417: Nikki Stratton—All the Gallant Men

Hey guys, me again with another episode of The Way I Heard It.

This one is called All the Gallant Men with Nikki Stratton.

Chuck, you've done it again.

You found a guest that I absolutely love with a story that absolutely needs to be shared.

Good story.

Good story.

I've reached out to our audience and I didn't want to share this with you.

I was going to save it for Christmas, but we've decided to keep you on for another month.

Oh, wow.

This is good news.

It is good news.

December 7th is upon us, and Nikki Stratton is a woman who is the sponsor of the new USS Arizona, or SSN Arizona.

That is correct, which stands for

submersible ship nuclear?

Yes!

We'll sort of fumble through that in the conversation you're about to hear.

But, of course, the USS Arizona famously sunk in the attack on Pearl Harbor.

I don't call it a battle.

Some people chided me for that historically, but I think it was more of an attack than a battle.

It was a surprise attack, a dirty, stinking, you know, kick you in the you-know-what situation.

Go ahead,

say it.

It was, man.

What happened in Pearl Harbor on the 7th of December, 1941 is infuriating.

And I was so struck in reading this book by Nikki's grandfather, Donald Stratton, all the gallant men.

I was struck to learn some things,

to relearn some things in a way that somehow made me angry, right?

It made me angry.

Just the pure horror of this attack and the way that I'm afraid we forget.

You know, it's always never forget.

Oh, we'll never forget this.

But we do, man, because we can't live with that level of jaggedness and that kind of constant outrage.

It's not good for us.

But we can't forget, man.

And this book will remind a whole new generation of what happened that day through the eyes of a man who survived against odds.

Guys, I am telling you, it's a miracle he lived.

It's a miracle he lived to 96, I believe.

Yes.

This book is a miracle.

And the fact that his granddaughter is now the sponsor of the ship that he occupied 80-some years ago, it really is a total circle.

And I just think you're going to like this woman.

She is a great spokesperson for the event.

She is the reason that people will never forget Pearl Harbor because she's carrying her grandfather's story on.

And as long as the SSN Arizona, when it finally is christened and launched.

2027, I think there should be.

Yeah, when it should be done.

As long as that's around, it's, you know, the story is going to live on.

Hopefully it's going to live on forever.

But she is going to help make that happen.

It's personal to her.

She sat on this man's knee and listened to him tell stories about what happened on that ship.

But not the whole story.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, this is

the thing about guys like Stratton and so many of the greatest generation, they just

hide it under a bushel and they do it, I think, in some cases just for self-preservation and for some cases out of genuine modesty and just a desire to move on from that hellscape.

But

you just have to really understand on a human individual micro level.

World War II was macro.

It was the whole world.

Right.

Right?

What happened at Pearl was micro.

And what happened to Donald Stratton.

Super micro.

Yeah.

It's a story that you need to hear.

The book is called All the Gallant Men, and we'll talk about why as we get into it, but I can't recommend it enough.

It's terrific, and so is the woman you're about to meet, Nikki Stratton.

Stand by for her right after this.

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This is so cool.

First of all, you came bearing gifts.

Yes, I did.

And I haven't looked in the bag yet.

I'm going to look now because of, first of all,

very patriotic bunting tissue paper.

I love that.

So that's actually a crew hat.

So that's the same hat that the crew wears on their daily rounds and duties.

So you are official member of the USS Arizona crew.

One size fits most, I see.

I hope so.

What a relief that is because my head is larger than the average.

These out here, what do we have here?

A shirt.

Yes.

So that was actually designed by the crew as well.

So the Arizona is kind of, they want it to be kind of the ghost of the ocean because of the new VPM module, which I'm sure we're going to talk about later.

VPM module?

VPM module.

What's that stand for?

Virginia Payload Module.

I have so many questions for you.

All right, Professor.

And then we have this.

So that's a challenge coin.

That's actually my personal sponsor challenge coin.

And so it's actually in the shape of Arizona.

On the first four side, you have the original battleship Arizona as she was December 6th, 1941.

And then you have the Tree of Life, which is actually on the USS Arizona Memorial.

and then when you flip it on the other side you have the future submarine so you have past and future

you're holding it sideways

I got a lot going on dude okay I got hats I got shirts I have this thing in my other hand so that is the USS Arizona coin for electric boat they're the ones that are actively building the submarine at the moment oh my god that's amazing and this that is the very first challenge coin from the USS Arizona it is their collector's items I think they've only made like 50 or 100 of them so only a handful of people actually will get those That's everything.

I think there should be a patch in there too, but it might be buried somewhere deep in there.

It's rectangular.

Hopefully there's a patch in there.

I don't know.

I don't know.

I got a shirt.

Ah!

It was in your lap.

So that's a crew patch.

They actually wear those on their uniforms.

It denotes that they are part of SSN 803, which is obviously the name of USS Arizona.

They actually did colorize versions of those, but I figured the military patches were cool.

I can't see SNN and see anything other than social security number.

Yeah, it's a hard one to get over.

What's the official acronym stand for?

Sailing ship.

Oh, gosh, you're putting me on the

yes,

subsurface Navy, I believe.

Oh, so this is for the new Arizona.

Correct.

Okay, I got it.

And this is your new husband, Mike.

This is my new husband, Mike, yeah.

Reclining and resplendent in a Davenport that's not my own.

When I heard that you guys were willing to fly in from Denver to talk about your pops, I was like, well, let's please make that happen.

So, first and foremost, thank you for coming and thank you for the lovely gift.

Yes, you bet.

Thank you for having me and appreciating that, you know, originally we wanted to do this in December, but I was going to be in Hawaii in December, so I appreciate the flexibility.

All right, having said all of that,

your pop.

My business, such as it is, my career such as it is, happened because of my granddad, who was a giant inspiration in my life.

And I am reading Donald Stratton's book, Your Grandfather, All the Gallant Men.

As you can see, I'm probably four-fifths of the way through.

And I started making marks, Nikki, about passages I might want to read aloud, ask you about specifically, and realized that the entire thing was marked up.

That's not going to happen.

But there are so many things in this book.

that absolutely took my breath away.

And the crazy thing about it is, while I learned a lot of things I didn't know,

the things I read about that I did know landed with such a wallop.

I know the Arizona.

I know what happened to it.

I've been there.

I've looked at it.

I had all that.

But reading about it from your grandfather's perspective, it's breathtaking.

And I can't even imagine how proud you must be, not only of your new position vis-a-vis your relationship to him, but just by sheer nature of the DNA you were so fortunate to inherit.

I'm so grateful.

I mean, he has been my hero since I was very little.

And it was one of those things where when you looked at him, you never knew that he had survived such a catastrophic event in history, was a part of such an incredible moment, inflection point in our history.

I mean, you could see the burns on his hands, but he acted just like everybody else.

He still had a great sense of humor.

And, you know, he never really wore anything that kind of indicated that he was a Pearl Harbor survivor, let alone a USS Arizona survivor.

There was another terrific book that this reminded me of a little bit around that point exactly.

It was called Unbroken.

Great movie, too.

Yeah.

Lampurini, was it?

Lamperini, yeah.

Escaped from a POW camp.

The fact that he did all that and survived is enough.

But the fact that it didn't break him,

that it made him even,

that made all the good things about him even better.

You know,

you have to remember he was an 18-year-old kid.

He had just come out of the Depression.

I mean, the Depression era forged that generation into just, you know, steel.

I mean, there was just no way of breaking them because of the Depression.

And so he was an 18-year-old kid.

He was burned over 65% of his body.

He basically, the Navy said, thank you for your service.

You're done.

And then he was like, I'm not ready to let go yet.

And he re-enlisted and went right back into war and finished out World War II after being burned as badly as he was.

Steel sharpens steel.

Yes, it does.

So he's there at the beginning, and he was really there at the end off Okinawa, right?

Yes, he was.

He started the war and finished the war.

Okay.

So

I hate to ask you this because I know you've been over it a thousand times, but so our listeners understand,

who was your pop?

Was it Red Cloud?

Red Cloud, Nebraska.

Right.

Yes.

I mean, Dust Bowl stuff.

100% Dust Bowl, yeah.

All right.

So how'd he grow up?

How did he get into the service?

And what in the world did he see on 7th December?

That last question is very loaded, but we'll start at the beginning.

My grandfather was born in Red Cloud, Nebraska.

It was a a town of maybe 100 people, 200 people.

It's slightly bigger today.

I think they're over 1,000, but not really a ton bigger.

He was born in a one-bedroom, two-bedroom farmhouse.

He shared a bedroom with his brother and sister, grew up on a farm working outside.

Really wasn't a lot to be had.

And when he was, oh, gosh, I want to say 13 or so, the Great Depression started.

And so that started putting...

everybody out of work.

There was food shortages, there was work shortages, everything.

Again, this is a thing that everybody listening has heard of.

And it's a thing that everybody listening thinks they have some sort of intellectual understanding of.

But you can't.

You can't.

Yeah.

Then you have this dust bowl that happened and basically, you know, dust storms covered, I think, what was it, 40, 45% of middle America.

