The Moth Radio Hour: Veterans' Day Special

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From PRX, this is the Moth Radio Hour. I'm Sarah Austin-Jeunesse from The Moth, and I'll be your host this time.
This episode is devoted to American veterans. The four stories you'll hear in this hour, from the battlefield and behind the front lines, were told live at the Moth, without notes, in theaters across our country.
A soldier and his family cling to routine during wartime. A female pilot and an African American Marine remember World War II.
And our first storyteller, Mike Scotti, battles post-war darkness after

serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. Mike told this story in Albany, New York, at a Moth Night we produced with public radio station WAMC.
A word of caution, this story includes frank descriptions of the effects of combat. Here's Mike Scotti, live with them all.

So I can still remember the sound of the front door slamming behind me in my old apartment.

It's a small studio in New York City.

And I remember I had just gotten home from a run, and I threw my keys up onto the counter,

and they slid across, and they ran into my BlackBerry,

which just happened to be ringing at that moment. And at this point in my life, I'd been home from the war in Iraq for about a year and a half.
Things were starting to feel a little bit more normal. I was in grad school.
I felt good that day because of the run. but when I saw the name on the ID on the Blackberry, my heart dropped because it was my old commanding officer from the Marine Corps.
And in the year and a half that I'd been home, I learned that when somebody from the Marines calls you during the week, especially while it's still light out, it means that somebody that I knew was dead. So, you know, a few seconds later, my fears were confirmed and the tears were falling.
And, you know, that was the reality. I'd lost another brother.
And it wouldn't be the last. Now I joined the Marine Corps because I wanted to defend my country.
I wanted to earn the title of United States Marine. I wanted to see if I had what it took.
After September 11th, obviously everything changed. I'd been in for a few years at that point.
I was a first lieutenant. and I lost two friends in the World Trade Center, Beth Quigley and Peter Apollo.
And I would think about how they died. They died violently on some random day at work while they're trying to earn a living.
And so I knew that I would do whatever it took to help find those weapons of mass destruction. I would do whatever it took to make sure that nothing like that ever happened again on U.S.
soil. That was something I was willing to fight for, and I was certainly willing to die for.
Now, my job in the Marine Corps specifically was that of artillery forward observer and I would call in over the radio the enemy's position. I'd be up front with the infantry and I'd call in those enemy positions to the artillery units who were parked behind us.
And they would shoot these large barrages of these shells on the enemy and if they missed missed, I would make a correction over the radio. Now, these shells are big.
They're heavy. They weigh over 100 pounds each.
They're made of high explosive and steel and iron, and they're designed to burst into large pieces of shrapnel. Each piece can be up to the size of a man's arm, and each piece is very dense and heavy, like a crowbar, but jagged.
And these things, when they blow up, the shrapnel covers an area the size of a football field, and that's for one round, and we'd shoot 50 or 100 of these things in the same area to just obliterate everything. So that was my job.
I would call in the shrapnel onto people. And I can remember very quickly understanding what that meant in Iraq from seeing all of the dead bodies on the sides of the roads as we drove along.
We'd hit an area and then drive through it. And I can remember the bodies would be in these very unnatural positions.
And their eyes would have many times turned this very deep black. And their mouths would be open.
And I thought I could see the looks of pain on many of their faces. And unfortunately, sometimes they were the faces of children who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Those faces, they stay with me. I realized quickly that once all the politics have been stripped away, for those who are fighting it and those who are caught in the middle of it, war is nothing more than a slaughter.
And it is filled with things like chaos and hesitation and uncertainty and fear. There's fear that you are going to make a mistake and get your friends killed.
There's fear that there are other human beings out there who are trying to kill you. There's fear that you could be maimed or wounded or burned.
And there are things like chaos. The chaos, like the day that we finally made it to Baghdad.
And we transitioned from fighting in the countryside where if you could see it, you could kill it, to fighting in a city where you couldn't see more than across a street or maybe half a block, and it was chaos. And your radios wouldn't work so well because the buildings blocked the signal, and you had 1,500 Marines assigned to 80 square blocks, and you're all trying not to shoot each other because the enemy's in between you, and you've got another 1,500 Marines on your left and on your right.
And the bullets would snap through the air and you wouldn't know where they'd be coming from. And I remember that every time a Marine would get killed, none of us would look each other in the eye for a little while, you know, the guys in my vehicle, because it was all just becoming a little bit too much.
We hadn't slept in two or three days and nights and I remember I looked to the west just happened to be looking to the west one instant and I saw a very large artillery barrage land on the edge of our battalion's position and I knew by the way that landed that it was U.S. artillery and I knew what was happening at that instant we had just hit our brothers with our own fire, so I picked up the radio, and I screamed, check firing, check firing, and I shut down all of the artillery in Iraq that the Marines were shooting for a few minutes because I had no time to figure out what was happening.
And I knew the next barrage was going to land directly on us, and it would. It hit one Marine, and it took out a few of his organs and entered him through the abdomen.
The next one would have been a lot worse. I remember slamming the radio handset down and being angry, shaking my head because somebody had shot into our zone without permission.
And I realized that in a war, the difference between life and death can be a few millimeters here or there, a few seconds, or the fact that one tired Marine happened to be looking in the right direction at the right moment. And I thought to myself, you know, I shook my head.
I said, this all better be worth it because we've been fighting for months and we haven't found any weapons of mass destruction. So when I came home, there was a day that sticks in my mind.
It was November. I'd been home for about a year.
I was driving from Manhattan out to Long Island. I had a fresh haircut.
My dress blue uniform was very neatly pressed and I was on my way to be the pallbearer in yet another Marine's funeral. This Marine's name was Lieutenant Matt Lynch and his older brother Tim had called me and asked me to carry his little brother's coffin.
Tim and I had served in Afghanistan together.

