Eighty-five-year-old Hewitt Theriot remembers clearly Sept. 15, 1944. That day, Theriot was part of a small fleet of ships fighting for the Pacific island of Pelelieu.
“We lost over 2,000 men that day,” said Theriot, who graduated from the University in 1941. “I can see their bodies right now.”
Theriot’s grandson, Jason, recently wrote a book chronicling his grandfather’s experiences during World War II, along with those of other men and women from Iberia parish.
“To Honor Our Veterans: An Oral History of World War II Veterans From the Bayou Country” started as a small effort. Jason, a 1998 LSU graduate, intended to write the stories of 10 men.
He told his grandfather his idea. Hewitt Theriot loved it and began shouting out names. Soon the project grew to include 60 men and women.
Jason, who lives in Houston, drove to New Iberia, La., each weekend to conduct interviews with Hewitt by his side.
“We went to their homes, had coffee with their wives and recorded their fascinating stories,” Jason said.
Hewitt and his wife, Evelyn, had been telling their children and grandchildren stories from the war for years, so when Jason was writing his book, they were ready for his questions.
“Our children asked us a lot of questions about the war and life at home,” said Evelyn, a 1939 LSU graduate. “We would give them the story, and they would go back to their classrooms and fascinate the whole class with stories about battles and gas and sugar rationing on the homefront.”     
The Theriots began each interview by asking where the men and women were when they heard the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.
“The stories poured out,” Hewitt said.
While most of the men and women were excited about giving interviews, some subjects had to be coaxed into telling their stories.
Hewitt remembers interviewing one New Iberia man and seeing a shadow in the hall the whole time they were talking. When Jason and Hewitt got up to leave, the man’s daughter emerged from the hall and hugged her father. She had never heard his story before.
By the time the Theriots finished interviews six months later, Jason had enough material to write three books. Jason published the first, concentrating on the war in the Pacific, in December of last year.
The second volume, focusing on the Mediterranean war and the homefront will come out in November, and the publishing date of the third book, the European theatre, will coincide with the 60th anniversary of the Normandy invasion in June 2004.
Jason Theriot, who has been fascinated by WWII history since he was a child, wanted to preserve the stories of the men and women from his hometown.
“The men and women who I’ve interviewed say the same thing,” he said. “They say ‘I didn’t do much,’ but on the contrary they did a lot, a lot more than we will never know. They saved the world from tyranny.”