[...]

As we shared earlier, you relive this with flashbacks, so this is part of the adjustment you're still making today. Initially, they're very tough. I can recall a time coming home, and I just wanted to go take walks by myself to get away from the family, to get away by yourself, basically.

I'm walking down this street in Lancaster, and I'm going by a home that had a fence, a pale fence there, and there was a kid coming the other way. This kid had a stick with him, and he just took the stick—brrrrr—along the fence. I picked myself up out of the gutter. It's just a natural reaction from what you've been going through all these years.

When you have a machine gun fire, you hit the ditch; you don't care, you don't think; you're reacting, but you recover from that slowly.

[...]

Dick, we're blessed that you spend the time with us doing this interview. My father—god love him—, when he was alive, didn't talk about World War II; didn't talk about his experiences in the South Pacific.

We need the veterans to talk about it. We need to know the horrors that you saw and what you went through. Why do you think it was that when the veterans came home there weren't "Band of Brothers" books then? There weren't movies then. Men didn't talk about their experiences. Why do you think that was?

Because to talk to you—they could talk to the men that were in the service with them that had shared their experiences. You can't always talk to men because they were in the army, but you had to share the experiences of the battles that you were in, that you shared together.

To talk to somebody that was also in the army, you can talk to them, but in a different way. Yet, to talk to a civilian or somebody who's never been overseas, again, you have to withdraw yourself because he won't know what you're talking about. And you do not want to come across the impression that you were bragging.

No, you're not bragging; you're just sharing a memory. And that's hard to do. So it's very, very difficult. And as you can see, it's even difficult right here today.

Thanks to this essay, I bought the book Heart of Darkness.