“If there is an attack on the United States or its possessions, and they needed 80-year-old men, I’d go.”

So reads the opening page of “The Lord is Our Shepherd” by Steve and Melissa Brawner, a book about Cletis Overton’s remarkable life.

Overton was 90 years old in 2010, when my brother and I interviewed him in his home for a pictorial history book we were preparing on Malvern. He died in 2016. But the story of his life, both in his telling and in the Brawners’ book , is one of the most remarkable ever lived by an Arkansan. Video footage of Overton telling his remarkable tale is part of an oral history project maintained online by the Library of Congress.

Overton was born in 1920 to Rufus and Virgie Overton, in a log cabin near the hamlet of Willow in the woods of Hot Spring County

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