This week's Sunday Special features four veterans of the 101st Airborne Division who served on D-Day in World War II. Jack Gutman, George Ciampa, Mike Levere, and Tom Rice tell their stories of being on the beaches of Normandy, France during the invasion of Iwo Jima, and the heroic actions they took in the aftermath of the assault on the beach by the Allies on D Day, June 6th, 1944. In today's episode, I'll be interviewing four veterans who served in the invasion, and some in Normandy itself. I'm honored to have been able to spend time with these men, and I hope that you enjoy hearing their stories. Special thanks to Tom Rice for joining the show, and for being willing to talk about the events that took place on that day in June, and how he handled the chaos and chaos that was involved in the rescue of an injured man who was thrown out of a plane. Thank you, Mr. Rice, for coming on the show and joining the Sunday Special. It was a pleasure to have the chance to spend some time with you, and hope you enjoy listening to the stories of four men who served with me in WW2 and the men who fought for our country. May you live in peace, and remember the day that was so bravely. Rest in Paradise! -Eugene P.S. - Thank you for listening and supporting the show. -Your continued support is greatly appreciated. and your continued support will be greatly appreciated by me. -Eddie, Tom Rice, Jack, George, Mike, and Jack, Jack and George, and G.Gutman, and all the rest of the guys who fought with us on D.D. . Tom, and Jack. -- -- Thank you so much for joining us on this episode of The Sunday Special! -- Tom Rice in memory of the 75th anniversary of D.Day, and a very special thanks to Jack, G.C.R. for coming home from WW2. in honor of D-day. Jack and G-Day, G-D-Day. , G-O-D Day , G-E-O & G-Y-DY-R-A-YE-P-A, -M-E. & J-A.
00:00:00.000When I saw what was happening on that beach, I saw bodies floating, and then my mind was flashing through.
00:00:12.000There's a son, a father, that will be coming home.
00:00:16.000This week's episode of the Sunday Special is going to be a little bit different.
00:00:26.000In just a few days, June 6th, it'll be the 75th anniversary of D-Day, the Allied invasion in Normandy, the beginning of the end of Nazi domination in Europe.
00:00:33.000In today's episode, I'll be interviewing four very special veterans who fought in World War II, some in Normandy itself.
00:00:38.000Jack Gutman, George Ciampa, Mike Levere, and Tom Rice.
00:00:42.000I'm honored to have been able to spend time with these men, and I hope that you enjoy hearing their stories.
00:00:51.000Well, I'm eager to welcome to the program Tom Rice.
00:00:53.000He's a member of the 101st Airborne Division during D-Day.
00:00:57.000Mr. Rice, thank you so much for joining the show.
00:00:59.000So, what was it like to jump into the middle of the firestorm on D-Day?
00:01:06.000Well, there's a lot of answers to that question, but mainly it was chaos.
00:02:30.000But he finally found out and he picked up this guy by the shoulder straps and Lifted him up and banged his head against the bulkhead took him down to the door and threw him out and Court of inquiry came into being and exonerated lieutenant Hamilton said he had all right to do that and the guy could have been shot for doing that but that was one the answer so we took off and
00:02:53.000And I was jump number one, and I could see all that was going on, and I was looking down at 750 feet was the jump altitude, and above the door there's three lights, a white light, a green light, and a red light.
00:03:09.000As we touch the coast, the white light goes out, and the red light goes on.
00:03:15.000It gives us about eight minutes of time to get ready.
00:03:21.000So what was happening in the aircraft was that Lieutenant Jansen was jumpmaster and he got everybody by verbal signals and hand signals because we did not have a door on the aircraft.
00:03:41.000So the hand signals was stand up and hook up.
00:03:49.000We hooked up to a steel cable that was about three-eighths of an inch in diameter and ran from the pilot's cabin to the aft of a little compartment there, and we snap fastened on that.
00:04:03.000Lieutenant Jansen went to number 18 man, or he was 18 man, and he checked the equipment on number 17 man.
