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Moe FonerMoe Foner
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Session:         Page of 592

I said, “Okay, I want you to leave word with my wife that I'm going to be operated on the following week.” Of course, while I was there, she would come out to visit me, and it was a big schlepp, and a lot of our friends, I remember, used to come out. You know, people would come to visit me because I was in the hospital. But anyway, so the operation was a success, unusual, unusual, because at that time, paratroopers were falling and they were diagnosing everything as disks. They didn't know their a-- from their elbow on disks, and they were experimenting in operations, and they were getting a lot of operations done. Most of them were on the lumbar spine, cervical disks problems were very rare. So that's why Gross was excited. He had a cervical.

For about weeks after, every time there were visitors of surgeons, they would come to me and say, “Okay, Corporal Foner, tell 'em how it used to be.” And I'd go through my whole routine.

Anyway, I was returned to the post.

Q:

Let's stop for a moment for chronology. You'd been going around with this for nine months?

Foner:

Yes.

Q:

It's already 1944.

Foner:

1944, yes. I'm out around late '44, '45.

Q:

You don't recall exactly when the operation is?

Foner:

No, I have it at home, because I remember one thing they did, we used to fool around in the ward, of course, everybody was a disk case, see. They called me “Crooked Neck,” because I used to stand like that. So I prepared a diploma and the seal was a disk. That used to get around people as a side effect.

Anyway, so I am back at the post. At the post, and the big advantage I have at the post, it's a commissary for officers, and it's food, where the officers are buying for people who live on the post, and also there's a place where you can buy everything. This is during the war. Food there --and there's a shortage of food -- it's dirt cheap, the best steaks in the world. I would take them out. Of course, at the end of the month, to keep the inventory down, they would tell everybody, “Now look, get the things out of here.” I'd go home with steaks like that, you know, I remember I once gave a steak to my mother, and my mother salted it and ruined it, made it like rubber. But anyway, so that's how I fought.





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