June 19, 2025 • 19 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Jay Moore, our regular contributor from Abilene, Texas, shares an emotional story of meeting a real-life World War II hero before seeing Saving Private Ryan in theaters for a second time—and tells the story of their friendship that followed.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is our American Stories, and now it's time for
another story from our friend Jane Moore. Jay is a
retired history teacher from Emilene, Texas who's known for hosting
presentations about his city's history to over nine hundred fellow
citizens that show up for them. And by the way,
if you have someone like jaymore in your neck of
the woods, send him our way, send him to our
(00:31):
American Stories dot com, and send her our way as well.
Today Jay brings us the story of a friendship forged
after the first time he saw one of the most
powerful war films ever made, a friendship that would be
even more powerful than the movie itself. Take it away, Jay, Well.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
Back in the summer of nineteen ninety eight, one Friday night,
my wife lined up a babysitter for our two young
daughters and we met some friends at the Mall Theater.
We wanted to go see the newly released Steven Spielberg
movie Saving Private Ryan. It had rave reviews and I
was looking forward to seeing it. But I'll have to
say I was not ready for that movie. I was
(01:15):
certainly not prepared for the intensity of that long opening scene,
the depiction of the D Day landing was unlike any
movie scene I had ever watched. It was as though
the cameraman himself was one of the soldiers, and in
those jumpy, staccato movements put you right in the middle
of that jarring reality. The camera was in the turmoil.
(01:38):
It wasn't filming like some removed onlooker, and you felt it.
It was hypnotically gripping, Starting with those young guys who
found themselves on board landing craft that was churning and
lurching forward, and that would deliver them to what's going
to either be a life changing or a life ending appointment.
You could feel their breathing, their nerves, that cold trepidation.
(02:04):
You saw their trembling hands, they're vomiting, that look of
a dreadful surrender that was mixed with the determined hope
that they might somehow pass through that onshore crucible that
was drawing ever closer. And then they reached the beach
and the bow ramp drops and some don't live to
(02:24):
make it three feet. The reenactment of the storming of
Omaha Beach was raw. The realism was mesmerizing and even terrifying.
It certainly felt as if I was in the middle
of the chaos, and that helter skelter every which way, disorder,
bullets buzzing and pinging, that flying sand, blood soaked waves,
(02:46):
the gore men destroyed by mortars and just cut down,
And the psychological toll was so well portrayed, that look,
that determined stare, knowing that if you wanted to live,
you had no choice but to make it. Legs run
straight at the death. You had to move, You had
to move, move like most everyone. I found the opening
(03:09):
scene to be not just jarring, but spell binding and draining,
and later I read that men who had actually been
there and others in similar fights said that Spielberg got
it right. So on the way home, I told my wife, well,
now that I know what to expect, I think i'd
like to see that movie again, and she said I
(03:29):
was too intense for her. Once was plenty, but I
couldn't shake it. So on Sunday afternoon, I went back alone.
I bought my ticket, but there was about thirty or
forty minutes before the show started, so to kill the time,
I walked down the mall into one of the bookstores,
where I went over to the history section. That's where
I always gravitate to. In a bookstore, there was a
(03:52):
man standing in the aisle. He was older. I took
him to be about eighty. He was intently looking through
an oversized book, and I could see it was about
World War Two. Since he looked like he was old
enough to have been in the war and friendly look
enough to be interrupted, well, I pointed at the book
and asked him, were you there? He looked at the
(04:14):
cover and said, oh, yeah, I was there. So I
asked did they send you to Europe or the Pacific?
He said Pacific. I asked him what branch he served in.
He told me he had been a marine. I remember
being surprised. I think my mental image of a marine,
even an older one, was different. He was shorter than me,
(04:37):
maybe five eight, but not anymore. He had silver hair,
and it was thinning, but very neatly combed. He had
a friendly face and an easy smile. There was a
ready kindness that came through. He had blue eyes that glistened.
To me, he looked like a grandfather straight out of
Central Casting, A nice, approachable, soft hearted kind of guy,
(05:00):
the kind of granddad who might give his grandson twenty
bucks because he knew it would help. Just by appearance.
He was not at all what I thought of when
I heard the word marine, but he said he had
been in the second Battalion, eighth Marines, second Marine Division.
