This is CBSI in the world. I'm John Batchew with Admiral Jim Stavridis.

The United States Navy retired. His new book is, To Risk It All, Nine Conflicts in the Crucible of Decision.

It is December 7, 1941 on USS, West Virginia, a battleship, a dreadnought tied up in Pearl Harbor, and now being

attacked by the wave after wave of Japanese warplanes. This is the moment that begins the crisis

for the U.S. Navy. A Cook third class, Doris Dory Miller from Waco, Texas, African American, is spending that day, it's a Sunday, on board with his friends.

And yet the attack comes, and they're told to go to general quarters.

At that moment, Doris Dory Miller makes decisions that I, Jim, I don't understand how he came to this level of heroism and he stayed there all day.

He must have known he wasn't going to survive.

Indeed.

You can only look at this as an act of pure courage, pure heroism.

He literally charges to the sound of the guns. He goes to the bridge of the ship

where his captain has been mortally wounded, but he helps evacuate the captain from the bridge.

And then most famously, he goes down to a gun deck. There's a crew served single anti-aircraft gun.

He doesn't know how to operate it.

He hasn't been trained to do that.

He and a couple of his shipmates kind of figure it out.

He scraps himself into this gun and starts shooting down Japanese aircraft.

Despite the fact that the decks on fire, the bullets are whizzing by him,

Japanese torpedoes are hitting the ship.

It's literally sinking in the harbor. It's a remarkable scene of courage. If you want to get a visualization of it,

there's a pretty good movie called Pearl Harbor, and Cuba, the actor playing it, does a marvelous

job depicting Dory Miller's real courage,

...