Valor on Iwo Jima - Woody Williams, MOH: Conversations with Our Greatest Generation (Episode Five)

marshall woody williams began his life in humble beginnings on a farm in quiet del west virginia born on the 2nd of october 1923 he weighed only 3 pounds yet he had the heart of a giant already beating in his chest his early education consisted of classes in a one-room schoolhouse and growing up he never dreamed of actually joining the military however in 1941 as woody served in the civilian conservation corps he answered the call to join the fight spurred on by the japanese surprise bombing at pearl harbor only 17 at the time woody's mother had to sign the papers for him to join the marines but she wouldn't do it when he turned 18 he returned to the recruiting office as a legal adult and filled out the paperwork and woody soon joined and was shipped to the pacific theater in january 1944 woody arrived as a replacement in the third marine division which was then stationed on guadalcanal following the fierce battle of 1942 and 43. as a flamethrower demolition operator woody fought in the battle of guam from july to august 1944 as part of the marianas campaign and he also fought in the battle of iwo jima in january 1945 the bloodiest battle per square mile in u.s history on an island only eight square miles which landed seventy thousand marines three marine divisions the third the fourth and the fifth marine divisions against twenty one thousand highly trained and dug in japanese soldiers in a life or death struggle that cost almost seven thousand marines their lives and wounded another nineteen thousand in only thirty days only three thousand japanese soldiers survived the battle it was a living bloody hell for those that were there were uncommon valor was a common virtue and woody williams was key to the american victory when woody and the first battalion 21st marines third marine division hit the black sand beaches of iwo jima several well-positioned pill boxes impeded their movement forward amidst the machine gun fire that ricocheted off his flame thrower and enemy soldiers charging with fixed bayonets woody led assault after assault to each subsequent pillbox destroying them all with bursts of flame his actions were decisive in neutralizing one of the most fanatically defended japanese strong points encountered by the regiment on 5 october 1945 president harry s truman presented the medal of honor to woody williams for his conspicuous gallantry above and beyond the call of duty woody is always humble and he knows full well how lucky he is to be alive and he credits two other marines corporal warren bornholes and private first class charles fisher for giving their lives to protect his woody is not only the last living medal of honor recipient from the pacific campaign but he's also the last living marine decorated with the medal of honor from world war ii after the war woody continued to serve retiring after 20 years in the marine corps he then continued his career of distinguished public service to serving veterans and their families whether serving as the commandant of the veterans nursing home in barbersville west virginia to creating foundations that support gold star families woody williams has always put service over self woody and the greatest generation fought the bloodiest war in all of history they took up arms against tyranny in the second world war to fight for something to achieve a better peace reflecting on the actions of the greatest generation instills in all of us a deep commitment to serve this great nation and our people and an understanding of how lucky we are to be americans how lucky we are to grow up in a country where we have freedom of speech freedom of the press freedom of religion and all the other rights and privileges we as americans enjoy in our daily lives today those with first-hand knowledge of world war ii are becoming fewer and fewer and so we must never forget the horrific cost of great power war and the sacrifices of those who went before us both my mother and father served in world war ii my mother in the navy medical corps and a hospital in seattle and my father with the fourth marine division making the assault landings on kawajalem cypantinian and alongside woody williams on iwo jima and that generation of world war ii the greatest generation the generation of woody and my parents has a lesson to teach us all and that lesson is to never let it happen again never let it happen again as the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff on behalf of every soldier sailor airman marine and coast guardsman more than 2.3 million of us who wear the uniform today we all extend our sincerest thanks to woody williams and our world war ii veterans for granting us the precious gift of freedom and we renew our commitment to maintain the peace protect the constitution and preserve the values you fought so bravely to pass on to our generation hello everybody i'm martha mccallum of fox news and i am so pleased to be with all of you today on behalf of the american veterans center as we continue our conversations with our greatest generation in commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the end of world war ii so today we are all honored to be in the company of herschel woody williams who is of course the recipient of the medal of honor for the battle of iwo jima and he's just been a remarkable figure in the middle of the world war ii history and commemoration throughout all of these years and i've just been so honored to spend time with woody and to