to the army-I wanted her to go back to the Army with me and live with me down there. Cause I was -we were field educational troops for the Officer Training at Fort Sill. So I thought I would spend all my time in the service right there. But it turned out different Anyhow, Mary and I are still together, sixty years later. So that was a high point in my life right there.

I: Could you tell us a little bit about your trip to Europe, what happened to you before 'D-Day.'

V: We left Fort Sill, Oklahoma and stayed six months in the desert in California and... from the desert we went to Camp Kilburn, New Jersey, through Camp Kilburn, New Jersey, and took-had our last examination and our last furloughs home and then got on the Aquirania, big British ship. Which she was the Queen of the Seas. I think she was built about Nineteen and thirteen. And had a lot of troops on there. If my memory's right, there was about thirteen thousand American and Canadian troops on the ship, and I remember the shifts crew was fifteen hundred, that gives you kind of an idea how big it was. And..we went to Belfast, Ireland, and stayed in Belfast in-out in the middle part-middle part of Ireland at Armoi for a few months and finally moved into England and was in a camp in Wales up from Southhampton when 'D-Day' came along.

I: Assigned to the Fifteenth Corps of General Patton's Third Army, you landed in France June twentieth, Nineteen Forty Four, exactly 2 weeks after 'D-Day.' Describe the scene as you recall it.

V: We went across the Chanel from England in a little freight. She was small ...I don't know whether there was any-we had about three hundred-three hundred fifty men in our battalion, and I don't know whether there was any other soldiers on there or not. But we went over in the hole of that little ship, and it had been carrying either coal or lamp black or something because the walls and the floors and everything was just covered in soot. And we looked like colored boys time we got to France. It was hot. You would sweat- everybody- when you 'd look at-when you 'd look at your buddy, he 'd have streaks running down his face where he was sweating through that soot on his face We had on-in June and warm weather, but we had on-they 'd made us put on our winter underwear and on-on top of that they were impregnated with stuff that would repel mustard gas. The scuttlebutt was that the Germans was going to throw us back into the sea with a gas attack, so that's the reason they had us dressed up like that. That was a mess. A real mess. But when we got to the coast, the., beaches had been cleaned up. That was about two weeks after the invasion. We didn't see any troops there on-on the beach. The troops held the beachhead just a-I would say not over five miles from the beach back inland went in at a place called Saint Mair Englis, France. It wa-It was-it was just before you could-could just go over to the top of a hill the other side of Saint Mair, and there was Saint Lo, that-that was where the Germans..when I was there. But lots of tanks, there was tanks, trucks, every kind of equipment that a soldier would have was strewn on the beach; none of that kind of stuff had been moved, taken up. They had laid mesh wire, or mesh steel, on the beach to keep us from miring down in the sand when we drove our trucks off the barges. Our-our outfit was mechanized; we didn't walk from place to place. We rode. I had a jeep, I had —I was a buck sergeant and.. I was in charge of six men besides myself We rode in the jeep and-a command car. The command car is just a-a touring car, front and a back seat. Of course in..in combat, you can turn the windshields down and cover them up so they don't reflect light, for camouflage and the top is all open, so-and all of our equipment was piled on those two vehicles. Seven men and-and our equipment, our guns.

I: Will you describe your unit's movement across France, from St. Lo to Fort....

V: Manonviller?

V: Yes, okay that-that trip across France took us from June twentieth until about March or April of the following spring. We fought through Abrece Lorraine, and it- things kind of bogged down and we just-we just ranged back and forth across the ridges, but in-in borders of Sal Alsasper Lorraine and Germany and at old Fort Manonviller, that was a high hill and I had an observation post in the edge of the old moat that was around the-the fort. Some-some antiaircraft outfit had moved into the fort, so we had to stay out here on this perimeter where the-where the moat had been. We dug a hole back in the bank, and it was a rainy time, and we dug a hole enough for seven men to lie down and stretch out our sleeping bags and sleep-or blankets, we didn't have sleeping bags. But just up front where we slept on top of the bank, we set up our instruments. And from that instrument, I could see Zweibrucken, Germany. Our-our outfit was equipped and kept up with things that was going on. One of our objectives was furnishing the Corps with intelligence-intelligence... We were up on the front so we could see what was going on, and what we saw went straight back to the -the big General in-in Corps and also along with that we fired artillery...fired Corps artillery if we saw a target to shoot at.

