 We were in a tough battle and we were going to win it and we're not going to take anything from the SS. The SS were the ones that were bad, they were the ones that killed all these troops and we were going to get even. And believe me, there's nothing like a bunch of paratroops when they wanted to get mad and they wanted to get even. You got problems. The battle was very hard and the weather was horrific. The atmosphere there was, we've got to do this, we've got to beat these people. We want to get this thing won and get it over with. The battle started on the 16th. There were very tough fights through all the villages. And the entire ball from there on was just nothing but one slug mass continually. Anybody that says they weren't scared is a liar because I know a lot of tough guys that just as scared as I was joined the service when I was 15 and worried about my age to get in. But like everybody else, my occupation was chosen by the Army for me. It was an exciting thing to ride along in a tank and I don't know, you kind of felt like you were king of the hill or something. That attitude when you were a kid, you know? Daredevil was a radio call sign. There's always a continual push, push, push, push. Therefore, we didn't get a lot of sleep. We didn't get a lot to eat. And we were very stubborn about the rest. Even if you're moving slow, you're pushing because you don't have to keep the enemy on their heels getting them moved out or killing them. Everything with the 82nd Airborne that our unit was, we're going to win this thing and we're going to win it our way. It reminds me of something happened in the bulge. A friend of mine was a tank commander. His tank was going down a firebreak one night and he came face-to-face with this Tiger Royal tank, the biggest tank the Germans had. Generally, if you come face-to-face with a Tiger Royal tank, that's the last thing on Earth you see. But in this case, nothing happened. He thought, well, maybe there's sleep inside. So he fired a star shell over this tank. And sure enough, when it lit up, the crew must have thought they were on fire because they all bailed out. Well, he was up in the turret with a .50 caliber machine gun. And he fired and he killed three of them, wounded one and one ran away before he could get them. He captured this tank and he radioed back to battalion and said, I captured this Tiger. He said, it's run and I'm going to take this sucker all the way to Berlin. It just seemed like the weather was against us. The Germans coming through Belgium had stopped at the town of Malmedie. It just so happened that part of the 7th Armored Division was passing through what they called Five Points, which is a point above Malmedie. When the Germans got there, they captured something like 92 American troops that were part of a convoy that was passing through Five Points. They captured them, had them stand with their arms up, and then they machine-gunned them and killed every one of them. There were five who made it, who escaped. And they came down to Malmedie and told the story of what happened. When that word got out there, all the troops, all of a sudden, the atmosphere, the morale, everything changed. Luckily, we were with the 82nd Airborne, as far as we were concerned, the best outfit over there. And we were going to get even. We had a high respect for the infantry. They were the guys that did the dirty work. We helped them do it. When it finally ended there, in the balls, if somebody would have told us at that time that that was the end of the ball, we probably would have said, so what? Because that portion of the fight was over, but that didn't mean that you then got a rest. You just kept going. That just meant we were going on into something else. January 25th was still cold, but we knew that even though it was cold, it was not going to be like it was before. We thought we were doing pretty good when we got the Siegfried Line, because of course the Siegfried Line was the entrance into Germany. That little ball was tough. Don't get me wrong, but the Siegfried Line was equally bad. Once we crossed that line, we were in Germany, and that's where we were headed. That made us feel good.