get to know him uh as i was working on my book about this period so it's really a great honor to be speaking with you we're also going to be joined by some students as well who will have some questions for woody as we move through the conversation so woody i just want to start by saying hello and how great it is to see you and to be with you once again um you're just a treasure to our country and i'm grateful to know you um i think i'd like to start i i love the name of the town that you grew up in quiet dell west virginia and i think it says a lot about you and who you are can you start by telling everybody a little bit about your upbringing in quiet dell uh quad dell is a very small country community and i was raised grew up on a dairy farm in quiet dell we had a dairy that we produced milk and delivered it seven and a half miles away to the city of fairmont west virginia and we had to do that of course every morning every day because at that time there were no general stores on the corner you couldn't go to stores and buy milk because refrigeration didn't exist at that time if you had a refrigerator you had to have ice for it and of course you would have to go to fairmont to get the ice which they would cut out of the river during the winter months and store so that we would have ice during the summer months so uh it was a large family we had 11 children in our family all of us didn't make it to adulthood because of various conditions including the flu that we had in 1918-19 and so growing up on the farm uh had to work every day it was a seven day a week kind of a job because you couldn't you just couldn't take sunday off because the animals still had to be taken care of and the work still had to be done to make sure that they were taken care of so it was it was a good life but it was a hard life it was all during the depression years when money was absolutely non-existent if i had a nickel i thought i was rich and we call it five cents today but back in my day it was a nickel and and uh but things were so reasonable in cost at that time you could go to a movie for five cents or you could get a hot dog for five cents or like cream cone for five cents imagine what an ice cream cost you today you know dollar sixty cents for an ice cream go so it was a different time but it was a good life yeah um i remember you telling me that your your dad you know i asked you if it was difficult for you in training camp and you said that it wasn't because it was kind of the way that you grew up can you share that with everybody yes uh because of the the work that had to be done uh boys particularly girls didn't they stayed more or less in the house uh they they were the housekeepers or took the things in the house most girls didn't get out on the farm and work like we did like you know hoeing corn and digging potatoes and all that sort of stuff but we were raised in such a way that when dad said do something it was just automatically that we do it we we didn't say i don't want to do that that was you if you said that one time you never said it a second time so uh uh going into the marine corps with the trump with the upbringing that i'd had growing up i had no difficulty in receiving orders or being told what to do when they said to do it we just did it because that's the that's all we knew so um military service wasn't too much of a change for us they have discipline and commitment and and uh um so when you after pearl harbor which we just um had the anniversary this week uh you wanted to enlist but it wasn't as easy as as you thought it might be tell us why well um when pearl harbor happened i happen to be in what was known in those days as civilian conservation corps uh the they started a program where youth from 16 on and probably the oldest person would be 24 or 25 years of age but it was a program so that youth could go into the civilian conservation corps and earn a little bit of money and do something that would give them some form of work ethic they could even learn trades they could become a mechanic or they might become a welder or whatever and my brother next to me and myself the two youngest of the family he went first into the ccc's and because he had a little bit of money and i didn't have any i thought well i'm gonna go two so i can get some of that money and so i joined and on pearl harbor day i was a way out in a little town called white hall montana and there were about 265 of we youth in that camp and the camps were run by army people we had a commanding officer and we had a first sergeant and a mess sergeant and and so we had a little bit of discipline because we had to obey the rules of course and when they announced that on december the 8th that we were going to war that america was going to war because pearl harbor had been bombed most of us had no idea where it was they offered us a choice that if we were over 18 years of age at that point we could go directly into the army we could enlist right then because we had army personnel on base but if you're under 18 then you had to have a parent consent and i my father had died my mother i knew would not agree with me going into the army or any military so i came home to join the marine corps why i joined the marine corps was simply because i liked the uniform better than the army uniform i think they got a lot of young men that way right it was the best one right but when i attempted to or joined the first time i was over 18 i just reached my 18th day and they turned me down because i was short they couldn't take me uh they had a heist