My family join us for our next International Moth mainstage on Saturday, December 12th, at seven, fifteen p.m. GMT plus one, you won't want to miss it. Get your tickets at the Mostaghim International Mainstage. From PUREX, this is the Moth Radio Hour. I'm Sarah Austin, Jinnah's from The Moth and I'll be your host this time.

This episode is devoted to American veterans.

The four stories you'll hear in this hour from the battlefield and behind the front lines, we're told, live at the Moth without notes in theaters across our country, a soldier and his family cling to routine during wartime.

A female pilot and an African-American Marine remember World War two.

And our first storyteller, Mike Scotti, battles postwar darkness after serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. Mike told the story in Albany, New York, at Ammonite. We produced with public radio station WAMC a word of caution. The story includes frank descriptions of the effects of combat. Here's Mike Scotti live at the. So I can still remember the sound of the front door slamming behind me in my old apartment, it's a small studio in New York City. And I remember I had just gotten home from a run and I threw my keys up on the counter and they slid across and they ran into my BlackBerry, which just happened to be ringing at that moment.

And at this point in my life, I'd been home from the war in Iraq for about a year and a half.

Things were starting to feel a little bit more normal.

I was in grad school. I felt good that day because of the run.

But when I saw the name on the ID, on the BlackBerry, my heart.

Dropped because it was my old training officer from the Marine Corps, and in the year and a half that I'd been home, I learned that when somebody from the Marines calls you during the week, especially while it's still light out, it means that somebody that I knew was dead. So, you know, a few seconds later, my fears were confirmed and the tears were falling and. You know, that was. The reality I'd lost another brother and it wouldn't be.

The last. Now, I joined the Marine Corps because I wanted to defend my country. I wanted to earn the title of United States Marine One to see if I had what it took. After September 11th, obviously, everything changed. I'd been in for a few years at that point, I was a first lieutenant and I lost two friends in the World Trade Center, Beth Quigley and Peter Apollo.

And I would think about. How they died. They died violently on some random day at work. They're trying to earn a living. And so I knew that I would do whatever it took to help find those weapons of mass destruction, I would do whatever it took to make sure that nothing like that ever happened again on U.S. soil. And that was something I was willing to fight for and I was certainly willing to die for.

Now, my job in the Marine Corps specifically was that of artillery forward observer, and I would call in over the radio the enemy's position and be up front with the infantry.

And I call in those enemy positions to the artillery units who were parked behind us, and they would shoot these large barrages of these shells on the enemy.

If they missed, I would make a correction over the radio.

Now, these shells are big, they're heavy the way over 100 pounds each.

They're made of high explosive and steel and iron and they're designed to burst into large pieces of shrapnel.

Each piece can be up to the size of a man's arm. And each piece is very dense and heavy, like like a crowbar, but jagged.

And you know, these things, when they blow up, they the shrapnel covers an area the size of a football field and that's for one round.

And we'd shoot, you know, 50 or 100 of these things in the same area to just obliterate everything. So that was my job. I would call it the shrapnel onto, you know, people.

And I can remember very quickly understanding what that meant in Iraq from seeing all of the the dead bodies on the sides of the roads as as we drove along, we'd hit an area and then drive through it.

And I can remember the bodies would be in these very unnatural positions and their eyes would have many times turned this very deep black and their mouths would be open. And I thought I could see the looks of pain on many of their faces.

And unfortunately, sometimes they were the faces of children who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

And those faces, they stay with me.

So I realized quickly that once all the politics have been stripped away for those who are fighting it and those who are caught in the middle of it, war is nothing more than a slaughter.

And it is filled with things like chaos and hesitation and uncertainty and fear, there's fear that you are going to.

Make a mistake and get your friends killed. There's fear that there are other human beings out there who are trying to kill you. There's fear that you could be maimed or wounded or burned.

And there are things like chaos, the chaos, like the day that we finally made it to Baghdad and we transitioned from fighting in the countryside where if you could see it, you could kill it to fighting in a city where you couldn't see more than across the street or maybe half a block.

And it was. It was chaos and your radios wouldn't work so well because the the buildings block the signal and you had 1500 Marines assigned to 80 square blocks and you're all trying not to shoot each other because the is in between you and you've got another fifteen hundred Marines on your left and on your right.

