Bob Conroy: The Sound of Bullets | Gordon

Transcript: Well, Gordon knew he had been hit, hit bad. A machine gun at close range writhes at it shoots, and so he was riddled, almost like a sewing machine, up through the middle. We knew that he was in bad shape. We had only a couple of options. One of which was to try to get him back to base, but we were, as far as both of us could determine, we were cut off. The Germans had overrun our position and we were in the foxhole by ourselves. We couldn't hear any action or any noise from our own guys. If you called out for a medic, a medic couldn't come. We knew that the cold weather was going to do him in, in about a couple of hours. We had the option of trying to go back to the bridge that we crossed and hopefully find an aide station back there. But we figured the Germans had that territory and I couldn't carry him without getting locked off. So basically, we both knew he was going to die. And once we realized that, the question came up as to what could we do about it. We had no morphine. We couldn't ease it. And so, I tried to knock him out. They took of his helmet, held his jaw up, and just wacked it as hard as I could. Because he wanted to be put out. That didn't work. And, so I hit him over the head with a helmet. And that didn't work. So we stayed together until he died, which was about a couple hours later. I put my overcoat around him. And when I found out that the Germans that smelled quite fragrant when we had wounded them earlier in the day, were not just lacking in sanitation. The smell that you don't see in the movies is the smell of hot lead going through a body. And Gordon stank the same way the German camp prisoners stank, just horrible.

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