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Episode #618 of Hometown Heroes, airing March 5-9, 2020, serves as a tribute to USS Arizona survivor Don Stratton, whose body was returned to his native Red Cloud, NE this week after a 400-mile funeral procession from Colorado Springs, CO.

You’ll hear excerpts from his memorial service, which you can watch in its entirety in the video below from Rocky Mountain Calvary, and you’ll also hear some of Stratton’s memories, captured in a 2017 interview on Hometown Heroes. When the general quarters alarm sounded on the morning of December 7, 1941, Stratton reported to his battle station, an anti-aircraft gun position on the port side, about 60-feet above the main deck on the foremast.

“The bomb that hit on the starboard side behind #2 turret went into a million pounds of ammunition and it blew up,” Stratton explained. “It just was a fireball that engulfed us up there where we were at, and no way to escape.”

Already burned over 60% of his body, Stratton had no way of getting down from his perch until a seaman from the repair ship USS Vestal, moored alongside the battleship, tossed a heaving line to his position. Stratton was one of six men who used that lifeline to pull his way to safety, losing a little more scalded flesh from his hands with each grip of that suspended rope. He would never again have a visible fingerprint pattern on any of his ten fingers. The identity of the man who had tossed that lifesaving heaving line remained a mystery to him. His parents and three siblings were initially told that he had perished in the attack on Pearl Harbor, only to learn later that he had survived. He spent the next ten months in the hospital, receiving skin graft after skin graft and relying on heat lamps to keep warm because he couldn’t apply any blankets to his scarring skin.

“Donald Stratton was a gallant man,” U.S. senator Cory Gardner said at his memorial service. “A life well lived, a man well loved, and a service never forgotten.”

Stratton was given a medical discharge because of the severe burns he suffered on the Arizona, but he decided to reenlist in the Navy, spending the rest of the war aboard the destroyer USS Stack (DD-406)

“I didn’t get a chance to fight back too much,” he said of December 7th. “I loved the Navy, so I went back in.”

After his second discharge from the Navy in December, 1946, Stratton pursued a career in deap sea diving. He once went 1,200 feet in a two-man submarine, and spent time as a bargemaster, and diver tender. Like so many of his generation, he always viewed the “heroes” of World War II as the the 406,000 Americans who never returned home. He routinely deflected any praise directed his way for the events of December 7th, 1941, or his reenlistment.

“Everybody had to be someplace,” Stratton told us more than once about his position on the battleship. “And I was there.”

He also realized that if that sailor aboard the Vestal hadn’t been there, Don and his descendants would not be alive. He wondered who it could have been, and what became of him. Was he decorated for his heroic act that saved six men from the burning battleship? At a USS Arizona reunion in 2001, he learned the man’s name was Joe George. He had passed away, but Don and his family still wanted to see his courage and compassion recognized. Thanks to the efforts of Senator Cory Gardner (R-Colorado), Joe George was posthumously honored on December 7th, 2017 with the Bronze Star, complete with a V device for valor. The decoration was delivered at the USS Arizona Memorial.