When I walk into Willow Park Baptist Church fifteen minutes early, I know I’m late. The assembly room is filled with mostly older men sitting at round tables covered in red, white, and blue tablecloths. On their heads are caps embroidered with letters that designate which branches of the military they joined, which ships they served on, which wars they fought in.
The participants at Roll Call, a Fort Worth veterans group, look forward to their monthly meetings, and the parking lot is full well in advance of the event’s scheduled 11:30 a.m. start. Many visitors arrive in vans from retirement communities and assisted living facilities, while others carpool with friends.
The nonprofit’s luncheon started with fifteen World War II veterans getting together in a restaurant in June 2014. It now brings in nearly five hundred former and active-duty members of the U.S. military for meetings in the Fort Worth area. At the September meeting, the room feels as if it’s overflowing with stories of patriotic sacrifice. Each recollection has a distinct beginning—a moment that caused a particular speaker’s life to ricochet in a different direction.
Bill McIntyre stepped out of a Washington, D.C., movie theater on December 7, 1941, to a scene of even more drama. “Extra!” yelled young newspaper hawkers on the sidewalk. “We’ve been bombed!” McIntyre took a streetcar to Lafayette Square, near the U.S. Department of Labor offices, where he worked. From the building’s windows overlooking the White House, he saw several limousines, likely carrying cabinet members, heading to the presidential residence. Within a year, McIntyre was drafted into service and loaded onto a ship that spent fifteen days dodging German submarines on the trip across the Atlantic Ocean.
More than two decades after Pearl Harbor upended McIntyre’s life, along with the lives of an entire nation, John Yuill’s path changed in 1970, when the B-58 bombers he’d piloted for part of his Air Force career were taken out of operation. While he was in the cockpit of a B-58, he wasn’t sent on missions over Vietnam. After he was reassigned to fly B-52s, he knew he’d be serving on the front lines of the air war over Southeast Asia.
“Up there is Don Graves,” says my tablemate, pointing to a table in the front row. “He was a flamethrower in Iwo Jima. I don’t know how he got home.” I want to hear everyone’s story at Roll Call, but there’s just not enough time. Not over the course of a two-hour meeting, not in the space I have to write this story, and not in the time many aging veterans have left in their lives.
The luncheon begins with “The Star-Spangled Banner” and the Pledge of Allegiance. A screen next to the stage flashes announcements of upcoming birthdays, deaths in the past month, and speakers who will share their stories that day. The face of Special Warfare Operator 1st Class Nathan Gage Ingram appears.
Ingram first started thinking about going into the military as a teenager in 2013, when he watched the film Lone Survivor with his best friend from high school. The movie, which tells the story of four Navy SEALs fighting for their lives while behind enemy lines in the Afghanistan War, inspired Ingram run three miles in the middle of a cold North Texas night as soon as the credits rolled.
While attending Texas Tech University, Ingram worked with a campus military recruiter to improve his speed and stamina when swimming and running, in hopes of someday becoming a SEAL. In the months after graduating from college, in August 2019, he completed boot camp and basic training. The early days of the COVID pandemic slowed his timeline, but in the summer of 2020, he went through Hell Week, a notoriously strenuous training operation that lasts five and a half days. His feet swelled to three times their normal size during the week, and he fractured his left tibia and right femur before it was over, but he made it through.
Afterward, Ingram called his mom. “Secured Hell Week,” he told her. She was so proud that she cried. In December 2021, he graduated with class 346 and was assigned to SEAL Team 3. He was deployed for the first time in September 2023, right after marrying his wife, Jewel.
Soon after Ingram was deployed to Bahrain, conflict heated up exponentially while he was in the Middle East. Israel was attacked by Hamas on October 7, 2023. Tensions boiled over, and the stakes seemed higher.
SEAL Team 3 went on a night mission in the Arabian Sea off the coast of Somalia on the night of January 11. The sea was filled with powerful swells. When the team climbed the ladder of an unflagged ship carrying illegal weapons destined for Houthi rebels in Yemen, fellow SEAL Christopher Chambers slipped and fell into the water. Ingram jumped in after him. The rest of the group searched for them, but in less than a minute, both had vanished from sight. A U.S. Central Command investigation determined that once Chambers fell into the Arabian Sea, he was above water for 26 seconds. Ingram was seen for 32 seconds. The investigation concluded that their equipment was too heavy and they had inadequate flotation devices. The entire episode lasted 47 seconds, and then they were gone. Still, the Navy spent an additional week and a half searching for the men.
At the Roll Call luncheon, Ingram’s mother, Kristi Hughes, steps up to the microphone to be her son’s voice. “My son, Nathan—Gage, as we called him—was born March 22, 1996, at a whopping nine pounds, thirteen ounces,” she says. “He was a very happy, chubby baby who grew into a little Texan boy wearing his cowboy boots, belt buckle, and chaps from the minute he started walking.”
