John Rutherford
NBC News Producer, Washington
By John Rutherford, Producer, NBC News
Early on the morning of Dec. 8, 1941, nine Japanese fighter planes swooped down on Malalag Bay in the Philippines and strafed and sunk two U.S. Navy seaplanes at the very outset of World War II.
All of the Americans escaped unharmed except Ensign Robert G. Tills, 23, of Manitowoc, Wis., who was cut down by machine gun bullets.
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| Courtesy Tills family |
| Ensign Robert G. Tills seen in his Navy Whites before he was gunned down by Japanese fighter planes on Dec. 8, 1941. |
"Ensign Robert Tills died in the fusillade of bullets from the Japanese strafers, the first American naval officer killed in the defense of the Philippines," the Naval Historical Center wrote.
Tills' sister Jean was 11 years old at the time.
"Our minister heard over the radio that he was among the missing and called us," she said recently. "Then somebody came to the house a couple of weeks later and said he was killed."
But Tills' body was not recovered. Memories were all that Jean and her parents and sister had of their beloved Bob.
"Airplanes and flying, that was his passion," Jean Aplin, now 78, remembers. "He wanted to do that from the time he was little. I was just very proud of him and idolized him. He was my hero."
Tills, whom the Navy named a destroyer escort after in 1943, was one of 78,000 Americans still missing from World War II.
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By John Rutherford, Producer, NBC News
WASHINGTON – America honors its veterans one day of the year, on Nov. 11. Spc. John Tilley and his fellow tomb sentinels honor them every day of the year.
Tilley is one of 24 soldiers who guard the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery. They are part of the 3rd Infantry Regiment (The Old Guard), the Army's oldest active infantry unit.
"We are incredibly proud of what we do," he says.
Tilley and the other sentinels guard the tomb every hour of the day, every day of the year.
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| U.S. Army |
| One of the sentinels guarding the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery. |
"Since 1937 we've never left our post, and that's in every type of weather you can imagine," he says.
Even when Hurricane Isabel was bearing down on the area, in 2003, the sentinels stood their ground.
"They gave the option to leave our post, and the sentinels honorably declined," Tilley says.
That was the only time the sentinels were given that choice. They live by their Sentinel Creed, which states in part, "My standard will remain perfection."
Honor in the details
That perfection is reflected in the way they guard the Tomb of the Unknowns. They walk exactly 21 steps, pivot, wait 21 seconds and retrace their 21 steps for as long as two hours at a time.
"Twenty-one is the highest honor that you can give to the military – the 21-gun salute," Tilley explains. "Everything we do here is off the count of 21."
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By John Rutherford, Producer, NBC News
WASHINGTON – Army Sgt. Jeffrey Hardaway, 35, of Kileen, Texas, hobbled on his crutches to a microphone to say a few words after receiving a Purple Heart recently at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
"First of all I'd like to thank my wife for putting up with me," he said to laughter and applause from a roomful of soldiers in Walter Reed's Joel Auditorium on Oct. 23.
"And second, I'd like to thank everyone here at Walter Reed for helping me ... ," he continued. "Thirdly, I'd like to, ah, what a lot of people don't know is we lost our embed reporter that day, and his name was Julio. He was from Spain, and, um ... "
At this point Hardaway lost his composure and broke down.
" ... I'm sorry," he said moments later. "He became a close friend. I wish I could say something to his family."
Hardaway was talking about Julio Parrado, 32, a correspondent for the Spanish newspaper El Mundo and an embedded reporter with the U.S. Third Infantry Division at the outset of the war in Iraq. He was killed on April 7, 2003, by the same missile that seriously wounded Hardaway.
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By John Rutherford, Producer, NBC News
WASHINGTON - Army Staff Sgt. Tara Harrilson was wounded three times in Afghanistan, the first time when she was stabbed while on a Special Forces mission in 2004.
