Interview with Damon Brown [5/2/2002]

Larry Ordner:

This tape is made May 2nd, 2002, with Damon Brown. Mr. Brown resides at Route 10734 on Highway 245 North, Lamar, Indiana, 47550. His date of birth is June 27th, 1925. Mr. Brown served in the United States Navy as a pharmacist mate. His serial number was 9556827, from April 1944 to June 1946. He enlisted at age 18. He saw duty at Pearl Harbor, Saipan, Iwo Jima, Laiti, Okinawa and Guam. Mr. Brown, tell me how -- at age 18, where were you living at the time, and how it happened that you decided to enlist?

Damon Brown:

We lived on a farm southwest of Chrisney in which I thought probably that's where I'd spend my life until I decided that farming was not a thing that I wanted to do, and, of course, with the war going on at that time, I felt that this was a more important thing that I get involved with than anything else. I had the opportunity to stay on the farm without having to go into service, but decided that that was not what I wanted to do, so I enlisted in the Navy in the first part of 1944.

Larry Ordner:

Now, where were you at school at that time?

Damon Brown:

I had just got out of -- I went to Chrisney High School, and I had just gotten out of school the fall or December before.

Larry Ordner:

Where did you go to enlist?

Damon Brown:

I went to Rockport to enlist, to the office down there where you were either drafted or enlisted, and they sent me on to Evansville with a couple of other fellows who wanted to enlist. And from that point on, we were sent to the Navy training station in Chicago, and we were there for six weeks, and then I was sent back home for a period of about one week. And then I went back to the naval training station, and at that point in time, you began to learn that there was -- if you indicated that there was a certain degree of interest, that they would allow you to select what position that you might be interested in, and the one I selected was to be -- well, they called them corpsmen at that time, but when you graduated, you became a pharmacist's mate, and that's what I did. We were sent to San Diego, California, where I was in school for a period of about eight weeks in training. And, of course, the first thing they did after we got out of training, there was about -- there must have been about 75 or 80 of us in this class, and then they would send you out to hospitals to get further training and to do things that needed to be done once -- to people who had been injured, one way or the other, after you were out on the front or wherever you might be or it might be just in a hospital, as far as that goes. And at that point in time, the Navy decided, since they were providing people who would serve the Marine Corps, we were placed on some LST ships, and these were called ships that were more or less hospital ships. In addition to that, they also carried much material for the Marine Corps to be used wherever it might be needed on -- whether it would be Iwo Jima or Saipan or wherever else. We would carry this along and then, of course, once we unloaded this material to the Marine Corps, wherever it was needed, then we were used then to take small boats and ride from these LSTs into shore to pick up people who had been injured or killed or whatever, and we traveled back and forth because these LSTs could only get so close to the bank until they -- until they hit ground, and that's where the small boats came in and we, then, would ride these small boats back and forth to pick these people up.

Larry Ordner:

Let me back up just a moment.

Damon Brown:

Okay.

Larry Ordner:

From the time that you had some decision-making to express preferences about what you might choose to do in the Navy, why did you choose to be a pharmacist's mate? If that is the correct terminology. What appealed to you about that as opposed to maybe something else?

Damon Brown:

Because -- well, there was two things. Number one, in the back of my mind, before I went into the service, I had in mind that I would like to be a veterinarian. That might have been one thing that lead to it. But the other thing that encouraged me is because I thought that this would allow me to make probably as good a contribution to people who had already been in service for quite some time, had been injured or whatever, or were being injured, and for some reason or other, I just felt the -- and the thing about it, I was not the only one, but because people -- we were ___ -- we were interviewed to a certain degree as to what we had done and what we liked to do and so forth, and that was how I happened to get into something that I really wanted to get into anyway.

Larry Ordner:

Um-hum. You picked up from the time, then, you were on the LSTs, before I interrupted. Tell me -- tell me where you -- what from there.

Damon Brown:

On the LSTs, then, we -- we first -- well, first we had training at Pearl Harbor because we had to learn how to run the small boats -- we didn't run the small boats because there was always a coxman that would be the one who would run the boat, but we did the things that were necessary to keep a man alive or prepare him before he got back to the ship.

Larry Ordner:

Was there training at -- in pharmacy conducted while you were at Pearl Harbor or was that prior?

