August 28, 2024 • 33 mins
Robert E. Bush is one of the youngest recipients of the Medal of Honor. At only 18, Bob found himself at the Battle of Okinawa, the bloodiest and fiercest battle of World War II’s Pacific theater. But Bob wasn’t the only teenager at that battle. Both the Japanese and US military had young soldiers and medics in dangerous – and lethal – situations at the frontlines. Bob’s story is about what it means to fight when you are still so young. How it shapes the people who survive. And what their legacy is to their country and to future generations.
Special thanks to the Congressional Medal of Honor Society.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Bushkin picture of Winter's Day in nineteen forty one. At
Willapa Valley High School, a pale stone building in the
little town of Menlo, nestled in the southwestern corner of
Washington State, Excitement was running high in the classrooms, more
(00:36):
than the usual amount of chatter. Was a Monday in December,
December eighth, to be exact, the day after Pearl Harbor,
there was a lot to talk about. The atmosphere was
thick with anticipation and fear. As the teachers urged the
students to settle down, a voice came across the PA system.
It was the school superintendent. The whole building leaned in
(00:58):
to hear him speak. It's official. He told them, We're
going to war. Robert Eugene Bush, a ninth grader with
a thick shock of dark hair at a somewhat devilish smile,
listened intently. He was too young to fight, just fifteen
years old, living at home with his mom and sister.
But in the months that followed he watched as friend
(01:20):
after friend left Willipa Valley to serve, and he mourned
with the rest of the little community when they got
the news that some of those teenage soldiers would never return.
So the moment Bob turned seventeen, the age when you
could enlist with parental permission, he joined the military. He
and another football player both signed up for the Navy Reserves.
(01:43):
He would be a medical specialist, a corman. Like so
many of the characters we'd met in this series, he
wanted to do something that would save lives, but he
had no real sense of what it was actually like
to be a corman in combat. He was a teenager,
caught up in the patriotic spirit, full of energy. He
made an impulsive decision that would change the shape of
(02:05):
his life, and just a handful of months later, Bob
would make another split second decision, one that would forever
change someone else's life too, him Malcolm Glawell. This is
Medal of Honor Stories of Courage. The Medal of Honor
is the highest military decoration in the United States, awarded
(02:25):
for gallantry and bravery in combat the risk of life,
above and beyond the call of duty. Each candidate must
be approved all the way up the chain of command,
from the supervisory officer in the field to the White House.
This show is about those heroes, what they did, what
it meant and what their stories tell us about the
(02:46):
nature of courage and sacrifice. Bob Bush would leave that
little town of Menlo, Washington, and by the age of eighteen,
he would find himself at the Battle of Okinawa, the
bloodiest and fiercest battlefield of the Pacific Theater. His story
is about bravery and heroism, but it's also the story
of a kid, one of the youngest recipisdiance of the
(03:10):
Medal of Honor. He wasn't the only kid at that battle,
and in this episode, I want to think about that,
what it means to send someone so young after fight,
How they forged lives for themselves after that service, how
it shaped them, what they learned. In a way, this
is a story about inheritance. Herbert Hoover famously said, older
(03:31):
men declare war, but it is youth that must fight
and die, And it is youth who must inherit the tribulation,
the sorrow, and the triumphs that are the aftermath of war.
How do we reconcile those things. To get a sense
(03:54):
of why Bob Bush went to war as young as
he did, you have to know a little bit about
his family situation. He was brought up by a tough
and hard working Irish Catholic mom.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
I was raised by my mother, a single parent who
was a registered nurse, and during the course of my upbringing,
my sister and I lived in the hospital that she
ran in a small lumbering town.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
He watched his mother tend to patience and take care
of her family as best she could. But Bob to
hear him tell, it was a handful.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
I had an unruly life, you might say, because of
the lack of a father, but that put a little
chip on my shoulder.
Speaker 1 (04:36):
He played football for the team at his tiny high school, Willipa,
only had about twenty five kids per grade. He had
a girlfriend, an adorable blonde named Wanda spoot Well. Wanda
had two boyfriends, both vining to go steady with her.
He kept Bob on his toes. But humming underneath all
of these small town teenage goings on was the war.
(04:58):
It was happening thousands of miles away, but it felt
personal to Bob. He knew all those friends and teammates
who were going off to fight.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
I lived in the community that had sixty seven young
man killed in World War Two, and the total population
was less than ten thousand and always young men. They
came from my schools. The full back on our football
team died on the Bataan death Marks.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
As his seventeenth birthday approached, he started thinking about getting
out there with them. He would have to ask his
mother's permission to enlist that young but his mom, as
I mentioned, was a no nonsense lady.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
I was in the third year of high school and
my mother said, Bobby, you're not the smartest kid in
the class. And I kind of chuckled, so I said, well,
maybe I'll go in the service. Her feeling was that
if I wanted to go, that was fine, and my
feeling was that we were in a war, so I
(05:58):
could go out there and I could make it a
little difference.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
I can imagine his mother staring into the deep set
eyes of her only son, thinking, maybe this will be
the thing that gives him responsible ability structure. She must
have been filled with equal parts hope and terror. Wouldn't
any parent feel that way. Bob certainly wasn't worried. He
was a teenage boy. They feel invincible, blindly optimistic. He
(06:23):
was running on adrenaline and a testosterone.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
I just thinking about this would be an adventure. Of
course you're looking for fun. Seventeen.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
In the late fall of nineteen forty three, Bob and
a friend from his football team went to enlist together.
They both chose the Naval Reserves.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
The Navy was always my service of choice, and also
I thought, well, if I go on the Navy, I
can sleep in clean sheets every night. Well it didn't
work out that way, but that was my plan. And
then by living in the hospital and having jobs to
do in hospital, and decided that the Medical Corps might
be for me.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
His medical training with the Navy Hospital Corps lasted less
than a year before he was sent to Camp Pendleton
in California to join a Marine battalion as their corman.
There he learned to handle weapons.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
When you're talking about rising guns and Thompson submachine guns
and air cool machine guns and water cool machine guns
and drowning automatic rifles and him one rifles, I mean,
these are big stuff for a kid seventeen years old.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
You can still hear it in his voice, the excitement
of a kid with a bunch of fun new toys.
But this training also drove home the point that he
wouldn't just be saving lives. He might be taking them too.
That became all the more clear a few months after
his eighteenth birthday, when he got on a ship with
the rest of his battalion. They were headed to Okinawa, Japan.
