Willis Johnson: Combat Veteran, Fortune 500 Company Founder, Patriot, Purple Heart Recipient

Well, my dad, he went to the fifth grade because it was hard back there back in the early years back in the 20s and 30s. School was hard back then. I think it was pretty hard and he had to drop out of school to help to support his mom and dad. Then he got married and then my dad was really good at starting businesses because my mom could read to him because he couldn't read but he knew how to start them and usually he could run it by his help and as the kids got older we all worked in the company with him and when the company got too big he did it over and over and over. When the company got too big that him and us kids couldn't run it he put it on the auction block and he auctioned everything off. So we might have been in doing some underground work for piping and he decided he's going to do it. He put on the auction block and within a matter of weeks we was in the lumber business and a matter of weeks was milk and cows and another time. So he just changed jobs every two years but they always worked for yourself and us kids grew up working with dad which was better than going to college because we learned all kinds of stuff.

Well, what happens is I think it was embedded in all of them, my sisters and brothers, that we never give up on something. And to work for yourself. Most of my sisters and brothers work for themselves. They had small jobs in school, but right after that, they went and started working for themselves. So, it kind of was embedded in us to work for yourself. We didn't know no better. And it just gave us hard work ethics because we always had to get up early and go to school. If we wasn't, we was working late. But to us as kids, it wasn't a punishment or nothing. We just really enjoyed working around wherever he was doing cleaning houses or when he was building houses or cleaning around the job sites or whatever. And the girls didn't really go out on the jobs. They did. My middle sisters went out and helped us clean houses after he got them built to get all the stuckle clean windows and stuff before he sold them. So, some of my sisters did that. The other sisters didn't. They all got married young when they were 17 and got out and did their own thing. But anyway we all was in and my mom was a really smart lady. She had really good common sense and she would get the newspapers back before the internet and stuff. She'd get the newspaper and read through the for sale ads and dad would hear and said, 'Oh, I can do something with that.' And one time he woke up and he bought a big wrecking yard, old Red's wrecking yard up in Northern California. And there's probably a couple thousand cars there and the highway was going through. And me and him went up there and I was only like 14. And we went up and we crawled through the trees and marked all the cars. It was complete cars and not complete cars. And we had to put a seal bid on them. And we did. And that taught me a lot about how he wanted to do it. Well, when we went in to turn the bids in for the cars for the state of California, the other guys came in with business suits on and they're all dressed nice. And we come in grimy and dirty because I was climbing on all the cars and putting X's on them. And you were working and so it was my dad and they everybody wrote a seal bid and put it in a hat in the middle of the room and they opened up the bids and my dad was the high bidder because we only had 90 days to smash all the cars and haul them off to the smelter because the city the state wanted to put a highway in. So anyway, that taught me a lot about tenacity to what you take on a job, do it if it takes you 24 hours a day or all the time there is. Just don't give up on it. Once you get that in your head, go for the gusto.

He won the bid. And actually it was a good bid because before we left the room, a guy from Harris Club Car Collection come over and wanted to buy 20 something of his cars. I forgot 10 or 20 of them for five grand and dad bought the whole thing for 15,000. Wow. And so that was a lot of money back then. You could buy a brand new house for $12,000. So $15,000 was a lot of money. But the guy from Harris Club, he only wanted a few for his collection. So he gave him five grand. Then another guy come up and said he would give him $20,000 for the rest of it. And no, 15. And dad said, 'No.' So we left to eat. And dad said, I said, 'Why didn't you take it, Dad? We could have made a quick $10,000.' And he goes, and that was a lot of money. And he said, 'Nah, you know what? He'll come back to me tomorrow.' And the guy did come back and said, 'I'll give you 15 for it or another 10 over it.' So dad made like $15,000 really quick and then we packed up and went away. And the guy took it over. So it's like we went and counted everything. So we knew what we was bidding. The other guys were buying it by a hunch and figured nobody was going to outbid him on it. And the guy come in with overalls on and a son that was filthy dirty. Outbid him. So that and I'm in the auction business today. So that's what I do because every time dad got done with a business, he put it on the auction block.

