Guillermo Vasquez and Myron Doxon

95TH BOMB GROUP (H)

ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

2006 REUNION   PORTLAND, OREGON

(Interviewed by Peggy Cozens) 

PC:   (This is Peggy) Cozens and we are in Portland, Oregon, and it’s August 31st, 2006.  Would you please state your name, and the date?

GV:  Guillermo Vasquez.  V-a-s-q-u-e-z.  And the date is August 31st, 2006.

PC:  Okay.  What were your dates of service in the Army Air Corps?

GV:  1943 – 1945.  The end of ’45.

PC:  And what were your dates of service with the 95th Bomb Group?

GV:  That’s asking quite a question.  I don’t remember.

PC:  What was your principle job with the 95th?

GV:  Waist gunner.

PC:  Thank you.  Now sir…

MD:  Myron Doxon

PC:  And the dates are the same, obviously.  And what were your dates of service in the Army Air Corps?

MD:  I enlisted, they put it up to married cadets in March of ’42 and I enlisted in April of ’42.  And graduated February 8th of ’44 from cadets, and went to Salt Lake City replacement depot, and from there to Ardmore, Oklahoma.  We arrived in England on D-Day, as a crew.   I went to an AT-9 school, which was supposed to qualify me for fighters.  But I was old.  And they had more bombers than fighters at that time, so I wound up, right out of cadets into a B-17 as a co-pilot.  

GV:  Weren’t you lucky.

MD:  Yeah (chuckling).  And flew, I believe, 15 missions as a co-pilot.  And then his pilot crashed.  Nobody was hurt seriously, were they?

GV:  No, I just got a broken ankle.

MD:  And so I got to be first pilot on that crew.  Their pilot was put in as co-pilot on the crew I was on.

GV:  Displaced.

PC:  Now, I didn’t ask you, Guillermo, what squadron you were in?

GV: 412th

MD:  412th, and I finished up in February of ’45 and went home.

PC:  Do you remember the date you enlisted, Guillermo?

GV:  You’re asking impossible questions.  

PC:  That’s okay.  Not a problem.

GV:  I don’t remember.

PC:  Okay, I guess what we’re interested in is what your first mission was together.

GV:  You just gave the date of the first mission we had, when you came over as 1st pilot.

MD:  I really don’t remember what the first mission was.

GV:  I thought you just gave it a little while ago.

PC:  What is your most memorable mission, maybe, together?  Do you have a story from one of your missions….?

GV:  Merseburg.

MD:  (Laughing) Merseburg.

GV:  There were 400 holes in the ship.

TC:  400 holes?
GV:  They quit counting about 450, and nobody was hit.  

MD:  We had a very unusual tour.  We never landed away from home base, and we never had a man shed a drop of blood.  Lots of flak went by us – went through the airplane.  In fact, one time I was flying, sitting there fat, dumb, and happy with my feet on the rudder bar, and a piece of flak came in right over the navigator’s head, came up right between my feet, and went out the other side of the airplane after going right over the co-pilot’s head – never touched anybody.  Made two holes in the airplane – one coming in and one going out.  

TC:  Besides that mission, what’s your strongest memory?

GV:  The strongest memory?  Well, I’ll tell you one thing.  We came back – we were flying, flying a mission.  And all of a sudden I felt something hit me in the helmet - ????? – and that thing, we had ears on it, okay?  And that thing just flipped around, flipped the ears in front.  They were big enough, so everything went dark.  I called the radio man, I said, “Morgan!”  He said, “What the heck do you want?”  I said, “I’m hit!”  “What do you mean, you’re hit?”  I said, “I’m all wet!”  He ran back and “Turn your darn helmet around, dumb fool!”  (Laughing)  Well you know, when you get hit, you get hit in the head, the perspiration man, just pours out.  I was soaking wet in about a minute.  He said, “You damn fool, just turn your helmet around.”  Well, it’s reaction, I guess.  

TC:  Myron, how about you.  What was your most memorable moment? 

MD:  It was kind of nice to land every time.  I stayed in reserve – did another 33 years in the Air Force.  I have a lot of memories besides combat.  But I never got back in combat.  In fact, I was too old.  What had happened was, I went through flight school, flying school on my own in 1935.  I was 19 years old.  I joined the Merchant Marine between Seattle and Asia, and saved enough money to go through flying school.  Then the school went broke, and I didn’t get a job.  That was in the depression.  I started doing anything I could.  I went straight from flying school to driving a logging truck.  That was quite a difference in speed (chuckling).  But the roughest missions were Merseburg.  That was the center of the synthetic oil production for Germany.  And it figured out to be about the roughest target in Germany.  They figured if you went there twice, the third time you were over the average.  I went there seven times, and never…

GV:  We went there three.

