At 84, U.S. Army veteran Amos Cox is in a wheelchair, disabled by a stroke that sometimes leaves the right side of his body too weak to walk, but he clearly remembers fighting more than 60 years ago in World War II.
“To begin with, I was just a young boy, never been away from home, and they took me down to Georgia and taught me how to kill people,” said Cox. “Then they put me on a ship and sent me overseas.”
The Church of God minister and Chattanooga resident was one of several civilians and military veterans playing games Wednesday at Sharon’s Adult Day Center in Chattanooga. The center is having a celebration today to honor veterans.
“Sometimes when people get old, they get forgotten. I want people to remember them,” said Sharon Kelly, owner of the center.
Other military veterans at the center Wednesday included James Bowles, who served during the Korean War, and Willie Wilson and the Rev. James P. Russell, both of whom served in World War II.
The veterans cheered for one other while playing beanbag toss, then using paper plates to swat balloons.
“Show ’em what you’re working with,” center coordinator Ella Moore said as 91-year-old Wilson sank a beanbag in the goal.
They also ate together and shared their wartime stories.
Bowles, 77, talked about serving in the mailroom at the Pentagon instead of going overseas during the Korean War.
Wilson remembered jumping off a truck and into foxholes to dodge enemy planes while in Italy. Russell recalled the Japanese kamikaze fighters who flew suicide missions, diving their planes directly into their targets.
Cox said he was 19 when he left to go overseas, going from Georgia to North Africa, then to Naples, Italy, where he saw scores of children bruised and bandaged. Some had one arm or no legs; others had only one eye.
All made their way to the soldiers, calling them “Joe” and asking for chocolate, Cox recalled. The soldiers gave it, because “we didn’t know any better,” he said.
Then they realized that, once they started giving, it never stopped. Kids kept coming.
Cox fought on the front lines of World War II, in the midst of bursting mortar shells and blazing machine guns.
“Guess who my combat partner was?” Cox asked. “His name was William Hickok III, a direct descendent of the great Wild Bill.”
Wild Bill Hickok was a legendary gunfighter in the old American West who lived from 1837 to 1876.
During the war, Cox was a member of the 178th Field Artillery, a division of the North Carolina National Guard, called the Phantom Battalion because, even after 36 months of combat duty, the unit had no fatalities.
Though no one died, Cox said he went “through stuff so horrible that there is no way to explain how I got out alive.”
He spent three months in a hospital psychiatric ward after the war, he said.
“I believe the only reason I was able to come out of combat alive is that the church and my parents were praying for me,” he said. “And the Lord delivered me out of it.”