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Re: Bronze Star Shines for Ex-POW

From: POW-MIA InterNetwork

Date: December 11, 2003

"Bronze Star shines for reluctant Pearl Harbor hero
By ANDRE MOUCHARD
Orange County Register

BUENA PARK, Calif. - Everybody gets the date wrong.

That's the first thing retired Lt. Col. Richard Gillett says when asked about Pearl Harbor Day.

On Saturday, Gillett, 82, received a belated Bronze Star for his actions when the Philippines was bombed in the hours after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor.

"I was behind the date line," Gillett said affably, in his Buena Park home, hours before receiving the award at the Armed Forces Reserve Center in Los Alamitos.

"So the attack everybody talks about came to me on Dec. 8, not Dec. 7," Gillett said. "I've won bets in a bar on that one."

Gillett has talked a lot about that day and the years that followed. He's got the basic story down to about 45 minutes. He's given a version of the story to Rotary Clubs and police groups and his grandson's history class.

Almost every time, he's asked to talk a lot longer than that.

"People are moved," said Gillett's son, Ron Gillett, a Fullerton police officer.

"When I was growing up it wasn't something he really talked much about," he said. "Now, I listen to him all the time, and I learn something every time."

The second thing the elder Gillett will tell you about Pearl Harbor Day, and the years that followed, is that he was no hero.

He's wrong about that.

When bombs dropped at Nichols Field airstrip in the Philippines on Dec. 8, 1941, Gillett, while under fire, carried a badly wounded man to safety, ignoring his own shrapnel wound to do it.

"When bombs are falling like that, and you don't have any place to hide, it's a terrible, terrible, terrible feeling."

His hands tremble when he says this, from age and, he admits, from the memory.

"That was the most fear I've felt, before or since."

A few weeks after that first attack, during the battle for Luzon, Gillett shot down a Japanese Zero while flying in a slower plane (a P-35) that his fellow pilots considered a death trap.

He waves that volunteer mission off as luck.

"The Zero just appeared in front of me in the clouds. Right there. I shot it and kept shooting until it went in the drink."

Years later, Gillett tracked down the name of the pilot he shot, Petty Officer Toshio Kikuchi of the Tainan Air group.

He waves that off too, as something any interested person might do.

Gillette also survived the infamous Bataan Death March, which came in April 1942.

He spent more than three years after that as a prisoner of war and slave laborer in Japan.

Gillett will talk about horrors from that time, of nearly starving to death, of contracting dengue fever.

He recounts, with a glare, how some Japanese guards killed his fellow soldiers.

In the next breath, he recounts how Japanese civilians sneaked him bits of food when he worked in a steel factory.

He talks about how they taught him some Japanese and, in one case, brought him some cherries to eat.

"God, I tasted those, and I was in heaven," he said, still able to laugh at the memory of it.

"I've never felt any hatred," Gillett added, sitting on a couch in front of a dozen African masks, mementos of some of the many trips he's taken in the years since he retired from his post-military career in advertising.

"There are some individuals, guards, who behaved in a way I can't understand still," Gillett added, shaking his head.

"But there were others who risked themselves to help me. I can't forget that."

Gillett is a hero because, hours later, when Rep. Ed Royce, R-Fullerton, handed him his Bronze Star, and a hundred or so military people in uniform rose to give him a standing ovation, he said nothing about himself.

"I accept this medal for the thousands of troops still in the Philippines," he said, eyes dry.

"Those people are never going home."

Then Gillett sat down, smiled, and stopped talking."