INTERVIEWER:   Mr. Wall, how did you go into the military, where did you go into the military and why did you go into the military?

WALL:   I went downtown in Winston-Salem and volunteered when I heard about Pearl Harbor.  This was in December of ’41.

INTERVIEWER:   Did you enlist in the Army?

WALL:   Oh yes, I enlisted in the Army Air Force or in those days, it was called the Army Air Corps.  Then we went to Jefferson, Missouri for a basic training course.  After that was over, we went, or at least I went to Scott Field, Illinois where I trained as a radio operator and we also had navigation training and mechanic training.

From there, I went to a gunnery school, an aerial gunnery school, in Kendall Field, Florida.  After that, I went to a join a B26 medium bomber outfit that was training in Lakeland, Florida.

INTERVIEWER:   How old a young man were you?

WALL:   I was 20 years old.

INTERVIEWER:   Had you been out of North Carolina much?

WALL:   No, I’d never been out of North Carolina.  That was my first trip out.

INTERVIEWER:   So you bounced over to Missouri and then from there…

WALL:   Yeah, near St. Louis, a big beautiful city like St. Louis.  I even went to the USO there.  It was a nice place.

INTERVIEWER:   It’s hot in the summer.

WALL:   Yeah, yeah and cold in the winter (laughter).

INTERVIEWER:   Yes, you’ve got both advantages.  You can be comfortable all year long if you want.  With all that training, how long did it take you to go through gunnery school, navigation, radio?

WALL:   Well let’s see, I joined in December of ’41 and in December of ’42, which was a year later, I was on my way overseas.  After I trained, well then we went to Fort Wayne, Indiana and we really didn't know why we were going there.  They told us we’d pick up some B26’s here.  So we went down there.  We were then told to go to Florida.  I don’t remember the exact place because we only stayed there one night.

INTERVIEWER:   Were you with a crew of other…

WALL:   Yes, I was with a crew at that time.

INTERVIEWER:   How many people constituted a crew?

WALL:   Six of us.  There was a pilot, a copilot, a navigator and me and two gunners.  Anyhow we went down to Florida.  Then we got orders to go to Puerto Rico and we were wondering why were we going down south in Puerto Rico.  See this was before the invasion of North Africa.  Anyhow we went to Puerto Rico, were there a little while.  Then we got orders to go to South America.  So we went to South America, a little town called _____ and that was in the center of Brazil.  We went from there to the coast of Brazil to a place called Natal.

INTERVIEWER:   Was this one aircraft?

WALL:   We were in a group.  What we were actually doing, we were ferrying aircraft over to North Africa, but we didn't know that at that time because as far as I knew there were no allies over in North Africa, but that was before the African invasion.  Anyhow from Brazil, we went to a little island called Ascension Island, which is right out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Well, actually it’s 900 miles from the coast of North Africa.

Then we went from the Ascension Island to North Africa.  First we went to the western coast of North Africa and then we went up the coast to Morocco.  From there, we went on missions in North Africa.  After awhile on going on missions, we went to missions in Sicily, a place called Anzio.  Then our next missions were over into Italy beginning with an invasion called Salerno.

From there we went up and down the coast to Rome and Naples.  Then we came back to Morocco and then I had finished my … what they did is they decided they were going to give you a number of missions you could fly.  Up until that point, you just went until something happened to you.  At that point, they said, well we’ll give you a number of missions.  I finished my missions and I came back to the States.

INTERVIEWER:   How many?

WALL:   Well you were supposed to do 40, but on my 38th, they sent me down to South Africa to train some South Africans down there.  When I got there, I found that they didn't want me, so they sent me back so I got to go home then.  That wasn’t bad at all.

INTERVIEWER:   When you arrived in Morocco, I’m going to take you back there, you just landed in Morocco.  What were your living conditions? 

WALL:   When we first got there, see we didn't have a ground crew, so all we had were pup tents, just the air crews.  All we had was a half of a pup tent.  So we dug ourselves a foxhole and me and one other guy put our two pup tents together and that’s where we stayed until our ground crew got there.

INTERVIEWER:   What did you have to eat?

WALL:   Mostly dehydrated food, (laughter).  That was another thing, those people over there and later on the same thing with the people I saw over in Sardinia and Sicily, they lived in poverty and there were no dogs or cats around anywhere.  They ate them all.  When you would go down the street, there would be all these little kids following you along and they were begging for stuff.  If you gave them a bar of soap or something, that made them happy, just something like that.

