Interviews

Talking to people is, by far, the most interesting thing about my job. Thanks to the large military presence, both active and retired, in this area, my best interviews often center around warfare. Yesterday was no different as I talked to two WWII vets for a rushed story on Pearl Harbor Remebrance Day.

There were all kinds of nuggets in the lengthy conversations, such as:

It was unbelievable to me that the Japanese would do something like this. And little did I know that I would be in the middle of it in a few years. (Mr. Keifer Marshall, who would go on to become a Marine and a mayor of Temple, was 16 in 1941.)

A lot of people thought it wasn’t going to last long. We’d just go over there and subdue that country real quick. But it took a mightly long time.

Whenever I do long features I rely entirely on a tape recorder, the better to facilitate conversation. I’ve noticed two things from listening to these tapes after the fact.

The first is that natural speech rarely translates into picturesque prose. (When it does, however, it is easily the most powerful tool a journalist has.) Not a startling revelation, but something to remember the next time you hear or read some “powerful” dialogue.

Second, and more unexpected, is when and how memorable passages arise in interviews. It’s not like turning on a faucet, as it sometimes seems on TV news shows. Instead, for me, many of my favorite quotes come out of nowhere, as a conversation winds and wends, and people casually drop stories of impossibly remarkable events that are, to them, just part of what they lived through.

To wit, Jack Jones, a WWII ace pilot in the Pacific, aviation writer and now an 85-year-old farmer from Holland, talking about what it was like after the war was over, at about the 55-minute mark of our interview:

It made you think. We thought in the beginning we were fighting fellow human beings. [pause] You just wouldn’t do those horrible things. Maybe 8 or 10 percent (of people) might do it, of the Japanese, or some of our guys. The majority of us were human beings. We didn’t have to do atrocious things.

The things with the Germans — and I lived in Germany three years after the Berlin Airlift, and I lived amongst Germans and traveled, Austria and everywhere. It’s a beautiful country. France and England on my time off. And I hunted. They were good guys. They helped us, and everything. With the Germans … [pause] … but, you just realize that we’re all human beings.

When you see something going on like now, it’s the worst thing in the world. I can’t believe where a guy will strap a bomb on his back and get on a bus and blow up women and children. That’s just somethng my generation wouldn’t have a … [trails off] … You know … [pause] … Well, of course now, we dropped the atmoic bomb on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

I volunteered as the commander of the Brian Airbase Jet Training Group, training pilots, you know. I volunteered to go out there, Camp David [unitelligible] and participated in an atomic bomb, um, exercise.

I ended up getting in a trench about twice as deep [holds arm above his head], but not too deep because the trench would collapse on you. But you got in there and you put the heels of your hands over your eyes at the countdown. And the platform is 3,000 meters — not yards but meters — away. And it’s four o’clock in the morning in the desert out there. And that thing goes off, and what’s the first thing that occurs? Light. The strongest light you ever saw in your life. Your hands are over your eyes, like this [puts hands over his eyes like a bawling child], but your eyes light up. And then, then you get, what’s the second thing? Earth, moving. You’re kneeling down and the earth’s moving [still covering his eyes, he begins rocking side to side in his chair]. And then the third thing is, bam [he says it under his breath, almost like a sigh]. Of course it’s the biggest bang you ever herd in your life.

But it didn’t blow the trench in. In the group before us that participated, a Marine stood up too early, and he lost his eyesight. Imagine… [pause] Human beings, you’ve always got one that’s going to do something [chuckles] that nobody else would do.

We didn’t, we didn’t have any problems, and then we went forward to ground zero. Of course, my wife says, “That’s when you got irradiated.” I said, “That’s right. But not the kind of radiation that would kill you.” Think of it. Hundreds of thousands got radiated at Hiroshima. But, I’m just giving you my life’s experiences as a fighter pilot and later on.

Getting back to Pearl Harbor Day. Pearl Harbor Day certainly trained me for all the rest of my life. But then my crowd was born 1918, 1919, 1920, and we admired the World War I guys so much, and I think that the fact that my hero was Eddie Richenbacher has carried me through a lot more amazing experi-ences, to Pearl Harbor. I went on over there and became an ace, just like Eddie Richenbacher. He shot down 20-something, I didn’t get that many. But when you read about Eddie Richenbacher going, you know, riding an airliner down and staying alive, well [pause] we had to survive, pe-riod.

During this whole time I was laughably stoic, nodding along and interjecting a “mm-hmm” from time to time. In my head was thinking, Holy shit what the fuck?

After the interview, I asked Jones about why he volunteered for that atomic bomb exercise.

“Because I was an old fighter pilot,” he said. “Just that spirit. I had to go see for myself.”

I was still kind of in awe.

“When it first occurred,” he continued as we paused at the door,

I didn’t want that to happen, for us to drop that atomic bomb and kill that many people. But then when you think about how many people were saved by those two bombs. The japanese would have lost millions and we would have lost millions — millions. Just two bombs, two airplane loads, I mean of guys, saved millions of people.

I nodded, not knowing what else to do.

“You gotta do what you gotta do, right?” this friendly old man said to me with a half-grin. “That’s a fighter pilot’s lecture. [laughs] But I had to go see for myself.

“I must tell you, there ain’t nothing like an atomic.”