Free "I Heard You Paint Houses": Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa by Charles Brandt Page B

power. But fire is fire. Two shots of fire is still bad.
    Running up out of the surf on to the beach at St. Tropez I thought I was shot. I looked down and saw red all over my uniform. I hollered for the medic and Lieutenant Kavota from Hazelton, Pennsylvania, came running over to me and shouted, “You son of a bitch, that’s wine. You ain’t shot. Get up and get going. They shot your canteen.” He was a good Joe.
    We finally drove the Germans back and we entered the Alsace-Lorraine region, which is part French and part German. I had a pal from Kentucky that we called Pope. He was a damn good soldier. You can’t say such and such a guy is a coward. You can only absorb so much. In Alsace-Lorraine I saw Pope stick his leg out from behind a tree to get a million-dollar wound so he’d be sent home; only a heavy round came in and took his leg off. He survived and went home with one leg missing.
    Another way I saw guys snap a little bit is when it came to taking prisoners. Here these Germans were shooting at you, trying to kill you and blowing your pals all to hell, and now you’ve got a chance to get them back, and they want to surrender. Some people take that personally. So maybe you didn’t understand what they were saying. Or if you did take them alive and you took them back behind your own line, maybe they tried to escape. I don’t mean a massacre. If you had a load of prisoners you took them back, but with a handful of Germans or less you did what you had to do and what everybody else expected you to do. The lieutenant gave me a lot of prisoners to handle and I did what I had to do.
    In a fire fight in the Alsace, Diggsy got hit in the back halfway up a hill. The medics got him and started bringing him down the hill. I didn’t have much emotion left by this time in the war, but I have to say seeing little Diggsy hit on that hill and I was emotional. I saw his rifle on the ground where he fell. They didn’t want you to lose your rifle over there. I must have snapped or something. So I called for cover from the other guys, and I crawled up and got Diggsy’s rifle for him. When we all crawled back down the hill, Digs said to me, “You got to be nuts. You could have been killed for this friggin’ M-I .” I said, “Ah, the Germans didn’t know they had us outnumbered.” It was the second time I had seen him get shot.
    In Alsace-Lorraine we heard that the Germans had launched a desperate counteroffensive up north through a forest in Belgium to halt our advance after Normandy in what they called the Battle of the Bulge. The Germans were advancing in a bulge and so Allied troops were needed to be sent from our southern front to reinforce their northern front. Our company was left to cover the division’s whole southern front, which meant 120 men were covering a front that might have been covered by a full division of 10,000 or 15,000 men.
    All we did was retreat. We walked the whole night New Year’s Eve of 1945. We watched the French people of the Alsace pulling in the American flags on their houses and start putting the German flags back up. But soon reinforcements came in, and we built up our strength and pushed back into the German part of the Alsace.
    From there we fought our way to the Harz Mountains. The Germans occupied the summit. One night we intercepted a mule train with hot food for the Germans on top. We ate what we wanted and soiled the rest with our waste. We left the German women alone. They were like our WACs. They had prepared the food. We just left them there. But the mule teams were driven by a handful of German soldiers. We had no intention of taking them back down the mountain, and we couldn’t take them with us as we advanced up, so we gave them shovels, and they dug their own shallow graves. You wonder why would anyone bother to dig their own graves, but then I guess you cling to some hope that maybe the people with the guns would change their mind, or maybe your own people would come along