Jack Thompson [ 00:06:40 ] When were you born, and where? I feel like a newcomer. I was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, January the 13th, 1922. And my mother was a supervisor for Procter & Gamble, and my father was in the construction business. And I—there's not time to tell you how I ended up in Bedford, but it's— Okay. I've been here 29 years, came in the day of the blizzard, and it's the best place I've lived. SPEAKER_1 [ 00:07:04 ] That's for sure. And the blizzard –what year was the blizzard? 1978. And that's when you came to Bedford, 1978? Jack Thompson [ 00:07:10 ] We were on our way from Champaign, Illinois. I was at the University of Illinois, and we were on our way, and it started sprinkling rain. And by the time we got to Indianapolis, it was kind of sprinkling something else. And by the time we got north of Bloomington, we couldn't see a thing, and we wondered where we were going. Never been on the road before, and it was quite an experience for us. We came for one day and stayed four. So what was the reason you were coming to Bedford? I was being interviewed for a position at one of the hospitals. It was interesting because it was a company from California that managed this department, and I was here to show interest and see if they wanted me, which they did. I was back here in two weeks working. SPEAKER_1 [ 00:07:52 ] So they didn't tell you about the blizzards that came along with it? Jack Thompson [ 00:07:55 ] I didn't know that was coming at all. It was a shock to me. SPEAKER_1 [ 00:07:57 ] It was a terrible night. It was just terrible. Yeah. And so you were up in a hotel, I guess, for a few days. Jack Thompson [ 00:08:03 ] Stayed north in Bloomington, and they got down. It was almost out of food, and of course there was practically no transportation except for the special vehicles. And people there were all going someplace else. Nobody could leave. And I think we were the first car to come south on 37 to come on to Bedford. Then we got lost. We ended up out here at the school and couldn't find the hospital I was looking for. So never having been here before, you know, snow was everywhere. The roads were just barely passable. But it was a smart move to come here. SPEAKER_1 [ 00:08:34 ] So you were here for four days. That's because you couldn't travel the roads? Jack Thompson [ 00:08:39 ] Well, we couldn't get back to Champaign-Urbana. SPEAKER_1 [ 00:08:41 ] Okay. Jack Thompson [ 00:08:43 ] So making a long story short, we established ourselves here. I spent 12 years at one hospital, a year at another, and my wife just retired after 29 years with a local hospital. So we're here to stay. Well, good. We're both retired and we're not leaving. SPEAKER_1 [ 00:09:01 ] Oh, good. We're glad you're not. Thank you. We're glad you're here. SPEAKER_1 [ 00:18:42 ] Jack, you were, did you enlist? Or did you, were you drafted? And where did you go for your basic training? Jack Thompson [ 00:18:53 ] Well, I tried to enlist the next day. I had three riders that I drove to school. And they all enlisted and were accepted. But I was involved in a guardianship situation in my home. And my mother refused to sign me. So I couldn't go then. So in July the 12th of '42, I joined the Navy. And the Navy agreed to let me finish college before they ordered me to active duty. So they kept their word. On the 7th of July in '43, I was ordered to Northwestern University to go to midshipman school. I spent four months there. And in this timeframe, though, the Navy failed to advise my draft board. I was in the Navy. So my draft board got very hectic at me. I kind of ignored it because I thought, they can't tell me what to do. I'm in the Navy. Well, they didn't know I was in the Navy. Came very close to having some situation that got out of hand. So I finally went to the Navy, and they finally notified my draft board that I was under the Navy's jurisdiction. SPEAKER_1 [ 00:19:57 ] So you were actually in the Navy, but they were still trying to draft you? Yes, yes. Okay, well, I think this is a first now. So you were getting letters of trying to, and they thought you were just ignoring them, I guess. My neighbor was chairman of the draft board. Jack Thompson [ 00:20:14 ] And he came over one day and he said, 'If you don't respond to our mail and our request, you could be in big trouble. You could go to jail.' And you were already in the Navy. I said, 'But I thought I was in the Navy.' And the Navy failed to give us anything to carry around. I went through a stop for speeding, and the policeman wondered why I wasn't in the service at my age. And I showed