John Schottelkotte always thought his tales of combat as a young Marine at Midway, Iwo Jima and other legendary battles of World War II would be mainly for his grandchildren to hear.

        Now, though, a whole nation will listen in to his war, his story.

John Schottelkotte on the porch of his Grosbeck home. (Steven M. Herppich photo) | ZOOM |

        Sunday morning, at 9 a.m., The History Channel will air another episode of “A Veteran's Story” - half-hour films produced by The Tullamore Corp., a San Diego-based video production company. The shows focus on the experiences of ordinary soldiers and sailors in the nation's four most recent wars — World War II, Korea, Vietnam and the Persian Gulf.

        “I never thought anybody would be much interested in what I was doing in the war,” the 82-year-old ex-Marine sergeant said, as he popped a cassette into the VCR in the living room of his home at the end of a Groesbeck cul-de-sac this week.

        He sat on the couch, a camouflage Marine fatigue cap on his head, stroking his chin, as the videocassette spun out black-and-white images of a war long ago, far away.

        Originally, it was a video his son and daughter paid the California company to make as a present for their father's 80th birthday. But The History Channel acquired the package of Tullamore videos and began broadcasting them in October.

        With stock footage of historical events and photos provided by the veterans' themselves, the films chronicle the lives of the veterans before, during and after the war, with narration by the former soldiers and sailors themselves.

A young John Schottelkotte posed at Parris Island in 1941 | ZOOM |

        “First time I heard it, I thought I sounded like Donald Duck,” the tall, strapping ex-Marine said, laughing as he poked a visitor in the belly and slapped his knee. “You never know how funny you sound until you hear yourself on tape.”

        There was nothing funny, though, about where Mr. Schottelkotte found himself in Dec. 1941. His Pioneer Platoon of the Third Marine Division was stationed at a Naval air base on the Midway Islands, smack dab in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, as close to Tokyo as he was to San Francisco.

        He had joined the Marines a year before, after growing up in Cheviot, where his family ran a grocery store.

        After graduating from Western Hills High School — he played the drums and xylophone in the school marching band — Mr. Schottelkotte went to work for a tool-and-die company on Spring Grove Avenue as an estimator, a job that didn't much suit the restless youth.

        One day, after his boss had asked him to estimate the cost of one million Frigidaire door panels, the young man asked for a $5 a week raise. I'll have to go to the board of directors to get that approved, his boss said.

        “That was it; I was out of there,” Mr. Schottelkotte said. “I joined the Marines.”

        Sitting at the kitchen table with his wife of 58 years, Mickey, he remembered Dec. 7, 1941 — the day the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor. It would prove to be a day when the young Marine from Cheviot heard his first shots fired in anger, too.

        “That morning, the fellow in the communications shack — we called him "Squeaky' — came running up saying the Japanese were bombing Pearl Harbor,” Mr. Schottelkotte recalled.

        “We didn't believe him,” he said. “We said, "Squeaky, you've been drinking that Aqua Velva again. Go back to sleep.'”

        But, a few hours later, two Japanese destroyers pulled into the channel between the Midway islands and began bombarding the air station and Marine post.

        “It got pretty hot that day,” Mr. Schottelkotte said. “We knew we were in a war.”

        But he was probably lucky to be there taking that pounding from Japanese destroyers.

        A few months earlier, he had been in Pearl Harbor with five other Marines, awaiting assignment. Three were sent to Wake Island; Mr. Schottelkotte and two of his buddies went to Midway. Not long thereafter, the Japanese invaded Wake and killed or captured nearly all the defending Marines.

        He was still on Midway in June 1942 when the Battle of Midway took place. It is principally known as a naval encounter, but the installations at Midway were strafed and bombed by Japanese planes.

        “I was in this when it was hit,” Mr. Schottelkotte said, showing a visitor a photograph of a communications post that had been turned into a pile of broken concrete and twisted metal. The Marine major who commanded his outfit — “a really great guy” — was killed in the bombing.

        After the Battle of Midway, he was sent back to the States for more training and then turned around and shipped out to Iwo Jima.

        Mr. Schottelkotte was among the third wave of Marines to storm that island, battling his way through mortar fire.

        After the successful battle, Mr. Schottelkotte was among the Marines clearing Japanese soldiers out of the island's many caves.

        As it turned out, he said, “I was the last Marine off Iwo Jima. I feel the good Lord was really watching over me that day.”

        And he was a witness to one of the most memorable moments of American military history — the raising of the American flag over Mt. Surabachi by five Marines and a sailor.

        “You should have heard the cheer that went up,” said Mr. Schottelkotte, who has a jar of Iwo Jima sand sitting on a living room table.

        In 1944, Mr. Schottelkotte, then on Guam, believed the war would drag on for a long, long time, so he re-upped.

        But, as it turned out there was only a year to go before the war's end, so, when the Japanese surrendered, Mr. Schottelkotte found himself stationed in China instead of on a troop ship heading home.

        He served for a few more years, finally returning home in the late 1940s, taking a job at Procter & Gamble, where he stayed for 35 years, and raising his family.

        But his years of military service are never far sight — from the Marine Corps doormat in front of his red brick home to the folders full of photographs and newspaper clippings of a time most people know only from history books.

        “I am,” he said, as the video of his life played in the background, “one lucky son-of-a-gun.”

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