September 24, 2024 • 19 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Jay Moore tells us an emotional story of meeting a real life World War II hero before going to see Saving Private Ryan for a second time in theaters.
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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 j Moore. Jay is a
retired history teacher from Ebilene, 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.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Take it away, Jay, Well, back in the summer of
nineteen ninety eight, on 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
(01:13):
ready for that movie. I was 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.
(01:36):
The camera was in the turmoil. 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
(01:59):
their breathing, their nerves, that cold trepidation. 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
(02:22):
drops and some don't live to 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, the gore
(02:47):
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 your legs run straight at the death.
You had to move, You had to move, move, like
most everyone. I found the opening scene to be not
(03:09):
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 was
too intense for her. Once was plenty, but I couldn't
(03:33):
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
man standing in the aisle. He was older. I took
(03:55):
it 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
cover and said, oh, yeah, I was there. So I
(04:18):
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,
maybe five eight, but not anymore. He had silver hair,
(04:41):
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,
the kind of granddad who might give his grandson twenty
(05:02):
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 had cost
lots of Americans their lives, even more Japanese Omaha Beach
four times over. And he told me, with a hint
(05:46):
of pride, that on Tinian he and his platoon had
been part of a group that cleared the area for
the air strip that would later provide a spot for
the Ononola Gay to lift off from and bring an
end to that war. The Battle of Guadalcanal was the
first serious land offensive by the United States in World
War II. Over twelve hundred Marines were killed, over twenty
(06:07):
eight hundred wounded. More than 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
(06:30):
the bookstore, it was just hard 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. He asked me if
(06:54):
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 up past his elbow.
(07:16):
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 you get that? He said,
(07:38):
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 bonzaie attacks off in the
(08:00):
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 platoons had fallen back
(08:23):
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, both on our knees.
We were peering into the dark and listening, with our
(08:44):
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 at
my wrist and follow 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
vett 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 can 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 his wife and said,
(11:48):
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 had been wounded.
(12:10):
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 were newspaper clippings.
(12:31):
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. It was
(12:53):
pitch dark. One of the Japanese charged our hole. I fired,
but he kept coming. He leapt down bayette 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 that had severed
(13:14):
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 from the
(13:35):
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.
(13:55):
He brought it back so his little 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
(14:17):
become a veterinarian. Then, in nineteen 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 life of
(14:40):
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 held
in a scabbard attached to a belt, so the soldier
(15:02):
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 finally to the back bedroom of
a home in Abilene, Texas, nineteen forty four to nineteen
(15:27):
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 next to the handle.
(15:47):
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, I did. When I
(16:09):
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 husband whose wife was now in
(16:32):
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. He handed me the bayonet's
(16:54):
metal scabbard. On it was a white sticker that he
had put there, and on the sticker he had 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 a defining day, of
(17:18):
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 held a bayonet
(17:39):
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 honor. My name is Jay Moore.
(18:03):
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 saw Tom Hanks and the
others moving toward the beach, but all of it was fake.
(18:25):
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 mend steel. The movie
(18:46):
remained powerful, but nowhere near as much, For 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 j Moore. Jay is a
retired history teacher from Ebilene, 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.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Take it away, Jay, Well, back in the summer of
nineteen ninety eight, on 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
(01:13):
ready for that movie. I was 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.
(01:36):
The camera was in the turmoil. 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
(01:59):
their breathing, their nerves, that cold trepidation. 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
(02:22):
drops and some don't live to 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, the gore
(02:47):
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 your legs run straight at the death.
You had to move, You had to move, move, like
most everyone. I found the opening scene to be not
(03:09):
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 was
too intense for her. Once was plenty, but I couldn't
(03:33):
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
man standing in the aisle. He was older. I took
(03:55):
it 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
cover and said, oh, yeah, I was there. So I
(04:18):
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,
maybe five eight, but not anymore. He had silver hair,
(04:41):
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,
the kind of granddad who might give his grandson twenty
(05:02):
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 had cost
lots of Americans their lives, even more Japanese Omaha Beach
four times over. And he told me, with a hint
(05:46):
of pride, that on Tinian he and his platoon had
been part of a group that cleared the area for
the air strip that would later provide a spot for
the Ononola Gay to lift off from and bring an
end to that war. The Battle of Guadalcanal was the
first serious land offensive by the United States in World
War II. Over twelve hundred Marines were killed, over twenty
(06:07):
eight hundred wounded. More than 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
(06:30):
the bookstore, it was just hard 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. He asked me if
(06:54):
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 up past his elbow.
(07:16):
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 you get that? He said,
(07:38):
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 bonzaie attacks off in the
(08:00):
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 platoons had fallen back
(08:23):
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, both on our knees.
We were peering into the dark and listening, with our
(08:44):
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 at
my wrist and follow 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
vett 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 can 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 his wife and said,
(11:48):
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 had been wounded.
(12:10):
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 were newspaper clippings.
(12:31):
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. It was
(12:53):
pitch dark. One of the Japanese charged our hole. I fired,
but he kept coming. He leapt down bayette 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 that had severed
(13:14):
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 from the
(13:35):
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.
(13:55):
He brought it back so his little 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
(14:17):
become a veterinarian. Then, in nineteen 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 life of
(14:40):
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 held
in a scabbard attached to a belt, so the soldier
(15:02):
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 finally to the back bedroom of
a home in Abilene, Texas, nineteen forty four to nineteen
(15:27):
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 next to the handle.
(15:47):
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, I did. When I
(16:09):
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 husband whose wife was now in
(16:32):
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. He handed me the bayonet's
(16:54):
metal scabbard. On it was a white sticker that he
had put there, and on the sticker he had 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 a defining day, of
(17:18):
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 held a bayonet
(17:39):
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 honor. My name is Jay Moore.
(18:03):
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 saw Tom Hanks and the
others moving toward the beach, but all of it was fake.
(18:25):
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 mend steel. The movie
(18:46):
remained powerful, but nowhere near as much, For 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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