Basically, crops became pulp overnight.

There was crops that were completely covered in dust where you couldn't even see over the top of them.

And so, I mean, that's America's, what little food that we had during the Depression wiped out every other food sources.

And I think just kind of in the Nebraska area alone, I believe that the dust storms actually killed around 7,000 people due to starvation because there wasn't enough food to go around.

It's worth pointing out, too, that this is not a time where, unlike today, what, 1.5% of the country feeds 330 million people, right?

Back then, there was a lot more farmland.

A lot more farmland.

And there were a lot more people who really lived specifically on the food they grew.

And so the whole ecosystem was just so much more intense and so much more personal.

So, yeah, this was not a thing that happened to other people.

It was the 1930s.

There was no fast food.

I mean, the Great Depression just wiped out everything.

So if you did manage to go into a grocery store, you'd be lucky if they had basic needs like flour.

You know, my grandfather remembers surviving on a piece of bread with butter and maybe a glass of milk from their cow a day.

That's one meal a day that they survived off of.

And this was still while trying to work the fields on what area that they could that hadn't been affected by the dust storms.

But you also have to remember when those dust storms came in, you know, there was no protection.

They didn't have masks.

They didn't, there was no way to kind of get around it.

And so, you know, dust got in the house, it got under plates, it got in the food, but mostly it got into the immune system.

My

grandfather's sister had a compromised immune system because she was breathing in the dust.

And I mean, she never, her lungs never really functioned right after that.

Oh, God, it's just, it's so insidious.

It's your eyes, your nose, your ears.

It just gets in everywhere.

It's kind of like rolling around in a thing of dirt and, you know, seeing what you breathe in, and then your eyes get all crusty and gross.

It just must be, you know, again, I'm saying something kind of obvious, but to be a grown-up and suddenly be confronted with this incredible change of circumstance, it's probably more terrifying in some ways than being a 13-year-old kid or younger and not having too much, right?

I mean, you haven't been around long enough to be sufficiently freaked out by the weirdness of it, but still you have to adapt.

You absolutely do have to adapt.

And you also have to remember, at least in the rural ports of America, most houses didn't have electricity.

So my grandfather's farmhouse did not have electricity and it didn't have indoor plumbing.

And so as these dust storms were raging and as, you know, things were going on, they still had to go outside to go to the bathroom.

And then when they came back in, there was no light.

So they basically just kind of had to feel around where they were they probably had some small lanterns but no electricity no indoor plumbing no toilet paper i mean toilet paper was a luxury at that point and so i would say 90 of homes at that point had no toilet paper so they used to use uh pages of this year's group catalog yeah i'd always heard it but your pop actually writes in some detail about yes he does yes he does wow um

and yet For all of that hardship, one of the first things that strikes me in the book is how painful it was to leave home,

to leave all that dust, to leave what you know, and basically muster out, right?

Well, I mean, at that point, as the Great Depression had finally had finished its course in a town of less than 500 people, not a ton of jobs for a 16, 17, 18-year-old kid.

And so he ended up, was running mail to and from the local theater and then wandered in and saw some of the colorized posters that are kind of iconic of World War II of a big old battleship.

And so he walked into the Navy office and got some information and took it back home to mom and dad and said, well, it's a job.

I would get paid $20 a month, which if you think about that today, how many people have $20 in their pocket right now and will spend that on a coffee or whatever?

$20 a month for him.

And a lot of those guys at that time would send, I would say, 80 to 90% of that money back home, you know, because they needed it more than they did.

Obviously, the military took care of food, lodging, and all of that.

So they sent most of that home.

Took that back to my great-grandmother and said, This is a chance for me.

I want to explore the world.

I want to see the world outside of Red Cloud.

And, you know, he used to read all of the time, and one of his favorite books was 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

And so he wanted to be like Captain Nemo.

Little did we know later in his life, he was very much like Captain Nemo, but we'll go through that a little bit later.

But he's like, This is something I really want to do.

And and my great-grandfather was in World War One.

He was in the trenches and actually had some damage to his lungs and obviously as we know it today, PTSD.

And so my grandmother was very hesitant to allow my grandfather to go just because she knows how my great-grandfather was with his nightmares and his lungs and all of that.

That's what I called it, shell shock.

Shell shock, exactly.

But, you know, my grandfather was very persistent.

He was a very stubborn man.

I think our entire family has inherited that trait of being stubborn.

And so she said, okay, she said, you can go enlist.

And so he enlisted.

And, you know, as he was walking out the bus to catch the bus, she sent him off with a pocket Bible.

It was, I believe, the New Testament pocket Bible because she was very religious and gave him a hug and said, you know, there's a couple of snacks for the road.

And then my great-grandfather said, basically, like, keep your nose out of trouble and stay out of the brothels.

That was his advice to my grandfather to make sure that he kept his nose clean.

You could have condensed it and just gone with keep your nose out of the brothels.

Yeah.

He was keeping more than his nose clean, but stay in LA.

So, what was the state of recruitment like prior to the war?

Were they leaning on people to encourage people to enlist?

Not really.

They really weren't leaning on it just because they, at the time, the Americans wanted to stay out of the conflict, both on the Pacific side and obviously the European side.

So, there really wasn't a huge push to recruit, but at the same time, they used kind of the depression as,

hey, this is a job.

This is $20 a month.

This is free room and board.

This is you can see a chance to see the world, to get out of your small town and to kind of see the world.

And so that was kind of where their recruitment tactics were.

Yeah.

Okay.

So for a long list of reasons, he decides to leave everything he knows and loves to go out there and have his adventure.

But he doesn't go straight to Hawaii, right?

He does not.

So he started his training, so his boot camp in the Great Lakes facility, which is actually still in existence today, virtually, I would say, almost very similar to what it was in 1941 I'm sure they have a few upgrades and then he headed out to a place called Bremerton Washington shipyard and the very first time that he actually saw an ocean was at the Puget Sound so in Great Lakes they have him training but it's on a lake so it's not necessarily the same as the ocean so the very first time he had ever seen an ocean was when he saw the USS Arizona and it was actually pulled out of

the water in dry dock and so it was almost like 20 feet overhead and like you can see the bow you can see the stern you can see the underneath piece of it you could see the like the beam line all the way through.

They were retrofitting her and painting her.

A mighty ship, a mighty ship, yes.

And one that had been around, though.

It wasn't just built for the war.

This thing had been, what, 1914 or something?

I believe it was commissioned in 1916 in the Brooklyn shipyard.

Wow.

So it was part of World War I, but didn't really see any action.

It did, I believe, escort President Hoover over to the Paris Peace Accords when they happened.

So it goes through a boot camp, which is instructive in the book.

And he checks all the boxes.

And

does he get to Hawaii on the Arizona?

He does.

So basically out of boot camp, his first and only ship for his first time around in the Navy was the Arizona.

So he hopped on out of Bremerton.

They actually didn't go to Hawaii right away.

They were on the coast of California.

So they were kind of sailing up and down California working on maneuvers.

And basically, he was learning his battle station.

He was a port-side anti-aircraft director setter.

So basically, his job was to kind of point the anti-aircraft guns and then he lets them know and fire.

But as and true in the Navy, you have multiple jobs.

And so one of the things that they had him do, and he actually volunteered for one time and one time only, was towing a motorized skiff out to sea about 15 miles away from the Arizona.

And behind it was a floating target.

And so the Arizona would use their 15-inch guns, 14-inch guns, and they would fire to hit that floating target.

And so he said the Arizona's guns were so accurate that they could hit that target from 15 miles away, dead center.

And he said it nearly capsized him in the skiff with his two crewmates.

And he said, out of all the jobs in the Navy, he said playing target was not his favorite.

So wait a minute.

He's in a skiff dragging the target behind him.

Like how far behind?

I would say probably a couple hundred feet, not far enough.

It was close enough to where the boat nearly capsized.

Wow.

Yeah.

That is a dangerous job.

Well, the thing that strikes me is just the sheer wonder of it all for this kid from the middle of a Dust Bowl, essentially, one minute and the next minute.

It would be like seeing a like a spaceship or something.

Just the technology, the massiveness of it.

All those other men, the camaraderie, the band, everything.

It must have been just, how do you process that?

I mean, for an 18-year-old kid, he was free for the first time in his life, really, and he was surrounded by young kids his age who had dealt with the exact same things that he had dealt with.

And they grew up up in the Dust Bowl, they grew up in, you know, the Depression.

And so they were all looking for the same escape.

They all wanted a job.

They all wanted to contribute to their country.

And so this was the way that they could.

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When does he get to Hawaii?

They pulled into Hawaii, I believe, later that summer.

You know, I always likened this to like the Dorothy, like the Wizard of Oz.

And so, for him, you know, being in Nebraska where it's gray and it's brown and it's like those are kind of like the colors that you see with the exception of a random green here and there with the corn.

But when you pull into Hawaii, it's almost almost turns into like a technicolor type deal where you see more colors of fish than he ever knew existed.

Like the watercolor was completely different than he had ever seen.