00:06:26.000So I fell free and I was down with a stretch out of the risers and the parachute canopy and the A vent pecked collar at the top of the parachute for the most part wasn't large enough to take care of all the flow of the air.
00:06:43.000So I started to oscillate to right and dump it out and swing to the left and dump it out and within a matter of five or six seconds I was on the ground.
00:06:54.000And with all that padding in front of me, I made a right forearm parachute landing fall and didn't get injured.
00:07:04.000Well, once you had landed, what was the next move?
00:07:08.000To meet up with the rest of the people in your company?
00:07:10.000Well, the next thing was to get out of that harness.
00:07:13.000And everything was so tight that I couldn't.
00:07:15.000And I had a double zipper here on my jumpsuit with a switchblade knife in it.
00:07:22.000And so I reached for that and opened it up, got the switchblade knife, pushed the button, now it flips the blade and I start sawing the webbing, trying to get loose from that.
00:08:14.000So I rolled over to the side of the road and dropped in the canal.
00:08:17.000Rolled back in the center of the road and it exploded and sent shrapnel around us and water and mud splattered us.
00:08:27.000So we got up and for the most part we began to break up and about six of us went down the road to a... I saw a small house on the side of the road.
00:08:36.000Well, we got more hand grenades than we got Germans, so let's investigate.
00:08:41.000So another fellow and I, Floyd Martin, and I went to the front door, and I said, Floyd, don't bang on the door like an ugly American.
00:08:48.000Just knock on it, you know, and we'll see what happens.
00:08:52.000And the rest of the guys, I sent them around to the back in case there were Germans in there.
00:08:56.000So the Frenchman finally came to the door, and he had a white nightgown from shoulder all the way to the floor.
00:09:06.000He had a white tousled cap with a puffball on the end of it.
00:09:17.000And I knew I was getting in danger when I came back to my senses, because once you get your mind taken out of the danger into something that is, for the most part, could happen in a city, you've got a problem.
00:09:31.000So I quickly came back to senses that I was in danger.
00:09:49.000And in the meantime his wife came in dressed the same way and he excused himself and he came back in about five seconds, five to twenty seconds and he had some ammunition, gave us six and he kept two.
00:10:03.000When you first jumped out, I mean, it sounds like it was, you mentioned that it was chaos.
00:10:08.000You came in and it was silent, correct?
00:10:12.000Were you under fire when the planes were dropping you?
00:10:14.000Well, there's so much noise you really don't know.
00:10:17.000But I could see the burst of flame and a hurricane of fire came up in the form of a rectangle.
00:10:23.000And I knew we were heading toward that rectangle.
00:10:26.000And luckily, the pilot swung way to the right.
00:10:28.000And that took us away from Drop Zone B toward Drop Zone D. And I just ended up on the southern end of Drop Zone D. So what was your first interaction like with the enemy when you did hit the ground?
00:10:40.000The 6th German Parachute Infantry Regiment was having a party one night, June 5th.
00:10:46.000One of the platoons, or rather, one of the platoons was at the beach, Causeway 4.
00:10:55.000And our mission was to hold Causeway 2, 3, and 4 so the beach forces coming in could go through us and continue on into the hedgerows and chase the Germans out.
00:11:07.000We ended up there at a place called Hell's Corner.
00:11:14.000All of this was going on, and we spotted the Germans coming in toward us from Causeway 4.
00:11:25.000For the most part, having fun, smoking, and a rifle slung on their shoulder and not thinking there's any enemy around.
00:11:35.000by the first or second German regiment and they were pretty myopic because they saw Germans and they saw Americans milling around down there and didn't know what to do.
00:11:48.000So we set up a defense and the Germans walked right into it.
00:11:55.000They had machine guns and mortars on both the ends of the defense line and the regimental colonel Howard Johnson I took two German-speaking GIs and went out and tried to get a hold of the regimental colonel of the German contingency.
00:12:13.000And he did, and he said, you guys are ready to surrender?
00:12:17.000He said, no, it's too early to surrender.
