Gordon Coutts
The Memory Project, Historica Canada
We were you know attacked on one night and that was the night that … That the RCR’s got attacked and some of them were buried in their bunkers with the explosion and stuff like that was going on and we dug them out a couple a days later finally and they came out of there and guys that were … Had brown hair and black hair and to begin with came out and one of them came out with snow white hair and you just … I don’t know how that happened, but you know he did. And then we were in … We had … We were in support of the … Of the [inaudible 0:00:55:1] 355 and we supported the [Van Doo 0:00:58:8] who came in after that for a little while and after we were in … There for a while, with the Van Door their … One of their sergeants came over and spoke to … Jack Smith his name was … Our officer and said – would any of your fellows like to go out on patrol and I overheard this conversation and I said excuse me sir I’d like to go, I’d like to have a whack at that. Boy was I ever dumb. Anyway he said well okay, but you watch what the hell you’re doing down there. So there’s a night patrol and the North Koreans used to stick up big signs across the road in the valley off 355.
And one poster of the flag would be on one side of the road and the other would be on the other would be on the other side of the road, so that the way the road ran, that we would be able to see the signs. So this sergeant [inaudible] Van Doo, he said we’re gonna go get sign and I said yeah okay. So they got their patrol ready and they got me in there and they coached me a little bit, so we snuck out down through the bushes in front of the hill and we got into the ditch on our side of the road and … And he said okay now what we’re gonna is a couple of our guys are gonna go over there and cut the rope and then come back and then we’ll cut the rope on this side of the road, so you sit there and wait. So we did and then the guys came back and he said alright now start pulling it in [inaudible] rope, we start pulling the sign in to our side and all of a sudden it stopped.
And we thought it was just snagged, but it wasn’t, they were pulling it back on the other side of the thing. So he said okay guys give it one more pull and when it stops, the rest of you fellas get up there and start firing. So okay so that’s what we did and then there was a hell of a noise going off in the middle of the night, you couldn’t see a damn thing, it was like … It was dark like the inside of a cow down there, you know and anyway the … We grabbed a hold of the sign and we started pulling and dragged it back over the road and … And he says let’s get outta here, so we hammered ourselves back up the hill and [inaudible 0:04:24:6] to our officer, he said to Jack Smith
… He said – we’d like to put this sign up in front of one of your tanks and [inaudible] says you go to hell [it makes too good a target].
Source: Historica Canada