Snarknado ⚓️ 🇺🇸

You wander around Texas and you find grave markers like this one for Herbert Ray Morris in Waco's Memorial Park cemetery. Sometimes you get a brief glimpse of what the person buried there experienced in his/her lifetime. In Herbert's case, his marker offers a VERY brief glimpse. Herbert born in Fort Worth on April 23, 1919, and was still a young man when World War II carried him halfway around the world and into one of the most harrowing ordeals ever endured by American servicemen. Herbert, you see, served with the 2nd Battalion, 131st Field Artillery, a Texas National Guard unit belonging to the 36th Infantry Division. The battalion was sent to the Dutch East Indies, where American and Allied troops attempted to stem the Japanese advance across Southeast Asia. In March 1942, following the collapse of Allied defenses on the island of Java, Herbert and his fellow Texans were captured by the Japanese. They would become known as the "Lost Battalion," a name reflecting their long isolation from home and the uncertainty surrounding their fate. For Herbert, capture was merely the beginning of a nightmare that lasted more than three years. He was initially imprisoned at the Bicycle Camp in Batavia, now Jakarta, before being transferred to the notorious Changi prison complex in Singapore. Eventually he was sent to work on the Burma-Thailand Railway, the infamous "Death Railway," built by Allied prisoners of war and Asian forced laborers through some of the most unforgiving jungle terrain in Southeast Asia. Prisoners endured exhausting labor, inadequate food, disease, and brutal treatment. Thousands died during construction. Herbert survived the railway ordeal and was eventually returned to Singapore, where he spent the latter part of his captivity in Changi Jail. Herbert was finally liberated following Japan's surrender in 1945. He had survived more than three years of captivity, including forced labor on one of the most notorious construction projects of the war. He lived another sixty years, dying in Waco in 2005 at the age of 86. I read his story yesterday in a 196-page oral interview he conducted with a historian in 1989. The interview is remarkable. I won't dwell on the horrific details, but suffice to say Herbert saw and experienced things that would break most men. You can find that interview at The Portal to Texas History, but I have it, too, and will send it to you if you just shoot me an email.