The Pink Flamingo :: James D. Puckett, a Vet, my Greatest Teacher, and a Good Republican!

If we are fortunate, once in our lives we will have a teacher who inspired us enough to challenge us and help mold the direction of our lives. James D. Puckett did just that for me.

Mr. Puckett ran away as a kid and lied about his age when he joined the Army. There were stories that he rode with Pershing, but I'm not going to swear to it. He ended up in North Africa where he was a truck driver. He fought in the Battle of Tobruk, where he was captured by the Germans. He spent quite a bit of time in a Nazi POW camp, and showed us the scars on his arms and hands where he was brutalized. He escaped and rejoined Patton's 3rd, where he ended up fairly close to Patton. When the Internment camps were liberated, one of the things Patton assigned Mr. P. to do was go in to the labs where Nazi "scientists" were doing human experimentation.

According to Mr. P, Patton did not have the stomach to even go past the door way of the labs after he went into one. He told Mr. P to take his .45 and "take care of thing" and put the poor creatures, some of whom could no longer be described as "human" out of their misery. The job was assigned to Mr. P alone. He was also assigned the duty of personally destroying the notes and records on the more grotesque of the experimentation.

The night after the first encounter with what the Nazis had done led Mr. P to begin drinking. He finally went to AA 30 years later, but by then the drinking had destroyed his health.

Naturally, as an inquisitive high school senior who was the very Lois Lane sports editor for our high school paper (Mr. P was our advisor), I would hound him for details on what he found. His answer was always short and simple. He said what he saw was beyond what anyone should even think of, let alone take part in as a "scientist". Mr. P said that many of the people he encountered had been so butchered or so brutally experimented upon that they no longer were "human". The only decent thing to do was simply walk up and put a gun to their heads. He did this to many tortured souls, and in return, for his service, he was tortured almost to the end of his life.

As with many extraordinary men who did the unthinkable in the name of their country and in the name of human decency, he only found peace through Christ - and then 30 years later after he started going to AA.

(An aside: I know a woman who was tortured in one of those camps as a child. They were doing kidney experimentations on her. She is very prestigious attorney, who is basically without any tactile feeling around her urinary tract area. As she walks, even through all the medical assistance money can buy, she still dribbles urine, and is constantly humiliated because of it. Like the vast majority of Holocaust survivors, she absolutely refuses to even hide the hideous tattoo on her arm.)

Mr. P taught history and government. I was his “prize” student in history. He would do two different tests for the class I was in, one for everyone else and one much more difficult – for me. Even then I would end up with extra credit grades of 110, etc. He was thrilled when I chose the Ladislas Farago bio of Patton. When he discovered I was a cradle Republican, well, that’s all it took.

Before I digress into politics, I want to touch on something Mr. P as a pedagogue taught me. As a historian, he was into understanding the how and why of things. He required that I, as a budding historian, put myself in the place of my “subject” now matter how vile and reprehensible that subject was. Case in point was the way he taught how Hitler rose to power. I had to understand what was going on in German at the time.

The greatest lesson I learned from Mr. P was that in order to understand someone, I had to put myself in their shoes.

Mr. P was the Oconee County GOP chairman my senior year in high school. He is the one who turned me into the political animal I am today. He is also the person who encouraged me to be a writer.

Okay, it’s all Mr. Puckett’s fault! He created a monster. I admit it.

Everyone should have the golden opportunity to have a teacher like Mr. P. His influence molded my entire life. It’s a good thing he was a Republican.

Dime con quien andas y te digo quien eres.

08 Bloggers Alliance