MD:  Yeah.  But I was very fortunate.

GV:  That oil________________________was it?  Merseburg.

MD:  Yeah.  Right.

GV:  That’s when the play with rockets.

TC:  Tell me more about the rockets.  

GV:  You could actually look out the window, and you’d see a formation coming at you.  And they were up – you couldn’t get a gun on them.  They were too close to the ship, and too far away for anybody….  So you’d look up and you’d see those things coming at you – ppppprrrrr.  A bright light.  In fact, the pilot we had before _______________, the first time we ever ran into fighters, the first mission, we had rockets.  We heard the _____________ come, clicking.  Click, click, click.  We asked them when we got home, “What the hell were you doing, ______________”.  He said, “Did you see those rockets coming at you?”  No, thank goodness, we didn’t.  (Laughing).

MD:  We got in on some of the first missions when the jets, the German jets, came up after us.  Well, they’d do 100 miles per hour faster than our best fighters –  51’s.  But they were short range – didn’t have much staying power – about an hour and a half, two hours was the longest they could stay in the air.  And then when they went down to land, they were out of fuel.  So the 51’s found that out, and they’d just follow them in and have a turkey shoot on their final approach.  Flak couldn’t shoot at them, because they __________ the airplane.  Their mortality rate was horrible (chuckling) after – they were great in the air, but weren’t much after they ran out of fuel.  

GV:  You’d see them come in, come at you, and you’d turn the gun at them.  But then you press the trigger, they were gone.  It was empty space you were firing at.  Once in a while we got to see them.  ???

TC:  Hugo, tell me what it was like as one of the enemy planes was coming in – what your reactions were like; how your training kicked in.  

GV:  Well, when they start coming in, they come in at an angle, coming around.  And you start shooting at them.  All the training you ever had came back in your head into one – one focus.  Just follow that, and that’s it.  

MD:  They don’t come straight at you. Fighters come in, we called in our day, the fighter curves.  They came in on an arc, so as to, well I guess the bullets had to catch up with the airplane – you’re going away from them.  I don’t recall ever watching a guy come straight at us, do you?

GV:  No.  If they came from up above, once in a while they came straight at us, but that’s about it.

MD:  All in all, I think we had a pretty easy tour, because I gained 46 pounds while I was over there (laughing).  

GV:  ___________ Scotch.  (laughing)

MD:  I enjoyed combat.  Of course, I was noted for being mean (laughing).

GV:  He was the easiest man in the world to get along with.

TC:  He was the easiest?
GV:  Uh huh.  _______________ was pretty rough.  He was a pretty rough pilot.  Straight and narrow.  Straight down the line.  When we got in combat, when we were under his orders, look out!  Pretty rough.  But we survived.  That’s what counted.  

MD:  I remember when I inherited the crew, they all drew straws, and the ones with shortest straw had to fly first.  

GV:  Well, we inherited him.  We were so accustomed to the pilot we had.  We didn’t like him.  None whatsoever.  

PC:  You didn’t like Myron?

GV: (no)  We were accustomed to another pilot – we’d been training with him ever since we came in.  And we didn’t like him at all.  He’d talk and “Yeah, uh huh, okay.”  That’s about the answer he got.   We got to know him after a while, it was a different story.  Getting to know a person’s the worse thing.

TC:  So Guillermo, was there any particular incident that you can recall where you and the other members of the crew began to trust Myron – anything that triggered it?  

GV:  After the second mission we flew together, we figured out he knew what he was doing (laughter).  We trusted him after that.  He was fairly easy to get along with.  

MD:  Oh, one other thing.  We had an airplane named Kimmy Car.  I had a one and half year old daughter, and that was probably the only airplane in the 8th Air Force named after a female less than two years old.  (Chuckle)  And they had a picture of Kimmy – she was a little blonde – in a kiddie car with a bomb on her shoulder

GV:  That was painted on the side, wasn’t it?

MD:  Yeah.

GV:  On the fuselage, that’s right.

