MONROE — The news bulletin came while Jake Meier and his family listened to music one Sunday on the radio. Perhaps it was Glenn Miller or Duke Ellington.
About 2:30 p.m. on Dec. 7, 1941, more than six decades ago, the tallish, handsome, 25-year-old farm boy from Lemmon, S.D., heard a newscaster say that Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor.
"I knew for sure that soon I’d be on my way to war," Meier said.
The next day, the United States entered World War II.
Meier was allowed to stay and help his parents through their next harvest. But by fall 1942 he was in the Army, nicknamed "Doc Meier" and on his way to serve three years as a front-line medic in the South Pacific. He ended up in the 24th Infantry Division.
In the bright, spotless Fryelands neighborhood home he shares with his wife, Mattie, the 87-year-old retired contractor and construction worker entered the dining room clutching a white binder — his book.
Titled "A Lucky Dogfoot of WW2," it contains 80 pages of vivid memories from his years at war. There are dozens of photos, pages of autographs from fellow soldiers, stories both funny and tragic, and the details of half a dozen of Meier’s close calls.
Meier has been working on the book since the early 1980s, and has circulated photocopies to family and friends.
"Oh, I’m still working on it," he said.
His photos show Meier was something of an Errol Flynn look-alike. He had the wavy brown hair, blue eyes, strong jaw and broad smile of a matinee idol.
The voice in his book is that of an upbeat, happy-go-lucky, small-town guy who ranched, mined coal and generally worked hard for a living after leaving school in the eighth grade.
While at war, Meier experienced things both wonderful and terrible.
He learned about first aid and medicine and visited new places, including beautiful islands where the natives would bring the soldiers bananas. He became good friends with other soldiers, playing pinochle on Army cots and using hand grenades to catch fish during down time.
But he also faced horrors that only those who go to war encounter — ear-splitting explosions, sickness, hate, cruelty and death. He wouldn’t leave the South Pacific before losing some of his good friends.
During his stories, Meier looks up and slightly away, as if his mind is rewinding and replaying each scene like a movie.
As a scene transition, he uses the word "anyhow." It seems to be the only thing to separate the laughter from the tears.
Meier remembers the firecracker sounds of machine guns and the "poof" of dirt as bullets hit the ground near him.
He remembers administering pint after pint of plasma through the night to an injured soldier, to no avail. He had to give out dozens of shots of morphine to soldiers who had "lost it" due to battle fatigue.
He remembers the stench as his convoy drove past piles of bodies of enemy soldiers.
And he remembers one American soldier who collected gold teeth from those bodies "to buy a casino when he got home."
Meier paused. "Anyhow."
He remembers one rainy night his buddy Russell Schiefelbein from New York City was sitting on the roof of a bunker. Meier was below him. Suddenly, their battalion came under attack by Japanese soldiers firing machine guns.
"I told him to put his helmet on," Meier said, as he tapped his hand on the table. He paused, and then the tears came. He put his head in his hands.
Soon after, Meier heard a moan, and Schiefelbein came rolling down the roof into Meier’s lap, where he died.
"It was so sad," he said of the friends he lost. "It wasn’t real that I ever was in that world. It didn’t seem real."
With a pause and another soft, "anyhow," Meier was on to the next topic.
He made it back to write his book, while others did not. But there were many times it could have been Meier who didn’t come home.
In Australia, he moved to the top of a hill to watch a platoon conduct target practice. Moments later, a defective mortar shell exploded prematurely, killing one and injuring 14.
On his first night on the Philippine island of Leyte, Meier was digging a foxhole to sleep in when the young soldier digging right next to him was hit in the head by a sniper.
While inspecting a captured enemy bunker with a Philippine scout, the two found a curious tunnel. The scout leaned forward to look inside and was shot in the head as he stood next to Meier.
"I was one of the lucky ones," Meier said.
Both in person and in his book, he is an expert storyteller, recalling brilliant details, both delightful and unpleasant, that give his recollections explosive power.
There was the time first lady Eleanor Roosevelt visited soldiers camping in Australia, and one GI patted her on the rear. "It didn’t go over so big," Meier said. She turned and suggested that the soldier spend an extra six months in New Guinea after the war to become civilized.
There was the time he spent a rainy night in a foxhole with 8 inches of water that seemed to permanently wrinkle his "toesies." This after sleeping 86 straight nights on the ground.
Another time, a 14-year-old Philippine boy named Portanato Tatong started following him around. They became friends, and Meier took some of his fatigues to a village seamstress to be made into school clothes for the boy, who had few belongings.
Or the times the soldiers would ask island natives to climb coconut trees to collect "tuba" — fermented rainwater that tasted like champagne — in a thick, 4-foot bamboo shoot. If the soldiers were lucky, Meier said, the natives would shake down a few coconuts as well for "coconut juice chasers."
One time, in October 1944, the Dogfoot was at his luckiest. While he helped a downed soldier who had been shot in the upper arm, bullets whizzed by their heads left and right. As he leaned to bandage the man’s arm, a bullet went through Meier’s helmet, punching an inch-wide hole but somehow ricocheting and only grazing his right temple.
He threw the helmet away while still on the island of Leyte. He later earned a Purple Heart for his injury.
All the while Meier sat at his dining room table telling stories, his wife listened. She has heard the stories before, and more like them. She was 18 when she met Meier at a Saturday night dance during a tri-county fair in 1946. He was 27.
Within a year, they were married. In June, Jake and Mattie Meier celebrated 56 years together.
Mattie Meier was just a young woman in North Dakota when soldiers started returning, bringing bits of the war with them. Now her husband’s war is in his book.
"A Lucky Dogfoot" is not available in stores or libraries. But the fact that it exists contributes a strand to the web of history. His family and friends, children and grandchildren will know the details of how someone close to them struggled through and survived one of the most difficult periods in U.S. history.
Anyhow, Staff Sgt. Jake "Doc" Meier’s part in World War II — and history — is written.
"There were some bad things in there, but I never regretted it," Meier said. "No way."
Reporter Jennifer Warnick: 425-339-3429 or jwarnick@heraldnet.com.
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