EP50: My Veteran Best Friend and Mark Twain
Our American Stories
iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 817 Ratings
🗓️ 14 August 2021
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode of Our American Stories, former marine, Jason Porter, tells the story of meeting his best friend Forrest Johnson and how serving in WWII impacted him; and Richard Gary tells the origin story of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (aka Mark Twain) and the racial history of Hannibal, Missouri.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Lee Habib, and this is our American Stories, and today we have a story of friendship from a former Marine, Jason Porter. |
| 0:19.7 | Here's Jason with a story of his best friend, |
| 0:24.0 | Forrest Johnson, aka Fari. |
| 0:28.2 | My first recollection of him was I used to go to breakfast |
| 0:32.8 | several times a week right over here at the Red Hot Inn. |
| 0:36.5 | And he was always there every single |
| 0:39.9 | day at a certain time. And he sat by himself and he had a hat on. And it said 95th infantry on it. |
| 0:46.8 | And it had a, you know, you see veterans wear pins and stuff on their hat. But he had a combat |
| 0:52.1 | infantryman's badge on his pin. And I knew he was a |
| 0:55.6 | World War II veteran. And I observed him for several weeks or months, never talked to him. And finally, |
| 1:02.3 | I'm like, I got to, I got to go talk to this guy. We spent a ton of time just talking, drinking |
| 1:08.2 | coffee. And through that, he brought me to the veterans group. And this |
| 1:14.2 | veterans group was very unique when I got there because I was by far the youngest guy there. |
| 1:20.9 | Everybody in that group, most of them were all World War II veterans. Time frame would have |
| 1:26.3 | been about 2002 was the first time I went there. |
| 1:29.4 | So there was probably 60 or 70 local World War II veterans who were still alive who went to that |
| 1:35.8 | group. I'm actually seeing guys here at this group. Like you would read about just incredible |
| 1:41.7 | events that you would see on the history channel or study about. |
| 1:45.7 | These guys were actually there. |
| 1:47.6 | So I met guys who actually landed at Iwo Jima, who actually parachuted in on Normandy on D-Day. |
| 1:54.9 | There was a guy who was on the USS Indianapolis. |
| 1:58.5 | I met guys who unlocked the gates at Dachauow. These are the kind of guys I got to |
... |
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