As the explosions outside increased, Private Jackson, who had been wounded on the patrol, began screaming, “Kill me! Kill me! Somebody kill me! I can’t stand it, Christ I can’t stand it. Kill me, for God’s sake kill me!” His face was covered with blood from a grenade fragment that had pierced his skill and lodged in his brain.
Sergeant Martin related, “Of course no one was going to kill him, because there is always hope, and that goddamn prisoner made me so goddamn mad I started kicking that goddamn sonofabitch, and I mean I kicked that bastard every way I could.” He concluded lamely, “Emotions were running real high.”
Someone telephoned for a medic with a stretcher, quick. Roe said he would be there in a flash.
Jackson continued to call out. “Kill me! Kill me! I want Mercier! Where’s Mercier?” He was sobbing.
Mercier went to him and held his hand. “That’s O.K., buddy, that’s O.K. You’ll be all right.”
Someone stuck a morphine Syrette in Jackson’s arm. He was by then so crazed with pain he had to be held down on the bunk. Roe arrived with another medic and a stretcher. As they carried the patient back toward the aid station, Mercier walked beside the stretcher, holding Jackson’s hand. Jackson died before reaching the aid station.
”He wasn’t twenty years old,” Webster wrote. “He hadn’t begun to live. Shrieking and moaning, he gave up his life on a stretcher. Back in America the standard of living continued to rise. Back in America the race tracks were booming, the night clubs were making their greatest profits in history, Miami Beach was so crowded you couldn’t get a room anywhere. Few people seemed to care. Hell, this was a boom, this was prosperity, this was the way to fight a war. We read of black-market restaurants, of a manufacturer’s plea for gradual reconversion to peace time goods, beginning immediately, and we wondered if the people would ever know what it cost the soldiers in terror, bloodshed, and hideous, agonizing deaths to win the war.”
Source:
Ambrose, Stephen Edward. “The Patrol.” Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2004. 232-33. Print.
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