In a small room in Oxford, Florida, a man holds up a brass shell three feet tall that weighs forty-five pounds. He had it demilitarized after the war, and he pays to haul it from school to school, because when he tells people what he fired at German planes from a ten-thousand-pound gun, they do not believe him. So he brings the proof and sets it on the table.
His name is Irving Locker. He is 101 years old, he still works out three mornings a week, and he still thanks God every day that he can get on his feet. He learned that habit in the war.
He was the youngest of seven children in a family that had no money and, as he tells it, everything else. His mother gave him one instruction over and over: take care of your brothers and sisters, watch out for them. He carried it to Fort Dix in 1943, into a barracks with fifty strangers, and across the Atlantic. When the Army asked who could drive a tractor trailer, he raised his hand, though he could barely reach the door handles. A lieutenant sent him to the machine guns, and the machine gun sergeant sent him to the big guns. That is how he came to a ninety-millimeter antiaircraft gun, ten thousand pounds of steel with a fifteen-foot barrel.
He made staff sergeant at eighteen, in a combat zone, in charge of sixty-five men, and every sergeant who had trained him now served under him. He says he got there the way his mother taught him, by convincing the men he was there to get them home. Sixty percent of them went deaf in both ears from the guns. When they asked to pack cotton in their ears he refused, because a man who cannot hear cannot take an order.
He landed at Utah Beach on a Higgins boat. When the ramp dropped, the dead and wounded were already on the sand, and the order all down the line was to get off the beach without looking or stopping. He kept moving. He went through the Ardennes in the worst winter in twenty years, sleeping in holes he dug in wet boots and a wet coat, and came out with frostbite and most of his men alive. By spring he was near Berlin, and he saw what the Nazis had done in the camps. He is a Jewish soldier, and he does not soften what that meant to him.
What he brought home sits in his living room: a German Luger with handles he had remade so no one would steal it, an entrenching shovel with his name stamped in the handle, a mess kit, and the helmet liner he washed, shaved, and bathed in, because his unit could never be near a building when the guns fired.
In June 2024 he went back to Normandy for the 80th anniversary of D-Day, a visit NewDay USA made possible. He had been sent there once to a place no one named for him, to do things no one explained. This time he stood on the ground and listened to people tell him what it had cost, and he says it was a different thing entirely.
He still goes to the schools with the shell, the shovel, and his flag. The men who signed that flag are gone now. Their children come to his door, take it in their hands, and find where their fathers wrote their names.
Read the full essay on Substack: https://heroespath.substack.com/p/interview-with-world-war-ii-veteran