I asked where he was in the Pacific. He smiled
and said, oh, I got the full tour. Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Saipan,
(05:25):
ended up on Tenian. That's where I got my ticket home.
As a history teacher, I knew a bit about what
those names meant. Mostly I knew that they just weren't cakewalks.
Each one had been a serious fight that cost lots
of Americans their lives, even more Japanese Omaha Beach four
times over. And he told me, with a hint of pride,
(05:47):
that on Tenian he and his platoon had been part
of a group that cleared the area for the airstrip
that would later provide a spot for Theonola Gay to
lift off from and bring an end to that war.
Battle of Guadalcanal was the first serious land defensive by
the United States and World War II. Over twelve hundred
Marines were killed, over twenty eight hundred wounded. More than
(06:10):
a thousand died at Tarawa, at Saipan, thirty four hundred more,
and on the island of Tinian there would be nearly
four hundred marine deaths, and many of those were victims
of fierce, suicidal Japanese forces. Screaming Bonzai long lived the Emperor.
Looking at him in the bookstore, it was just hard
(06:32):
to imagine that such a pleasant, older gentleman, just a
guy in my West Texas hometown, had been there for
all of that, for the bombings and the shootings and
the destroyed lives. It seemed oddly incongruent that he and
I would be standing together in the comfort of a
bookstore on a pleasant Sunday afternoon. Then he surprised me.
(06:53):
He asked me if I wanted to see his ticket
home from the war. I said sure, but I didn't
really understand exactly what he meant. And as he put
the book back on the shelf, I thought maybe he
was going to take out his wallet and unfold some
piece of paper, or maybe a military discharge that he
had kept all of these years. But instead he unbuttoned
the cuff on his left sleeve and he pushed it
(07:14):
up past his elbow. When he turned his arm over,
I saw his ticket home. It was a scar running
from his wrist to the crook of his elbow. He
said that scar had saved him from the bloodiest Pacific
battle of them all, Okinawa. Now we were both looking
at his arm, and I asked the obvious question, how'd
(07:36):
you get that? He said, I got it one night
on Tenian. He then went on to tell me this.
We cleared that airstrip the last week of July of
forty four, and then my platoon moved on up the
island by August. First, we had pushed the Japanese back
to a pretty small area they couldn't get out, so
at night they would come at us in these desperate
(07:57):
bonzaie attacks of the big US Navy ships offshore, which
fire star shells and light up the sky so we
could see what was happening around us and try to
pick them off. I was in a foxhole with another
guy who was a lieutenant named Stacy Davis. He manned
the machine gun. I only had a car being and
it kept misfiring. After a while the rest of the
(08:21):
platoons had fallen back and it was just the two
of us out there. As I listened to his story,
I just shook my head. I said, it all sounds
pretty terrifying. He assured me it was. How old were you?
He told me he was twenty six. He went on
and said, Lieutenant Davis and I were in a foxhole,
(08:41):
both on our knees. We were peering into the dark
and listening, with our senses on high alert, and suddenly,
out of nowhere, a Japanese soldier ran right towards me,
screaming with a wild look. His bayonet was coming straight
at my chest. So I put up my arm and
that thing went in here at my wrist and follow
(09:01):
the bone all the way here to my elbow.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
And you're listening to Jane Moore from Abilene, Texas, telling
the story of his encounter with a World War two
vet at a bookstore on his way to seeing Saving
Private Ryan a second time. I think I've seen that
movie fifty times, and anytime it comes on, well, I'm
gone and I won't come back until it's over because
(09:27):
it's that good. And I learned just a little bit
more about life watching it. Each time, I'm changed, and
the movie seems to change when we come back more
with j Moore, this remarkable story here on our American stories,
(10:09):
and we're back with our American stories and with Jane
Moore's story of his unexpected friendship with a World War
II hero, Joe Brown.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
He stopped talking and again we were both looking at
his arm. So I asked, well, what happened after that?
And he said, well, we fought. He told me that
a lot of folks don't realize that very often the
fighting in World War two came down to a fight
between two guys. With a bit of astonishment, I said, well,
I take it you won your fight. He smiled, and
(10:43):
as he rebuttoned his shirtcuff, he said, yeah, I won.
He then said, you know I have that bayonet. It
was the real ticket home for me. And in the fighting,
with that dead gum thing stuck in my arm, I
managed to bend that middle bayonet. I've got it at
the house. Dang, I'd like to see that, I said.