At the end of the chow line, there was a big garbage can and when we finished eating from our mess kit, we would dump it into the garbage can and then pour coffee or whatever.  Now this was all dehydrated food you know, it wasn’t great food.  Well these kids and a few older people would stand there with cans and dip that out to take it home to eat.  You know something I never forgot those people.  I think about them today.  They really had it rough.  Glad to be an American.

INTERVIEWER:   What did you do for recreation?

WALL:   Well there really wasn’t much to do, walk around.  It’s all desert country there.

INTERVIEWER:   When you got there, just the aircrews with the other squadron members, how long did it take before the support staff showed up?

WALL:   Gee, I don’t remember exactly, but it was a number of months, like a couple of months, something like that. 

INTERVIEWER:   During that time, what did you do for ammunition?  What did you do for fuel?

WALL:   Oh we weren’t flying missions until they got there.

INTERVIEWER:   So you spent months on the ground waiting for the rear echelon to catch up with the front?

WALL:   Yeah, that’s right, then we went on our missions.  I keep thinking back to the people I met there, the people that were in charge of us there.  One famous person was General Doolittle.  Now he was the one from Tokyo I think.  He was a commander of the group.  See we formed the 320th bomb group of the 12th Air Force.  We formed the group at that time .  Well he came over and was commander of the 12th Air Force.

We used to drive by and see him.  He’d come out and he dug his own foxhole and he would come out.  He was sort of a short, chunky guy, you know.  He was real friendly.  He would wave at us.  He didn't have any shirt on, I remember.  He was a great guy.  We had some pretty good commanding officers too.  Later on, they could go on the mission if they wanted to as observers if they weren’t scheduled to go.  But they would go a lot of times anyhow.

We had one that didn't come back because he just wanted to go.  He went in as what we called tail end Charlie on the end of the squadron where he was easy to get to.

INTERVIEWER:   Why did you say that?

WALL:   Well we flew in formations of threes.  V’s and if you were set in the back, then the fighters could get to you easier than if you were up in the middle because they had to go through all this fighting.  The Germans had these 88mm guns and they were in batteries of three.  If you were flying over Salerno, I could see a flash below me and a burst of flack above me.  Well I knew there were going to be two more.

If you saw one flash on the ground and a burst, then you saw another flash on the ground that burst, you knew there was going to be a third one.  So they had these 88mm guns and then if something happened to you, you got hit or something, then their fires would jump on you, you see.  That’s the way they had it set up there.

They had another method that they used.  When we went to Rome, they set up this big curtain flack that you had to fly through.  They weren’t shooting directly at you, but they would put up this big curtain and you had to fly through that curtain and if you were wounded or something, when you got through and you couldn't get back into formation, then the fighters were on you like a bunch of flies.

Another thing that happened, we went out on a mission up into Italy.  Coming back we ran into some problems, our crew did.  We had to crash land, well it wasn’t a crash landing, it was a pretty good landing on the Isle of Malta.  Well we had to stay there quite a while before we could get off and get back.  When we got back and I got back to my tent…the ground crews were there then and they brought tents and we lived in tents.  Well there was a guy there and he had my clothes on.

I said, “Hey man, whatcha doing with my clothes on” and he said, “I didn't think you were coming back” (laughter).  But that was routine.  What they would do is if you didn't come back, they would send your personal clothes and things to home and they would divide out your clothes, GI issue you know.  Give me back my clothes, man (laughter).

INTERVIEWER:   What was Malta like by the way?

WALL:   All I did was stay around the airplane there.  I didn't get, we weren’t sure we could get off.  When we landed, we had to dump everything off, some of the gas and guns, just to get off the island.  So they had a short runway and that’s about all I remember.  We were just there for a while, you know, we wanted to get back.

INTERVIEWER:   For the record, what kind of aircraft were you?

WALL:   A B26 which is a medium bomb.

INTERVIEWER:   How many engine?

WALL:   Two, two engines.

INTERVIEWER:   Fast?

WALL:   They had a cruising speed of around 200 miles an hour.  They could go 300.  The first B26’s that came out had a high mortality rate because they were hard to fly.  People didn't understand them.  They had a lot of bugs in them.  Oh incidentally, the B26 that we picked up in Fort Wayne and took all the way to Morocco, the hydraulic system was corroded so we called it Old Corrosion. 

