20 years old to 22 years old

Lowell was nineteen and working in a bank when Pearl Harbor was bombed.  He knew it would mean he needed to go to war.  At first the draft age was twenty, so he waited to enlist.  He went home to help Carvel, his brother, on the ranch and farms the summer of 1942.  Carvel had been working very hard to keep the family's holdings in check, help was hard to find, but he had helped make it so his younger brothers, Lowell and Frank, could try their luck in the city.

Lowell worked hard that summer, but he also kept his eye on what he considered "the prettiest girl in Panguitch".  Wars come and wars go, and love ever interests the young.  So, even though they knew he would have to go soon, he and Alice got married and had their first son, Richard.  He missed getting in the Air Force, which is where he thought he wanted to serve, so it was the Navy.  After testing to find his aptitudes, he was assigned the engineering part of the Navy.  This was a lucky break, because he learned much about how engines work, which has stood him well all the rest of his life.

He was sent to Farrago Idaho, Great Lakes Training Station; Richmond, Virginia, and then Long Beach, California.  Then he was assigned to a ship named the USS Colussa APA74 which was an advanced attack troop carrier.  It contained a number of small landing crafts and its job was to get as close to the Pacific Islands as it could, lower the landing crafts and troops so they could storm the island and take them from the Japanese.  It was a dangerous assignment.  Lowell was a motor machinists on one of the small landing boats.  Those on such crafts before them and doing the same thing had a life expectancy of one-half of one trip, in other words, they had a 50% chance af being killed.  This was before the dropping of the atomic bombs. which when it happened, eliminated the necessity of that line of fighting by the men of Lowell's ship.  The war soon ended and the USS Colussa was sent back home.  It did, however dock in  the South of Japan and one other place for a few weeks.  Lowell went ashore, but never spent much time there.

When asked if he ever got seasick, he said no he didn't, and he was at sea with hardly a break for a year.  He said before they started for Japan they picked up 900 men in San Francisco most had been partying and when the sea became rough, it was a terrible mess with so many sick.  He also said  that the biggest influence he had for good was his family, his faithful wife, Alice and by then two little boys. He was twenty-two when he got out of the service.

Lowell Henrie is my grandfather. He has four sons and no daughters. Robert Val Henrie is my dad, Lowell's and Alice's third son.