He knew what scrap iron was, what aluminum was, the copper was, all the precious metals in a car. And he knew where he could divide it all up and move that stuff around. And these other guys are just buying a bunch of scrap iron. He said, 'Okay, back then scrap iron was $18 or $20 a ton.' Well, he looked at the $18 a ton, but he looked at all the aluminum radiators and copper radiators and starters and alternators that could be sold for cores. So he already knew that he could make more money on these vehicles. But that was when he was in the lumber business, he would buy bulk lumber and sell it off. He put it out on his farm and start selling lumber off because he buy truckloads of lumber. And then we was in the construction business to tear down old buildings and he figured, okay, if I tear them all down, I save these old doors and windows, I can sell them off. So dad always had a different way of looking. He was basically in the auction business because within about a year and a half two years it all went on the auction block and he started over and that's exactly what you've done and that's all I do is auction.

More out of junk. That's basically the business I'm in. I'm in the scrap iron business, the junk business, recycling business of used business. I don't sell nothing new. I'm just not in the new business. There's different profits margins in that because in the new stuff, you could buy it from anybody and you just have a markup. On scrap, you don't know. You're taking your chances, but you got to know what you're doing. Because scrap iron is the only thing that's pretty constant and it's only constant for six or seven months. After that, aluminum goes up, copper goes up, catalytic converters goes up, and scrap iron goes up by tonnage.

Yeah. I didn't go through the hard everybody's got a testimony when they come to Christ. I think I was born a Christian. My mom and dad was Christians and we went to Sunday school every Sunday. We didn't know any difference. We was all a Christian family and we went to Sunday school and Sunday night church then Wednesday night church and then we'd go on revival on Saturdays so we there was a lot of Christian faith in our family.

My Sunday school teacher said something, I had no doubt in what he said. Everything anything that was in the Bible that he read to us, I was a firm believer. When he was swallowed by the whale, I figured I don't think people can live in a whale, but the Bible says he can live in a whale, he can live in a whale. It was true to me. I didn't have no doubts in it.

Well, I'll go a little bit in the business here. I bought a company out every six weeks for 20 years. I had a team behind me doing it. And every deal I made, I prayed over it. When I'd go in and make the deal with the people, verbal deal or paper deal, I would go home, I'd go back to the hotel that night and I'd pray about it. And the next day, if I went in there and they changed the deal, I'd walk out. I just say, 'I'm done. I don't want to do it.' We had an agreement yesterday and I walked out on a lot of deals. And they say, 'Well, we don't have to do that.' I said, 'It doesn't matter.' When you pray to God for something, you don't say if something changes and you don't like it because you want to do it. If you pray for an answer for something, you take the answer when it comes. Don't ignore it because it's just not a good thing. I've just never been that way.

Well, I'm a funny prayer. I pray different than everybody else. I don't repeat myself to God. He's the smartest thing in the world ever. So, I repeat myself one time. I don't ask and ask. God, is this deal fair for me? Good for my family, good for my company. I just need guidance. Give me some kind of an answer. Amen. My prayers are short and fast and done. I just don't repeat myself and ask and ask and ask. I got daughters that I love definitely, but they'll ask for the same thing five times on and on. Well, God created everything. So why do you got to repeat it to him? He knows it when you think about it, let alone say it. My prayers are always short fast. Now, I have longer prayers when people are sick. I do a lot of begging then.