And so it was very much like Dorothy, you know, stepping into the world of Oz when that color change happens.

Not in Kansas anymore.

Very much so, yeah.

Very much so.

So this would have been early in 1941?

Yes, early 1941.

Okay.

So he's there in Hawaii.

He gets used to it enough.

Does he go native?

Is he, I mean, do you get soft, I wonder?

I mean, you're stationed in Hawaii.

You're not really at war.

It's just in the temptations.

I'm just thinking of those brothels again.

You know, Hotel Street was very popular with the sailors, as, you know, I'm sure a lot of the stories have said.

And Hotel Street actually still, the street itself actually exists today in Hawaii.

There's the original USS Arizona bar, Smith's Union, still exists there.

It's still a bar owned and operated by a man who loves the Arizona.

That virtually hasn't changed.

My grandfather was very,

he took his father's vice to heart.

I think really the only like crazy thing, I guess if you could call it that, that he did at that time was he got a tattoo.

So the very first tattoo he got were a pair of swallows on his arm, and swallows are very

unique to naval culture.

And then as he kind of progressed through his naval career, he ended up with a full Spanish galleon ship on his chest.

So that's kind of where he went.

Wow.

From a couple of swallows to a galleon.

Yes.

I want the whole ship.

Yes.

What is the significance of the swallow?

You know, I can't remember offhand, but I believe swallows indicate the safe passage, both outward going and coming back.

But don't quote me on that.

I'm not 100% sure.

All right.

I'll have to look that up.

So there he is, doing his thing, biding his time, living the life.

And

December 6th comes along.

He goes to bed.

Next morning, that's not in the playbook.

Not in the playbook at all.

His best friend that he worked with, Harl Nelson, had actually gotten sick and was in Sick Bay about a week beforehand.

And so my grandfather got up very early because he was going to go to church.

It was a Sunday.

He was going to go to church on the fantail of the Arizona.

And he ended up having an early breakfast and grabbed some oranges and was getting ready to head down into Sick Bay to go see Harl.

But unfortunately, he never made it.

And the sirens started blaring for the attack on Pearl Harbor, so he ended up dropping his hat full of oranges and sprinting to his battle station, and thankfully he made it there unscathed, but some of his shipmates did not.

Yeah, unscathed is not really a word that applies to that day, it seems like.

I mean, everybody got a little something on them.

The lucky ones did, anyway.

But there were...

I just looked up the swallows.

Yeah.

And it says that sailors earn a new swallow tattoo for every 5,000 nautical miles traveled, which is about 5,754 regular miles.

Okay.

Very cool.

There you go.

There we go.

There was no talk of tattoos on that morning.

No talk of tattoos.

In fact, I dare say many were burned off.

I would say the majority of my grandfather's tattoos were burned off.

So when I knew him as

a person who could appreciate that, I would say pretty much all the tattoos on his arms were gone.

The swallows did survive because they were on the underside of his arm, but for the most part, the majority of the galleon ship was

kind of there, not all there, but the rest of his tattoos were not.

The account in the book, and he wrote this with he had some help, I assume, Ken Ken Geyer, yes.

I'm curious about how they collaborated on this.

It's so tight.

Didn't you think, Chuck, reading it?

Just

I'm surprised at how quickly I was turning the pages on a story that I already knew.

It's a very easy read.

It is easy, but it's horrifying.

Yeah.

It's horrifying in both the detail and the simplicity.

You know, it's almost like the sentences are, it's almost Hemingway-esque.

It's very short.

Yes.

And my skin fell off.

What?

Yeah.

It's like sentence after sentence.

And the exponential effect of that is really one of immersion.

They did a great job.

The book itself is a testament not only to my grandfather's story, but to Ken Geyer, and that's because he really listened to my grandfather.

So Ken would come over to my grandfather's house.

He was 91, 92 at this point, so he was well into his 90s.

He basically said, okay, nobody can be in the house when we talk.

It's just you and me, Don.

And a lot of that is because he wanted my grandfather to feel safe and he did not want any disruptions and any distractions because, you know, when you're a person who has been in a situation like my grandfather, yes, you can kind of talk about it and you can kind of gloss over to the fact, the fact of everything that happened, but Ken wanted to go deeper.

And he knew that if my grandmother was there, my father was there, that my grandfather would not be able to slip into the psyche of a 19-year-old kid and really get into the nitty-gritty details of what he remembers.

And so, I think it took him two to three weeks every single day of Ken coming over to the house.

And basically, my mom or my dad and my grandmother would leave the house.

And they would come back four or five hours later, and they'd asked how it goes.

And my grandfather would be like, it was fine.

And so, basically, the reason why you see short sentences, like my skin fell off, is because that is my grandfather's voice.

That's how he was, that's how he spoke.

Yeah.

I won't ask you to go through all the knit and all the grit, but had he talked to you about this beforehand, Joe George, for instance, and the neighboring ship?

What was it, the Valse?

The Vestal.

The Vestal and the captain over there and the insubordination that ultimately led to his survival.

That's an amazing story.

Yeah, I would like for people to at least know that.

Spoiler alert, folks, but it's important.

I mean, no matter how many times I tell it, it's always going to be the core of the story is the same, but obviously the details, you know, just kind of depending on

who I'm talking to, I try to tailor it to whom I'm talking to.

But there was a neighboring ship called the USS Vestal.

It was a repair ship.

It was moored alongside the Arizona.

It was still fixing some of the hole damage that the Arizona had had when it hit the Oklahoma on November 22nd.

It wasn't supposed to be.

Correct.

Yeah, it wasn't supposed to be in Pearl Harbor because it was actually on its, should have been on its way back to Bremerton, Washington for a complete overhaul.

But as they were doing maneuvers, the Oklahoma rammed right into her

side, and she was like listing, I think, 30% of the ship.

And so thankfully, they were able to fix most of that.

And she got back into Pearl Harbor.

And so the Vestal was actually, you know, fixing the rest of that damage.

And there was was a man by the name of Joe George.

And I should preface this by saying our family had no idea who this man was.

We didn't know his name.

We knew he existed.

We just, we didn't know where he's from.

We didn't know his name.

So for the majority of my life, he was just a guy.

He was the guy.

And so a sailor was...

The guy in a story that you've heard

around the edges.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so Joe George, he was a sailor aboard the Vestal.

He was the heavyweight champion of the Navy.

He was a boxer, and so absolutely loved to fight.

And I always say what Joe loved more than fighting inside the ring was fighting outside of the ring.

And so on December 6th, actually December 5th, Joe was in a bout with the Marine Corps and it was heavyweight versus heavyweight and it was touted as the, you know, the biggest fight of the century.

And Joe ended up knocking the guy out.

And I think he'll under a minute.

It was heralded to be this long, brutal bout.

And so Joe just was like, I'm not going to deal with that and just knock the guy out.

And so he did what any other sailor would do after winning a bout.

He went out to the bars and celebrated.

Sure.

And so him and his buddies were out and some sailors from the Marine Corps came into the bar they were in.

They objected of his knockout of their sailor.

And Joe did what anybody else would do.

He started a fight and knocked the one that spoke up first cold on the floor.

So he took on, I think, three or four sailors, knocked them out, knocked him around, took a couple punches himself.

MPs were called.

He was taken back board the vestal.

His commanding officer was like, that's it, that's enough.

This is your third strike or whatever it was.

You're going to face the summary court martial in the morning.

We're going to put you in the brig until Monday morning, which you'll, when you'll get your summary court martial.

So Joe's in the brig.

They actually ended up letting him out on Sunday morning early.

He doesn't know why.

We still don't know why, but they let him out.

Maybe the captain had a change of heart or something.

Before the attack?

Before the attack.

They let him out right before the attack.

Because a summary court-martial basically would mean you're essentially guilty.

Pretty much.

Yep.

Like, we've just

got to go.

You're guilty on the face of it.

Yep.

And later we'll have a little ceremony.

Yeah, exactly.

We'll check the box.

So at that point, he knew his life in the Navy was over.

So summary court-martial, you're done in the Navy, dishonorably discharged.

He knew it was coming.

December 7th happened.

So he was let out early that morning.

As he was walking back to his bunk, that's when the alarm started blaring.

That's when the attack on Pearl Harbor happened.

So Joe, being a man who was facing a court-martial, you know, did what any man would do.

He joined the fight.

He picked up an axe and started fighting fires.

He started trying to get some of the lines cut from the Arizona because they were tied along each other.

Absolute sitting docks.

Absolute sitting docks.

Tied to each other.

Tied to each other.

Complete sneak attack.

Cold boilers, no engines.

I mean, it would take three to four hours for those boilers and those engines to get going if they really needed to get going.

So lucky enough, I believe it was the Nevada was the only one that had her engines up and running, and they were able to kind of get out and run aground, and so they didn't block the channel.

Interesting, too, to point out, zeros are coming in just over the surface, dropping torpedo bombs in a way that makes it almost impossible to hit them.

Exactly.

And I mean, my grandfather mentions in his book and was very candid about this, he could actually see the whites of the pilot's eyes.

