“Larry Colton’s Ordinary Joes are just like us, yet they endure what we could never imagine, and are ennobled in ways they themselves might not claim. Intimate and epic, unblinking and even-handed, CColton’s engrossing story strips sentimentality and cliché from our notion of hero.”
— Ron Shelton award-winning screenwriter and director of Bull Durham White Men Can’t Jump and Tin Cup on No Ordinary Joes
No Ordinary Joes
by Larry Colton
On April 23, 1943, the seventy-man crew of the USS Grenadier scrambled to save their submarine,and themselves,after a Japanese aerial torpedo sent it crashing to the ocean floor. Miraculously, the men were able to bring the sub back to the surface, only to be captured by the Japanese.
No Ordinary Joes tells the harrowing story of four of the Grenadier’s crew: Bob Palmer of Medford, Oregon