And the bullets would, you know, snap through the air and you wouldn't know where they'd be coming from. And I remember that every time a Marine would get killed.

None of us would look each other in the eye for a little while, you know, the guys in my vehicle, because it was all just becoming a little bit too much. We hadn't slept in two or three days and nights and. I remember I looked to the West, just happened to be looking to the west one instant and I saw a very large artillery barrage land on the edge of our battalion's position. And I knew, by the way, that it landed that it was U.S. artillery and I knew what was happening in that instant.

We had just hit our brothers with our own fire.

So I picked up the radio and I screamed, check firing, check firing. And I shut down all of the artillery in Iraq that the Marines were shooting for a few minutes because I had no time to figure out what was happening. And I knew the next barrage was going to land directly on us. And it would it hit one Marine and it took out a few of his organs and him through the abdomen. The next one would have been a lot worse.

I remember slamming the radio handset down and being angry, shaking my head because it shot and somebody had shot towards and without permission. And I realized that. In a war, the difference between life and death can be a few millimeters here or there a few seconds, or the fact that one tired Marine happened to be looking in the right direction at the right moment. And I thought to myself, you know, shook my head. I said, this all better be worth it, because we've been fighting for months and we haven't found any weapons of mass destruction.

So when I came home, there was a day that sticks in my mind, it was November, I'd been home for about a year. I was driving from Manhattan out to Long Island, I had a fresh haircut, my dress uniform was very neatly pressed and I was on my way to be the pallbearer. And yet another Marine's funeral, this Marine's name was Lieutenant Matt Lynch.

And his older brother, Tim had called me and asked me to carry his little brother's coffin. Tim and I had served in Afghanistan together. I can remember carrying. Mats, coffin with my white gloved hand. And gripping the rails. Very tightly, the rail that runs along the edge of the coffin, because I didn't want to drop it. And I remember a few minutes later trying not to wince as the rifles went off, as they gave Matt his final salute in front of his loved ones, because it was the first time that I'd heard gunfire since the war.

And later that evening, I sat in the. At the bar in the main meeting in Long Island, and I just drank and drank beer after beer and the tears came and I didn't care who saw him, I was still wearing my dress blues because at that point, I. Had just given up on ever finding, you know, any hope of finding weapons of mass destruction. And I was searching for meaning in the deaths of men like Lieutenant Matt Lynch and others that had lost.

And I couldn't find any. And as a warrior. My belief system began to unravel. And that took me to a very, very dark place. I took me to the edge of the abyss and I stood there looking in and I remember wondering whether or not I was going to just jump off.

Whether or not wondering whether or not suicide for me was going to be the way to go. And what have these conversations with myself, like whether I should make it look like an accident and, you know, go for a run in New York City one day right into the path of a bus? Or should I make a spectacle of the whole thing and take a flight to San Francisco, do a swan dive or something off of the Golden Gate Bridge, just like the first person to ever kill themselves there, that was a veteran from World War One.

And then I thought about my mom and dad and what it would do to them if I went through with it. And I knew that I just couldn't do it. I knew that I had to survive for them. So I started talking, I started listening, started reading in and opening up a little bit, getting out there. And the Marine Corps, you know, the first thing that I realized was that there were a lot of other veterans my age who felt the same way.

And then I realized that even the Marine Corps knew that I had a problem on its hands.

And they needed to help do something to stop the few and the proud trained killers from killing ourselves because we were doing it in record numbers. And the Marine Corps put out this video that was on their website and had a bunch of colonels and generals on there and high ranking sergeants talking about how they struggle about the war, you know, after the war.

And about halfway through the video, this woman comes on and she's a Navy psychiatrist and she had served in Fallujah on the front lines with the Marines, you know, helping them out and talk to them as they came off the line. And she had struggles. She talked about her struggle. And she looked into the camera and she said, it's OK. To be angry. It's OK, Marine, to be sad. It's OK if you're not OK.

And I remember those words, they hit me like a train. Because I'd never heard words like that before and never occurred to me. And they were exactly the words that I needed to hear at that moment. Because the Marine Corps teaches you that vulnerability is weakness, because in war, vulnerability is weakness, because the enemy will exploit that vulnerability and kill you and all of your men. But when you come home, vulnerability is the one thing that will allow you to survive, it will allow you to take those demons that are inside of you and drag them from the darkness out into the light and they cannot survive there.

