By MELANIE POOLE / Special to the Reporter

The Veteran of the Week is sponsored by the National Veterans Shrine and Register of Honor at the American Village — honoring America’s veterans and telling the stories of their service and sacrifice for the cause of liberty.

“The American Village is pleased to join the Shelby County Reporter in recognizing Petty Officer First Class Lomax Bryant Williams as Veteran of the Week,” American Village founder and CEO Tom Walker said. “He is representative of the hundreds of thousands of Alabamians who have risked it all for the sake of our country and its freedom. To all veterans we owe a debt we can never fully repay.”

Visit the website, veteransregisterofhonor.com, today and add your loved ones to the Register of Honor. Help us honor, recognize, respect and remember our country’s veterans.

Here are highlights about this week’s Veteran of the Week: Petty Officer First Class Lomax Bryant Williams was born in Greenville, AL in 1923, but called Auburn his home. He was sworn into the Navy in Birmingham in 1942, and trained in Great Lakes, MI Co. 951; Bedford, PA Co. 7E; V-12 at Duke University; and advanced base school in Noroton Heights, CT Co. C3-204. In World War II he served on the Tarazed, Roper DD147 Atlantic oil convoy escort; and the Lew Wallace, LCI 777 to Samar, Philippines. After WWII he served on the Epping Forest LSD4; the Chimariko ATAF 151; the USS Fall River; Eldorado; and Estes AGC 12. Petty Officer Williams was called up from the Naval Reserve to go to Korea from June 1951 to September 1952, where he served aboard the Damato DDE 871 in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean Sea. He died in 2010 and is buried in Auburn Memorial Cemetery.

In His Own Words: “So it was that this old sailor saw little of the action, death, and glory that fell to many Naval personnel; only a small portion was mine. Outside those submarine attacks, bombing, and strafing by enemy planes . . . I was blessed by not seeing many of my comrades shot up. It seemed that we were on the fringes of the main actions or arrived too late to participate.”

Melanie Poole is Communications Officer for the American Village and can be reached at MPoole@americanvillage.org.