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I don't know whose idea it was but someone decided the reporters covering the Eighth Air Force ought to go on a mission themselves. It probably grew out of the uneasy feeling we all had that we were watching too many young men our age die while we were writing stories about them and going back to London for dinner.
As correspondents we were not supposed to be armed or fire weapons of any kind. This allowed for better treatment in the event we were captured by the enemy, although my position as an Army sergeant with a corespondent's credentials was unusual. I don't know whether I'd have been considered a correspondent or a soldier.
In spite of the rule against weapons for reporters, the two officers charged with preparing us for the trip decided that if we were going on a raid we'd have to go to gunnery school and learn how to shoot a .50caliber machine gun. It didn't make a lot of sense but we did it. It was the argument that in a life-or-death situation we might be faced with the choice of shooting or dying and it would be better if we were prepared to shoot.
There were eight of us: Walter Cronkite, United Press; Homer Bigart, New York Herald Tribune; Paul Manning, MBS (Mutual Broadcasting System); Jack Denton Scott, Yank magazine; Gladwin Hill, The New York Times; and myself. We were sent to some kind of training camp for a week and we learned a little about parachutes, life rafts, and the .50-caliber machine gun. There was some talk of learning to pack a parachute and several demonstration classes were held but, in the belief that there was no chance that someone who couldn't make a bed would ever learn to pack a parachute, I did not attend.
The briefing was dramatic. I guess they always were. The G2 (Intelligence) officer stood with a long pointer in his hand in front of a wall with what was obviously a map covered with a blanket-sized piece of blue cloth. Sometimes I can't remember my own name but I remember, fifty years later, that the cloth was blue
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February 26 was the first time I'd seriously considered my own death. Until then, when the thought of death occurred to me, it was someone else's, not my own. From the time I was six, it had seemed to me that people got slowly old, lost track of time and feeling, and faded away until one night they died in their sleep. It never hurt. They had finished life and were unaware of going. They weren't frightened by the thought of never anything ever again.
Obviously it was too late to pull out and I never seriously considered it. I did think of Margie and Mother and Dad and all the people I'd left at home and wondered if I'd ever see them again. I don't recall being so much afraid as introspective. I supposed I felt the way a lot of infantrymen feel in the front lines. If they were alone they'd run, but they can't because they feel an obligation to the people all around them who are doing the same thing. And then I had the same feeling everyone who ever fought a war has. I heard it expressed a thousand times. "The guy next to me may get it but I think I'll be okay."
Excerpted by permission of PublicAffairs. Copyright © 2000 by Andy Rooney.
