This presentation of In Their Own Words is brought to you by the Honor Project and is dedicated to the brave men and women of the United States Armed Forces.

Recording interviews for the Honor Project gave us the chance to meet some remarkable veterans,

like Medal of Honor recipient Walter Eelers.

In November 1940, he and his older brother Roland joined the army together

and fought side by side in North Africa and Sicily.

In the spring of 1944, they trained with the 1st Infantry Division, prepping for the D-Day invasion.

I wanted to talk a little bit about infantry and what you saw in combat. What is the infantryman's perspective on

war? When you're in the infantry, of course, you know you're the one that's being shot

at it all the time, or you're being bombed or you're being straved. You're subject to all the mines and things like this.

So as an infantryman, you go through the whole garment of warfare.

You have to make the assaults on the beaches.

You have to make the patrols at night, which are scary.

You go out into territory you've never been into before and expect to come back alive, you hope.

And it's a harassing type of work in wartime, you because you're always overexposed and everything

you're the very tip of the sphere so to speak that it's it's the grunt on the ground

that wins the territory that well we secure we secure the territory, you know.

What goes through your mind when you're about to enter combat,

I mean, face-to-face, you know, arms distance from the enemy at times?

What's running through your mind?

Well, self-preservation.

You just want to stay alive.

And, of course, the thing that's going through your mind is one of the things that we were

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