requirement and i didn't meet it so they wouldn't accept me they took that height requirement down to where they would take people that didn't meet that requirement so in 1943 i went in to join again when i joined that time they accepted me of course and we went off to the war never thinking and her having any idea that we would ever leave the united states of america i thought i'd stay right here in my country to protect my country and my freedom never thinking that i would go to some foreign and yeah to be in a war that isn't why i enlisted my country but when i got to boot camp of course we learned then that we're we're not going to fight the war in america we're going to fight ourselves so you went from being someone who was too small to join the military to being a man a young man who would earn the medal of honor for courage and valor in one of the most fiercely fought battles in the pacific war in iwo jima it's an extraordinary extraordinary story um i i want to fast forward a little bit but i want to go first to to guam which was one of the first places that you served so tell me what it was like for this young man from quiet dell west virginia who had really never traveled anywhere outside of that except for training camp to find yourself in guam what did you think when you when you were there of what it was like well fortunately for us uh starting in january of 1944 marines that had already been in combat in on an island called bougainville they i joined their outfit so they had the experience and their experience gave us some basic that we would have never known otherwise and from january 44 until august of 44 when we went to guam to take guam back from the the enemy that had taken it from us in 1942 it was american territory we owned that one so we went there to take it back and of course there's always a tremendous amount of anxiety and fear because you know you're going into battle and you realize that there is a possibility that you're not going to survive this battle so our training was so important that we had confidence in ourselves and confidence in what we were being taught and told what to do that that was the basis of which we had to have in order to be successful if we didn't have that we would have never made it so to say you weren't afraid when you're in combat i don't believe that i think everybody has a fear it's a matter of you controlling your fear rather than the controlling you if the fear controls you you cannot operate under fear you can operate under courage how did you find a way to do that i think because of the training that the marines had given me gave me confidence that i could succeed that i could be successful in whatever i was attempting to do and the other marines around me of course were also illustrating confidence and courage and so you just become a part of it it becomes a part of you and you really don't give it much thought it's something that we must do if we're going to win this war tell us about the battle in guam and once you were in battle what was that like and what was the mission for you specifically was of course altogether a different island than iwo jima guam was almost in our area of combat was was totally jungle real thick heavy jungle and you find a jungle warfare different than you would fight in an open battle open ground type combat and the thing that i remember most was you never knew what the next step was going to be because you couldn't see anything in front of you except jungle so you didn't know what was on the other side i can remember when we would get orders that we were moving out and to go forward you became very cautious because the the enemy was exceedingly successful in camouflage they could hide themselves in places that you wouldn't even dream of and you had to be constantly on the alert it was one of those things to just run hour after hour and sleep didn't make any difference you you just had to keep on going and you become so exhausted at points in time that you you could you could sleep on a pack of nails it wouldn't make any because you just reached that point where you must have some rest and automatically you just drop off to sleep i think i swear i've seen guys standing on their feet sleeping up against a tree or or something and would absolutely be asleep uh because the exhaustion had reached that point but you have to overcome that if you're going to be successful so when did you first become aware that you were going to iwo jima and what did you think about that what did you what did you think that the mission was going to going to be like well after we secured guam after we got control of guam we continued to train as if we were going to be in junk again someplace else because that's all we knew yeah most of the islands had been jungled to that point so in february of 1945 we got orders or we were told we're going to board ship we didn't know where we were going they didn't tell us that until we got aboard ship once we got aboard ship and out in the ocean then they told us we were going to this island of iwo jima none of us had ever heard of it of course and when they told us the size of it we couldn't or at least i couldn't imagine why would need all these marines to take a little piece of island that was you know only two and a half miles wide and five miles long and guam was a huge island compared to that and we couldn't figure out why that would be why so many people would be required but we had no intelligence about iwo jima we didn't know what what the enemy had done on iwo in the amount of of tunnels