She tells the room about his training, his missions, and his ultimate sacrifice at age 27. “Those were the ten longest days of my life, with an end I wish I could rewrite,” she says. “Gage is and always will be my son, my hero, and I will forever be so proud of him.”
When she finishes speaking, the crowd rises to its feet. I see WWII vet Jack Stowe swipe a finger under his eyes.
After the plates are cleared, attendees grab sugar cookies from assortments brought to the tables. The tables where WWII veterans with upcoming birthdays are seated receive cakes as well. Mary Staffeld, Roll Call’s president, announces the ages of those turning ninety or older. She points to Stowe.
“He turns ninety-eight tomorrow, but the Navy still thinks he’s going to be one hundred,” she says as everyone laughs. “It’s a good story. You should ask him about it.”
McIntyre, who turned 104 in July, got a special treat at his table at the luncheon a few months back. He’s hard of hearing and nearly blind, and he sits in a wheelchair, but his speech and recollections are clear. “I had a terrible job,” he says.
When he was drafted, he requested a spot in finance, since he had taken some accounting classes. The government obliged. After all, it takes an entire society to run a war.
He was sent to New York and put on a ship with 41 other enlisted men. They didn’t know where they were headed. The ship stopped in Oran, Algeria, and from there McIntyre boarded a train to Algiers. In North Africa, McIntyre was given the task of completing paperwork for pilots who were killed in action. Each family of those lost received a $10,000 death benefit, and the documents needed to be signed and certified before that could happen. “They kept telling us, ‘Get the paperwork in because we have to keep up the morale in the United States,’ ” he says. “I worked night and day.”
After a year, McIntyre was reassigned to Naples, Italy, which was no more than ten minutes’ flying time from a German-controlled airfield. During McIntyre’s two years in Naples, the base withstood frequent attacks. “When they flew over us at night, they’d drop flares and they’d light up the whole bay,” he says. “We’d lose somebody every night.”
One evening he counted the bombs. He could hear Italian citizens screaming as they ran to shelters.
Boom. The ten-story dormitory across the street was sliced down the middle.
Boom. Furniture showed in the rooms that were left standing, now in the open air.
Boom. “They were just shaking the ground,” McIntyre says. “Man, they were getting close.”
Boom. The next morning, he walked toward the transportation building that housed Jeeps and other vehicles. A five-hundred-pound bomb sat on the ground, unexploded. There was an imprint on the side of the outer wall where the giant shell had struck a glancing blow before landing nearby.
When the war in Europe ended, McIntyre had earned a Bronze Star and was reassigned to serve at the War Department in Washington, D.C. At least the move would get him back on American soil. McIntyre boarded a B-17 in Naples in September 1945, relieved to be headed home. As the plane raced down the runway during takeoff, a rear tire blew out. The pilot got the bird in the air and yelled back to the men. “Don’t worry, boys,” McIntyre remembers him saying. “This is the third rear tire to blow out on me on a B-17, but I radioed Casablanca. Casablanca says, ‘Well, Captain, don’t land on the concrete.’ ”
The pilot kept the nose up as long as he could as he brought the plane down on the dirt beside the runway in Morocco. When the tail came down, the bomber slid to the side. An ambulance was there just in case, but the passengers disembarked unscathed. “We opened the doors and thanked the Lord that we were alive,” McIntyre says.
The other legs of his trip home were no less eventful. The back door of a C-47 opened as the plane was taking off from Central America on the way to Puerto Rico. McIntyre and others had to grab the door and pull it closed. When they flew over south Florida, on the approach, the pilot brought the plane low over Miami Beach so they could all take in the first view of continental U.S. soil. “It was a beautiful sight,” McIntyre says.
When I sit next to Lieutenant Colonel John Yuill and ask him about his service, he gives me a quick, two-sentence wrap-up, then says, “I’ve lived such a boring, unaffected life.” His response belies the truth—he was in the air during two pivotal moments in American history.
As a copilot on a loaded bomber over the Atlantic during the thirteen days of the Cuban Missile Crisis, in 1962, he was tasked with 24-hour missions to monitor the skies on the brink of World War III. One dark night, the undercast broke apart and the moon light up part of Spain in a way that had him convinced for minutes that the Russians had dropped a nuclear bomb on American bases there.
“Every time I see a full moon, I think about that experience,” he says.
A decade later, when he was 38, the details of another night flight were seared into his memory. Yuill was thirty seconds from “bombs away” on Bach Mai Airfield, near Hanoi, when the first surface-to-air missile hit. It was 2 a.m. on December 22, 1972, the fifth night of Operation Linebacker II, which included U.S. forces’ first use of B-52 bombers against targets in the North Vietnamese capital.
The missile that slammed into the left wing of Yuill’s aircraft, causing the plane to bank 30 degrees. Yuill, the pilot, worked to get the wings level before checking the red warning lights on the panel in front of him. With a look out his window, he confirmed what the monitors told him: Engines three and four were on fire.