(07:57):
Okinawa is one of the Ryuk Islands, located southwest of
the Japanese mainland. The Allies saw it as a lynchpin
to the war in the Pacific, which by nineteen forty
five had been dragging on for nearly four years. Okinawa
would give the Allies an air base close enough to
bomb the Japanese home islands, plus an ideal place to
(08:18):
station the Allied naval fleet, and possibly even plan and
invasion of the Japanese homeland.
Speaker 3 (08:25):
Okinawa will provide an offensive base against Formosa, the China coast,
or Japan itself, only three hundred and sixty five miles away.
Speaker 1 (08:33):
Okinawa hadn't always been a part of the Japanese Empire.
It was only an ex in the late nineteenth century.
Many Japanese considered the people of Okinawa to be inferior,
second class citizens of the Empire. Once the war began,
the Okinawans had been pressured to prove their worthiness to
the Japanese cause, so they had been pressed into service.
(08:55):
Adult men joined the Japanese Army or the local defense Corps.
Some two thousand high school students were drafted to The
boys went into the Blood and Iron Student Corps and
were ready to fight. The girls became nurses members of
the Himiurikorps. Some were as young as fifteen. In other
battles of the Pacific, civilians weren't part of the action.
(09:17):
Gauadalcanal had been a military base, and the civilian population
on Iwojima had been evacuated before that battle began, But
in the spring of nineteen forty five, almost five hundred
thousand civilians were living on Okinawa. They would be in
the middle of whatever conflict was to come. On April first,
(09:41):
Easter Sunday. It came that morning. Bob Bush was on
the first wave of transport boats. Everyone in the American
fleet knew what this kind of invasion looked like. Normandy
had happened the previous summer, Ewojima had just been the
month before. In both cases, the Allies had faced an
enemy with dug in defenses. The Americans had been mowed
(10:03):
down just as quickly as they landed for Okinawa. The
command expected and eighty percent casualty rate at minimum.
Speaker 2 (10:13):
The night before, we were told that the entire first division,
the first Marine Division, was expendable. That means that we're
going to lose everybody, and that really didn't make for
a happy camper.
Speaker 1 (10:27):
As the sun rose on that Easter morning, Bob and
the rest of his company and marines looked out on
what would be the largest amphibious assault ever mounted in
the Pacific. There were fifteen hundred ships and half a
million men. About sixty thousand would go ashore on that
first day.
Speaker 2 (10:45):
As far as you could see, there were ships. And
I gave you a certain amount of confidence when you
could see this amount of transports and aircraft carriers and
battleships and unit cruisers and just innumerable amount of them.
And so we thought, well, there's going to be a
piece of cake.
Speaker 1 (11:03):
The troop transports skipped across the surf towards the island.
As land got closer, Bob was filled with dread.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
I noticed that our boat was a boat length in
front of everybody else, and I told the squad leader
stand next to me, I said, why don't you tell
him to slow this thing down. We don't need to
be the first one there.
Speaker 1 (11:25):
But when the men landed on the island, there was
weirdly nothing, no barrage of fire, no hailstorm of motor shells.
Speaker 2 (11:35):
There wasn't a shot fire on the beach.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
It was eerily quiet. It seemed so easy, But that
peaceful landing hit a horrible secret.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
The Japanese had elected to let us on board and
then nail us after we got there.
Speaker 1 (11:52):
They would wait and let the Allied forces work their
way inland.
Speaker 2 (11:56):
There.
Speaker 1 (11:56):
The terrain gave the Japanese troops an extraordinary advantage. The
island was covered in ridge lines, and each one of
those was poked with concrete tombs, bunkers, and dozens of
volcanic caves. They could pick the Americans off from the
high ground. The Japanese soldiers also used the caves as
foxholes and living spaces. They turned him into hospitals. That's
(12:20):
where the teenage nurses in the himiurikorps were sent to work.
So civilians were often indistinguishable from the enemy. Bob learned
that on his very first day in Okinawa. In fact,
the first war casualty he saw was a civilian.
Speaker 2 (12:36):
We had a Japanese person run across in front of us,
and of course we were all trigger happy, and the
platoon leader ordered him shot, although he wasn't threatening us
at that point. I checked the guy and he didn't
have a soldier uniform on.
Speaker 1 (12:54):
The American who killed him was a rifleman named Clyde Petty, who,
by total coincidence, would also die just hours later. Bob
saw it happen and tried to save him.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
And I went to Petty's support, and he was and
I left lunge. I'm out there working on this guy.
And as soon as I got him that I knew
I was in trouble. I just scared the hell out
of me, really, and I looked up and I could
look into a twenty five caliber Japanese Bold Action rifle.
(13:26):
I was close enough to see that he was pointing
that thing right at me.
Speaker 1 (13:31):
Bob was in the crosshairs, but somehow he was still
able to retreat to safety. He couldn't figure out what
kept the sniper from shooting at him.
Speaker 2 (13:40):
We found out later that before we got to them,
a woman came out of that same cave and picked
up a Japanese soldier that we'd shot and pulled him
back in and while the woman came out, we didn't
fire on her because she was giving medical attention to him.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
It seemed like the two sides had some kind of understanding.
The US soldiers didn't shoot the female medic who emerged
from the cave, who was most likely of the girls
from the Himayuri Nursing Corps, and the Japanese snipers didn't
shoot at Bob For at least a moment on that
first day of fighting, the teenaged medics on both sides
of the conflict must have felt safe, maybe still full
(14:23):
of that youthful exuberance and hope. But that was just
the first day, and both the Japanese command and the
Allies had already decided everyone on the island was expendable.
(14:50):
May nineteen forty five, the Battle of Okinawa had been
going on for a month. It was proceeding exactly as
the Japanese had planned, a war of attrition, with casualties
ticking up on both sides and a resolution desperately out
of reach.
Speaker 3 (15:07):
Campaign to win Okinawa soon developed into a desperate and
prolonged struggle. And you were both caves and hidden pill boxes, Honeycomb,
the island ridges, the Yanks cannot advance until every cave
is filed and every pill box smashed.
Speaker 1 (15:23):
It was a crushing, demoralizing battle, constant bombardment from artillery
and mortars, the smell of death everywhere. Thousands of bodies
American military, Japanese soldiers, local civilians lay where they had fallen.
Speaker 2 (15:38):
You have to be almost walking over them because there's
so many of them that are dead.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
And the Americans had to grapple with the grim realization
that Okinawan families and children were being caught in the crossfire.
Bob remembers how hard it was to differentiate between the
enemy and the terrified, starving civilians.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
If somebody comes out and hungry, they fed them. If
they come out and they needed medically, we wouldn't usually
fire on anybody unless they fired on us first. I mean,
if they had a weapon that was even pointed vaguely
toward us, so they got it. But if they weren't firing,
then we didn't.
