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Craig Leyda

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Craig Leyda, a helicopter pilot in Vietnam, recalls a playful dog which led him to enemy headquarters. (3:30)

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Craig Leyda tells the story of a colorful airborne attack against Vietnamese forces. (1:36)

Curt Beckham

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You didn't see many sailors in Atlanta but Curt Beckham and his friends joined the Navy regardless. After a rather disjointed training experience and after serving with a couple of radar units, he was assigned to the USS Shangri-La as a cook. (5:35)

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The brand new carrier USS Shangri-La carried out an attack on Tokyo, then participated in the Okinawa invasion, and then returned to attack Tokyo again. Curt Beckham was a mess cook on the ship and he had a battle station as well, down in the ammunition room. (4:01)

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Although he didn't choose to become a mess cook, Curt Beckham learned that, in the Navy, a cook is godlike. He recalls the great leave policy they had while in port and he remembers some bad things, like having to wake up other cooks and not seeing land for three months. (3:36)

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Curt Beckham tells what it's like to ride out a typhoon with a Navy fleet. Besides that ordeal, he also was sunburned to a crisp on R&R and, because it would have gone on his record, was unwilling to report it and get treatment. Another time, he and his buddy had a bright idea about a cooler place to sleep up on the flight deck. (4:08)

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The chief commissary steward would give you some tough jobs, says mess cook Curt Beckham. It could be hundreds of individually wrapped sandwiches or a breakfast cream sauce, but it was always too much work. There was a screwball in the outfit, though, and he had a joke backfire that involved one of the sandwiches. (5:34)

Curtis Banker

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After training for over a year on both large and small artillery weapons, Curtis Banker deployed to the Pacific, where he manned a howitzer mounted on a tank chassis. On New Guinea, his men found that even lighter armored vehicles were at the mercy of the mud. (3:30)

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There weren't many tanks in the Pacific but Curtis Banker was a loader on an unusual armored vehicle that came ashore at the Luzon beachhead. The 105mm howitzer mounted on a tank chassis was an effective weapon where the terrain allowed, but the lack of cover for the loader meant that bullets were always whizzing by his ears. (4:54)

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Curtis Banker was with an armored artillery unit in the push to take back the Philippines when he had to be evacuated with a serious illness. He recovered fine but he nearly wound up as an unassigned replacement when he was ready to return to service. He said no, I am going back to my own unit. After the atomic bomb settled the war, he got a brief look at the homeland of the enemy. (4:21)