Swofford, Peter J. oral history

              Mr. Peter Swofford
[Born 04/16/1927)

Interviewed by Anisha Yadav
Recorded on 05/17/2006 by Anisha Yadav
Transcribed on 06/28/2006 by Ben Stovall

[Interview starts at 004 on counter]
Anisha Yadav:  Today, we are interviewing Peter J. Swofford. He was part of the Navy and was part of the Amphibs and was a Quartermaster 2-C. He was enlisted in World War 2 from 1945 to1947 in the South Pacific, Japan, and China. The first segment is just to jog your memory. So, why did you join?
[008]
Peter Swofford: Well, World War 2 was going on and I was a senior in high school, closely approaching 18 years of age, when I would have to sign up for the draft, and then I would go into the army. I chose the Navy because I liked that branch. I had a brother in the Marines, a brother in the Air Force, and so I decided, round about, I’ll go in the Navy. So that’s why I joined.
AY: Ok. Do you recall your first days in service?
PS: First days? Yeah. It was a lot of fun. Went over to Seattle, Washington, was inducted. We got on a train. More like a cattle train. You know, a square box. Not as bad as hauling the people to Buchenwald, but it was square things like that with, I think it was two bunks—two bunks high, or maybe three bunks high. We went down on that to San Diego. I think it took us about two days to get down to San Diego.
[018]
AY:  Is that where you trained?
PS: That’s where I went through Boot Camp. I can’t recall how long, but I think it was about two months—maybe eight, nine weeks. Boot camp was great. It was like going to camp. In other words, you get up—everything was done regimentally—you’d get up in the morning at six and you’d fall out on the grinder, which is where’d you march like big parking lots—big, big parking lots where you’d have just lots and lots of sailors. So first you wash up and you get ready, you get dressed, you fall out, they march you to breakfast, then you go out to fall in again, then they march you out to march. And so then you march for a couple of hours, and then you go to various classes where they start teaching you what they want you to know. When you get out of boot camp, you’re a Second Class Able-Bodied Seaman, meaning that you can swim, you can climb a rope ladder, you know the front end from the back end of a ship, you know the sides, you know the upper deck, the lower deck, so, I mean, you know your way around. It’s just to get you acquainted with the terms of the Navy and what’s going on with the ships. Plus, they want to make sure you’re in good health. So, you have calisthenics every day, you have obstacle courses every day, you go to the dentist until your teeth are either pulled out or fixed up, or anyway, your teeth are okay. They have to pass. They don’t want you to have trouble when you’re overseas. You don’t get time out for a toothache. You just keep right on working. So you get your teeth fixed up, your health situation is taken care of and you go through your training. You have to learn how to swim, or you don’t get through boot camp. So, a lot, I shouldn’t say a lot, but some of the people that had joined had a lot of trouble learning how to swim.  The instructors, you know, they’re not being mean, but they don’t let you grab onto the side, because you’ve got to tread water for thirty minutes. And they’ve got big poles. They keep pushing you out. You think “Well, this is bad.” No. You’ve gotta learn how to tread water, and, believe me, you learn how to do it. This is sink or swim, and these aren’t your friends up there, you know. It was fun. I was a good swimmer, good diver, I was having a blast. This is really great and I loved the obstacle course, but the fatter people didn’t like it. But they got through all right and they lost weight and it was just a good time. And you were learning things all the time. You know, you go through fire control drills and you fight fires. They form you into groups of three, four, or five, and you’ve gotta go into what’s an assimilated deck and they light a fire in a corridor and there’s all this black smoke and you’ve gotta go in there and put the fire out after you find it. And people get lost, you know. And then they teach you what it’s like to have tear gas. You go into a room and they throw in some tear gas bombs and, believe me, it makes worse that peeling onions, but then they give you gas masks, and believe me, you learn how to put those on in a hurry, and you learn how to put on the mae west, you know, that you do for life-saving drills. They teach you how to jump off the side of a ship. They have a mock side of a ship that’s about thirty feet in the air and you’ve gotta hang onto this because if you don’t, it comes up into your face and you might come up feet first instead of head first. I mean, you just have to hang onto that. So, you learn how to do those things and it becomes second nature, but it’s all for a person’s survival, so it was a fun time. I just thought it was a camp. It was great, you know? None of them—we’re going through it the first time, so you meet other people—some guys from the state of Washington or from other states or whatever and it’s just a mish-mosh, you know? You meet the guys from back east and they’ve got this accent, you know, from New York, and you think they’re crazy. What are they, from some other nation or something? And the southerners, but it’s fun. It was really great. You meet some great people that’re your buddies for the rest of your life.
