William Z. Duncan
1920 - 2008

William Z. Duncan, a retired McKinley Elementary School principal and one of the few "Merrill's Marauders" to survive the China-India-Burma Theater during World War II, died Wednesday. He was 88.
A service is set for 10 a.m. Saturday at Garrett Family Funeral Home Chapel in Checotah. Duncan was born Aug. 20, 1920, in a tent near Wetumka, where his "wildcatter" parents, Ada (Graves) and William Z. Duncan, drilled for oil. He didn't live in a house until he was 6 years old, and he was proud of that fact. "If you guys hadn't lived in a tent the first six years of your life, you haven't experienced anything," he used to tell his four boys, said son Jim Duncan. On June 27, 1940, he married Maria Bell, and they were together for 65 years until her death in 2005. Duncan began teaching near Tahlequah in 1941, before finishing a bachelor's degree at Northeastern State University in 1946. He received a master's degree in education from the University of Oklahoma in 1951.
During World War II, Duncan was one of only 200 out of the original 3,000 men who returned alive from a dangerous mission to Burma. He served as one of Merrill's Marauders, considered the first Army Rangers unit, which went into Japanese-occupied Burma to shut down Japanese operations there. "We had to take them there (in Burma)," Duncan told the Tulsa World last year, "because the Japanese would have taken India." After the campaign in the China-India-Burma Theater, the reconnaissance officer was awarded an Asiatic Pacific campaign ribbon with two battle stars, a Purple Heart, the Bronze Star and a Presidential Distinguished Unit Citation.
Later, the Marauders were immortalized in movies and history books. After this dangerous mission, which often left him starving and cut off from writing home to family, he returned to the United States to recover from several tropical diseases. Duncan was an educator for 44 years and retired from Tulsa Public Schools in 1986 as principal of McKinley Elementary School. He is survived by survived by three sons, William Z. Duncan, Jimmy W. Duncan and Bob J. Duncan; one sister, Bernice Carpenter; 11 grandchildren; and numerous great-grandchildren.