Speaker 1 (16:16):
Bob's days were nothing like the wild adventure that he'd
envision back home in Menlo. It was just a long,
rainy slog, forcing the men in his company to take
their malaria medicine, which everyone hated eating beans out of
a can. But he felt like his marines were watching
out for him, which of course they were. He might
(16:37):
have only been eighteen, but he was the first line
of medical care on the battlefield.
Speaker 2 (16:42):
We knew how expendable we were, and everybody kept their
cool and they kept fighting, and they just did a
beautiful job of keeping us protected to.
Speaker 1 (16:53):
Thirty two days into the invasion, on the day that
changed the course of Bob Bush's life, it became clear
that really no one was safe.
Speaker 2 (17:04):
The morning of May second, nineteen forty five, it was
a typical morning of fighting on Okinawa. Our patoon leader,
Lieutenant James Roach, elected to make the statement that he
would take a squad of men because our mission that
day was to take a certain hill by eight thirty
in the morning. Well, my feeling was he should have
(17:26):
taken the whole team down or to fight that hill,
rather than take one squad of nineteen men out on
a hill and do the things that he did. But
that was his decision. So that left two thirds of
our people up on the ridge looking so they could
see everything that was going on. I was like a theater,
and we set up our machine guns up on the
(17:47):
hill and He went down with his nineteen men down
through the ravine and got to the base of the hill,
and all hill broke loose.
Speaker 1 (17:56):
The nineteen men, with Jim Roach at the lead, were
immediately surrounded by Japanese troops. They were massively outnumbered. Bob
was up in the ridge watching it all happen.
Speaker 2 (18:07):
Where the hell they came from? Nobody. But in the meantime,
Jim Roach got hit and the platoon sergeant said, well,
Roach is hit out there. What are you thinking. Well,
the rules of the road where the Navy coremans are
that if you're going to threaten your own life to
go out and get him, you're better off to reserve
(18:28):
that because you got fifty seven war men to take
care of. And I never adhered too much to that,
but that was the rule, that was the teaching.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
Bob had to make a split second decision. Should he
put his own life in danger to go to Roach
down in the ravine. He wasn't supposed to risk everything
for one person, but he was sure Roach was alive,
maybe not for much longer.
Speaker 2 (18:52):
So I said, I can get out there to him.
I ran across the field rapidly and I got to
him in a foxhole in a shell hole. I took
a can of albumum, which is a blood plasma, because
his eyes were dilating and he was slipping away. I said, Jim,
you're in good shape. Can see that. We're going to
fix you right up, and we're going to get you
out of here. So I got him going with a IV.
(19:14):
And then I looked up on the hill and not
thirty feet away I saw a Japanese head, a superior
private with a helmet.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
Bob was holding the blood plasma high up with one
hand so that it would flow into the IV. With
his other hand, he started grasping for Roach's rifle, all
the while refusing to let that can of plasma drop.
Speaker 2 (19:38):
I was feeling for his carbing, because I know my
forty five that's in my shoulder rolls to you. It
won't work too well when you're trying to get a target.
Speaker 1 (19:48):
The enemy's soldier was taking aim, but Bob grabbed the
rifle with one hand, raised it and pulled off the
first shot, still holding the plasma, still tending to Roach.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
And then another head came up.
Speaker 1 (20:03):
Bob swung the gun around and fired again.
Speaker 2 (20:07):
Another head. I don't know what I was thinking. About,
but I was thinking one thing that if they're going
to take me, by God, they're going to pay the bill.
By that time, I had Jim Roach kind of coming around.
He had a bad shoulder injury, and if we put
compresses on it, and I did, I got him kind
of going in a manner that we could get him
(20:28):
off the battlefield.
Speaker 1 (20:30):
The Marines brought Jim Roach up to safety, but Bob
was still stuck down in the ravine, and those shots
had drawn more attention.
Speaker 2 (20:39):
The Japanese looked down and saw me there, and they
threw hand grenade down. As soon as that came down,
I threw my arm up like that and it protected
my left eye, but I lost my right eye, and
he hit me with three hand grenades.
Speaker 1 (20:55):
Three grenades one would have been enough to kill him,
but he was unbelievably lucky. Yes, he had shoppnel in
a lung and an arm. He lost an eye, but
I probably Bob was alive. In fact, he attempted to
walk back up the ridge to the battelaid station by himself.
He refused medical treatment until he was sure that Roach
(21:16):
had been safely evacuated. Finally Bob collapsed. He saved Jim
Roach's life. With the plasma in one hand and a
rifle in the other, he had made a split second
decision that was remarkable in its bravery. He was eighteen
years old. Bob Bush's grand teenage adventure hadn't quite turned
(21:37):
out the way he'd hoped, but war rarely does.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
I said, will you gotta get me patched up? I
got to get home, and then I was thinking of home.
Speaker 1 (21:47):
He was still a kid. He wanted to go home,
and now he could. When Bob Bush joined up, he
thought about war the way he would have thought about
a football game, two sides, one winner. I can imagine
that the teenagers serving on the other side envisioned it
in the same unambiguous way. But the young medics of
the Himiuri Corps were facing a sa situation that was
(22:10):
even more dire. Trapped in the caves with little training
and even fewer medical supplies, unable to keep the Japanese
soldiers and their fellow okinawan's from dying. In the book
Japan at War and Earal History by Haruko Taya Cook
and Theodore Cook, the authors interviewed Miagi kuk Kuko, one
(22:30):
of the Hymnayuri girls. She was sixteen when the Battle
of Okinawa began. She remembers it this way quote, Wounded
soldiers were being carried into the caves in large numbers.
Some didn't have faces, some didn't have limbs. At first,
we were so scared that we wept. Soon we stopped
outside was a rain of bullets from morning tonight. There
(22:54):
was no time for sobbing or lamentation. Miyagi and Bob
shared something important, a belief in a cause and a
hope that they could save lives. They both had that
optimism of youth save a life in an extraordinary heroic way.
Then he got to go home. Miyagi wasn't so lucky.
(23:16):
Her home was the battlefield. She would have to be
there until the bitter end. The Battle of Okinawa lasted
a total of eighty two days. Ultimately, the Allies were victorious.
Many Japanese soldiers who survived the battle committed suicide instead
(23:37):
of being captured, and civilians did the same thing. They'd
been convinced that the Americans would treat them barbarically. Miyagi survived. Later,
she remembered, quote, We'd been taught and firmly believed that
we Okinawans must never fall into the hands of the enemy.
I could think of the Americans only as devils and demons.