I don't know that I did. Like I said, I was born with it. So even as a kid you grow up with faith and you find your friends that's the same way. I guess when I did finally really really I knew I was saved. Listen I'm a unique person. I got saved every Sunday. Every Sunday. So that was the only thing you had to repeat yourself on. Every Sunday the pastor say somebody want to come up and be saved? So I'd go up and be saved. My mom says son you don't got to get saved every Sunday. Well, he asked me and I thought I need to go forward. So, I did. So, it was just his message got me. But when I got to Vietnam, it was a deal. We was out in the bush a lot and we had our chaplain always out there. Now, the chaplain, he didn't care if you was Catholic, Protestant, whatever you was. You all went out there and sit on your helmet and he talked to you. And that really brought a lot of light to me then because we're sitting here with all different faiths. Sitting on a helmet with a gun by him and the chaplain's telling us about the Lord. I'm going Jesus Christ come from all because I was always went to a Baptist. I was raised in a Pentecostal church. All of us kids was we're all Baptist now, but it's okay. My mom was Pentecostal. My dad I'm a Pentecostal. Southern Baptist, I think. So anyway, over there it was different because I was mixed in with every faith there was that wanted to hear about the Lord. And it really and these guys were dying. And they was getting shot and wounded every day. We was in the infantry. We was first to 16th Rangers. We was in the bad stuff. And we was in the calvary basically. We sat on the base with 15 choppers and when stuff hit the fan, all 15 choppers, five went out and we landed in hot landing zones all the time. So these guys that was with us was always worried about getting wounded or shot or hurt and there were a lot of prayers went on during that time and the chaplain became a major deal to us when you're out in the bush because we was out in the bush most of the time.

Well, when I got it, I didn't know. I was working at a chicken ranch, shoveling chicken manure and picking eggs and stuff. And I just wanted to date and have cars. And I got a letter. I moved out. Like you wanted to date girls and have cars. I want to date girls and have cars. That's how I love cars. And my mom said, 'You have a letter here.' And I said, 'Okay.' So I stopped in and got it and it said, 'Uncle Sam.' And I read it. Says, 'Mom, this letter says, who's Uncle Sam? We don't have no Uncle Sam. They want me to report to Oakland, California.' Wow. And she said, 'Well, that's the president, son.' I had no idea who Uncle Sam was. And then she said, 'Well, you've been drafted. You got to go to Fort or California or into Oakland to get shipped out. Where are you going shipped out?' So that's when I found out that you have no control over your life because you get off a bus and they shave your head and strip down naked and make you cough and give you some uniforms and send you out to boot camp and you got a DI there that scares the heck out of you but you grow up.

Basic training wasn't hard for me because of my dad. It goes back to my dad when we went through and we had to go through when you're first kid and you get a duffel bag. You can pick out your shoes and your boots and they got you fill a duffel. I weighed 135, 140 lbs. They gave me a duffel bag weighed as much as I did. And we had to walk up the hill there in Fort California to Tigerland and of course I'm sweating and beating and of course you got a DI hollering at you and screaming at you. And then we found out there if you didn't do exactly what he said, you'd be cleaning the floors and cleaning the latrines and sweeping half the night. And I found out if you do what he says, then he'll let you be a squad leader. And then you don't have to do as much. So I did everything to make him happy and I got to be a squad leader.

Make your bed. Clean around in there. There can't even be a string left on your bed. Get up. Be out front on Reveille. When Reveille went off in the morning, don't let him wake you out of bed. Be up, be dressed. When the reveille happened, you was out there first. You was out there standing in the line ready to do anything. Was there something for being volunteered to do? Volunteered for it. And usually the DI would pick you out, say, 'Okay, you're a leader.' And give you four or five guys to be over. And that way you got out of all the heavy work. You didn't have to do KP. You didn't have to go pick up trash. You got to be a leader, a boss.

