第189页
"They were a couple of our paratroopers, but from some other company. We told them, 'Damn it, you could have got your heads blown off!'
"They finally promised to slow down on the driving. We told them the next guard post was about ten miles up the road, to keep an eye out for it, and to slow down to a crawl. They promised to take it easy.
"But when we got back we learned that those two damn fools had barreled right through Welling's post with Welling out yelling, 'Halt! Halt!' After the third 'Halt!' Welling took one shot and hit the driver." Later Welling visited the wounded man in the hospital; he said he had no hard feelings toward Welling, that he would have done the same thing.
Sgt. "Chuck" Grant, an original Toccoa man, was a smiling, athletic, fair-haired Californian who was universally respected— he had knocked out an 88 in Holland—and liked. One night he was driving a couple of privates to a roadblock for a changing of the guard. As they arrived, they saw a commotion.
A drunken G.I. was standing with a pistol in his hand, two dead Germans at his feet. He had stopped them in their vehicle and demanded gasoline, as he was out. But he had no German, they had no English, he concluded they were resisting, and shot them.
A British major from military intelligence happened to have been driving by. He and his sergeant got out of their jeep to see what was going on. The drunken G.I. pointed his pistol at them and told them to back off.
At that moment, Grant came driving past. The drunk took a shot at him, but missed. The major made a move to disarm the man. The G.I. turned on him and shot him dead, then his sergeant. Grant came running over; the drunk shot him in the brain, then ran off.
Speirs thought the world of Grant. When he heard of the shooting, he and Lieutenant Foley jumped in a jeep, drove to the site, got Grant on a stretcher, and roared off for the regimental aid station. The doctor there was a disgrace, unshaven, unkempt, wearing a badly stained shirt. He took a quick look at Grant and said there was "no hope."
"Bull shit," said Speirs, who put Grant back on the stretcher and roared off again, this time for Saalfelden. Speirs had heard there were some German specialists there. One of them was a brain specialist from Berlin. He operated immediately and saved Grant's life.
Word of the shooting flashed through the billets. E Company went out en masse to find the culprit. He was found trying to rape an Austrian girl in Zell am See. He was a recent replacement in Company I. To the expressed disgust of many of the men, he was brought back to company HQ alive.
He almost wished he hadn't been. Half the company was milling around him, threatening, kicking, swearing vengeance. Before anything more serious happened, Captain Speirs came rushing in, straight from the hospital.
"Where's the weapon?" Speirs shouted at the prisoner.
"What weapon?"
Speirs pulled his pistol, reversed his grip to hold it by the barrel, and hit the man right in the temple with the butt. He started screaming, "When you talk to an officer, you say 'Sir,' " and hit him again.