him this card that I had written on the back, and I was in the Naval Reserve. And he accepted that. So, I mean, it worked there. But I finally got my draft board to realize that I was not in their jurisdiction. I went on to active duty. And years later, I still, my neighbor would still say, 'You had a close call.' I said he just didn’t understand what was going on. You know, there were thousands, millions of men joining, and there was people being drafted. And I mean, it’s no wonder they kept anything straight. But they did. So, I was then went to active duty from Northwestern University to Pearl Harbor, where I was assigned to a ship. SPEAKER_1 [ 00:21:19 ] Whenever, Jack, you'd mentioned that you wanted to join the day after. Are you talking about on December 8th, 1941? Jack Thompson [ 00:21:26 ] When I went to pick up my three riders, they had me drop them off at the recruiting station in downtown Cincinnati. And I didn’t even go to school that day. I went home and told my mother that I was going to join that day. And she said, well, she had already looked into it. And I couldn't join because she was my guardian and she wouldn't let me go at that time. So, that's why I finally convinced her. It was a difficult job to convince her that the Navy would not pull me out of school because there were things that were happening that certainly made that not a fact. But they did. They kept their word. They gave me a month after I finished school to take my state exams, which I appreciated very much because if I had taken four years later, I would have forgotten everything. SPEAKER_1 [ 00:22:09 ] So, you were in college? Jack Thompson [ 00:22:11 ] Yes, I was a junior in pharmacy college in Cincinnati. SPEAKER_1 [ 00:22:15 ] Okay. And so, are you a pharmacist? Yes. Okay. Sixty years. Sixty years as a pharmacist? Yeah. And so, you were a pharmacist here in the local area? Jack Thompson [ 00:22:27 ] I was at one hospital 12 years and the other hospital for a year. Okay. And I worked for Walmart in 14 different stores for five years. And I worked in other hospitals. I think I worked in a total of 10 hospitals. SPEAKER_0 [ 00:22:41 ] Okay. Jack Thompson [ 00:22:42 ] Starting way over by Richmond, Indiana all the way down to Jasper. SPEAKER_1 [ 00:22:46 ] And you had mentioned before we started taping that you had a connection with a drugstore. This would have been in what year? Jack Thompson [ 00:22:54 ] That was in 1950. 1950. This was going on when the Korean War started. Okay, I had spent four years working for Eli Lilly and Company. Then I bought this drugstore. And then this war started. And I'm still in the reserve. I was out of the active reserve, but I was still in the Naval Reserve. And my friends in Cincinnati were being called. And I could imagine. I was married and had two children and had a drugstore; I had signed up for. I could imagine my situation and frustration and watching the mailbox, not realizing or not remembering that anything that came with orders was registered mail, so that the mail that just came was ordered to take a physical, which I mean, I began wondering, you know, what's going on? So it was a rather hectic time for me. But I did not get activated because I was in a classification that they were looking for. They were looking for qualified, what they called, deck officers. And I was a qualified, relatively young, 28 years old. But I think having the obligation of a family, which it never went to the saying, look, I own a drugstore. You're going to take me away from this. It never came to that. I think it would resonate with me. But I was invested on the family situation, having a wife and two children. I guess nobody ever explained it to me. I was in the reserve for 11 years and I was never activated. So, I mean, I was thankful for that. Right. I spent about four years on active duty in the Navy. I spent three trips overseas. First one was almost two years. The second one was six months. The third one was two days. Think about that. Two days? Two days. Now how did that happen? Well, I had command of a PGM-30, a gunboat, and we had been activated to go to Eniwetok for the bomb test. But our ship had just come back from 14 months out in the Pacific. So there was a lot of work to be done. So they hurried up and did the work and really sent us to sea with a crew that was not trained to be on a small ship. These were men off the Enterprise and off the South Dakota or whatever, not a big ship. And this man put a vat of grease on the boat. He put a stove in the galley and turned the heat on and then he left it. And we were still in the