Warren Tuggle of Punta and his family were run out of Biloxi, Miss. 65 years ago by the Ku Klux Klan. The Tuggle family was black and Warren was a 17-year-old high school graduate in 1947 when they left town.
Tagged Fort Dix
Pfc. Joe Battaglia Army communication specialist saw action along 38th Parallel in Korea
Shortly after Joe Battaglia was drafted into the Army in November 1951, he found himself in a bunker a few hundred feet behind the “Main Line of Resistance,” the front line, along the 38th Parallel separating North and South where the fighting was taking place during the Korean War.
Mary O’Neil of La Casa became 18-year-old clerk typist in Washington before WW II started
When Mary O’Neil of La Casa Mobile Home Park in North Port, Fla. went to Washington, D.C. in 1941, she was an 18-year-old civilian clerk typist who had just graduated from high school in Houston, Mo. her hometown.
Barney Jimerson, a Seneca Indian, joined 11th Airborne during Cold War
“Barney” Jimerson of Gardens of Gulf Cove, south of Englewood, Fla., is a full blooded Seneca Indian, born in Elco, N.Y., He grew up, graduated from high school in the Jamestown, N.y. area and volunteered for the draft in 1955 when he was 21.
Cpl. George Eyster served in 254th Engineering Bn. all through Europe in Second World War
George Eyster started off driving a 2 1/2 ton army truck in the 254th Engineering Battalion attached to Gen. Omar Bradley’s 1st Army when it came ashore on Omaha Beach June 6, 1944. He saw the war from the vantage-point of a deuce-and-a-half starting with the invasion beach to the Battle of the Bulge, on…
Spc. 4 Dutch Dutcher of Polynesian Gardens was a 9th Division cook in Vietnam
Dutch Dutcher was a 17-year-old wise-guy from Brockton, Mass. when he signed up for the Army with a friend in 1967.
John Brophy was too skinny to go to war during Korean Conflict
John Brophy of Heron Creek subdivision in North Port at 21 was 6-feet 3-inches tall and 120 pounds when drafted in 1951 during the Korean War. He was too skinny to fight.
His eyes kept him out of Air Force and Navy, but Army gave him a thumbs up
Lowell McCarty want to be a fly boy. “I tried to enlist in the Air Corps when I was 17. I passed the written exam with no problems, but when I took the physical exam they found out I was color blind and they told me, ‘We don’t want you!’” the 84-year-old Port Charlotte man…
Warrant Officer II Charles Myers fought Army’s administrative war for 2 decades
Charles Myers was born and grew up in the Panama Canal Zone in Central America in 1933. At 21 he enlisted in the U.S. Army on May 17, 1954 under agreement between the U.S. and Panama.
Pfc. James Johnson protected an Atomic Bomb during war games at Ft. Polk
When James Johnson joined the 82nd Airborne Division, an elite fighting force, in the fall of 1955 as a 20-year-old soldier he took part in one of the largest ground maneuvers the Army ever staged in the United States.
Sgt. Fred Strass remembers ‘Gardelegen Massacre’ at close of war
Fred Strass was a rifleman in an infantry company that fought in Europe during World War II. He served as a sergeant in K-Company, 406th Regiment of the 102nd Infantry Division.
82nd Airborne was still an elite outfit in ’55 despite the fact there was no war
When Randy White went into the Army and eventually joined the 325th Paratroop Regiment in 1955 his unit was a far cry from the one that flew into Normandy, France in gliders on D-Day to fight the Germans.
Julius Hirsch fought Japanese in the Aleutians and finally in Okinawa at war’s end
Julius Hirsch grew up in the Bronx and went to war almost a year before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. He was a member of the 862nd Antiaircraft Artillery Battalion sent to the Aleutians when the Japanese invaded the barren islands off the Alaskan coast in 1942.
War Tales 