that they had in the volcano or underground or how many of the pill boxes we called them we call them bunkers today but in my day it was pill boxes we didn't know the number of pill boxers which is reinforced concrete bunkers if you will we had no idea how many of those they had so we had no intelligence of the island and apparently the people in charge of the car of the assignment of the combat had some idea that the island was going to be difficult to take because 40 000 marines on the very first day landed on the beach and we didn't have that many people to take guam only had one division taking guam and now we've got two divisions two marine divisions taking this little island and we were told with our group we were another division which made three of course that we probably would never get off ship or go ashore because they didn't think that we they would need us but we were there in the event they would and of course after the first day then they told us we were going to shore because we had lost so many marines wounded and killed that they needed additional people and so we were ordered to go to the island on the second day but the marines are sure had not been able at that point to get enough territory to give us ground to commune on we had no place to land because they were still occupying the beaches and so we had to wait another day and then go in on the the third day and by that time they had been able to start moving forward and eliminating some of the enemy to gain ground and we finally got in to to with us with a specific assignment that our division would be the point of of the island we would go up the center of the island and the other two divisions are taking the shorelines and of course our division we had to cross the airfields that uh that they had built there and there's no protection on an airfield it's open ground and so we lost a tremendous number of marines attempting to get across the airfield and that's when we encountered all of these numerous reinforced pill boxes that were there to protect the airfield that's why they had built and they stopped us we every time we would move forward to try to break through the the string of billboxes uh they had all the advantage we had none and we would just lose marine after marine so flame thor became flamethrower and demolition became this the if you would the super weapon for the pill boxes dropping bombs on them or hitting them with artillery didn't do a thing for them because they were reinforced concrete pillboxes but if you could eliminate the enemy within the billbox it couldn't be reoccupied and that would give you the advantage and that's the event eventually what we had to do that's why the flamethrower became such an important weapon on iwo jima so the airfields that you talk about were the reason why there was so much focus on iwo jima it was needed for the b-29 the super fortress to make stops or to uh land there if there was a repair that had to be done uh otherwise they would be lost in the ocean between guam and and japan uh as the fight towards the mainland continued um so tell me about tell me about your experience on iwo jima i know i i want you talk about the marines who were being killed at such a tragic and enormous clip in those in those early days you lost a very good friend there didn't you would he yes i did yes i've said probably one of the best friends i've ever had in my life you have a tendency and i think this is true of all branches of the service there will be individuals that will hook up with each other and you became so close to each other because their lives are depending on each other you know it's just it's just one of those things that happens in combat and so vernon waters and i were those two individuals and he was six six and i'm five six so comparison i'm a run to his side but he was my flame floor operator and of course had something happened to me then he would have had to take over the duty of being the flamethrower operator uh other than that he was my assistant and he carried all the material you know our packs and our extra ammunition our extra grenades and everything else because you've got 70 pounds on your back on a with a flamethrower there's very little that you can take with you other than the essentials of operating the flamethrower so uh but we were in the same tent together and and very close absolutely uh so uh he got he got hit with a mortar and uh we lost him on on march the 6th of 1945 and we we still think of him very often very frequently yeah your story is so similar to many other stories that i've heard of you know young men who felt that they were closer than brothers with the men with whom they fought because of the circumstances and because of how much they relied on each other and you lost your unit lost so many men that there came a moment when your superior turned to you and asked if what you could do against these pill boxes you were the only flamethrower operator left correct in my company yes that's right when when we hit the beach or when we got to the beach uh i was in charge of six other marines and they were flamethrower demolition people they had been trained to either one they could operate the flamethrower or they could do explosives to blow up things or to seal a cave or whatever but by the 23rd of february which is you know five days into the battle uh that's the day the flag went up on mount sir you know i had nothing to do with that i just i saw it after it got up and i had nothing but those six marines had either been wounded or killed