Damon Brown:

That was at -- that was at San Diego.

Larry Ordner:

Okay.

Damon Brown:

That was San Diego.

Larry Ordner:

What kind of training was -- how would you describe that training and what kind of things did you study?

Damon Brown:

Well, I'll tell you, so far as it was a long approach from being a -- anything like a doctor or anything like that, but we were in a position that we could carry out instructions, number one, of what we -- of what a person who might have been a doctor would see and would need us to do or that we had been trained enough in those weeks out there to be able to -- to make our own decisions as to whether this person needed just a bandage or whether he needed medication of some kind, or what have you, that we were allowed to have while we were out by ourselves. And, of course, we didn't stay out by ourselves because there were four of these LSTs and each one of these LSTs had four doctors on them and then, of course, we got them back to where they needed to be. After all, I think it just makes common sense that if they've got to lose somebody, it better be a corpsman or a pharmacist's mate rather than a doctor because they made a greater contribution to the people that needed help. And, of course, our job was to get these people back off of the shore or wherever we found them on the shore because, for example, when we -- when we went into Iwo Jima, there were a lot of -- a lot of guys that got -- you know, got killed before they even got to the shore, and sometimes we could pick them up, sometimes we couldn't, but our main concern was to get to the shore and pick up these people who had been injured or whatever their situation might be.

Larry Ordner:

Do you remember the first time that you -- what your first mission was in this role?

Damon Brown:

Yeah, it was to get on that boat with a -- with a young man who I was sure hopeful -- there was a -- there was a couple things that happened on that trip in, my first trip in, was that this young man, I think it probably was one of his first trips in and we were both scared, and we had a -- the Japanese came over and they laid some dust down and we couldn't see where we were going. As far as that goes, we ran into a ship, it happened to be one of our own, we were lucky on that, before we got to the shore, and we -- we went in and we were out for quite some time until we -- we picked up -- as a rule we could only handle three or four people who had been injured at a time. And this first trip, we went in, they -- they gave us -- they gave us a band that we could put around our -- that we could put around our arms, it was a Red Cross band, and they said if you're in a place where you think that someone won't be shooting at you, why you can wear that band and get by with it. Now, the other thing is, they gave us a little gun of some kind that I really didn't know how to use, and the ironic part of the whole thing is we lost our gun on the first trip in, which it -- it was not one that I had been trained to use, you know, because I hadn't been trained to use a gun, I'd been trained to treat people. And so it was kind of a funny thing, after it was all over with, that sure enough we lost the gun, but we didn't need it anyway, so...

Larry Ordner:

Well, were you apprehensive about maybe reporting that it was lost?

Damon Brown:

Not at all, because they had given us all the freedom that we needed to do this thing that we needed to do, and they -- they gave us a card that would allow any other ship to pick us up and take us where we needed to go because we were assigned to do these particular things and pick these people up and take them back to our LST for treatment, and we had a lot of freedoms. And, you know, the ironic part of the whole thing, being a pharmacist's mate, other officers, they responded with respect on this, and, in fact, we went aboard a couple of ships and they kind of cleaned us up a little bit, helped us out a little bit, put us back on our boat and sent us back to our LST out in the water. So it was a -- it was a pretty good -- it was a wise decision for me to be a pharmacist's mate because I made a contribution and it was something that I kind of liked to do.

Larry Ordner:

Do you remember some -- can you tell me some other stories, though, of --

Damon Brown:

Oh --

Larry Ordner:

-- just specifics of what you encountered, anything you care to say?

Damon Brown:

Yeah, there's -- there are a lot of things that -- of course, you go back when you first go in and you're 18, 19 years old, you know, and there were several of us that --

Larry Ordner:

When you -- at age 18 when you enlisted, I mean, was that your -- really your first time away from home, too?

Damon Brown:

That is right.

Larry Ordner:

Well, what was that like for you being so young?

Damon Brown:

(Laughs.) Well, you know, it really wasn't all that bad because you were with a whole bunch of other people in --

Larry Ordner:

Yeah.