I: I was impressed by your promotions in rank. Do you remember where and why each promotion occurred?

V: Well I got..I got a Corporal rating pretty soon after we-...when the outfit was formed because the job that they put me to doing carried a corporal's rating. I didn't -I didn't really earn it or anything like that. We were all green horns as to what we were doing. But if the job... rated a sergeant or a corporal or whatever, well that's what they made us. They gave us that kind of a rank After that it was sort of a merit thing. Finally I made sergeant. When I made sergeant, I was in charge of the -of the small group-seven men.

I: Always there are high points and low points. Tell about the time Sergeant Hoyle told the Command Center to send someone to replace him. And then tell about the "rabbit stew."

V: (chuckles) While we were at old Fort Manonviller, I think I said before-it was a rainy time. It was a miserable way to live; we stayed wet all the time. When you walked-when you walked back away from the bank where we were staying or got out, well you'd mire up—the mud would come up almost to the top of your boots. It was just a sloppy, just an awful sloppy time. I-I had been on the instrument one morning, and I observed an enemy artillery about- I would guess about a half a mile out in front of us. He wasn't shooting on top of the hill, where I was, but they were really tearing up the infantry that was in the woods down at the foot of the hill. And I was looking right down the barrel of about eight or twelve guns. And it was-it was just: boom, boom, boom! Boom, boom, boom! Over and over and over. And I had a good, good view of it. One of my other buddies had a good view of it. And we..got a triangulation point on it and sent the coordinates in for a fire mission. Waited and waited and waited. Nothing happened, and we did it again, and I was getting more disgusted all the time. I guess it was down later in the evening and...hadn't had a response to my call to fire all day. And when I come in and I asked to talk to the sergeant down at the headquarters that 's where the plotting board was that took care of our information, and then they were supposed to send it on to corps, hook us up with an artillery gun, so we could shoot. And I asked what had happened to it. Couldn't find out; nobody knew.

And here we 'd been laying out there in that mud for nearly a month; first opportunity we 'd had to make any kind of a change or to do anything, like kill some Germans; and I just told them, I just said, "Well, how about-- I'm going to go down here, and get in my sack. You tell that lieutenant to send somebody out here to take my place. I'm not-I'm quitting."

And I did. I quit. And the..sergeant that I had reported to in the command center called me and tried to cool my feathers down, and smooth things over, and I wouldn't listen to him.

He said, "You know they can shoot you for this." I didn't 't care; I really didn't 't care, the way we 'd been having to live and then see something that we thought we could do some good and couldn't get any response at all. And I 'just had enough right then. I lay there all night. I slept some. But every time I 'd wake up, I 'd-I 'd think about it. Next morning sometime, well the sun was up, next morning-I heard somebody walk up, was talking to the boys outside.

And he said, "Is Sergeant Hoyle here?"

They said, "Yeah, he's in there in his sack."

"Tell him to get out here."

Well, I just -I didn't gather up my stuff, but I thought I might as well gather up my stuff, that they 'd come after me. Come out there, and it was our Colonel. Commanding officer.

He says, "Sergeant Hoyle, how long you fellas been living like this?"

We all looked like a bunch of hogs that'd just been wallowing in the mud. Every one of us. No shaving, we hadn't 't shaved- it was useless to try to wash, our clothes was just mud.

It was-that 's the truth, and. "How long you fellas been living like this? " and I told him how long we 'd been there -about three weeks.

"Three weeks, sir."

Well he said, "bring me a map."

And I went and got a map. By that time he had crawled up on top of the ramps where we could see out over the front of us and where we could see Zweibrucken.

He says, "What's that town-that city over there?

