In April or May 1945 Patton's Third Army captured a railroad train loaded with the booze hoard of a Nazi bigwig. Patton being the kind of guy he was, every G.I. in his army received a bottle of brandy, a bottle of wine and one of champagne. For the next couple of days the entire Third Army was stumbling drunk.

Dad, a corporal clerk-typist (two stripes over a "T") who was sober at the time, walked out of the headquarters of his 105mm battery in a stone farmhouse in Germany only to see the battery's 105mm howitzer tubes pointed at the HQ building while staggering drunken G.I.s prepared to fire a live mission at the Wehrmacht. Dad shouted "Check Fire" and that was the end of that particular fire mission.