(24:00):
The Japanese army gave the Himiyuri girls grenades and told
them to use them on themselves. Of the roughly two
thousand high school students who were drafted into service, only
nine hundred and fifty survived. Miagi was one of the
lucky ones. Almost a quarter of a million people died
(24:21):
at Okinawa. Fourteen thousand of those were American troops and
roughly one hundred and fifty thousand were Okinawan civilians, a
third of the island's population.
Speaker 2 (24:34):
That's a hell of a lot of people to die
and more than both atomic bones.
Speaker 1 (24:40):
In fact, the enormous casualties and the brutal fighting during
the Battle of Okinawa directly influenced the American decision to
use atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Harry Choon was
afraid that an invasion of the Home Islands would look
like quote Okinawa from one end of Japan to the other.
(25:02):
Bob Bush made the most consequential decision of his life
to join the service when he was a teenager. In
an optimistic leap of faith way you do things when
you're that age. He and his friend from the football
team couldn't wait to get out there and serve. He
had no idea what he was getting into, of course,
how could he. Being that young is both a blessing
(25:24):
and a curse. You have this idealistic notion of what
the world can be, you go out and fight for it,
and then it colors your life going forward. It shows
you what is possible, and it shows you what can
be lost.
Speaker 2 (25:40):
Two guys on the football team up there, that Willipaul
Valley decided, well, we better go help them, and that's
what we did. And I was very happy to have
the opportunity of doing that. I don't know that I'd
do it again, but I'm happy that I did for
one time.
Speaker 1 (25:56):
Anyway, Bob spent time in a military hospital, but he
(26:22):
wanted to get back to Menlo as quickly as he could.
He returned in the summer of forty five, and that
fall he went back to high school. He was anxious
to restart his old life. He even tried to play
football again with his glass eye and his chest wound.
Speaker 2 (26:39):
I said, coach, and I can still play, and I'd
like to get suited up, and so he said, Okay.
Speaker 1 (26:46):
One Saturday morning, he was on his way to practice
when the war encroached again in a different way.
Speaker 2 (26:53):
I was carrying my football shoes out. The phone rang
from my home and I answered it and it was Forestal,
Secretary of the Navy.
Speaker 1 (27:02):
James Forrestal was calling to tell him he'd won the
Medal of Honor. President Harry Truman was going to get
him the award at the White House. He'd get to
travel all the way cross country from Washington State to Washington,
d C.
Speaker 2 (27:17):
Yeah, so this was a trip for your lifetime when
you live in a little town of Washington, d c.
As about four across the country as you can get.
Speaker 1 (27:27):
His first thought was that he'd bring his mother to
the ceremony. His mom had a different idea. Bob's girlfriend, Wanda,
had waited for him when he was overseas and they
planned to get married after he graduated. Bob's mother made
a suggestion, why not get married now and take Wanda
to Washington as a honeymoon, and so he did. The
(27:50):
Middle of Honor service took place the day after Bob's
nineteenth birthday.
Speaker 2 (27:55):
Took one year, six months and twenty two days from
my entire military service, and I was in the service,
out of the service, home, married, back in school, and
I was still nineteen.
Speaker 1 (28:11):
The first days of adulthood. His life was just beginning.
But what he'd experienced in Okinawa had shaped him. He
knew now how arbitrarily cruel the world could be, and
he knew how lucky he had been for one thing,
he'd survived, unlike so many young men, including that high
school friend who had also hoped to marry Wanda.
Speaker 2 (28:33):
I have a very close friend. He was a competitor
to my wife. In fact, my wife had two boyfriends
and he was one of them, and I was the other.
And he was killed on me with GiMA.
Speaker 1 (28:44):
Bob knew that it could just as easily have been
him dying on the shores of some foreign island, So
he honored his missing friend, his romantic rival.
Speaker 2 (28:54):
I have decorated his grave for fifty years. I feel
badly about it, but I know what wore a cost.
Speaker 1 (29:02):
That to me is the crucial thing. Two kids with
the same hopes a split second bullet, and everything breaks
differently for each of them. Life snuffed out for one
fundamentally altered for the other. Bob knew the costs of
war because he saw soldiers and civilians, men and women
and children pay the price. He saw those things when
(29:25):
he was barely an adult himself. Bob Bush, the guy
whose mom wasn't quite sure he was smart enough to
get to high school, bought a lumberyard with a friend
and turned it into a multi million dollar business. He
went on to lead the Congressional Medal of Honor Society.
(29:48):
He was featured in Tom Brokaw's book The Greatest Generation.
He went back to Okinawa not just to pay tribute
to his fallen comrades, but also to the civilians who
gave their lives because they weren't given any other choice.
Speaker 2 (30:03):
I've been out there four or five times since the
war that I took my whole family, fifteen of them
back there.
Speaker 1 (30:12):
The surviving Himiyuri girls, including Miyagi, built a museum to
memorialize what they had suffered through in the war. Not
letting the world forget was part of how they made
sense of what happened to them when they were so young.
Bob also built his life on the foundations of his
war experience. A lot of his fellow servicemen that greatest
(30:33):
generation came home determined to work hard, be successful. Clearly
Bob did too, but he would tell you that the
most consequential thing he did in the wake of his
service was something more emotional, more personal. The fatherless Ruddless
boy was determined to be a father. Bob and Wanda
(30:56):
went on to have four children, and Bob believed that
it would never have been possible if he hadn't gone
to war.
Speaker 2 (31:03):
What I learned in the service, but both an Avian wrinklers.
I learned a value of a family and to be
able to come home every night to a family and
watch him grow up wonderful and believe me, I felt
that that wouldn't be possible had I not served, because
I don't think I'd have been disciplined enough to know
(31:25):
what the hell I was doing.
Speaker 1 (31:28):
I can understand why it must have felt so wonderful
to him. Kids are inherently optimistic, so unjaded, just like
Bob had been back at Willepa Valley High waiting for
the moment he'd be old enough to go on his adventure,
to go and fight, totally unaware of what lay ahead.
Bob lived through the brutality of Okinawa so he could
(31:51):
look into the hopeful faces of his own children and say,
the future is yours, This is your inheritance. I fought
for this better world. Let me give it to you.
(32:17):
Medal of Honor. Stories of Courage is written by Meredith
Rollins and produced by Meredith Rollins, Constanza Galardo, and Izzy Carter.
The show is edited by Ben Nadafh Haffrey, Sound design
and additional music by Jake Gorski, recording engineering by Nina Lawrence,
fact checking by Arthur Gompert's, original music by Eric Phillips.
(32:40):
If you want to learn more about our Medal of
Honor recipients, follow us on Instagram and Twitter. We'll be
sharing photos and videos of the heroes featured on the show.
