The hospital's waiting room was, for the most part, quiet. A few people were talking at not much more than a whisper. The volume of the television was muted.

Patients' loved ones waited, reading the array of magazines lying about the room. As I reached for a magazine, a group of teenagers walked in and went to the water fountain.

They were talking loudly and using language that was not suitable for a sailor convention, much less a hospital waiting room. There were four guys and three girls. The apparent leader of the group had large piercings through his ears and a bar through his nose, and he towered over the others in the group. He began making vulgar comments to the staff and even made a sexual gesture toward a female staff member, who turned red with embarrassment and anger. As all of this was going on, I saw the receptionist behind the desk pick up the phone.

Don Pickens

A few moments and a lot of vulgar remarks later, an elderly man wearing a security guard uniform walked into the room. By this time, the group had sat down in the chairs and was having a party of insults. One of the females looked over at the security guard and said, “Uh-oh, gramps is here to try to kick us out.”

The security guard told them they needed to leave. The leader of the group stepped toward the security guard and said, “What if we’re not ready to leave, rent-a-cop?” I felt my heart begin to beat faster as all of this was unfolding in front of me.

The security guard didn’t back down. He just looked him straight in the eyes. I saw the teenager's shoulders drop, and then in what appeared to be an act to save face, he said, “Come on, guys, let's go before this old-timer has a heart attack.”

The group walked out of the hospital doors. I watched the elderly security guard crack a smile and thought he didn’t even seem to be slightly scared, even though he was outnumbered and in the midst of a conflict. I wondered what his story was.

A couple of days later, I walked into a diner and in the corner booth was that same security guard. His name was Don Pickens. He invited me to join him by extending his arm toward the other side of the booth. I asked him if he had just gotten off work, and he replied, “Yeah, but it's not really work. I just do it to have something to do." His real job at the Alcatraz prison had ended many years before, when he retired.

He noticed my interest and began telling his story. When he was a child, he and his family moved to Arizona from Oklahoma. He said it was during the Great Depression, and his father was looking for work, like many other Americans were during that time. They arrived in Arizona and settled in a small town called Solomon, right outside of Safford. When the war broke out, he enlisted into the Army and was sent to the Pacific to fight the Japanese.

Pickens shipped out of San Francisco and sailed by Alcatraz Island. “I remember thinking what a godawful place that would be,” he said.

While he was in basic training, he was told how horrible and ugly the jungles were. He said when he and his unit were sailing into the islands in the South Pacific, he thought, “Those liars.” From the ship it looked like paradise. The trees were green, with sandy beaches. When they broke the tree line, they sank almost to their knees in mud. He said it was a dark, nasty mud that had a foul odor when it was disturbed.

At night they slept in banana boats. I asked him what a banana boat was, and he laughed and said, “Well, the ground was so muddy that you couldn’t sleep on it, you see.

“We would take the bark off of the trees and lay down and that is what we slept on; we called them banana boats.”

Pickens went on talking about the war, where he was awarded the Bronze Star during one of the campaigns. He told me how he and three other guys saw a squad of enemy soldiers passing by, and they ran down a ravine, headed them off, engaged the entire squad and came out victorious.

He told how at the end of the war, he and another soldier were in their tent. He had been through four campaigns and was getting ready to go his fifth. He said, “I was writing the letter home.”

“The letter?” I asked.

Pickens replied, “Yes, the letter to my parents and younger brother, Pinky. I felt that I was not coming back from this one. It was my time.” I asked him if he was scared, and he replied, “Yes I was, but things were different then. We were there to do a job, and you didn’t stop till it was done.”

The other soldier's name was John, and he, too, was writing the letter. Everyone else was at the entertainment tent, watching a picture show, when they all started yelling and laughing.

"I looked over at John and said, sounds like we missed a hell of a good show.” John didn’t even look away from his letter. He said, "Yeah, it sure does," and we went back to writing our letters.

Moments later another soldier ran into their tent and asked them if they had heard the war was over; Japan had surrendered.

As the day turned into evening I sat there, hanging on every word and asking him questions. Pickens was larger than life as he told his story. At one point I saw the focus in his eyes go elsewhere, and I could see he was reliving the war in his mind. At times his friendly, light-blue eyes turned to ice, and I could feel the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Was this the look the teenager at the hospital saw when he decided he should leave?

When Pickens returned from the war, he was looking for a job when someone told him that the prisons were hiring. He applied and was hired, but the only openings were on Alcatraz Island. He accepted the position, and on his first day he was riding the boat to the island.

Shortly after he started an inmate wrote “There, but for the grace of God, go I” across a wall. He put a lot of thought into that saying and said he used that theory in dealing with the inmates.

Pickens said he always had to remember that although Alcatraz was one of the most dangerous prisons in the United States, the inmates were still human. He also had to remember where he was. At night, it could be scary because he could hear inmates sharpening shanks on the cement and wondered if they were thinking of him as they did it.

He talked about the Bird Man of Alcatraz and how some inmates escaped and the prison was shut down. After Alcatraz was shut down, he transferred to the federal prison in Safford and finished out his career.

As he left the diner, I thought about the remarkable life this man had lived and wished those teenagers had known this man's story. I would like to think they would have shown a lot more respect for a hidden hero.