MD:  I should have brought the A2 jacket.  I’ve got an A2 jacket that says Kimmy car on the back of it. 

GV:  I did too, but I lost mine.  

MD:  You probably gave it to some girl.  (Laughter)

GV:  Well I can’t say I gave it to a boy.  That won’t get you anywhere.

TC:  Guillermo, on a day where you weren’t flying.  Can you kind of take us through what life was like on the base for you?

GV:  For all the enlisted men, we’d get up and have breakfast.  Then we’d lay around, read and do what we had to do.  That was a normal day like that.  We weren’t involved in too much, because some of us didn’t have too much to do.  But that was about it.  That was routine.

TC:  What about for fun; what was________________ during the day?

GV:  Playing baseball, basketball, volleyball, chasing girls.

MD:  Very seldom that you caught one, though.  (Laughter)

TC:  So tell us about chasing girls.  Where would you find a girl when you went off base?

GV:  Well, we’d sneak off the base, and then we’d go to London quite often.  We’d go to London – raise hell on pass.  So chasing was done close to the base.   What was the town close to the base?  

MD:  Horham, or Diss.  Diss is where we caught the train.

GV:  Caught the girls.

MD:  And then a little town called Eye.  You know, real strange.  I don’t think the English people ever changed too much.  These old guys would be sitting around the depot watching the train come in and leave.  ____________________  But they’d get off the train coming back from London, and they’d gather round and say, “Have you been down to London?”  If you went down to London, wanted to know where you were and say, “Yeah, I’ve been to London.”  “What’s it like?”  God, they were 60 or 70 years old and within three hours of London and never been there (chuckling).  We went every time we got a 48 hour pass.

GV:  Right.  That’s very true.  We’d take off even before we got the pass.  As soon as we found out we’re on the list, we’re gone.   ???

TC:  Did either of you develop maybe a particular friendship with anybody around Horham, one of the local people?
GV:  Most of the local people, we got along very, very well.

MD:  Yeah.  We had…officers were separated from the enlisted men, of course.  We had a – I don’t think he was over ten years old – Smitty – he collected our laundry.  We had to furnish the soap (chuckle).  The soap was all rationed for them, but we had plenty.  But he would come in and he’d get the laundry.  And his total conversation would be “It rains.”  He’d gather up the laundry and say, “So long, it rains.”  I tried to find – I’ve been back to England three times and tried to find Smitty, but never did.  Nice little kid.

PG:  What about the other people on your crew.  Do you have any stories about any of the men on your crew?

GV:  No, we got along very, very well, other than when I got hit in the head and the radio man came back and he told me to switch my helmet around because I had the _____________ down around my eyes.  We got along very, very well.

PG:  Were there stories or events that you recall being on the plane, or praying together on the plane?
GV:  I guess we all did a lot of praying.  

MD:  You only had to go on two or three missions and you realized you were all in this together – you better get along.  One day, on the original crew, we had a tail gunner that one of the other pilots went to our first pilot, Fletcher, and said, “I think your tail gunner is stealing flak vests from our plane.”  And Fletch said, “Well, I don’t know what he’d do with that. He gets his own flight vests and everything.”  He says, “Well I’d appreciate it if you’d check and see if he has any extras.  Fletcher went back in the tail of the airplane.  He said, “You know, now that I think about it, that airplane is flying tail heavy.  I’m using a lot of ….  I notice that I’m having to use a lot more pressure to keep the tail up.  Fletch and I went back and the tail gunner’s position, and he had 10 flak vests back there, making a little fortress of his own.  (Laughing)  It was really something.  We got rid of those and the airplane was back to normal.  

GV:  All my crew, they were all from the east, more than likely.  Doc was close to me.  I was the only one from the west.  They were all foreigners.  (chuckle)

TC:  Guillermo, tell us about where you grew up and what you were doing at the time the war started.  

GV:  Well actually, I was going to school.  I was going to school, and I woke up and said, we’re at war.  Didn’t pay any attention to it.  I had a year or two before I went in.  Come on, Uncle Sam ___________________.   And I went in, and I asked for the Signal Corps.  I wanted the Signal Corps.  We took our tests – IQ’s.  They called me up and said, “You’re not going to the Signal Corps.”  “Where am I going?”  He said, “You’re going to the Air Force.”  I said, “I don’t want to go top the Air Force.” He said, “Your tests came up high enough for you to go in the Air Force.”  I said, “Well, what am I going to do?”  He said, “You’re going to fly.”  I said, “I don’t want to fly!”  “You’re going to fly anyway.”  I said no, they said yes.  That’s the reason I went into the Air Force.  Because the Army sent me.  But I didn’t want any part of it.  My mom told me “You don’t want to go into the Air Force.”  I said why not.  “You’ll get killed out there.”  Okay.  (Chuckling)

What were they going to do?  You know mothers – worrywarts.  