He told me to come by, told me to call
(11:05):
and I could tell a minute. So about a week
later I did call, and over the phone he said,
how about tomorrow. I rang the doorbell and he and
his wife invited me in. He said he had been
born in nineteen eighteen in Wichita Falls. He was raised
there with two brothers and two sisters. He told me
that after the war he took a job with an
(11:26):
oil field service company. They had lived in Abilene since
nineteen fifty nine, raised a daughter and two sons. He
told me that he and his older brother Marcus, had
been together for much of the war, including on Saipan
and Tenian. They both spent thirty two months overseas. He
told me that he made it home from the war
on a Friday, and he looked at as a wife
(11:47):
and said, and we got married on Monday. After a while,
he asked, well, you want to see my ticket home.
He and I walked down a short hall to a
back bedroom, and there, on top of a dresser, he
had already laid out the things he wanted to show me.
There was a telegram that had been sent to his
mother in nineteen forty four telling her that her son
(12:08):
had been wounded. There were medals and citations, one for
a bronze Star and two for silver stars, citing heroic service,
devotion to duty, conspicuous gallantry. Although wounded, he continued to
lead his men, inspired them by his example, and there
(12:29):
were newspaper clippings. One was from the wichital Daily News
dated October nineteen forty four. It was written after he
and his brother Marcus had returned home. He had told
about the experiences of these two hometown boys. Lieutenant Stacy
Davis had recounted for the Reporter the details of that
night on Tenian Davis said, we were in the same foxhole.
(12:52):
It was pitch dark. One of the Japanese charged our hole.
I fired, but he kept coming. He leapt down, baying
at first, and the fight was on. The article went
on to tell how this kindly grandfather, who was now
standing in front of me as I read, how in
the dark, with a bayonet stuck in his arm and
(13:13):
that had severed an artery and sliced a tendon, how
he grabbed the barrel of that rifle and fought his attacker,
fighting with such strength and adrenaline that the steel bayonet
lodged in his arm was bent at the shank. It
told how he managed to get the upper hand and
how despite his wound, he was able to pull the
bayonet out of his arm and wrestle the weapon away
(13:34):
from the Japanese soldier. After I read the article, he
filled in more of the blanks, telling me that when
the sun finally rose. He led the other walking wounded
down the hill to battalion headquarters. His brother happened to
be there and he told Marcus about the fight. So
Marcus went back to the area found the bayonet laying
on the ground. He brought it back so his little
(13:56):
brother could bring it home. I asked about Marcus. He
told me that in one battle, a bullet struck the
front of Marcus's helmet. It whizzed right across the top
of his head exited the back. He smiled and said
it parted his hair. Doesn't get much closer than that,
he said. Marcus took his gi Bill, enrolled at Texas
A and M to become a veterinarian. Then, in nineteen
(14:19):
forty nine, five days before he was to turn thirty three,
and having survived some of the worst battles of World
War Two, he lost his life in a motorcycle accident.
He told me they named one of their sons for him.
In that back room, I was hearing and seeing some
of the most personal stories in meaningful trophies from the
(14:39):
life of a man that I didn't really know, just
a nice guy I had met in the bookstore at
the mall and struck up a conversation, and there laying
on the dresser was the bayonet the one Marcus retrieved
and brought to him. One just like it was issued
to every Japanese soldier in World War Two, designed to
be help in a scabbard attached to a belt, so
(15:02):
the soldier could either pull it out, use it as
a handheld weapon, or attach it to the end of
his rifle and just run right at you. Of course,
that's how this one had been used, clipped to the
end of a Japanese rifle, and that bayonet had traveled
from Japan to Tenian, across the Pacific, and finding to
the back bedroom of a home in Abilene, Texas, nineteen
(15:25):
forty four to nineteen ninety eight. I asked if I
could pick it up, and he handed it to me.
It was heavy, heavier than I thought it was going
to be. It was about fifteen inches long, had a
single edged blade, had a very menacing point. The metal
tapered and was thickest near the handle and right up
(15:46):
next to the handle. The blade was bent. It was
canted over at about a forty five degree angle, and
staring at it, I asked so with this in your arm.
