Mac Brandy and Me World War II

This is the story of my life from ages eighteen to twenty-one serving as an infantry soldier and radio operator in the European Theater during those years of combat against Germany during World War II. I am now eighty-six looking back to those eventful years and remembering history. I grew up in the Bronx in New York in a wonderfully mixed neighborhood full of Italian Jewish Polish and Irish people and attended POS 89 along with all the other kids. We all walked to school together tossing a ball around and at times causing mischief especially with a farmer and his goat along the way. Prejudice wasn't a word we know. At eighteen in the early forties I enlisted in the army and began a whole new life. These are some of my most vivid memories from that time. It is about a friendship that was formed with two other soldiers who I met at Camp Wheeler by sheer coincidence; we went into combat together and became lifelong friends: one Italian one Jewish and the other Irish. We fought together laughed together cried together and bonded. We were kids who became soldiers together and never lost the kinship we had found. Lord how I miss them both. England France Germany Austria Czechoslovakia-where else could an eighteen-year-old go free of charge and with all his friends too? And being on a huge passenger liner to boot ... well there were a few problems but hey that's the way it was. This is dedicated to those few of us who are still here and to all who didn't make it.