That cannot hurt you there. So now I no longer search for meaning in the war or in the deaths of these beautiful human beings, these Marines and soldiers. I find meaning in helping fellow veterans and allowing other veterans to help me, because that's what we do. We take care of each other just like we did in the war. So now when the phone rings, it's not 3:00 p.m. on a Tuesday. You know, with the news that someone's been killed, it's 3:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning and a body is calling because he's upset, maybe he's had a little bit too much to drink and he's angry or he's sad or both.

Because his demons are eating him alive and I say to him, I love you, brother. Lay it on me. And then we talk and then we talk some more and I listen. And before we say goodbye, I always say. No matter what happened over there or no matter what's happening to you right now or no matter what will happen later on down the line, one thing is for certain.

And that's it's OK that you're not OK. That was Mike Scottie. Mike is the author of The Blue Cascade, A Memoir of Life after War as a former U.S. Marine and veteran of both Iraq and Afghanistan. Mike is also a founding board member of the military charity Reserve Aid. We talked to Mike after he told his story, telling my story up.

There was a very, I think, cleansing experience and enlightening it almost the way the friendships that you make in the military, especially in kind of like combat units where you're training for something that is going to put all of you into harm's way together. And you're relying on each other from a from a survival standpoint that forges a very, very deep and solid friendship. That is it's different than than most people would experience. So it really, really is a brotherhood and it spans generations.

You know, if somebody comes up to me and tells me they're a Vietnam War vet and I can see it in their eyes, they've been through some things. There's just a trust that's there.

And, you know you know that person that well. It's kind of a baseline level of of of appreciation for each other. That was Mike Scotti to see photographs and find out more about all of our storytellers, go to the mall thag. Coming up next, a story from 97 year old World War Two veteran Dawn Seymour, who is a women's Air Force Service pilot, also known as a WASP.

The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and presented by PRICK'S. This is the Moth Radio Hour from PUREX, I'm Sarah Austin. Janez, World War Two vets are becoming rare and we produced a moth night dedicated to the greatest generation to help preserve their stories. Dawn Seymour, our next storyteller, was a pilot and military aircraft instructor in World War Two. She was with the Women's Airforce Service Pilots known as WASPs, flying by seventeens and training men to go to war.

The night Don told her story was only a few days shy of the 75th anniversary of her first flight on stage. She wore her blue and white wasp scarf and her silver wings on the lapel of her blazer. Our host that night, Ophira Eisenberg, welcomed Dawn to the stage like this.

Now your next storyteller, usually people, when they come and tell stories on the main stage, they stand. But our next story teller is 97 years old. And when you are 97 years old, you can do whatever you want.

In 1939, I was 22 years old, straight as an arrow, and I was newly graduated from Cornell University.

And we did many things, but as part of an experiment, I was a research subject, and one day our leader said to me, his name is Dr. Richard Parmenter.

He said, I am going to be the new director of flight research at Cornell, the under the CVT civilian pilot training course, under the CAA, a federal program, and one in 10 can be a girl, he said, and you can learn to fly.

And I said to him, Dr. Dick, I've never been an airplane.

He said, Well, let's go drive down to the airport in a yellow cab.

Piper Cub on a beautiful October day, October 16th.

He took me up into this absolutely wonderful new world of sky and land below. And the air was full of sun beams.

The land below was clean and borderless.

And the lake, the Blue Lake of Key, the water which extended to the north and and beyond, was a circle of land meeting sky and I was just overwhelmed with the beauty of it, the earth and the sky and signed up right away was chosen.

And I spent the next few months learning how to the fundamentals of life. And that is important.

In May 1940, I received a private pilot certificate, and that would allow me to take up passengers, I only had lost about 40 hours how they dared go up, but they did.

And so I live with this wonderful new experience.

Now, 1941, December came along quickly and and after Congress declared war, everyone able bodied was needed in the war effort and everybody needed training.

And there was a flurry in America, an excitement, a determination to fight this new enemy. What we do, the enemy was there, but it made to fight.

And to produce aircraft and to train men and Jacqueline Cochran, who is a famous American woman pilot, had a program in mind that she sold General Hap Arnold and then the program she would train women pilots the same exact way that the male pilots were trained and have a supply of women who could then go out and do the housekeeping jobs in America, the training and the ferrying and so forth.