00:12:18.000We don't surrender under these conditions.
00:12:21.000So they turned around, walked back in, and they got fired on.
00:12:24.000Then half an hour later they went out and tried it again and they told the regimental colonel, German regimental colonel, that to have the men that are wounded put bayonets on their rifles, jab them in the ground, put their rifle butt or their helmet on their rifle butt and we'll come out and pick them up and we'll have a truce for a half an hour.
00:12:45.000So for the most part that was what was going on.
00:12:48.000Now back at Hill's Corner, I was right next to a lieutenant who had jumped with us, and he had communications with the United States naval ship Quincy.
00:13:00.000And he was trying to communicate with them because Colonel Johnson wanted fire.
00:13:05.000Put on the rear end of our column because the Germans were coming down from Cherbourg on N13 and were going to invade the area and get in behind us.
00:13:24.000So he was making contact, and they used the baseball lingo, and for LeMars, who won this game and who won that, who's national champion, et cetera.
00:13:55.000And from there, I was given the detail to take two men and go to La Barquette Lock and outpost it.
00:14:04.000So we went over to La Barquette Lock and I set up a defensive system.
00:14:10.000The locks were closed, the poulders were flooded, and for the most part, the ones that were not flooded had rommel asparagus stuck in the ground.
00:14:21.000They were poles, trees that were stripped of bark and branches, pointed and jammed in the ground, and then wires strung from treetop to treetop.
00:14:35.000It was an anti-glider activity that took place and anti-parachute.
00:14:41.000And they told us before we jumped, make sure your legs are crossed when you come down, relax your ankles and hope for the best.
00:14:50.000So, crossing the Lauberkette Lock, decided not to go into the house.
00:15:00.000Because if any one patrol came through, they could surround us, set it on fire, drive us out, and do us in real quick.
00:15:09.000So we set up in the orchard right next to the house, the right-hand side of the house.
00:15:16.000And we were about 10 yards apart, and we had a pretty good idea we were being observed, because the Germans at Carentan were above sea level.
00:15:32.000And we were to stay there until called back.
00:15:41.000As the daybreak was coming into being, I set up a series of steel stakes, and strung wire between the steel stakes, and hung tin cans full of bolts and nuts and rocks from the wires, and stretched it across the areas that the German patrol might approach from the left,
00:16:10.000Absolutely no talking whatsoever from this point on until the next morning.
00:16:16.000If anything happens, if any rattling occurs, just start shooting.
00:16:22.000And so, at two in the morning, we started shooting.
00:16:28.000He laid out there for quite some time, moaning and groaning.
00:16:31.000And the gurgling sound of a dying man stops all conversation, as you know.
00:16:37.000So, one of the guys had some mortuary experience.
00:16:39.000He went out with his trench knife and finished him off, and in the morning we pulled the guy in and dug a trench for him under an apple tree.
00:16:49.000And I took a couple branches and broke them and made a Christian cross and put it at the head of it, and I cut off his wings.
00:16:56.000I still have the wings on the book I wrote.
00:16:59.000And never get caught with a German souvenir in your pants or your pocket or anywhere, because they'll do you in.
00:17:04.000Especially us guys in baggy pants, as we called the Germans, Green Devils.
00:17:13.000So we stayed there until June 7th, and then were called back and put in reserve, because the 1st and 4th Infantry Divisions had already moved through us.
00:17:25.000Well, more on that in just one second.
00:18:44.000That's going to be great because I'm going to jump tandem this time and go for the ride.
00:18:51.000So I think there'll be more than one in the aircraft.
00:18:55.000They're going to jump a static line, maybe 1,200 feet, and then I've got to go to 13,000.
00:19:03.000And we're going to have an American flag, a French flag, and a 101st Airborne Division flag.
00:19:09.000I think we're going to tether it from weights.
00:19:11.000and attached to the harness and we come in and we're supposed to be spectacular.
00:19:16.000We did it before at Montpellier the year before and it worked out very nice.
