Raised on a cotton farm near Oak Grove, Louisiana, my father was the youngest of 13 children.  He was described as a cheerful and earnest young man.  Like many other young southerners during the Great Depression, he moved north to Michigan to work in an automobile assembly plant.   

In 1941 he was drafted into the US Army and assigned to the Texas 2nd Battalion, 36th Infantry Division (soon to be known as the Texas “Lost Battalion”).  Before his ship left for Asia in December 1941, he wrote to his mother that he looked forward to “the great adventure of my life.” His battalion was sent first to Australia, then to the Isle of Java on a mission to “show US resolve” against the unstoppable Japanese incursion into the Dutch East Indies.  He was taken prisoner at Surabaya in March 1942, along with 530 fellow Americans, as well as Dutch, Australian, and English soldiers.  Most of his fellow prisoners were sent to Thailand to build the infamous Burma Railway (portrayed in the 1957 movie Bridge on the River Kwai).  My father was put on a ship to Japan. 

He spent 3½ years in POW camps as a slave-laborer in Nagasaki shipyards and later coal mines. He suffered many serious injuries, illnesses, and psychological cruelty. Fortuitously,  he was in a coal mine in nearby Orio when the atomic bomb fell on Nagasaki in August 1945.  But soon after his “liberation” he was back in destroyed Nagasaki, exposing him to nuclear radiation. Before he died in 1962, my father tried to tell me what he witnessed in newly bombed Nagasaki, but he could only say: “words can’t describe the most dreadful sights imaginable.”  

Following his return to civilian life in the United States, he enrolled in Louisiana State University on the G.I. Bill, and obtained undergraduate and graduate degrees in psychology and social welfare. At LSU he met my mother, who was working at LSU, through her cousin Mark Bonner, who was my father’s roommate in the campus “Army Barracks.” My parents married in 1947 and within a few years my sister and I were born.

My father spent his remaining years as a university professor and school administrator, working to “liberate” special-needs children confined in horrific 1950s Louisiana “asylums” and to create special educational facilities for them.  For this work, in 1962 he was posthumously honored by the Joseph P. Kennedy Foundation at an event in Washington, DC, hosted by President John F. Kennedy, and attended by my mother.