His buddies called him The Preacher. Little did they know this man of the cloth could shoot.

Willis Walker was a divinity student at Northwest Nazarene University in Nampa, Idaho, when the Army drafted him in 1943.

Walker, now 92, was part of the 81st Infantry, which was sent to the Pacific Theater as part of the Palau Islands campaign to neutralize Japanese forces before the invasion of the Philippines.

On the island of Peleliu, Walker drove a Jeep with an anti-tank gun and kept it supplied with ammunition. The 81st -- nicknamed the Wildcats -- was called in to mop up the Japanese stragglers after the Marines secured the island in a bloody battle.

Walker recalls an eventful first night. Their mission was to surround and pummel the caves around a ring of mountains where the Japanese were hiding. Walker's regiment put two soldiers on guard as night fell while the rest went back behind the lines to camp. "We want to coax them out with a banzai attack," he recalled.

Suddenly, a guard threw a flare, yelling that the Japanese were coming. "The Japanese were about 50 yards away, and when they saw the flare, they dropped to the ground. The flare died out, and five of them got to their feet and waded out through the swamp. We fired, but we didn't get any of them."

But Walker got a second chance. Somebody threw another flare and he saw two Japanese in the swamp. With his M1, the first semi-automatic rifle generally issued to the infantry, Walker shot them both dead.

"The funny part was, the sergeant, when the next morning he found out I was the one who did it, he grabbed my arm and said, 'The Preacher! The Preacher! The Preacher was the first one to get one.'

"I don't know if they were worried I wouldn't pull the trigger or what," Walker recalls now, laughing.

Any qualms? "I didn't mind it a bit. That's what we were there for."

The next morning, he pulled a samurai sword off one of his victims and later sold it for $25. He sent the money to his wife, who was slowly losing her eyesight to a tumor back in Yuba City, Calif.

"That," he said, "was a pretty good find."

* Leah Beth Ward can be reached at 577-7626 or lward@yakimaherald.com.