MD:  I joined for completely different reasons.  I had gotten a job on the Northern Pacific Railroad.  I started out as a brakeman, and had been promoted to conductor.  And we were on the McCord Field switch job.  Sitting out there one day, sitting on a flat car eating lunch, and these old guys – guys that had worked all their life on the railroad – started talking about how smart you had to be to fly.  We were watching P-38’s land and take off.  They got talking about how smart you had to be.  Well I’d gone through flying school in 1935, so I knew you didn’t have to be very smart, because I had a license.  I spoke up and said so.  I said, “You don’t have to be too smart to fly an airplane.  If you’ve got normal coordination and good depth perception, anybody can fly.  And they said, “Oh, you young guys, you can do anything.  You know everything.  If you can’t do it, you think you can do it.”  And I said, “Well, I think I could fly.”  So I closed my lunch bucket and walked over and enlisted.  (Laughing)  I showed them.  Never went back to railroad.  When I got back, I had a bunch of terminal leave time.  My wife wasn’t too happy with the railroad anyway, because the young guys all had out of town jobs and everything.  I used up my terminal leave, and said, “I guess I better go down and get my job back at the railroad.”  And she said, “Well while you’re downtown, why don’t you go see an attorney.”  I explained to her how my job was protected with the Soldiers and Sailors Act, and I knew I could get my job back and everything, and I didn’t need an attorney.  She said, “You’ll need an attorney if you go back to work at the railroad because I’m getting a divorce.  (Laughter).  So I went out to - my Dad and my brother were Studebaker dealers – I asked them if they needed a mechanic.  That’s how I got into business.  I’m still working every day.  But I’m not a mechanic anymore.  I’m president of Doxon Toyota.  And I still work every day at 90 years old.  

GV:  I was different.  Once they found out my age, I go to apply for an age, they said, “Sorry, we can’t use you.  You won’t be here too long.”  I couldn’t get a job anywhere.  I finally got a job – my dad worked for a railroad and I worked for them for about eight months before I went.  I couldn’t get a job anywhere.  I’d apply, they’d look at me and said, “Get out of here.  Can’t use you.  You’re a short timer.”   Other than that, I just bummed around, I guess.  __________________ looking for a job.  Besides, I was going to school.  

PC:  I wanted to ask you a question to clarify.  Was it you with your first pilot where your plane had 400 holes in it?  Can you guys tell us a little more about that, the whole mission?

MD:  You don’t know until you get back and start counting them.

PC:  No, I mean about the mission.  Can you talk about that?

MD:  Probably Merseberg when flak went through.

GV:  It was rough.  Very, very hard mission.  They were all hard, but particularly Merseberg. That was the hardest.

MD:  The worst flak, the more holes, it breaks above you, the piece, and you run into it.  You didn’t really live through too many direct hits.  But it would break up above you and just shrapnel – you’d hit it…

GV:  _____________ gravel.

TC:  What was the most courageous thing you saw either a fellow crew member do or maybe another crew.  Something that really stands out to you as maybe going above and beyond.  

GV:  Hard to tell.

MD:  You didn’t have much time for sightseeing.

GV:  You’d look up, and it was going on, so I mean it happened so fast.  You really couldn’t concentrate – thought about it afterwards.  It would scare the heck out of you.  

MD:  I thought some of the bravest things that I saw was the – not only the crew I was on, but other crews – went to church and acted like they should go.  (Laughing)

GV:  Above and beyond.   

MD:  Yeah. 

GV:  We did more or less things automatic.  It happened so fast that you realized ________________________________.  You did something that you were trained to do - ________________________________.  That’s why if you think about it, it would scare the heck out of you.  

