TALES...TEXANS IN THE NEWS

TALES FROM THE WEST TEXAS DUST--3/12/2002

"TEXANS IN THE NEWS"--AN INTERVIEW WITH LEE SOUCY (PART V)

PLAINVIEW (Special)--And now, more of our interview with Pearl Harbor veteran Lee Soucy here at the Suite:

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101: The fact that at this juncture, you're getting there...Maybe this would be a good juncture now...let's fast-forward, let's jump over half-a-century to today. Many years have gone by for you and others since the attack. If you were to look from the viewpoint now looking back at the time to what happened then, what would you see? What now about the incident at Pearl Harbor will serve as the most poignant recollections of the experiences that you faced during the attack and what mental pictures of that time will you carry most in your mind?

Soucy: Well, you mean the day of the attack or...

101: Yeah, all of the whole experience...

Soucy: Of course, I saw too many things--it'd take all day to tell. But mainly--seeing people lying there, some of them for weeks and for months badly wounded. You see, I was medical--so all my time was spent in the hospital taking care of wounded and doing the laboratory tests, you see...I didn't actually work on the patients except to draw blood, get urine specimens, and do laboratory analyses.

To me, like when I was in Hawaii last month [Editor's Note: Soucy is referring here to a reunion of survivors of Pearl Harbor that he attended in December 2001], there's a guy from CBS that interviewed me for an hour. And he was talking about the impact of Pearl Harbor and the impact of the World Trade Center 100 years from now--which one would be remembered...And USA Today had a poll...and depending on the age--the younger people would say that the World Trade Center would be remembered much longer than Pearl Harbor more vividly...and the older people said "Pearl Harbor..."

And there was an article in the Plainview [Daily Herald] which I've got to get out--no, it was in the American Legion magazine or VFW or one of them...that said that the World Trade Center was a much, much bigger event than Pearl Harbor. And then he [the writer] talks about Pearl Harbor was just another battle. Well, he's got the whole thing in reverse...

The World Trade Center, like Pearl Harbor--nobody knew that anybody was mad at us. You know, we were there just as relaxed, we weren't there with our guns at the ready or anything. We were just in port, at safe haven--and there had never been anything like that before or since. Now the World Trade Center that terrorists attacked--we had many, many before...and unfortunately, we will have many after. And so I told the guy, "E pluribus unum--out of many one." So the World Trade Center was one of many terrorist attacks.

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