Pedro S. Parra served in the 854th Engineer Aviation Battalion. He was born in Canadian, Texas in October 1922. He had five brothers and five sisters. He grew up during the Great Depression. He started working at a young age at any kind of job he could find. That went all the way through high school. He went to work on the railroad after he graduated in May 1941. The third Monday in June, he was hit in the head by lightning. He was told it flipped him into the air. His right shoe came off and his left shoe had a hole in it. He was unconscious and he had no pulse. They started working on him and taking him to town. As they got there, he started breathing. Four individuals picked him up to put him in the ambulance and he shocked them. They dropped him. He eventually made it to the hospital. They had him on morphine. On either Wednesday or Thursday, he came to. Another person who got struck was there too. He asked where he was. It had perforated his left ear. One corner of his belt buckle melted, and his stomach was blistered. He started aching all over and electrical shocks were going through his legs about every minute. When he was struck, he weighed about 150 pounds. He was sent to Kansas to another hospital. He could not walk on his own. He stayed there for about four weeks and he walked home to Canadian. He weighed 110 pounds then. He exercised to get better. He had vertigo. He returned to work in November 1941. He received his draft notice in December 1942.

[Annotator's Note: The interviewer asks Pedro Parra where he was when he heard the news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on 7 December 1941.] Parra was at the afternoon matinee at a theater. It rained on the way home. The radio was on at home and it said Pearl Harbor had been bombed. He had no idea where Pearl Harbor was. Mostly people were angry because the Japanese gave no warning. After that, all of the eligible ones volunteered for the Army. His parents did not object. He wanted to join the Marine Corps. His mother would not sign the papers because he was too young. He then waited until he got drafted. He thought having been struck by lightning [Annotator's Note: in June 1941; see clip titled "Struck by Lightening"] would have hurt his chances. He told the doctor at his physical exam. The doctor had him hop on one leg and then the other and said he was okay. He found out the military was strict. He was used to doing what he wanted to, and found out in the Army, you did what they told you. He believes his railroad background got him into the engineer battalion they were creating to work on runways. He tried to get into the Air Force and took the exams. They told him it would be a long wait to be a pilot, but he could be a gunner and he said no. He was put into an engineer battalion [Annotator's 854th Engineer Aviation Battalion]. He had his physical on 7 January 1943 and then got seven days leave [Annotator's Note: an authorized absence for a short period of time]. He went home. On 14 January he went to Fort Sill, Oklahoma to the reception center for about two weeks. He then went to Jefferson Barracks, Missouri for about a month. He then took a troop train to Riverside, California to the perimeter of the Air Force Base [Annotator's Note: then March Field, now March Air Reserve Base in Riverside County, California]. When he found out what he was going to be, he wanted to get out and go to the paratroopers. He and four others interviewed but were not taken because they had already signed up.

[Annotator's Note: Pedro Parra was assigned to the 854th Engineer Aviation Battalion in February 1943.] They did not know what theater of war they were going to. They did desert training in California. He presumed they were going to North Africa but were shipped to the Pacific. He was put into the message center. He saw a paper that said "Top Secret" and it showed they were going to the Pacific. He said he did not read it and he never told anybody. They took a troop train to Camp Stoneman [Annotator's Note: in Pittsburg, California] where they loaded onboard a ship. He had never been on anything but a fishing boat before. They went to Hawaii and got there on 10 December 1943. They loaded equipment there. They learned they were in on an invasion [Annotator's Note: Battle of Kwajalein, Kwajalein Atoll, Marshall Islands, 31 January to 3 February 1944]. They spent four or five days traveling. He could hear thunder in the distance and thought they were going into a storm. He went to sleep. The next morning, he went up on the deck as they pulled into a lagoon. He thought there were in fog, but it was smoke from the Navy shelling the night before. They were watching aircraft drop their bombs. They started unloading and he said he did not want to go. They were dropped in knee-high water to go ashore. They were still fighting and there were Japanese bodies all over. The Japanese had snipers in what few coconuts trees were left. Parra talked to a soldier that said they shot at all of the trees with a .50 caliber machine gun [Annotator's Note: Browning M2 .50 caliber machine gun]. The Japanese had tied themselves into the treetops. That morning they were all dead. Parra and the engineers were right behind the infantry. Their job was to get the runway functional. It was concrete and short for the Japanese fighter planes. They had to put in coral rock, and they worked 24-7 [Annotator's Note: slang for 24 hours per day, seven days a week]. The island was about three-quarters of a mile wide and horseshoe-shaped. It was almost flat. In about a month, they extended the runway enough to land Navy fighters on it. In another month, they blacktopped the coral and brought in B-24s [Annotator's Note: Consolidated B-24 Liberator heavy bomber]. The B-24s would return from missions and he could see the holes from them being shot at. There were ten B-24s that would go out every night on bombing missions. Parra was happy to see the bombers working but mostly he was very tired as they were on the go all the time.

