TALES...TEXANS IN THE NEWS
PLAINVIEW (Special)--And as promised last week, we return you once again to our interview with Lee Soucy, picking up where we left off right in the heat of the battle of Pearl Harbor:
101: Maybe at this juncture, this would be the best time to...as you saw that and the things happening around you, in the midst of the attack and the worst part of it is right in front of you--from the vantage point you had, in all of this in just a matter of minutes--what was it truly like to be in the midst of the action? What are the things that stand out most about what happened as the attack on U.S. forces got worse and worse?
Soucy: Well, disbelief...there's only one word...we just couldn't believe it. I still can't believe it--60 years later, it's still unbelievable. So, you know, as I started to say, the sky was filled with airplanes--but they were all Japanese. Now there were a few American planes that got off...there's a few American planes that got off at Wheeler Field...if you saw the movie Pearl Harbor, these two guys, they take off and they shoot down a few Japanese-that's true, I mean, that's actual. Of course, some of the things in the movie are far from the truth--but that particular incident is true.
So, you know, [I was backstroking] and I could see these planes diving..and they would head toward the ship and machine-gun the people that were trying to shoot them back. And I don't know, a minute or two, a few minutes after I got my wind back, then I went back to swimming...maybe not full speed, but I was still wanting to get out of there in a hurry.
And so when I got on the beach, I was exhausted...on Ford Island. We were tied up next to Ford Island. So I got on the beach--and as I was trying to get my wind back, another Pharmacist's Mate from the Utah, Gordon Sumner, [who] was a Second-Class Pharmacist's Mate like I was...he had his first aid kit wrapped around his shoulders, his back, you know, like a backpack. So he was a good swimmer, too--but he did have a handicap. I had no handicap and he did. So I remember saying, "What took you so long?" [Editor laughs hard at this recollection.] It was just a matter of a minute or two. But he was gingerly trying to get out of the water--and as I said, the bottom of Ford
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