You grabbed hold of the rifle barrel, and you fought
hard enough, you created enough torque to bend this, he said,
(16:07):
I did. When I finally got that out of my arm,
I managed to turn the rifle around, and I tried
to stab that guy, but it would glance off because
I didn't know I had bent the thing over. But
I managed to use the butt of the gun and
it turned out all right. So you killed him with
his own rifle, he nodded, yests, it seems surreal. A
(16:30):
husband whose wife was now in the kitchen, A proud father,
a grandfather who put photos of the grandkids on the wall,
a guy who mowed his grass and kept his cars
clean and went to church, and who a lifetime earlier
for his country, had killed a man in a bare
handed fight, had won a victory in a world war.
(16:53):
He handed me the bayonet's metal scabbard. On it was
a white sticker that he had put there, and on
the sticker written in black ink, my ticket home. It
was the ticket to the rest of his life. That
day at the bookstore, he pushed up his sleeve and
showed me his scar, a scar he had looked at
every day for fifty four years, a tactile reminder of
(17:16):
a defining day, of a victory, of a ticket home.
Looking at him in the bookstore that day, I just
couldn't get over how ordinary he was. And had he
not been reliving his past thumbing through a book that
piqued my curiosity, had I not asked, were you there, well,
I never would have stood in his back room and
(17:38):
held a bayonet in my hand. At the bookstore, he
and I visited right up until I needed to head
to the theater. I told him I was going to
see Saving Private Ryan. I asked him if he had
seen it. He smiled and said no, I don't guess
I need to. I put out my hand and said, well,
I've enjoyed visiting with you. It's been an Aye. My
(18:00):
name is Jay Moore. He shook my hand. He shook
it firmly, just like you would expect from a marine.
He said, I've enjoyed visiting. Come see me. My name
is Joe Joe Brown. Sitting in the darkened theater, I
(18:21):
saw Tom Hanks and the others moving toward the beach,
but all of it was fake. There was no real blood,
no real injuries, no gore, there was no live ammunition,
there was no actual dying, and no two guys really fighting,
rolling in the sand, sweating and swearing, kicking and clawing, clenching, yelling,
and squeezing, squeezing so hard, hard enough to bend steel.
(18:45):
The movie remained powerful, but nowhere near as much where
I had just met Joe Brown.
Speaker 1 (18:54):
And my goodness, what a story different than watching a movie.
Joe Brown's story in a way j Moore's story. Two.
Here on our American stories
This is our American Stories, and now it's time for
another story from our friend Jane Moore. Jay is a
retired history teacher from Emilene, Texas who's known for hosting
presentations about his city's history to over nine hundred fellow
citizens that show up for them. And by the way,
if you have someone like jaymore in your neck of
the woods, send him our way, send him to our
(00:31):
American Stories dot com, and send her our way as well.
Today Jay brings us the story of a friendship forged
after the first time he saw one of the most
powerful war films ever made, a friendship that would be
even more powerful than the movie itself. Take it away, Jay, Well.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
Back in the summer of nineteen ninety eight, one Friday night,
my wife lined up a babysitter for our two young
daughters and we met some friends at the Mall Theater.
We wanted to go see the newly released Steven Spielberg
movie Saving Private Ryan. It had rave reviews and I
was looking forward to seeing it. But I'll have to
say I was not ready for that movie. I was
(01:15):
certainly not prepared for the intensity of that long opening scene,
the depiction of the D Day landing was unlike any
movie scene I had ever watched. It was as though
the cameraman himself was one of the soldiers, and in
those jumpy, staccato movements put you right in the middle
of that jarring reality. The camera was in the turmoil.
(01:38):
It wasn't filming like some removed onlooker, and you felt it.
It was hypnotically gripping, Starting with those young guys who
found themselves on board landing craft that was churning and
lurching forward, and that would deliver them to what's going
to either be a life changing or a life ending appointment.
You could feel their breathing, their nerves, that cold trepidation.
(02:04):
You saw their trembling hands, they're vomiting, that look of
a dreadful surrender that was mixed with the determined hope
that they might somehow pass through that onshore crucible that
was drawing ever closer. And then they reached the beach
and the bow ramp drops and some don't live to
(02:24):
make it three feet. The reenactment of the storming of
Omaha Beach was raw. The realism was mesmerizing and even terrifying.