So actually when we landed in Morocco with it, we cracked it up.  I remember getting bumped on the head and crawled up to the top, looked out the top and I saw one of my buddies running across the field (laughter).   Cause these things would blow up you know, if the fire started and got in the gasoline.  So I saw him running and I jumped out and started running.  That was in Old Corrosion.  Of course they gave us another one right away.

INTERVIEWER:   Did it burn?

WALL:   No it didn't burn.  It was no more any good because the landing gear was gone.  Landing gear didn't come down.  See the hydraulic system controlled the landing gear.

INTERVIEWER:   So you came in on a belly landing?

WALL:   Yeah, yeah, but we didn't know that it wasn’t going to hold.  We hit the runway with the wheels down, but the wheels folded up and then she just went. 

INTERVIEWER:   Well that made your heart go pitty pat for a minute.

WALL:   Yeah, well it happened so fast, you know, you didn't have time to get scared (laughter).  And some other guys I keep remembering over there.  There was this one guy.  He used to sing in the tent and he had the awfulest voice.  I mean he could sing Yankee Doodle and Swanee River and they both sounded the same.  He couldn't carry a tune. 

But you know one time his crew went into the ocean.  His crew went into the ocean and his plane sunk and somehow he crawled up through the hatch and swam to the top.  That was something I remember about him.

INTERVIEWER:   Did the other crew people get out too?

WALL:   I don’t think they did.  Now he was transferred to another squadron after I knew him very well and then I saw him later, you know, he came by and was telling me about this.

INTERVIEWER:   He wasn’t a pilot?

WALL:   No, no, no, he was a radio operator.

INTERVIEWER:   Now what was your rank in those days?

WALL:   Sergeant.

INTERVIEWER:   Buck?

WALL:   Buck sergeant, tech sergeant.  Well I was over there as a buck sergeant, but they made me tech sergeant while I was there.  There was another thing, this same group, there was a guy there.  He was an Indian, big, strong Indian kid.  He was a gunner and he was sort of a friend of mine, but he was real quiet.  He kept to himself and he was real macho, you know.  His pilot had another crew and they went out and they didn't come back.  They were lost.

I went down to see him and you know, he was crying.  You know, macho guys don’t do that.  And I was wondering, you know, a side of him I’d never seen before.  I always remember that guy.  He was an American Indian.

INTERVIEWER:   What did you say to him?

WALL:   I didn't say nothing much.  You know, I didn't want to embarrass him.  We were talking and all of a sudden, he just starts crying.

INTERVIEWER:   As a gunner, did you ever have an opportunity to shoot?

WALL:   Our crew shot down two fighters, but it wasn’t me, I gotta admit.  I was doing something else at the time.  It was our two gunners.  They got credit for shooting two fighters down.  I was pulling pins out of the bomb or something.  I forgot what it was.  You gotta sort of admire those guys, they would come right into your formation.  Of course, I didn't like them.

INTERVIEWER:   Again I’m going to ask you to explain something.  You said pulling pins out of the bombs.  Now people that are going to see this video tape probably don’t have the vaguest idea…

WALL:   Well there are fragmentation bombs.  When you drop them, there’s a little, like a parachute and they go down and they burst over the people or over the target.  Well they have a little pin in them because you don’t want them to fly over them like that.  When you pull the pin, you arm them.  When we went on a mission like that, we didn't go on a lot of missions like that.  Most of our missions were just straight bombs, you know.  When you pull the pin, they were armed and you open the bomb bay doors and drop them.

INTERVIEWER:   So these are anti-personnel bombs.

WALL:   Yeah, yeah.

INTERVIEWER:   More than blowing up buildings or bridges?

WALL:   Right, right.

INTERVIEWER:   I suspect you’re right.  You wouldn’t want one of those to go off in the aircraft.  What was the bomb load on the B26?

WALL:   I don’t remember, but I can remember 2000-pound bombs.  Now whether that was one bomb or more than one, I don’t know.  So I don’t know the exact amount of bombs we carried.  I never really looked that up. 

INTERVIEWER:   At what altitude would you fly?

WALL:   Okay, you were under 10,000 feet, you were about 7,000 feet unless it was socked in.  If it was socked in, you might go lower see and you didn't like that.  You didn't want to go lower because you would be closer to the ground.

INTERVIEWER:   Would you need oxygen a 7,000 feet? 

WALL:   Not at 7, but at 10,000 feet you would.  We didn't use a lot of oxygen.  We were generally under the oxygen level. Now the B17’s, they were higher and they used oxygen.