Damon Brown:

-- like in this training, and they were in the same thing, too. We --

Larry Ordner:

___What was the reaction from home when you enlisted?

Damon Brown:

Oh, they didn't want us -- I mean, my folks didn't want me to, really, not that they didn't -- that they didn't want me to be in the service, they just felt I'd be safer at home, I think, or what have you, you know. And, of course, they needed a little help -- they needed help on the farm, too, as far as that goes, but I had a younger brother and he needed to work, and so he could stay there and help. And for some reason or other, I just felt I needed to go. I wanted to go because, you know, I read -- see, I was in high school at the time World War II started, and I remember reading and hearing about all the things that were happening, and it just encouraged me to think that, gosh, if all these guys have been doing this for a pretty good length of time, I think I need to do a little something, too. I really did. I felt -- I felt I really wanted to be there.

Larry Ordner:

You felt a real calling to serve then.

Damon Brown:

I really did, uh-huh. And, you know, the whole thing is I came back and I got into business later on, but I look back on it and I'm always glad that I did, always -- always have been. There were a lot of things happening. We get to Pearl Harbor and, of course, we hear all the stories about things that happened there and so forth, and so finally, last day, they let us -- they turned us free and we went into town and we -- of course, we did some silly things. I mean, you spend five dollars to get behind a bar someplace to show off that you were in jail or something, you know -- you know, fun. And I've got pictures of things that we did, you know, or there was girls along the street there that they were Hawaiians and they would, for five dollars, well, they'd let you take their picture with them, see, and you had a Hawaiian girlfriend and all this kind of stuff, you know, and just things like that that we done that we thought was -- oh, we thought that was kind of fun. So we, in addition to being scared once in a while, we had some fun along the line, too, you know, because these things came up and --

Larry Ordner:

Tell me about some of your friendships that you had.

Damon Brown:

(Laughs.) Well, in the -- let's see, where's -- in the friendships that I had --

Larry Ordner:

Just for the record, I'm going to say we do have quite a thunderstorm brewing here, so on the tape, the booms are thunder.

Damon Brown:

We're not back in the war, are we. I recorded the names of some of the guys that I was on ship with. I have these -- they're from all over, and I have their names and I have their addresses of that time. And they were -- you know, they were everybody from guys who -- well, there were a couple of them that were ministers in here, accountants, and you name it, but the nice part about the whole thing is that they were committed people who had responsibilities in private life and so that came over into our -- into our responsibilities here serving in the Navy and the Marine Corps, you know. And it was something that -- I felt like I wanted to be part of these things and, you know, the ironic part of the whole thing is I've had very little contact with any of them since then because when it was all past, well, we just scattered like -- like birds, you know.

Larry Ordner:

Uh-huh. I'm sure as you look at those names, you see those faces --

Damon Brown:

I see them. In fact, I've got some pictures. You know, we weren't allowed to take many pictures, but, you know, there was always a guy that had a camera and he'd take a picture and he'd give you one, you know. And I've got some pictures of most of these guys, they're little things, but they're enough that I can remember, you know, who they were. One of them was -- and, you know, the ironic part that -- we went to church, one of these guys was a preacher and so we had church. One of them was a barber, so we got our hair cut once in a while, you know, just things like that. One of them was -- was an accountant. He was a Mormon, and he -- very nice man, and I think he kept a lot of us young guys from ever starting to smoke. You know, just things like that that I remember about these people who -- some of them were old farm boys like myself, some of them were -- had never had a job before, you know, they really didn't know what they wanted to do. And the -- it was just -- you know, it was interesting to be with these people because the -- the picture of the class of 75 in San Diego where we took our training out there, these people were from all over the country, and, you know, we had -- an interesting thing happened out there in that school, and that was this one young man had a -- had not liked -- had learned that he was not going to like being in the service as much as he thought. Now, whether he had been drafted or enlisted, I don't know about that, but I well remember -- we had to go through some pretty good discipline, too, at the same time, and I well remember going out one morning to -- because he was not in our room on his bunk, and we went out to look for him, and he had hanged himself because he didn't feel that he could take this kind of service, you know, because they did, they laid it on us pretty good, our responsibilities, what we needed to do in taking care of these other people, and this just wasn't cut for him, but he didn't know it.

Larry Ordner:

Did you start to forge some friendships with some of the men that you were actually helping?

