HOUSTON – When we pulled into his driveway at his Rosenberg home, Stephen Brown was taking down an old tattered American flag and replacing it with a new one.
“My neighbors told me I needed to replace my flag,” he called out as we walked up towards him.
Brown, who is legally blind, couldn’t really see us or hear anything we were saying but he knew why we were there.
For 60 years he was quiet about what he lived as a merchant marine for the Coast Guard in World War II.
But on Friday, when we put a microphone on him and a camera in front of him it was clear he wanted to tell his story.
For 25 minutes he spoke about his service in the military, describing the memories like they happened yesterday.
He was in high school when he was recruited for a job that not many wanted, working aboard a tanker refueling ship that would serve the fleets in the Atlantic and Pacific.
“Everybody was patriotic but they were afraid of the tankers, there were no weapons and without an escort they were a sitting duck in the water,” said Brown, who is now 90 years old.
He said he was assigned to the USS Settling Hill, a ship that carried six million gallons of high octane fuel.
“Full it made 15 miles an hour, so it took months to get where we were going,” said Brown.
When they arrived in the Persian Gulf, they met with two other ships just like theirs with the same mission: fuel the fleets at war in Japan.
The Persian Gulf was the last place the American ships could stop for fuel according to Brown, so their captain told it was time to write home.
“He said, we are looking down the barrel of the gun. Tell them you love them because you may never see them again,” said Brown.
As a teenager from a small town in Texas who’d never seen any of the world, he didn’t know what to write to his mother other than to describe some of the adventures he was having.
He wrote about a mongoose and a cobra he witnessed have a fight in India, and described shark fishing from the ship.
Then he asked his mother to keep the letter as a souvenir because he had paid 95 cents to mail it.
Brown said when the ship left the Persian Gulf for Okinawa they were told each tanker ship would be traveling 150 miles apart from the other.
They slept two hours and stayed on watched for six. During one of those ships, Brown heard the lookout call ‘fire on the port side’.
“We knew it was 6 million gallons of fuel, and it was about 150 miles away so we knew it was number 3,” he said.
The next day their captain confirmed the Japanese had torpedoed that ship.
His ship would eventually join the other tanker in Okinawa and not long after arrival they were given good news: Germany had surrendered.
Brown describes it as one of the happiest moments of his life. But for the forces in the Pacific, their work was not done. He said hundreds of men chanted in unison, “One down, one to go and then we go home”.
A bombing attack would come soon after, and Brown would find himself manning an anti-aircraft gun.
“We turned that sky into a white-hail,” he reminisced.
When a bomb landed close to their ship, he said it blew him and the Navy gunner he was teamed with 18 feet from their gun.
Eventually, the commander of the island ordered them to leave.
“He said they are after the fuel and the aircraft carrier. Cease firing and head out to sea and lose yourself in the darkness and we'll make a rendezvous at a later date,” said Brown.
But there was no need for rendezvous, because Japan surrendered after the United States dropped two atomic bombs.
Brown, still recovering from his injuries, would get to return home.
He got married and had three children. But for 60 years, he said he could not stop thinking about how many men didn’t get to come home so he never spoke about it.
It wasn’t until his second wife found a book about the men and women from Nacaogdoches County who served in WWII.
“She says, it says here you have 4 medals. I let the government keep them, they just remind me of all those dead people,” said Brown.
But his wife wrote the department of veteran’s affairs and made sure her husband got his records. That’s when he finally started telling his stories, and displaying his medals proudly.