INTERVIEWER:   You know, I’ve never asked this of any of the other interviewers.  The aircrews of the big bombers, did they look down at the aircrews of the smaller bombers?  What was the attitude between them?

WALL:   I really don’t know much about that because I was never stationed right with them. 

INTERVIEWER:   They had their own fields and you had yours.

WALL:   Well I didn't see any, where we were.  See it wasn’t for high altitude bombing.  See we were in North Africa.  It wasn’t high altitude because they were fighting.  Rommel and those people were fighting over there and the Germans were being pushed out of North Africa.  So there was more or less a low altitude thing.  Now over in Sicily in the invasions, of course you want to be low then.  You don’t want to be high and in Italy it was the same way.  But I did see some B17’s over in Rome one time when we went through Rome, but that was the only time I really saw them.

INTERVIEWER:   But when you got to North Africa, American land forces were still there and fighting the Germans?

WALL:   Yeah, that was right after the invasion of North Africa.  I guess they had it timed that we would get there right at the invasion of North Africa, but the invasion had already come off because they pushed into North Africa.  In fact, they would have to in order for us to have a field there.

INTERVIEWER:   So your mission was to support the ground forces?

WALL:   For a while and then we went into the invasion.  Then we went to Sicily and I was stationed in Sardinia too for a while to fly over to Sicily and Italy.

INTERVIEWER:   And again back to the comforts of life, when you were in Sardinia, were you under canvas?

WALL:   Oh we had a tent there.  We had tents, I don’t think we had bunks, I forgot.  I had a cot, yeah, probably cots.

INTERVIEWER:   Were the Sardinians as impoverished as the Moroccans?

WALL:   The people I’m talking about were more the Sardinians than it was the Moroccans.  I really felt sorry for them.  Years later, after I got out of the service, those kids bothered me all the time so we actually adopted two kids later on in life (laughter).  And they turned out pretty good too.  I got some grandsons and a great-grandson (laughter).

INTERVIEWER:   Where did the children come from?

WALL:   The children were here in the states.  That’s something that happened a long time later.  After I finished my missions, I was to come back to the States on the ship and when I left there, I felt kind of bad because a lot of the people weren’t coming back.  There was a group that went to gunnery school with me.  There were 28 of them and a lot of them didn't make it.  They went to another squadron and they had higher casualties than we did.

Also the copilot in my crew was lost.  He went to another…he got himself another crew after we left him.  I heard this after I got back.  And he was lost, he didn't make it back.  So I often think of those people that I was with.  I was in Illinois in radio school, I met some boys and I stayed with them for over four years.  Excuse me, almost four years, right at four years and you get to know people pretty well in that time.  When you lose one of them, you know, it really bothers you.

When I came back to the States, I signed up to train foreign crews on the B26.  That was about as dangerous (laughter) as flying missions.  Those guys, we had a language barrier.  I remember one time I was between the pilot and this Frenchman, there were three French people.  What the pilot did was in the training, he was going to cut one of the engines and then the guy we were training which was the copilot, the Frenchman, he was supposed to trim the chip up with the trim, feather the engine that was cut so the prop wouldn't spin off and then turn it back on.

Well the pilot reached up and flipped the switch and turned it off and this Frenchman says, “Oui, oui” and he cuts the other engine (laughter) and I thought holy smoke.  This is the end of me, but the pilot caught it and we got back alright.

INTERVIEWER:   Does a B26 glide very far?

WALL:   No sir, it will fall like a rock (laughter).  And another kid, we landed in…see your destination that you go to in the airport is in code and you have to know the code in order to know where your compass is set to land at a certain place.  So this guy takes us in for a landing.  We were in Cincinnati and we were supposed to be in Cleveland (laughter). 

INTERVIEWER:   Oh dear (laughter). 

WALL:   The radio compass is really a valuable tool on a B26.  We flew over from Puerto Rico to Ascension Island, they had a radio beam that went out 500 miles and you would set your compass on that when you got within 500 miles.  You were on a trip that was 3000 miles there into North Africa coast and if you missed that with your compass, you were dead because you didn't have the gasoline to go anywhere.  You’d be lost.

When we went over, we went over in flights of three.  We actually lost a flight or two going over like that.

INTERVIEWER:   It never connected to…

WALL:   No, they didn't make it.  They went by it or something like that.  I’m not sure.  One story about that, when we were going over down through South America, there was this one guy there with us and he got a monkey as a pet.  Well the monkey liked everybody, but it didn't like him (laughter).  This guy, I’m going to call him Hillhouse but that really wasn’t his name, he’d sit over there and say, “I’m going to kill that damn monkey”.  But it came to sort of a tragic end because he was one of the planes that didn't make it.  I don’t know whether he had the monkey with him or not, but he didn't make it.

