154 HISTORY OF THl COMMUTE] ( '\ SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 



combat, when he went out personally to reconnoiter enemy positions 

 and went up and down the frontlines talking with his men prior to 

 issuing combat operations orders. 



After finishing Texas A. & M. College in 1932 and being com- 

 missioned a reserve second lieutenant in the infantry, Teague as- 

 sumed a full-time ]ob at the post office in College Station, Tex. During 

 the depression years, he rose to become superintendent of that office 

 until his enlistment as a first lieutenant in the Army on October 5, 

 1940. With the famous "Cross of Lorraine" 79th Division, Teague 

 went into combat almost immediately after the Normandy invasion in 

 1944. As a battalion commander, his outfit was engaged in intensive 

 combat in the Normandy hedgerows after landing on Utah Beach. For 

 120 successive days of bloody fighting, Teague's battalion had no rest, 

 and in the battles across France toward the German border one-third 

 of the battalion was killed and one-third injured. Teague himself was 

 wounded six times, the most serious occurring on December 18, 1944, 

 as he was reconnoitering alone near the Siegfried line. Shrapnel tore his 

 left ankle, and another shell's fragments entered his lower back. 

 Fashioning his own tourniquet from a lace from his right shoe, he 

 crawled back on his own power, but that was the end of combat for 

 Tiger. He then had many operations and two years in Army hospitals. 



His war wounds eventually led to the loss of his left leg, in 1977, 

 but before then a special rocker-type shoe enabled Teague to master 

 his disability and also become one of the undisputed paddle-ball 

 champions of the House of Representatives. 



While still in McCloskey Army Hospital in Temple, Tex., in 1946, 

 Teague made his decision to run for Congress. Congressman Luther 

 Johnson from the Sixth Congressional District in Texas was named a 

 Federal judge, and a special election was called. "Some of us in the 

 hospital had done a lot of talking about the war and the Government, 

 and I just thought I would try it," Teague said casually, starting 

 toward a legislative career which would span 32 years of service. As one 

 of the most-decorated combat veterans in Congress, Teague was a natural 

 to rise to become Chairman of the Veterans' Affairs Committee. Along 

 the road to the top, he opposed and helped narrowly defeat a giveaway 

 pension bill which would have milked the Treasury for an eventual 

 $125 billion. From the time he became Veterans' Affairs Committee 

 chairman in 1955 at the age of only 44, he shepherded through Con- 

 gress over 200 bills which he sponsored, almost all of which went 

 through by crushing majorities. 



Stocky and barrel -chested, Teague's wide popularity stems from a 

 variety of sources. He has the knack of going right to the heart of issues 

 without a lot of the palaver which is the bill of fare of some politicians. 



