The Marines fighting at Tarawa in the Pacific after Pearl Harbor, WWII. Check the numbers out this guy talks about at the end of his interview. I pulled the video from the National Archives in Maryland. The Marines had to walk across the coral for about 500 meters, waist deep, to get there. Below is a pic of the beach during the fight, and a wounded Marine being pulled back out across the coral to safety in a Zodiac by his brothers. Click on "Tarawa" below to see the short video. I cut it a few years ago.


 

Tarawa

An old USMC sniper story I cut...I was so green. No pun intended. Just a weapons test before patrol, Ghazni, Afghanistan. This may be the only selfy I've ever posted. Click on "USMC Sniper" below the pic to see the story...really short video. 

USMC Sniper

Another story about another hero. Click on "Texas Recon" below. This was a tough story to produce. Our equipment always had limitations, and we had deadlines, but the subject matter was tough.

Texas Recon

Killed in Action

Click here for the video. I plan on posting other content, but I wanted to get the heaviest stuff out of the way first. These men are legends...you'll see that word again.

A Bit about Me

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John D. Smith

            

            As story-tellers themselves, my parents begat another. They both died young in separate incidents. I am 36 and have outlived them.  Mortality is indiscriminate, hence my choice to become a writer/filmmaker, as film is the most powerful of story-telling mediums.  People will remember me as they remember their first firecracker. A tiny powerful blast they shouldn’t recall, but they do.

            It took roughly eight minutes to prepare the safety equipment that would save a laborer from being crushed by a train car while it was hoisted from track to track in  the rail yard. But on April 26,1982, in Knoxville, TN,  the boss-man at Norfolk Southern Railway figured those aforementioned eight minutes couldn’t be spared. The lifting cables broke that day, and a train car fell. It crushed one basic laborer like an ant. His name was James David Smith.

            Like most folks from the hills and hollers of East Tennesse, David had been a musician and a storyteller. Pickin’ the guitar and tellin’ a story were like biscuits and gravy. You just couldn’t have one without the other. He went to Heaven when I was seven years old. He was my dad.

            As for my mother, she could play the piano by ear and wield her vagina like a baseball bat. She beat any man she wanted into submission with it. She left my dad when I was two years old because she found a rich man who was twenty-two years older than she was, and for that I’ll not laud her a bit. But I will spare her name the shame of articulating the horrors her children suffered at the hands of that rich old sot.  She left him. She was an opportunistic feeder.

            It was after midnight on a cool night in April 1989,  mom was in the passenger seat, and her drunken confidant, Mary, was driving. My sister and I were asleep in the backseats of our big fancy GMC conversion van, as we had been while the ladies popped a cork up front. This thing had a VCR in it. The muppets were on and I could hear them and the rhythm of the road as we slipped through the night. It was bliss. 

            I remember thinking my mom was the richest woman in the world after that divorce. Occasionally, she would flash a stripper-knot of cash the size of a softball. She wasn’t even a “dancer,” (but her daughter became one.)

            When I saw all that folding money, I’d just stare at it and mouth-breathe. I guess that old drunk gave her a lot of stuff when he didn’t want to see us anymore. This is how my mind’s eye made sense of it all when I was a kid.  Sorry about the cliché, but hindsight is 20/20. I digress. 

            Mary took a sharp corner in our van going way to fast that night. It rolled off the road, like an elephant tumbling down a hill. It came to rest on the driver’s side in a hay field that smelled quite fresh. The cops on location guessed we rolled about six times. I remember their voices.

            My sister and I survived it. My mother was ejected, and the van rolled over her. I clawed my way out of the wreckage and found her on her back pressed into the earth like a child’s hand pressed into Plaster of Paris. Her eyes had exploded and left deep vacuous sockets. I guess her soul went with them. Her maiden name was Lola Hanzle Lamb, and all the others in between don’t matter I don’t reckon.

            My sister was 15, and I was 11.  A lot of money was involved, so she and I were both quickly scooped up by extended cousins and thrust into separate hostile living situations.  Each of our new families were wealthy, and their love of money raped us of our the rest of our younger years.  If love was involved our separate adoptions, Jesus will have to show it to me when I get There. This scope of avarice is beyond my ability to articulate. We were like a couple of guaranteed mortgage payments. Until I had my druthers, I rarely saw my sister again.

            In the interest of brevity, the story of my childhood is all you get. There is so much to be said about the glory and failure of the time between, I can’t give you more than just a few words about them. If you all will have me, I’ll tell you the rest when I get there.

            High School, College, Terrence Malick, L.A., USMC, combat, husband, father, blinding light and abysmal darkness.

           

            There could have been no great happiness or success for me without my absurdly shattered childhood. I would not rewrite the story any other way, as the truth will have its day regardless.

            To my great delight, I have been diagnosed with “Borderline Personality Disorder” according to the docs, which really means that I was short-changed on parental nurture and developed my own way to live, and lived I have. I lived inside of movies, books…stories. They became my reality as I had to isolate as a child. Those silly grown-ups thought I had it bad because my family-life with my drunken mother and stepfather was perversely abnormal, but in reality, I had it my way. With an insatiable thirst, I endlessly poured every character I met into myself like water.

            I was everyone and everything forever. There was no end, and I lived absent of inhibition. I was a hero who laughed in the face of annihilation and snatched injustice by the throat.  I gallivanted with chaste young women who lasciviously threw themselves at me only to be humbled by my own focus and resolve to protect the weak even if it meant stifling my carnal appetites to preserve my integrity….I was a prepubescent megalomaniac who helplessly drowned in their adulation. My story never wanted to end, nigh would I let it.

            If my youth had ran a different course, all may have been lost. These were the years where my intrinsic abilities to fabricate and tell stories, i.e. lie like the devil, surfaced. It was clear, and I exploited it.

            I was different than other children, but adults and children alike gravitated toward me when I told stories. They couldn’t shoot holes in them, even though I was blazing from the hip, improvisation, muscle-memory, etc…Thus I defined my life and became a student of all types of behavior and simply picked who I wanted to be and when, this is my nature and my story. I embrace both without shame and continue to share with whomever cares to lend an ear. I’ll sure as hell fill it.

I've been to heaven and hell...from "A-list" movie stars in hot tubs up in Hollywood Hills to trailers stacked deep in the hills of the Appalachians and all there in between...now it's time for the world to know. This is for my girls, Suz and Lola, and all the Smith's to come. 

             

All sorts of images and short stories to follow...parental discretion is advised.