We'd also love to hear from you dm us with
a story about a courageous veteran in your life. If
you don't know a veteran, we would love to hear
a story of how courage was contagious in your own life.
(33:02):
You can find us at Pushkin Bonds. I'm your host,
Malcolm Baba
Bushkin picture of Winter's Day in nineteen forty one. At
Willapa Valley High School, a pale stone building in the
little town of Menlo, nestled in the southwestern corner of
Washington State, Excitement was running high in the classrooms, more
(00:36):
than the usual amount of chatter. Was a Monday in December,
December eighth, to be exact, the day after Pearl Harbor,
there was a lot to talk about. The atmosphere was
thick with anticipation and fear. As the teachers urged the
students to settle down, a voice came across the PA system.
It was the school superintendent. The whole building leaned in
(00:58):
to hear him speak. It's official. He told them, We're
going to war. Robert Eugene Bush, a ninth grader with
a thick shock of dark hair at a somewhat devilish smile,
listened intently. He was too young to fight, just fifteen
years old, living at home with his mom and sister.
But in the months that followed he watched as friend
(01:20):
after friend left Willipa Valley to serve, and he mourned
with the rest of the little community when they got
the news that some of those teenage soldiers would never return.
So the moment Bob turned seventeen, the age when you
could enlist with parental permission, he joined the military. He
and another football player both signed up for the Navy Reserves.
(01:43):
He would be a medical specialist, a corman. Like so
many of the characters we'd met in this series, he
wanted to do something that would save lives, but he
had no real sense of what it was actually like
to be a corman in combat. He was a teenager,
caught up in the patriotic spirit, full of energy. He
made an impulsive decision that would change the shape of
(02:05):
his life, and just a handful of months later, Bob
would make another split second decision, one that would forever
change someone else's life too, him Malcolm Glawell. This is
Medal of Honor Stories of Courage. The Medal of Honor
is the highest military decoration in the United States, awarded
(02:25):
for gallantry and bravery in combat the risk of life,
above and beyond the call of duty. Each candidate must
be approved all the way up the chain of command,
from the supervisory officer in the field to the White House.
This show is about those heroes, what they did, what
it meant and what their stories tell us about the
(02:46):
nature of courage and sacrifice. Bob Bush would leave that
little town of Menlo, Washington, and by the age of eighteen,
he would find himself at the Battle of Okinawa, the
bloodiest and fiercest battlefield of the Pacific Theater. His story
is about bravery and heroism, but it's also the story
of a kid, one of the youngest recipisdiance of the
(03:10):
Medal of Honor. He wasn't the only kid at that battle,
and in this episode, I want to think about that,
what it means to send someone so young after fight,
How they forged lives for themselves after that service, how
it shaped them, what they learned. In a way, this
is a story about inheritance. Herbert Hoover famously said, older
(03:31):
men declare war, but it is youth that must fight
and die, And it is youth who must inherit the tribulation,
the sorrow, and the triumphs that are the aftermath of war.
How do we reconcile those things. To get a sense
(03:54):
of why Bob Bush went to war as young as
he did, you have to know a little bit about
his family situation. He was brought up by a tough
and hard working Irish Catholic mom.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
I was raised by my mother, a single parent who
was a registered nurse, and during the course of my upbringing,
my sister and I lived in the hospital that she
ran in a small lumbering town.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
He watched his mother tend to patience and take care
of her family as best she could. But Bob to
hear him tell, it was a handful.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
I had an unruly life, you might say, because of
the lack of a father, but that put a little
chip on my shoulder.
Speaker 1 (04:36):
He played football for the team at his tiny high school, Willipa,
only had about twenty five kids per grade. He had
a girlfriend, an adorable blonde named Wanda spoot Well. Wanda
had two boyfriends, both vining to go steady with her.
He kept Bob on his toes. But humming underneath all
of these small town teenage goings on was the war.
(04:58):
It was happening thousands of miles away, but it felt
personal to Bob. He knew all those friends and teammates
who were going off to fight.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
I lived in the community that had sixty seven young
man killed in World War Two, and the total population
was less than ten thousand and always young men. They
came from my schools. The full back on our football
team died on the Bataan death Marks.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
As his seventeenth birthday approached, he started thinking about getting
out there with them. He would have to ask his
mother's permission to enlist that young but his mom, as
I mentioned, was a no nonsense lady.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
I was in the third year of high school and
my mother said, Bobby, you're not the smartest kid in
the class. And I kind of chuckled, so I said, well,
maybe I'll go in the service. Her feeling was that
if I wanted to go, that was fine, and my
feeling was that we were in a war, so I
(05:58):
could go out there and I could make it a
little difference.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
I can imagine his mother staring into the deep set
eyes of her only son, thinking, maybe this will be
the thing that gives him responsible ability structure. She must
have been filled with equal parts hope and terror. Wouldn't
any parent feel that way. Bob certainly wasn't worried. He
was a teenage boy. They feel invincible, blindly optimistic. He
(06:23):
was running on adrenaline and a testosterone.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
I just thinking about this would be an adventure. Of
course you're looking for fun. Seventeen.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
In the late fall of nineteen forty three, Bob and
a friend from his football team went to enlist together.
They both chose the Naval Reserves.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
The Navy was always my service of choice, and also
I thought, well, if I go on the Navy, I
can sleep in clean sheets every night. Well it didn't
work out that way, but that was my plan. And
then by living in the hospital and having jobs to
do in hospital, and decided that the Medical Corps might
be for me.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
His medical training with the Navy Hospital Corps lasted less
than a year before he was sent to Camp Pendleton
in California to join a Marine battalion as their corman.
There he learned to handle weapons.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
When you're talking about rising guns and Thompson submachine guns
and air cool machine guns and water cool machine guns
and drowning automatic rifles and him one rifles, I mean,
these are big stuff for a kid seventeen years old.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
You can still hear it in his voice, the excitement
of a kid with a bunch of fun new toys.
But this training also drove home the point that he
wouldn't just be saving lives. He might be taking them too.
That became all the more clear a few months after
his eighteenth birthday, when he got on a ship with
the rest of his battalion. They were headed to Okinawa, Japan.
(07:57):
Okinawa is one of the Ryuk Islands, located southwest of
the Japanese mainland. The Allies saw it as a lynchpin
to the war in the Pacific, which by nineteen forty
five had been dragging on for nearly four years. Okinawa
would give the Allies an air base close enough to
bomb the Japanese home islands, plus an ideal place to
(08:18):
station the Allied naval fleet, and possibly even plan and
invasion of the Japanese homeland.
