John Laster was born in April 1924 in Louisville, Kentucky. He started school in Dalton, Georgia, but when he was in third grade, his father bought a farm and left it in the care of Laster's uncles while he traveled as a salesman. Laster quit the country school he was attending in fifth grade. His further education happened when he was discharged from the Navy, under the auspices of the G.I. Bill. From the age of 11, he was trying to fill his father's place on the farm. At 16, he made an attempt to join the Army Air Corps because he wanted to become a gunner in a bomber, but when his father found out there was a "big squabble," foiling Laster's plans. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor [Annotator's Note: Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on 7 December 1941] in December 1941, Laster was having coffee at a truck stop and heard the announcement over the store's radio. Laster turned 18 in April 1942, and in October he volunteered for the Navy.

When John Laster got to Great Lakes, Illinois for boot training, he became a part of Company 1595, 36th Battalion, 23rd Regiment. On his first night, he got into a fight with a man he later befriended, because he called him a "Rebel SOB." The two had numerous fights during the six weeks of boot camp, and Laster laughingly commented that he never got a Good Conduct Medal. After his initial training, Laster was tested for placement, but he was insistent that he wanted to go to sea, and more importantly, to fight the Japanese. The Navy finally agreed. He was late coming back from holiday leave, and had lost his peacoat along the way. After being fitted up with a new coat from the deceased sailors' inventory, he caught a train to gunnery school in Gulfport, Mississippi.

To John Laster, gunnery school was an exercise in teamwork, and for three weeks he ate, slept and drank gunnery. He learned to tear down and put together all sorts of small guns, then graduated to three, four, and five inch guns. He remembers practice shooting at a Studebaker pickup truck with a sign on it that moved up and down like a ship on the sea. Laster was the first loader on the guns. He explains that the third loader took fixed ammunition out of the ready service box, handed it to the second loader who passed it on, and the first loader slammed it in the gun and "hollered 'ready'." The different guns, he said, had varying weights and loads. Once firing commenced, every man from the third loader to the gun captain and gunnery officer had to be proficient at his job. Laster sometimes went to nearby Biloxi, Mississippi on the weekends, and remembers that when caught misbehaving, the sailors were put in the "darkroom" for punishment, where they would disassemble and reassemble guns without the benefit of lighting. After gunnery school, Laster was sent to New York and, to have something to do, volunteered to load ammunition on ships in the harbor. He recalled that on the last day, a sailor dropped a box of impact-fused four inch rounds about eight feet down, and it scared the daylights, and all future volunteer duty, out of him. Then, in the middle of one night, he spent his first miserable night at sea aboard the SS Alcoa Patriot (C-1B) as a Naval Armed Guard.

To be a member of the Naval Armed Guard, John Laster said, a sailor had to have 20-20 vision, be in good health, and have a good attitude. The history of the Naval Armed Guard went back to the Great War [Annotator's Note: World War 1], and according to Laster, the force went dormant until just prior to the Second World War when ships carrying goods covered by the Lend-Lease Program were being threatened, and armed guards were needed to help protect ships bringing goods to Europe. Laster was a gunner in what he said was sometimes called the "outlaw" or "dungaree" Navy, and he wasn't disappointed at not being assigned to a battleship or a destroyer, so long as he could defend his country. He doesn't think he ever hated the Germans or the Japanese, even when it wasn't nice. Laster served on three different ships during his service, and mentioned that he was in Calcutta, doing shore patrol during a cholera epidemic, when the war in Europe ended.

When the war in Europe ended, John Laster and others in his gun crew were pulled off their ship in Port Said, Egypt. After a few weeks of clerical work and minor patrol duty, Laster and several of his buddies got into a brawl with British soldiers over the methods of imbibing tea, and the Egyptian consulate kicked them out of the country. They boarded an ammunition ship bound for the Pacific; Laster landed on Saipan and stayed in that area for the rest of the war. Laster remembers making cigarette lighters out of .50 caliber rounds and selling them to the Air Force guys. When the war was over, he and his gunnery mates took almost all of their part of the ship's war materials 12 miles out and dumped it into the sea. While he was on Tinian, Laster said, he did "absolutely nothing" except for riding around on a captured Japanese motorboat. He confirmed that all of the four ships he sailed on were ammunition ships, and he was satisfied to serve on them. Although he was always under the impression that he had signed up for six years' service in the regular Navy, when he looked into the possibility for discharge, he found out he was in the reserves.

John Laster said he would not like to go back through it, but his service during World War 2 was quite an experience, and thinks that every young man should have an opportunity to "pull a couple of years in the military," but not in war. At this point in his interview, Laster digressed about the involvement of the younger members of his family with military service. Brought back to the topic of his war service, Laster admitted that more than once he was angry when fired his ship's guns. He said he found the reaction unavoidable when he saw his fellow servicemen exploded on a nearby ship. Laster began laying out his experiences in sequence. His first trip was aboard the SS Alcoa Patriot in February 1943. He noted that early in the war, the east coast of the United States was "lit up like a carnival," and the Merchant Marine ships were sitting ducks. The area was referred to as Torpedo Junction. On this particular trip, they were escorting LSTs [Annotator's Note: Landing Ship, Tank] out of Gitmo Bay [Annotator's Note: Guantanamo Bay, Cuba], one dropped out of convoy because of a steering problem, and was sunk a quarter of a mile out of the harbor. Interestingly, Laster said that while traversing the Panama Canal, no one is allowed to mount the gun decks. Laster said the rule was meant to prevent someone sabotaging the locks.

