Decorated Veterans Gather to Remember Pearl Harbor on 80th Anniversary

Generals, Colonels, POWs and Purple Heart recipients gathered at New Hope Ministries on the 80th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7 to observe Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt said that December 7, 1941 “will live in infamy.” On December 8, 1941, Roosevelt signed the Declaration of War against Japan.

Major General James Lee Dozier was in attendance Tuesday. Dozier was the subject of worldwide media attention in 1981 when he was kidnapped by the Red Brigades, Europe’s most feared and bloody terrorist organization. Dozier, who was NATO’s deputy chief of staff for land forces for Southern Europe at the time, was held for 42 days.

Dozier, now 90, appears in fine health.

Master of ceremonies, Chaplain, Brigadier General Edward Brandt, Ret., surprised Dozier by inviting him to the dais to address the crowd.

“I can’t wait to hear what I’m going to say,” Dozier joked. He shared his childhood memories of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

“I do remember exactly what I was doing when I heard about Pearl Harbor,” Dozier told the audience. "I was playing across the street from our house in the elementary school parking lot when my dad came out and said, ‘We are at war.’  I was involved in schoolboy patriotic activities that helped with the war effort, like collecting tin foil, selling war bonds and things like that."

Dozier was kidnapped in his Verona apartment on December 17, 1981 by four Red Brigades guerrillas posing as plumbers. One held a gun to his wife’s head to convince Dozier not to resist. He was kept in a tent and forced to listen to loud music through headphones, resulting in permanent hearing damage. He was interrogated daily about NATO operations.

Dozier was finally freed by a 13-man police special operations SWAT team who liberated him in one of the most daring rescue raids in Italian history.

Colonel Robert Kies was also in attendance. Kies, who is two weeks shy of 96, was a prisoner of war when he was 24 years old.

“I came in the Army at 18,” Kies said, “I was a lieutenant at 19, in World War II. I was a combat platoon leader at 24 in Korea. My whole platoon was wiped out. We lost our whole battalion, 600 men, in 31 hours, Third battalion, Eighth calvary. Just wiped out. It’s in the history books. Lost a lot of good men. I got two Purple Hearts in six hours. I was a prisoner of war for 25 days. Luckily, it was the Chinese. We were the first unit attacked in Korea. They said, ’There aren’t any Chinese up there.’ I’ll tell you, there were a lot of Chinese up there. The Chinese overrun us. We took a terrible beating. In a matter of two days, we were wiped out. Over 600 casualties in two days. Of course, a group of us couldn’t walk. They left us laying out there. The day after Thanksgiving in 1950, they dumped us in front of the American lines. If it had been the North Koreans, they would have shot us. We were lucky. I got out of the hospital in April. There’s nothing glorious about fighting in a war. It’s nasty. You look at that guy over there, you’re either going to kill him, or he’s going to take you out. You’ve got to be brutal, but you can't let it get through to your memory.”

Kies said he doesn’t reflect much on the battles and his time as a POW.

“Very infrequently,” he said. "I haven’t had any sleepless nights or flashbacks. Too many of these people claim they’re having problems. I had two combat tours in Vietnam and one in Korea. You can go on without a lot of difficulty. I stayed on the right side of the tracks. There’s no use fighting it. Most of us had a pretty normal life.”

The program was organized by U.S. Marine Corps veteran Julie Badour, life enrichment director at Villa at Terracina Grand, and Bernadette La Paglia, community liaison, Hodges Funeral Home at Naples Memorial Gardens.