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Let's get into it. I miss him so much and he was a lot of fun. It's okay to cry. Our family was like beaver cleaver. Well, dad was a beaver cleaver. Dad was funny. When he was feeling good, he would get in his boxer shorts and start dancing across the living room floor, smacking his butt and singing. He used to wake me and my sister Paulette up because we were the youngest. He would wake us up for school and he'd say, Alicia D, Pauly P, rise and shine, rise and see the sun shining. His vegetable soup was the nastiest thing you could ever eat. He would take everything out of the refrigerator, I don't care if it was a crumb, and put it in a pot and make us all eat it and say they're starving children in Africa or whatever it was.
He didn't like waste. One time I know with my niece, she had eaten popcorn or something prior to dinner and she didn't want to eat and my dad forced her. He put her on his lap and force fed her. But we were all made too. We couldn't get up from the dinner table until our dinner was done.
Or our napkins were full. If we said we hated something, we got more of it because hate and shut up were horrible, terrible words in our family. We could not say shut up to each other except for my sister. That was her. That was her word. If we got into trouble, we would be sent to our room or something and then he would always come back in within five to 10 minutes and tell us why he did that.
My mother is just, you know, no, you go to your room and that's it. But he would always come back in and explain why he punished us. He was a great outdoorsman and he loved to fish three times a week. He'd come home from work, hook up to the boat and go to the lake, most of the time by himself. And he would take my brothers and all of our friends. He would take us to the lake and we got to do whatever we wanted to do, smoke and cuss and everything. And as soon as we pulled in the driveway, all of that ended.
And that's one of my best memories. We went camping every weekend. Mom and Dad would pack us up and take us to the lake in our carry all truck. And they just let us go.
I was like maybe six or seven. They just had so much trust in us. And we would go out into the middle of the lake and we would all just get on a big old huge inner tube and just have fun.
Every weekend they did that for us. And we used to go to our uncle's house and go swimming. He threw me off the boat.
Me too. He threw me in the swimming pool. That's where my dad taught me to swim, by sink or swim. I remember Dad telling me that when that boat got blown up with Japanese ships, that's where he learned to float. He floated on his back for two days before they were captured again.
And that's why with our uncle's pool, he would get on his back and he would fall asleep. Yes. And he saw the planes come over and shoot while he was floating.
Yeah. I didn't hear about it during the days. It was when he came home at night and he had been drinking and I would warm up his dinner. That's when he would open up about his experiences with me. And there was a time one time he had told me about there was a man who was on the Oroka Maru with him.
He was he was dead, practically dead. And he showed me what he did. He placed his hand over his mouth and his nose. And he did that on me. He got this crazed look in his eye and he wouldn't stop until I pushed him away. He was in that moment and I had to remind him, you're in the kitchen with me, your daughter. Every year on that man's death, he would have a total meltdown.
My mother had to. I never saw it, but my mother said he would actually go crazy on that specific day thinking of that specific man on that ship. Because it wasn't like a killing, like he wanted to kill him. Dad couldn't see him suffer anymore. He just didn't understand why he was allowed to live.
He carried that guilt with him because other people around him were just dying of ungodly things that they did in the prison camps and these horrendous, horrendous treatment. He was the oldest of five children, four boys and one girl. He was the doctor of the family that anytime anybody got hurt, they always called on him to fix it. He was a farmer.
He worked very diligently on the farm, apparently with my grandparents. He did not join the Navy because he wanted to meet girls, as has been recorded. He joined the Navy because he apparently got into a argument with my grandfather and had had enough.
That's why he joined the Navy, not because of women. He was stationed in Kanakoa, where he worked entire nights and days under constant air alerts, evacuating casualties from the danger zone. And then on January 2nd, he was captured by the Japanese Army. And that was the start of his horrific treatment for the next three years and eight months as a prisoner of war. From Passai, he was marched to Billabid Prison in Manila, where he spent and suffered for the next two and a half years. And you've been listening to the story of Estilla Myers. He was a World War II veteran and survivor of the Bataan Death March. Over 10,000 of our soldiers died on this trek and many thousands more died suffering in POW camps designed and put together by the Japanese Empire.
