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Recently we sat down with soldiers from World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Desert Storm and the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Here is the second part of our Veterans Roundtable (the first installment can be found on KansasCity.com).
Describe your first experience in combat.
Gary Shepard (Vietnam War): I was at a base when they sent me up for some chow and a rocket hit right where I had been. It took my pack away, and my new rifle.
One of the guys I saw was running to the bunker. He got hit in the mouth with a piece of shrapnel. That was pretty dramatic.
If anybody tells you they’re not scared under fire they’re either crazy or lying. I said “Boy, this is going to be something.” You know?
Roy Shenkel (World War II): My first experience was on a B-17 Flying Fortress. It was 1944, the sixth of April, two months before the invasion. That’s when we got shot down.
We had a raid in Yugoslavia. It was a milk run — not many fighters, not much flak. I was flying the right waist-gunner position.
I spotted a German fighter, and I put this over the intercom: “FW190 low at 5 o’clock” And I’m tracking this fighter, but he’s horizontal to us out of range. All of a sudden I heard a big explosion in front …
The next thing I know the left waist gunner was standing at the escape hatch waving his arms frantically at me. I looked to the front, and fire was coming out of bomb bays into the radio room — boiling fire. I panicked. I had to get a flak suit off to get my parachute on.
I struggled for a while and then gave up. I just looked at that fire and said, “This is it. I’m dead, but I’ll never know what hit me.” But then my mind cleared up, and I did everything right after that. I was 20 years old.
Maj. Jason “Tank” Sherman: (Iraq and Afghanistan): After landing at Kandahar one night (the enemy) had somebody attack the perimeter. And it was funny. Everybody did all the things they’d been trained to do. They went to their foxholes and all that.
But (the attack) never made it (inside the perimeter). So everybody’s walking around, and people are climbing on Conex’s (large metal containers) trying to see what’s going on instead of taking cover.
Patrick Ratterman (Desert Storm): Yeah, there’s an absolute chaos in combat. You can have the best-laid plans, but with the first shot fired it absolutely goes to hell.
The first day I recall in a combat zone was the day that we entered over the berm into Iraq. … If you remember the buildup to the ground war there were just weeks and weeks of shelling, sorties and rocket attacks.
When we pushed over the berm we got to see the effects. It was just dead, dead, dead bodies, and you can imagine them being out in the sun for a week or two, and the flies and the maggots, and just the horribleness of war …
This whole time we thought they were shooting so much because they were missing. Turns out they didn’t miss much. They literally buried these guys alive. We’d drive across the desert and see an arm sticking up out of the sand, just a dead human being. And there was mile after mile after mile of that.
Andrea Whitworth:(Afghanistan): I was in Afghanistan. It was the evening of my second night there. I heard a boom, and the alarms started going off. We just grabbed full battle rattle and hit the bunkers and waited for the all clear.
The closest one (hit) a mill van. It went off about a block away. It lifted me about a foot off the ground. I was petrified. I landed back on my feet, but I looked around. It’s not a good feeling.
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