On August 31, 1944, near the town of Archingny, France, I was the loader in a Sherman tank called 'Wolverine.' We had been pushing through France for three weeks straight without resupply — eating K-rations, sleeping in the mud, smelling like diesel and gunpowder. On that day, we crossed a small bridge and found ourselves facing four German Panthers that had been abandoned — out of fuel. The crews had stripped them and walked east. Our driver, a kid from Detroit named Tommy Kowalski, got out and examined the Panthers. He found a German soldier's lunch pail in one of them — still had actual bre...

I was born in Java, which was Dutch East Indies at the time. In 1942, the Japanese took me and 50,000 others and put us to work building the railway between Thailand and Burma. They called it 'the Railway of Death.' I was seventeen. I lasted 22 months. I survived because I was small and could fit into places where others couldn't — inside culverts, under railway cars. The Japanese engineers didn't bother with safety measures. If you fell, you were replaced. I watched men die from cholera, dysentery, malaria, tropical ulcers, and simple exhaustion. I saw men eaten by tigers at night. I worked w...