Like many World War II veterans, Jerry Sigler will be the first to tell you he doesn't have much of a story to tell.

As a teenager, Jerry Sigler served as a gunner's mate aboard the USS Lamar (APA-47) in the Pacific.

Sure he was in the thick of things at Bataan, Corregidor and Okinawa. And it's true that he has five battle ribbons to show for his service.

But there was really nothing exciting about what he did during the war, according to Sigler.

"I was like everybody else, like a million or two other guys — we did what we had to do," the 81-year-old Lake Havasu City resident said. "It's not very exciting when you have to go out and shoot at people."

Sigler was a 17-year-old from Home Garden, Calif., when he enlisted in the Navy in 1944. He served as a gunner's mate aboard the USS Lamar (APA-47), an attack transport vessel that launched amphibious assaults at places like Leyte and Luzon in the Philippines.

"That's where we first ran into the kamikaze planes, and they were pretty thick," Sigler said.

His ship was never hit by one of the suicide flyers — the sailors always managed to destroy them with anti-aircraft guns before that happened — but they still endured nervous moments while the debris from the planes rained down into the water around them, he said.

Miraculously, Sigler was never injured, almost as if he had a guardian angel. One time he was called away from his usual post on the flying bridge, where he was responsible for six gun positions, minutes before it was hit by enemy fire. The sailor who had taken his place on the bridge was injured, but not killed.

Another close call happened during the Battle of Mindoro, in the northern Philippines, where the ship was used as a decoy to draw a Japanese ship out into the open so it could be fired upon.

"We were put on the expendable list," Sigler said. "Nobody knew it … They did tell us, if you have anything of value, send it home, because they thought we'd get sunk."

Lucky for Sigler and his shipmates, the Japanese ship fired over their heads, and they were able to steam out to safety.

In spite of being in frequent peril, Sigler doesn't remember being particularly scared.

"When you're that young, the service tells you to jump and you jump. You don't question why," he said. "I think I'd be a nervous wreck to go through some of those things now."

Sigler was discharge from the Navy at the end of the war in May 1946. Back home, he said, "I bummed around and didn't do anything because there were no jobs to be had."

Eventually he started a career with U.S. Steel and was called back as a reservist during the Korean War to teach for a year and a half at the Navy's fleet gunnery and torpedo school in San Diego.

Later he became active in city government in his home of Buena Park, Calif., serving as a city councilman and mayor before retiring and moving full-time to Lake Havasu City in 2002.

Sigler said the only troublesome hold-over from his was war experience was a lingering animosity toward Japanese men of his own generation.

"It's something you can't get out of your system," he said. "But you can't really blame them. The young Japanese were out there shooting at people and they didn't know what was going on, and we didn't know what was going on. None of us really liked any of it."

Sigler said he's lived a full and busy life outside his military service. Still, he said, that era has never been duplicated.

"World War II was a war - that was a war," he said. "These things that came after were just skirmishes."

You may contact the reporter at dparker@havasunews.com