They [Annotator's Note: Pedro Parra and the rest of the 854th Engineer Aviation Battalion] left Kwajalein [Annotator's Note: Kwajalein Atoll, Marshall Islands] in June 1944 for Hawaii. The military was segregated then. A Black engineering outfit replaced them on Kwajalein. Around August they left Hawaii on LSTs [Annotator's Note: Landing Ship, Tank]. They called them rocking bathtubs. They went to Guam [Annotator's Note: Guam, Mariana Islands] and it was a rocky ride. They took them as close as they could to the shore. Their mission was to construct a runway. The runway was about 12,000 feet. They had to go through the jungle. The natives lived in huts. The only civilized place was where the Marines were. They carved their way to the north end through the jungle. Just when the runway was almost finished, they brought in what Parra thought was "the bomb" [Annotator's Note: Little Boy; codename for the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan on 6 August 1945]. They had a high tarp covering whatever it was. They did not even see it come in. The B-29s [Annotator's Note: Boeing B-29 Superfortress very heavy bomber] came in with LeMay [Annotator's Note: Curtis Emerson LeMay; US Army Air Forces then US Air Force General; Fifth Chief of Staff of the US Air Force] when the runway was completed. They say the bomb took off from Saipan [Annotator's Note: Saipan, Northern Mariana Islands], but Parra thinks the bomb came to Guam first. The B-29 was a big plane. They knew what it was for, they were going to start hitting the bigger islands like Iwo Jima [Annotator's Note: Iwo Jima, Japan] and Japan [Annotator's Note: mainland Japan]. Parra went to Okinawa [Annotator's Note: Okinawa, Japan] after Guam. On the way to Okinawa, they stopped on Ulithi Atoll [Annotator's Note: Ulithi Atoll, Caroline Islands, Federated States of Micronesia] for a beer stopover. They landed on a small beach and slept in pup tents. They were about a mile from the ocean. They worked on Ie Shima Field [Annotator's Note: Ie Shima Auxiliary Airfield, Ie Shima, Japan]. There was nothing left on Okinawa. Naha [Annotator's Note: Naha, Okinawa, Japan] was all rubble. There were only two buildings, the prison and the castle. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer asks if he had experience with Kamikaze planes.] They were awakened from the time they got there until the war was over, from them flying nuisance raids between one o'clock and three o'clock in the morning. They had trenches for air raid cover. One night, the sirens went off and the searchlights spotted three planes. One plane came right over them in a power dive. The trenches were filled with men and water, so he had to lay flat on the ground. That was the nearest experience he had with dive-bombing. Mostly transport planes used the runway. Not many fighter planes used it. There were special camps for the civilians, so he did not see any of them. They got caught in a typhoon. It destroyed everything they had including all of their tents. They opened a Japanese tomb to get out of the rain. The Japanese leave their dead in there until the flesh falls off the bones. They then come and get the bones and put them in jars. They had no choice but to be in there.