[064]
AY: Did you see combat in World War 2?
PS: Well, World War 2, I was very lucky there. I went on a draft with a bunch of other sailors up to Shoemaker, which is outside of Oakland in San Francisco, and there were 30,000 sailors there and they would take them—every day people would come, and they would draft going overseas, which they would punch into the units that were being shot up and needed recruits, and so when I arrived there, why we were scheduled to go out the next day, but I got an emergency call stating that my brother in the Air Force had been killed, so I was sent home on emergency leave. Went home for ten days, came back, all my guys were long gone.
I#2: Where’d they go?
[073]
PS: They went overseas on LSTs, LCSs, various ships. In fact, they were attacking Okinawa at that time and they had the ring around it and I thought, well , that’s probably where I’d be going—Iwo Jima. And I got there, went back to my barracks and nothing happened. I’d get up in the morning, go out, fall out, and they’d call, and they never did called my name, so I decided, well, the best thing to do here is (there’s so many sailors), I’ll go over to the library, I’ll get a book— and I’d get Zane Gray— a Western, you know, and then I’d go stand at the head of the line going to the chow hall, sit down, read the book. Noon, I’d go in and eat, go back to the library, get another book, come back, then sit down in line. Then I’d eat supper, then I’d go wherever you go on the base and, you know, they had a lot of entertainers. I saw Bob Hope there with his crew and I saw a lot of others that came through, but they never did call my name, so I would get up, go to bed, get up, do the same thing. I read all the Zane Grays, you know, all those books, about thirty. I was there for almost a little over two months. Never got paid, so I couldn’t leave the base, although if I’d had some money to go I could have got on the A-train, went to San Francisco and had some fun. So the war actually ended while I was in Shoemaker. I couldn’t even go in for, they were having celebrations. So I’d wire home—send me five dollars, could you please? And I’d use that to buy knickknacks. But anyway, I finally decided something’s wrong, so I went into the Adjutant’s Office and asked him, why aren’t you calling me? They thought I was AWOL—Absent Without Leave, so I told them when and what happened. Well, they got to looking around and they found my record behind a cabinet that had fallen over the end, so I just didn’t exist until they found it. And then within two days I was on a draft going overseas. I was on one that went to Okinawa, and we got to Okinawa, then they take you out and put you on various other ships.
[ 101]
I was first on five LCSs—Landing Craft (Supports). These are actually rocket-launching platforms. They only drew four feet of water, yet they could go all the way across the Pacific. They had four ?grade? marine engines. They could go pretty fast—about 28 knots, but they had the battery power of a cruiser—a huge ship. They had huge banks of 24 rockets—two in the front, two in the back. When these things would go off, it was just like roman candles, but they could lay down a barrage on the bank that was better that any battleship, really and they could get very close to the bank. So I’d get on one and they’d say, “We’re going back to the stateside” and I’d say, “Well, hot dog. I just get on here and I’m going to go back.” No. They’d got orders for me to go to another one. So I got on five of those. Then finally, when the last one was sent back, they said “Well, we’re going to put you on an LST.” So I went with a group of about, maybe, eight or ten sailors to an LST that was anchored on Tsingtao, China. By now it’s December. I’d gone in in April. December’s very cold and when you get on, you’re on the deck crew, and I think the first day I got aboard this ship, they put me over the side on a board scraping paint and painting with foul weather gear on. I looked down at the water and thought, “Geeze. If I fell down into that thing, nobody’s going to dig me out. I’m gonna sink like a rock.” So I said, “I’ve gotta get into something other than the deck crew.” And so you become a little more knowledgeable about what’s going on, and so I nosed around and within two weeks I had made friends of the head of the bridge gang, which is the gang that works up in officer’s territory. There’s a signalman, the radarman, the radar techs, the radio people, the quartermasters, and this quartermaster 1st, who was head of the bridge gang, he’d been over there for four years, maybe five—I guess about four, but he was anxious to get home and he couldn’t get anybody to replace him. So you have to be at least a quartermaster 2nd to relieve him and take over his duties. So I started reading the books. He gave them to me, so I wrote in for the quartermaster 3rd—well, first it was Seaman 1st and I passed that, then quartermaster 3rd, then a month later, quartermaster 2nd. So within two month’s time, I was a quartermaster 2nd, head of the bridge gang with all these other people up there, you know.