00:19:21.000- So how old were you when you jumped out the first time? - First combat jump, 20, almost 21. - What was your kind of training when you first jumped out?
00:19:34.000How much training did you have to go through to become a paratrooper?
00:19:37.000Two years plus we had, for the most part.
00:19:42.000And we did anything and everything, and anything and everything was experimental, because airborne activities were so new that it was experimental all the way.
00:19:59.000All of my jumps were great, except that Normandy one.
00:20:02.000And those were things that I thought that they had thought of, but nobody ever thought about.
00:20:06.000A plane going up maybe 30, 40, or 50 feet when the para packs were dumped.
00:20:12.000And I thought machine gun bullets was going to come up through the bottom of the aircraft and strike me and hit me in the vital spots and change my plumbing.
00:20:21.000Well, thank you so much for everything that you've done.
00:20:24.000And congratulations on the upcoming jump.
00:21:07.000The rate was not movable, but the course was.
00:21:10.000And we flew two missions like that, and they were off the coast of Denmark, some target off the coast.
00:21:18.000It was an oil refinery, actually, that we were supposed to hit.
00:21:21.000And I found that to be a rather easy mission.
00:21:24.000They usually gave you an easy one to get you used to flying, you know, to learn the ropes, so to speak.
00:21:29.000Now, they call it a milk run, but I never liked the term milk run, because even on a milk run, somebody is shooting flak at you, shooting 88s at you, and if one piece hits you and kills you, it wasn't a milk run.
00:21:42.000And I remembered it was a lot of flak.
00:22:16.000Every mission we went on, we came home with holes in the airplanes.
00:22:20.000Little, because, you know, when a shell goes off, it just splatters a whole area with flak, what they call flak, which is just fragments of metal.
00:22:36.000The second mission I flew was a rather difficult one.
00:22:41.000I think we went to Magdeburg, which is deep in Germany.
00:22:46.000And that's when I really saw people getting knocked out of the sky and things like that.
00:22:50.000It was quite a sight to see a plane get hit and spiral down and see parachutes coming out of them and falling to the ground.
00:22:58.000Unless you actually see the real thing, you can't imagine how frightening that is, you know, that it could have been you and you wind up in Germany in a prisoner of war camp.
00:23:09.000I was very lucky that we never got seriously hit to where we had to abort the mission because we were struck by German fire.
00:23:19.000We actually aborted the mission because something went wrong with the airplane and we had to come home.
00:23:23.000But the way you, you know, you got credit for every mission that you dropped your bombs over enemy territory to a certain target.
00:23:32.000They gave you certain targets of opportunity, which meant that if you had to abort, you could pick one of these targets of opportunity, bomb it, make a record of it, and they would give you credit for a mission.
00:23:43.000So how many missions did you actually end up flying?
00:23:45.000So, I did a total of 36 combat missions.
00:23:50.000That did not include several other missions, which included bringing gasoline supplies to General Patton, who was running up, at that time, by the time I had to do that, he was moving up the French into Belgium.
00:24:07.000And he had run out of gasoline, or was running short on gasoline, and what they did to our B-24s and our squadron was take the bomb racks out and put two 500-gallon gasoline tanks in there to carry automobile gasoline, because that's what his tanks used.
00:24:26.000These were called gas-hauled missions, and since they were administrative-type missions, they were not counted as a regular mission.
00:24:33.000But in my opinion, they were more dangerous than a regular mission, because of the amount of gasoline that was actually in and around the airplane from slight leaks in the tanks, and the fumes, you couldn't smoke or get anywhere near fire, the airplane would blow up.
00:24:52.000We had two Tokyo tanks and two main tanks.
00:24:55.000And so we just flew with the Tokyo tanks with aviation gas, and the first place we landed was Clostres, France, where on landing, the Germans had just left that area about three days prior to us landing there, and there was quite a few bomb holes in the runway.
00:25:14.000And so when I finally got there, I asked the pilot, he says, do you think we could land on that shorter runway?
00:25:19.000He says, we've got to, we've got to get rid of this gasoline.
