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Consequently I had, I owned the first aqualung
in the United States.
And I used up 30 minutes of air and there was no place
that would fill it.
They never saw one before.
So I went down to the fire department and I put my
aqualung in with their rescue equipment and I got my
aqualung filled once a month.
Of course the 30 minutes went about 15 minutes it seemed like.
And then out of that, the Detroit River, you know,
Lake Erie was muddy and you can't use a light because
you turn the light on and you can't see anything.
So they, so I figured the aqualung is not doing me
any good so I traded my aqualung for a typewriter, and I got
some monstrosity, I didn't know anything about typing.
So I would hold my finger on one letter and find it over here,
and this and that, and I said I can do better than that
with a pencil.
So what I did I had some electrician tape, and I put the
electrician tape on the keys and I cut them around with a
razor blade so I couldn't see the key, and I would punch it
and see what came up on the paper.
And I memorized the letters, and that's the way
I learned to type.
I've written four books now, plus a lot of communication
in between.
And I can type, but that's where I knew that I had something
wrong with my head, you know, in the beginning because when I was
typing I would go back and edit my work, and I found that on the
average page I'd have maybe 350 words and I'd have maybe
3 typos at the most.
And then I got into combat, like the Bois Jacques where Spear was
killed, and our 158 men wiped out one battalion of Germans,
and we lost 8 men and 4 of those were from my squad.
And Spear, my best buddy, he died that day.
But anyway there was, what the heck was I going to say?
Let's talk about something here.
But see, you know, when you hit 82 you don't forget,
it's your duty.
[audience laughter].
But anyway, yeah, I did learn to write and I did put out my
four books and I did get into the typewriter.
And after I got my book out, it was placed with Houghton Mifflin
and they produced it.
They didn't want it at first, they threw it away, and then
it was an Army brat that came in and she looked in the
throw-aways and she saw my title and she took it to the office,
she read it and she went in to Mrs. Hartman who was the
editor-in-chief and she said, "This is good,
you ought to print it."
So Mrs. Hartmen said no, she said, "I don't think so,
I think it's a bunch of lies."
Well it turned out that I'm the very first enlisted man ever to
write about the Airborne.
And so anyway, this lady, I won't tell you her name but
anyhow, she gave the manuscript to Martin Blumenson who wrote
"Kasserine Pass", and now he was in charge of the
military archives in Washington, DC.
So she took it to him, and he was a good friend of
General Eisenhower, and he took the manuscript
to General Eisenhower.
And General Eisenhower read my manuscript and he said,
"You go tell Houghton Mifflin, this is the best thing I have
ever read of all the books I've read."
He said, "And this is true, every bit of it is true."
So General Eisenhower endorsed my book, and he made a statement
for my book, and it said, I have a friend over here, he has a
paperback and it has General Eisenhower's statement on it.
I'm the only one that General Eisenhower ever endorsed and
made a statement for.
And later on, unbeknownst to me, the publishers called my wife
and I back to New York.
We had a pretty good-sized dinner, and after the dinner
they brought the dessert tray around, and we had never left
the children with a babysitter before.
If we went some place we took the kids, and if we couldn't
take the kids we didn't go.
So this time we did and it was a quick trip to New York, and we
just had the dessert tray come to the table and the waiter
brought a phone.
He said, "Mr. Burgett",
and I said, "Yes?"
He said, "Here's the phone."
I say, "Oh my God, the kids, they hanged the babysitter, they
burned the house down."
[audience laughter].
So anyway, the phone, I picked it up and I said, "Hello?"
And this voice says, "You Donald Burgett?"
And I said, "Yes."
He says, "This is General Eisenhower."
And I said, "Yeah, and I'm the Blue Fairy."
[audience laughter].
And he cracked up.
He couldn't talk for about five minutes and then all of a
sudden, I have a slow computer here, and it said, that was
General Eisenhower.
[audience laughter].