MD:  I remember one mission, some flak hit number three engine.  It apparently hit an oil line.  We had a reserve, or reservoir, to stop the prop – separate oil.  That ran out of gas.  But you could see the gears coming out through the nose cone of the engine – the reduction gears.  And then it finally let loose and just took off.  All the time the gears were coming through and everything, you didn’t know if the prop was going to come through the fuselage and cut the airplane in half, or go the other way and maybe land in some lousy Frenchman’s house.  It fortunately went the other way.  (Chuckle).  What I was amazed at, after we lost that prop, that airplane flew just about as good on three engines as four.  When the prop was wind milling, it was a handful.  But after the prop left us, we stayed right with formation and came on back.  Nobody ever asked what happened to the prop.  (Laughter)

GV:  Nobody went after it.

TC:  Were there any particular experiences with the ground crew that you remember?

MD:  They were the greatest people in the world.  They just – ground crews would do anything for you.  What I remember most about the ground crew though was, gasoline was rationed here.  You probably weren’t even alive then.  But you had coupons for two gallons and five gallons.  I mean it was real precious.  Over there, they were using aviation gasoline to scrub the hard stands. (Chuckle).  Gasoline was no problem.  

GV:  We had a co-pilot that wasn’t very well liked – Bennett.

MD:  Yeah.  Well, he wasn’t a very good co-pilot either.  (Laughing)

GV:  He and Leil and Doc argued like cats and dogs sometimes.  In fact they were the only three people that I heard scream at one another.  One wasn’t doing his job, and the other two didn’t think he was doing it.  We survived.  In fact, he was one we had to, when he cracked up, throw the heck out of the airplane.  And it was his fault, actually, wasn’t it?

MD:  Yep.  He’s the guy – what happened is, they were at, I think Leil told me 19,000 feet, and an engine blew up.  And they came down - on take off.  So they still had relatively a full load of gasoline.  And they came down to land.  And when you’re on final approach, it was the co-pilot’s job to put the props in low pitch, high RPM for additional power if you needed it for any reason.  And we came back from the mission after three or four missions.  Anyway, when we landed, I checked the airplane.  We were still in high pitch.  And I said to the co-pilot, I said, “You didn’t give me low pitch on final approach.  What happened?”  He said, “Well I must have forgotten about it.”  And I said, “Well that’s what happened when you crashed, isn’t it? “  I said, “You didn’t give Leil low pitch, and didn’t have any power.”  I knew that they’d tried to go around.  I’d talked to Leil about it and he said he tried to go around and the airplane just _________________ in.   And he admitted it was his fault there.  And so, anyway, at the reunion I was talking to Leil, and I told him I’d found out what happened to cause the crash.  And he said, “Well what did you find out?”  And I told him about that.  And he says, “Well that was only part of it.”  He says, “In addition to not giving me any power, I asked, when we decided to go around, I asked him to gear up, and he pulled up the flaps instead of the gear.  And that was all she wrote.  When you pull up the flaps, you automatically lose 25 or 50 feet, depending on…….  It was completely the co-pilot’s fault.  Leil said…I said, “Why didn’t this come up at the court martial?”  He says, “The first pilot’s responsible.  It was my fault.  And I said, “Why don’t you admit you were tired of flying with him and you wanted to get out.”  (Laughter)  He said, “Well, that might have had something to do with it.”  

GV:  Decided ______________________________ bombs.

MD:  Was it you that told me?  One tank broke, gas all over.  And one of the guys was going to light a cigarette.

GV:  Ronnie Freeman was sitting out there, ____________________, burst a tank, you know.  He pulled his lighter out.  There he was, trying to light it up and somebody came along and kicked it out of his hand.  And he got angry – oh, what did you do that for?  And there was gas all over the place.  About that deep, ankle deep _________________.

MD:  And the airplane was still laying there in pieces when Benny Goodman, who was it?  Benny Goodman – we had a 200 mission party, and Benny Goodman was there.  Everybody in the world, I think, saw that airplane laying there all smashed (Laughter).

GV:  I should have brought those pictures.

TC:  Guillermo, was there a time when, I think prior to Myron, that your plane went down in France.

GV:  Yeah, we landed in France, yes.  I mean, no significance.  It wasn’t anything out of the ordinary.  We just had to go down.  Had to go down quick.

TC:  What brought you down quick?  What was going on?

GV:  Engine trouble.  That was the worst thing that got you all the time was with engines.  They got you.

TC:  Do you remember where you landed and what you did until you were picked up?

GV:  Down in Lyon, France.

