This is an I-Heart podcast.

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people.

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Now it's time for another story from our regular listener and contributor, Roger Latham,

from Fort Worth, Texas.

Let's take a listen.

John Steinbeck once wrote that Texas is a state of mind.

I've come to understand that in more ways than one and agree with it 100%.

In this story, I've got to have a little preface, that being that I'm a rather slight individual.

In my youth, I'm probably 5 foot 9 inches tall and weighed 150 pounds.

I wasn't much of a Texan, but I was one.

In 1967, I joined the United States Army.

And later, after my joining day and basic training,

I was sent to Keesler Air Force Base to undergo air traffic control training.

I successfully got through most of that until the very end. At the very end, I was at a lunch line one day

when I overheard another friend of mine from Texas named Lewis, he was talking to another private about a situation.

And he said, Jackson's been picking on me and I don't know why. I said, boys, let me inject

myself here for a second. Why don't you just take a, and slap upside the head that big boy and explain to him in that way that you're not going to take any more of his scoff?

And Lewis said to me, well, he's six foot two, and I'm five, nine and a half.

And I don't want to get killed.

And I said, well, you're not going to get killed because a bully, and that's what he is, a bully. They don't want to fight. They want to just humiliate smaller individuals, and you're a smaller individual like me, and he doesn't want to fight. So the other guy, the other private, said to me, he said, well, Latham, why don't you go over and slap him

...