in my company and so i am the only trained flamethrower individual left and uh we had attempted to go break through these this string of uh pill boxes and lost so many marines that my commanding officer uh had gathered a group of us together to try to figure out what are we going to do from here and of course it was up to him but he at that point asked me if i thought i could do something against some of the pill boxes with the flamethrower and i've said many times i'm not sure of my answer some of the marines that were there later testified that i my response was i'll try he gave me some marines to help me gave me four marines to assist me and i went to work that's what i was trying to do it was my job i wasn't doing anything special i was just fulfilling the obligation that i had as a trained individual and other marines had trained me to be able to do that but uh during that period of time it went on for four hours uh much of it is just blank to me because you're not thinking you're not trying to remember anything you're just trying to accomplish something so much of it is blank but in and out four hours two of those marines that had joined that were assigned to me i didn't even know who they were they weren't for my outfit they weren't from my particular platoon or squad so i didn't know them other than they're just marines and two of those individuals sacrificed their lives that day protecting mine so i've always felt an obligation to say that even though i didn't know what the medal of honor was i'd never heard of it i had no concept of what it was or why anybody would get it or anything i've said since i received it that i wear it in their honor because they gave all they had protecting me and that created a a feeling and a burden upon me to say well they did more than i did and they deserved the medal not me woody you've talked about what it's like to use a flamethrower it has a very specific smell and it is a very powerful weapon give everybody just a sense of what it was like and and whether or not you say that you you think you know you may have picked up another flamethrower along the way um you you took out how many pill boxes explained to everybody sort of exactly the extent of what you were able to do in those four hours well let me say first of all that i could not have accomplished what i did without the assistance of other marines naturally you have to have help there's very little that you can do alone and uh other marines supporting me and firing at the flame thor i mean flowering at the pill boxes when i'm trying to get to them with a flamethrower that was absolutely urgent it was exceedingly important but during the period of four hours uh flamethrower lasts if you just open it up and shoot it it would last 72 seconds that's all the fuel that you had and so we were trained not of course to do that because it would probably be a release to most of it but we were trying to shoot it in bursts short bursts and to get close enough to a target to where it would be effective and the only way that we could eliminate the enemy within the pill box was to either get flame into the bill box or get close enough to get an explosive into the hillbox and we would usually we were trying to do the flamethrower first and then follow through with an explosive to make sure that the enemy within couldn't couldn't fight it anymore and during that four hours uh i used up six flamethrowers one of the things that bothered me all my life is how did i get the additional five frame thor's i know i ha i can remember the first one very very well but how did i get the rest of them we had them stored in our company supply group or unit and we had serviced them had them all ready to go before we ever got into combat we had 35 or 40 of them already serviced and ready to be used but i had to go get those somehow in order to use six of them and i was able with the use of the six eliminate the enemy within seven of those pill boxes those are not my figures those are figures that my commanding officer and witnesses uh other marines of that day they're the people who gave us those numbers i i had no idea uh but you crawled more than you walk or you have to get on the ground do we have protection because the minute that you stand up with these tanks on your back you become a target naturally because you can be recognized and flamethrower was one of those things that that the enemy was exceedingly fearful of and uh so you you do most of the crawling to get to wherever you're going and you would have to get within within 25 to 30 yards of the pill box in order for the flame to reach the bill box because you only had so much pressure to force it out of the out of the flamethrower so uh often they were of course attempting to eliminate me because if they eliminate me then i'm not going to be a danger to them and i can remember uh a few times when uh it was well done howell survived really bulls at one point in time was ricocheting off of my flame floor i could i could feel the they were shooting at me with a machine gun and i can remember that i'm hitting the flamethrower on my back fortunately the flamethrower was made of real heavy metal and the bullets ricocheted off of course fortunately they ricocheted up and stood them down or i wouldn't be talking with you today but uh it was one of those things i guess just meant to be and something completely out of my control it's a remarkable story and every time i hear it i hear new things in in your telling of it i know that the students who are with us have questions for