I can remember carrying Matt's coffin with my white-gloved hand and gripping the rails very tightly,

the rail that runs along the edge of the coffin,

because I didn't want to drop it.

And I remember a few minutes later, trying not to wince, as the rifles went off as they gave Matt his final salute in front of his loved ones, because it was the first time that I'd heard gunfire since the war. And later that evening, I sat in the, at the bar in the Maid Maid Inn in Long Island, and I just drank and drank, beer after beer.

And the tears came, and I didn't care who saw them.

I was still wearing my dress blues,

because at that point, I had just given up of ever finding,

you know, any hope of finding weapons of mass destruction.

And I was searching for meaning in the deaths of men like Lieutenant Matt Lynch and others that I'd lost. And I couldn't find any.
And as a warrior, my belief system began to unravel. And that took me to a very, very dark place.
It took me to the edge of the abyss, and I stood there looking in, and I remember wondering

whether or not I was going to just jump off, wondering whether or not suicide for me was

going to be the way to go.

And I'd have these conversations with myself, like whether I should make it look like an

accident and go for a run in New York City one day right into the path of a bus. Or should I make a spectacle of the whole thing and take a flight to San Francisco, do a swan dive or something off of the Golden Gate Bridge, just like the first person to ever kill themselves there.
That was a veteran from World War I. And then I thought about my mom and dad and what it would do to them if I went through with it.
And I knew that I just couldn't do it. I knew that I had to survive for them.
So I started talking. I started listening.
Started reading and opening up a little bit, getting out there. And the Marine Corps, you know, the first thing that I realized was that there were a lot of other veterans my age who felt the same way.
And then I realized that even the Marine Corps knew that it had a problem on its hands. And they needed to help do something to stop the few and the proud trained killers from killing ourselves.
Because we were doing it in record numbers. And the Marine Corps put out this video that was on their website and had a bunch of colonels and generals on there and high-ranking sergeants talking about how they struggled about the war, you know, after the war.
And about halfway through the video, this woman comes on and she's a Navy psychiatrist. And she had served in Fallujah on the front lines with the Marines, helping

talk to them as they came off the line. And she had struggled, she talked about her struggle.
And she looked into the camera and she said, it's okay to be angry. It's okay, Marine, be sad.
It's okay if you're not okay. And I remember those words, they hit me like a train.
Because I'd never heard words like that before. It never occurred to me.
And they were exactly the words that I needed to hear at that moment. Because the Marine Corps teaches you that vulnerability is weakness.

Because in war, vulnerability is weakness

because the enemy will exploit that vulnerability

and kill you and all of your men.

But when you come home,

vulnerability is the one thing that will allow you to survive.

