On Tuesday, a movie star and a war hero met on a Bienville Square bench.
After filming a scene for the WWII disaster movie “USS Indianapolis:Men of Courage,” Nicolas Cage sat down to chat with one of the actual men of courage: Navy veteran and Alabama native Richard Stephens, 88.
Stephens is a survivor of the 1945 sinking of the USS Indianapolis, the cruiser that delivered the atomic bomb to the South Pacific island of Tinian where it was retrieved by the plane that dropped it on Hiroshima.
After the ship was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine, Stephens, who was 19 at the time, spent five days fighting for his life in the South Pacific.
He witnessed many of his fellow servicemen die from shark attacks, exposure, saltwater poisoning and dehydration before he and the remaining few were spotted by a plane and rescued.