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ON A HILL FAR AWAY, a young man of 28, with blue eyes and curly, sandy-brown hair, now cut close, finds himself shivering in a pup tent in North Africa's Sahara desert, at a place called Mud Hill. He's dug in, eating C-rations out of a can in his fox hole.

The occasion? It's Christmas Eve 1942, and Army Staff Sgt. Emerson F. Hunsberger, squad leader of Company B, 437th Signal Heavy Construction Battalion, along with several hundred others, is sitting on the precipice of history, gazing up into the starry night.

"We were there with various elements of the infantry, and some soldier with a deep bass voice started singing 'Silent Night, Holy Night,' and another soldier picked it up, and another, and another," he recalls. "It wasn't long before the whole encampment was singing the Christmas carols." On this starlit night, Mud Hill was transformed into a choir of soldiers, echoing the sounds of Christmas, far away from home.

"When Pearl Harbor was attacked, I was working in Williamsburg," reminisces Hunsberger. "Everybody was talking about Pearl Harbor, and how it was going to affect everybody's life." He was then seeing Anne Chandler Moore, his girlfriend of several months, whom he had met on a blind date. On the day President Roosevelt said "will live in infamy," he and Anne had a date.

Hunsberger's home in Clifton stood atop a hill on 40 acres, two miles outside town. Emerson was born there in 1914; his family made its living on the "general farm." He was always considerate, helping his mother in the kitchen. He liked to go fishing and hunting with his brother, Austin, and while in high school, teamed up with fellow Cliftonian Robert Burke to play country music on their guitars. His old home place, now the back of the house, was renamed Mulberry Farm in the late 1980s. The original house of seven rooms, a back and front porch, and cellar, still stands, though it has changed a lot through additions and remodeling as it passed through various families.

When Hunsberger graduated from Clifton High School in 1932, it was the peak of the Great Depression. "I took the work that was available to me, working on a section gang for the Southern Railroad" in Clifton, he recalls. By 1934, with the economy a little better, he was able to land a decent job, working for the State Department of Highways as a rodman.

By 1939, Hunsberger had worked his way up the line to become assistant chief of a survey party, the transit man, in Williamsburg. "We were all in our 20s, and decided to go ahead and enlist, so we could choose where we wanted to be," he recalls of his survey team.

Fort Belvoir was where he really wanted to go, but the Army post had no vacancies. "They told me they'd be organizing a signal company at Langley Field, in Norfolk, if I was interested in that. I said 'Well, not too bad, my girlfriend's in Williamsburg, so I'll just take the Signal Corps.'"

Hunsberger soon found out that didn't mean he and Anne would be spending any time together; no sooner had he enlisted on Dec. 27, 1941, than he was put on a bus for Camp Lee in Petersburg, where "we got our shots, uniforms and went through basic training. Before long, I was on my way to Langley." As a buck private going in, he moved through the ranks quickly. By the time they sailed for Europe, he was a staff sergeant and squad leader in charge of 66 men.

At Langley, the soldiers learned to march and went to Signal Corps School. "We learned how to maintain and operate the various signal systems, including telephone, telegraph, cryptograph and teletype. We learned how to use them all," Hunsberger remembers.

When they left Langley for a short leave in August 1942 at Fort Dix, N.J., Hunsberger's outfit was Company B, Second Platoon, 437th Signal, Heavy Construction Battalion. While at Fort Dix, the men had an opportunity to "kick up their heels." Well, almost.

"The Stage Door Canteen was on the base, where the movie stars and all entertained the troops. We were in the tent, getting ready to go to the Stage Door Canteen . . . when [the] first sergeant appeared at the tent entrance. 'Everybody fall out as you are!' Well, some of them had on only a pair of shoes, a pair of drawers, or just underwear, that's all they had on. 'All leave is hereby canceled and be ready to leave by 1400 hours!' We were shipping out, and we didn't get to go to the Stage Door Canteen.

"On the Queen Mary, when we sailed from New York on September 12th, we were told we had about 18,000 troops on board and 1,000 crew." The trip took five to six days, but they finally arrived on the shores of Grenoch, Scotland, in the third week of September.

"The ship was anchored a ways out. The men went in on smaller crafts. It was doubtful that the ports could even take the Queen Mary; the ship was too big. The Scottish ladies treated the men to tea and cookies as we went ashore. When we sailed to Scotland, our equipment went on to North Africa," he laughs.