It will allow you to take those demons that are inside of you and drag them from the darkness out into the light. And they cannot survive there.
They cannot hurt you there. So now, I no longer search for meaning in the war or in the deaths of these beautiful human beings, these Marines and soldiers.
I find meaning in helping fellow veterans and allowing other veterans to help me because that's what we do, we take care of each other, just like we did in the war. So now when the phone rings, it's not 3 p.m.
on a Tuesday,

you know, with the news that someone's been killed.

It's 3 a.m. on a Sunday morning, and a buddy is calling because he's upset.

Maybe he's had a little bit too much to drink, and he's angry, or he's sad, or both,

because his demons are eating him alive.

And I say to him, I love you, brother. Lay it on me.
And then we talk. And then we talk some more.
And I listen. And before we say goodbye, I always say, no matter what happened over there, or no matter what's happening to you right now, or no matter what will happen later on down the line,

one thing is for certain,

and that's it's okay that you're not okay.

Thank you.

Thank you. after war.
As a former U.S. Marine and veteran of both Iraq and Afghanistan, Mike is also a founding board member of the military charity Reserve Aid.
We talked to Mike after he told his story. Telling my story up there was a very, I think, cleansing experience, enlightening in almost a way.
The friendships that you make in the military, especially in kind of like combat units where you're training for something that is going to put all of you into harm's way together and you're relying on each other from a survival standpoint, that forges a very, very deep and solid friendship that is different than most people would experience. It really, really is a brotherhood, and it spans generations.
You know, if somebody comes up to me and tells me they're a Vietnam War vet and I can see it in their eyes, they've been through some things, there's just a trust that's there. And even though you don't know that person that well, it's kind of a baseline level of appreciation for each other.

That was Mike Scotti.

To see photographs and find out more about all of our storytellers, go to themoth.org.

Coming up next, a story from 97-year-old World War II veteran Dawn Seymour, who was a Women's Air Force Service pilot, also known as a WASP. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts and machine learning, coding, game design, and more.
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This is the Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Sarah Austin-Janez.
World War II vets are becoming rare, and we produced a Moth Night dedicated to the greatest generation to help preserve their stories. Dawn Seymour, our next storyteller, was a pilot and military aircraft instructor in World War II.
She was with the Women's Air Force Service pilots, known as WASPs, flying B-17s and training men to go to war. The night Dawn told her story was only a few days shy of the 75th anniversary of her first flight.
On stage, she wore her blue and white WASP scarf and her silver wings on the lapel of her blazer. Our host that night, Ophira Eisenberg, welcomed Dawn to the stage like this.

Now, your next storyteller, usually people when they come and tell stories on the Moss stage, they stand.

But our next storyteller is 97 years old, and when you are 97 years old, you can do whatever

you want. In 1939, I was 22 years old, straight as an arrow.
And I was newly graduated from Cornell University and did many things, but I was part of an experiment. I was a research subject.
And one day our leader said to me, his name was Dr. Richard Parmenter, he said, I am going to be the new director of flight research at Cornell under the CPT, the Civilian Pilot Training Course under the CAA, a federal program, and one in ten can be a girl.
He said, and you can learn to fly. And I said to him, Dr.
Dick, I've never been in an airplane. He said, well, let's go, try.
Down to the Ithaca Airport in a yellow cub, Piper Cub, on a beautiful October day, October 16th. He took me up into this absolutely wonderful new world of sky and land below.

And the air was full of sunbeams.

The land below was clean and borderless.

And the lake, the blue lake of Cayuga water,

which extended to the north,

and on beyond was this circle of land meeting sky.

And I think that overwhelmed with the beauty of it, the earth and the sky, and signed up right away. I was chosen and spent the next few months learning the fundamentals I've spent the next few months learning the fundamentals of flight, and that is important.
In May 1940, I received my private pilot certificate, and that would allow me to take up passengers. I only had less than about 40 hours.
I don't know how they dared go up with me, but they did. And so I lived with this wonderful new experience.
Now, 1941 December came along quickly. And after Congress declared war, everyone able-bodied was needed in the war effort.
And everybody needed training. And there was a flurry in America, an excitement, a determination to fight this new enemy.
We knew the enemy was there. But I mean to fight and to produce aircraft and to train men.
And Jacqueline Cochran, who was a famous American woman pilot, had a program in mind that she she sold to General Hap Arnold. And in the program she would train women pilots the same exact way that the male pilots were trained and have a supply of women who could then go out and do the housekeeping jobs in America, the training and the ferrying and so forth.
And she sold this because we were very short of pilots. And they were needed desperately as the planes were being produced in the factories.
And I wanted to be near as I could to the fighting war. And I applied for her program and was accepted.
And I found my way to Sweetwater, Texas, 200 miles west of Fort Worth.