And she sold this because we were very short of pilots and they were needed desperately as the planes were being produced in the factories.

And I wanted to be near as I could do the fighting war, and I applied for her program and was accepted and I found my way to Sweetwater, Texas, 200 miles west of Fort Worth, and met my classmates have a class of 45. There were 18 classes all together.

So it was an early bird and learned to fly primary basic and advanced in our last few months of training. Ten days before we graduate, I graduated my best friend, my buddy Peggy SCIP was killed with her instructor and a fellow West pilot and Joe Syverson, and no reason was given for the accident. There was no ceremony held, they just disappeared and it was a heart wrenching event and Peggy had left the garden, the only garden anyone had ever grown had in Sweetwater, Texas, and she planted seeds in the hard Texas soil in the hot Texas sun.

And it bloomed on our graduation day.

Jacqueline Cochran came to give us her wings and presented them to me, think me and wish me well. I was pleased because I had won my wings.

More training came into the picture and I was sent to the Rockburn Army Air Base in Columbus, Ohio, and here, to my astonishment, were over a hundred and eighty bees.

Seventeen's, Boeing Bee Seventeens, Flying Fortresses, the big four engine plane that was flying raids in over Germany with the 8th Air Force and the new CEO of our squadron, Major Freddie Wilson, had received a telegram only two days before and said expect 70 women pilots for training.

And he said, My God, I got to deal with these. I have a bad strike. I don't know anything about women.

And so it was my first very first ride in the be 17.

I'm in the lefse, the instructors in the right seat. This is Lieutenant Logue. Mitchell later became good friends. Number three engine caught fire.

And before we knew it, he'd give me orders and I knew enough to win with the two of us to the fire was out and I said, Oh, my goodness, this is the plane for me.

And it was exciting time because the pilots are returning from their 25 missions and in Germany and they came back and they would tell us about the real war and the real war was tough.

Then my orders set me down to Florida Buckingham Army Airfield. And here we were asked. Ordered to fly the plane to be 17 again with student gunners and their instructor on board, and the mission was to train the gunners to fire at a moving target from a moving platform. And this was a routine that we did day after day morning, this day, afternoon, the next day.

And it was glorious because some days the sky, the clouds and the sea itself would melt and there'd be no horizon. And this is when you had to trust your instruments to fly straight and level.

This lasted for the rest of the time I was in the service and in December. Forty four, while the Battle of the Bulge was going on and the war in Japan was not over, hardly started.

We had a letter from Hap Arnold General have Arnold saying that our program was going to be canceled, terminated.

Congress had not appropriated the funds.

It was a blow here, we thought we were doing a good job.

We felt the war was over and the message we received was, girls, go home, we don't need you anymore.

So we packed up those ceremonies. No, just farewells to our friends and the base and off we went to new lives. Eight years later, 30 years later, after all of the civil rights acts and so forth, they were women military pilots and they were allowed in the Navy and the Army Reserves.

We went into the academy in 1976 for the very first time.

And I thought of of Peggy Sipes garden and the seeds that were planted, I think perhaps that took 30 years, but yet women had persevered and were accepted by our military women pilots. We were volunteers coming in and we were volunteers going out. And our motto was, we live in the wind, in the sand, and her eyes are on the stars.

That was Don Seymour after telling her story, Don got a standing ovation from the audience in 1977, three decades after the WASP program was terminated, Don and the other female pilots were finally recognized as veterans.

Their instructor, Lieutenant Logue Mitchell, wrote a letter to Congress in support of his WASP students. Here's Don reading from that letter. How did they do?

I won't say superior because I don't remember any student. I read it super. I did read them great. Great, because they were dedicated, motivated and determined. They were just plain worked harder than any class of men I ever instructed. To me, they were and still are fellow military pilots and veterans in every respect. Anything short of full recognition of these women by our elected leaders will, by my standards, disgrace this nation. Today, there is frequent mention of women in combat.

I am convinced that any or all of the six I trained would have gone if asked. I would have led or filed as required, and I would not have worried about their performance. Respectfully, Lord Mitchell. Don and the rest of the women Air Force Service pilots were awarded Congressional Gold medals in 2009.