I don't think they touched. They could beat you to death with their voice, right? And a normal person can do five or 10 push-ups. They said give me 50. I've never done 50 in a month and I got to do 50. But at least he was gracious. He give me 50 and he turn his head then you would lie and you go seven, eight, nine, ten then you do it. But he knew he knew you couldn't do it because we just couldn't do it. But they're tough. You might have to go through the monkey bars three times before you get to the mess hall. It was training you making a team. And you don't know that till you're in there for about three or four weeks and then he drilled into you that you're a team. Everybody's a team. You work together. Which was probably a really good training for me. And then from there I took tests to say what your MOS was going to be. I must have failed because I was infantry. So then I got sent to Fort Polk, Louisiana. And when all my guys went to Vietnam, they held me back for a couple weeks to show me how to be an FDC, a fire directional center for the mortars. Now what's a fire directional center? Well, when the FO calls in your coordinates and I was really good with math and maps, when you go through training, they teach you how to read maps and you got to go through the swamps and everything so I could read it. So, they held back the people that could do that. So when the FO calls in your coordinates and everything, you set out an azimuth and you know when to do it. Then you call into the guns and the guns would set up and then you was talking to him and the FO would say fire one round for adjustment, two rounds for adjustment and then he'd give you real coordinates and 10 rounds for effect. So I did that for probably eight months, nine months. Then our FO got killed and so they said you know maps you can go out in front of the company and you can be an FO. So you and your RTO is out in front of everybody. So it's pretty scary when you're all by yourself. But when there's ambushes you're they usually let you go through the ambush. We went through the ambush twice. Our orders was if the company gets hit you and the RTO just keep going as far as you can because if you come back you're going to get killed. Just keep going as far as you can and out into the jungle and go through the jungle and the helicopter will pick you up down the road somewhere. But don't go back because they already got a horseshoe set up. You ain't going to get back in. They let you go in spring the trap. So, I only got caught out twice.

Well, they triggered an ambush and started shooting and me and my RTO, we had to keep just going through the jungle till we could get way away from the fighting until they could pick us up.

We had radios. And you call them where you are, they come get you. And soon as we knew they were close, we'd throw smoke. We'd have green, yellow, purple smoke, whatever.

Well, they didn't really send nobody after you. They was after the whole company or the battalion or whatever they was after. And they were dug in. They wasn't going to go chase a lone rabbit. They just let you go.

We pretty much got out of sight, out of mind, until things calmed down and we heard choppers coming in to take out the wounded. We knew the fighting was over and we still didn't come back in because we was cross lines and we could get shot by friendly fire. So we just stayed out till the choppers had come and get us.

First time I think it was we was flying into some rice patties and you can't land on the top of the rice patties because they'll shoot you. The chopper lands in just about 2 foot above the rice patties and you jump out and of course you sink halfway to your waist in rice patties and then you crawl up to the side there and then that's when bullets was flying all over. We had to crawl in the rice patties till we got to the river banks and you could hear bullets going over there. Of course our people jets were coming in and we could see napalm coming down and jets coming in and the helicopter shooting. So then you realize, okay, this is real and guys were getting shot and hurt. And of course, when they got shot, your whole deal is to go to somebody that's hurt. If they're screaming or they say they're hurt, you want to get to them. And that's how I got I didn't get my Purple Heart with that way, but I got banged up pretty bad because there was we had some guys hit out. We just landed in choppers and one of the guys got hit and we had bandoliers around our deals with magazines in them and of course our helmets wasn't buckled in and you just jumped on soon as you jump off the chopper you threw the helmet on and when a guy got shot one of the medic says I need to go out and get him. I said I'll go out and guard you. So I ran out in the opening with it and when we got to the medic did it, we had to go back and I got to running and my bandolier got loose and hit my knee and fell and when it did my helmet went down and my head hit the helmet knocked me out which could have saved my life because it was in the middle of a firefight and it knocked me out. But when I woke up I was squeaking wet and of course that little cut here wasn't a big cut maybe an inch and a half that all that blood turned into sweat. It look like I was bleeding everywhere. So then, you know, I realized, okay, I didn't die, but I thought I was dead. Then the same thing happened when I got the Purple Heart. We dug in deep that night. And we when you dig in, everybody digs a foxhole with a shoot hole in the right hand side and the left hand side. And we got in, they couldn't bring no metal in, so we had to cut down trees. We cut down like 5 inch trees and put sandbags on it. Me and Lamb was laying on the top because it was really hot. And we heard thump thump thump thump that we knew them were mortars coming in. So we jumped in a foxhole and a couple first couple rounds hit the top of our foxhole would have buried me and him. And I said, 'Lamb, you okay?' And he says, 'Yeah.' And I said, 'Can you see?' And he says, 'I can see, but I can't move. I'm buried.' And I said, 'I can see out mine, too, but I can't move either.' Because it collapsed on us. And we figured, okay, if they come, we can't even throw grenades because we couldn't get to them. We just had our own guns. But they never came across. But at that time, I had shrapnel all over my arm and back, and we was sweating again. So when they got us out of there, of course, I was blood everywhere, and I thought, I don't know where I'm hurt. I didn't hurt. But I had blood everywhere.