Damon Brown:

You know, the ironic part of this whole thing is that at the time that -- you know, in fact, I had one -- one young man by the name of T.Y. Taybert (ph), he was from Glasgow, Kentucky, that was the closest one I had, but, you know, we told each other, hey, boy, when we get out of this, out of the Navy, why, we're going to get in touch and all this kind of stuff, though we didn't do it with others. I have only seen -- I've only seen three or four of those. In fact, this one that lived in Glasgow and I happened to work later -- in later years in Kentucky, I got to meet him, got to know his family and, in fact, he's got a son that's named after me. And that's how good a relationship you develop with some of these people, you know, in the service. You know, the service is something that a lot of people just, you know, want to stay away from, but, you know, it's an important part, an integral part of -- of our country, of having a good service program. And I think -- I think this is the thing that, even though we said we were going to get together and all this, we didn't do it. It didn't work out. I mean, we got home, we got married, we got jobs, we did things, you know, and these things became more important to us than -- the service days were over.

Larry Ordner:

Yeah. Can you tell me -- you're the first gentleman I've spoken to that's had any service at Iwo Jima.

Damon Brown:

Uh-huh.

Larry Ordner:

Can you tell me about that, please?

Damon Brown:

Iwo Jima, yeah, in fact, I have -- I have a couple of -- I have a couple of pictures here that were taken as not I was on the boat, but one of our boats that was going in. You know, when you went in on Iwo Jima, you didn't see anybody or anything, except you knew they were there, they were grounded in. And this -- this was enough to concern and scare you because they had warned us ahead of time that they were there because, you know, as we flew over the island, we -- they saw things that they could tell us about. There were a lot of Japanese in there. And this was -- when we went in from our LST, going into shore, all we could see was a long, looked like sandy hill, but we knew that there was something in there. And we darn well knew there was something in there when our Marines started to go in on their -- on their boats and whatever -- whatever machinery they had that we had hauled in there that they had to go in ashore on, then the Japanese started coming out, shooting at them out of the holes that they were in up on the hill, but it was nothing but a long, long, big hill up there that come to a point. And if you've ever seen pictures of the flag that they floated up there when they took a picture of Iwo Jima, well, that's exactly what it looked like, except there was no flag up there. They were good at hiding at it. They really were. Saipan was a little different kind of a thing because it was more level, and a lot of the guys, they -- a lot of those people there, they were in trenches as far as that area was concerned. It was a little more difficult for them to -- to see our Marines coming in and not -- you know, they had to hide themselves down in the trenches and sometimes our Marines got to them before they could see that they were coming, and so we didn't have as many people that got shot up there as we did on Iwo Jima. That was a kind of a bloody one of the people who went in and -- and, you know, they had no place to hide as they went in. And I have a picture of it here that was taken, and one of the doctors gave it to me and so that I could have that as a kind of a record, and there you are, you see the big hill and you see our people going in, but you don't see anything else back up there until they got there, and then they really blasted loose, and that's where -- sometimes we would start picking up fellows who had been injured, who had been shot or whatever, before we even got to shore.

Larry Ordner:

How close, really, were you to the fighting?

Damon Brown:

How close?

Larry Ordner:

Yeah.

Damon Brown:

Probably -- here, I guess the best way to say would be in miles. I'd say the closest I was to the actual fighting was probably, in most instances, a half a mile or maybe a mile or something like that, not knowing exactly where they were coming from, and sometimes getting curtailed and turned back and --

Larry Ordner:

I can't imagine what it was like trying to get the wounded out of those situations --

Damon Brown:

Well --

Larry Ordner:

-- and I guess to feel the pressure of time.

Damon Brown:

Yeah. Well, see, the thing of it -- I tell you, the thing that got next to you, first of all, you had been trained, I had been trained to do this kind of work, all of us had, to do this kind of thing. Some of us could take it better than others as far as that goes, but it was your job. And we'd go in, and I'll tell you the thing that really got next to you more than anything else is to see a young guy that you knew was 18, 19 years old, and he was shot up enough that he would never, in his lifetime, ever be able to enjoy what a person of his age would grow into, you know, having a job, having a family or a wife and a family and things like this, you know. And I guess this is the thing that got next to me --

Larry Ordner:

Uh-huh. Just knowing that some ___--

Damon Brown:

-- more than anything, and I still -- that's right. And sometimes, you know, some of these -- some of these guys, they were -- they were hard, you know, they were pretty tough nuts, and they did their job, but it was tough, you know, for us to see them finished off right there. I think that was -- that was the hard part, but it was better to see them finished off completely than to see the condition that they're in -- that they were in at that time that they would never get over.