MD:  That was after I left.  Did you know Dave McKnight?  You’d met him, hadn’t you?

TC:  Yes.  

MD:  He was a good friend.  He was chief pilot – just a prince of a guy.  We had another – well, I just plain liked to fly.  So I met this guy – whenever we had an engine change, the airplane had to be taken up and flown four hours at altitude before it was certified to go back into combat.  The guy that did that – he wasn’t actually a test pilot.  He was just another pilot.  He went up and bored holes in the air.  So I talked to him and we got talking and he said he just plain didn’t like to fly, but he had this job and he would do it.  I says, “Well I’ll fly.”  He says, “Would you fly and sign my name?”  I said, “Sure, I’d be happy to just get in the time. I’ll sign your name.  It doesn’t matter, I get the same pay anyway. So I did, and Dave found out about it.  I was flying and signed off another guy’s name.  So when it came time, there was a chance to go from co-pilot to first pilot, I know darn well he’s the guy who said “You can do it.”  If it hadn’t been for Dave, I don’t think I ever would have gotten to be first pilot. 

GV:  He’s dead now.

MD:  Yeah, he died.  

PC:  When, like with Benny Goodman there, did you enjoy those shows?

MD:  This was the first concert that the band put on after Benny Goodman – you heard what happened to him.  He learned to fly over there, but never got instrument training, and took an airplane to go to France, and it was bad weather over the Channel, and never heard from him again.  He was missing at that time.  They didn’t know what had happened to him.  Yeah, they were nice concerts.  

GV:  I missed the Benny Goodman concert.  Right away they took me up to the hospital to see what was wrong with me.  Like I said, broken ankle.  So they put me in bed; kept me there for three days.  And I missed the whole thing.

TC:  What are some of the stories the two of you swap when nobody else is in the room.  You know, when you’re out having coffee or whatever.

MD:  You know some of them (chuckling)

TC:  I’ve heard rumors that there’s some good ones that we might not be getting ___________.   Now I don’t want to get rough with you, but I bet there’s a couple of good things you haven’t told us yet.

GV:  Pertaining to girls?
TC:  Whatever you wish (laughter), knowing your daughter’s in the room.

GV:  We did a lot of drinking.  That’s one thing I remember.  

MD:  You don’t live this long without drinking.  And if you spent a year in England, you learned to drink Scotch.  We used to take a B-17 and go up to Prestwick and get a full plane load of Scotch and bring it back to the Officers’ Club.

GV:  And then they’d give us, or buy it from them – whichever.  Buy a few cases from them and they’d bring some down.  Word got around they had it, so we’d buy it.  

MD:  One of the things I remember – well, when I got to be first pilot, naturally I had to leave the crew that I – in the barracks, had to get a new place to live.  And I went down to where Leil and Swartz and Goldberg and Bennett lived.  And I walked in, and it was the damnedest, dirtiest, barracks I was ever in in my life.  I thought, I won’t live here.  And I went back and told – I was very fortunate.  Frank Oskie was a West Pointer, and he had been our instructor at Ardmore.  He came over and got to be Squadron Commander.  And he’s from Gate Harbor, and I was from Tacoma – 10 miles apart.  And I told him I says, “I’m not going to live there.”  He says, “Well, I think we’ve got a place that you can live in the same barracks I’m in.”  His navigator, there was an extra bunk in his room.  I hadn’t been there very long, and this navigator was appointed as snow removal officer.  That was the biggest joke in the world – snow removal officer.  Went along probably less than a month, and one night we got about eight or ten inches of snow, and there was a mission on the next morning.  And they came and got him out of bed about two o’clock in the morning and said, “Come on out; you’re snow removal officer.”  (Laughter)  And he had to go out there and see to it that they got them off.   Had a bunch of guys with snow shovels and everything else.  We got a bunch of airplanes on the taxiway, and one of them slid off, buried itself in the mud.  That mission was scrubbed.  

PC:  We’re getting close to the end here, and I think maybe what we want to do is ask if there’s anything you’d like to add for the record before we close?

GV:  No, we just flew with a whole bunch of wonderful people.  That’s about it.  They were the best.  

MD:  The reunions are fun.

GV:  Uh huh, that’s right.

PC:  How many have you come to?

MD:  I was at one back in the ‘80’s I think it was.  We had a reunion – the Eighth Air Force had a reunion in Washington, D.C.  And Art Frankel was there.  They had a room.