No. Because you was kind of shook up about everything and it was like a whole bunch of little BBs because it's pieces of scrap metal.

It's gone now, but it took years to come out. But they don't dig it out. If it's just under the skin a little bit, they said it'll come out over time. But I got sewed up in the back as a big piece there came in. But they sent us in and in the big red one you had to be wounded really bad or at least three times before you went home. So went back out in the field and that was only once. And it was we was in a pretty bad outfit. I'd say 80% of the guys in our outfit had purple hearts and probably 20% of them were killed during that time that year I was there.

Lamb didn't make it. He went out on an ambush and the ambush got killed trying to come back in. He was only 22 years old and he was a high school coach. He just got out of school to be a coach and he just didn't make it.

I was back I went back over to help the FDC and he was my RTO. So he went out to be an RTO with another lieutenant. And then they got caught in a fire.

That night when we heard radios going on and everything, we heard that they got overrun. So I knew Lamb was out there. Because we was in a company makes a circle and then you send out LPs about an LP goes out maybe 100 feet and that's one person. And then ambushes go out, six or seven guys go out. They might go out two football fields away. And that's six or seven guys. So there's ambushes, then you got LPs, and then you got the fox holes goes around and all the mortar guys are in the middle and a captain. So it's every night. Every night you had to dig in. Only time we ever stayed very long, more than four or five days, it was we was securing a made-up air base where they could land some aircraft. We might stay there for a week, week and a half and after that we was out on the well, it was like the calvary. We was somewhere every night somewhere else.

Oh, we had it. We had to carry a lot of them. People watch cowboy shows and they take a dead person and throw it over their back. Well, that's not true. When you're working with a dead person, it takes two, three guys to pick up a dead person. They're like a noodle and they're real heavy. And so you're always having to once it's wounded, if their muscles work, then you can carry them. But if their muscles ain't working, you ain't carrying them. You can't carry a dead person. It's too hard. So we'd have to put them on the helicopter. So we was around it quite a bit. It was a changing deal in my life. When I come back home, I was grown up. I was a grown man. I wasn't a kid anymore.

What changed me was as time went on life become more precious to me. I would never do anything that I thought I could get hurt at because right after I got out back we me and my wife got married and we started having kids and as I built my first company I realized then okay I had a platoon I had people work for me in the military I'd take care of them well I treated my company the same way these people come to work for me they got to have homes they want their kids to go to school so I need to take care of them I went to work to make sure they had jobs and to keep them and use a lot of paint to keep things clean. Line everything up like the military does and use a chain of command on everything.

67. What was the country like? Had the anti-war things be? They didn't like us. Especially in California. I came back to California. There was I just kind of come back and put my civilian clothes on and stayed away from all that. I just went and did my own thing because you could see it on the news and there was always protesting. And I understand back then I was young. The president said you got to go fight a war. But as I look back on it, the Vietnam War was uncalled for. But you know what? When you're an American, you do what your president says. That's right. And that's what you do. You fight for your country.