"I was outside the wire with my team, and it was pretty much – long story, short – it was a setup, and there were a whole lot of bad men and four of us," the 27-year-old native of Gaithersburg, Md., said recently.
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| Louie Palu/ZUMA Press |
| Army Staff Sgt. Tara Harrilson at Walter Reed Medical Center on Sept. 26. |
"I didn't realize it until afterward, but I had been stabbed several times from different angles while trying to get out of the area," she said. "I can't go into more details than that."
Tara was wounded two more times in a series of explosions in 2005. In one of them, some body armor was blown off a hook and landed on top of her head, herniating her brain into her neck and causing a spinal cord injury. She also suffered shrapnel wounds on her arms, legs and chest in the explosions.
"I've lost a lot of vision in my left eye, hearing in the left ear," she said. "I can use my left side pretty good, just not real fine, like to grip and open a bottle, and I've lost a lot of feeling in it."
‘A slow process’
Tara, who walks with a cane, is still recovering from her wounds at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C.
"I think I'm doing really good for someone who just had brain surgery," she said.
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By John Rutherford, Producer, NBC News
WASHINGTON - Army Capt. Humbert "Rocky" Versace is one of 88,000 Americans still listed as missing in action since the outset of World War II, including 1,800 from the war he fought in Vietnam.
Rocky was wounded and taken captive by the Communist Vietcong on Oct. 29, 1963, in the U Minh Forest of South Vietnam. He was never repatriated.
President Bush has honored Rocky and all Americans who were prisoners of war or are still missing in action by proclaiming today National POW/MIA Recognition Day, an annual event held the third Friday in September.
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| Courtesy of the Versace family |
| Army Capt. Humbert "Rocky" Versace, seen before he became a prisoner of war in Vietnam. |
"We will not rest until we have achieved the fullest accounting for every member of our armed forces missing in the line of duty," the president said in a proclamation released on Wednesday.
From the outset of his captivity, Rocky defied his Communist captors.
"Rocky stood toe to toe with them," fellow POW Dan Pitzer said after his own release in 1967. "He told them to go to hell in Vietnamese, French and English. He got a lot of pressure and torture, but he held his path."
Beaten, starved and shackled, Rocky refused to give in to the Vietcong.
"He was the one who set the lead for all of us in the camp," Nick Rowe, another POW, said not long after escaping in 1968. "He was a tough act to follow, but there was nobody in our camp who broke."
On Sept. 26, 1965, nearly two years into his captivity, 28-year-old Rocky Versace was taken out and executed by the Vietcong for his unrelenting defiance. His remains were never recovered.
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By John Rutherford, Producer, NBC News
WASHINGTON - On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, John Yates was standing less than 100 feet from where American Airlines flight 77 slammed into the Pentagon.
"There was just this tremendous boom, and a ball of fire went right over my head," he remembers. "I was blown through the air and ended up probably 30 feet away. The room was instantaneously black. The smoke was down to within a foot of the floor.
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AP
John Yates, seen in a photo taken on Sept. 2, 2002, when he was still wearing compression garments on his arms and hands to prevent scar tissue from hardening. |
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"It was painful to breathe. Everything was hot," he said. "There was debris everywhere, and you had to feel with your hands to see where you were going. I eventually made my way out into the corridor.
John spent the next two and a half months in hospitals with burns over 38 percent of his body.
"Top of my head, my face, my entire back, portions of my buttocks, my left leg had second-degree burns," he said. "I had third-degree burns on my hands and my forearms and elbows, which required three skin grafting operations."
I first met John in December 2001 as he was beginning five months of outpatient therapy at Washington Hospital Center's burn clinic.
"This is the toughest part, the no-pain, no-gain portion if it," he groaned as a rehabilitation therapist worked to straighten his charred fingers.
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By John Rutherford, Producer, NBC News, Washington
Lyndon Johnson was born 100 years ago this week, on Aug. 27, 1908, and one person who's even older than that and still around to talk about it is John "Cas" Casparis, the former president's high school classmate and debating partner.
