BEYOND THE CALL OF DUTY

Among the pantheon of America’s heroes, none is more improbable than the black son of Texas sharecroppers and grandson of slaves, Doris Miller. Miller, known to many as “Dorie,” was born on October 12, 1919, during the darkest days of the lynching epidemic that blighted the South in the 20th century’s first decades. Only three years before Miller was born, his hometown of Waco became the scene of one of the most brutal lynchings on record when 17-year-old Jesse Washington was burned alive on the lawn of the city hall. Miller was compelled to drop out of high school in order to help support his struggling family—“We were a little hungry in those days,” his mother later explained—but when he could not find work, in September 1939, at 19, he joined the U.S. Navy.

At that time, black men serving in the navy were not only ineligible for promotion, they were consigned to the lowly messman branch where they were tasked with making the beds and shining the shoes of their officers and waiting on them in the officers’ mess. As one of Miller’s fellow messmen said, they were merely “seagoing bellhops, chambermaids, and dishwashers.” By regulation, they could not be trained in or assigned to any other specialty, such as signals, engineering, or gunnery. Their battle station was below decks in the “hole” or magazine, where they passed ammunition up to the gunners. They were not even allowed to wear buttons marked with the navy’s insignia, an anchor entwined with a chain, and had to wear plain buttons instead.

But, said Miller, “it beats sitting around Waco working as a busboy, going nowhere.” After attending a racially segregated boot camp at Norfolk, Virginia,—which, due to the rising tensions between the United States and the growing Japanese empire, was soon transferred along with the entire Pacific Fleet to Pearl Harbor.