JAMES M. GAVIN
25 ACORN PARK
CAMBRIDGE. MASSACHUSETTS 02140

July 9, 1973

The Reverend A. D. Bestebreurtje, Ph.D., D.D.
First Presbyterian Church 500 Park Street
Charlottesville, Virginia 22902

Dear Arie:

               I was in Ridgefield, Connecticut, yesterday attending a ceremony honoring Cornelius Ryan. The Ambassador from France flew, up and presented him with the Legion of Honor. As I believe I may have told you in the past, he has been quite ill for some time. I must say that I never saw him. look better than he did yesterday.

               I have read his manuscript which is well on the way to being completed. He gives a good account of your action in the town of Nijmegen the evening that you got shot. Surprisingly, he had no information about the action in which you and I participated shortly after landing. He may have it in his files, but it has been overlooked. To me it was a very dramatic moment that, in its way, set the pace and level of excitement and danger of the combat that followed in the ensuing 4-5 days.

               You may recall that after leaving the DZ we had to go through the woods for about a quarter of a mile where we expected to find, according to the map, a road that would lead us into Groesbeek. It would intercept another road at the outskirts of Groesbeek that would take us to the selected site for the Division Command Post. In view of the uncertainty of the combat that would follow throughout the entire Division area, and the need to take advantage of the opportunity that the first few minutes of surprise gave us, I thought that we should move as fast as we could to the Command Post area. I directed some Engineers who were there to put out a point and get moving promptly. It was obvious that they were far too timid and careful and many of them probably had had no combat experience in the past, so I decided to ask you to take the point with me and get moving. It reminded me of the old saying, "You can't push a piece of spaghetti,"

               We took the point and moved out very fast, found the road and moved up the road. It was a sunken road with the dirt bank on each side about a foot or two over our heads. From time to time there was a drainage cut coming in from the flanks of the road. You were on the left and I was to your right rear, about 5 yards. We had not gone more than a few hundred yards when a German machinegun fired down one of the cuts on the right at you. At that moment, I scrambled up the gank [sic s/b "bank"] to engage the machinegun crew, pushing my rifle ahead of me. Before I could reach the top, you had already fired. As I got over the top of the bank, the German behind the machinegun had been hit in the head and was, of course, dead. Another German was running through the trees