Kamikaze Nightmare/Ron Burt

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Description BOOK REVIEW BY: Tin Can Sailors - The National Association of Destroyer Veterans Reviewer: Bernie Ditter Overall Rating: Four Stars: Highly recommended. An excelllent book. Ron Burt writes a compelling story about his older brother's heroism and injuries received at the hands of Kamikaze direct hits on two ships, about his brother's recovery from those injuries and about his own efforts to gather the information necessary to support the process to have his brother awarded the Navy Cross and Silver Star. His brother, Pete Burt, was on the USS OMMANEY BAY (CVE-79) when it was sunk by a Kamikaze attack. While he was in the water following the order to abandon ship he gathered ten non-swimmers and kept them together until rescued. The officer on the whaleboat told Pete that he planned to recommend him for the medals. Following his rescue he was transferred to the USS COLUMBIA (CL-56) where two days later it too was struck by a Kamikaze attack resulting in the injuries sustained by Pete Burt. He was to survive fifty surgeries and twenty-two and one half months in hospitals and nearly a lifetime of post traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD). During much of this time his brother Ron, a four year Navy veteran of the Korean Conflict and a tin can sailor (USS SHELTON (DD-790), spent years of research and writing his account of his efforts to locate veterans who could corroborate Pete's heroism. He contacted the Navy, veteran's organizations, his congressman, placed ads in veterans magazines and contacted numerous veterans by phone, mail and in person. He went to the reunion of the survivors of the OMMANY attack in 1990 and spoke to the nearly 120 veterans and their families who were there. The result is a book that is unique in that it puts a face to the Kamikaze pilots who committed these atrocities, provides vivid first person accounts of the experience (as painful as they are) and gives us a hero that we can all identify with, one who was there and who lived through