00:25:22.000So we flew very low over the runway to look at it, and I said, there's a lot of holes in that runway.
00:25:27.000He says, well, we're going to land anyway.
00:25:29.000Unfortunately, at that point, my pilot had overshot the end of the runway too far in, and we wound up going off the end of the runway into a meadow of mud.
00:25:42.000And the plane sank right down in the bomb bays, and we were so afraid of the plane exploding, we all just got out of it and ran like heck to get out of the way.
00:25:53.000And the only other missions that I did that I did not get credit for was at the end of the war, many of the ground people that serviced the airplanes at the airbase during the war We're now able to get in the airplane.
00:26:05.000We took 10 of them at a time and flew them over Germany, over the rooftops, to show them the amount of damage in Germany.
00:26:12.000And I'm telling you, there wasn't a rooftop left in Germany when we got through with it.
00:26:18.000So, in a second, I'm going to ask you what it was like both dropping the bombs and also being on the other end of receiving flak.
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00:27:47.000It was their headquarters where all of the German high mucky mucks, the generals and all that, would meet to plan out maneuvers or whatever to enhance their position in the war.
00:28:01.000And we found out through intelligence that there was going to be a big German meeting of very important generals and high people in the German army that were going to meet there.
00:28:13.000And this was close to the end of the war already, you know.
00:28:15.000They were losing the war pretty bad by that time.
00:28:25.000So on D-Day, what was your involvement with the invasion?
00:28:28.000I was in the 2nd Air Division of the 8th Air Force, the 96th Combat Wing, which consisted of three groups.
00:28:36.000One of mine was the 458th Bomb Group, and I was involved in the D-Day landings, flying one mission that day to bomb airfields somewhere behind the lines where they were going to invade Normandy.
00:28:50.000We weren't really aware of what was going on.
00:28:55.000It was very secretive before the invasion.
00:28:58.000And we were just assigned a mission, and it happened to be the D-Day landings.
00:29:03.000And we knew there was a lot of ships in the channel at the time.
00:29:10.000And we did our mission, bombed this airfield, and came home.
00:29:14.000How exact could you be with the bombing, given the technology and the constraints?
00:29:18.000The bombing, the Norton bomb site that we used at the time was fairly accurate.
00:29:24.000However, only the lead plane actually aimed the bombs.
00:29:29.000The rest of the planes in this formation, there could be as many as 50 or 100, maybe as high as 400 planes in a formation.
00:29:39.000They would drop on smoke markers that the lead planes would drop.
00:29:43.000They would locate the target, and the bombardier in that plane would aim the bombs, and then the rest of the formation would just drop on his smoke markers.
00:29:53.000And the accuracy was as good as the guy that did the initial aiming.
00:30:24.000And once you joined, what was the training regimen like to become a flyer?
00:30:29.000Well, they picked us up, we got on a train, we wound up at Keesler Field, Mississippi, where we initially took our basic training for flight duties, you know.
00:30:40.000And you still, you were classified for all three, but you hadn't been determined whether you would be a pilot, a bombardier, or a navigator.
00:30:47.000It depended on what the Air Force needed at the time, the Air Corps needed at the time.
00:30:51.000It was not the Air Force that it was called, the Army Air Corps, so we were part of the Army.
00:30:56.000I had trouble passing through the high altitude oxygen chamber test.
00:31:01.000That's a test where they put you into this chamber and they simulate, well they don't simulate it, but they actually decompress the chamber until you reach what is the equivalent of about 35,000 feet.
00:31:14.000And you spend about an hour in there and at that altitude you take your mask off, your oxygen mask, so you can feel what anoxia, which is a lack of oxygen, Would feel like if it happened up in the air.
00:31:26.000They'd ask you to try to write or talk and speak like that and so you would learn what it felt like if you didn't have oxygen.
00:31:34.000At any rate, I couldn't pass that test because previous to my entrance into the army, I had an accident where I broke both my kneecaps and apparently when I got At that altitude, I got a lot of pain in my knees from bubbles or something.