[133]
I#2: How long would it usually take to make that kind of jump in rank?
PS: About two to three years, but in more time or that time, all that is, why, they can jump you. You can go from a lieutenant to a general if somebody wanted to do that, but it was great. And I was willing to study and learn this stuff because—I had to learn blinker light, Morse Code, and I spent hours with that, with somebody flashing flashlights back and forth, you know.
I#2:  So you were signalman and the navigator and…
PS:  Right. I took care of all that charts, had to make sure all the corrections, in every month you would get corrections coming out from the Naval Bureau of the Pacific Area where things were changing—a mine field had been laid or had been removed, or where something was happening, but you had to put these in the charts. They had to be accurate. And I would take all of the sightings, or we called them shootings, when the captain would come out and shoot the stars for our positioning. You didn’t have satellite navigation then. I mean, it was going by the stars, the sun, the moon, whatever was up there you could shoot, and so I became very interested in that—started doing it myself, and so our navigator, who was a 1st lieutenant from Texas, a nice guy, didn’t know too much. He was 22, I think. “Swabby, you go do it.” It was fun and I could do that fine. I’d figure it out for him anyway. But it was just really fun and it was a challenge. So I kept my own log book. I could have brought those, but I didn’t realize they were at home, but they’re log books of all our travels, all the courses. Our flotilla captain—the name was Stanfield—and he was only 26 years old, but he came up through the regular Navy. I was in the reserves, so he came up as a quartermaster, went through, and then was promoted to an officer, and then he’s the one that, actually, was—we were the lead boat on all the convoys, going up and down the China coast and in French Indo-China to bring Chaing Kai-Chek’s army up to Manchuria and also to pick up Japanese prisoners of war and take them back to Japan. We usually take them to Sasebo, Japan, which was a submarine base in Japan. So, a lot of interesting stories with the Japanese, and with the Chinese especially because they were very ill-equipped. They had one rifle for three people. So three people would march together with one rifle. First one got killed, the other guy took the rifle. And everything was done by bugle. They didn’t have cell phones or things like that, so they’d listen for the bugle and they would eat at the bugle, they would finish at the bugle, they would go to the bathroom at the bugle. I mean everything was done at the bugle, but one of our enterprising sailors stole the bugle. He thought it was fun. I mean, isn’t that ridiculous? Well, that thing was turned back in about two days. And, you  know, they would also would bring their own food, which was just rice. And so they’d bring these huge, huge, big bags of rice, which they would stack on the back of the fan tail of the LST. And then they had a big, 50-gallon drum that they would cook this in. They would get the water boiling, then dump in the rice, and then they would pour out the rice and they would pour it out onto, it looked to me like it was a big, canvas sail or something. Well, there’d be a big mound of rice and the soldiers were all lined up and they would make them like snowballs and they’d walk by and they’d just throw it to them and they’d go over to their spots and they’d have a little, like, shovel. Boy, that rice was down under a minute’s time. That was their meal. That’s all they ate once a day.
[189]
I#2:    How many soldiers would you have on the ship?
PS: Well, the LST has two decks. You have the tank deck down below, where you’re lucky if you get down there, because at least you’re protected from the weather. And then you have the upper deck. You can put tanks below or trucks. Same thing above. And you have a big ramp that goes up from the upper deck to the lower deck and you have bow doors that would open when you go up onto a beach, drop the bow doors, put them over, then drop the ramp. They just drive right on out onto the beach. You drop the stern anchor when you come in, so then you pull on that anchor to pull you off and then you go load up again. So we would—I would imagine we probably have three, four thousand. I mean, there’s no chairs or anything. The bathroom facilities was a couple of boards over the side of the ship on both sides that they get up there and squat because they knew afterwards we’d have to wash off the ship. Some of them I think had diarrhea or something. It was a mess, but I think about those things and they did what was necessary. Now, when we had Japanese prisoners of war, we had Marines on board that acted as their guards. Well, the sailors will steal anything. They stole all the Marine’s guns. I mean, geeze! Next thing you know, “Well, whoever stole that submachine gun or whoever stole this, we gotta give it back to the guy to protect us from these prisoners.” Oh, boy.