And here I met my classmates.

I was in class of 43.5.

There were 18 classes altogether, so I was an early bird.

And learned to fly primary, basic, and advanced.

In our last few months of training, 10 days before I graduated, my best friend, my buddy, Peggy Sipe, was killed with her instructor and a fellow WASP pilot, Helen Jo Severson. And no reason was given for the accident.
There was no ceremony held. They just disappeared.
And it was a heart-wrenching event. And Peggy had left the garden, the only garden any wasp had ever had in Sweetwater, Texas.
And she planted seeds in the hard Texas in the hard Texas soil soil in the hot Texas sun, and it bloomed on our graduation day. Jacqueline Cochran came to give us our wings and presented them to me, thanked me, and wished me well.
I was pleased because I had won my wings. More training came into the picture.
And I was sent to the Lockburn Army Air Base in Columbus, Ohio. And here, to my astonishment, were over 180 B-17s, Boeing B-17s, flying fortresses, the big four-engine plane that was flying raids over Germany with the 8th Air Force.
And the new CO of our squadron, Major Freddy Wilson, had received a telegram only two days before and said, expect 17 women pilots for training. And he said, my God, what am I going to do with these? I'm a bachelor, I don't know anything about women.
And so it was. And my first, very first ride in the B-17, I'm in the left seat, the The instructor's in the right seat.
This is Lieutenant Logue Mitchell, later became good friends. Number three engine caught fire.
And before we knew it, he'd given me orders and I knew enough. The two of us, the fire was out.
And I said, oh my goodness, this is the plane for me.

And it was an exciting time because the pilots were returning up from their 25 missions in Germany. And they came back and they would tell us about the real war.
And the real war was tough. Then my orders sent me down to Florida, Buckingham Army Airfield.
And here we were asked, ordered, to fly the plane, the B-17 again, with the student gunners and her instructor on board. And the mission was to train the gunners to fire at a moving target from a moving platform.
And this was a routine that we did day after day, mornings this day and afternoons the next day. And it was glorious because some days the sky, the clouds and

sea itself would meld and there'd be no horizon. And this is when you had to trust your instruments to fly straight and level.
This lasted for the rest of the time I was in the service. service.
And in December, 1944, while the Battle of the Bulge was going on, and the war in Japan was not over, hardly started, we had a letter from Hap Arnold, General Hap saying that our program was going to be cancelled, terminated. Congress had not appropriated the funds.
It was a blow. Here we thought we were doing a good job.
We felt the war wasn't over and the message we received was, girls, go home. We don't need you anymore.

So we packed up. No ceremonies.

No, just farewells to our friends in the base.

And off we went to new lives.

Years later, 30 years later, after all of the civil rights acts and so forth, there were women military pilots and they were allowed in the Navy and the Army Reserves. and entered the academy in 1976 for the very first time.

And I thought of Peggy Sipes' garden and seeds that were planted. I think perhaps that took 30 years, but yet women had persevered and were accepted now as military women pilots.

We were volunteers coming in,

and we were volunteers going out.

And our motto was,

we live in the wind and the sand,

and our eyes are on the stars. That was Dawn Seymour.
After telling her story, Dawn got a standing ovation from the audience. In 1977, three decades after the WASP program was terminated, Dawn and the other female pilots were finally recognized as veterans.
Their instructor, Lieutenant Logue Mitchell, wrote a letter to Congress in support of his WASP students. Here's Dawn reading from that letter.
How did they do? I won't say super because I don't remember any student I rated super. I did rate them great.
Great because they were dedicated, motivated, and determined. They just plain worked harder than any class of men I ever instructed.
To me, they were and still are fellow military pilots and veterans in every respect. Anything short of full recognition of these women by our elected leaders will, by my standards, disgrace this nation.
Today, there is frequent mention of women in combat. I am convinced that any or all of the six I trained would have gone if asked.
I would have led or fouled them as required, and I would not have worried about their performance. Respectfully, Logue Mitchell.
Dawn and the rest of the Women Air Force Service pilots were awarded Congressional Gold Medals in 2009. Since the time that this episode first aired, Dawn Seymour has passed away.
She left this world 17 days after her 100th birthday. She was a business executive, mother of five, grandmother of eight, and author of In Memoriam, honoring the 38 women pilots who gave their lives in World War II.
To see photos of Dawn flying a B-17 and to hear an interview with Dawn and her moth director, Catherine McCarthy, go to themoth.org. Next, a story from an Ann Arbor Grand Slam.

