December 24th, 1944

 Raining cats and dogs, and its really cold.  Knee deep mud.  Black night.  Our unit was in bivouac, sitting in the rain.  We'd been in combat since December 16th, when the Bulge went up.  Captain Mikeljon splashes into our little circle and asks for ten volunteers.  He needs a full gun crew, truck driver, loaders, plus one gun and one truck.  This may be a suicide mission.  No guarantee that anybody would come back.  He needs to send them to No-Man's Land.

I and nine other guys volunteer.  We hitch up one of out 105 howitzers, load up a gun truck with ammo, and we're ready to go.  The Captain's jeep pulls up, and says "OK, men follow me."

We pull out of bivouac, and follow the jeep east towards the line.  The dirt road is rutted and muddy, and the rain just keeps coming down.  Black as pitch and we can barely keep the jeep in sight.  We eventually climb a little treeless hill.

The jeep stops, turns around, and the Captain climbs out and sloshes over to the truck.  "OK, fellas, here's the deal.  I want you to point your gun down this road, looking to the east.  Load it, and be ready to fire.  Put out some listening posts. If anything comes up this road, shoot it, 'cause it's the enemy.  If you shoot, get the hell out here.  When it gets close to dawn, you'd better pull out, because it's an exposed position, and the Germans will pick you off with their artillery or planes."

 He wished us luck, and then he and his driver took off.

We turned the truck around, unlimbered the gun, horsed it into position, loaded a round, and we were ready.  I put a couple of guys up the road as pickets.  I told the rest of the guys to take shelter in the truck, and try to get some sleep.  I then realized that there were ten helmets visible in the darkness.  What the hell?  I thought there were only ten of us.  I pulled out my GI flashlight and shielding the lens between my fingers, flicked it on.  The eleventh GI was one of our two medics, and he was armed with a rifle!

"What the hell are you doing here?"  I asked.  Both our medics were conscientious objectors, and non-combatants, so what was he doing with a gun? 

He answered.  "I thought I'd better come along, in case you guys needed me."

"What's with the rifle?"

"Uh, I borrowed it in case you guys needed some help." OK, first time that had happened.

An ack-ack unit, which was a halftrack armed with twin fifty caliber machine guns, pulled up and took position just up the hill from us.  I guess the Captain was trying to give us some air cover.

So there we sat all night.  We rotated the guys back to the truck once in a while, but I don't think anybody slept.

Just as it started to barely get light, I decided that it was time to move out.  We hitched up the gun, pulled in our pickets, and got out of there. Just as we pulled out, the ack-ack crew was starting to wake up. We took off down the muddy road, rain still failing, back towards our Lines.  We were cold and wet, but we'd been to No-Man's Land and back.  We were lucky.

As we got back to our bivouac of the night before, the unit was lined up in column, ready to pull out.  (We didn't know it then, but the Third Army was off to Bastogne to relieve the 101^st Airborne, which was trapped there.  Patton promised to move the whole army ninety miles in three days, and he did.)

Our truck and gun pulled into line, and then Captain Mikeljon came running up to the truck.  "My God, I thought you guys were dead!"  He was almost blubbering.

Huh? 

"Battalion observers reported action on that hill just at dawn.  I thought you guys got gobbled up!"

I turned to the truck driver.  His eyes were as big as saucers.  "I guess that was the ack-ack crew that got grabbed."  We got out just in time.