Yeah. It was a graduation for a friend of mine and they started talking it and I just said, 'Joe, I really like him. I really appreciate him, but I'm not going to sit here and listen to this. I just don't hang around people like that. Soon as something like that comes up, I'm not going to fight with them and try to change them. I just said, 'Hey, we're out. We go. We just leave. Because we got our own family, our own life.' To me, it's what's best for first of all, God's first your family, then your country. It's not my company because God gave me that company. I went to the 12th grade and he gave me a $40 billion company. I mean, how do you do that? But I prayed over everything. God gave me the wisdom to make it happen and he made me to make the right decisions and the right decision for the right people. So I don't argue with nothing of that nature. I just when something is bothering me in politics or whatever, I just avoid it. I don't try to change people. I let the news reporters try to change people, but I'm not going to. I got a short life here. Take care of your family. Take care of your friends. Take care of everybody you can take care of and your foundation. I got we got a good foundation and we help a lot of Christian things and I don't give money to nothing unless it's based around Christianity. You know, I say that but kids with cancer I do. They're all Christians. All them kids are going to go to heaven anyway. So I overlap that. But everything else if we use our foundation and we got a pretty big foundation and it's just from day one my mom and dad always gave their 10%. I know people says 10%, but mom always you give your 10% and you can give tithes over that. You don't have to just give 10%. And so from day one we've always done that. Me and my wife from day one we did it. We've never stop when I all the money I've always made I put it back in the company as I pull the money out of the company then we sit down and we move the money to the foundation immediately and that way it's like okay we put it in there and then let it grow and I believe in tithing. I believe all the Christian Christianity has to be like you need to send people out across America across the world to teach Christ and so mission fields are really important but to me the biggest mission field is America because if we lose America we've lost the world. I still believe in mission fields.

I think if I and I do with my grandkids, pick good friends, stay within the word of what God wants you to understand, and don't take no gray areas. I never took gray areas in taxes. I don't take gray areas in nothing. What the law is the law and I believe the law the way it's supposed to be. And the law of the Bible is the law of the Bible. You need to follow that. And it doesn't matter if you like it or don't. That's what you need to do. And you'll be blessed. Look, we got a big family. My mom, we had eight of us kids. We all got big families. And my wife's come from a good-sized family. She's got all good family. And we found out that they're all Christian-based. And God's blessed us. We don't have a lot of death or bad diseases in our family, which is better than making money. You got good health in your family. And I just say, how are we blessed? We're blessed with good friends. We're blessed with health. We're blessed with good knowledge how to run a company. And God's always blessed us. I don't wake up think he's not going to bless me. I just don't have that doubt. Questioning if he's going to bless you or guide you or give you wisdom. He gives me wisdom. You don't question that? No. I wake up at 2 o'clock in the morning. He got my brain working. I'll grab I used to be a yellow pad. I'd go downstairs and write and now I've got my phone. I go down and make notes and then I go back to bed at four o'clock. But he brings answers to me in the middle of the night. Why? I don't know. Just happens. It's a unique deal. And all the companies that I do business with know where we stand. If you go to the Arab Emirates, which we had operations there, and you go into our buildings, there's Christmas trees there. We have Christmas trees everywhere. And if they believe in it, they believe in it. If they don't, our company does. All the people. We start all of our company meetings off with prayers and thanking the Lord for how he's blessed his company. And we got like 15,000 employees. And they all know we're a Christian ran company. We don't tell them they got to be Christians. We don't force nothing down their throat, but they know where we be and my CEO, my chairman of the board now, is. And most of upper management, not all of them, we trying to witness to them, but they don't have to be a Christian to work for us. They'll just learn by being around us. Sometimes when you're younger, you do a lot of witnessing and you think you're going to rush to get people to be saved. As you get older, people pay attention to your life and your lifestyle and your decisions and almost your authority. Just by seeing how you take care of yourself and you don't try to change anything. Just let's just follow the rules. Just do what you know when you're talking to somebody you're talking to okay when I'm talking to you I'm talking to you like okay you could be the Lord talking to me so I better be answering right so that's just the way we are whole family's that way.