Speaker 3 (08:25):
Okinawa will provide an offensive base against Formosa, the China coast,
or Japan itself, only three hundred and sixty five miles away.
Speaker 1 (08:33):
Okinawa hadn't always been a part of the Japanese Empire.
It was only an ex in the late nineteenth century.
Many Japanese considered the people of Okinawa to be inferior,
second class citizens of the Empire. Once the war began,
the Okinawans had been pressured to prove their worthiness to
the Japanese cause, so they had been pressed into service.
(08:55):
Adult men joined the Japanese Army or the local defense Corps.
Some two thousand high school students were drafted to The
boys went into the Blood and Iron Student Corps and
were ready to fight. The girls became nurses members of
the Himiurikorps. Some were as young as fifteen. In other
battles of the Pacific, civilians weren't part of the action.
(09:17):
Gauadalcanal had been a military base, and the civilian population
on Iwojima had been evacuated before that battle began, But
in the spring of nineteen forty five, almost five hundred
thousand civilians were living on Okinawa. They would be in
the middle of whatever conflict was to come. On April first,
(09:41):
Easter Sunday. It came that morning. Bob Bush was on
the first wave of transport boats. Everyone in the American
fleet knew what this kind of invasion looked like. Normandy
had happened the previous summer, Ewojima had just been the
month before. In both cases, the Allies had faced an
enemy with dug in defenses. The Americans had been mowed
(10:03):
down just as quickly as they landed for Okinawa. The
command expected and eighty percent casualty rate at minimum.
Speaker 2 (10:13):
The night before, we were told that the entire first division,
the first Marine Division, was expendable. That means that we're
going to lose everybody, and that really didn't make for
a happy camper.
Speaker 1 (10:27):
As the sun rose on that Easter morning, Bob and
the rest of his company and marines looked out on
what would be the largest amphibious assault ever mounted in
the Pacific. There were fifteen hundred ships and half a
million men. About sixty thousand would go ashore on that
first day.
Speaker 2 (10:45):
As far as you could see, there were ships. And
I gave you a certain amount of confidence when you
could see this amount of transports and aircraft carriers and
battleships and unit cruisers and just innumerable amount of them.
And so we thought, well, there's going to be a
piece of cake.
Speaker 1 (11:03):
The troop transports skipped across the surf towards the island.
As land got closer, Bob was filled with dread.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
I noticed that our boat was a boat length in
front of everybody else, and I told the squad leader
stand next to me, I said, why don't you tell
him to slow this thing down. We don't need to
be the first one there.
Speaker 1 (11:25):
But when the men landed on the island, there was
weirdly nothing, no barrage of fire, no hailstorm of motor shells.
Speaker 2 (11:35):
There wasn't a shot fire on the beach.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
It was eerily quiet. It seemed so easy, But that
peaceful landing hit a horrible secret.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
The Japanese had elected to let us on board and
then nail us after we got there.
Speaker 1 (11:52):
They would wait and let the Allied forces work their
way inland.
Speaker 2 (11:56):
There.
Speaker 1 (11:56):
The terrain gave the Japanese troops an extraordinary advantage. The
island was covered in ridge lines, and each one of
those was poked with concrete tombs, bunkers, and dozens of
volcanic caves. They could pick the Americans off from the
high ground. The Japanese soldiers also used the caves as
foxholes and living spaces. They turned him into hospitals. That's
(12:20):
where the teenage nurses in the himiurikorps were sent to work.
So civilians were often indistinguishable from the enemy. Bob learned
that on his very first day in Okinawa. In fact,
the first war casualty he saw was a civilian.
Speaker 2 (12:36):
We had a Japanese person run across in front of us,
and of course we were all trigger happy, and the
platoon leader ordered him shot, although he wasn't threatening us
at that point. I checked the guy and he didn't
have a soldier uniform on.
Speaker 1 (12:54):
The American who killed him was a rifleman named Clyde Petty, who,
by total coincidence, would also die just hours later. Bob
saw it happen and tried to save him.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
And I went to Petty's support, and he was and
I left lunge. I'm out there working on this guy.
And as soon as I got him that I knew
I was in trouble. I just scared the hell out
of me, really, and I looked up and I could
look into a twenty five caliber Japanese Bold Action rifle.
(13:26):
I was close enough to see that he was pointing
that thing right at me.
Speaker 1 (13:31):
Bob was in the crosshairs, but somehow he was still
able to retreat to safety. He couldn't figure out what
kept the sniper from shooting at him.
Speaker 2 (13:40):
We found out later that before we got to them,
a woman came out of that same cave and picked
up a Japanese soldier that we'd shot and pulled him
back in and while the woman came out, we didn't
fire on her because she was giving medical attention to him.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
It seemed like the two sides had some kind of understanding.
The US soldiers didn't shoot the female medic who emerged
from the cave, who was most likely of the girls
from the Himayuri Nursing Corps, and the Japanese snipers didn't
shoot at Bob For at least a moment on that
first day of fighting, the teenaged medics on both sides
of the conflict must have felt safe, maybe still full
(14:23):
of that youthful exuberance and hope. But that was just
the first day, and both the Japanese command and the
Allies had already decided everyone on the island was expendable.
(14:50):
May nineteen forty five, the Battle of Okinawa had been
going on for a month. It was proceeding exactly as
the Japanese had planned, a war of attrition, with casualties
ticking up on both sides and a resolution desperately out
of reach.
Speaker 3 (15:07):
Campaign to win Okinawa soon developed into a desperate and
prolonged struggle. And you were both caves and hidden pill boxes, Honeycomb,
the island ridges, the Yanks cannot advance until every cave
is filed and every pill box smashed.
Speaker 1 (15:23):
It was a crushing, demoralizing battle, constant bombardment from artillery
and mortars, the smell of death everywhere. Thousands of bodies
American military, Japanese soldiers, local civilians lay where they had fallen.
Speaker 2 (15:38):
You have to be almost walking over them because there's
so many of them that are dead.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
And the Americans had to grapple with the grim realization
that Okinawan families and children were being caught in the crossfire.
Bob remembers how hard it was to differentiate between the
enemy and the terrified, starving civilians.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
If somebody comes out and hungry, they fed them. If
they come out and they needed medically, we wouldn't usually
fire on anybody unless they fired on us first. I mean,
if they had a weapon that was even pointed vaguely
toward us, so they got it. But if they weren't firing,
then we didn't.
Speaker 1 (16:16):
Bob's days were nothing like the wild adventure that he'd
envision back home in Menlo. It was just a long,
rainy slog, forcing the men in his company to take
their malaria medicine, which everyone hated eating beans out of
a can. But he felt like his marines were watching
out for him, which of course they were. He might
(16:37):
have only been eighteen, but he was the first line
of medical care on the battlefield.