Is that-" probably about fifteen to maybe twenty miles away, but we had a good view of it. I told him it was Zweibrucken, Germany. "Germany, " he said, "we'll soon be over there."

He says, "Where did you see these guns? " And I set the instrument on the little orchard where I had seen the guns. The guns had quit firing that day; they had moved out that night; they's gone. But I set it on the orchard and then let him come look through the instrument and see.

I said, "They 's right here in this orchard, sir."

He looked through it a few minutes' course wasn't anything there.Said, "Well, you boys been doing a good job of carry on." And that was the last I heard of it. I went back to work.

I: You've had me crying over that so now tell about the rabbit stew and let me laugh.

V: (laughing) Rabbit stew...when we first got into France, we-we- we were running into..about every farm house would have a rabbit hatch or a hutch, where they raised white rabbits; they ate white rabbits. We were eating K rations. That 's just a box of crackers and a little can of meat, that's all we had that 's all we-that 's all we had, all through the war, was K rations. Had plenty of that, but, boy, you'd get hungry for something to eat. We would catch rabbits, .when we'd find a rabbit or chickens, we'd get a house-a pot from a house we finally just stole a pot from a house and carried it with us, so when we caught a rabbit or could catch a chicken, well, we'd skin them, skin the rabbit, skin the chicken, chop them up and put them in that, and put a little salt on it, salt and pepper them, and stew it and that was good eating to us. We fixed a many a white rabbit..Right on somebody else's stove, (laughs)

I: You got a wound in the war, for which you did not get a Purple Heart.

V: I wish you hadn't a brought that up. (interruption) Okay, we-we had- we had a thing in France when-we-we we would, ride and follow tanks, following General Pattton 's tanks, we 'd ride through the day and then we 'd stop at night. We'd pulled off in this little field and of course everytime you 'd stop, you 'd have to-you 'd dig a foxhole. You soon learned to dig a foxhole. Get down to where they- they couldn't hurt you. And it 'd really have to make a direct hit, you know. But we hada-Germans had a plane, and I reckon it was..was all over the front like that. After dark, this little plane just like a Piper Cub would go back and forth over the front line. And we called it Check Charlie." Didn't pay much attention to it. Did at the start, you know; it 'd scare us to death but we got kindly complacent about it. And this particular field we pulled up to this night -we passed a haystack just before we got to where we was going to camp. And I had-hit in my mind, I'll sleep in hay tonight. Get up off the ground." So I dug my foxhole; by that time it was dark. I went up, left my gun in the -I left my gun, with the muzzle sticking up, in the corner of my foxhole. Maybe it stuck up over the top of the bank about (gestures) six inches or something like that. And I went over there and got me a big arm full of that hay, coming back across the field, I was-I was within twenty or thirty feet of my foxhole, and Bed Check Charlie come over, and he dropped a flare. And those flares they 'd drop, much more than moonlight. It just lit the whole place up like you's in the middle of town. Well, it looked like it was straight over me. Well, I threw that hay down, and I run to my foxhole and I took a leap, and I went in feet first and something just tore my rear end up. I had just sat down on the end of that gun. Well, I got that off and finally the flare left and I was feeling back there you know, and I 'd come out and look at my hand, and it as bloody as it could be. I knew I was-I thought I was hurt bad Wasn't shot of course; the gun didn't go off. But.. it made me another, another hole there, beside of the one I had And I went to the medic.

They laughed; you wouldn't believe how they laughed " Sergeant..you'll never get a Purple Heart for that! Cause it's in-it 's on the wrong side!" (laughing) But that was the way that ended up, I didn't get a Purple Heart for it (chuckles).

I: One thing that struck me about your account of the war was that you never lost a sense of compassion for the enemy. Tell about your reaction to the fire bombing of Zweibrucken and the boy with the little red wagon. Two different stories.

