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By Steve THE SON OF MY UNCLES ALTONS BEST FRIEND:


Did I know him? Yes. Though I was not born untill 1958, my father William Alves lived in the trenches with him. He spoke often of Red, as he was called. He would tell of some of the battles they went through. He would tell of the day that Red went down to a little stream to fill the canteens to get water to clean the tent stove and a sniper shot him. How he went to the tent where the doctors tried despertly to save his life after being hit by sniper fire. How my dad and some others of his unit went out to find the sniper and to take him out just after Red died on the operation table. What was unique about this endever was that the men would take compass readings of the rifle fire as the sniper would fire his weapon. They then triangulated his position and my dad call up a tank on his radio and gave him the cordiance to fire a shell and take out the sniper. As a tribute to a fallen friend he kept the empty shell casing that was fired to take out the sniper that killed his best friend. My dad proudly displayed this shell in his home untill his own passing in Octobe of 2000. I cannot tell you the countless times I heard him tell people the story of the shell when they would see it in our house. My dad never forgot about Red or any of the other men in his unit. He kept them alive in his memory and as a result, in a way, I knew them to.

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