Published on October 25th, 2016 in the Miami New Times:

Julius Woods still remembers the Japanese fighter pilot who insulted him.

It was 1943, the height of WWII, and Woods and his fellow sailors on the USS Van Valkenburgh had just shot down several Japanese fighter planes over the South Pacific. Some of the enemy pilots survived and were floating in the shark-infested water, but they refused to grab the lifebuoys that the Americans threw to them. They preferred to drown or, worse, face the sharks.

But five airmen did come aboard. “I was standing on deck when they walked by,” Woods recalls. “One of them gave me a dirty look and called me the n-word.”

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