V: Two different stories. The-the bombing of Zweibrucken, the British bom-the British bombed Zweibrucken one night, probably around ten or eleven o 'clock, with fire bombs. Fire bombs at that time were jellied gasoline bombs. I don't know how large they are-or how large they were when they dropped them from the plane. But they come-you could see them. They would light-you could see them, in the dark, that they would light, and then they would come down so far; and then they would explode and just come down like rain. Globs of jellied gasoline burning. The whole-it-you wouldn't think that anything could live through it. It was just the most horrible thing. And-and you realized it-it probably wasn't hitting soldiers. When they just dump it on a town or a city like that, well there's nothing there probably but civilians. Maybe a munitions plant or something like that.But it looked like and just felt like to me just such a silly way to do...Back when I was young, I guess one thing that-that made me think so strong about it, when I was young I saw a neighbor's house catch fire one day, and he, like us, were poor as Job's turkey-didn't have much. And I ran to his house; he was there alone, and., the fire had already burned past us doing anything about it and it had caught the broom sage-the grass fire all around and was about to burn up to the mountain. So I grabbed a-I think I grabbed a tow sack and started beating out the fire and- helped him. We finally got the fire in the woods out.

And I remember when we sat down on the bank and looked back toward the house, Harley says, "Well, Vernon-" Well, let me say this first ...the- the top had burned off, the walls had burned off and all, 'it had all just about collapsed and here in the middle of the fire was an iron bed, and it had just kindly melted into itself (gestures) like that, the mattress or straw tick or whatever they was sleeping on had burned up and just the metal part of it left. And we sat there and watched that bed go down. And Harley started crying- grown man. And I was just a big old chunk of a boy.

And., he was a crying. And he says, "Well, Vernon, it wasn't much, but it was all I had."

And that stayed with me all my life. That's one thing made firebombing look so bad to me. The little red wagon. The war was practically over. We had went through Munich, Germany and we were on the -in the suburbs of east Munich when nightfall came; we 'd just had a bad time before that with the bombing- a bomb had hit the outfit, and we lost-we lost about four or five men killed, and there were twenty four put out of commission-injured or- and killed together of our outfit. And we 'd just went through that, and we had just-then a day or two before that we had liberated the prison camp at Dachau. And...we stopped at this-on this street in town. Houses all looked alike, just a whole line of them down by the side of our convoy, and the lieutenant came around.

He said, "Sergeant Hoyle, commandeer a house," says, "We'll let everybody sleep in the bed tonight." So we just when- when I went up to the door, the first house, one closest to our jeep- knocked on the door and a man and a woman came—or-elder-elderly man and a woman came to the door. There were two small children followed and was hanging on to the-I think it was the grandpa and grandma and two children. They were flanging onto grandma's skirt. And I told them as best I could in German and with hand motions and so forth that we wanted the house to sleep in tonight. They had to leave, so we could use their house. Finally got it across to them what we expected them to do. The little boy went into the bedroom or another room of the house and come dragging a little red wagon in. Ordinary size-I said little, but it was ordinary size, big enough to haul the some merchandise, you know. So they gathered up some clothes, and they gathered up some bedding, piled on that little red wagon, pulled it out on the sidewalk, and we just stood there and watched till they got out of the way, and the kids were crying and...as they went down the street looking back at their house, find that's always stuck (begins crying) with me till today. I wrote a little piece just a week or two ago about it. And I have wished many, many times that I had slept on the ground that night. Excuse me..

I: You mentioned Dachau, and your unit was among the first of American troops to reach the concentration camp. You say it opened your eyes to the horrors of the Nazi regime. Please tell us what you saw.