00:32:15.000Meanwhile, the other people that were in the chamber with me, and these were all these people that were L's, K's, L's and M's, you know, their last name, had shipped out to Kingman, Arizona for night gunnery training.
00:32:33.000And while they were at Kingman, Arizona, these people were on a bus going to night gunnery practice, and that bus was hit by a Southern Pacific freight train going 60 or 70 miles an hour and killed them all.
00:32:45.000These are all the guys, and they were all killed.
00:32:48.000One day I was coming out of school at the university, and this news kid was hacking, hey, there's 27 air cadets killed in Arizona, blah, blah, blah.
00:32:57.000So I bought a newspaper, and I was astonished at what I read.
00:33:02.000Had I have passed that test, I would have been on that bus.
00:33:06.000So what was the rest of your crew like?
00:33:07.000So you served with the same crew for the entire?
00:33:40.000But what I did is I got a hold of a friend of mine that knew a pilot that needed a navigator.
00:33:46.000And I got on that crew and flew a B-24 back from my airbase back to Boston.
00:33:54.000At that time, the Japanese were still fighting in the Pacific, and so they reassigned us to go into B-29 training, and during that time, the atom bomb was dropped, and of course, there was no need to do anything further, so that was all canceled, and we were sent up to Fort Dix, New Jersey for, well, they gave you a choice.
00:34:15.000Did you want to stay in, or did you want to get out?
00:34:17.000If you had enough combat points, you could get out, which I did.
00:34:21.000So, went up to Fort Dix and was discharged at Fort Dix.
00:36:13.000I don't know where it was from, but there was explosions.
00:36:15.000There were mines all over the beaches and all.
00:36:18.000And what I had to find out, which I found out later, why in the heck did this happen?
00:36:24.000Why did we lose 9,000 men, you know, for that battle?
00:36:30.000Then, when I read about it, the big problem was...
00:36:35.000They shelled the beaches, and then they were supposed to send over, there was actually 5,000 ships, 11,000 planes, there was 4,500 LCVPs, landing craft of various types, and then there was 150,000 troops, English and Americans and all.
00:37:28.000And they had some machine guns, which I found out could shoot off 150 bullets a minute or more, and just mowed these poor guys in the first, second, third wave, whatever it is.
00:37:41.000It was just, and one of the problems that would happen, that's why we saw so many bodies in the water and all, is that guys were jumping off, which I found out even from some of the wounded there, I was asking, what happened?
00:37:56.000And when they dropped the ramp and machine guns were mowing the guys down, they jumped off the side of the boat.
00:38:02.000Now, when that happened, all of a sudden these heavy packs that they have on them, which is at least 50 pounds or more, and they went right down.
00:38:13.000If they couldn't get the packs off, they drowned.
00:38:15.000So some guys never even got a shot off or anything like that.
00:38:18.000And it was just one heck of a mess on that whole thing, on that beach.
00:38:28.000What would you do from there with the wounded?
00:38:30.000My job was to assist the medical group that was already there.
00:38:34.000There were guys that had been patched up and all, and there was other guys that are not.
00:38:40.000And I tell people, no matter what they're doing, and when I speak at different places, when you're on a team and you're doing things, never think you are a lone man on the totem pole.
00:38:53.000Because when I was going in, I was a corpsman, first class, really one of the lowest men on the totem pole.
00:40:16.000You go from one to the other, and then there's some people you have to redress because when the first medics go through, they leave them there to be evacuated, and that was going to be part of our job.
00:40:30.000The blood gushing so much that you have to redress it.
00:40:32.000Now you can't take the old, the one that's on, you don't take it off.
00:40:37.000I have to admit, myself, I was really scared.
00:40:41.000I mean, it was, when you see what I saw there, and this is an 18-year-old mind, and there was guys that I saw dead there, and I thought of the guys on the ship earlier that day, laughing and kidding around and all this.
00:41:15.000And then finally, I think, then we went back with the wounded, taking care of whatever wound we had, back to the hospital, which was in Nettley, England.