you and i want to be sure that we give them an opportunity to ask them so um let's begin with cadet caney uh of virginia tech cadet caney so sir i understand that uh to this day you still do a lot of work with veterans and helping gold star families and you said that you wear the medal of honor for all the other marines and veterans who have done so much for you so with that being said i was wondering which do you value more your legacy that you earned as a war fighter on iwo jima or your legacy that you earned as someone who to this day continues to help gold star families and veterans that is a very good question and i appreciate that well they are so far apart in meaning i'm not quite sure i can give a specific answer to it let me say first of all the medal of honor completely changed my life i took on a new life that i never expected ever having in my lifetime simply because i was awarded the medal of honor i became a public figure things were expected of me that i would have never dreamed of before and that went on for many many years and for many years because i lost a very close friend boyhood friend he and i had walked back and forth to school for seven years we didn't have any bus service back in those days we walked to school back and forth and we were a little over a mile from the school so leonard brown and i were really probably closer than brothers because we were together every day all during the school years and leonard lost his life in world war ii and that had a great impact upon me because his mother and father were very close as i said my father was deceased and i sort of depended on his father as as a family member as the father and that had an effect but for whatever reason our country in all the wars that we'd had had never paid any respect or honor or tribute to the families that had lost a loved one in our armed forces we did a terrific job in honoring veterans i think but we have all kinds of memorials for them but nothing for the families of those that didn't get home and that bothered me for years and years and uh finally uh ghost our mothers became pretty the name and and appearances became pretty frequent in america but the families never were involved in it was just of course our mother and a father who had lost his son in afghanistan really is the one that set me on the trail to get something that would honor the families because he lost the only son he had and we had never even mentioned gold star dad and anything we ever did it was always just ghosts our mother so from that we decided we needed to do something at least in our own state to honor those we've got 11 474 names on our veterans memorial on our capitol grounds and those got home and we've never done anything to pay tribute to their families so that's why we we ought to do something for the families and so uh in 2013 we did the first memorial that would honor families of those lost in the united states of america and today the communities around america even as far away as hawaii have erected 79 of these memorials to honor the lost in their communities and this continues to grow we have about 73 other communities right now that are in the process that eventually will have a memorial for the folk in their community and it's something long long overdue in america families suffer tremendously when they lose a lot they deserve to be remembered that answer your question yes sir thank you it's a wonderful legacy to all of those families and to you woody um next up we have midshipman not alyssa knott from george washington university go ahead good afternoon sir thank you for sharing your experiences with us i think one thing that i really took away from hearing you speak um was your really devotion to accomplishing your mission by clearing out these pill boxes um really emphasizing this idea that uncommon value or valor was a common virtue so my question is how can we as midshipman or cadets really cultivate this culture of valor within our units or community at large and is it even possible to do so or do you believe that valor is something that can only occur in times of uncertainty well i think you're doing what certainly needs to be done in america we must have a strong armed forces uh otherwise somebody's gonna take advantage of us and it takes young folk like you who are willing to when you raised your hand and took that oath of office to say that you would defend the american against all enemies foreign and domestic you were saying in effect not wanting it not desiring it and hoping and praying that it would never happen but you said in effect you may take my life but you cannot take my freedom or my country and if we don't have folk like you that follows in our footsteps to protect america we will lose america so you're doing exactly what our young folk need to do and it's getting tougher and tougher all the time recruiters tell me that it's getting more difficult to find individuals such as you who's willing to take that oath and to stand up and to be a part of a force to protect all the rest of us so thank you for what you're doing you are important to us you're you're important to america well said let's hear now from from cadet benjamin danko from the university of north georgia good afternoon sir um my question is uh given your experience with leadership what is some advice that you could give in regards to stepping into new positions well first of all let me say learn all you can absorb all you can there is nothing like experience the experience of others is important to us as an individual because