groundswell situation. We were 300 miles at sea and we took a nice big groundswell and the pot of grease boiled over and started to fire. My firing was very damaging. I mean, this fire. But the convoy turned around and escorted me back to San Francisco. That was a two-day, two-and-a-half-day trip. I counted that as being overseas. Okay. So I didn't get very far. How much damage did the fire do to the ship? Well, we severed all the power lines to the back of the ship because the fire got into the wiring. But when we severed the power lines, we cut off the power steering. I couldn't have my ship steered by one man. I had to put two men on the helm because the ship was 500 tons. I mean, we had power steering. All the aft, electrical work was out. So they had to come to the officer's galley and make sandwiches and get some coffee and things for the crew. First thing I had to do, since I didn't know who was down there, I had the men all come up on deck and counted everybody because I could have had somebody down there who had been very damaging to them. Could have lost somebody. But we had to jettison ammunition because the bulkhead got warm between the galley and the place where there was ammunition. So then we pumped so much water on the fire that we started, frayed boards start dropping down. But meanwhile, you got to realize there's seven ships in this convoy, everybody standing around wanting to help and not knowing what to do. It was quite an experience for us, really. That would have been. Yes, it was. SPEAKER_1 [ 00:38:27 ] Well, Jack, now, you're heading into the South Pacific. Jack Thompson [ 00:38:31 ] Yeah, I was past his island. SPEAKER_1 [ 00:38:33 ] Oh, you were past Marco's island? Jack Thompson [ 00:38:35 ] We took escorts up to Bougainville, and from the Solomons, the Tlaagi. And, uh, we didn't know each other, you understand. But later, we found out that he was on Green Island, and, and I was going past. Hi, Marco. Oh. No. But, mostly my, our work was patrol and escort work. We were, to, if we found any submarines, we hoped they stayed under the water, because if they surfaced, we were no match for them. Uh, they had bigger deck guns, they had greater speed. But if we could keep them under with depth charges, and then we had a thing called mousetraps, that fired missiles, like projectiles, out over the bow of the ship. Of course, we were trained every month; we had to go in and train the use of that, finding a, a sub, and then attacking it, you know what I mean? But if they, so that would have been our, our downfall, if they would have surfaced. But I was on that ship two years, and we never; I know, I never had a positive response, but, uh, we were told, from our sound gear, that there was a, a ship, that there was a, a submarine out there. Originally, we had no radar, which was very difficult to operate. I lost a ship one night. I don't mean lost it, I mean I couldn't find it. I had the twelve to four watch, and about two o'clock, it was very dark, black, dark. I mean, it was just awesome, I guess is the word. And, we had three watch, man standing watch, besides myself, on the flying bridge. Uh, and suddenly, we couldn't, no lights, and you're not allowed to break radio silence, unless you have an emergency. And, we couldn't find the ship, for an hour and a half. We could not find the ship. That was the ship we were supposed to be protecting. I could imagine them being hit, and fifty, or sixty, or seventy men, you know, being floundering in the water, attacked by a shark. And it was just about dawn, when I this ship, and us, got all separated somewhere. We did a zigzag, in front of them all the time, to look for the sub. Somehow, we zigged. And I mean as there they were, way on the horizon, about a spot like that. So we only took them out, three hundred miles from that was in the New Hebrides, Esprit de Santa. We only took them out, three hundred miles, then they could go on their way, because they could; they had better speed than we did. You have to realize, that a sub chaser, in World War II, was the identical boat, that they had in World War I. The only difference was, they sealed up the portholes. The 110 feet long, 17 feet wide, 110-ton. And you had 26 men, and three officers. And it's very compact, but they, early in the 40s, they started building these boats, in Boston. Because I mean, it didn't cost a lot, and they had been successful, I guess, in World War I. But that was our boat. It was all wood, and in a rough sea, I'd have to put my raincoat over my bunk because the water comes through the, the wood, right down. The, the ship