That’s something I remembered.

INTERVIEWER:   What was it like as a squadron member and somebody didn't come back?  How did the other people handle it?

WALL:   We felt bad about it and everything, but you know, macho guys, we’d try not to show any emotion much, but you really felt it.  I think years later when you think about it and get my age, I show emotion you know.  Then we tried not to show emotion.  There were all kinds of guys I met there that I keep thinking about. 

There was a little bit of this north/south going on.  Okay now I came from Winston-Salem and to me actually I probably seemed to some of the guys like some hillbilly, you know.  It’s like you got one leg shorter than the other from climbing the side of mountain.  Well there were some guys that were really, to me they had a loud mouth on them.  They were from the northeast.  They were from New York.  One of my very best friends was from New Jersey. 

But you know, after three years together, four years together, they’re my very best friends.  My very best friends weren’t hillbillies; they were these guys.  They were great guys and I think of them often.

INTERVIEWER:   Have you been to any reunions?

WALL:   No, I haven’t been to any reunions.  Now I was in the 320th bomb group of the 12th Air Force.  Well the 320th bomb group did have some reunions and they sent me some letters and things.  Some of the guys had written, but I never did go, get to go.  I forget what was happening, but I just couldn't get to go.  I think I was in school or something.  Now I don’t see them listed as a reunion anymore.

INTERVIEWER:   Where were you when peace was declared, when the war was over in Europe?

WALL:   Oh I was back in the States.  I think I was I was Suffolk Field, Michigan, if I remember.

INTERVIEWER:   Where is that in Michigan, near where?

WALL:   It’s near Detroit.  We were training, like I said before, we were training foreign crews at that time. 

INTERVIEWER:   Did you get discharged at that time?

WALL:   Yeah, I was discharged, well I was discharged in September of ’45.  See I joined for the duration.  I guess they figured that was the duration.  I don’t know the exact date of the VJ Day, but it was pretty close to that time.

INTERVIEWER:   What was your rank at the time?

WALL:   Tech sergeant.

INTERVIEWER:   But then you went into the Reserves did you say?

WALL:   Yeah, after that I enrolled in school first.  Then I enrolled in the Reserves because I could make a few extra bucks and then too, they would fly you home.  See I was going to school in St. Louis and they would fly you home so what have I got to lose, you know.  I make a few bucks and fly home.  Then the Korean War broke out (laughter).

Well they said you had to come down for orientation for I think it would be a week.  So we went to orientation.  The guy said well I hate to tell you this, but you’re going to go to Korea for 21 months.  But before that, I remember this, he was telling us see this was a new Air Force.  This was after the Air Force, they had their own outfit.  It wasn’t the Corps anymore.

INTERVIEWER:   Right, no longer the Army Air Corps, now it’s the US Air Force.

WALL:   Right, so he said now this is the Army Air Force and I want you to respect it.  We’ve got nice ground here planted, nice grass and everything and I don’t want you to walk on it.  I want you to act like gentleman.  So then when he told us, sorry to tell you this but you’re going to have to go to Korea for about 21 months, everybody walked on the grass (laughter). 

INTERVIEWER:   Were you still a tech sergeant?

WALL:   Yeah, I was a tech sergeant.  I didn't get any promotions or anything.  I don’t know why I stayed in to tell you the truth.

INTERVIEWER:   How long were you in total?

WALL:   Total, well I was supposed to be in for 21 months, but it actually was 24 because when I went over to Korea, I got on a mission basis again and it ended up it was 24 months instead of 21.

INTERVIEWER:   And you were back in B26?

WALL:   Well they called it a B26.  It was actually, it was on old A26.  They had a new name and called it a B26 so there I was back in the B26.

INTERVIEWER:   Doing the same thing?

WALL:   Yeah, but we were in the observe squadron.  What we would do is we would go in over the target just in front of the fires.  Most times we were unarmed.  Well this made the gooks pretty mad.  They would shoot at us, you know.  We would radio the weather back to them and then they would come in.

INTERVIEWER:   They’re coming in low?