AY:  Could you understand the Japanese or the Chinese?
PS: No.
AY: Did you have translators?
PS: Oh, yeah. Yeah, but they could understand English. So it made it nice. Although when you would get shore leave, like in Seoul, Korea. We were there one time—several times I was at Seoul., They didn’t seem to understand what I was trying tt—all I would do on leave—I didn’t smoke, I didn’t drink, I didn’t go out with women. I was really a good kid and I was trying to convert everybody else. They called me “preacher”. I listened to these people and they would talk. When you went on liberty they would give you penicillin, rubbers (condoms), and something. You had to take them.
I#2: Cigarettes?
PS: Cigarettes you always got on-board ship. Yeah. I had lots of cigarettes because you got two cartons a week, and I mean you can buy anything with cigarettes. Yeah. They’d give you ten dollars for one package—or more. I got nice leather suitcases and stuff like that, but you get so much junk you can’t carry it around. The only people when you leave the service that can carry are officers. Enlisted personnel—no. I had a nice Japanese rifle, I had a big, long bayonet, I had a sword, you know? All this stuff that I’d picked up. Well, I left it standing against a tree at Treasure Island—wouldn’t let me. I tried to get one of the officers to carry it on the train going up to Seattle and [he] wouldn’t do it, so. Now they could even mail them home. Ours, no. It’s just unfortunate that you’re not treated all alike.
[241]
AY: Why was that?
PS: Well, because they could get away with it. That’s why I thought, “I’m going to go back and I’m gonna be an officer.” You always try to do something to make a little more money. So I found that after I became friends with all of the officers, I thought, well—they needed somebody to show movies for the officers. You’d get extra pay—not only that, when you’re in port, you can commandeer a Higgins boat, go right into Shanghai or Hong Kong or whatever and go get the movies. So you got all that time to yourself—pick up a few fresh vegetables, a few fruit, you know, you bet cha. So I showed movies for the officers and I would show movies occasionally for the enlisted men. And you’re out there, maybe you have a collection of five or six movies and next thing you know, you see a ship over there [flash with blinker light],“Well, what movie you got? We’d like to change.” Then you get over there and you’re going like this and they send them over with lines, you know. [interviewer #2 asks Swofford to explain blinker lights.] That was a real experience. 
I#2: Are you [asking AY] familiar with what he is talking about?
[263]
AY: Blinker lights? Morse Code?
I#2: A big spot light with shutters on the front, so that as you push the button down it opens the shutters up and it sends out a big white beam and then you let go and then black. It uses dots and dashes with visuals with a light beam—that’s how a ship communicated at night. You weren’t using radio and that way you couldn’t be intercepted unless seeing it.]
[270]
PS: Well, I was into maybe about maybe four weeks into my striking for quartermaster, and remember the captain came up as a quartermaster, and so it was raining outside and it was blowing and it was cold and so he was like, “Swofford, come up here and take this message.”  “What?” I didn’t say “what?” I went up there. So here I am around the conning tower, rain’s blowing onto you. Here’s a ship over here and they’re blinking away, blinking away. And I’m saying, “Geeze, what is that? I don’t know. Is that an ‘R’? Is that an ‘E’?” I was out there for about forty minutes just getting killed. Finally, I said, “I need somebody to take down this message.” Finally, it says, “Turn on your radio.” So, I went to the captain. He said, “Yeah, I know. They want us to turn on the radio.” All they wanted to do was change a movie, you know. Strangely enough, after that, I could read blinker lights. You get so good. What you do is they’re sending, you just hold the thing down, the light’s on. “Keep sending. Ah, can’t you go a little faster? Come on, keep going. Come on, come on, come on, come on, come on. Honest to be good, you get so good, it’s just like talking. Then, ff you’re over the horizon, you can shine the light like a spotlight, and so you read the beam of light. So you’re here and then maybe there’s someone sixty miles away and they’re sending a message that you can read. It’s really, really neat. And then you get into semaphore, that’s the flags. Well, I didn’t know my eyes were as bad as they were, but I had tried for the V-5 program, which was flight training. Well, that’s when they told me my eyes were— “Ah, no. You can’t do this.” So that’s when I joined the Navy and I wasn’t in any place long enough to get a pair of glasses. I’d go in and get checked, “Well, pick them up next time you’re here.” Well, I was never back there. So, I went through the entire Navy and got my glasses when I started university when I got out. I’d have to use binoculars if somebody was sending semaphore. I’d put binoculars on. Oh yeah, then I could see it, sure. But, you know, binoculars are usually about 100 feet away or they’re pretty close, but they send that real fast and it’s just like reading the other stuff—all Morse code, you know.