00:41:27.000Now, there was a guy there I took care of.
00:41:29.000He became almost like friends with me, this officer.
00:42:11.000And when he died, he went into delirium, because when you lose spinal fluid, all kinds of things happen.
00:42:19.000And then, if a man dies on your watch when you're in a hospital with him, not on the beach or anything, but there, you have to pack every cavity in his body So he won't leak before rigor mortis sets in.
00:42:37.000And I had to do this four times here in Okinawa and everything else.
00:42:42.000And I'll tell you, Ben, it becomes very personal, Ben.
00:43:30.000But in Okinawa, They did it in the beginning, and then the Japanese, it was a target, so they were killing the medics off.
00:43:42.000And so therefore there was a big rush to have a bunch of medics over there, so I guess whether I had Normandy invasion or whatever, they needed medics.
00:43:53.000And I wound up there, so next thing I was on a ship called the buoy, and we went on to Okinawa, and they made the invasion there.
00:44:03.000And we lost 14,000 men in Okinawa by that finish.
00:45:02.000And what happened then is that All of a sudden, a big gun went off right near me, and that caused me to lose half my hearing on that.
00:45:13.000And I'm in here battle station, so I'm running, and all these kamikaze planes are coming in.
00:45:19.000And then I see them, some are hitting some of the ships.
00:45:23.000Well, I'm running to the sickbay deal down the deck there.
00:45:29.000I kid you not, there's a picture I had in my file and all, it's in my book too, in this book here.
00:45:36.000And that there was, I saw this kamikaze plane coming in low, And he veered, you could see by that look, because it was between, we were like a football field, a little over a football field, between me and the battleship New Mexico.
00:45:54.000And I see him coming in low, and he veers and goes right into the bridge of the battleship New Mexico.
00:46:34.000Well, in your book, you actually talk a fair bit about your struggles with PTSD.
00:46:38.000I was wondering if maybe you could talk a little bit about that.
00:46:40.000We called it Battle Fatigue and You'll Get Over It.
00:46:44.000It didn't get over, it was getting worse.
00:46:47.000In my book, I didn't have it in there, then my daughter made me put it in my book, my daughter Paula, and she said, you've got to Tell people what your flashbacks were like.
00:47:00.000I said, well, they were just horrible.
00:47:02.000And then finally she said, well, I think maybe they'd like to know.
00:47:05.000Well, all the flashbacks from different guys are all different.
00:47:09.000But my flashbacks were, I keep seeing, and they happen quickly, or when I'm sleeping especially, I see the invasion over and over again.
00:48:01.000I felt I would wind up in a mental institution, and what happened in my training, I spent a few weeks or so in a mental institution taking care of patients, and it scared the heck out of me.
00:48:16.000So I didn't want that, so I never told anyone.
00:48:18.000So finally I was at the Veterans, and finally he says, you ever wounded?
00:48:22.000And I said, I'm going to finally tell you.
00:48:25.000At 66 years, and I was doing the craziest things, Ben.
00:48:29.000I was self-medicating myself with alcohol.
00:49:56.000And then he said, Jack, What we're going to do is we're going to melt those cubes that are memory in your head and then we're going to wind up.
00:50:09.000You will be able to talk about it and get back to normal.
00:50:16.000And in my mind, I looked at him and I thought and I said, the hell you will.
00:50:21.000I'm not coming back because I didn't want to go through that again.
00:50:25.000And then he said, I want you to think about it.
00:50:28.000So I left and I figured 66 years of doing the craziest things.
00:50:33.000If you invited me to your house, I would not bring one glass of a bottle of wine.
00:50:38.000I would bring a magnum of champagne or a gallon of wine so I would not run out.
00:50:46.000And I was with my family on Thanksgiving at my son's house and we are Playing, I'm playing, I'm drinking all the wine I brought and everything.
00:51:00.000And when they set the table on Thanksgiving, and I sat down at the table, they brought the meal, my face fell right into the plate in front of them.
00:51:13.000My family was the most embarrassing thing, and they were going to have an intervention with me.
