Thomas Long was born in January 1926 in Saint Louis, Missouri. His father died when he was only three years old, leaving Long's mother with three children, Long and his two sisters, during the Great Depression. It was a hard time for everyone, so it didn't disproportionately affect Long's "happy" childhood. A few years later, his mother remarried a firefighter, who proved to be the inspiration for Long's own postwar career. He remembers he was 15 years old and playing soccer on the day Pearl Harbor was attacked by Japanese forces. No one there knew the location of Pearl Harbor, and Long said he had no idea what effect that momentous event would have on his life. After watching a Navy hero ride through Saint Louis in a patriotic parade, Long dropped out of high school in January 1943 and tried to enlist in the Navy on the day he turned 17. His excitement was such that he was turned away because of high blood pressure. On his fifth return to the recruitment office they accepted him, and he joined the Navy on 8 February 1943. He took a train to Farragut, Idaho for six weeks of cold weather at boot camp, after which he was sent to La Jolla, California for several months of gunnery training. Then Long was assigned to an antiaircraft battery, and traveled by ship to the Aleutian Islands.

His duty in the Aleutians lasted for about seven months, after which Thomas Long was sent to Coronado, California for amphibious training. The soldiers lived in tents on the beach and went through "pretty rough" instruction. From Astoria, Oregon Long boarded a brand new ship and stopped in Honolulu, Hawaii for supplies. Among the cargo was equipment including a car and potted plants for Admiral Nimitz [Annotator's Note: US Navy Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz] on Guam. It was there that Long experienced his first call to general quarters [Annotator's Note: commonly referred to as "battle stations"]. Next, their ship transported troops to the Philippines, then got ready for the invasion of Okinawa. Long remembers it was around Eastertime [Annotator's Note: the invasion of Okinawa took place on 1 April 1945, Easter Sunday], and that he spent most of this time out in the smaller boats. They had 23 LCVPs [Annotator's Note: Landing Craft Vehicle, Personnel], which were equipped with .30 caliber machine guns, two LCMs [Annotator's Note: Landing Craft Mechanized] that had .50 calibers machine guns, and one other boat, the name of which he can not remember. Long was in charge of maintenance on all the guns, and supervised two gunner's mate strikers [Annotator's Note: "strikers" refers to individuals in the Navy who are training for a particular rating]. When the ship was under attack, the small boats in the water dropped smoke pots for cover. They also kept watch for swimmers whose goal was to blow the screws [Annotator's Note: propellers] off the ship. To deter such sabotage, Long and his mates would drop sticks of dynamite in the water if they saw anything. Long said he witnessed dead bodies in the water, and Kamikazes in the sky. The destroyer USS O'Brien (DD-415) was near his ship when it was hit, and Long helped bring aboard the casualties. Long felt blessed that he came through all right.

Until he went into the Navy, Thomas Long had never been away from home. Traveling by coal-fired trains was uncomfortable, and he had no idea what he was going to do. He remembers living in Quonset huts and working in the battery [Annotator's Note: in an antiaircraft battery] on Dutch Harbor in the Aleutians, and not being able to do much good in 40-below temperatures. He had steamed up to that post on the USS Alaska (CB-1); coming back he sailed on the USS Attu (CVE-102), an old, rat-infested vessel rumored to have broken in half on its next journey. Long took his only leave at that time, and went home to his family. Long had two sisters in the military, one a Navy nurse, the other was among the first class of female Marines, neither of whom he saw during the war. Not until he got into amphibious warfare training at Coronado, California was he in a position that he felt good about. Long joked that they killed a lot of fish during that time. He brought his new skills into combat, first on Guam, and then in the Philippines where they dropped troops off. But his most furious fighting came about when they were hitting the beach with the boats at Kerama Retto where they encountered suicide boats and Iejima [Annotator's Note: also known as Ie-shima] where the war correspondent Ernie Pyle got killed. Long remembered that they took a lot of casualties off of Iejima.

Thomas Long said they made four landings among the small islands around Okinawa, under limited enemy fire. Their biggest worries came from mines and the Kamikaze attacks, which "scared the tar out" of them. Such were the Japanese skills with pyrotechnics that once, when Long was out dropping smoke pots to cover the ship, the enemy dropped an enormous net that drifted down and lit the ship up "like a Christmas tree." There were days when they were at general quarters for 18 to 20 hours on the alert, never leaving the guns. Long's watch station was in the back of the ship on the five inch gun. During one skirmish they hit an enemy aircraft, but Long wasn't sure of what happened to the plane afterward. The Navy's greatest loss of personnel occurred off Okinawa, Long said. When not in combat, the sailors found ways to entertain themselves. For example, one of the sailors picked up a monkey off of the Philippines and kept it as a pet. When the ship returned to the United States, word got around that if they brought the monkey back, the ship would have to go into quarantine; the monkey mysteriously went missing.

The closest call Thomas Long recalled was the time he was dropping dynamite to repel enemy swimmers whose mission was to sabotage the ship [Annotator's Note: USS Drew (APA-162)], and a gunboat came speeding up; Long said the crew couldn't get their flashlights to work when they tried to signal, and the encounter "scared the tar out of him." But, he said, he was never really afraid. In fact, the night before they were going into Okinawa, the thing that was on Long's mind was a cream puff, although he couldn't say why. There was also a big crap game going on, and one soldier won 10,000 dollars. Long often wonders if he made it through the war. The ship carried about 1,500 troops from the 77th Infantry Division down below, sleeping seven high in the racks, but the crew had little contact with them. In the area where Long slept, the bunks were five high, and because he had rank he had the choice of bunks; the top rack was preferable, otherwise people were "stepping on you all night long, coming up and down." After leaving Okinawa, Long's ship came back to United States and went into dry dock in Washington state. "That's when the "A bomb" [Annotator's Note: atommic bomb] was dropped according to Long, and he had no concept of what it was all about. He was ashore when he heard the war had ended, and he felt a "big relief," because before that he had lost confidence in ever coming home. His ship carried out its scheduled invasion of mainland Japan, dropping troops on the beach at Wakayama, but no one fired a shot. He remembered it was raining that day, and there was a Japanese individual on shore holding an umbrella, watching the soldiers arrive, leaving a mental image that he carries to this day. A little later the ship was nearly capsized by a typhoon, a "spooky" weather event that had the sailors holding on to their lines.

When Thomas Long was once more in the United States, he thought he would be discharged from San Francisco, where his ship [Annotator's Note: USS Drew (APA-162)] was docked. Instead, he was given leave to return to Saint Louis, and when he went to the Civil Courts building to check in at the end of his leave, he was told he would be taking new recruits out to Shoemaker, California. From there he was sent to Great Lakes [Annotator's Note: Naval Station Great Lakes, Great Lakes, Illinois] where his discharge was delayed for medical reasons. Long was a Second Class Gunner's Mate [Annotator's Note: Gunner's Mate 2nd Class (GM2c)], and had enough points to get out. When he was finally released on 4 February 1946, he hitchhiked home. Long said he used "every bit" of the G.I. Bill. He took the 52-20 [Annotator's Note: a government-funded unemployment program that provided 20 dollars a week for 52 weeks of benefits], went to school at Saint Louis University, used the "self-employment" opportunity to start an ambulance business which didn't succeed, and spent the remaining funds. He joined the Saint Louis Fire Department where he remained until retirement as chief. Long asserts that joining the fight in World War 2 was "the thing to do." He thinks the experience changed his life for the better. It made a man out of him, and provided an education that he couldn't have gotten any other way. He thinks young people today have no clue what happened in those days, and by not knowing the history, they are missing out.