Since the time that this episode first aired, Don Seymour has passed away. She left this world 17 days after her one hundredth birthday. She was a business executive, mother of five, grandmother of eight and author of In Memoriam, honoring the 38 women pilots who gave their lives in World War Two to see photos of dawn flying a B 17 and to hear an interview with Dawn and her math director, Catherine McCarthy, go to the morgue. Next, a story from an Ann Arbor Grandslam, we partner with Michigan Radio to make this open mic series happen.

And the story you're about to hear is Bill Krieger, who is a company commander in the Iraq war. Here's Bill live at the moment. So I remember reading somewhere that routines are good for children, they help them develop, they're good for their self-esteem, and they can help them through troubling times.

And I would have to agree with that, but I think some of the best routines are the ones that we find by accident, and that's sort of the way it is with me and my two daughters, MacKenna, my oldest, Caroline, my youngest. You see, every night since they've been very little, I took them in in bed before I go to bed myself. In the way it works is I go to my oldest daughter, McKenna's room, and I give her a kiss on the forehead and I give her a nice tight hug.

And I took her in and I tell her that I love her and that I'll see her in the morning. And then I close her door and they go across the hallway to my youngest daughter room.

Daughter's room, Caroline. And I give her a kiss on the forehead and I give her a big hug and I tell her that I love her and she looks at me and says, I love you more. And I say, no, you don't. I love you more.

And she says, You're right, Dad, you do. And then I say, well, I'll see you in the morning, and she says, not if I see you first. I don't know if you're seeing a theme here. She's kind of a smartass.

And as I leave her room and close her door, she'll always say, close the door just a little bit and she'll laugh and I'll pop my head back in and say, don't tell me how to close the door.

I know what I'm doing. I know how to close the door just a little bit. We have a good laugh and I go off to bed. And so that is our routine, and in the summer of 2006, I was called to active duty. To serve in Iraq. And I had about two months to get everyone ready for this, and when I say get everyone ready, I was the company commander, so I had that responsibility. Of making sure everyone had the equipment they needed in the training they needed and that their families would be taken care of while we were gone.

And the days were long, sometimes 20 hours, and every night at nine o'clock, I had to go to this meeting and so I would get in my car and I drive 30 minutes to this meeting and I would get out of my car and go to the building and climb up to the second floor where I would tuck my children in at night. Because that was the most important thing I had to do every night to maybe make sure they were shielded from some of the reality that we were about to face as a family.

And I remember the night before I left for Iraq. I went to my oldest daughter, McKenna's room, and I kissed her on the forehead and I gave her an extra tight squeeze and I told her I loved her and that I would see her in the morning. And I closed her door. And I went across the hall to Caroline's room. And I gave her a kiss on the forehead. And I told her that I loved her and she just sort of stared at me and then I said, I'll see you in the morning.

And she just sort of stared at me and as I walked out of her room and began to close her door. She didn't say anything, and so I turned around. And I said, honey, is everything OK? And she said, Yeah, Daddy, everything's OK. And I asked her what she was doing, and she told me that she was staring at me and I said, well, I get it, you're staring at me, but why are you doing that?

She said, Because, Daddy, I want to burn you into my brain so that if you don't come home, I won't forget what you look like.

It was all I could do to hold it together in that room and give her another kiss and walk out into the hallway. You see, for all the parenting and all the shielding and all the routines that we had. She got it, that little six year old blonde headed girl got it and she knew what we were facing as a family.

And the next day we got up very early in the morning and we had a breakfast together and we hugged and we kissed and we laughed and we cried. And I walked out that front door and began my journey, which would be about 18 months, 18 months away from my family, 18 months of no hugs, no kisses, 18 months of not tucking anyone into bed. Because I will tell you from experience, soldiers do not like to be tucked into bed.

Plug it in in the fall of 2007, I returned home, I returned home to my family and I returned home to my routine of tucking my children in before I went to bed. And I can tell you that I learned a lot from these experiences, I learned that routines are very important for children. It gives them stability. It helps them through tough times, but they're also important for us adults, and I can tell you one thing that I know beyond the shadow of a doubt, and that's how to close the door just a little bit.

Bill Krieger was a military police company commander stationed in Mosul, Iraq. He was a first lieutenant at the time to see a photo of Bill and his family go to the mall, dawg.

After our break, another story from the Greatest Generation, a 90 year old World War Two vet tells us of the all black 93 infantry and their service in the South Pacific. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and presented by the Public Radio Exchange Pyrex Dog.

