Army Center of Military History and author of the book "Hell in Hurtgen Forest." Rush, a former Army Ranger who is a historian at the U.S. "I don't even think soldiers today have an understanding how bad it was," said Robert S. Soldiers went into battle with no body armor, only helmets, and they sometimes came under artillery and mortar fire that seemed ceaseless. It was a war fought largely by young men who were drafted or enlisted fresh out of high school and who had few of the technological gadgets, protections and conveniences of modern warfare. Now, at the end of their lives, the opening of the National World War II Memorial is prodding many of them to recall harrowing days when they were young soldiers and afraid. The veterans of World War II are of a generation that never talked much about its experiences in combat. "I feel guilty that I made it," he said softly. Six decades later, the memory of his three weeks in the Hurtgen Forest still has the power to make Pennegar shudder and cry. If it was their buddies, there wasn't much need for a medic."
Sometimes you'd hear the wounded yelling for a medic. But you could make out medics scurrying around. "You'd look around, you couldn't see far because the forest was so dark. "It was brutal," said Pennegar, now a 79-year-old widower living outside Philadelphia.
All he could do was wrap himself around a tree trunk being vertical left less of his body exposed than throwing himself on the ground. He came under shelling within minutes of joining his platoon - and realized that his M-1 rifle was useless against a relentless barrage of artillery timed to explode in the treetops and scatter a wide dome of shrapnel. So three months after the D-Day invasion of Normandy, the 19-year-old from Pennsylvania stepped off a troop carrier bringing replacements to the Hurtgen Forest along the German-Belgian border. Jacob "Bud" Pennegar was a clerk in an army that desperately needed infantrymen.
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