It certainly felt as if I was in the middle
of the chaos, and that helter skelter every which way, disorder,
bullets buzzing and pinging, that flying sand, blood soaked waves,
(02:46):
the gore men destroyed by mortars and just cut down,
And the psychological toll was so well portrayed, that look,
that determined stare, knowing that if you wanted to live,
you had no choice but to make it. Legs run
straight at the death. You had to move, You had
to move, move like most everyone. I found the opening
(03:09):
scene to be not just jarring, but spell binding and draining,
and later I read that men who had actually been
there and others in similar fights said that Spielberg got
it right. So on the way home, I told my wife, well,
now that I know what to expect, I think i'd
like to see that movie again, and she said I
(03:29):
was too intense for her. Once was plenty, but I
couldn't shake it. So on Sunday afternoon, I went back alone.
I bought my ticket, but there was about thirty or
forty minutes before the show started, so to kill the time,
I walked down the mall into one of the bookstores,
where I went over to the history section. That's where
I always gravitate to. In a bookstore, there was a
(03:52):
man standing in the aisle. He was older. I took
him to be about eighty. He was intently looking through
an oversized book, and I could see it was about
World War Two. Since he looked like he was old
enough to have been in the war and friendly look
enough to be interrupted, well, I pointed at the book
and asked him, were you there? He looked at the
(04:14):
cover and said, oh, yeah, I was there. So I
asked did they send you to Europe or the Pacific?
He said Pacific. I asked him what branch he served in.
He told me he had been a marine. I remember
being surprised. I think my mental image of a marine,
even an older one, was different. He was shorter than me,
(04:37):
maybe five eight, but not anymore. He had silver hair,
and it was thinning, but very neatly combed. He had
a friendly face and an easy smile. There was a
ready kindness that came through. He had blue eyes that glistened.
To me, he looked like a grandfather straight out of
Central Casting, A nice, approachable, soft hearted kind of guy,
(05:00):
the kind of granddad who might give his grandson twenty
bucks because he knew it would help. Just by appearance.
He was not at all what I thought of when
I heard the word marine, but he said he had
been in the second Battalion, eighth Marines, second Marine Division.
I asked where he was in the Pacific. He smiled
and said, oh, I got the full tour. Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Saipan,
(05:25):
ended up on Tenian. That's where I got my ticket home.
As a history teacher, I knew a bit about what
those names meant. Mostly I knew that they just weren't cakewalks.
Each one had been a serious fight that cost lots
of Americans their lives, even more Japanese Omaha Beach four
times over. And he told me, with a hint of pride,
(05:47):
that on Tenian he and his platoon had been part
of a group that cleared the area for the airstrip
that would later provide a spot for Theonola Gay to
lift off from and bring an end to that war.
Battle of Guadalcanal was the first serious land defensive by
the United States and World War II. Over twelve hundred
Marines were killed, over twenty eight hundred wounded. More than
(06:10):
a thousand died at Tarawa, at Saipan, thirty four hundred more,
and on the island of Tinian there would be nearly
four hundred marine deaths, and many of those were victims
of fierce, suicidal Japanese forces. Screaming Bonzai long lived the Emperor.
Looking at him in the bookstore, it was just hard
(06:32):
to imagine that such a pleasant, older gentleman, just a
guy in my West Texas hometown, had been there for
all of that, for the bombings and the shootings and
the destroyed lives. It seemed oddly incongruent that he and
I would be standing together in the comfort of a
bookstore on a pleasant Sunday afternoon. Then he surprised me.
(06:53):
He asked me if I wanted to see his ticket
home from the war. I said sure, but I didn't
really understand exactly what he meant. And as he put
the book back on the shelf, I thought maybe he
was going to take out his wallet and unfold some
piece of paper, or maybe a military discharge that he
had kept all of these years. But instead he unbuttoned
the cuff on his left sleeve and he pushed it
(07:14):
up past his elbow. When he turned his arm over,
I saw his ticket home. It was a scar running
from his wrist to the crook of his elbow. He
said that scar had saved him from the bloodiest Pacific
battle of them all, Okinawa. Now we were both looking
at his arm, and I asked the obvious question, how'd
(07:36):
you get that? He said, I got it one night
on Tenian. He then went on to tell me this.