He could see them smiling

and laughing as they gun down sailors.

Because the torpedoes are slamming into the boats, and then they're strafing the sailors who are running around trying to deal with it.

Meanwhile, the guys who are on the guns can see the bombers way up there, but they're out of range.

Yeah, so the fuse timers, the high-altitude shells that they used at the time had fuse timers, and so they were bursting before they reached the right altitude in order to hit those bombers.

And so what they did is they had to lengthen the fuse and then try again.

But because the attack happened, you know, the fuel and the earth, the ammunition and stuff was not being loaded and sent up.

And so one of the guys in my grandfather's grandfather's director actually left to go get more ammunition, and he was never seen again.

Wow.

Okay, so the attack's underway.

Joe George, for reasons we don't understand, has been released from the brig aboard the vestal.

Your granddad is in a state of absolute pandemonium.

A couple thousand sailors running here and there.

trying to make sense of what's going on.

And then the big one hits.

And then the big one hits.

It hit on the forward part of the magazine.

It basically went through a number of decks into the lower part of the Arizona where the powder was, black powder.

So basically it ignited a million gallons of aviation gas and then probably around the same of black powder.

And so basically what happened was, is the ship itself lifted almost 100 feet out of the water straight up.

So just think of it as like a Roman candle just going like that, and it slammed right back down.

So the entire front of the battleship was blown off.

And so what it did is it sent a concussion wave across the entire island of Oahu.

It blew men off decks, but it basically anything that was in the forward part of the deck, which included my grandfather and his battle station, was almost instantly vaporized.

If you didn't have any type of surrounding metal to help you, you were pretty much instantly vaporized.

I mean, the captain of the Arizona was holding on to the rails in the command center, and all they found of him was his class ring, and it was welded to that railing.

That's how hot, and that's how bad that blast was.

And the flash burns were interesting, too.

I mean, really, these guys are, most of them were asleep.

Some were having breakfast, but the uniform for the day was what?

A white cotton shirt and cotton shorts because it was a Sunday.

So the normal, you know, uniform of like long pants and a white shirt that, I mean, on Sundays, they were a little bit more casual.

And so pretty much anything that wasn't instantly, like, that wasn't covered.

So basically, all your arms and all of your legs was almost flash-fried and instant first-degree burns.

So,

that happens, and very quickly, what's left of the Arizona turns into like a kiln.

Yeah, you know, obviously, you have a massive explosion, and then everything is on fire.

So, the deck was made of teak, and so that was instantly on fire.

But, you know, what happens when you heat up metal, right?

When something you put heat under metal, it just expands, right?

So, you know, my grandfather remembers his shoes melting, so he was basically standing on burned feet in his battle station because the soles of his shoes had completely melted off.

Most of his clothing was gone because it had been burned off, and it just kept getting hotter and hotter and hotter.

They said at its highest temperature, it was the same temperature as lava coming out of the Kilauea volcano, which was about 2,000 degrees.

So, you're standing on magma.

Pretty much.

They're still shooting at you.

The torpedoes are still coming.

You're seeing your friends vaporized

all around you.

Your ship is sinking sinking

and burning at the same time.

Men are in the water by the hundreds.

Oil is in the water.

On fire.

A foot to two feet thick.

In many cases, it was the oil that was holding the people up.

So you're wedged in there.

It's an inferno.

You did forget one element, though.

What's that?

Sharks.

Oh, fun.

In the harbor.

In the harbor.

Because there was so much blood and so much decay and so much dead body in the harbor.

Sharks came in from the ocean because they smelled the blood.

And so my grandfather looked down and could see sharks picking people apart.

It's so odd how I only associate that with the Indianapolis.

But of course, it's not like the sharks are just

dedicated to one ill-fated boat.

Okay, so all of that's happening.

It's getting hotter and hotter.

Your grandfather tries to describe the pain.

And as I read it, my feeling was he just gave up on trying to find the words,

which is a very powerful way.

One time in the Boy Scouts, Nikki, sitting around a campfire, I took a stick and I put a styrofoam cup on the end of it because I was 15 and curious about the way things burned.

It was the green flame that attracted me to it.

And I held it up to watch it burn, of course, and a blob of styrofoam fell down onto my hand.

And it burned so bad, I thought maybe I would just weep, you know?

that little piece of styrofoam burning through my skin, Chuck.

Absolutely indescribably.

Sounds horrible, Mike.

Yeah.

And then I read this book and I thought, well, how about that?

You know, at some point, I think the body, I think there's two things that happen.

So, first of all, the body goes into shock.

And so it's just like, okay, this is where we are.

Like, there's nothing we can do to change our circumstances right now.

We're just going to do what we can to survive.

But also, as you start to burn away layers of your skin, you effectively almost cauterize your nerves as well.

So as you get deep enough into the skin, basically the nerves just go dead because they've been cauterized and cut off from where they are.

And so you kind of just go numb from that.

So I think he experienced a little bit of both of those.

And at one point, it was just 100% survival mode, right?

You just put yourself into a state of almost meditation as you can in a chaotic environment that you're in.

Just saying, okay, what's the next thing, right?

We've done this.

What's the next thing?

We've shut the door.

So my grandfather ended up shutting the director door to try to alleviate some of the smoke and fire from coming in.

Just describe what the director is real quick.

So the director is, think of it as a little house that's on the side of the Arizona.

Pretty much when you look at the most famous photo of the Arizona and you see it kind of tilted sideways, there's like a little house and a little door.

My grandfather's battle station was right in there.

And so when the big bomb hit, basically what happened is it blew that door open.

And so all the smoke and all the flames and everything were coming through.

And so my grandfather who was closest to that door reached out with his right arm and tried to close it.

He ended up did getting it closed.

You know, obviously it burned his palm very badly, but it scorched his right arm almost like blackened to the point where he could pretty much no longer move it.

And so they were basically, there was him and five others that were trapped in this director.

One had passed away from the blast because he hit his head against the bulkhead and his skull caved in from the pressure.

And so they were basically, yes.

Is this the most famous one?

That is the most famous picture.

So this right here,

that area right there, that is my grandfather's battle station.

You think he's in there?

He is in there.

When that photo is taken.

Yes.

Yeah.

Crazy.

Yeah.

More than likely.

I mean, it's just unthinkable.

Yeah.

So it was him and five others that were trapped in that little box next to

the vestal.

And they're over top of a burning.

They're over top of a burning, sinking.

Pretty much.

Yeah.

They were in pot, right?

So it just kept getting hotter and hotter and hotter.

The Arizona burned for almost four days afterwards before that they could actually get on there and start recovering bodies.

So part of you is thinking, I've got to jump over.

And then you look over the side and you say, I can't jump over.

I can't jump over.

That's out of the frying pan, into the fire.

Yep, the water was on fire.

There were sharks.

There was just no way.

So in this moment of absolute futility and despair, they look across at the vestal.

And who do they see?

They see a very large man carrying a hatchet, which happened to be a man by the name of Joe George.

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And what the heck does Joe George do?

My grandfather and his shipmates started hooping and hollering, as obviously their singed focal cords would allow, and they said, hey, Vestal.

Hey, Vestal, throw us a line.

Hey, Vestal.

How far away are they, you figure?

It was probably about 75 to 100 feet.

And this is obviously between the two ships.

The Arizona was kind of tilted, but it was still fairly high up, so they were kind of like this.

So Joe looked over, saw the men in the vet in the Arizona, and he kind of was looking around.

So he got a monkey's fist, which is like a ball of twine, and it's wrapped a bunch of times.

And he knew that if he could get that line over there, that they could kind of shimmy off and get to the other side and the vestal.

So the monkey's fist is attached to an actual line.

A thin, like a heaving, or like a thin line, so that they would attach another line over and then they'd pull it across.

Yep.

So, I mean, think about it.

I mean, the director itself, the window is probably maybe a yard by a yard.

That's just kind of how I imagine it.

And to get that monkey's fist through there, it had to have been just a, I mean, there's obviously smoke and fire and all of that.

So it was a once in a million shot.

And it took a few times, a few tries before he did, right?

So Joe is on the vessel and he's throwing this thing about 75 feet through the air up

into a target that's probably a cubic yard.

Yes.

That's what he's shooting for.

That's what he's shooting for.

And your pop and four of his friends are in there getting cooked.

Meanwhile, Joe's purpose out there with the axe.

Was cutting lines from the vestal to the Arizona.

To get away from the Arizona.

To get away from the Arizona.

And in the midst of Joe George's trying, this impossible Hail Mary shot, his captain comes down, who, for reasons we still don't understand, let him out of jail earlier that day and says, what?

And says, cut all ties to the Arizona.

And this included, at that point, when his commanding officer came down, Joe had made the throw.

He had got it into the Arizona.

They had just tied off the heavier heaving line.

So it's probably a line, probably two or three inches thick.

And so his commanding officer says, come down and says, cut all ties to the Arizona, including that one, the one that he just tied.

And Joe's like, no, those guys are over in the Arizona.

They're going to come across.

