But like so many of his generation, he wasn’t average. Not by a long shot.

I spent several hours with him nearly one year ago. We talked of something I know a lot about, but not nearly as much as he did, because he lived it. He
spent three and a half years in what amounted to hell on earth and was lucky to make it to the age of twenty-seven, let alone eighty-eight.

In April 1942, Williams was one of several thousand Americans who surrendered to the Japanese on the Bataan Peninsula of the Phillipines. U.S. soldiers had held out for months with little food, supplies or ammunition and they had no choice but to surrender to vastly superior forces. This was early in World War Two and Japan dominated the Pacific.

The Americans and several thousand of their Filipino allies were marched 60 miles to a prison camp. There was no food, no water, no medical treatment during the journey. It became infamous as the “Bataan Death March.”

The killing started almost immediately. If a soldier fell behind, tried to get water or just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, he was bayoneted, shot, beheaded or beaten to death. In scenes worthy of the worst horror film you can imagine, American soldiers saw friends killed and had to step over their bodies as the march continued. It’s estimated that some 2-thousand Americans and some ten thousand Filipinos were executed.

Williams nearly became one of them.

“I lay there and a Japanese soldier poked me with his bayonet” he recalled. “I said go ahead and get it over with. I was totally exhausted.”

Williams was lucky. Friends got him on his feet and he continued on, but surviving the death march was only the beginning. He then faced a prisoner of war camp that was among the worst: Cabanatuan.

Thousands of Americans were housed there with little food, medicine or sanitary supplies. Men died daily of starvation, disease, beatings and executions. The farmer’s son from Kannapolis helped bury his friends beneath makeshift crosses in a graveyard that got fuller by the day.

He was there for two years and spent the last year and a half of the war working in a slave labor mine in Japan. He and many others were walking skeletons when they were freed.

He came home to Charlotte. His marriage to Dorothy Fogg produced three sons and lasted 57 years until his death last week. He was a deacon in his church and worked over twenty years at the National Linen Company, retiring as a supervisor in 1980.

Yes, all of that sounds like the life of an average, good man. But that three and a half years in the 40’s gave him something the rest of us can only imagine: a true measure of freedom’s cost.

We lose one thousand of his generation everyday. I take note of his passing. I think we all should.

MOVIE OF THE WEEK

“Gunga Din” 1939

Directed by George Stevens this is one of the great adventure films of all time. It stars Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Cary Grant and Victor McLaglen as three soldier buddies in the British Army in India in the late 1800’s. It’s all for one and one for all as they put down an uprising with the help of the native waterboy, Gunga Din. The story comes from the Rudyard Kipling poem of the same name. It is sentimental, courageous, funny and sad.

1939 is considered the greatest year in the history of movies and had the movie been made in any other year, it would likely have been nominated for and won several academy awards. The fact it won none is a tribute to the year and makes it one of the greatest movies never to have won an award. I dare you to watch it only once.