was mainly, wood, yeah, it's all wood. It was all wood. Yeah. We had a pair of 268 diesel engines, and gave us a speed of about 12 knots, which is about 13 and a half miles per hour. And we drew about three feet of water. And our fire power was a three inch three inch gun on the bow. Later it was a 40 millimeter gun on the bow and two 20s midships, two 20 millimeter. And then on the fan tail there were two 50 calibers. And originally we had about 12 depth charges on each side. And then, we had a Y, Y gun, that would fire depth charges like that. That was our firepower, because that's the experience they'd had in World War I. Okay. But, our ship was eventually converted to a LCC, which was a landing craft control ship. But, my only hearing experience would be my sister's ship decided to fire stand away from the convoy and give the fellow something to do to fire in the drum that they put over the side. And, but they had not put on gun stops. And the man on the gun lost control and fired into the pilot house. Five projectiles. All these projectiles explode on contact. Hit 11 or 12 men, and killed one. And, they had no pharmacist. I wasn't a pharmacist mate, but my commanding officer volunteered me to go onboard that ship at sea and give first aid where I could. Then, we found the pharmacist on a mine sweep that was in our convoy. And, we spent about six hours after he was hit. There was nothing to do for him; he needed surgery. And, the sea was such that we didn't have helicopter services. And, we didn't have seaplanes that could land in a three-or four-foot sea. So then, we made the man comfortable, laid smoke, put a canopy over him on deck-it was hot. We'd just gone over across the equator. But the part that got to me was the fact that he was only 19 years old. He'd only been in the Navy about three months. And he was part support of his family back home a sister and a mother. And I mean this was negligence on the part of the Navy. Guns should have never been fired if the, they're pipes that are welded around the ship. So when I'm airplanes coming in and I start to shoot at the airplane I don't suddenly start shooting at you on another gun. It's gun stops that I call positive gun stops. They didn't put them on that ship. So this man lost control pilot house. One thing he hit, was a five-gallon bucket of paint. You ever been on a wood boat with a five-gallon bucket of gray paint, running all over? And everybody was bonanza. Everybody was-they were zombies. Everybody responded. They had no training, these guys, on this ship. We had no ice cubes. We needed some water, and the water that came out of the tap, which obviously is warm water. I had people who said that they were hit because they had blood wiped the blood off. They hadn't been hit but they'd been standing next to somebody who had been hit, and the blood squirted on them. And this guy was in pain because he had been hit. So, this was, and of course, our facilities were, you know, what we had to work with. A little ship, with a few men, and inexperienced. A civilian pharmacist, and a Navy pharmacist, is all the care that that man could have. That was a bad experience. You knew, the man was dying, then? His chin was gone. His shoulder projectile had penetrated through his rib cage, into his lung, and this is what killed him. He drowned in his own blood. There was nothing to do. There was no bandages to put on him. There was nothing else to make him comfortable. We had Syret, some morphine, and we gave him some repeated injections, so he'd stay comfortable, and he wanted to smoke. And we'd be this was on deck, and very hot. And so, we built a canopy over him on deck, and brought up a mattress from down below, so that he would be comfortable. But in the hospitals they were hit because they got the projectile when it exploded. SPEAKER_1 [ 00:45:36 ] The young man was conscious. Did he talk to you about his family? Did he want to get a message? Did he know that he was in bad shape? Jack Thompson [ 00:45:48 ] No. I don't think he knew he was going to die. And I only learned about his family by going through the commanding officer's records when he had to write a letter to about what had happened. And of course, like the boy, had been, really, hit in combat. Which, of course, wasn't true. But, you know, I know the impact on the family when you have your only son that's been lost who'd only been in the Navy a short time. SPEAKER_1 [ 00:46:15 ] The helpless feeling you must have felt then, Yeah. was something obviously if you're talking about it right now is something that still is very near to you. Jack