Sabers

Show and Tell! Colonel shares and shows Pete his PSC ROTC saber.

Colonel: This is a standard issue item. So when we had formal parades and things of that nature, that was the only occasion for which we wore it. It was in a box in my parents house until my father passed away, eventually my mother. I took it out and its been in a box ever since again! I don’t think they have them at all anymore, do they?

Pete: They might have them at West Point or the Naval Academy. What we used was not personalized like this. More or less, if you were in a high-ranking position and you needed it for a parade, they gave it to you. Once you graduated, they passed it down to the next class.

Colonel: This, of course, I picked up somewhere’s in Europe. [Handing Pete another saber] I can’t tell you where, I don’t remember. On the internet somebody once told me they were trying to sell one for 3,000 dollars. I picked it up and threw it into a duffle bag in which I had put things of this nature. Mostly the purpose of that duffle bag was the hold pistols and knives and give them out to those who were wounded and did not have any souvenirs to take home. So Yust and I would go into that bag and give them something to take home. And I kept that for myself, I don’t remember where I got it.

Pete: The SS logo is on here.

Colonel: Yeah! Yeah. I may have gotten that, well we took a pretty severe licking on Palm Sunday. The influence of SS, a bunch of SS troops on Palm Sunday. We took a licking. Had to back up. And there was an abandoned school. An SS school. So when we went back, I may have taken that from the SS school.