[320]
AY:  While you were in the Navy, did you stay in touch with your family and if so, how often?
PS:  I wrote letters and sent to them. I may have received a couple of letters, but we would go on a trip from port to port and maybe I’d be gone for six weeks, eight weeks, you turn right around, then you go again, and you don’t know because they change all the time. “Well, we’re going to go to Shangh.” “No, no. You’re going to Hong Kong.” “Well, you’re going down to Hanoi.” “You’re going to Taiwan.” So it was fun. I was the first one to learn from the captain where we were going because I drew out the plots and how we were going to do this because they send the positioning things where you’re going to change. So that part of it was really, really exciting and it was fun. In my station at time of battle was at the wheel. I got so good with that. I was so cocky. It’s a, “We’re going a course 0-9-0.” “Come to course 2-7-0.” “Aye-Aye, sir.” Flip the old wheel, then they go m-m-m-m-mouth blob blob  zzzzzzzzz [engine sounds], then I flip it back and stop it. 270. “270, sir?” It was fun. Going into Hanoi, we went up that river with LSCs and we only had three feet on each side. It’d just been dredged out. LSC draws, usually, not loaded, about six feet in front and about eight feet at the stern. When you’re loaded down, you’re down twelve and probably about eight to ten in front.
AY:  Did you fit okay through there?
[357]
PS: Oh yeah. We went all the way up there and got Chiang Kai-Chek’s army and went back out and took them up to Manchuria, then they got chased all the way back down to Taiwan.
AY:  Did you feel the pressure and stress?
PS: Oh, I was stressed all the time. I never got seasick. Let me tell you this. I got aboard that ship in San Francisco’s harbor and you know, it was great—you’re looking at Market Street and all these streets and you see Coit or Hoyt, I guess it’s Hoyt [Coit] Tower up there. And you back out and they’re tootin and everybody’s yelling and everybody’s at the rail and I’m like, “This is really great, you know?” And somebody grabs you on the shoulder “You.” “What, me?” “Yeah. Come in here. We’ve gotta mop this floor.” And here I am, inside the galley area mopping the damn floor while I should be out there seeing these streets that I’m leaving. Well, the boat starts going like this, and the next thing you know we’re underneath the Golden Gate Bridge and there’s people urping over here and they’re urping over there and they’re urping everywhere and I’m mopping this damn floor. Next thing you know, we’re past the Golden Gate and I’m all through mopping and I thought “Well, at least I didn’t get sick.” I didn’t think about it. And I just enjoyed it. Never did get sick in the Navy. And we were through a lot of things. 
[388]
We were at Okinawa and a big typhoon came in, so they don’t want you to stay anchored in the harbor because you can blow right up onto the beach. You can put out a couple of anchors, but you just still—so that you have to put out to sea. So you go out to sea and you turn into the wind- the way the waves are coming, so that you’re riding up and down like this so you won’t be capsized. Well, this is the time during the night, our bow doors actually got blown open. Broke the—it was so strong—it blew then open and the only thing that saved. . . . [tape runs out]
[End Side 1 #403]
[Start Side 2]
PS: Bow doors were open, so they just had to get those fixed and then go back into Okinawa. You know, you really need to see all the ravages of war—the sunken ships, the stuff on the beach. It was horrible. We went to an island that we were supposed to—this was after the war was over, but we wanted to occupy it—and they had some Japanese soldiers there that we had to pick up and there was no landing area—just high cliffs and then about, you know, 90 fathoms of water—540 feet—that’s a long way down. That’s about the maximum of what we have as far as anchor chain or cable, and so we drop anchor and the next thing you know, one of the generators goes idle. So now you can’t hoist the anchor.