During the three months that Company B was in England, it bivouacked in three different locations. Its first assignment was an air base in East Anglia, near the city of Norwich. Here, they saw their first real action; they were bombed twice during the day by German aircraft.

Hunsberger never took anything personal in his life. His experience in England was no exception: "They weren't bombing us particularly, they were bombing the air base where we just happened to be."

Company B departed England aboard the HMS Empress of Canada, sailing through the Straits of Gibraltar to Oran in North Africa. "When the old HMS Empress of Canada started out again for England, it cleared the Straits of Gibraltar all right, only for German submarines to send her to the bottom," he chuckles nervously.

As he and his brothers Lawrence, Arthur, Austin and John faced close calls during the war, their lives were spared by quick thinking, staying cool under pressure, and a guardian angel who prayed every night for their safe return. The angel was their mother, Lucy Ellen Keene Hunsberger, back on the farm in Clifton. And every month, her son Emerson sent her his Army allotment check.

In Oran, Algeria, the Signal Corps' line trucks, weapons carriers and earth-boring equipment soon got put to good use. In the early spring of 1943, Company B moved to Oudja in the northern Sahara, sleeping in pup tents as they went. "It got real cold at night, and burn[ed] you up in the daytime, the temperature varying as much as 50 to 75 degrees," he recalls. "During the day, it hovered around 110 to 115, going down somewhere between 40 to 60 degrees at night."

He didn't see any Germans until they reached Tunis, the Tunisian capital on the Mediterranean Sea. Gen. Erwin Rommel, the Desert Fox, commanded German forces. Gen. George Patton led the U.S. forces in North Africa, where Hunsberger recalls seeing Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower: "I saluted him as he drove down the road."

With Rommel driven back, having surrendered near Tunis, Adolf Hitler recalled him in March 1943 to the European Theater. Company B moved on. From the seaport of Bizerta in September 1943, they sailed on an LCT (Landing Craft Tank)--equipment and all--to Salerno, Italy, just south of Naples.

"The first thing off the ship was a small bulldozer. He just pushed some sand up around the plank, extending off the ship, right onto the beach!" he remembers.

The Army's 36th Infantry had spearheaded the invasion on Sept. 9; Company B arrived a few days later. In Salerno, the Germans put up a fight.

"Although their job was to set up communications, you can be sure Dad saw plenty of action overseas," says Roger M. Hunsberger, Emerson's son. "The Signal Corps boys came right in after the front-line infantry."

"After that, we started running telephone lines wherever they were needed," Hunsberger says. "Naples fell Oct. 1, 1943, and we desperately needed it for a seaport." The Army needed support offshore, so that its Ducks, amphibious 21/2-ton trucks, could bring supplies. "When we first arrived, the Germans bombed us for about a week. Then they fell to the north."

The traps of war, especially land mines, jumped out at the soldiers.

"Just outside of Naples, I lost my first truck. An earth-borer machine hit, and blew the front wheels right off, injuring two of my men. They never rejoined the outfit; they were pretty badly beat up. I think they did survive."

Then, outside Civitavecchia, Italy, a line truck struck a mine. "The injured soldier was able to come back," Hunsberger recalls, "but my truck was ruined."

Halted at Cassino, the troops had to go west through Anzio, Italy, to reach Rome. Once the infantry broke through the German lines at Anzio, Hunsberger's Company B started north.

Rome fell on June 4, 1944.

"You couldn't even get down the street," he laughs.

Women and children threw flowers to the convoys of trucks moving through the Holy City, and "the Italian girls were all over our jeeps."

The Germans abandoned their control of the Italian government. Italian dictator Benito Mussolini realized his goose was cooked and, disguised as a German private, tried to escape in a truck bound for the border. He didn't get far. The partisans caught him, and hung him and his mistress at a service station in Milan.

Company B gradually moved north.

"As the front moved, we moved with it. One of the duties of the Signal Corps was to follow the railroad, because it had an underground cable that ran from Rome to Pisa, and we were using the circuits wherever we could for the military."

Just south of Leghorne, also known as Livorno, Italy, 'Hunsie' --as Hunsberger was called during the war--had to enter a railroad tunnel to test circuits.