He's like, the commanding officer basically looked at him and said, they're dead already.

Like, just look at them.

There's nothing left of them.

They look like ghosts.

Like, you could only see the whites of their eyes.

They were so badly burned.

And Joe stood up tall.

And again, you have to remember Joe is a Navy fighter, a heavyweight fighter.

He had an axe in his hand as well.

And said,

didn't need it.

But

didn't need it.

And said, no, I'm not going to leave those men over there.

They're going to make it off.

And his commanding officer told him again, he's like, cut that line.

So Joe kind of walked up to him a little bit more, probably intimidated him more than enough or more than he probably should have and said, no, I'm not cutting that line.

And the commanding officer decided that day that it was probably better to find himself elsewhere dealing with other things

than Joe George, heavyweight boxing champion of the Navy.

He's had a big 24 hours.

He's probably hungover still.

Maybe.

But didn't his commanding officer threaten to court-martial him as well?

Yep, he did.

He's like, I'm already going to be court-martialed anyways.

It doesn't really matter.

So, Joe is the only reason why I'm here.

Wow, that's amazing.

Well, but it gets crazier.

It gets crazy.

It does.

I mean, it's kind of a miracle.

It's like throwing a bullseye about 50 feet away from a dartboard.

Yeah.

Like, nice shot.

But he makes the shot finally.

But now all that has to happen is these men who have been burned to a crisp have to crawl arm over arm from the Arizona to the Vestal.

Yep.

Below them

is the fires of Mordor.

Yep.

Right?

Yep.

That's the most harrowing part of the book yeah the handover i mean his skin's gone skin's gone

tell it so uh my grandfather was the second to cross uh the guy that um crossed first wanted to make sure that it was okay and he was actually burned less because he actually had pants on that day so he climbed over he's like yeah let's go so my grandfather gets on the rope Obviously, his skin is all burned, blackened.

He, you know, his fingerprints, I'll tell that story in a second, but climbs hand over hand across the burning water.

You have to remember, obviously, burning water, you have to remember sharks, you have to remember oil, but obviously the planes were still strafing at the same time.

They were shooting at him.

They didn't hit him, thankfully, but they were shooting at him from crossing that line.

And I'm sure you on Dirty Jobs know this.

When you get to the center part of a line, even if it is a little bit lower, what happens?

It dips.

It doesn't matter how tight you make it.

Exactly.

And so the last probably 20, 30 feet was completely uphill.

And so when he finally, as he was going, Joe just, my grandfather remembers this so clearly.

Joe kept yelling at him, let's go, kid, come on, you can do it.

Don't look down.

One hand in front of the other.

Let's go.

You can do it.

Keep coming.

And so when he finally landed on the deck of the Vestal, he knew he was relatively safe.

He was obviously off the burning ship.

Pearl Harbor was still happening.

Strafing was still happening.

But he looked down at his arms.

Hopefully I don't cross you guys out too badly, but he basically just kind of went like this and pulled the skin down his arms like a tube sock.

So basically when you think of a tube sock and you roll it down.

And we asked him later in life why he did that.

And, you know, as you pointed out with the book being very simple sentences, he had a very simple answer.

And he said it was in the way.

I'm struck

the unbroken thing vis-a-vis your pop and all those other guys.

But I'm also just struck by this weird duality.

in men and like in the way we think of Joe George.

Like the night before, he's a brawler.

He's probably a bully in some ways.

He's had a few drinks, and he just loves to knock heads.

It just feels like today, based on that character assessment alone, we would dismiss him as the very definition of everything that's toxic and masculine.

Right?

But within 24 hours,

he's doing about the most selfless thing you could ever hope.

I mean, he's got everything but the cape on, Nikki.

Yeah, he saved six lives.

Come on, boys.

Six lives.

You can do it.

Yep.

The night before, you could have just as easily been throwing him through a window.

Exactly.

Yeah.

We're very good friends with the Taylor family, the George family.

And his daughter, she's like, you know, my dad wasn't perfect.

He was a drinker.

He liked to fight.

But, you know, later on in his life, when he met his wife, Joanne's mother, she tempered him out.

And he ended up, you know, he had a full.

The women will do that.

A good woman will do that.

Oh, no, now, see, that's going to get you in trouble.

Why?

Say it again.

A good woman will do that, really?

It's 2024, genius.

People actually listen to this.

But, you know, he had a full career in the Navy.

He went another Joe George.

Joe George, he did.

You find his picture, Chuck.

It's got to be there somewhere.

Full 20 years in the Navy.

So nothing like he basically had a commendation written in his

military jacket that said commended for, you know, saving five lives, six lives off the Arizona.

That little piece was lost to us for, I want to say,

when we first started looking, when we first started trying so 16 years, but it was 70 years.

How does that get lost?

That's like saying,

yeah, Jefferson, good guy.

Misplaced the Declaration.

Never knew he did that.

That was a good one.

I mean, that's one of the defining moments in the man's life.

Yes.

The only way we would have found him is he gave.

Is that him?

That's him.

That's Joe George.

That's Joe George.

Oh, that's just nothing but mischief.

Well, it's everything we've talked about.

You can see it in that face.

That guy's just as soon likely to pull over and change your tire or knock your teeth out.

Yeah, right.

Maybe both.

Who plays him in the movie that needs to be made about this whole thing?

If we had our choice, I'd say maybe Alan Richardson.

He's the guy that plays Jack Reacher.

Reacher?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Same body type, same virtual kind of big guy, fighter, you know, things like that.

So

I think like in the old days, maybe George Kennedy could have done it.

Yeah.

You know, but uh, we're actually pursuing this, you know, it kind of just with the writer's strike and everything.

We were working on getting it turned into a movie, and we're hopeful we would love to have Tom Holland as my grandfather.

And the only reason being is because when you put those two side by side, they look almost identical, it's actually kind of spooky.

By the way, quick sidebar: Don Stratton

was the bass singer in an international champion barbershop quartet called the Oriole 4.

Different Don Stratton.

I was going to say, my grandfather may have had a secret life.

I didn't know.

Well, when Chuck sent me this book, you know, weeks ago, and I looked, I'm like, Donald Stratton.

I was like, dude, we know Don Stratton.

I said no, and it's not that Don Stratton.

Different Donald Stratton.

But maybe it's not such a sidebar because music is a part of this story, too.

And the fate of the Arizona band.

Oh, my God.

Yep.

That's worth a quick riff.

I mean, to this day, the trophy that's awarded for the best band in the Navy is still known as the USS Arizona Trophy.

It's dedicated to them and their service.

So at the time, the Arizona was the best band.

They were competing in the Battle of the Bands in Pearl Harbor, and so they had played the night before.

Their battle stations was very, very deep in the hold.

They were running up the munitions, up the conveyor belts, and everything like that.

And so when Pearl Harbor started happening, every single one of them ran down to their battle station.

And unfortunately, when the big bomb hit, there was just anybody lower in the lower decks just was instantly vaporized.

Fortunately, unfortunately, I'm not sure either word works, but in the pantheon of things that can happen,

instant vaporization on that day.

Blessing.

May have been, yeah.

I mean, you just hate to say it out loud, but

talk too, if you would, or if you can, about the incredibly underrated role of music on a ship in the armed forces in general.

I just don't think a lot of people think about that.

Well, I mean, you have to think, first of all, if we're looking in 1941, you have to remember they didn't have TV, they didn't have Wi-Fi, they didn't have internet.

So they used to do movies on the fan tail.

So they would set up a screen and they would, you know, put movies on.

But the only really other form of entertainment was music.

And so bands in the 1940s, especially, were hugely sought after because when you're out at sea, when you're in the middle of nowhere, music is what connects us to our humanity.

And so, having a band on board to entertain and having a band on board to remind us who we are and that we're humans, it was a big deal.

I mean, it's still a big deal to this day in the American Armed Forces.

You know, they have the naval band, which obviously is my favorite because I'm a Navy girl.

They're fantastic.

You know, they take pride in their craft and they're skilled musicians, but at the same time, they're also Navy sailors.

They have a battle station, they have orders, they have a duty outside of just the music piece.

And so they're an integral part of our United States Armed Forces.

Your pop writes with such affection about those men.

Yes.

About all of the men,

actually.

And I'll tell you something else that occurred to me where I guess it didn't occur to me, but I just, it made me angry, Nikki, all over again.

And I don't know how to feel about that, but angry the way I was on September 12th.

Obviously, I wasn't around on December 8th of 1941.

But that's the closest I can come to thinking about just the outrage.

Just the, it made me think things I can't say out loud, just a, like a visceral anger.

And your pop is honest about that.

It's funny.

He quotes FDR a lot, talking about the importance of doing this for humanity, civilization, and not vengeance.

But he almost always follows it with a parenthetical.

He's like, now for me, I was pissed and I wanted vengeance.

And talk a little bit about

somehow he survives this.

And somehow they get him out of Hawaii and over to Amare Island.

And somehow he gets out of that.

And then he does something truly unthinkable.

But go ahead.

So once my grandfather, they got him on an open air truck.