And when we come back, more of this remarkable story, this very real story to these family members on Our American Stories. Black Friday is coming. And for the adults in your life who love the coolest toys, well, there's something for them this year, too. Bartesian is the premier craft cocktail maker that automatically makes more than 60 seasonal and classic cocktails, each in under 30 seconds at the push of a button. And right now, Bartesian is having a huge site-wide sale. You can get $100 off any cocktail maker or cocktail maker bundle when you spend $400 or more. So if the cocktail lover in your life has been good this year, or the right kind of bad, get them Bartesian. At the push of a button, make bar-quality cosmopolitans, martinis, Manhattans, and more, all in just 30 seconds, all for $100 off.
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Find the Vizio all-in-one soundbar at Best Buy for just $129.99 and make your holidays sound better than ever. This is Lee Habib, host of Our American Stories. Every day on this show, we tell stories of history, faith, business, love, loss, and your stories. Send us your stories, small or large, to our email OAS at OurAmericanStories.com. That's OAS at OurAmericanStories.com. We'd love to hear them and put them on the air.
Our audience loves them too. And we return to Our American Stories and the story of Estill Myers telling the story as Estill's family. When we last left off, he had been captured by the Japanese following the surrender of the Philippines in World War II.
Let's continue with the story. He suffered, oh my gosh, from dengue fever, diarrhea, bronchitis, asthma, beriberi, heart disease, pellagra, night blindness, severe malnutrition, and severe vitamin deficiencies, which he kept going forward in his life. He then departed beloved prison on 12-13 of 1944 by marching through the streets of Manila, ill and weak, to what is known as the million dollar pier, only to be loaded on the hellship, the Oruko Maru. They were packed into these airless, humid holds of the Oruko Maru with more than 1,600 prisoners sharing the hardships created by the insufficient food, the water, the ventilation, the sanitary facilities on the ship.
He was one in charge of disposing of the dead. He risked his life in stealing sugar from the deck to try to nourish the men down below who were dying at a rapid pace. And then when the Oruko Maru was bombed by the Americans unaware of the prisoners of war, they all had to swim to the shore of Subic Bay.
And I remember him telling me that men were being eaten by sharks to the left of them and to the right of them and to the front and the back. And that's when the Japanese were firing machine guns at them when they were swimming, trying to get to the bay. This is when they were captured again and held on the tennis courts for six days. While they were on the tennis courts, he created a makeshift hospital to assist in the amputation of a man's arm without any medical equipment or medicine available. He also treated many of the wounded and sick men unceasingly. He also helped the Japanese. And that's probably one reason why they let him live.
I remember him telling me this and I was just grossed out that they had to eat cats, dogs and roaches just to stay alive. Who was the one thing about the shoe? Didn't his friend have his shoes floated up or something? So he got to use his friend's shoe? No. Dad had told me that when he was taking care of people, he had to let one man die so that he could have his shoes. So that he would have a pair of shoes to wear. Yeah.
Horrible. Upon leaving the tennis court, the surviving men were taken to Pampunga, where they were loaded onto boxcars on top of the other with the sickest being at the bottom. These boxcars took them into San Fernando del Union of Langayen Gulf. The remaining alive men were loaded onto freighters. This freighter was full of horse species and smell of ammonia was overtaking them. After 17 days on the 30th, they finally saw Japan.
The freighter landed with only 435 men left. The men were forced to march to a factory in a warehouse where the men lined up by the hundreds and found relief by drinking water from a toilet. They were brutally beaten. I remember the only thing Dad really telling me was that when he was in Japan, and they were marching from prison camp to prison camp, the Japanese soldiers that were on their horses would ride by the American prisoners and pull out their long swords and just for practice, they would cut off an American's head.
