"I was worried about my mom and dad because they were... in Japan near Hiroshima, and I was the only single one in the family, so I said, I decided to re-enlist... Then before I boarded the ship [in San Francisco], I had a telephone call from…

"It was in Genoa. We were in Genoa, Italy, and we were in a big hallway and we heard all kinds of firecrackers going off. I went outside and said, 'La guerra è finito,' the war is ended. I was happy for that. We were going to go to…

"We were way up. All we had to worry about were the shells coming. They couldn't come over the mountains, so when they hit one side, the rocks would come flying onto our side. That's the only thing we had to worry about... Staying…

"When we got [to Bruyères, France], a friend of my brother’s came up to me and said, ‘Hey, your brother [Michael] died five days ago.’ I says, 'Wow, I didn’t know. I was waiting for my sister to write to me about it.’ But she never did.…

"It was about close to October...Well it was crowded, about 5,000 soldiers. And Mickey Rooney was there. He was an entertainer...I was on the 6th level bunks. On the bottom of the ship and I was at the top and had to climb over everybody...They…

"They took me right away. I went to Camp Blanding, Florida right away...It was hot and [there were] snakes. One guy put the machine gun down and looked right straight at a seven-foot rattlesnake... We had to learn everything because…I think…

"So I went and started working for this defense plant, and I worked there for about three months...It used to be a bicycle shop and they made it into a defense plant... I don’t know what the radar parts were that they were making, and that’s…

"I get my orders to report to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, to be with the Marine Corps. They don’t have their own medical personnel. So us as Navy corpsmen are stationed with the Marines and take care of them... I wound up with the…

"Three or four days before I was ready to graduate from basic training, an officer and our company commander, who was a chief petty officer, came walking through the barracks, and they said, 'Everybody six foot and over stand in front of…

"Two weeks before I was ready to graduate high school, I got into serious trouble; I was taken before a judge and given two choices: enlist in the military or go to jail. Well, I didn’t know what the military was all about, but I had a pretty…