Thompson [ 00:46:23 ] Don't think about it anymore because you go back to a situation where there's nothing you can do. There's no way we can do anything. We can break radio silence. They had already broken radio silence when they had the accident. We can break radio silence. But, I mean, we are 300 miles almost from Funafuti, which is just a coral atoll in the Ellis Islands, and it's got ships. Anything ahead there are ships as that's where we had to bury him. And, I mean, you ought to try to dig a grave on coral. I mean, see what you could do. How would you do that? Oh, I don't know, they've put in very deep at all. But, there was nobody there. There were no facilities there, they could bring to us. And, that's what we needed. This man needed to go to surgery, now. They had to get in there, and I'm not sure that they would have saved him. Having seen the gap, and realizing, little I know about anatomy, and physiology. I mean, this, where this had entered in here. I mean, I don't know, that we had surgeons, that were, adapted, doing this type of, repair. It's going to be repaired. Don't worry about the shoulder, and don't worry about the chin. It looked terrible, but, you know, we put some pads on that tape, to try to stop it bleeding. I mean, but, there was the one, right there, was nothing. We didn't have anything to put on that. That hole was that big up there. So, that was, what about, made me think I should have, joined the army. Or, something else. SPEAKER_1 [ 00:47:48 ] Did you, during that time, you, you were talking about, the nature of the ship, which, I'm learning something about that. But, I would almost, you chased the submarines, but I would almost have been, almost been afraid to find one. If they fired and hit you, you didn't have much of a chance. Jack Thompson [ 00:48:06 ] Well, you know, a torpedo would have blown us away. But, we had to, if we found one, this is what we were trained. If we found one, we weren't like a destroyer, or a big ship, that had big fire power. But, if we found a submarine, we had to keep him below the surface. That was our only chance. And, how did you keep him then, below the surface? We would drop those depth charges. Boom. Boom. Just fire pattern. Actually, we had sound gear. We'd try to make a run on him. We'd try to kill him, of course. Try to get him. But, I mean, he's moving around. And, at the very beginning, the radar would do us no good, because it's surface. Find stuff in the surface. Sound gear, which was, also in 1940, sound gear, they never updated our sound gear. It was all manual. A man sat there, and he turned it a couple degrees, until he got all the way over to zero. Zero, nine, zero. Then, he turns it a degree or two, until he gets back to 270. Then, he comes back, and let's imagine how monotonous this is. We have to change that watch, change that man on that watch, on that thing, every two hours. Then, go bananas. But, he's got to stay below the surface. I'm not saying that we wouldn't have survived, if he was a surface. But, I'm thinking that if we try to run, he can catch us. Right? They were that much quicker than right. They probably ran another four or five knots, over what we could do. If we hit him head on, and he swung these four-inch deck guns around, and they had any ability at all, they'd blow us away that way. You can't ram a metal submarine with a wood boat like this, the enemy below, this Navy picture that's been shown, with Robert Mitchum, where he has it constantly keeping the German submarine down, you know, until the German submarine surfaces. He rams it with his destroyer escort, or whatever that was. We'd have come apart. I mean, we're wood, you know. You don't have a chance. But, you live with that. And then it was a different thing to live in such combined quarters. We had 16 men in the forward compartment, eight men in the back compartment, and the officers had a little compartment that had three bunks in it. We had enough water for about five days. You could not take a shower and see. We had enough fuel for about 10 or 11 days. So, in this convoy that we took from Pearl Harbor, to Esprit, to Sano, when we were gone 25 days, every five or six days, we go alongside a sea-going tug, which is a big boat. They let us have provisions, let us have water. We have clean 55-gallon drums, that we fill before we go to sea, with a bucket on each one. If you want a shower or a bath, you got to take the bucket, and you better not take more than one bucket, because there's not that much, and of course, it only lasts a couple of days. Everybody doesn't take a shower, or a bath either, but the facilities were very limited. I mean, we had to turn off the showers. I mean, this is, you can imagine 28 men, living in a space, 17 feet wide, and 110 feet long. One deck down, everything is below deck, except driving the boat, and the men who do the lookouts, the watch, and everything. 