Larry Ordner:

For those who needed more serious treatment, how could you get those men to safety some way, for -- even for hospitalization? How was that possible?

Damon Brown:

Well, the hospital -- see, our LST would be out probably another half mile or something like that, and that's where we were, in the small boat, we were traveling back and forth, hauling these guys in. Maybe we only picked up one, maybe we picked up three or four, but that's about all we could handle. And so what I would do, my job was to -- first of all, about the only medication I had was morphine, and they gave us plenty of that, and you only gave it to the guy that was suffering such pain that he had to have it. And then you had enough gauze or whatever and tape that if they were bleeding, you shut them off so that they wouldn't bleed to death. And -- or if it was just an injury that had to be covered up, you took care of that while you were riding back with this guy, this coxman that was driving the boat, you know. That was not his responsibility. His responsibility was to get me in and get me back. And so we'd load them up, we'd pick them up off of the ground, we'd pick them up sometimes floating in the water and whatever, you know, because, you see, you think about getting that close to shore, the water's not all that deep anymore because this LST, and if you're familiar with an LST, they were made in Evansville, some of them, anyway, they could get pretty close, and then they had enough power to back themselves off, you know, after they unloaded the tanks and whatever that the Marines brought in. And consequently, it was -- you were close enough there so that you kind of have an idea as to what was going on, you know, and -- but you had a -- but these Marines in there, they were -- they had covered us up pretty well. They -- they knew what we were there for and so they kind of -- they helped us to -- if they had a buddy there that needed to be hauled out, well, they would help us load him up and get him on our small boat and take him back out there. Now, then, they went back to the LST. Now, that -- we had four doctors there. This doctor here, this picture, that was the one I worked with the most. And there's another one. Here, this is the card that I showed you a while ago. This -- this pharmacist's mate, that's my assignment. I could get by with some things there that -- you know, because they felt that I'd carry out my responsibility. And then these doctors there, these four doctors on this ship, they would then take the next steps to do what these fellows needed to keep them alive. Now, then, there was the big ships on out, way out, and they were covered by some of our planes and so forth, where they had hospitals and all this. And so then there would be this LST that we were on, then they would go with a load of these people back out to this -- to these ships and unload them there, so that they could have -- so they could get whatever help they needed to remain alive, and -- but sometimes they'd be five miles out.

Larry Ordner:

I suppose there were sometimes you just wondered, a few days later, gee, I wonder how --

Damon Brown:

Yeah, that's right. See, you wonder how -- how lucky can you be, you know, to -- well, first of all, that you -- that you could do something to get these people ready to go back out. Once in a while, you had to give up on one and say, he's not going to make it, and we had to leave some once in a while because they were in such shape that you couldn't do anything for them, you know, so we had to leave them and pick them up -- somebody else had -- I guess in the Marine Corps, they probably picked them up ___+.

Larry Ordner:

That would be awfully hard to do that.

Damon Brown:

Yeah, this is true. This is true. It's a decision that you had to make that -- that's a tough one, but -- and, you know, the ironic part of this thing is I'm talking about some things now that I really haven't thought about in a -- in a lot of years and it comes back to me. As I went through some of these pictures and so forth, it refreshed my memory because when you think about 50 years ago or more since this happened, you know, why it gets a little -- you don't remember exactly some of the things that took place, but it kind of comes back to you.

Larry Ordner:

Anything else of those -- from that vein of story that you can recall? Anything that just made such an impression on you during that time?

Damon Brown:

Oh, no, I -- well, one thing, after -- after I finished my -- my job there and they didn't need us anymore at Saipan, Iwo Jima or what have you, why they sent us back to Guam, so -- and off of our LST, and they gave us an assignment in the hospital. One interesting thing that happened was a young man that I had picked up somewhere along the line, he remembered me, and I didn't remember him, of course, but he remembered me. He was a young man, he was only -- if I remember right, he was only 19 years old, and -- but he was back at Guam because over there, it was -- the weather was hot and if you got an infection, it was difficult to have the medication that was necessary to clear this up, you know, and so I'll never forget getting back there and this guy, he remembered me. And he was there being treated because he had an infection throughout his body, and -- and it just happened that I worked on a ward with this same doctor that I had been out there with, and he said, why don't you go take care of him. And so I gave him 120 some shots before we got him cleared up, you know. And his back end got so sore that he dreaded seeing me coming, you know, but I thought, you know, this is a -- to me, an interesting thing that happens to people who are out like this, and you see them -- you lose them, and you see them again, you know. Oh, I don't know. And then, after we got back there, why, we were involved in helping take care of a lot of people that were on their way back to the States now because, you know, even on the bigger -- bigger hospital boats, they could only do so much, and they had to get them back to the States as soon as they could. Now, we had some hospitals in Hawaii or at Pearl Harbor, we had -- in fact, I was stationed there for a little while that one time, nice hospital there, and -- if they thought they could get them back there, and then if not, why they'd put them on a plane and fly them back to the States. And they did -- they did everything they could from the time they were first injured until they were cured. And it was not an easy -- not an easy thing to do and I think our start on the thing -- I've always felt, there were times that you would feel bad about things, but I always felt good about it because there were some of the guys, if it hadn't been for some of us corpsmen there, they would never come back.

Larry Ordner:

I would think that that would be a tremendous -- this I know is not the right word, but to look back at things 50 years -- plus years later would almost comfort --

Damon Brown:

Yeah.

Larry Ordner:

-- knowing that you were responsible for really saving so many people.

Damon Brown:

Oh, I do. I think back on this ___ + my wife and I think about it, we talk about it once in a while. I mean, I -- she always gets on me because I talk about the good things, you know, rather than the other, and she -- you know, for a -- really, I get a little cross-eyed here once in a while even thinking about it now, but, you know, if I had it to do over, I'd do it the same way again, if I had it all to do over. I wouldn't run from that for a minute because I -- I've always felt that, you know, for what little -- I lost a gun, so I wasn't in that kind of a thing, you know, but it was an opportunity for me to make a contribution during World War II.

Larry Ordner:

Did that mold your life differently from that time on?

Damon Brown:

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely, yeah. I took a -- I tell you what, that made a contribution to my life, to the work that I finally got into when I got back into -- here, I'll go back farther than that. At the time that I was sent back, and I had 30 days and -- the war was over, 30 days leave, and I had intended to stay in the service. Now, that's how much I thought of the work that I was doing, that we were doing, and I was going to stay in, but things just got so -- when -- well, there's two things. Thirty days in, leave, I met a guy from Purdue University who had kind of made me an offer, and I was interested in that, but I was still thinking about staying in the service. Well, I got mixed up and service began -- because of so many people coming back and going home, getting lost and their papers getting lost and being in the wrong place, and it got so mixed up over at St. Louis where I was to be discharged that I decided that I -- I was going to stay out a while. Well, when I got back and I got together with the gentleman who had made an offer to me at Purdue, that was one of the best things that ever happened, I think, because I got into a work that I was in for the next 42 years, and it was a new kind of thing. And I think being in service, being trained to do what I did as a pharmacist's mate for the Navy and the Marine Corps, that I just -- well, I had a successful business -- job, in marketing with a company for the next 42 years.

Larry Ordner:

Did you use your GI bill any?

Damon Brown:

No. No, I've got those papers laying right here, but -- and, you know, they -- and I thought about that, but, you know, it never worked out that I needed to --

Larry Ordner:

Now, tell me about your marketing job. What did you do in those 42 years?

Damon Brown:

Okay. I got back and, of course, I was -- I went back to the farm, but I knew I wasn't going to stay on the farm. And so I went back to the farm, dad had milk cows there, and so I helped with that. And this person who -- from Purdue was a dairy professor up there and they were starting what they called artificial insemination of cows. And he said -- he called me one day and he said, Damon, he said, I need somebody to go to a training school to learn this business, and he wanted to know if I would. And I said, yep, I think I would, because -- I mean, it was new and it was just a real challenge. And my mom -- my mom and dad says, that'll never work, you know, you're just starting something that -- that -- hey, listen, I had seen so many things in the past two years, I knew anything could work, you know. And now, I maybe sound like --

Larry Ordner:

Had you not been in the Navy, do you think you would have done that?

