Excerpt from 1997 Chinese OG reunion:

Emmet F. McNamara

Operations:
France: Earle's LINDSEY
China: Hoppers' 1st Commando, APPLE

The France thing to me was a lot more interesting. Out of 5 B24s that went in on the night of August 16-17, 19 of us parachuted in. In the first operation 3 were captured and Emile Roy was shot. We sat on a hill where we were going to stop the Germans from coming up the hill who didn't know we were there—that's what we thought. About 5 minutes past 11 a farmer down front of us was moving his cows near one of those clumps of trees that they have everywhere. We didn't know why he was moving the cows. Next thing you know dirt started blowing up, up, up in front of us. They were firing mortar at us. A whistle blew and had us take off. From then on it was mostly being chased. They knew where we were.

Telephones were working fine so we get the message of the Southern France invasion. Do your best to get up to Paris, which we did. There were 11 of us that finally got up there.

All volunteered to go to China. No one would look at the other guy and say, "I'm not going. Are you going? Yeah, I'm going." So we all go over to China. There we lived in Maryknoll Mission. I got a kick out of someone's story how the Chinese made pajamas out of the chutes. We all wore them. The night we parachuted alongside the river, some dropped in dry rice paddies but some Chinese dropped in rice paddies containing water and drowned. The Chinese left them there. You go to heaven if you drown in China. We were chased by about 500 Japanese. We had to run for 3 days in stocking feet; we had no shoes. We had no food. We walked over the mountains and ended up in Father Connelly's Maryknoll Mission which was an orphanage for little girls—at least there was a little girl outside who had survived. We took her back in where there were around 100.

The object there was to stop the traffic on the West River pulling the sampans with rice on them. The sampans would be pulled by a little motor boat which you could spot at night. You'd hit that and all the sampans would flip over and the Chinamen would come out of everywhere to grab these floating restaurants—they were full of rice.

We heard the war was over. Some of us were sent back to Kunming. The rest stayed along the West River and went from town to town. Bates was our Lieutenant and he would know the details. Eventually we joined the others in Kunming.

A few years ago Ernie Trudeau and I went to a meeting organized by by Dan Pinck at the Harvard Law School. That thing was not the OG type—a little more hierarchy—people who knew what was really going on—not us—the way I look at it we were just followers.

Transcription compiled by John Hamblet.