V: Dachau prison camp was a-they didn't have American prisoners they-there may have been one or two in there. I never saw any Americans there. The-they were mostly Poles-Poles, Hungarians, political prisoners and...there was a crematorium at-at Dachau. Th-there was a railroad siding of tracks-railroad side tracks that ran right up by the buildings, and when we got there-when I got there, they hadn't opened the gates. But..the prisoners that could-could, that were mobile that could get out of bed and come to the-to the wire fences around the stockade, well, they were just oh, thick, fifteen maybe twenty deep back just crowded in as close as they could get. Most of them were crying, they were so happy that somebody had come. They was starved, skin and bones.. emaciated. It was really something to see. Th.. the railroad cars we had already looked at this before we got to the wire fence. But the railroad cars, there was thirty cars, in the- in the train. Half of them, fifteen of them, had been unloaded and carried into the crematorium, and the others still had the bodies in them, and they were stacked on the floor, as many as four or five deep just pitched in like you would pitch in acord wood- a stick of wood They 'd just lay like they fell when they threw them in there. You could see wounds, where they had been-puncture wounds from gun shots or otherwise...Most of them-all of them were barefooted, very scantily clothed, some of them with nothing at all on, and it just a carload of dead bodies. No..nothing covering them, they carried them into the crematorium and they had stacked them in a stack just like you would stack up cord wood: feet all one way, and head the other, up about the height of your eyes and I guess the-the length of the stack of bodies, there was probably forty or fifty feet long. That was Dachau. They told us up at the gate, some of the fellas, lots of them spoke English, so we had a good conversation with them; they said there was around thirty thousand people inside there; half of them couldn't get out of bed, that far gone. That was Dachau, and it wasn 't one of the worst prisons they had.

I: Where were you and what were you doing when you heard that the war in Europe was over?

V: From about-from Munich on to Salfzburg, Austria, we merely were in a convoy following the tanks down the main highway. And when you 'd pass a little side road, one or two —some of the outfit would kindly split out in a re-recon- how do you say it? They would go out these little side roads and-and..then we 'd move on down-further down the road. But it was just merely a thing of riding along. And we were down right close to Salzburg when we heard that the Armistice had been signed. We all stopped. Everybody that had a gun fired up what ammunition he had the big guns, artillery piece. They just pulled them out by the side of the road and fired their guns, the big ones, aimed them up on top of the mountain.

I: Would you pick up that German medal beside you and tell us what it is and how you got it?

V: {picks up medal) Just before we got to Munich, we had passed Dachau. And it-it wasn't too far outside of Munich. It was a cross, it's a German medal that a German woman had on, just had it around her neckband I asked her what it was. She spoke a little English, enough broken English till we could- we could talk to her. I asked her what it was.

She says, "That s a medal Hitler gave to women that would have children and dedicate them to the Third Reich to be raised as soldiers." Says, "Do you want it?"}

"Sure, I 'd be glad-I'd love to have it." There it is. "It says on it, "Der Deutchen Muhter."

The Dutchess Mother-The German Mother.

I: Will you try to evaluate for us the way World War II shaped your life, either for the good or for the bad?

V: The bad side of a war is, there's so much of it that you can't forget. It just burns in your-it just burns in your mind You hear a -a -for years, I 'm not as bad now as I used to be about gunshots. Hear a gunfire, anywhere, it frightens y-you just get stiff, you get-it frightens you. When-when even you might -a car running-going down the road and and it just inadvertently does a -what do you call it?—backfire. Just makes you jump, scares you to death. Even though I was never-1 was shot at..a time or two. Had shells burst real close, real close. Covered me up with dirt, never got a wound, never got a wound, scared the pants off of me, but. things like that -it takes a long time- if it ever wears off. I still—I mentioned earlier the bomb that tore up our outfit-when airplanes now come over practicing their Maneuvers in the sky-I have to see what's going on. I have to go outside and look at them and watch them. Its-it just-I can't sit still till I know that it 's—what 's going on. Just the sound of them going (makes sound and gestures of an airplane diving) scares me. I used to dream about a battle, and we were on a ridge trying to take a little village of white houses, down at the -down at the bottom of the ridge, and I dreamed that same dream, over, and over, and over. I guess a thousand times. Nothing ever happens, but just that one scene, somehow or other stuck in my mind. That's the bad part of it.

The good part of it: I learned a lot of—I learned about discipline. I learned... I learned..alot. Before I went in the army, I was pretty much of a vagabond I didn't stay at home much, wasn't at home much. Just went from pillar to post, slept where I could find a bed, with folks: cousins, uncles and aunts. And when I came home from the army, all of that-all of that stopped. I was more settled. I guess that's the good part of it.

I: Thank you for sharing these experiences with us, and with many others who will view this tape.

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