17 feet wide is not very wide. No. No, that's right. If you're going in rough sea, you are in rough sea, because this thing, if you go into the sea, and I'd get sick as a dog. Going into the sea, I just get terrible. Now, if you turn, and then the other guys get sick, this is ridiculous, I know, but I don't get sick if the boat just rolls. There's something about that. You can't see anything. Yeah. You can't see anything if you're up on watch. It's great if you stay on watch, but you can't see anything, particularly at night, if the sea is so cold. The sea is, I've seen seas that were 15 feet. Well, that means that the waves are where I'm sitting on my flying bridge. I'm in the trough, but up here, that's the water. I can almost reach over. Took a, like a Sonics coffee maker that we had, similar to that, but before that time. Took that out of the holder, and across the compartment into the bulkhead. I mean, it was a harrowing experience. My next ship was the one I had command of, was much bigger. Jack Thompson [ 00:52:27 ] I thought, how did I get into this? My dad was in the Navy. My cousin was in the Navy. I thought I should be in the Navy. The Navy treated me nice. But this was, we had people that could not stay on the ship. We had men that we had to transfer off the ship, because they could not take the proximity of living. You have to get along. If I bump you, you're not, knock me down. You really have a type of situation. And when you tell a fellow, you're gonna take a bath, you take it out of that barrel with that bucket. Well, I never took a bath in public before. Well, then you're not gonna take a bath. And if you're at sea very long, your friends may decide to leave you if you don't take a bath, because the heat; we were going across the equator, and the heat was intense. You know, we had a lot of humidity. But, the only advantage, if there was an advantage to me, was I was trained to do every job on this little ship. Because there's only three officers. Four hours, and you're off eight. There's only three officers. So, when I left there, I was qualified to do things that, if I'd been on a bigger ship, I never would have done. You know, I was qualified for navigation. I was qualified for command. Dealing with the guys, evaluating other men. We had a one of us was a training officer. I don't know what good it did me in civilian life. It made me glad I was a civilian. And I thought about that in 1950, if I went back, I probably would go to a larger ship, because I had moved up a little bit. SPEAKER_1 [ 00:53:54 ] Did your, the one you had command of, did that ship have a name? Jack Thompson [ 00:53:57 ] No, it was a PGM-30. PTMPG. SPEAKER_1 [ 00:54:01 ] PG. Jack Thompson [ 00:54:01 ] Patrol, gun, boat. It was a patrol, PG, motorized. Patrol, gun, motorized. And it was 179 feet long, 490 tons. We had 70 men on that ship. And we did patrol. We did offshore support of landing. And we did assisted in mine sweeping. And we would destroy them. We did, we destroyed 400 mines out in the East China Sea, I think it was. But that ship was more a ship for the war that we were in, not a little wood boat that we brought around on. And people couldn't believe, how did that, I said to this fellow, how did that boat get over here? He said, what do you mean? It's not a boat, it's a ship. How'd it get over here? What do you mean? I said, it was built in Quincy Adams Yard in Boston. Did they bring it here on another ship? We all got on it and we drove it over. We drove down through the canal up to San Diego and drove. And we did patrol at Hilo. And we did patrol in the Solomons. And we did patrol in Esprit de Sando. We did patrol in Okinawa. We went all over. The thing was still running at the end of the war. That was a good ship. SPEAKER_0 [ 00:55:10 ] A wooden boat. Jack Thompson [ 00:55:11 ] Yeah, a wooden. Good wood boat. Ship. Yeah. Jack Thompson [ 00:57:15 ] Did you get homesick? I'd never been away from home; I went to college and lived at home. My total life, I'd been to Boys State for ten days. It's the only time I'd ever been away from home. It was very difficult for me to; I was not married and my family was very small. My mother, my dad, and myself, and they were both in the world at the time I went. So I got a lot of mail from home. I got a lot of packages from