We partner with Michigan Radio to make this open mic series happen.

And the storyteller you're about to hear is Bill Krieger, who was a company commander in the Iraq War. Here's Bill, live at the Moth.
So I remember reading somewhere that routines are good for children.

They help them develop, they're good for their self-esteem,

and they can help them through troubling times.

And I would have to agree with that,

but I think some of the best routines are the ones that we find by accident.

And that's sort of the way it is with me and my two daughters McKenna my oldest Caroline my youngest you see every night since they've been very little I tuck them in a bet in bed before I go to bed myself and the way it works is I go to my oldest daughter McKenna's room and I give her a kiss on the forehead and I give her a nice tight hug and I tuck her in and I tell her that I love her and that I'll see her in the morning and then I close her door and I go across the hallway to my youngest daughter room daughter's room Caroline and I give her a kiss on the forehead and I give her a big hug and I tell her that I love her and she looks at me and says I love you more and I say no you don't I love you more and she looks at me and says, I love you more. And I say, no, you don't.
I love you more. And she says, you're right, Dad, you do.
And then I say, well, I'll see you in the morning. And she says, not if I see you first.
I don't know if you're seeing a theme here. She's kind of a smartass.
And as I leave her room and close her door, she'll always say, close the door just a little bit, and she'll laugh. And I'll pop my head back in and say, don't tell me how to close the door.
I know what I'm doing. I know how to close the door just a little bit.
We have a good laugh, and I go off to bed. And so that is our routine.
And in the summer of 2006, I was called to active duty to serve in Iraq and I had about two months to get everyone ready for this and when I say get everyone ready I was the company commander so I had that responsibility of making sure everyone had the equipment they needed and the training they needed and that their families would be taken care of while we were gone. And the days were long, sometimes 20 hours.
And every night at 9 o'clock I had to go to this meeting. And so I would get in my car and I would drive 30 minutes to this meeting and I would get out of my car and go to the building and climb up to the second floor where I would tuck my children in at night because that was the most important thing I had to do every night to maybe make sure they were shielded from some of the reality that we were about to face as a family.
And I remember the night before I left for Iraq. I went to my oldest daughter McKenna's room and I kissed her on the forehead and I gave her an extra tight squeeze and I told her I loved her and that I would see her in the morning.
And I closed her door and I went across the hall to Caroline's room and I gave her a kiss on the forehead and I told her that I loved her and she just sort of stared at me.

And then I said, I'll see you in the morning.

And she just sort of stared at me.

And as I walked out of her room and began to close her door, she didn't say anything.

And so I turned around, and I said, honey, is everything okay?

And she said, yeah, Daddy, everything's okay.

And I asked her what she was doing, and she told me that she was staring at me.

And I said, well, I get it, you're staring at me, but why are you doing that?

She said, because, Daddy, I want to burn you into my brain so that if you don't come home, I won't forget what you look like.

It was all I could do to hold it together in that room and give her another kiss and walk out into the hallway. You see, for all the parenting and all the shielding and all the routines that we had, she got it.
That little six-year-old blonde-headed girl got it, and she knew what we were facing as a family. And the next day, we got up very early in the morning, and we had a breakfast together, and we hugged, and we kissed, and we laughed, and we cried, and I walked out that front door and began my journey, which would be about 18 months.
18 months away from my family, 18 months of no hugs, no kisses, 18 months of not tucking anyone into bed. Because I will tell you from experience, soldiers do not like to be tucked into bed.
Don't like it. And in the fall of 2007, I returned home.

I returned home to my family, and I returned home to my routine of tucking my children in before I went to bed.

And I can tell you that I learned a lot from these experiences.

I learned that routines are very important for children.

It gives them stability.

It helps them through tough times.

