(6 of 9)
"I Lay There Real Still." "I figure that they're going to get me. I didn't think about very much. I just said to myself the bastards won't get me alive and they aren't going to live either. I got the last grenade and held it. When they got real close to me, I was going to pull the pin and let it go between us.
"I lay there real still and they come up slow as hell. I was just ready to pull the pin when a hell of an explosion came between me and them. It must have been our artillery. The next thing I knew I was at the bottom of a rise. I must have been rolled 100 feet or more. What happened to the gooks I don't know. They weren't around."
Stan Popko, hurting bad, started crawling. He figured he crawled almost a mile before he looked up and saw a tank coming down the road.
"The turret man was waving his big 50-cal. machine gun at me, and I figured he was going to let me have it. I yelled, 'I'm a G.I.' He looked at me and then the other way. The tank went right by me.
"I got up some way and started to run. I took two steps and fell down. I saw two G.I.s coming toward me and I passed out. I stopped worrying.
"I came to the next morning about 6 o'clock and I felt for my right hand. I couldn't find it. I started yelling like hell and this South Korean kid who brought water around to our stretchers came in and asked me what the trouble was. He showed my hand to me. It was in a cast and I just was scared to look for it. I thought sure they'd cut it off."
Later that day Popko was taken to the Pusan airfield and flown to a hospital near Tokyo. Two weeks later they sent him home to Bayonne, NJ. A lot of people asked him would he do it again—enlist if he knew what was ahead? Said Stan Popko: "I guess I would. I can't see myself spending my life as a counterman or hanging around streetcorners."
The Sun Never Sets. A man's past, the things that shape his character, are reduced in wartime to a few sentences in a personnel file. But ENSIGN DAVID TATUM, like any fighting-man, is the kind of fighter he is in large measure because of the way he grew up and the things he learned. Tatum flies a Grumman jet fighter off the carrier Valley Forge. When he was a boy in Baton Rouge, La., his father gave him a BB-gun, with instructions to stand guard over the Tatums' little back garden, then beset by seed-snatching sparrows. David scared off the birds; frequently he hit one, but he didn't enjoy the sport. "I would look at these sparrows and think, 'He didn't do me any harm. He was minding his own business.' I felt guilty."
He learned the Ten Commandments in Sunday School, but they meant nothing to him. "My mother taught me that it was right to go to church, but that you didn't have to go to church to have religion. She taught me to hate a hypocrite —a Sunday Christian." His parents also taught him to respect older people—a lesson driven home more than once with a switch. "I didn't mind that. It didn't hurt—it only stung a little. I would rather be beaten than fussed at."