home. But I was thinking of the first letter I wrote to be sent to my mother when I told her what a horrible place this was and told her how bad this ship was and how I wondered what I did to get in the Navy. Well, officers have honor censorship. In other words, I write the letter and you put their censorship name on it, and then it goes out unless you suspect something. My commanding officer on that ship was much older. He was almost 40, I think. And he was an attorney and had been all around the world this type of thing. And when I got done with that letter, he said, Jack, who are you writing to? I said, my mom and dad. He said, can I read the letter? I said, yeah. He picked the letter up and he read it and he said, would you like to rewrite that, Jack? I said, what do you mean? He said, I think just I don't want to get into a discussion with you but would you like to rewrite that letter and then I'll censor it and I won't even look at it? I said, well, I guess so. I said, you mean I shouldn't have? He said, they got their own moral problems. You're homesick but they got their own problems. They got their only son way off in the war someplace. They don't know that the next letter is going to be from him or from the war department. Now write him a nice letter. SPEAKER_1 [ 00:58:56 ] Tell him about being in Hawaii, this was on Honolulu, this is going to learn that same lesson. I never thought about that. Don't tell them what it's like. Jack Thompson [ 00:59:11 ] Tell them what they want to hear. That's about what it boils down to. I learned for the rest of my time even though I had the honor of writing and nobody reading it, I never wrote anything like location or anything like the accident. I wouldn't tell anybody about the accident on that other ship because then what does that do? That makes them worry about what if that happens and they're protected from that. That's such a good point. Yes, I got homesick. I got homesick when I was at Northwestern in Chicago. I was only 200 miles away from home. SPEAKER_1 [ 00:59:46 ] So Bedford looked pretty good when you guys got back. Oh, yeah. Jack Thompson [ 01:01:57 ] Jack, same question. I think the friendships that I developed that are still in existence are one of the things that's carried over. You know, we can talk about it. I feel like, I don't know if you remember Barney Ross the Fighter or not, but when Barney Ross the Fighter arrived in San Francisco, he'd been a Marine, he stooped down and he kissed the ground. I was on the first shipload of troops to come from the forward area when World War II ended, when Truman had declared that weekend. And I almost felt the same emotion because as Fred pointed out, there's no place like America. I mean, I was in Japan and saw how the destruction and saw the way that people your loved ones are safe. And you know that you can, you can drive from Ohio to Indiana to Illinois and you don't have to get out of your car and be searched and this type of thing or have social papers, I don't think. But I mean, I just think that most of the men who came back had a different appreciation of what what we have here. And I also think that we're disappointed that what has happened since. In other words, the number of fights we've been involved in, I mean, I just didn't think it would ever happen again. I mean, not criticizing who made these decisions, but suddenly it becomes these are endless things that keep going on and keep going on. You know, Vietnam kept going on and Korea. And I mean, we thought that when that September day came in 1945 and he said, that's the V-Day, it's over. We're not going to have any more of this. Our kids and our grandchildren are not going to be going off to war and getting in situations that I think are almost indefensible. You know what I mean? I just feel like it's a combination of different things. But I talk every 10 days to a man out there, and I'm glad I was in the service with, 1943. Still, he lives in Fort Thomas, Kentucky. We talk every 10 days or two weeks. And he'll call me and say, 'This is another anniversary, Thompson. This is the day we went to the Navy, when we went to the service.' That type of thing. You know, of course we talk about stuff today, but this is something that you can't take away from me. I mean, you can, but it would be a very final thing. So it's an experience that I'm glad I went. My father was an invalid from the first war, being in the service. I had three cousins die in World War II. But I still felt that blinds you. I mean, you go, you do your thing, if you can. If you don't want to go, you don't go. That's it.