Continuing his sequence of experiences, John Laster described a personal injury that was not the consequence of combat. Still on the SS Alcoa Patriot, which was nearing Australia at the time, he was on lookout and spotted an airplane. He was trying to help a shipmate cock his gun when he pulled the barrel down on his own head and knocked himself out. Although he attempted to gain his battle station, he was ordered off the gun deck with a bloody towel on his head. Rather than go to a hospital in Australia, he stayed with the ship as it traveled on to the Persian Gulf. Late in the summer of 1943, when there was still plenty of action on the east coast, his ship was returning from the Canal Zone and had temporary air support. Laster had just come off duty and was chatting with an old salt [Annotator's Note: an older veteran sailor] when the man pointed to a colony of sea gulls. Sure that there was a submarine in that area, he warned Laster to stay close to his gun station. Before 30 minutes had passed, a submarine surfaced seven or eight miles off, and the shooting started. Before long the vessel on the horizon disappeared, and Laster's ship continued to New York [Annotator's Note: New York, New York]. Laster had Christmas dinner in 1943 in Basra, Iraq, and on the way back the ship picked up three cages of monkeys, each holding about 500 specimens, for the University of New York. They encountered a storm that broke up one of the cages, and monkeys covered the entire top of the hold. Some jumped into the sea, and a few had to be rifle shot, but they caught as many as they could as they ran around the amidships housing.

John Laster described other ships and other missions that were dangerous but never fatal. Once, the SS Alcoa Patriot was coming into New York [Annotator's Note: New York, New York] following another ship through the darkness and passing the Saint Ambrose Light where it took a port turn to reach the harbor. The forward ship reported sighting a submarine that dove and settled, right below the first ship's path; Laster's ship went over it not long after; neither was accosted. In late August or early September 1943, Laster was aboard the Liberty ship [Annotator's Note: a class of quickly produced cargo ship] SS Joseph McKenna going through the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal past German held territories and it was nerve-racking duty. The Germans employed a fast and highly maneuverable "Q-Boat" [Annotator's Note: Schnellboot or S-boot, known to the Allies as the E-boat], the equivalent of the American Patrol Torpedo boat, that would hit-and-run, and caused a great deal of mischief. Laster thought it the most difficult of his tours. He passed up the possibility of promotion because he didn't want to be responsible for anybody being killed as a result of his decisions.

Remembering a sister ship that had come into the Mediterranean by way of Oran, John Laster said it had picked up a group Air Force flyboys [Annotator's Note: airmen] on their way to Italy. That ship was on his port side, near the path the Germans liked to prowl, on one very quiet night, and the atmosphere became really tense. There were 68 ships in the group, covered only by a couple of destroyers. The convoy came under air attack, but the event blurred in Laster's mind, so busy was he with loading shells into the guns. It was perilous work, keeping the barrel stoked while avoiding the sixteen inch recoil. The attack was over in two or three minutes, and Laster was intent on doing the greatest amount of damage to the enemy while it was going on. But when he realized the imminent destruction of a ship full of men who were powerless in the situation, and he saw it literally disintegrate, it affected him greatly. Laster commented that he would never forget the sight or the smells. So he became intent on doing his job to the best of his ability. Laster described his attitude thus: "They were after my butt, and I wanted to get them first." But after each escape, he would think, "Well, we got by that time." He tried always to do his duty to his family and his country, although there was a period of nine months when his wife didn't hear anything from him, given the vagaries of the mail systems in the areas Laster served. Laster mentioned that he has never received the decorations he was told were his due for the combat campaigns in which he participated.

Arriving at Naples, John Laster said, the Army would assume defense of the incoming ships. On the mountains behind Naples, the Allies had set up heavy guns in the mountains behind the harbor, and had a signaling system indicting whether they had the area covered, or if a ship was on its own. Laster, who liked to sleep outside and would sometimes take his cot on to the gun deck, was resting peacefully on the deck when a French ship came into the harbor. Regardless of the green light, which indicted that the harbor was clear, a French ack-ack [Annotator's Note: antiaircraft artillery] ship came in closer than regulations dictated, and started firing. Laster said he wasn't the only one yanked from his slumber that night; sailors in their cabins were startled into action as well. After the war, he expected to be making the rounds on a recruiting tour, and while traveling across the country he got into a scrape with a Greyhound Bus baggage agent, and an MP [Annotator's Note: military police] hauled him into headquarters. After an overnight delay, he continued on his way to Jacksonville, Florida and discharge. Asked how the war changed his life, Laster said he had a difficult adolescence that hardened him, but once he became a part of the Navy, he found other values besides being "John Laster, not afraid of the devil himself."

Processing out of the Navy, John Laster underwent physicals and financial settlements. He hadn't used very much of his pay while at sea, so it was a sizeable amount. He was dismayed to find his discharge papers badly fouled up. Initially, Laster would not sign the papers, but after being assured that the officer in charge of his reserve unit would fix any errors, he executed the documents. Every year for six years he received correspondence from authorities in the Navy reserves, telling him to "keep himself available," but the records were never corrected. In March 1954, Laster joined an Army reserve unit, and thought they would find his records, but he was disappointed, and after two hitches he got out at the rank of buck sergeant, E-5. He has made numerous attempts over the last 60 years, without satisfaction, to get the records straight. Sometimes his appeal gets a response to the effect that the Navy has "no record" of his service. Nevertheless, if he were needed to defend the United States today, he would go. He thinks that it is very important for institutions such as The National WWII Museum [Annotator's Note: in New Orleans, Louisiana] to teach the history of the war, because the world needs to know what happened. He hopes the younger generations can gain a heartfelt pride in their country, because it is the best country in the world.