Oh, I mean, I can't even I can't even I mean, I sound like I'm reading from a Stephen King book. He said that the Japanese would lay them all out in a line and go through and either ban at them or just shoot them. And they left him and he didn't know why. He was like, why did they leave me? And so he truly believed that he had a guardian angel with him the entire time. He had to. Yeah, and we believe he did, too. He had a dream that the MPs would come in with, you know, their helmets and and say, the war is over. You're liberated.
And that dream came true three years after he had that dream. My dad stayed in Kyusha prison camp until his liberation after the plutonium bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. Kyusha is probably about 20 miles from Nagasaki. And he used to tell us the stories that he had fallout, the ashes thick, thick all over their bodies, and the Japanese would not allow them to wash it off. So they walked around with thick radiation ash all over their bodies. That kind of concluded his voyage. And that explains why he always floated on his back in the pool. And he was told, well, I don't know if you want to go this far yet, but he was told after he got out of the military that he would never father children because of all the stuff he wanted to do. He never wanted to show his children his suffering, what he went through. You know, my dad had anxiety and panic disorders three to four times a day.
Never saw that. He just looked at life like I wrote before with that Louis Armstrong song. That's the way he looked at life, that there was always hope. There was always God. There was always a light at the end of the tunnel.
The sun's going to shine the next day, no matter how bad your life is or how bad you feel, that sun's just going to come up in the morning. He was just everything to us. He was that pillar. He was that strength. He was brave and never complained.
No, never. I never heard him complain. He taught us to be devoted, loyal, honest, forgiving. He taught us all those things. To love one another, to love our mother, to believe in God, family and country. We are who he raised us to be with the Golden Rule, with the Ten Commandments, with being honest, being good citizens, loving your country.
That's who we are. He was just a man full of compassion. He worried about his fellow man, how they felt.
If they couldn't provide for themselves, he made sure that they had what they needed. I would spend days with him at his farmer's insurance agent office. He had made a little cot for me behind his desk, and I would just watch him interact with his clients. We were just talking earlier that he would pay people's premium for them if they couldn't pay it. He didn't charge for his chiropractor business.
He would barter like a chicken for an adjustment. But he was just good. He was my hero. He will always be my hero. My sister wrote a poem. I want to share it with you.
It's called The Heart of a P.O.W. It says, There was a young man who went off to war to fight for his country with a victory to score. Even after being captured by the enemy hands, he still believed in his country and for which it stands. After four long years, he always prayed, and finally he faced his Liberation Day. Even though he was finally free, he couldn't shake the memories. The war had left him with many fears, ones he could only express with many tears. Then one day came when he was finally free, for he was in the Lord's hands and free indeed, with no more scars for pain of the war. This was his vital victory, and he scored. Oh my gosh, I'm sorry.
I mean, you would love him. And a beautiful job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Monty Montgomery. And a special thanks to the family of Estill Myers for sharing their father's story with us. And what a story they told. He never wanted his children to know about his suffering. And that's true of so many of the World War II generation, of the greatest generation. They wanted to get home and get on with their lives.
They didn't want the Nazis or the Empire of Japan stealing their joy, stealing their hope. He was everything to us. He never complained about anything. He was devoted. He was honest. He was giving.
We are who we raised us to be. He was my hero. He will always be my hero. Always he was praying to the glory of God, always the light at the end of the tunnel. That's what he was always thinking about. The sun, he told them, always rises the next day.
The story of Estill Myers is told by his family here on Our American Stories. We've all got a thing, an obsession. For some of us, it's vintage fashion, our cars, anything we can collect.
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Kids demanded his release. I'm Daniel Alarcon. From Serial Productions and The New York Times comes The Good Whale, a story about the wildly ambitious science experiment to return Keiko to the ocean. Listen to new episodes on Thursdays. Want early access to the whole show? Subscribe to The Times at nytimes.com slash podcast to listen on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. I answer questions for people just like you on essential topics that are not often discussed in church. To listen, just search tablet questions with Pastor Mike.
