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I talked to a 60mm mortarman who was carrying almost an entire cloverleaf of HE shells on a backpack rig. Asking why he was so overloaded, I was told his battalion commander wanted the mortarmen to try the arrangement because they could carry more ammo than in a regular ammo bag. I hoped fervently that none of our officers saw that rig.

I also saw a machine-gun squad with “Nip Nemesis” stenciled neatly on the water jacket of their .30-caliber heavy machine gun. They were a sharp-looking crew.

We passed a large muddy area in the road cut. In it lay the body of a dead Japanese soldier in full uniform and equipment. It was a bizarre sight. He had been mashed down into the mud by tank treads and looked like a giant squashed insect.

Our column moved down into a valley at five-pace intervals, one file on each side of the road. An amtrac came clattering slowly along, headed toward the front farther south. It passed me as I was daydreaming about the delightful possibility that we might not get shelled or shot at anymore. But my reverie was terminated rudely and abruptly by whiz… bang! whiz… bang!

“Disperse!” someone yelled. We scattered like a covey of quail. About ten of us jumped into a shallow ditch. The first enemy antitank shell had passed over the top of the amtrac and exploded in a field beyond. But the second shell scored a direct hit on the left side of the amtrac. The machine jolted to a stop and began smoking. We peeped out of the ditch as the driver tried to start the engine. His crewman peered back into the cargo compartment to assess the damage. Two more shells slammed into the side of the disabled amtrac. The two Marines in the cab jumped out, ran over, and flopped down, panting, into the ditch near us.

“What kinda cargo is in there?” I asked.

“We got a full unit of fire for a rifle company—‘thirty’ ball, grenades, mortar ammo—the works. Boy, she is gonna blow like hell when that fire gets to that ammo. The gas tanks are hit so bad there's no way to put it out.” The driver crawled off along the ditch to find a radioman to report that his load of ammo couldn't get through to the front.

Just then a man crawled over next to me and stood upright. I looked up at him in surprise. Every Marine in the area was hugging the deck waiting for the inevitable explosion from the amtrac. The man was clad in clean dungarees with the new sheen still on the cloth, and he displayed the relaxed appearance of a person who could wash up and drink hot coffee at a CP whenever he was in the mood to do so. He carried a portable movie camera with which he began avidly filming the pillow of thick black smoke boiling up from the amtrac. Rifle cartridges began popping in the amtrac as the heat got to them.

“Hey, mate,” I said. “You'd better get down! That thing is gonna blow sky high any minute. It's loaded with ammo!”

The man held his camera steady but stopped filming. He turned and looked down at me with a contemptuous stare of utter disdain and disgust. He didn't demean himself to speak to me as I cringed in the ditch, but turned back to his camera eyepiece and continued filming.

At that moment came a flash accompanied by a loud explosion and terrific concussion as the amtrac blew up. The concussion knocked the cameraman completely off his feet. He was uninjured but badly shaken and terribly frightened. He peered wide-eyed and cautious over the ditch bank at the twisted amtrac burning on the road.

I leaned over to him and said pleasantly, “I told you so.”

He turned his no longer arrogant face toward me. I grinned at him with the broadest smile I could conjure, “like a mule eatin’ briars through a barbed-wire fence,” as the Texans would say. Speechless, the cameraman turned quickly and crawled off along the ditch toward the rear.

Four or five Marine tanks were parked close together in the valley downhill from us about one hundred yards away. Their heavily armored fronts faced up the valley to our left. The crewmen