"When I went in, I stepped on an anti-personnel mine, and it went out of its shell. Loaded with shrapnel, they usually go up about 30 inches and explode. This one went all the way up, and fell back."

The mine was defective.

"If that thing had exploded in that tunnel," he says, "you and I wouldn't be talking here today."

By now, it was the fall of 1944, and Company B moved from Livorno to Pisa, where Hunsberger climbed the famed Leaning Tower. Next was Florence, then on to Futa Pass in the North Apennines mountains.

"A weapons carrier hit a tellar mine just south of Bologna, at the head of the Po Valley. I had three men in that. Two were hurt pretty badly, the other not at all," he recalls. "In all, two of [Company B's] line trucks, an earth borer and two weapons carriers were blown up during the war."

By early 1945, Hitler had no place to go, except back to Berlin. What was left of it, that is.

American armor rolled through Italy's Po Valley so fast that the Germans retreated north of the Po River and gave up on May 2, 1945.

"When the Germans surrendered, whole battalions were giving up," Hunsberger says of the Italian campaign. That was the end of the war in Europe.

Company B moved back south to Florence, awaiting assignment to the Pacific. As it waited for orders, side trips were made available to the troops, two from each platoon. None of the other men in Hunsberger's unit wanted to travel, except home. While as anxious to go as the others, he knew that, once home, things would change forever. So he did some traveling. He flew from Florence on a two-engine plane to Alexandria, Egypt, then to Libya, spending some time in Bengasi, the city by the sea.

In the meantime, America's Manhattan Project changed Company B's orders and the course of events in the Pacific--ending the war with the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. "There would be no Japanese invasion," Emerson says.

"When I arrived back to Florence, the company had moved out. My things were still there, so I caught a jeep ride to a depot, where I was asked to drive a 21/2-ton truck loaded with men to Naples," he chuckles. "I drove them.

"Then they asked if I would take air transportation. 'I'll take it,'" he said.

Assigned the safekeeping of 20 men and their service records, Hunsberger and his men wound their way home, first on a B-17 from Naples to Casablanca. From there, on a four-engine aircraft with 80 men, they flew to Dakar (French West Africa), then Puerto Rico and Miami, Fla. And the next day, a train delivered them to Camp Blanding, Fla. From there, it was all the way to Fort George G. Meade, Md., where Emerson F. Hunsberger was honorably discharged on Sept. 9, 1945, with the distinguished rank of master sergeant, a good conduct medal and a service ribbon.

As the war was winding down, June 1945 proved a sad time back home in Clifton. Only, Hunsberger didn't know it. His eldest brother, Manuel, had written him from his office at the War Department, where he was working to say their guardian angel was in pretty bad shape, suffering from hardening of the arteries, known today as atherosclerosis.

On June 26, 1945, Lucy Ellen Keene Hunsberger passed away.

"They held the funeral over for a whole day, thinking I'd be coming," recalls Hunsberger, tears welling in his eyes as he stands, many decades later, at his mother's graveside.

"I never did, because I didn't know that Mother had died, until a month later. They [military authorities] kept the letter from me, and they knew it." In wartime, all incoming and outgoing mail was opened and censored.

But Lucy Hunsberger's five boys stood the tests of wartime--bombing, the shrill sound of 210 mm artillery shells whistling overhead, missed being sunk by German submarines, twice, bullets coming straight at them on the front, stepping on anti-personnel mines, watching equipment being blown up with their men inside, and Japanese kamikaze planes diving into their midst.

Every one of them made it home.

"We were all so very fortunate to have survived, the five of us," says Arthur Hunsberger, Emerson's youngest brother, who served with the Navy in the South Pacific.

After Emerson finally made it home, after he and his sweetheart, Annie Chandler Moore, got married in Williamsburg and had gone on their honeymoon, he found his mother had left him a surprise.

"I come to realize that Mother hadn't spent a dime of [his allotment checks], but had put all of it in the bank, for me."

She'd wanted to help her son however way she could, to give him a decent start in the future she was sure he would have.

"I was glad I was able to serve my country at that time," Hunsberger says of his military experience. "It was a very popular war. The whole country was behind you, and we had unbelievable support at home. We were attacked, and that made all the difference."

JUDY STOBBE of Stafford County is a Realtor and freelance writer.