Following Orders
Interviewer: Were you ever given orders that your conscience didn’t allow you to obey? Well in this one particular situation [in the infantry] this company commander took over because our commanding officer was just a Lieutenant. And I’m listening on the radio, I was the squad leader so I liked to keep the radio with me in case anything went wrong. And I hear the company commander say “ok…there’s going to be a whistle and we’re going to fix bayonets and we’re going to charge”. And I couldn’t believe this! So I said to my squad “OK listen when this whistle blows and they make this charge. DO NOT MOVE. I’m giving you a direct order. If anything comes down about this and anybody gets court-martialed it’s not on you guys, it’s on me, cause I’m telling you do not move.” And the whistle went and you heard the screaming of the charge and then you heard the machine guns open up and the you heard people yelling “medic, medic”. They just got cut to pieces. You don’t charge dug in machine guns, that went out in the trenches in 1918. But that’s what this guy wanted to do. There was a kid who had been assigned to my squad for the day. I knew him but I hadn’t had a chance to work with him or anything, he wasn’t really one of my men but he was stuck in my squad for some reason. He had gone on the charge and he died. From what I heard he went out with a little class. He was lying there and he realized he had been hit and he looked up, smiled at his buddies, and waved bye-bye and died. The kid’s name was Smith, they called him snuffy because he was from some backwoods kind of place. He wasn’t very sophisticated but he was a sweet kid. He was going to marry a Vietnamese girl but he didn’t make it back from that one. That was another time I’m absolutely sure I saved some lives because if I had let them just make that rush some of them would have been cut down, I have no doubt of it. And when you do something like that and disobey orders you have to expect either a court-martial or a medal, well fortunately I got the medal. They wrote me up a nice citation saying my actions were correct and I had helped to save lives. I said on the radio right after all these guys were getting cut down: “Sir this is Sgt. Chambers on the point, my squad is intact. I can slip them to the left form a skirmish line and cover you while you withdraw the wounded.” And that’s what we did.