AY: You’re stuck.
PS: Yeah. “We’re stuck, right. And so what’re we gonna do now?” “We’ll call for a tow.” And so you radioed and they send a ship. I don’t know where it came from, maybe Okinawa or something, but anyway, it arrived about four or five days later. And meanwhile they’re trying to fix the generator. Well, we have two, but the first one wasn’t too good anyways. It wasn’t running. The second one just got pumped out too and without the generators, you couldn’t start the engines, so they’re sort of out, too, and nothing’s running on the ship. And so we don’t know how we’re going to steer this thing, how we’re going to… So, here again, just my reading. I’d read where you could go into aft steering, which is above the rudders and using cranks, you could turn the rudders certain ways to facilitate the heading of the ship. And so I spoke to the captain about this –“excellent idea.” You and somebody else go down there, station yourself in aft steering, and we’ll talk to you by radiophone. So I went down there, and then for about—I think it took about four or five days, we finally got back to Okinawa. That was a fun thing, it was just a new thing to do. No one had ever done that that way before. So it worked out good.
AY: That was good thinking.
PS: Oh, yeah.
I#2:  How did you get the anchor up? Did you just cut the chain?
PS:  Just cut the chain. It’s probably still there. In China, a lot of times, you don’t have ports, so you just anchor out in the ocean and you’re maybe a mile offshore or something and usually it’s pretty shallow— like maybe two or three hundred feet, but there’s a lot of ships there, and so you have to have bearings, so you’ll put out your anchor, and then if you just have one in front, you could swing all the way around that thing, you know. Other ships are swinging around, too. So you’d get your bearings, and so when you’re on duty at night, you’re supposed to have lights that you can take bearings from and say, “Oh yeah, we’re about in the same position.” One night, we anchored like this and we’d gone all the way through the whole flotilla and we were down here. Hadn’t hit anybody.
AY: So you were, like, how far away from where you were originally?
PS: Oh, maybe a mile.
I#2:  You dragged your anchor?
PS: Oh yeah, just dragged it. And nobody got it. They were sitting there, having coffee, or “Oh, yep, yep. I’m right here. I’ve got my eye on it.” Or, you’re coming into the beach, and so you’re steaming in—you’ve got all these five or six, eight ships behind you, so you land like this. Well, the thing to do is you drop your stern anchor, you’re supposed to go straight in. You don’t drop your stern anchor over here and then cut over here, then go this way and cross over somebody else’s anchor line. Well, we had a couple of jokers that dropped it here, went over ours, then they decided to leave early, then they took our stern anchor right with them. So then we couldn’t get off the beach. As they’re being pulled off, they run into the stern anchor, and the cable winds up around the propeller shaft and so that disables that boat, that disables our boat because our stern anchor’s gone. We’re stuck on land. So then sailors get really devious. They start stealing jeeps. They’re going to be there for a while. So, they go out and “Hey, this is a nice-looking jeep.” The guy gets out, they just drive it on the tank deck, close the door, “Nah, I don’t know where it is.” I doubt if somebody drives them with a … We always had two or three jeeps in the tank deck. All the time. So that when you got somewhere, “Oh yeah. We have transportation right here. This is our local ‘Hertz’ right here, local ‘Hertz’.”
[456]
I#2: What about when you were on shore patrol?
PS: I was on shore patrol in Shanghi and shore patrol in Hong Kong. 
AY: What is shore patrol?
PS: Shore patrol is shore police. That’s the MPs in the Navy. You walk around looking real tough with a club and a gun and you have a yellow badge around your blue suit—SP on it—Shore Patrol. And so you’re supposed to take unruly sailors—get them back to the ship and actually help them. Not get messy or anything like that. But you also meet a lot of girls, you know. They want to take you home. Yeah, they do. I mean literally. Take you home, have dinner with us, then we’ll have some fun, you know. Well, I never partook of that, but I did go with some of my buddies and tell them to hurry up because I want to go get some pie a la mode. These guys, it was so crazy. Great experience. Like I say, I was too young to realize the opportunity that I had to get a camera, to document a bunch of these things.
[471]
AY: Did you keep a diary or a log?
PS: No. No, I kept a log of all the places I went to and kept all the charts that I used, which I was able to bring home. We decommissioned our ship in Okinawa.