We cleared that airstrip the last week of July of
forty four, and then my platoon moved on up the
island by August. First, we had pushed the Japanese back
to a pretty small area they couldn't get out, so
at night they would come at us in these desperate
(07:57):
bonzaie attacks of the big US Navy ships offshore, which
fire star shells and light up the sky so we
could see what was happening around us and try to
pick them off. I was in a foxhole with another
guy who was a lieutenant named Stacy Davis. He manned
the machine gun. I only had a car being and
it kept misfiring. After a while the rest of the
(08:21):
platoons had fallen back and it was just the two
of us out there. As I listened to his story,
I just shook my head. I said, it all sounds
pretty terrifying. He assured me it was. How old were you?
He told me he was twenty six. He went on
and said, Lieutenant Davis and I were in a foxhole,
(08:41):
both on our knees. We were peering into the dark
and listening, with our senses on high alert, and suddenly,
out of nowhere, a Japanese soldier ran right towards me,
screaming with a wild look. His bayonet was coming straight
at my chest. So I put up my arm and
that thing went in here at my wrist and follow
(09:01):
the bone all the way here to my elbow.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
And you're listening to Jane Moore from Abilene, Texas, telling
the story of his encounter with a World War two
vet at a bookstore on his way to seeing Saving
Private Ryan a second time. I think I've seen that
movie fifty times, and anytime it comes on, well, I'm
gone and I won't come back until it's over because
(09:27):
it's that good. And I learned just a little bit
more about life watching it. Each time, I'm changed, and
the movie seems to change when we come back more
with j Moore, this remarkable story here on our American stories,
(10:09):
and we're back with our American stories and with Jane
Moore's story of his unexpected friendship with a World War
II hero, Joe Brown.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
He stopped talking and again we were both looking at
his arm. So I asked, well, what happened after that?
And he said, well, we fought. He told me that
a lot of folks don't realize that very often the
fighting in World War two came down to a fight
between two guys. With a bit of astonishment, I said, well,
I take it you won your fight. He smiled, and
(10:43):
as he rebuttoned his shirtcuff, he said, yeah, I won.
He then said, you know I have that bayonet. It
was the real ticket home for me. And in the fighting,
with that dead gum thing stuck in my arm, I
managed to bend that middle bayonet. I've got it at
the house. Dang, I'd like to see that, I said.
He told me to come by, told me to call
(11:05):
and I could tell a minute. So about a week
later I did call, and over the phone he said,
how about tomorrow. I rang the doorbell and he and
his wife invited me in. He said he had been
born in nineteen eighteen in Wichita Falls. He was raised
there with two brothers and two sisters. He told me
that after the war he took a job with an
(11:26):
oil field service company. They had lived in Abilene since
nineteen fifty nine, raised a daughter and two sons. He
told me that he and his older brother Marcus, had
been together for much of the war, including on Saipan
and Tenian. They both spent thirty two months overseas. He
told me that he made it home from the war
on a Friday, and he looked at as a wife
(11:47):
and said, and we got married on Monday. After a while,
he asked, well, you want to see my ticket home.
He and I walked down a short hall to a
back bedroom, and there, on top of a dresser, he
had already laid out the things he wanted to show me.
There was a telegram that had been sent to his
mother in nineteen forty four telling her that her son
(12:08):
had been wounded. There were medals and citations, one for
a bronze Star and two for silver stars, citing heroic service,
devotion to duty, conspicuous gallantry. Although wounded, he continued to
lead his men, inspired them by his example, and there
(12:29):
were newspaper clippings. One was from the wichital Daily News
dated October nineteen forty four. It was written after he
and his brother Marcus had returned home. He had told
about the experiences of these two hometown boys. Lieutenant Stacy
Davis had recounted for the Reporter the details of that
night on Tenian Davis said, we were in the same foxhole.
(12:52):
It was pitch dark. One of the Japanese charged our hole.
I fired, but he kept coming. He leapt down, baying
at first, and the fight was on. The article went
on to tell how this kindly grandfather, who was now
standing in front of me as I read, how in
the dark, with a bayonet stuck in his arm and
(13:13):
that had severed an artery and sliced a tendon, how
he grabbed the barrel of that rifle and fought his attacker,
fighting with such strength and adrenaline that the steel bayonet
lodged in his arm was bent at the shank. It
told how he managed to get the upper hand and
how despite his wound, he was able to pull the
bayonet out of his arm and wrestle the weapon away
(13:34):
from the Japanese soldier. After I read the article, he
filled in more of the blanks, telling me that when
the sun finally rose. He led the other walking wounded
down the hill to battalion headquarters. His brother happened to
be there and he told Marcus about the fight. So
Marcus went back to the area found the bayonet laying
on the ground. He brought it back so his little
(13:56):
brother could bring it home. I asked about Marcus. He
told me that in one battle, a bullet struck the
front of Marcus's helmet. It whizzed right across the top
of his head exited the back. He smiled and said
it parted his hair. Doesn't get much closer than that,
he said. Marcus took his gi Bill, enrolled at Texas
A and M to become a veterinarian. Then, in nineteen
(14:19):
forty nine, five days before he was to turn thirty three,
and having survived some of the worst battles of World
War Two, he lost his life in a motorcycle accident.