Damon Brown:

I don't think I would. I think I'd have been so scared about doing something strange that I wouldn't have done it, but I was in there -- in there long enough that I just -- you know, you get to a place where you feel you can do about anything you want to if you'll try hard enough, you know. And so I did, I got into this business, and I actually inseminated cows myself for a short period of time, and then this company called one day and said, we want you to come and work for us, and they're out of Madison, Wisconsin. And they said, now, the only thing is -- now, see, I've always lived right here in this community, not too far away, southwest of Chrisney or -- that farm over there was a dairy farm that belonged to my wife. I met her while I was -- I was inseminating cows. I just happened -- I made calls out here for farmers, my wife lived in a house right over here, that's how I met her, I was making calls up here. We got married, been one of the greatest things that ever happened was meeting her, and been married almost 55 years now. But, you know, the thing about it, if I had not had the tenacity that I'd gone through in the Navy, I think you're right, I would never have -- I would never have gone through going into a job that was so new, and I -- and yesterday, I went up in the attic and I have -- and I -- now, this is going to sound like I'm bragging, but I've got enough awards up there for the work that I did in this business that it fills a box, and it happened right up until the end. And I had a little heart trouble because I worked -- I worked hard, I worked long hours, and I had a good wife who helped raise three kids here, and she took care of them while I had to travel in about three states here. And, you know, the thing that really, really appealed to me was the fact that when this company, at the end of time when I was having a little trouble with my heart, I remember the president of the company coming to me one time and he said, Damon, he said, you've given us 42 years, he said, and -- see, I was two years before retirement, and he says, we're going to give you two years, he said, you do as much or as little as you want to. And so -- and I still say it goes back to my Navy days.

Larry Ordner:

One final thing, how do you look back now at 50 plus years later and feel what the U.S. sacrifice accomplished? How do you feel looking back and being part of that experience, the World War II experience?

Damon Brown:

Well, you know, as I look back -- the approach of people that I knew who were in service in World War II before me, the ones who were in service during the time that I was in there, I think that there was a greater feeling of responsibility at that time that people had, that, hey, here's something that needs to be done, and I'm going to be one to help do it. I think that's a little part of -- now, we've had a lot of years now that we've had little skirmishes, but it's never been anything like what we faced up to, you know, back at that time. And I feel that, you know, I think these -- these -- the young people today, I think they still have that same desire to succeed, but many times they just don't have the opportunity to succeed. There are just too many things out here that they -- that keeps them -- that keeps them kind of -- it wasn't easy, but, you know, nothing that turns out good ever starts out easy. And I think that, to me, is one of the greatest things. It was that way when I was at home on the farm, it wasn't easy because it was just after Depression days, it was in the service with the Navy, and some of those old Marines, they were tough boogers, you know, it wasn't easy. When I went into my work later on, it wasn't easy, but I think one thing led to another, and if I hadn't had the step by step experiences that I had, I wouldn't be sitting here today talking to you.

Larry Ordner:

Anything else you'd like to add? I really appreciate your doing this, very much.

Damon Brown:

Well, I -- no, I really don't have -- gosh, I mean, you know, there's so many -- there's so many stories that -- that really are -- oh, some of them are kind of fun and some are not, but as far as that goes, but, no, but it's just a part of ___. I wanted to stay in the service, you know, and, see, if I'd have done that, I'd never have met her. Now, so anyway, I stayed out and I got this -- I was telling you about Sam Gregory calling from Purdue and offering me the job, you know, or wanting to know if I'd be interested in doing something that my folks told me I shouldn't do it because it'd never work. And everything I've told you is absolutely true now. There's nothing here that's -- and I bet you he -- if I -- she knows more about the things that happened through my life than anybody else from being in service and so forth, because there's -- I'm not one -- you know, I'll talk about the good things that happened, and some things or things like that, you know, but, you know, this thing is going around and talking about, boy, I saw 15 people get killed here, you know, that, to me, is not something that is fun to be talking about, but she -- but she knows as much or more about this, and then, of course, I -- we got to talking about the contribution that being in the Navy made to me to take the job that we had, and then I happened to meet a wife that was very supportive and made it easier for me to do my job, and without her, I couldn't have done it. I might have come close, (laughs), if I'd tried hard, but she did because she raised three kids here, a lot of times by herself and -- in fact, they turned out darn well.