WALL:   We were about a medium height.  The bombers would come in high or low depending on the mission.  I did 50 of them (laughter).  They had more medals there though.  They gave me a DFC for one run that we went on.  They came over and did a lot of bombing and I guess destroyed whatever so they gave me a DFC believe it or not (laughter).  It was kind of a surprise.  But then when I got out, well time was up and they discharged me, I went back to school.

INTERVIEWER:   What school were you going to?

WALL:   Before I was going to the University of St. Louis.  When I went back, I went to the University of Hartford and I finished there.

INTERVIEWER:   In Connecticut?

WALL:   Yeah, yeah.

INTERVIEWER:   Why did you go there?

WALL:   Well when I was in…after I came back from Korea and I was still in the Reserves, they kept me in for a while in Connecticut and I kind of liked the place there.  I thought it was a good place so I thought I’d go back to school there.  Then I went to St. Joe’s University for postgraduate work.  Now this was on the GI Bill and that’s one thing they sure did for me.  They gave me the GI Bill.  Not only that, I was able to buy a home too at a reduced interest rate so I was very happy about that.  That was one positive thing that came out of that.

INTERVIEWER:   What did you observe the differences between combat or military life World War II and combat military life during the Korean conflict?

WALL:   Well we were on different types of missions.  See in Korea, we were unarmed really and we did a lot of night flying too.  All we did, we didn't shoot at any fighters or anything.  We let the fighters do that, our fighters do that because they were around close.  But the people I met in Korea in the Army in Korea, they were good guys believe me.  I liked them all.

There was something about the group that I was with in World War II that I’ll never forget.  They were like civilian soldiers.  One guy that was in the crew that was in our flight flying over to our right wing, he was a piano teacher in a college you know, people like that.  Of course we lost some of them and those people I never forgot.  Of course the people in the Korean War were good guys.  They were brave and they had all the qualities of good soldiers, but they weren’t the World War II people.

INTERVIEWER:   During World War II, the military services were segregated.  At the time of the Korean conflict, segregation had been substantially reduced in the military.  Did you have any black…

WALL:   Yeah, yeah, there were a lot of the Pino guys and black guys with me, just like everybody else.  There was no prejudice or nothing.  I certainly didn't have anything against anybody because they were doing a good job, probably doing a better job than I was. 

INTERVIEWER:   Would you do it again, Mr. Wall?

WALL:   Go to war again?

INTERVIEWER:   Yeah.

WALL:   If I was young, say 20 years old, I’d probably give it a shot.

INTERVIEWER:   How many children do you have?

WALL:   I have two children.

INTERVIEWER:  And how many grandchildren?

WALL:   Two grandchildren and one great-grandchild.

INTERVIEWER:   Alright, tell you what I’m going to do.  I’m going to ask you to look right in the camera and remember what you’re now going to do, you’re going to talk to generations that will be adults when you’re gone.  I’d wonder if you’d tell them what did all your military experience wartime, what did it mean to you?  What did you learn from it?

WALL:   I think the most important thing I learned was war is an awful thing, not because of the people that are fighting, but for the people that are there, the innocent people.  Those innocent people that I saw over in North Africa and Sicily and Italy that ate out of garbage cans.  They had no life.  They were the ones that I really think about.  I think about the guys I was with of course, but I remember those people.  They’re really so innocent.  They didn't declare war; they were just there.  That’s what I remember.

INTERVIEWER:   Does a war ever cure anything?

WALL:   I don’t think so because you get one group in there.  They win a war and a lot of times, I’m not talking about the United States, I’m talking about some of the other countries, they become just like the people that they threw out.  It doesn’t seem to help any.  Then too, another thing, the people that declare the wars generally aren’t fighting the wars.  They’re sitting at a desk somewhere.  Then some 20-year-old that has a life before, loses it.  That’s another thing about war.

INTERVIEWER:   I’ve been told that wars don’t stop just because the shooting stops.  Would you comment on that?  That wars go on after the shooting stops, the results anyway.

WALL:  Right, that’s it.  The people that win the wars, I’m not talking about our people, we’re different, the people that win the wars go back and do what the people that they’re fighting, threw out of the country, were doing.  They do the same things themselves and it’s just a vicious circle.  I’m afraid it’ll go on forever.  Then there’s so much hatred in the world, that has a lot to do with it.  If you hate another group, so what do you do to that group?  You kill them.  Somebody don’t believe like you believe, well you kill them.

INTERVIEWER:   And that means somebody else is going to kill you.

WALL:   That’s right.

INTERVIEWER:   Sergeant Wall, it’s been a real privilege to be with you.

WALL:   Thank you.