But they're also important for us adults. And I can tell you one thing that I know beyond the shadow of a doubt, and that's how to close the door just a little bit.
Bill Krieger was a military police company commander stationed in Mosul, Iraq. He was a first lieutenant at the time.
To see a photo of Bill and his family, go to themoth.org. After our break, another story from the greatest generation.
A 90-year-old World War II vet tells us of the all-black 93rd Infantry and their service in the South Pacific. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and presented by the Public Radio Exchange, PRX.org.
I'm Sarah Austin Janess, and you're listening to The Moth Radio Hour. Our next storyteller, William Cole, served in the 93rd Infantry Division, an African-American segregated unit of the Army in World War II.
Here's William Cole, live at The Moth. I'll start at Fairbanks-Morse Beloit, Wisconsin.
It was a diesel plant that made submarines during the war. And I happened to be privileged to be working there in the kitchen, washing pots and pans.
And one of the naval officers came through one day and told me, he said, Willie, would you like to be deferred and not have to go into the war? The war was just getting hot. And I said, well, I didn't think they would draft me right away, you know.
Hell no, I don't, this job's nothing. Why would I want to be deferred and stay here? And it surprised me.
That was in September. January, that was September of 1942, January of 1943, I was at Fort, I mean, Camp Custer, not Camp, excuse me, at Fort Wheeler.
I've got it all wrong now. I was at Camp McCoy, Wisconsin.
And that camp is in the middle of Wisconsin, and not very many black soldiers live up in that area. And as a matter of fact, where I lived, I was from Beloit, Wisconsin, there was not too many black people there at that time.
And I went to the schools. It was all integrated and everything.
I didn't know anything about prejudice or segregation, all that type of thing. But when I got to Camp McCoy, there was two or three blacks in that group.
And we went to Camp Custer, Michigan. When we got there, the group got blacker and blacker.
And then from there, we went to Camp Wheeler, Georgia. And that was a training camp to get soldiers ready in a hurry.
I don't know if you know it, but World War II, the American soldiers were trained in 13 weeks. And they had to learn what would get put before them.
If they didn't, the instructor would tell you, if you don't pass, you know what's going to happen, don't you? No, what, sir? You're going to be dead in a little while. Because this is for keeps.
You've got to learn these things. Well, so happened that I was sent to Camp Wheeler, Georgia and we had a black army career man was there.
They called him Iron Jaw. He must have been 65 years old or so, but he was training troops and when we came in he said, well I want to tell you fellas something.
They think that you're not fit to serve in the Army because most of you are cotton pickers and farmers. And you don't know anything about anything but milking cows and plowing horses.
And we're going to make a liar out of them. I'm going to tell you how to use a rifle and how to use other instruments that are not rifles.
Anything that you have in your hands, you want to be able to kill with it because you've got a very capable enemy that we're fighting up against. They're well trained and most of their privates has as much education as our West Point men.
That scared us to death.

Being black and not having gone to the universities and schools and so forth, to most of us. This is a terrible dilemma to be set into.
I'll make iron jaws out of all of you. We got through our training, and the next thing I knew we was in Guadalcanal.
In Guadalcanal, a lot of American boys died there. There's a Wisconsin division known as the 32nd.
When we got down there, the Wisconsin division was there to train us and break us into doing jungle warfare. And I was very proud of them.
I was from Wisconsin. And by the time we got to Guadalcanal, we had been well trained by this iron jaw, this black man.
He taught the men how to shoot a Browning automatic running at top speed from the hip, and you could hit a bushel basket 50 yards away. And he said, you have to be able to be an expert with your weapon,

otherwise you're going to die.

And also, with a knife, trench knife, you could throw the knife,

or you could do close hand-to-hand fighting with it and come out on top.

This is the type that all the men had trained that.

But then, when we got down there, we were surprised that the jungle warfare was something that we were not used to certainly. But the main thing that surprised us, we went down there and these were Imperial Marines.
Have you ever heard the expression, the Imperial Marines? The Imperial Marine is about six foot tall, the average one of them. A very able adversary in any man's army.
And this is the type of people we came up against. Well, at the time, my mother got a letter that I was missing in action.
I hadn't been missing in action. I had been detailed to a group that was going under the hills and spy on the Japanese because they had a colonel down there who was making fools out of the American army.
His tactics and so forth, they just befuddled everybody. What was going on? We have to find out what's going on.
We observed from the hilltops and we found out that the airplane that was raiding us every night, or every two or three nights, and disappearing into nowhere was coming out of a mountain. They had a mountain that they had put up a plane on a boxcar, a flat car, and it was on hydraulic pulleys.