Speaker 2 (16:42):
We knew how expendable we were, and everybody kept their
cool and they kept fighting, and they just did a
beautiful job of keeping us protected to.
Speaker 1 (16:53):
Thirty two days into the invasion, on the day that
changed the course of Bob Bush's life, it became clear
that really no one was safe.
Speaker 2 (17:04):
The morning of May second, nineteen forty five, it was
a typical morning of fighting on Okinawa. Our patoon leader,
Lieutenant James Roach, elected to make the statement that he
would take a squad of men because our mission that
day was to take a certain hill by eight thirty
in the morning. Well, my feeling was he should have
(17:26):
taken the whole team down or to fight that hill,
rather than take one squad of nineteen men out on
a hill and do the things that he did. But
that was his decision. So that left two thirds of
our people up on the ridge looking so they could
see everything that was going on. I was like a theater,
and we set up our machine guns up on the
(17:47):
hill and He went down with his nineteen men down
through the ravine and got to the base of the hill,
and all hill broke loose.
Speaker 1 (17:56):
The nineteen men, with Jim Roach at the lead, were
immediately surrounded by Japanese troops. They were massively outnumbered. Bob
was up in the ridge watching it all happen.
Speaker 2 (18:07):
Where the hell they came from? Nobody. But in the meantime,
Jim Roach got hit and the platoon sergeant said, well,
Roach is hit out there. What are you thinking. Well,
the rules of the road where the Navy coremans are
that if you're going to threaten your own life to
go out and get him, you're better off to reserve
(18:28):
that because you got fifty seven war men to take
care of. And I never adhered too much to that,
but that was the rule, that was the teaching.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
Bob had to make a split second decision. Should he
put his own life in danger to go to Roach
down in the ravine. He wasn't supposed to risk everything
for one person, but he was sure Roach was alive,
maybe not for much longer.
Speaker 2 (18:52):
So I said, I can get out there to him.
I ran across the field rapidly and I got to
him in a foxhole in a shell hole. I took
a can of albumum, which is a blood plasma, because
his eyes were dilating and he was slipping away. I said, Jim,
you're in good shape. Can see that. We're going to
fix you right up, and we're going to get you
out of here. So I got him going with a IV.
(19:14):
And then I looked up on the hill and not
thirty feet away I saw a Japanese head, a superior
private with a helmet.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
Bob was holding the blood plasma high up with one
hand so that it would flow into the IV. With
his other hand, he started grasping for Roach's rifle, all
the while refusing to let that can of plasma drop.
Speaker 2 (19:38):
I was feeling for his carbing, because I know my
forty five that's in my shoulder rolls to you. It
won't work too well when you're trying to get a target.
Speaker 1 (19:48):
The enemy's soldier was taking aim, but Bob grabbed the
rifle with one hand, raised it and pulled off the
first shot, still holding the plasma, still tending to Roach.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
And then another head came up.
Speaker 1 (20:03):
Bob swung the gun around and fired again.
Speaker 2 (20:07):
Another head. I don't know what I was thinking. About,
but I was thinking one thing that if they're going
to take me, by God, they're going to pay the bill.
By that time, I had Jim Roach kind of coming around.
He had a bad shoulder injury, and if we put
compresses on it, and I did, I got him kind
of going in a manner that we could get him
(20:28):
off the battlefield.
Speaker 1 (20:30):
The Marines brought Jim Roach up to safety, but Bob
was still stuck down in the ravine, and those shots
had drawn more attention.
Speaker 2 (20:39):
The Japanese looked down and saw me there, and they
threw hand grenade down. As soon as that came down,
I threw my arm up like that and it protected
my left eye, but I lost my right eye, and
he hit me with three hand grenades.
Speaker 1 (20:55):
Three grenades one would have been enough to kill him,
but he was unbelievably lucky. Yes, he had shoppnel in
a lung and an arm. He lost an eye, but
I probably Bob was alive. In fact, he attempted to
walk back up the ridge to the battelaid station by himself.
He refused medical treatment until he was sure that Roach
(21:16):
had been safely evacuated. Finally Bob collapsed. He saved Jim
Roach's life. With the plasma in one hand and a
rifle in the other, he had made a split second
decision that was remarkable in its bravery. He was eighteen
years old. Bob Bush's grand teenage adventure hadn't quite turned
(21:37):
out the way he'd hoped, but war rarely does.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
I said, will you gotta get me patched up? I
got to get home, and then I was thinking of home.
Speaker 1 (21:47):
He was still a kid. He wanted to go home,
and now he could. When Bob Bush joined up, he
thought about war the way he would have thought about
a football game, two sides, one winner. I can imagine
that the teenagers serving on the other side envisioned it
in the same unambiguous way. But the young medics of
the Himiuri Corps were facing a sa situation that was
(22:10):
even more dire. Trapped in the caves with little training
and even fewer medical supplies, unable to keep the Japanese
soldiers and their fellow okinawan's from dying. In the book
Japan at War and Earal History by Haruko Taya Cook
and Theodore Cook, the authors interviewed Miagi kuk Kuko, one
(22:30):
of the Hymnayuri girls. She was sixteen when the Battle
of Okinawa began. She remembers it this way quote, Wounded
soldiers were being carried into the caves in large numbers.
Some didn't have faces, some didn't have limbs. At first,
we were so scared that we wept. Soon we stopped
outside was a rain of bullets from morning tonight. There
(22:54):
was no time for sobbing or lamentation. Miyagi and Bob
shared something important, a belief in a cause and a
hope that they could save lives. They both had that
optimism of youth save a life in an extraordinary heroic way.
Then he got to go home. Miyagi wasn't so lucky.
(23:16):
Her home was the battlefield. She would have to be
there until the bitter end. The Battle of Okinawa lasted
a total of eighty two days. Ultimately, the Allies were victorious.
Many Japanese soldiers who survived the battle committed suicide instead
(23:37):
of being captured, and civilians did the same thing. They'd
been convinced that the Americans would treat them barbarically. Miyagi survived. Later,
she remembered, quote, We'd been taught and firmly believed that
we Okinawans must never fall into the hands of the enemy.
I could think of the Americans only as devils and demons.
(24:00):
The Japanese army gave the Himiyuri girls grenades and told
them to use them on themselves. Of the roughly two
thousand high school students who were drafted into service, only
nine hundred and fifty survived. Miagi was one of the
lucky ones. Almost a quarter of a million people died
(24:21):
at Okinawa. Fourteen thousand of those were American troops and
roughly one hundred and fifty thousand were Okinawan civilians, a
third of the island's population.
