Mark Millican: The day that changed America

Published 2:00 pm Thursday, December 7, 2023

If memory serves, the first or second time I met Vic Davis was when visiting his home to do a story, possibly on his late wife’s old truck he had restored and named “Sally’s Grocery Getter.” We’ve been friends ever since.

Vic served in the Army from 1956-58, between the Korea and Vietnam war years, but he knew two Vietnam veterans from our area who were killed in action. As a much younger man, Vic remembers his father giving a child, Jerry Williams, his first haircut. Jerry would move with his family to lower Whitfield County, and it was there he received his draft notice.

And it’s possible Vic may have been the last person from Gilmer County to see Jimmie Plumley alive. Jimmie had served an Army hitch in Korea, then came home to Ellijay where he could not find work. He had his thumb out hitchhiking to the induction station in Atlanta to reenlist when Vic picked him up.

Vic called a couple of weeks ago to try and get in touch with April Brooke Davis, who had memorialized Gilmer’s World War II veterans buried in Henri-Chapelle American Cemetery in Belgium with her husband, Reinaldo Hernandez. April gave Vic a call, but before then while I had Vic on the phone, I asked him if he remembered Pearl Harbor. He began by telling me he was 7 years old on Dec. 7, 1941, the date of the infamous sneak attack in Hawaii that propelled America into war.

“I can remember some about World War II,” he said. “My sister, Opal (Davis) Gudger, came home — she was already in high school, I think — and told us about Pearl Harbor being bombed. We didn’t have no radio back then, we lived way out in the country. Of course, everything was rationed. Gas was rationed, and tires, sugar and lots of stuff. You had to have stamps to buy it.”

Does he remember if people were fearful after the attack on Pearl?

“Not so much. I was young and didn’t understand a lot,” he replied. “But people talked about it a lot.”

A few years ago, Opal told me she recalled people praying “all over those hills” in Mountaintown (below the south flank of Grassy Mountain) for their sons and husbands and fathers in World War II.

Another friend, Mark Congdon, served in the U.S. Coast Guard from 1980-84. Three years of that enlistment were aboard the Coast Guard Cutter Taney, known as the “last surviving ship from Pearl Harbor.” Mark has been to Baltimore a few times to see the Taney, and on the 60th anniversary of Pearl Harbor — just three months after the 9/11 terrorist attacks of 2001 — he was in “B’more” with former shipmates for a ceremony that included hearing Pearl survivors share their testimonies of that day.

What they had to say, including about our tendency to lower our national defenses, is embedded in Mark’s memory forever, he told me.

Earlier this year, Kelly McClain of Dalton got in touch with me after I put out an interrogatory about Pearl Harbor. We were unsure if we’d met in years past, but I remember when his first cousin, Leslie McClain, tragically drowned in the Ocoee River when we were all teenagers.

Kelly’s dad, Keith McClain, was in the thick of the action at Pearl Harbor as a U.S. Marine who was pulling guard duty on shore in sight of the USS Arizona. Kelly not only remembered what his father told him about the Japanese sneak attack and how he and fellow Marines responded, but found an old Dalton Daily Citizen article about his family going to the 50-year anniversary in Hawaii.

Keith McClain’s memory of pulling sailors out of the harbor who survived the bombing is extraordinary historic reading. On the other hand, Vic Davis related how his time in our nation’s military was unremarkable.

“I didn’t do much, but if they told me to dig a ditch I’d try to dig a good one,” he said. “I do have a heart for veterans.”

As many can attest about military life, much of it is mundane. There can be the “KP” (kitchen police) duty of peeling potatoes, or “hurry up and wait” syndrome, as in “Hurry up and get your gear packed and get on that truck to the dock!” only to wait for hours and hours until your ship arrives.

Then there are the big events that are riveted into our national consciousness, like Pearl Harbor, even if we were not alive when it occurred. However, there are still some who do remember. and may we all never forget what happened on that “date that will live in infamy” – Dec. 7, 1941. If you do remember, share your story while you still can.

Mark Millican is a former staff writer for the Dalton Daily Citizen.