I'm Sarah Austin Janez, and you're listening to The Moth Radio Hour. Our next storyteller, William Cole, served in the 93 Infantry Division in African-American segregated unit of the Army in World War Two. Here's William Cohen live at The Man. I'll start in Fairbanks Morris in Beloit, Wisconsin.

It was a diesel plant that made submarines during the war and I happened to be privileged to be working there in the kitchen washing pots and pans.

And one of the naval officers came through one day and told me, he said, Willy, would you like to be deferred, not have to go into the war. War is just getting hot. And I said, well, I didn't think it would drag me right away, you know, hell no, I don't want this job is nothing. Why would I want to be deferred and stay here? And it surprised me that was in September. January, that was September of 42, 1942, January 43, I was at Fort I mean, Camp Custer not excuse me, at Fort Wheeler and I've got it all wrong now.

I was at Camp McCoy, Wisconsin, and that camp is in the middle of Wisconsin. And not very many black soldiers live up in that area.

And as a matter of fact, where I lived up from Beloit, Wisconsin, there's not too many black people there at that time.

And I went to the schools were all integrated and everything. I knew anything about prejudice or segregation, all that type of thing. But when I got to Camp McCoy, it was two or three blacks in that group and we went to Camp Custer, Michigan. When we got there, the group got blacker and blacker.

And then from there we went to Camp Wheeler, Georgia, and that was a training camp to get soldiers ready in a hurry.

I don't know if you know it, but World War to the American soldiers were trained in 13 weeks and they had to learn what let's get put before them. If they didn't, the instructor would tell you, if you don't pass, you know what's going to happen. Don't you know what, sir?

You're going to be dead in a little while because this is for keeps. You got to learn these things.

Well, so happened that I was sent to camp. We leave Georgia and we had a black army career man was there. They call him Iron Jaw. He must have been 65 years old or so, but he was training troops. And he when we came in, he said, well, I want to tell you fellows something. They think that you're not fit to serve in the Army. That because most of your cotton pickers and farmers and you don't know anything about anything but milking cows and plough and horses, and we're going to make a liar out of them, I'm going to tell you how to use a rifle and how to use other instruments that are not rifles.

Anything that you have in your hand, you want to be able to kill with it because you got a very capable enemy that we're fighting up against.

They're well-trained in most of their privates, has as much education as our West Point man that scared us to death being black and not having gone to universities and schools.

And so was the most of us. And this is a terrible dilemma to be set into. We were like, I'll make iron jaws out of all of you. We got through our training and the next thing I knew, he was in Guadalcanal, the Guadalcanal. A lot of American boys died there. There's a Wisconsin division known as the 30 Second. When we got down there, the Wisconsin division was there to train us and break us into doing jungle warfare.

And I was very proud of them.

I was from Wisconsin and by the time we got to Guadalcanal, we had been well trained by this iron jaw. This black man and its owners had touch.

He taught me how to shoot a browning automatic running at top speed from the hip, and you could hit a bushel basket 50 yards away.

And he said, you have to be able to be an expert with your weapon, otherwise you're going to die.

And also with a knife trench, now you can throw the knife or you could do close hand-to-hand fighting with it and come out on top. This is a type of all the men had trained that. But then when we got down there, we were surprised that the jungle warfare was something that we were not used to, certainly. But the main thing that surprised us, we went down there and these were imperial Marines. Have you ever heard the expression Imperial Marines?

The Imperial Marine is about six foot tall. They have one of them, a very able adversary in any man's army. And this is the type of people we came up against. Well. At the time, I was my mother got a letter that I was missing in action, I had been missing in action that had been detailed to a group that was going up into the hills and spy on the Japanese because they had had a colonel down there, was making fools of the American army.

His tactics and so forth, was just befuddled everybody. And what was happening was going on. So we have to we have to find out what's going on. So we observed from the hilltops and we found out that the airplane that was reading us every night or every two or three nights and disappearing into nowhere was coming out of a mountain. And they had a mountain that they had put up a plane on a boxcar, a flat flatcar, and it was on hydraulic pulleys.