Speaker 2 (24:34):
That's a hell of a lot of people to die
and more than both atomic bones.
Speaker 1 (24:40):
In fact, the enormous casualties and the brutal fighting during
the Battle of Okinawa directly influenced the American decision to
use atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Harry Choon was
afraid that an invasion of the Home Islands would look
like quote Okinawa from one end of Japan to the other.
(25:02):
Bob Bush made the most consequential decision of his life
to join the service when he was a teenager. In
an optimistic leap of faith way you do things when
you're that age. He and his friend from the football
team couldn't wait to get out there and serve. He
had no idea what he was getting into, of course,
how could he. Being that young is both a blessing
(25:24):
and a curse. You have this idealistic notion of what
the world can be, you go out and fight for it,
and then it colors your life going forward. It shows
you what is possible, and it shows you what can
be lost.
Speaker 2 (25:40):
Two guys on the football team up there, that Willipaul
Valley decided, well, we better go help them, and that's
what we did. And I was very happy to have
the opportunity of doing that. I don't know that I'd
do it again, but I'm happy that I did for
one time.
Speaker 1 (25:56):
Anyway, Bob spent time in a military hospital, but he
(26:22):
wanted to get back to Menlo as quickly as he could.
He returned in the summer of forty five, and that
fall he went back to high school. He was anxious
to restart his old life. He even tried to play
football again with his glass eye and his chest wound.
Speaker 2 (26:39):
I said, coach, and I can still play, and I'd
like to get suited up, and so he said, Okay.
Speaker 1 (26:46):
One Saturday morning, he was on his way to practice
when the war encroached again in a different way.
Speaker 2 (26:53):
I was carrying my football shoes out. The phone rang
from my home and I answered it and it was Forestal,
Secretary of the Navy.
Speaker 1 (27:02):
James Forrestal was calling to tell him he'd won the
Medal of Honor. President Harry Truman was going to get
him the award at the White House. He'd get to
travel all the way cross country from Washington State to Washington,
d C.
Speaker 2 (27:17):
Yeah, so this was a trip for your lifetime when
you live in a little town of Washington, d c.
As about four across the country as you can get.
Speaker 1 (27:27):
His first thought was that he'd bring his mother to
the ceremony. His mom had a different idea. Bob's girlfriend, Wanda,
had waited for him when he was overseas and they
planned to get married after he graduated. Bob's mother made
a suggestion, why not get married now and take Wanda
to Washington as a honeymoon, and so he did. The
(27:50):
Middle of Honor service took place the day after Bob's
nineteenth birthday.
Speaker 2 (27:55):
Took one year, six months and twenty two days from
my entire military service, and I was in the service,
out of the service, home, married, back in school, and
I was still nineteen.
Speaker 1 (28:11):
The first days of adulthood. His life was just beginning.
But what he'd experienced in Okinawa had shaped him. He
knew now how arbitrarily cruel the world could be, and
he knew how lucky he had been for one thing,
he'd survived, unlike so many young men, including that high
school friend who had also hoped to marry Wanda.
Speaker 2 (28:33):
I have a very close friend. He was a competitor
to my wife. In fact, my wife had two boyfriends
and he was one of them, and I was the other.
And he was killed on me with GiMA.
Speaker 1 (28:44):
Bob knew that it could just as easily have been
him dying on the shores of some foreign island, So
he honored his missing friend, his romantic rival.
Speaker 2 (28:54):
I have decorated his grave for fifty years. I feel
badly about it, but I know what wore a cost.
Speaker 1 (29:02):
That to me is the crucial thing. Two kids with
the same hopes a split second bullet, and everything breaks
differently for each of them. Life snuffed out for one
fundamentally altered for the other. Bob knew the costs of
war because he saw soldiers and civilians, men and women
and children pay the price. He saw those things when
(29:25):
he was barely an adult himself. Bob Bush, the guy
whose mom wasn't quite sure he was smart enough to
get to high school, bought a lumberyard with a friend
and turned it into a multi million dollar business. He
went on to lead the Congressional Medal of Honor Society.
(29:48):
He was featured in Tom Brokaw's book The Greatest Generation.
He went back to Okinawa not just to pay tribute
to his fallen comrades, but also to the civilians who
gave their lives because they weren't given any other choice.
Speaker 2 (30:03):
I've been out there four or five times since the
war that I took my whole family, fifteen of them
back there.
Speaker 1 (30:12):
The surviving Himiyuri girls, including Miyagi, built a museum to
memorialize what they had suffered through in the war. Not
letting the world forget was part of how they made
sense of what happened to them when they were so young.
Bob also built his life on the foundations of his
war experience. A lot of his fellow servicemen that greatest
(30:33):
generation came home determined to work hard, be successful. Clearly
Bob did too, but he would tell you that the
most consequential thing he did in the wake of his
service was something more emotional, more personal. The fatherless Ruddless
boy was determined to be a father. Bob and Wanda
(30:56):
went on to have four children, and Bob believed that
it would never have been possible if he hadn't gone
to war.
Speaker 2 (31:03):
What I learned in the service, but both an Avian wrinklers.
I learned a value of a family and to be
able to come home every night to a family and
watch him grow up wonderful and believe me, I felt
that that wouldn't be possible had I not served, because
I don't think I'd have been disciplined enough to know
(31:25):
what the hell I was doing.
Speaker 1 (31:28):
I can understand why it must have felt so wonderful
to him. Kids are inherently optimistic, so unjaded, just like
Bob had been back at Willepa Valley High waiting for
the moment he'd be old enough to go on his adventure,
to go and fight, totally unaware of what lay ahead.
Bob lived through the brutality of Okinawa so he could
(31:51):
look into the hopeful faces of his own children and say,
the future is yours, This is your inheritance. I fought
for this better world. Let me give it to you.
(32:17):
Medal of Honor. Stories of Courage is written by Meredith
Rollins and produced by Meredith Rollins, Constanza Galardo, and Izzy Carter.
The show is edited by Ben Nadafh Haffrey, Sound design
and additional music by Jake Gorski, recording engineering by Nina Lawrence,
fact checking by Arthur Gompert's, original music by Eric Phillips.
(32:40):
If you want to learn more about our Medal of
Honor recipients, follow us on Instagram and Twitter. We'll be
sharing photos and videos of the heroes featured on the show.
We'd also love to hear from you dm us with
a story about a courageous veteran in your life. If
you don't know a veteran, we would love to hear
a story of how courage was contagious in your own life.
(33:02):
You can find us at Pushkin Bonds. I'm your host,
Malcolm Baba
Host
Malcolm Gladwell
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