we learned from each other most of us and i'm one of those have never had an original thought in our life that somebody else hasn't already thought of but we activate that thought and pass it on to somebody else and they continue to pass it on to the next person so stepping into a new position and and i've done that i i've occupied fortunately uh every rank or grade depending on whether what branch or service you're in in the marine corps it's rank of course but i've occupied every rank from private to first sergeant in the marine corps now i'm a warrant officer in the marine corps so when i went from enlisted to an officer status my whole thinking had to change and i had to adopt what others had already done and learn from them because i couldn't do it on my own so when you step into a new position uh follow in the footsteps of those who have been successful and you too then will be successful does anyone have a second question that you would like to ask woody before we wrap up today based on all of the stories that he shared with us so generously this afternoon yes ma'am i can ask a second question um you touched on this a little bit sir before when you were talking about your training but i was wondering what you relied on when you're put in a really difficult situation other than your training such as you know your morals or values or upbringing and what advice would you give us when we're about to commission into the military yes to what we should rely on when we're put on difficult situations that's a real good question it really is well i certainly our upbringing has a tremendous impact on our lives we all know that if if we are taught something that is beneficial to us we can use that teaching for for an advancement for to our advantage so upbringing is very very important and i think you're an illustration of that but somebody said in your mind somewhere along the way that to serve america was one of the important things in life and you accepted that had you gone the other direction and said no i i don't agree with that i don't think i need to serve i don't think i the country needs me in any way you wouldn't be where you are today so upbringing certainly has a has a tremendous impact on how we react not only in adulthood but how we react when the there's we're called upon to do something that we never dreamed we would ever do i'm sure you're doing things today as a midshipman that you never thought you would ever do you know you're forbidden to walk on the sidewalk [Music] [Laughter] but you accept that because you've accepted that way of life at the moment so continue doing what you're doing and absorb everything that you possibly can from others that have been successful and just like martha she absorbed something from somebody that made her successful because otherwise she wouldn't know and and then she's very successful so success has a great impact upon our lives as we go along if we hit a success a plateau then we gather another plateau of success and we continue to climb and this fail failure that scares us to death none of us want to fail well i want to thank all of you uh for your service and woody listening to your discussion with these young men and women who are preparing to serve our country is so inspiring to me i thank all of you for making the choice to serve our country we're grateful to you all and we're grateful to you woody for sharing your wisdom and your experience with these young people today it's invaluable and i hope that a lot of people get to hear this conversation with one of the greatest members of our greatest generation so woody thank you so much on behalf of the american center let me ask those cadets and midshipmen please question have you ever seen a medal of honor no only in pictures sir just in pictures yeah okay they're only uh right now there are only 69 of us living in the united states that are able to wear the medal of honor but the medal of honor is just a a token of somebody's appreciation for what that individual did and every one of the 69 individuals in them i know the most of them i've been in this outfit since 1947 i'm part of the medal of honor group and every one of those as far as i've ever been able to find out uh all of them say that they wear it for somebody else because they could not have done anything alone they had to have others supporting in order to accomplish what they did when i received the medal of honor i had never heard of it i didn't know what it was i really didn't understand why i was getting it and others did not so it is something that is a life-changing experience but it all comes about because of others thank you so much woody thank you for spending the time with us today and thank you again for your service to this country you are a living treasure and i hope that many people have the opportunity to listen to your sage advice and your wisdom uh all the way from quiet dull west virginia to the beaches of iwo jima we thank you from the bottom of our hearts and thank you to all of you students and cadets and midshipmen for joining us today we're so proud of all of you thank you thank you martha thank you very much for your time you

Channel: American Veterans Center

Views: 7,585

Rating: 4.9305553 out of 5

Keywords: AVC, American Veterans Center, veteran, veterans, history, army, navy, air force, marines, coast guard, military, navy seal, world war ii, wwii, medal of honor, pacific theater, woody williams

Id: ixVpESggbFE

Length: 54min 51sec (3291 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 09 2020