Pedro Parra was getting ready to get to go to Japan when the bomb [Annotator's Note: nuclear weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, 6 and 9 August 1945] was dropped. Fireworks opened everywhere; everyone was shooting up in the air. They went by points [Annotator's Note: a point system was devised based on a number of factors that determined when American servicemen serving overseas could return home] in determining who could go home. Parra did not have many points. He left around 15 December [Annotator's Note: 15 December 1945] to go back to the United States. It was nice to be home, but he gotten used to the group he was with. He had been overseas with them for 25 months. He missed them at first. They were a happy unit [Annotator's Note: 854th Engineer Aviation Battalion]. They used to have reunions. The last one they had was in Reno, Nevada in the 1980s. A lot of them are deceased. Parra used the 52-20 program [Annotator's Note: a government-funded program that paid unemployed veterans 20 dollars per week for 52 weeks]. It was free money, but you had to register with the Unemployment Office. He lived in Canadian [Annotator's Note: Canadian, Texas] and the nearest office was in Pampa [Annotator's Note: Pampa, Texas] which was about 50 miles away. Gasoline was rationed, so if you did not have a car, you could not get there. He never applied for any of it. He just looked for work instead. He worked for an electrical company, then a lumber yard, and then at Amarillo Air Force Base [Annotator's Note: in Amarillo, Texas] until it was closed. He then moved to Lubbock [Annotator's Note: Lubbock, Texas] and attended Texas Tech [Annotator's Note: Texas Tech University] on the G.I. Bill. He participated in Air Force ROTC [Annotator's Note: Reserve Officer Training Corps] and got his commission. He went to Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio [Annotator's Note: San Antonio, Texas] in February 1951 for his physical. He was told they could not take him because he had a perforated ear. Another doctor said it was okay. He retired 31 May 1970. He wanted to stay longer but Nixon [Annotator's Note: Richard Milhouse Nixon, 37th president of the United States] made everyone with 20 years in get out. The Vietnam War [Annotator's Note: Vietnam War, or Second Indochina War, 1 November 1955 to 30 April 1975] had ended. His first assignment in the Air Force was at Eglin Air Force Base [Annotator's Note: in Okaloosa County, Florida] in a Headquarters Squadron. He was then transferred to the Boat Squadron. They had an old ship in the channels that the aircrews did practice bombing on. He applied for the Office of Special Investigations and got in. He then went to Barksdale Air Force Base [Annotator's Note: in Bossier City, Louisiana]. He traveled everywhere.

Pedro Parra feels that most veterans of the war did not talk too much about it. The young people have no idea what it is to go to war. On Kwajalein [Annotator's Note: Kwajalein Atoll, Marshall Islands] there were about 4,000 Japanese and none of them escaped [Annotator's Note: Battle of Kwajalein, 31 January to 3 February 1944]. Parra and the men [Annotator's Note: of the 854th Engineer Aviation Battalion] were sleeping in pup tents and those bodies were there for almost two weeks. They were about 20 feet from the dead. They were surrounded by them. It was a shock to see so many dead bodies. Their First Sergeant was shot in the head by a sniper and you could see his brains in his helmet. That got to Parra. [Annotator's Note: Parra's voice cracks with emotion.] People here [Annotator's Note: in the United States] have no idea what that is and that is a good thing. War wakes you up to what life really is. It gives you discipline too. The Air Force in the 1960s still had draftees. They had no discipline. Finally, they went to volunteers and that was the best thing that happened. Parra thinks the Museum [Annotator's Note: The National WWII Museum in New Orleans, Louisiana] is very important as it gives both grown-ups and kids an idea of what war really is. His message to future viewers is that they should volunteer for the service to learn what it is all about. His parents were immigrants from Mexico in 1920. There were 13 in his family. There was discrimination in those days towards Hispanics. Parra says he was just as good as anyone else and he set a goal that one day he was going to get out of that small town. He did. He saw officers and knew he could be an officer too. He became one. After the war was over, the situation in the town changed. They found out the Hispanics were just as good and even better than some the Americans. The mayor told them that many of the ranchers' sons had found ways to stay out of the war. None of the Hispanics did. They went in and did their duty. It changed things completely.