Because I've heard it many times before, and I said "Oh, my God."
So anyway he laughed, he said, "That was funny."
But anyway he's a human being, and he sent me a letter after
that, you know, from his place to mine, and I put that in the
safe deposit box.
And right after that I had a flood of letters coming in from
General Gavin, General Taylor, General McAuliffe,
and I have them all.
And I actually, for one envelope from Eisenhower, the day I got
it I was offered $300 for the envelope that day, just an empty
envelope.
So it is still sitting in the strong box, they're going to be
for my kids, maybe they'll need a new car someday.
[audience laughter].
But anyway, I'm trying to think of what happened right after, oh
yeah, the mailman came by and he said, "Mr. Burgett,"
he said, "you're getting some mail from a lot of
important people", because I was getting from all these generals,
General McAuliffe who said "nuts",
and everybody was known at that time.
And I was sitting on the front porch and he handed me a letter
and it was from President Johnson, and it said "White
House To Donald Burgett, Personal."
And he said, "You're getting some awful important mail from
some awful important people."
And I said, "Yeah, they got a little problem over in Vietnam
and they want my advice."
[audience laughter].
He just shook his head and walked away.
[audience laughter].
Meet all kinds of nuts in this world but anyway, is there any
more questions?
Yes, sir?
(male speaker). When you landed,
I assume you were scattered.
I'd like to hear what it was like to get regrouped.
(Don Burgett). Well that, we had
those little crickets supposedly.
And I was going to surprise you guys now you ruined
it because I forgot it.
Telephone, I never have a phone, my daughter made me take this
and I don't even know how to turn it on.
[audience laughter].
Oh, here, yep.
It drove to the bottom of my pocket.
There it is.
This is a reproduction, but this is the same company that made
the same cricket for us in Normandy, and the 101st are the
only ones that had it.
And they said the Germans would think this is a cricket.
[click-click].
Does that sound like a cricket?
[audience laughter].
You'd get your head blown off with this thing.
But anyway that was it, you would [click, click] and they,
of course, you challenge somebody and then they would
come back with [click-click, click-click] and you'd see he's
a friend.
So you'd stand up and get your head blown off because the
Germans heard you doing it.
But our best, you know they always had a password.
The challenge word I heard on television, you know, they have
a password but it's the challenge word first and then
the password.
Now the challenge word in Normandy was "flash", and the
password was "thunder".
And they always pick out something that's going to be
adverse to the person's natural language.
So if I said "flash" and the guy said "tunder," he's dead.
[audience laughter].
Now you don't ask you just do it.
And the same thing in Japan down in the Pacific.
The Japanese couldn't pronounce their L's so they had
challenging passwords, you know, like "lollipop" and
"lollapalooza".
You say lollipop and the Japanese say, "raraparooza."
***!
How'd he know?.
[audience laughter].
But anyway, they get a little tricky that way, so you've got
to keep on top of everything.
But, yeah, I challenged a guy and it turned out it was
Hundley, he was in the Stable next to me.
And we knew each other very well and I says, "How come you didn't
click or answer?"
And he said, "I lost my damn cricket," and he said "my throat
was so dry I couldn't talk."
So we were about 10 or 12 feet apart and I knew I had the drop
on him so we got together and I didn't kill him, but I came
really, really close.
But anyhow, we did get together like that all through the night.
We made the attack at day break and liberated Ravenoville.
And they did this all over.
I think the air corps missed dropping us, and by the way,
that wasn't their fault.
Steve Ambrose said they had no training and everything.
Yes, they did.
Where did we get our training?
We dropped from their planes in training.
They were the ones that trained with us.
And the thing is, what most people like probably and you and
yourselves don't know is that only the one lead plane of each
flight had the homing device for the signal system that the
pathfinders who jumped in an hour ahead of us, they would set
up the signal on the drop zone.
The lead pilot would head in for that, and all the other planes
would follow him.