We’re all a little older and wiser on this eleventh month, eleventh day of 2023 and as our generation gradually fades away into the pages of American History, we gather once more to remember our gallant and heroic veterans. The men and women who saved us from a guy named Hitler, and another we just called Tojo. There was no love lost for these “historical rascals” from WW-II. There was much love and concern felt for our Uncles, Fathers and Brothers and Kin who bravely bore arms during those dangerous horrible years of war. A war and many battles of survival for our beloved country.

Even though I had several kin who heroically fought and suffered so long ago, I want to mostly write about my uncles. One was my Uncle Jack — Dad’s kid brother who served valiantly in the

US Navy. Although coming close to getting killed a few times he told me later that his greatest fear was that he wouldn’t do his job properly and cause the death of his shipmates. Jack’s battle station on his ship was “Captain’s Talker.” As such he had to listen closely and relay his Captain’s orders though the ship’s central telephone system. Jack said his captain spoke softly and was hard to hear and plus there was chaos and explosions all around. His fear? That he would make a mistake in his job, and they would all die. I loved my Uncle Jack.

My Uncle Ezra was my mom’s brother. I loved him a lot, too. A 1939 graduate of Lula High School he married his sweetheart Paralee Hudgins, and they produced my cousin, Lonnie, and later on two pretty girls. Meanwhile WWII had begun. Uncle Ezra may have been the most patriotic man I ever knew and of course he didn’t wait on the draft board — he enlisted. He soon found himself in an Army communications unit that seemed to have on their schedule an endless string of islands to invade. The islands had names like Papua, Okinawa, Iwo

Jima, Bougainville, Tarawa, Truk and others of the deadly Marianas.

Ezra said that when they were on their way in on landing craft, these islands were lovely to behold but he soon found them to be a mess of slops and stinks and pestilence, of scum crested lagoons, vile swamps with some inhabited by giant crocodiles, scary spiders as big as your fist, giant wasps, lizards, tree leeches, scorpions, centipedes who just by walking on your skin left a trail of inflammation and pain. Mosquitoes were there in clouds — bringing malaria, dengue fever and several other filthy exotic diseases. And if that was not enough, the islands were all crawling with Japs, trying their best to kill you.

Ezra’s job was to set up a central communications center. This involved having a bulldozer scoop out a deep trench, installing a telephone switchboard from which wires would be strung to each forward company’ s commander. These many wires would be strung out by skilled technicians with a big spool of telephone wire on their backs. A dangerous job indeed. Jap snipers seemed to abound in the tops of the coconut trees along these battle areas. Ezra, one night after sending out several wire stringers to the command posts saw every one of them shot dead. Finally, Ezra put a spool on his own back and headed out, from shell hole to shell hole.

The snipers who were determined he would not get through, could not quite see Ezra but his spool was visible. Ezra finally did make it but his telephone lines were “shot.” His back was full of wire fragments which medics spent a lot of time working on pulling out them out — even now. He said that after a few such landings that only a half-dozen survivors were all that were left in his original unit. The other guys were all replacements. Ezra told me that he knew he would never see Oklahoma alive again and so he and his old buddies just accepted the “fact” that they could never survive all the hazards of this war. “Some of the guys called us daredevils” but he said he was at ease about it. We all know now it was a form of “shellshock.”

One day Ezra got a letter from my grandpa, his dad, that told him his cousin was on an LST out there and gave him the number. Sure enough, Ezra looked and there it was. Cousin Clytee Armstrong from Borger, Texas was there and while they were having a joyous reunion aboard the ship the Japs staged an air raid. The ship hurried out of the harbor, taking Ezra along. But they later put back in and let Uncle Ezra go ashore. The Japs hadn’t given up! Another air raid sent the ship scurrying back out. Alas, this time my cousin Clytee’s ship was sunk, and he was set swimming in the Pacific. Luckily, another LST (Landing Ship Tank) appeared and rescued all the survivors. But before you could say hurray, another Jap Sub sent another torpedo which meant Clytee went swimming again. But he was rescued a third time and survived the horrific war of the Pacific after being sunk twice in one day.

Ezra went back to his unit where he was transported for yet another horrible island invasion. Like Clytee, when the war ended Uncle Ezra thought he was headed back to Lula, but he wasn’t. He would have been part of the Japanese invasion fleet which experts estimated would have inflicted another one million more casualties on our armed forces. Thanks to a noble American, President Harry Truman and his A Bomb we never had to do that. Instead, Ezra’s communications company was loaded onto an airplane and flown to Sasebo, Japan. There, they were to set up communications ashore to facilitate surrender of the Japs. The war was finally over. After the medics had picked another few pounds of shrapnel and wire from Ezra’s backside he was allowed to come home. Ezra was in bad shape, but alive.

Pat and I visited Ezra’s family a few years ago and we had a wonderful time, just talking. But I had to cut my visit short. Ezra’s latest appointment at the VA in San Francisco had arrived. After all these years they were still getting a lot of telephone wire out of his shoulders, his back and hips. How much do we owe these guys anyway?

Now, my Uncle Ezra is gone. I rest assured he is with the Lord as he was a Christian. As a matter of fact, all my uncles are gone now along with my cousin Clytee, and I thank God we had such men. I’m proud to have had such heroes as kin.

God Bless America! And be sure and go to church this Sunday.

Wayne Bullard, DPh

cwaynebullard@gmail.com