He told me they named one of their sons for him.
In that back room, I was hearing and seeing some
of the most personal stories in meaningful trophies from the
(14:39):
life of a man that I didn't really know, just
a nice guy I had met in the bookstore at
the mall and struck up a conversation, and there laying
on the dresser was the bayonet the one Marcus retrieved
and brought to him. One just like it was issued
to every Japanese soldier in World War Two, designed to
be help in a scabbard attached to a belt, so
(15:02):
the soldier could either pull it out, use it as
a handheld weapon, or attach it to the end of
his rifle and just run right at you. Of course,
that's how this one had been used, clipped to the
end of a Japanese rifle, and that bayonet had traveled
from Japan to Tenian, across the Pacific, and finding to
the back bedroom of a home in Abilene, Texas, nineteen
(15:25):
forty four to nineteen ninety eight. I asked if I
could pick it up, and he handed it to me.
It was heavy, heavier than I thought it was going
to be. It was about fifteen inches long, had a
single edged blade, had a very menacing point. The metal
tapered and was thickest near the handle and right up
(15:46):
next to the handle. The blade was bent. It was
canted over at about a forty five degree angle, and
staring at it, I asked so with this in your arm.
You grabbed hold of the rifle barrel, and you fought
hard enough, you created enough torque to bend this, he said,
(16:07):
I did. When I finally got that out of my arm,
I managed to turn the rifle around, and I tried
to stab that guy, but it would glance off because
I didn't know I had bent the thing over. But
I managed to use the butt of the gun and
it turned out all right. So you killed him with
his own rifle, he nodded, yests, it seems surreal. A
(16:30):
husband whose wife was now in the kitchen, A proud father,
a grandfather who put photos of the grandkids on the wall,
a guy who mowed his grass and kept his cars
clean and went to church, and who a lifetime earlier
for his country, had killed a man in a bare
handed fight, had won a victory in a world war.
(16:53):
He handed me the bayonet's metal scabbard. On it was
a white sticker that he had put there, and on
the sticker written in black ink, my ticket home. It
was the ticket to the rest of his life. That
day at the bookstore, he pushed up his sleeve and
showed me his scar, a scar he had looked at
every day for fifty four years, a tactile reminder of
(17:16):
a defining day, of a victory, of a ticket home.
Looking at him in the bookstore that day, I just
couldn't get over how ordinary he was. And had he
not been reliving his past thumbing through a book that
piqued my curiosity, had I not asked, were you there, well,
I never would have stood in his back room and
(17:38):
held a bayonet in my hand. At the bookstore, he
and I visited right up until I needed to head
to the theater. I told him I was going to
see Saving Private Ryan. I asked him if he had
seen it. He smiled and said no, I don't guess
I need to. I put out my hand and said, well,
I've enjoyed visiting with you. It's been an Aye. My
(18:00):
name is Jay Moore. He shook my hand. He shook
it firmly, just like you would expect from a marine.
He said, I've enjoyed visiting. Come see me. My name
is Joe Joe Brown. Sitting in the darkened theater, I
(18:21):
saw Tom Hanks and the others moving toward the beach,
but all of it was fake. There was no real blood,
no real injuries, no gore, there was no live ammunition,
there was no actual dying, and no two guys really fighting,
rolling in the sand, sweating and swearing, kicking and clawing, clenching, yelling,
and squeezing, squeezing so hard, hard enough to bend steel.
(18:45):
The movie remained powerful, but nowhere near as much where
I had just met Joe Brown.
Speaker 1 (18:54):
And my goodness, what a story different than watching a movie.
Joe Brown's story in a way j Moore's story. Two.
Here on our American stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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