They got him to like the triage center where only the worst kind of were given a bed.

He was given a bed right away.

The nurses famously marked lipstick, the red lipstick, on the men who've had a morphine shot, and they did that for two reasons.

One, to not overdose them, because they couldn't tell if they had had one or not.

And two, because they were rationing the supply.

And my grandfather...

was there for a couple weeks but he remembers very viscerally the first couple nights that he was there and you know men were screaming for their mothers for their gods for the nurses to hit them on the head with a bedpan anything to put them out of their misery.

But what he remembers most is the darkness.

And that's because at the time they did not know if the Japanese weren't going to come back.

So the entire island was blacked out.

No lights, no nothing.

And so that's what he remembers the most is just being alone in the dark, not knowing if he was going to live, die, or if the Japanese were going to come back.

It was a couple weeks later when, you know, they were starting to send some of these sailors back stateside, and my grandfather piped up and said, I want to go back home.

And the orderly turned to him and was like, no, you're not going to make it.

You're going to die on the the way back.

My grandfather's like, I think I'm going to make it, being the stubborn man that he is.

And he's like, what do I got to do?

What do I got to do to go home?

And he's like, all right, well, if you can get yourself up out of bed without assistance and stand while we change your sheets, I'll put you on the next one home.

So he got himself up.

He stood on burned and blackened feet for probably what felt like an eternity and basically just stood there while they changed his sheets.

And true to his word, he was on the next boat home and ended up arriving in California on Christmas Day of 1941.

So he was in recovery, and I think when he could finally stand again, his enlistment weight was about 160 pounds.

And when he could finally stand again on his own, they weighed him and he was about 82 pounds.

Oh my God.

So all of his hair was gone, part of his ear was missing.

He couldn't move his right arm.

And so then they started doing all of the triage and all the appointments and skin grass and stuff.

And so, you know, they used leeches to coax

maggots to eat the dead skin, leeches to coax the new tissue to develop blood flow.

And at one point, they actually took my grandfather back for his saltwater bath.

So they used to do saltwater baths.

You get saltwater or something in an open wound, it is not.

So imagine your entire body submerged.

So they usually gave him a shot of morphine, and then he remembers once they actually forgot to give him the shot of morphine before they submerged him.

And the nurse just came running down because she was trying to find where he was.

And you could hear where he was because he was screaming pretty good.

Gave him a shot of morphine and kind of moved on with their lives.

And so then they started doing skin grafts.

So they would take skin from his backside because that was one of the only things that really wasn't burned.

And so they would put it on his arms, hands, face had grafts, his feet had grafts.

And then it finally came to a head when the doc pulled him aside and they wanted to amputate his right arm because they said it would never fully work again.

And I think at that point my grandfather said, I've had enough.

Like no more.

Like you're not taking my arm.

We're done.

I'm out.

I'm tapping out.

Like, we're done.

No more treatments.

No more anything.

He said, you know, if you take my arm, you know, what kind of life would I lead?

And so they discharged him, medically discharged him from the Navy.

And because there was still a war going on, he ended up hitchhiking back to Nebraska, back home, as one does.

Oh, no.

I didn't.

Oh, you're kidding me.

No.

Yep, hitchhiked back home.

So, my great-grandmother knew that he had survived at that point when he started making his way home, but she pretty much for about a month didn't know if he was alive or dead.

And that's a lot of it because it was chaotic.

Obviously, we don't have the digital records that we do today, and so they were still trying to figure out who was alive, who was dead.

And so all she knew is that he was missing in action.

And there was another young man in my grandfather's graduating class that was on the Oklahoma, and he unfortunately did not make it.

So Red Cloud had two boys from two of the most famous ships in Pearl Harbor.

One survived, one did not.

So my grandfather finally made it home.

He recovered for a little while and then his dad, being who his dad was, put him to work, which I think actually saved my grandfather because it kept his mind busy.

It kept his body active.

And so gradually he started building up strength again.

And my great-grandfather ended up buying a bar.

And so my grandfather was hauling beer kegs around the state.

And so obviously those things are not light.

And so he actually started to develop movement and strength in his right arm again.

And once he kind of realized that he was one of the only young men men in town, he's like, all right, I'm ready to go back.

And of course, my grandmother was, or great-grandmother, was heartbroken.

And she's like, you've done your duty, you don't need to go back.

For him, it was a little more like he wanted some revenge.

So his best friend Harl Nelson is still aboard the Arizona, and he felt like he needed to go back for himself and for Harl and for the rest of his shipmates.

This was the guy who he was going to see

the morning of the attack.

Correct.

Who, I guess, saved him, really.

Really saved him.

Yep.

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Yep.

I want to hop forward into

actually I want to hear the story when you were in the fourth grade.

But before we do that, I just want to circle back to the prostitutes that you so gently brought up and Hotel Road and the shortage of nurses in the wake of this calamity and what those women did.

I love this story.

And it's a story that just is not told.

It's not known to history.

So the women of Hotel Street, obviously, a lot of their money was made through the sailors, right?

Keeping them company.

And so what happened during Pearl Harbor is they effectively stopped their normal business and they opened up all of their brothels and their rooms and housed injured sailors and nursed them back to health.

They donated blood and a lot of them went back to like the Navy Corps and said, how can we help?

What more can we do?

And they're like, well, all that's left is just kind of dirty jobs.

And so they're like, we'll take it.

We'll do whatever we need to do.

And so they ended up starting to clean bedpans, change sheets, and clean medical tubing.

The smell, Nikki.

Yes.

The smell.

Yes.

I've been in a hospital laundry before.

This is that times, what, infinity?

Infinity.

And on top of that, they didn't have enough nurses or doctors to go around to escort the sailors back home.

And so they volunteered to hop on a ship and take care of these sailors as they crossed the Pacific, which is known to be not nice waters, landing in California.

And a lot of these, you know, women, they got to know the sailors through both their normal work and through this.

But unfortunately, when they were docked in California, these women wanted to see their sailors off, but unfortunately, the Navy would not allow them to exit the ship.

They had to stay on the ship.

And then they were just taken right back to Hawaii.

So unfortunately, a lot of them never got to say a truly heartfelt goodbye to their sailors that they took care of, which is unfortunate.

This is another movie, you know.

Absolutely.

I mean, it's probably another movie all by itself.

It'll be a heck of a scene and the one you want to to do.

But I just think it's so poetic and ironic and human that your great-grandfather's bit of advice to your pop is keep your nose clean and stay out of the brothels.

And it's the women from the brothels who, when the chips are impossibly down, actually step up to bring.

They gave blood, too, right?

Yeah.

Standing in line to give blood.

People were giving blood twice a day.

It's really tempting for me because, like Dan Carlin, I get sucked into

just the minutia of the horror of these things that I think I kind of understand on one level, but can't possibly hope to.

But I'm not going to do it because the book does a wonderful and important job of it.

Flashing forward, you don't know any of this when you're in the fourth grade.

You know your pop was heroic and you know where he was on 7th December.

But tell me about your history, teacher.

Oh, I love this story.

So we were learning about history, the Pearl Harbor history in fourth grade.

And, you know, we were talking about it and everything like that.

And I raised my hand.

And I said, you know, my grandfather was in Pearl Harbor.

I said he was on the Arizona.

My teacher got very quiet and very serious.

And he's like, Miss Stratton, I need you to stay after class because it was kind of close to the end.

I was like, ah, great.

I'm in trouble.

As, you know, a fourth grader does.

And so he's like, I need to know everything.

And so I ended up telling him what I knew, which was not a whole lot.

And I realized that I didn't know my grandfather's story as much as I should.

So I went home and I said, Dad, you need to tell me about grandpa.

I said, we're learning about Pearl Harbor.

And my teacher got really weird when I mentioned that grandpa was on the Arizona.

And I said, I want to know more.

And so I ended up bringing some.

paper clippings in and I learned the story.

But I was really able to learn a lot more when I was younger because I'd crawl up in my grandpa's lap and I'd say, grandpa, tell me about your boat.

The boat piece of it always stuck with me because he would always kind of knock me behind the ear and say, cricket.

And he'd be like, cricket.

He's like, it's not a a boat, it's a ship.

And so that, to me, always stuck with me.

And it's going to stick with me through this new submarine that we find ourselves in because I will always call it a ship.

And even though it's technically a boat, but we can get into that later, too.

But I would just absorb all of this knowledge, and I kind of became this family historian.

As I kind of grew up and I grew older, I would collect stories, I would listen, and I would go to Pearl Harbor, and I'd listen to all of our Pearl Harbor survivors and the Arizona survivors.

And, you know, then we started learning and wanting to know who the man who saved saved my grandfather's life was because he didn't have a name.

And then so it was at the, I believe, 50th or 60th anniversary, 60th anniversary, where we started to enlist the help of the Arizona Foundation, like, help us find this guy.

Like, there has to be a record somewhere, right?

And there was.

There was a single audio recording of Joe in the 1970s to a Texas state university.

And it's about maybe 10 seconds long where he's talking about how he saved six lives off the Arizona and that was that was it.

