Christmas eve night, shortly after the chow truck had made its evening rounds, orders to evacuate came down from regimental headquarters. We were to destroy anything we could not take with us. We made a quick trip to the barrack area to empty what we could from our footlocker into our barracks bags. The footlockers and their remains we buried in the fields adjoining our gun position I don’t think there was a one of us who really thought we would be digging them up again. Ever. We loaded everything in the two, 2-1/2-ton trucks that were pulling the two 37 mm guns, lined up in the convoy awaiting orders to move out.

“March Order” came about 10:30 that night and started us out on one of the most hectic nights imaginable. Traveling 45 miles per hour, driving a ‘right side of the road’ vehicle on the left side of the road, blacked out, in convoy with the enemy supposedly hot on your tail, can get pretty hairy. Sometime during the night, the kitchen truck tried to straddle a concrete road marker and ripped the whole underside out. The cargo was spread out over the other vehicles, including our two. Heretofore, I had managed to doze some, but now with a frozen side of beef as a bed partner, sleep was out of the question.

Besides running off the road a couple of times and a few bumper bang –ups, we pulled into a cane patch near the little town of Hermosa some where west and south of Manila on the road into the Bataan peninsula, Early Christmas day. Our objective here was to furnish anti-aircraft protection to keep the Jap airplanes from bombing the bridge the troops withdrawing into Bataan had to cross. ‘Bataan, the land of our last stand.’ Poetic! No?

It was Christmas Day. What irony. A day of peace on earth, good will toward men. What peace? Good will? Bah, humbug. I thought. Yea, war is no respecter of Sunday and Holidays. Most of the day was spent in digging foxholes, setting up and trying to camouflage our gun position. That was a joke. We had two air raids in the afternoon. The best they could do was bomb a small nipa hut at least a hundred yards from the bridge.

Instead of turkey, cranberry sauce and all the trimmings of Christmas, we had to content ourselves with a can of C-rations and biscuits for lunch. That evening the cooks excelled themselves in spite of the conditions under which they had to work. My frozen bed partner became a beautiful piece of roast beef, accompanied with gravy and the usual trimmings. Anything warm would have been welcome, but this was a feast.

After we had finished out banquets, three or four of us retired to my foxhole where the communications was centered. We spent a while reminiscing until Captain Ashby came over with his last bottle of orange gin. After we killed a better part of the bottle and shot some bull, we headed toward our respective foxholes.

Alone, I checked in with my 1st Sergeant for the latest news, and with nothing new coming down, prepared to get some shut-eye. It had been almost 36 hours since I had done any sleeping other than dozing now and then. For some strange reason, I was not a bit sleepy. I sat on the edge of my foxhole, noticing how everything was so still and quiet…a beautiful night. millions of stars in the sky. Made me think back to the days when I was a small boy sitting on the porch of my Grandparents little homestead shack in New Mexico with my Grandmother, listening to crickets chirp and the occasional snort of one of Granddads’ horses in the shed out back. Those same stars were shining then just like now. Then the strains of “Silent Night” came drifting across the sky, a haunting harmonica, music being played somewhere by some other soldier…I broke down. Maybe grown men and hardened soldiers aren’t supposed to cry, but at that point in time this soldier had tears running down his cheeks, and no regrets. This was my first Christmas away from home.