And it would come out to the front, and the would take off and then they'd shut it up again. Just like it was a mountain that hadn't been disturbed.
And that's how when he got through with his strife and bombing, he would go back there and close the mountain up and look, there was nothing there. When we found out that and we reported that back to the headquarters, they took that mountain out.
There's no more of that type of stuff. But then when we came back down out of the mountain, that's the first time that I got fired on.
We was crossing a little hill and down a little river, a little creek. It wasn't a river.
It was a small creek running across. We got about knee deep in the water and a machine gun fire opened up, 50 caliber machine guns, crossfire.
That's when I thought I was going to meet my maker. One bullet hit on this side, between my legs and another side.
It didn't hit me. We went and took cover and called back down for support and they dropped mortars all over the top of the hill.
When we went over there, there was nothing there but split up, cut up, charred corpses. And that's the first time I had a close call.
I said, that's the time that my mother must have been praying for me. And God answered her prayer because I was not a Christian and I didn't know anything much about God or anything then.
But I was so thankful that I had a mother praying for it at home. Then we have to find this colonel that's doing all this dirt to us.
His name was Colonel Ucci. And we had a bunch of young black boys that had been highly trained by Iron Jaw.
And they said, the only way we can get him without him killing himself, we'll have to go into his camp and take him by hand without firing a shot. We have to use trench knives and get to him and kill him so we can bring him back untouched.
And they did just that. And they caught him in his bed to sleep.
And they brought him out with his hands tired and his feet tied and put a pole in and brought him out to the headquarters. He was in perfect shape.
And they were able to interrogate him and so forth. But shortly after that, we were back.
And whenever a skirmish went down, you'd have a brief rest. We'd go back and you'd have American entertainers come over, and the USO girls, you've heard of them.
They'd come over and they would entertain us and tell us all the grand things that were back in the States and singing to us. And so when all of a sudden the loudspeakers opened up, said, we have a special announcement to make.
What in the world could this be? The war is over. Japan has surrendered.
They dropped the bomb on them and they surrendered. Unconditional surrender.
You boys will be going home soon. And we were so happy.
And the girls jumped off the stage in the middle of the soldiers and just had a time there. Then I got back home.
I got back home to Pittsburgh, California, and we marched down the street to a de-embarkation area where we were sent back to our homes and that. And it was so wonderful to see these American girls, big, tall, king-sized girls that we're not used to.
And this was America, which we like kissing the ground that America was on. Because everything was so, it looked like going to heaven there.
And when we got back to our hometown and so forth, we had our GI bills and all that. All these things had come along.
And I went to Rockford, Illinois, to get a home. And I got a surprise.
They said, you people can't have a get-by-here. We'll find you a place, but you can't buy here.
I was so disappointed. I thought I was a gladiator.
I had fought for the country and come back in here. They're throwing this type of stuff in my face.
It was a long time before I bought a gladiator. I fought for the country and come back and here they're throwing this type of stuff in my face.

It was a long time before I bought a home.

I was so discouraged with that. But I'm so proud to be an American soldier and I'm glad that I did his story.
You told me at one point that you were very proud of the other men in the 93rd. Oh, yeah.
I was proud of them because they fought valiantly, and they were glad to fight for the country. I come back home, and nobody knew anything about us being in combat, and that was kind of a letdown for me.
I didn't appreciate nobody knowing that. Do you remember seeing your mom for the very first time after the war? Yes.
I came home at midnight, and then when I got to Beloit on the bus, I took my duffel bag, and I walked about a mile to the house because nothing was running that time of night.

And I knocked on the door, and there she was,

and she was just as happy as she could be,

and she couldn't believe her eyes, you know.

Because then she wasn't an old woman then.

She was only in her 50s, I guess.

And she was just beside herself.

It was joy that I was home. And so we just had a grand time after that.

That was World War II veteran William Cole.

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This Moth Radio Hour veteran special was supported by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Your host for the hour was Sarah Austin Janess.
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