President Johnson died in 1973, but Casparis, who celebrated his 100th birthday on June 29, is still going strong and remembers teaming up with LBJ at Johnson City High School.
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| LBJ Library |
| Cas Casparis (left) and Lyndon Johnson (right), 1924 |
"It was back in 1924 and Lyndon and I were selected as being a debating team to represent the Johnson City High School in the Blanco County portion of the state of Texas interscholastic debate literary events," Cas said in an interview.
The subject of the debate was whether the United States should join the League of Nations, which was formed after World War I as a precursor of the United Nations. Johnson and Cas argued in the affirmative.
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By John Rutherford, Producer, NBC News, Washington
Jerry Beau is a national treasure, not only for his service to his country but also for his service to his fellow Marines and their families.
Beau, 89, served 24 years in the Marine Corps and has spent the last 52 years as the unpaid historian of the Marine Raiders Association, meticulously collecting service records and other information on 7,600 men who served with the elite Marine Raiders during World War II.
"We only have about 200 of the original Raiders left," he said in a recent interview.
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| Family photo |
| Marine 1st Lt. Jerome Beau, North China, 1946 |
Beau has filled 20 file drawers with muster rolls, discharge papers, obituaries and other documents on his fellow Raiders. His files are a gold mine of information for historians, the Raiders and their families.
A few years back, he sent Mrs. Dorothy Lockhart of Peoria, Ill., the war records of her late husband Jess, a Raider doctor in the South Pacific.
"Oh, my, he did a wonderful job," she said of Beau. "On a legal-sized piece of paper, the full front page and half of the back page, he had every place Jess was sent while he was in the Marines, every ship he was on and every landing he made. I was thrilled to death with what he did."
Beau began his own Marine career back in 1940, fresh out of Fond du Lac, Wis.
"They gave me a blanket and a railroad ticket and sent me to Parris Island, South Carolina," he said.
He volunteered when the Raiders were formed in 1942 to operate behind Japanese lines and conduct guerilla-type operations.
"We were special people, you know what I mean?" he said.
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By John Rutherford, Producer, NBC News, Washington
Aug. 14 doesn't have the ring of Dec. 7 (Pearl Harbor) or June 6 (D-Day) in the annals of World War II history, but on that summer day in 1945 Japan surrendered to the United States and its allies, ending the deadliest conflict in human history.
It's a date etched in the memories of three centenarians featured by Willard Scott on NBC's "Today" show.
"We kept the radio on," Winifred Jeeves, 100, said in a recent interview. "We didn't have television in those days. When the word came through, we were whooping it up and being so happy and relieved. You never knew what was going to happen until then."
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| Family photo |
| Win Jeeves and family, circa 1941 |
Three and a half years earlier, Win, her husband, their 8-year-old son and 6-year-old daughter had been on the last ship out of Manila before the Japanese invaded the Philippine capital in December of 1941.
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By John Rutherford, Producer, NBC News, Washington
WASHINGTON - Patricia Angus was a senior at Rosary High School in San Diego and Chuck Scharf was a sophomore at San Diego State College when they first met through Chuck’s younger sister in 1952.
"He was my steady from the very beginning, which my mother was against because she thought I should be meeting other men,” Patricia said in an interview. “But I said, 'No, Mother, this is the young man I want to date.'"
Chuck and Patricia were married two years later, in 1954; he was 21 and she was 19.
"He was a sweetheart," she said, "handsome, loving, caring, just perfect."
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| Family photos |
| Chuck and Patricia Scharf, the early '60s |
Fast forward to 1965. Chuck was an Air Force fighter pilot about to take off for Vietnam. Patricia was there to see him off, the pregnant wife of another pilot alongside her.
"He looked over at me, and I'm waving my scarf, and he salutes me," Patricia said. "And Donna Jewel turned and said, 'We're never going to see them again,' and I said, 'Yes, we are.' Well, guess what?"
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