AUSTIN Texas Land Commissioner and Veterans Land Board (VLB) Chairwoman Dawn Buckingham, M.D., is proud to introduce the next installment of the series highlighting the VLB’s Voices of Veterans oral history program. This week, they highlight the service of MSgt. Dotson Lewis who served in U.S. Army.
Dotson was born 35 miles south of the Oklahoma border in Gunter, Texas but didn’t live in Texas his whole life, and moved to Fayetteville, Arkansas before high school because of his mother’s preference.
“We moved to Arkansas because we were having too many sandstorms and my mother wanted to move, she was from Arkansas, in the mid-30’s during The Depression,” Lewis explained.
Lewis said he remembers when the United States was thrust into World War II, a foreshadowing of his future, December 7, 1941.
“I remember it very vividly, I was out playing, it was a Sunday after church and a bunch of us kids were out playing football in a field in Arkansas when my dad called me and said you better get in here, we’re at war,” Lewis said as he recalled that day in his mind. “He was listening to the radio and I remember it specifically and the next morning, my Uncle who just turned 19, he and I went down to the recruiting to join the Marines and, of course, I was only 13 or 14 so they wouldn’t let me go, but he went.”
Lewis said while the war changed things growing up, as anyone can imagine, he had earned a scholarship to college and considered going. While his parents were split on his decision to forego college, he felt getting drafted was inevitable and decided volunteering to enter the service was his best bet.
“I had no choice, I was going to get drafted but if you volunteered for three years you got the appointment of your choice and the school you’d like to go to if you joined for three years and, naturally, I went to Japan immediately after I finished basic training,” he explained, adding he attended basic training at Fort Lewis, Washington.
In Tokyo, Lewis said he was drafted to play in some sports since he was an athlete growing up but with an automotive mechanic background, he said he ended up in an ordinance outfit in Japan working on bomb disposal shortly after World War II ended and he helped clean up tunnels around the country.
“When I first got there, McArthur decided he wanted one American to play on every baseball team and the Japanese loved baseball, so I was assigned to play shortstop with the Chunichi Dragons,” Lewis shared, admitting his start in the Army wasn’t the same as others before him or after him.
Lewis said for the next three years he would be in Japan and then, when he was getting ready to reenlist, things got dicey in Korea, adding his platoon was the first to land in the hostile area before the war even started.
“It was my outfit, the First Cavalry Division, that arrived in Korea when it was still a police action at that point, it wasn’t a war,” he explained.
Lewis went on to say he will never forget when the stark reality of war set in for him, not long after they landed.
“We landed in Korea on the 13th of July of 1950 and we didn’t know what war was, but we were immediately at war. I had a platoon and I sent my squad out to find out what was going on because the North Koreans weren’t there,” he said about his First Cavalry Division. “My squad sent three up there and they found the North Koreans about 20 miles north. We didn’t hear back from them but we found them two days later, they had been massacred up there and we found their bodies.”
Click here to listen to MSgt. Dotson Lewis tell his story.