AY: I’m sorry. I don’t know what decommissioned means.
PS: Decommissioned means you take it out of service. In other words, it’s served its purpose, you no longer need it, you don’t want to take it back to the United States— it’d just be scrap metal there, so they gave it to the Okinawa government with the idea now that they have something now that they can go between islands and haul stuff. So it goes to the Okinawa people—their government—and what you did is you destroy anything valuable on it—all the radar that was thrown overboard. No guns, nothing really valuable other than it was a workable, run able ship. So, had a couple of nice Higgins boats, which are the boats that run up on the beach and the bow comes down and the soldiers run out.
I#2:  Like on Private Ryan?
PS:  Yeah. That was my first job when I was in the Navy—running one of those. I could just putt those things up there.
I#2:  How old were the Marine officers?
PS: Well, we would get some 90-day wonders that were 19.
AY:  What were 90-day wonders?
PS: Ninty days and then they’d become officers. In other words, in the ROTC or something like that, and so they took their training in high school, and they hadn’t finished college, but they’d go 90 days to officer candidate school, get their ensign or get their 2nd grade lieutenant. They would be an ensign in the Navy. Our captain just loved to take things out with these fools. And they didn’t know anything. You come into a port and you’ve got a lot of ships here and everybody’s watching and then you’ve got these big buoys and they were going like this, you know, and the water’s rushing, and you’re bouncing. It’s “Mr. So-and-So.”—that would be the ensign—they’re all ‘misters’ “Tell your crew and secure the line to buoy number five.” “Oh, ok. Well, you guys had better get a Higgins boat.” Go down, and, of course, that’s doing this, and you’ve gotta be careful or else that’ll capsize, so then he gets out there. Now you’ve gotta get the line that he’s taking from the ship (this is a small line) to the buoy, so that you can pull a big hawser, you know, a great big thing that’ll hold the ship tied to that buoy, so then you don’t have to anchor, you’ve got a very good permanent buoy. But he’s gotta get that. I mean, that’s like riding that topsy-turvey thing. Geeze, you’ve gotta get out of the wind and onto this thing that’s bouncing around. He just had a heck of a time doing it. Finally, one of the seamen would do it, but he would say “Mr. So-and-So, get that line,” with a big bull-horn so everybody knows what’s going on and could hear it. Everybody’s watching from all the other ships, too. Finally get it done and we would be berthed and then you’d be able to go do your thing, go on liberty or whatever.
[509]
I#2: How old do you think your captain was?
PS: Our captain was 26. He was really an old man. He’d gotten in there a long time ago. Well, see, most of the others that were officers had come through the four years at 22, so that was…
I#2: Most of the Seamen were 17-19.
PS: 17-19. Yeah.
I#2: And the officers were 21, 22, and older.
PS: Yeah. That was about it.
__:  And an old man was…
PS:  26. Except for the Admirals, you know. And they were in their 40s.
I#2: Young crew.
PS: Young crew with a lot of expensive equipment, but they got the job done. It’s the same way right now in Iraq—young people. That’s what you need. What else you need here?
[520]
AY:  What did you go on to do as a career after the war?
PS: Thank goodness to that education bill—the G.I. Bill.
AY: Is that how you got to University?
PS: Yep, yep. So I went to the University of Washington (at junior college first) and then University of Washington. Degree in Zoology.
[524]
I#2: What were you doing in the mean time?
PS: I was also a meat cutter. My brother was a meat cutter—the one who was in the Marines, and then I had another brother, who was 4-F, couldn’t get in the service, and he ran a grocery store. So I worked in the grocery store, or the meat department all through junior high and high school. I became a journeyman meat cutter. Good occupation. And so it really helped me in anatomy. I could dissect stuff in a hurry. Whatever you don’t want is gone, you know? Boy. So, I got a degree in Zoology and was going to apply for med school there at University of Washington, but you have to pay for the first year. So I said, “Okay. I’ll pay for the first year and away we’ll go. ” That was in 1951. I’d been going with this girl, lovely girl—she’s John’s mother—or two years, three years. She’d gone to Seattle U, I went to U of W and we got engaged and I got married in the fall of 1951. So a year later I was working at World Meat Companies—a wholesale meat distributing thing—but nice guys there, ex-veterans and I was the smallest one of the whole bunch, but…
I#2: You were important?