00:51:20.000Then my daughter Paula, who was like a therapist, she got me to go to a grief recovery program she was in.
00:51:31.000And she got me to finally cut back on the liquor.
00:51:34.000And from cutting back on the liquor, I finally wound up going to the therapist.
00:51:41.000And I went three and a half years with this therapist.
00:51:44.000And he finally, little by little, Cured me of it, and then I was able to talk about it, and then finally write a book.
00:51:52.000And this is just kind of a short book and all.
00:51:56.000I kept it very honest, and I kept the book cheap, you know, just so I won people.
00:52:03.000I give away a lot of my books because I want people to know you don't have to Be in a war, to go through post-traumatic stress disorder.
00:52:16.000If you've got any kind of stress or any problem, and I tell people when I speak at different places, to get help.
00:52:24.000And if you know a veteran, and I plead with veterans, if you're a veteran and you're going through this thing where you're thinking of suicide, for God's sakes, don't do it.
00:53:01.000I mean, it does raise the question, I think, that a lot of people would ask, which is there are thousands of people, thousands of men who I'm sure have experienced the same thing that you have in terms of PTSD, particularly in the aftermath of the things that you've seen.
00:53:21.000Oh, absolutely, because I know and I've seen so many things and talked to so many people, you know, in various countries and whatever it may be too.
00:53:33.000We are not perfect, but we have the most wonderful country in the world.
00:54:56.000And then when we got back to Los Angeles, they had a huge A group upstairs and then one downstairs, and somebody, a young cadet, comes up with my name on it and says, Welcome home, Jack Gutman.
00:56:37.000I could hear the 88s screaming over us.
00:56:41.000And I remember we started heading in and we came back out.
00:56:44.000And we started heading in and we came back out.
00:56:47.000And I thought it was because of the shelling, thinking we were going to get hit any time.
00:56:52.000But I found out years later that the guy that's driving that thing, he's looking for a place to land because the Germans had obstacles in the water to keep us from getting all the way in, so we had to wade in.
00:57:04.000You've probably seen pictures of that.
00:57:32.000They didn't want any dead on the beaches, morale of other troops coming in.
00:57:37.000And so we picked up paratroopers that had landed in the channel erroneously because, I don't know what happened, but they dropped them in the wrong place and the parachutes came down over them.
00:57:50.000These paratroopers are loaded with gear and they drown.
00:57:53.000And so we wrapped them in their parachutes and buried them.
00:57:57.000We were attached to the 1st Brigade Combat Engineers for provisions.
00:58:06.000And the 4th Division landed on that beach, on Utah Beach.
00:58:10.000Half of our guys, two platoons landed at Omaha and two at Utah.
00:58:19.000And what were you doing in the lead up to D-Day?
00:58:21.000Well, you've got to go back to when I was a kid, because when I was five years old, and again at seven years old, a few situations in the family with deaths.
00:58:31.000And so I had a big fear of death as a little boy.
00:58:33.000They put me in a Catholic school, and you had to attend funeral masses, and so I dropped out of school.
01:00:18.000On the way over there, in the middle of the night, we're sleeping down in a hold, and all of a sudden there's a big explosion, and the ship was rocking, everybody's scurried up on a deck, and then found out that there was a torpedo plane that was dropping a torpedo, and the Navy gunner shot him down.
01:03:38.000Anyway, we walked through the cemetery there, Normandy, Omaha Beach, Colville, Sur Mer, Skoll, and I walked alone for a while.
01:03:54.000And I wondered what bodies I handled, because that's the job we had, handling bodies.
01:03:59.000And walking through the graves and looking at the marble crosses and stars of David, I noticed that there's no date of birth on the crosses or stars of David.
01:05:03.000Well, thank you for doing that, and thank you for coming on the show and doing that, because education really is, I think, the beginning of reestablishing the sort of patriotism you're talking about.
01:05:11.000George Champa, thanks so much for joining the show.
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01:05:29.000The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special is produced by Jonathan Hay.