Veterans Day is next week, and on the bank of the Brazos in East Waco, a nine-foot bronze sailor stands at the bow of a ship, facing the river he grew up beside.
His name was Doris Miller. This is his memorial, and his story is worth the few minutes it takes to read.
A sailor from near Waco
Doris Miller was born near Waco in October 1919, the third of four sons of sharecroppers. He was given a girl's name because his parents were expecting a girl.
In 1939 he enlisted in the only branch of the Navy that would take him — the segregated messman branch — and was assigned to the battleship USS West Virginia as a mess attendant. On the morning of December 7, 1941, at Pearl Harbor, he was collecting the ship's laundry.
He went toward the guns
When the attack began, the magazine he was supposed to report to had already been destroyed. So he went up instead. He helped carry his mortally wounded captain off the bridge. Then he manned a .50-caliber anti-aircraft gun he had never been trained to fire — Black sailors were not permitted weapons training — and he fired it until the ammunition ran out and he was ordered off the ship.
On May 27, 1942, aboard the USS Enterprise, Admiral Chester Nimitz pinned the Navy Cross on him. Doris Miller was the first African American to receive it.
You will read elsewhere that he shot down two planes, or four, or six. The Handbook of Texas calls those accounts almost certainly apocryphal, and the citation cast into the paving at the memorial claims no number at all. Miller himself said he thought he might have hit one. He did not need the number. He is remembered for going toward the guns.
The Liscome Bay
He was promoted to cook third class and sent to the escort carrier USS Liscome Bay. On November 24, 1943, a Japanese torpedo found her near Makin in the Gilbert Islands, and she went down with 644 men aboard. Doris Miller was among them. He was twenty-four.
Many Sailors Make A Ship
Waco remembers him at Bledsoe-Miller Park, 300 N. MLK Jr. Boulevard. Cultural Arts of Waco led the memorial. Sculptor Eddie Dixon of Lubbock made the bronze, working with designer Stan Carroll. The statue was unveiled on December 7, 2017; the full memorial was dedicated on December 7, 2018; and bronze reliefs were added in 2021.
The memorial's two long, slanted walls are the hull of a ship — an abstraction of the West Virginia herself. The steel sculpture folded along them is titled Many Sailors Make A Ship, and its plaque says what it is for: the 2,403 service members killed at Pearl Harbor. Miller stands where the bow would be.
Go and stand there
The Doris Miller Memorial is The Sailor at the Bow on our Waco's Walls trail, in East Waco by the river. Bring the time to read the citation cast into the paving; it takes a minute, and it's the right minute to spend before Veterans Day. Creative Waco's Public Art Map has its own page on the memorial.
East Waco's walls carry a great deal of this town's memory. If you walk on from the memorial, walk slowly — the Waco's Walls trail will show you the way.