And it all come out to the front and the plane would take off and then they shut it up again, a pool of hell. And it was like a mountain that hadn't been disturbed. And that's how he when he got through it, is striving in for a bomb. And he would go back there and close the mountain up and look, it was nothing there. When we found out that and we reported that back to the headquarters, they took that mountain out.

There's no more of that type of stuff.

But then when we came back down out of the mountain, that's the first time and I got fired on was crossing a little hill and down a little river to a little creek. Wasn't a river, was a small creek running across. I thought we got about knee deep in the water and machine gun fire opened up 50 caliber machine guns. CROSSFIRE that's when I thought I was going to meet my maker. One bullet hit on this side between my legs on another side didn't hit me.

We went and took cover and called back down for support and they dropped mortars all over the top of the hill. When we went over there, it was nothing there but split up, cut up and charred corpses. And that's the first time I had a close call.

I said, that's the time. And my mother must have been praying for me. And God answered her prayer because I was not a Christian. I didn't know anything much about God or anything then. But I was so thankful that I had a mother praying for me at home. Then we have to find this colonel's doing all this dirt to us. His name was Colonel Luchi. And we had a bunch of young black boys had been highly trained by Iron Jaw, and they said the only way we can get him without him killing himself, we'll have to go into his camp and take him by hand without firing a shot.

We have to use trench knives and get to him and kill him so we can bring him back untouched. And they did just that. And they caught him in his sleep and they brought him out with his hands tired and his feet tied in the proposal and brought him out to the headquarters was in perfect shape and they were able to interrogate him. So forth was shortly after that we were back in the of scrimmage, went down. You would have a brief recess.

We'd go back and we'd have American entertainers come over and USO girls, you heard of them, they'd come over and he was entertaining us and tell us all the grand things that were back in the States and singing to us. And so when all of a sudden the latest loudspeakers opened up.

So we have a special announcement to make with what in the world could this be? The war is over. Japan has surrendered. They dropped a bomb on them and they surrendered unconditional surrender. You boys will be going home soon. And we were so happy and the girls jumped off the stage in the middle of the soldiers and just had a time there.

And then I got back home.

I got back home to Pittsburgh, California, and we marched down pizza disembarkation area where we were sent back to our homes. And that and it was so wonderful to see the these American girls, big, tall King-Size girls we had not used to.

And this was America, which we like kissing the ground that America was on because everything was so it looked like going to heaven there. And when we got back to our hometown and so forth, we had our G.I. bills and all that. All these things had come along. And I went to Rockford, Illinois, to get a home and I got a surprise. There's a new you people can't have a good by here. We don't have we'll find your place, but you can't buy here.

I was so disappointed.

I saw Gladiator and fought for the country and come back. And here they saw this type of stuff in my face a long time before I bought a home or so discouraged with that. But I'm just so proud to be an American soldier and I'm glad that I did what I did and came back to the United States. And it's the best country in the world.

That was William Cohen. He lives in Racine, Wisconsin, near his son Ivan, who is also a veteran. Recently, I spoke to William about his story.

You told me at one point that you were very proud of the other men in the 1930s.

Oh, yeah, I was proud of them. Were they? They fought valiantly and they were glad to fight for the country. I come back home and nobody knew anything about us being in combat. And that was kind of a letdown for me. I didn't I didn't appreciate, you know, not. No way. No.

Do you remember seeing your mom for the very first time in the war?

She I came I came home at midnight and I and then when I got got to Beloit on the bus, I took my duffel bag and I walked about a mile to the house because nothing was running that time of night. I knocked on the door and there she was. And she was just as happy as she could be. And she couldn't believe her eyes, you know, because then she was an old woman. Then she was only in her 50s.

I guess she was just beside herself. It was joy that I was home. And so we just had a grand time after that.

That was World War Two veteran William Cole. Are you a veteran with a story you'd like to tell anyone can call and pitches a personal story by recording it right on our site or call 877 799 MOTHE. That's 877 799 six six eight for the best. Pitches are developed for math shows all around the world. You can share these stories or others from the Moth archive through our Web site, The Morgue. We're also on Facebook and Twitter at The Moth.

That's it for this episode of The Moth Radio Hour. We hope you'll join us next time. And that's the story from The Moth. This Moth Radio Hour veteran special was supported by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, your host for the hour with Sarah Austin Ginés. Sarah also directed the stories in the show, along with Meg Bolls, Jennifer Hickson and Catherine McCarthy.

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