We had a name for the first time in our lives.

He was no longer just the guy that saved our grandfather's life.

It was Joe George.

So when do you feel personally like you because it feels like you're on a mission or became what's the right word?

Convicted at some point to tell this story and to just wrap yourself in the past of it.

Maybe to keep it present for the rest of us?

It's a good question.

I think that a lot of times, you you know, whenever we would go out with my grandfather and people would realize who he was, he kind of became like the Beatles whenever traveling with them, especially for military-related events because people would just gravitate towards him.

I think we realized as a family that whenever he passes away, because we knew that obviously he was getting up there in age, as well as all of the survivors of the Arizona, that when those guys passed away, That was it.

There was nobody else to tell the story if they go.

So it was placed upon our shoulders then and it was put upon our hearts to say, okay, it's our job now to take this story, to share it where we go, to speak about it to other people so that, first of all, it stays present in everybody's minds and also to remind people what happens when we forget our own history and we become complacent as a country.

I think that's probably the biggest thing is that you don't want history repeating itself.

Obviously, we saw what happened on September 11th where we were attacked again, virtually very similar circumstances.

And you would think as a country we would learn.

You would hope that we would learn.

But for me, it became very personal because

my grandfather's life means something.

It meant something.

And the sailors that he served with meant something to me and to this country.

I'm always of the feeling that if we stop talking about it, then their memory just fades.

There's no more of them once we stop talking about it.

But every time I talk about Harl and every time I talk about Joe, their memory is perpetuated for another generation where somebody will remember them and it just keeps going.

In a way, way,

you're a custodian not just of the facts, but of

well, of gallantry.

In fact, all the gallant men is the name of the book.

Why?

All the gallant men is in memory of all the gallant men is written on the memorial wall at the USS Arizona Memorial.

And so this is in memory of all of them.

What does the word mean to you, gallant?

I don't know if I can put it into words, but whenever I hear the name gallant, I always see Joe George's George's face.

And that's because he didn't have to do what he had to do.

He knew that if he followed his commanding officer's orders, they may have forgiven him for what he did the night before.

But he chose.

He chose a different path.

He chose to save six men's lives, and he knew that his career in the Navy was probably over.

But there was nothing on this God's earth that could stop him from doing that.

And to me, when I hear the term gallant, that's what it means to me.

I see his face.

Your pop says something about it in here.

He buries it like he does a couple of other big points.

It's one of a thousand things I marked.

I'm not going to go hunting for it, but

he says,

and this is the difference between brave men and gallant men.

Brave men do the hard thing when the chips are down.

Gallant men volunteer to do it again.

Yeah.

Knowing.

Right?

Yeah.

Knowing.

It's running into the fire.

Yeah.

After you've been burned.

After you've been burned.

Your old man went back to fight.

Yes.

He's on the Arizona and he's on, I forget the name of the, was it the stack?

USS stack, yes.

At Okinawa.

Okinawa.

Iwo Jima.

Leyte Golf.

I got to talk about your position as a

sponsor.

It's such an odd title.

Now a word from our sponsor.

It's Nikki Stratton.

But

I'm sorry I'm hopscotching around, but I don't want to forget I'm at the part in the book now where your pop talks about Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

And he very even-handedly, I think, talks about the controversies.

And we've done it on this podcast before.

I don't want want to belabor it, but walks through the projections and the statistics.

And he makes this statistical case, he makes the numerical case.

He talks about 10 million Japanese deaths and probably 800,000 dead Americans if we invade.

It just becomes very mathematical and practical.

And I'm like, yeah, I've heard that argument, and that makes sense.

And then again, in another little parenthetically short sentence, he says, and you know something, we dropped leaflets.

Yeah.

And then he publishes, publishes, he writes the exact leaflets that were dropped.

They're incredibly detailed and persuasive.

And then the final sentence of that chapter is,

we didn't get any leaflets on December 7th.

I'm like, yeah.

I know.

That knocked me out too.

I mean, what can you, right?

So it's just.

Bravo all around, all the gallant men.

But flashing further forward, now here you are, his granddaughter and the Arizona lives again in the form of I think you brought some visual aids let's have a look

well before we do that did you want to see the

I want to see all of it

I want to see the thing wrapped in the towel yes so before I move on to the submarine I do want to show you guys this so I've got two pieces of battleship Arizona here.

The first one is pretty significant.

So this is actually a piece of the armor plating that was basically surrounding the Arizona.

So that's probably about a five by five piece.

And you can tell by its weight, it's pretty heavy, right?

It's cast iron.

Pretty much.

And so that armor plating was meant to protect the Arizona from armament and obviously direct hits.

And

we kind of know what happened to the Arizona when a bomb hits the teakwood deck and goes down many decks.

But, you know, the armor plating was pretty technologically advanced at the time.

It was meant to kind of deflect any type of larger armament.

but it also added some significant weight to the Arizona.

So I think that they, I think she was like 25 and a half

thousand tons, I think.

25,000, yeah.

Yeah, just around that.

Well, that's heavy.

Yeah.

Wow.

Yep.

So, and then I also brought a smaller piece of steel, which

to me, I know that the armor plating is significant, but this is probably my favorite.

And that's because you can actually see the delamination of the steel.

So when steel is made, it's made in layers.

But when it it gets hot again, it actually what's called delaminates.

And so, you can actually see the individual layers of steel that created the battleship Arizona.

And basically, this shows you how hot the battleship burned because you can see the individual layers on there.

So, that was very close to my grandfather's battle station right there.

That piece is in Waipo, the main superstructure is in Waipo Island.

It's like a little inlet.

So,

just resting away.

Amazing.

Yeah, truly.

Yeah.

all right.

Um,

let's see, oh, I also want to show you guys this.

So, this is actually

so cool, so cool, right?

So, the um Pacific Historic Parks, um, where the USS Arizona Memorial is, uh-huh, um, back in I think the 90s, maybe early 2000s, I think the 90s, decided that they wanted to do an Americans of Valor series, and so they started with my grandfather.

He is the first and only crewman of the USS Arizona or of any battleship to be created into his own action figure.

And I really want to stress this enough.

It is not a doll.

My grandfather made it very clear that it was not a doll.

What would Joe George say?

What would Joe George

think?

Yes.

So basically what it is, it's my grandfather as a 19-year-old sailor.

It has his story on the side.

They actually did a Rosie the Riveter one as well, but his was the actual only sailor that they ever did.

Did he sign it on the line?

He did.

So that's his actual actual signature.

That's his actual signature, yeah.

So they did a run of them.

You can still find them on eBay every once in a while, which was super fun.

How many did they make?

Oh, gosh, I want to say probably, I want to say maybe like five to ten thousand of them.

They sold out.

Every time we went to Hawaii, they were always sold out.

We actually talked to a couple companies, and they're like, we want to do, if the movie ever gets done, they want to do another series of these, which would be super amazing.

Super cool.

That would be awesome.

All right, now for the the cool thing, the next gen thing.

So this is a model of the future USS Arizona nuclear submarine, which was named in 2019 by Secretary Thomas Modley.

Nice.

Just to go back, I did look it up.

SSN stands for Submersible Ship Nuclear.

Submersible Ship Nuclear.

I should know that.

I'm probably going to get a lot of hate for that.

Well, you are the sponsor.

If nothing else, you can take that from this conversation.

And one other thing for you, Unbroken was written by the guy who was in, you know, his story was Louis Zamparini.

Zamparini, not Lamporini.

Thank you.

All right, good.

So this is, what is this, Virginia class, Columbia?

It is a Virginia class, but it's actually a new gen model.

So it is the Virginia class with the VPM.

Okay.

What does the average person

need to know about this weapon and submarines in general that they don't?

Well, right now, submarines are absolutely crucial to our Navy or to our United States

just overall safety.

They patrol the waters.

So pretty much the Navy has stated outright that basically a SEAL team or a United States Navy team can be on site to any particular area in the entire world and on the entire globe within 24 hours.

And a lot of that has to do with our submersible fleet.

I would say what makes the Arizona unique is it is a new generation model.

So it has what's called the VPM module.

module.

It's an additional 83 feet to the current Virginia class.

It has four vertical tubes tubes that are basically placed inside of the submarine itself.

I want to say it's kind of like, it's not really open use, but there are so many uses for those.

So they can actually store additional Tomahawk missiles, so it triples the lethality of the current Virginia class.

They can actually flood those tubes as well and launch Navy SEALs out of them so they actually don't have to surface where currently they do.

Which I'm not going to lie, when it's kind of...

done I kind of want to try it.

I kind of want to have them I want to don some scuba gear and have them shoot me out of the VPM tool.

So

totally working on that.

It's a good time for sure.

You know, I'm a sponsor.

I can do what I want, right?

That's true.

But what it basically does is it gives our Navy another weapon against some of our rising enemies and rising aggressions, especially over in China.

She will most likely be positioned in Pearl Harbor when she's completed.

So right close to China and some of those other places.

But obviously, I want her to be stationed in Pearl Harbor.