As Yuill glanced over at his copilot’s side of the cockpit, a second missile struck the plane. There were no lights left to check. The power was out. Yuill saw the plane’s left wing engulfed in flames and realized he had to make a decision before the wing snapped and the plane became uncontrollable.
If he could hold the plane together long enough, they might be able to fly to the U.S.-controlled Gulf of Tonkin and be picked up by friendly forces. But it would take about seven minutes to get there, and the wing could go at any moment. Yuill ordered his crew to bail out, and once they’d all made it out of the plane, he hit his “eject” button and launched himself into the air.
Yuill’s parachute deployed, and he floated safely to the ground, with some shrapnel in his shins from the ejection. Soon after he gathered himself and removed his parachute harness, a group of curious civilians approached him. A few hours later, in Fort Worth, Rose Yuill heard the doorbell ring. The men on the other side told her that her husband’s plane had been shot down. They didn’t know his fate.
Yuill wound up in Hoa Lo Prison, the detention camp dubbed the Hanoi Hilton by American forces. Upon his arrival, Yuill spent a week in solitary confinement. Then he was put in a cell with three or four other prisoners. He felt relieved to see that his entire B-52 crew had survived the descent, but at the same time, Yuill was devastated that they had all become prisoners of war.
Yuill’s cell had a small courtyard on the back side that abutted the prison’s outer walls, which were topped with barbed wire and broken glass. Yuill could hear day-to-day life in Hanoi happening on the other side of the wall as bicycles and motorcycles whizzed by. He tried to stop himself from hoping he’d have that kind of freedom again. “There was no way to escape that we could see,” he says. “I figured that was it. That’s where I would be for the rest of my life. I had no idea how long that would be. It wasn’t a good time physically or mentally.”
About a month into his detention, Yuill and the others were transferred to Cu Loc Prison, known as the Zoo. Yuill spent two and a half months there. Each building held five cells, with four or five men assigned to each room. They were let out midmorning to mingle in the courtyard for up to five hours and agree on which lies they’d tell when questioned by the North Vietnamese interrogators.
Once, Yuill walked into the interrogation room to find an unusual sight. Usually it was just him on a stool and an English-speaking person in a chair behind a desk. This time the space was full of reporters and cameras. Behind the desk was North Vietnam’s top MiG pilot, with an interpreter. Yuill quickly deduced that it was a PR stunt. His interrogator asked him several questions before inquiring about heat deflectors on the engines of a B-52. Yuill went into great detail about the equipment and even took pen to paper to draw a design of it.
More than fifty years later, Yuill admits with a laugh, “We had no heat deflectors on our planes.”
One day in the early months of 1973, guards led Yuill and the other hundred or so prisoners into a theater and told about a ceasefire agreement. Prisoners would be released in four groups, each two weeks apart. The first set of men was taken out of the camp exactly two weeks after the announcement. The second group was let go a day or two later than the timeline dictated. The third left three or four days past the two-week mark. “The way I analyzed that, they were preparing us for the fact that they were not going to release the last group—which I was in—until they could get some more concessions,” he says. “I wasn’t in a real positive frame of mind.”
On the day they were supposed be released, March 29, 1973, Yuill and the remaining prisoners were taken on four buses to Gia Lam Airport, on the north side of Hanoi. At the entrance, Yuill saw several people come in with cameras. One person in the crowd looked familiar. It was Walter Cronkite. “If Walter is here, you gotta believe it’s happening,” he recalls thinking.
There were two U.S. cargo planes on the runway. Yuill watched two busloads of American POWs board the aircraft. Both jets closed their doors, taxied, and screamed into the sky.
At first Yuill thought his suspicions had been confirmed—the last group of prisoners was being held to extract further concessions from the U.S. government. Then, a few minutes later, another plane appeared on the horizon. It was an American C-141 cargo jet coming to take the men home.
Yuill wound up being a passenger on the last plane that carried U.S. POWs out of Vietnam. He says he didn’t allow himself a glimpse of hope until the jet was barreling down the runway. Once it lifted off the ground, the men jumped and cheered inside the cabin.
“I was out of the seat as soon as we broke ground,” he says.
The meeting ends with members of each military branch standing and singing along to their respective fight songs. Those in the group disperse quickly, returning to a world where they mostly look like unassuming senior citizens, but happen to hold intimate details of some of America’s most difficult chapters.
I zigzag through the throng to get to Stowe. He’s originally from Fort Worth and enlisted in April 1942, altering a document to convince the Navy that he was seventeen years old even though he was, in fact, only fifteen and hadn’t even finished ninth grade. “I got to be a cook in the Navy,” he tells me. “We haven’t got time for the story, but four cases of beer got me to be a cook.”
I want to ask him about growing up in Fort Worth and how he felt on a ship, but he stands and picks up a bundt cake another Roll Call attendee brought him for his birthday. “Honey, I have to go,” he says.
