Dick Bostwick This is Me

 Web References

1. 1. Casper vet recounts dirt, French dinner

   www.casperstartribune.net/arti - [Cached]

   Published on: 7/22/2004   Last Visited: 7/26/2004

   As Adolf Hitler was making a last-ditch attempt to carve a corridor from Germany to the North Sea, Dick Bostwick found that the misery of war occasionally had a lighter side.
   
   Bostwick was an intelligence officer for 94th Infantry Division of the Third Army during World War II. The co-founder of the Murane & Bostwick law firm told the Casper Rotary Club of his experiences on Monday.
   
   He arrived in England, along with 22,000 other troops, aboard the Queen Elizabeth and was eventually shipped to France via Normandy and then to Brittany where he was stationed for about three months, he said.
   
   In December 1944, the German advance known as the Battle of the Bulge began.
   
   Bostwick, who left law school to serve in the Army, started another kind of education, he said.
   
   Early on in the combat, a fellow soldier told him he had a tear on the left shoulder of his uniform, he said. The patch on his shoulder had a hole through it, and further inspection of his skin revealed a black mark.
   
   "They were trying to kill me," said Bostwick, who had recently seen death in combat.
   
   That experience made Bostwick, an athlete in his high school days, weak in the knees, he said.
   
   Later, his division was looking for a headquarters in Chateaubriand, France.
   
   Bostwick served as a courier from the front to commanding officers in the town, where one officer was looking for a building to serve as the headquarters, he said.
   
   An officer found one promising building, but it was occupied by three elderly women, he said.
   
   Those women had invited him to dinner, and that officer needed a companion.
   
   Bostwick protested, saying that he had not been out of his muddy uniform for days.
   
   The officer told Bostwick that it was all right because the women knew they were at war.
   
   So the two of them went to the house for dinner at 8 p.m. and started the three-hour meal that included steak and duck, he said.
   
   The Americans knew little French, and the French women knew little English, but they managed to have a good, if quiet, time, Bostwick said.
   
   At 11 p.m., the dinner group went into another room in the house, where the women had a wind-up record player and a set of records of big band music, Bostwick said.
   
   They danced with the women for a couple of hours, and Bostwick returned to his fellow soldiers, he said.
   
   This brief luxury, however, did not offset the fighting and the difficulties of a soldier's life.
   
   "On March 24, I took my clothes off for the first time in 80 days," he said.
   
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