Tony Dodero -- From the Newsroom

We all know since Sept. 11 patriotism has taken on such a deeper

meaning. On Friday, the Daily Pilot touched on some of that patriotism as

we chronicled stories recollecting Pearl Harbor day and the pain and

anguish that our nation felt on Dec. 7, 1941.

Whenever stories about World War II churn up in our news pages, I

think of my Uncle Jim, a retired, decorated chief petty officer, super

class, who spent 20 years of his life fighting the enemy.

So on Friday, Dec. 7, 2001, I gave him a call and asked him just where

he was exactly 60 years ago when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.

“Me?” he asked. “I was in my bunk. I hadn’t even got up yet. I was

being lazy.”

That laziness quickly faded away though as he realized that his ship,

the dry-docked USS James Thorton, was under attack by Japanese Zeros, as

was the entire Pacific fleet.

“They sounded the general alarm,” he recalled. “Smoke was going up all

over the place. We were halfway buried in water. The first thing the

skipper said was ‘start shooting.’ We had one ready box of ammo and

that’s what we were doing. We were firing.”

Did you hit any planes?

“No way,” he said. “But we sure made a lot of noise.”

Let me just say here that as a rule of thumb, I avoid writing about my

family. I’ve written about my dad breaking his leg and meeting President

Clinton. I wrote about the births of my two daughters. But for the most

part, I avoid those topics.

But my uncle, well, he has a story to tell and with the times being as

they are and the U.S. deep in the middle of yet another world conflict, I

just thought some of you may enjoy hearing this one.

Plus, I wanted to make sure I took this chance to thank him.

James “Gunner” Dodero joined the Navy while still in his teens. He

didn’t want to tell me the exact age when he enlisted because let’s just

say he might have sneaked in before he was legally able to shave.

“I wouldn’t broadcast that,” he said. I do know, it was September of

1941, just a little more than two months before the attack.

“I went to boot camp in San Diego and from there went aboard the James

Thorton and from there we went to Pearl.”

At Pearl Harbor, the ship encountered engine problems and went into

dry dock behind the USS Pennsylvania.

The Japanese planes blew the dry dock apart on Dec. 7, but aside from

a few injuries, no one on his ship was hurt. The Pennsylvania wasn’t so

lucky.

“They lost quite a few lives on that one,” he said.

In the days after the attack, one of his jobs was to dive below water

to patch the ships and get them back up to the surface. It was the

beginning of a long career of diving in the Navy.

“Seven of them have my fancy welds on them,” he said of the ships.

Unlike many Pearl Harbor survivors, my uncle doesn’t talk much about

his experiences. In fact, it was only recently that our family learned of

all his exploits on the seas.

“It’s not something you go around talking about,” he said. “It’s a

part of your life you don’t want to remember.” But he can’t deny the

life-changing experience.

“I went from being a young snot-nosed kid to a man, real quick like.”

And man what a journey he took, basically getting a front row seat to

some of the biggest events in history.

By February, he requested a transfer back to the states and then took

the Mermansk to London where he learned underwater demolition as part of

a group of Navy bomb experts that would later evolve into the special

forces known as Seals.

He came back to the states on the Mermansk and ended up in Boston

where he met his future wife, Josephine, who unfortunately, passed away

just before Thanksgiving. They were married for nearly 50 years.

My uncle was assigned armed guard duty on the merchant ship, the S.S.

Richard Rusk, and as the ship was just off the coast of Scotland, it was

hit by German aircraft.

“They poked a couple holes in us and we took on water,” he said. “They

took us off and they let it go down.”

He came back to New York on a destroyer and then got a hitch on the

USS Badger, where he became a mount captain on a five-inch, 38-millimeter

gun. That’s where he got the nickname Gunner, and he’s been known as that

ever since. His ship sailed to the Mediterranean, where he was involved

in invasions and then reassigned to the Pacific.

He took part in battles in Guadalcanal and other South Pacific

islands, the Battle of Midway and the invasion of the Philippines under

Admiral Halsey’s task force during the time Gen. Douglas MacArthur made

his famous return. He went to Okinawa and into Tokyo Bay where he took

part in the invasion of Japan in 1944 and early 1945. He got a job fixing

the guns on the USS Missouri and was sitting on top of a twin five-inch,

38-millimeter gun mount when he snapped a picture of the Japanese

surrendering to Gen. MacArthur.

“A good sailor always carries a camera,” he joked.

He later was part of the invasion of Inchon, Korea, on the USS

Evansville and was part of President Kennedy’s forces in Vietnam in the

early part of the 1960s, teaching the South Vietnamese demolition

techniques just before the war started.

After a little more than 20 years, he retired in 1963 to spend time

with his family and my cousin, Maria, who was born in 1959.

“I wanted to come home and see what it was like to have a daughter,”

he said.

But 27 years after he retired, Desert Storm was underway and he got

called back to Coronado to teach bomb disposal to the Navy Seal class

there.

“I had to teach them how to blow things up,” he said. “That’s

something you don’t forget.”

Something else he won’t ever forget is the carnage he’s seen. And like

many who have witnessed war firsthand, he sees little sense in all that

killing. That’s kind of how he feels about this latest day of infamy,

Sept. 11, and the terror attacks on the World Trade Center and the

Pentagon.

“That’s a little hard to make the comparison,” he said of the two

events. “Sept. 11 was all civilians. Dec. 7 was military. There were some

civilians hurt, but the target was military.

“It’s such a big difference,” he continued. “But what’s the same is

it’s still a big loss of life for no reason at all.”

* TONY DODERO is the editor. His column appears on Mondays. If you

have story ideas or concerns about news coverage, please send messages

either via e-mail to o7 [email protected] or by phone at

949-574-4258.