It makes sense not only from a historical standpoint, but from a

tactical standpoint as well.

So how did you come to be like, this is a phone call?

Do you get a telegram?

How does that work?

So typically what would happen in every other normal case, the Secretary of the Navy would reach out via either a phone call or via email.

A lot of times they have personal relationships with sponsors where they have a specific person in mind.

And basically what it is, is there's a single female sponsor per United States vessel.

First of all, let's start with the the naming.

So the USS Arizona was named in December of 2019 by Secretary Tom Modley.

My grandfather passed away in February of 2020, so just a couple months after it was named.

And, you know, I actually got to know Secretary Tom Modley when he was the undersecretary.

He had the USS Vesto Bell in his office.

Oh, wow.

And he had a picture of my grandfather above it.

The reason he did that is he said, every time I walk by, he's like, I want to remember what we're fighting for, and I want to remember what our men did so that we don't repeat it.

So, him and I got to know each other through email very well.

And when my grandfather passed away, we ended up inviting him to attend the funeral.

He ended up speaking at my grandfather's funeral, which was absolutely incredible.

And then he pulled me aside and said, Nikki, I have something I want to speak with you about.

And so, we ended up going into a small room at the church, and he said, Now I know you know about sponsorships and being a sponsor of a vessel.

And I said, Yes, I'm familiar with the practice.

And he said, Well, I want you to be the sponsor of the Arizona.

And he's like, I can't, in good conscience, just name anybody.

He's like, This is such a unique piece of our history.

He's like, There has to be a familial connection with this ship because of the 1,511 crew members.

And we knew that they would probably not make it until the at that point, I think there was two left that they would not make it until the commissioning of the submarine.

But he said he really wanted to make sure that there was always a familial connection, a direct descendant with the original battleship Arizona to to this new generation.

What are your duties?

That's a fun question.

So there's ceremonial duties and then there's actual duties.

And for the most part, a sponsor can be as involved as she wants with her crew and with the ship.

For me, I'm very involved.

Do tell.

I'm sure you probably guessed that.

But kind of the very first milestone of sponsorship is called the keel lang.

And that basically marks the very first construction piece.

And nine times out of ten, for a non-submersible vessel, obviously there's the keel, which is the backbone of a vessel.

So what happens is, is a welder, the sponsor will first write her initials into a plate, and then a welder will weld her initials into the keel plate, and then they will affix it on the keel itself inside of the vessel.

For me, being the

extra girl I am, decided with the blessing of Electric Boat to weld my own initial.

And so my husband and I ended up learning to weld in Denver.

And we ended up laying our keel plate down December 7th of 2022.

So on the anniversary, I got up there, I donned my amazing Rosie the Riveter gear.

It was probably the most comfortable I have ever been at an event.

I didn't have to wear a dress, I didn't have to wear heels.

I was in a jumpsuit, I had gloves on, and I welded my own initial into the plate, and then we had the welder finish it because it's actually a really huge honor to be chosen as a welder for a keeling ceremony.

And so I did not want to take that away from a welder.

And so we ended up having an electric boat welder who had been with the company for almost 40 years, I believe.

And he started when he had just gotten out of high school.

He had done a number of other boats.

And they actually gave him the opportunity to weld on the USS Illinois, so Michelle Obama's vessel, but he's like, no, give it to someone younger.

Like, it's good for them to do that.

And they came back and said, well, we have USS Arizona.

You know, we want to give you that opportunity.

And he's like, I'm not passing that up.

So he made sure that he was on the USS Arizona.

What do you do in real life?

I do want to show this.

That is my welding helmet.

I wore that when I welded my initials.

And thankfully, Lincoln Electric heard about me and my story.

And they're like, well, we don't want you to just wear any helmet.

Like, you have to have a badass helmet.

And so I was like, yeah, let's go for it.

And so they ended up, they're like, well, we have two like U.S.

flag helmets.

One was a little bit more modern, um, like a more modern flag, and they said this one has a little bit more of an older feel.

I was like, I want that one because it had that, it just has that like cool 1940s vibe to it.

And then you can see the signatures around.

So, a lot of those were the people on stage with me.

So, you have Admiral Lindsay, Lance, Yancey Lindsay, so he was one of our admirals on there.

The president of Electric Boat was on there, our welder is on there, and so it just is a very good memory of

yeah.

When I go around and speak around the different places, you know, I'm very blessed to be able to tell this story.

I bring the helmet with me, especially to the younger kids.

And, you know, when I was down in Gilbert, Arizona, which is the host town for the submarine, they actually watched me welding.

And a lot of the girls, when I came back, I think three or four months later, they're like, You're the welder girl.

You might make me want to weld when I'm older.

So, for me, it's really cool because it's like they associate that with like, oh, a girl can do that.

Like, yeah, let's go.

Yeah, well, you may be the sponsor for more than the Arizona.

yes really so but to continue that um so the next ceremony thing that we have is the will be the christening and that means that i get to smack a bottle over the nose of the sub and for me it will be unique as always

because originally the original battleship was christened with two bottles so the first was water that had been collected from the roosevelt dam so it was the very first dam that was built in arizona arizona was also a dry state at the time and so they did not want their first battleship to be christened with alcohol and then the second is the traditional champagne.

For me, it's the first bottle is going to be root beer.

And a lot of that is because the guys, they were the survivors of Arizona drank root beer when they were recovering because it settled their stomach with all the medication and all of that.

There's actually a local brewery in Gilbert, Arizona that brews their own root beer.

And so they're going to make the bottle for us.

And then we're going to smash that over.

And then the second will be the traditional champagne.

We're honoring the past and then obviously forging and creating a new future.

And then the last ceremonial event will be the commissioning, which is basically where I will call the ship to life and say, you know, sailors, man your posts and call the ship to life.

And as I say that, the submariners are going to run out onto the sub, man their stations, and then basically from that second on, it is an active service vessel in the United States Navy.

Do we have a date?

We're hoping late 27,

early 28.

You know, I wonder if this is one of the ships that Blue Forge Alliance.

Have you heard of these guys?

I believe so.

The American Submarine Industrial Base is this huge assortment of 15,000 companies.

They're trying to hire 100,000 tradespeople over the next eight, nine years to build four of these things.

Yes.

And it's just so interesting that you mentioned welding.

We're constantly beating that drum here.

The shortages are so real, and I worry just not just about the Navy, but the overall workforce and and skilled labor and it just seems we're so out of balance in the opportunities that exist yeah they're everywhere and the fact you're sitting here with actually the submarine one of the ones in question that's crazy yes i love it

yep anything else you want people to know that they don't aside from the fact that all the gallant men is a book that every american ought to read

um

well i guess

and you can put this anywhere but i will say that my grandfather always left with some of the best advice and it's advice that i take with me through every bit and piece of my life.

You know, he said this to former President Trump in the Oval Office.

He said this to Mad Dog Mattis in the Pentagon and a few other folks, and that is, don't do anything you can't do standing up in a hammock.

Wait a minute, what?

Don't do anything you can't do standing up in a hammock.

Correct.

There's a lot.

There's very little you can do standing up in a hammock.

That's essentially, I think, what he's saying.

Don't get over your skis.

Exactly.

If you're going to do a thing,

be careful.

Do it right.

Do it right and do it right the first time.

Don't do anything you wouldn't do standing up in a hammock.

It's interesting.

It's not a terrible title for this episode either.

I'll tell you that.

Thank you so much for

the hat and the shirt.

You're so welcome.

Mostly for the time.

And also, you know what, for keeping grandfathers relevant.

That's probably a good place to end this.

We just read so much and hear so much about, you know, the importance of the family unit.

Obviously, it's only critically important, but the role of grandfathers and the impact yours had on you.

Yeah, hugely important.

Not only just who he was as a person, but how he lived his life after.

Obviously, I didn't know him when he was a little younger, but I mean, to go through what he did and to experience what he did, he had the best attitude.

He was always laughing.

He was always joking.

He enjoyed his life.

He was an offshore,

he worked on the oil rigs when he was retired.

And, you know, he at one point had the deepest dive in a two-man submarine.

He was just a genuine person, and he lived his life to the fullest.

And I think that that's something that we all should strive towards, is just living our life to the fullest, no matter what adversities come at us or what, you know, life may throw at us, just understanding that that's part of what makes us who we are, but living our life to the fullest.

Well, he's the epitome of the greatest generation, and you are indeed proof of it.

Thank you very much.

Thanks again for coming there.

Thank you so much.

This is wonderful.

This episode is over now.

I hope it was worthwhile.

Sorry it went on so long,

but if it made you smile,

then share your satisfaction in the way that people do.

Take some time

to go online

and leave a

review.

I hate to ask, I hate to beg, I hate to be a nudge.

But in this world, the advertisers really like to judge.

You don't need to write a bunch, just a line or two.

All you've got to do is leave a quick five-star review.

All you've got to do is leave a quick five-star review.

and not two all you got to do is leave a quick five star review

all you got to do is leave a quick five star review

all you got to do is leave a quick even if you hate it five stars especially if you're

all alone

thank you

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