Jesse Magee lives alone. He still drives and takes care of himself and gets around quite well for a man who’s turning 95 today.
He’s one of the last living Buffalo Soliders. Those soldiers, who were given the nickname by Native Americans, were the African-Americans who served in the cavalry and fought in the Indian wars.
The first Buffalo Soldiers were in a unit formed on Sept. 21, 1866, at Fort Leavenworth, Kan.
Magee entered the Army in November 1942, shipped off to basic training at Fort Breckinridge, Ky., and furthered his training at Fort Huachuca, Ariz.
His nephew, James Manning, said he’s proud to be related to one of the few Buffalo Soliders still living.
“The training was rough,” Magee recalled.
He was transferred out of his original unit and served in the Aleutian Islands on Alaska’s coast.
The islands played an important role in World War II because the remote chain was one of the only places where the Japanese attempted to seize United States soil, taking island natives hostage in the process.
Magee, an infantryman, never saw actual combat, though.
“I was the fighting man, the rifleman. I carried a rifle and I even carried a bazooka. I carried a Browning automatic, too,” he said, reffering to the weapon more commonly known as the BAR.
“Was it a rifle?” Manning asked.
“Yeah, it was a rifle,” Magee said.
“Was it automatic and semi-automatic?” Manning asked.
“It was both,” Magee said. “It had a thing where you could make it automatic or semi-automatic.
“That thing would let off — brrrrrt,” Magee said, replicating the sound of automatic gunfire.
Magee said his original battalion went to Germany, but he didn’t.
“Most of them were killed in combat,” he said.
He said some of the soliders were riding in a plane mistaken for enemy aircraft and were shot down.
Magee transferred to a different unit, which stationed him in Alaska instead of Germany.
While in Alaska, Magee spent time on the Bering Sea. He remembers hitting a bad storm while aboard a ship.
“That boat would dive in the water and then come back up. When it came back up, it would throw water onto the ship. I was on guard,” he said.
“I had nowhere to go. It was a little cover that shielded me, but I had to stay there,” Magee said.
He also remembers going to a place he called “Shimmy Island” in the Aleutians.
“It was a three by five — three miles by five miles island,” he said.
“Why do you call it Shimmy Island?” Manning asked.
“Because when a shell hit it, it would shimmy,” Magee said laughing.
After the war, when segregation was still the law of the land, Magee’s service to his country meant little to those who regarded him as a second-class citizen.
He remembers being in a drugstore when three white men bumped into him intentionally.
“They wanted me to say something, but I just didn’t them pay any attention,” he said.
He also lost a job for reasons that would be considered glaringly unfair today.
“I was working with John. He was a white guy and he was younger than me,” he said. “He misplaced an item and they asked me, ‘Who did it?’ and I said, ‘John,’ and they say, ‘Who?’ And I said ‘John.’ You know, three days later I didn’t have a job because I didn’t call him Mr. John. See, in those days we had to call the white folks ‘Mr. and Mrs.’ and I wasn’t calling anyone younger than me no Mister.”
Manning said Magee’s daughter Bernadine Sln, who lives in New Orleans, is taking her dad out for his birthday.
Magee has two other children, David Conerly of Ruth and Caroline Sue Richardson, who lives in California.
Magee is the last surviving child of nine kids.
He outlived his wife Vundella, who he married in 1948 while he was still in the Army, and his two sons, Eddie Bernault and Jesse Magee Jr.
His still lives near family in Ruth.
When asked if he had any advice on how to live a long life, Magee said just live right.
“Do right by people,” he said.
“Do unto others and you would have to unto you, right, uncle?” Manning asked.
“Right,” Magee said.