PS: Yeah. But I was the brightest. I could make a profit, boy. If you want to make a profit, you show the boss how to do that. Well, it was easy to do. So this was a good job. I was making two dollars an hour. I mean, Shirley said “Hey, this is great!” Well, I hurt my back while I was working there in one of the big coolers. At that time, they had wooden cooler floors with sawdust, so that’s really slippery. So I was carrying a quarter of beef out to cut up or something and went right down underneath it. Well, it just crunched me a little bit. But anyway, our family doctor was a Dr. Lull, who’d an MD there— that internist that was out of town. So one of the guys said, “Well, you can go to my doctor. Don’t go to Lull. Go to my doctor, he’ll fix you right up.” So I was like, “Fine.” This was a Dr. A. J. Meyers, and I went to him and he was an osteopathic physician and so got to talking, this guy was a real talker. Anyway, before I got out of his office, I had an application in my hand for Perksville, the original school of osteopathic medicine and surgery, and a book about it and him saying that he’d pay the first year of medical school if I’d come back to Yakima to practice. Geeze, this is like having the magic fairy go, “Ding, ding, ding”. So I didn’t even know if there were any more schools. (There were about 24 that I was on). Anyway, I apply. I went down and got accepted. I thought, “Geeze, what do I do now?” So I was talking to my wife, she said, “That’s crazy game. You’ve got a good job.”  We have one child, our first son had just been born, and we were buying a washer and dryer and getting something else, and I mean all these things were happening. We were living in a little 300 square foot house, I think if was, but we were really on the road to success. And I told her, I said, “Geeze. I can be a meat cutter anytime, but I was going to be a doctor maybe once.”  Everybody I’ve talked to says, ‘Do it’.” So I said, “We’re going to do it” and that was in 1953—yeh, ’53 I started med school.  The rest is history, really.
[578]
I#2:  How’d you pay for medical school?
PS:  How’d I pay for it? Oh, well, I worked every day. I didn’t work the first year, you know, but after that…
I#2:  What happened?
PS: Well, I was fortunate to be number one in the class, so I got a scholarship to pay the tuition and I did that the remaining three years. So I got my tuition each year and then I worked in the anatomy lab as a dissecting assistant, so I’d prepare the dissection for the anatomy professor or whatever and go through it with the kids and help them with their tests and so forth and you really learn anatomy that way. But it was fun. I got a dollar an hour. I worked enough that I made at least $100 a month—$100 a month there, and then we had— I got some loans, very small, but we lived on a budget of about $170 a month—that included rent, $24 at the veteran’s housing Units—like chicken coops. But it was great times. We had nothing, but we were the happiest. It was just great. We had real fun.
[595]
AY:  Did your military experience affect your thinking about the war or about the military in general?
PS: Well, I would do it all over again. Absolutely. I don’t have much patience for these lily-livered guys that say, “Oh, I don’t want the military here!” I would remove all federal funding for every damn school that did not let the ROTC or recruitment on their campuses. That’s un-American. How in the world do they think they’re here? How do they exist? That is so ridiculous. I don’t see how they can do it. Now, as far as this immigration thing, I—Number one, the borders are closed. I mean, this is a nation of laws, and if you base your premise of being a citizen on breaking the law, get to the back of the line, buddy, then you might not get in, you know? That’s it. And the employers that’s hiring them, you’re right back there with them. And all the DSHS people that won’t ask if the people are here legally, you’re fired too. You know, geeze, people died for this. You know, I was going to tell them in my talk about the fact that in the Civil War 600,000 people died. Those are all Americans—people on both sides. 600,000. The Battle of Antietam in Virginia, 51,000 in one day. And then we’ve got all these bleeding hearts—2500 in four years in the war in Iraq. Give me a break. Geeze, we’ve got more people dying on our highways each day—7200. Throw all the cars out. They ought to get perspective, you know. Don’t get me started. It almost raises my blood pressure. Yeah, I would do the same thing, I think. All these veterans are wonderful people, you know. You just go do it.
AY: Is there anything you want to add that I didn’t cover?
PS: Take that out, would you? I’m really a nice guy.
AY: I think we’re done. Thank you.
[End of interview] [628]