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Shortly before Christmas, I was at
the VA hospital in Leavenworth, Kansas, getting a prescription filled. As I sat in the waiting area, a gentleman
wearing a KOREAN WAR VET ball cap with Purple Heart, Combat Infantryman, and
24th Infantry Division pins displayed walked in with his cane. He complimented me on the lug soles of my
boots (“Those ought to keep your feet out of the snow and ice”) and sat down
next to me. The half-assed historian
that I am, I am always interested in hearing the stories, so I asked him about
his army service. He did not hesitate. He allowed as how he was the youngest of 7
Missouri brothers, all but 1 of whom served in the military. The other had a badly broken leg that was
improperly set, leaving him with a limp and a medical deferment. Their father had been drafted in 1917. During basic training, his instructor asked
the company who among them could read and write. He and a handful of others raised their hands.
As a result, his father survived the
Great War as a mail clerk, delivering bundles of letters in his sector of the
western front on a Harley-Davidson, instead of getting shelled in the trenches.
My new friend told me of one older
brother who was an Army tanker in Europe during WWII. He had a sweetheart back in Missouri whom he
planned to marry after the war. In 1944,
his tank was hit. He got out alive, but not
unscathed. He wrote to his girlfriend
from the hospital, "You need to find someone who can do you some good. My privates are all gone." He remained on active duty, and was killed in
action later that year. Another veteran
brother of his drank himself to death, dying in a VA hospital in the 1960s. The
last conversation he had with that brother, the brother told him "come to
the hospital and have a drink with me. I
think they serve milk."
This gentleman proudly spoke of his
own time in uniform. At induction, he
answered “no” when asked if he had graduated from high school. The response was simple and automatic: Infantry. He expressed a great dislike for armor. He rambled some (much less than I will should
I make it to age 88), but I gathered that he was in an anti-tank unit. He said he once got a clear shot at a North
Korean (Russian) T-34 tank with a "three-and-a-half inch rocket." He watched the round go downrange and hit its
target. Then only smoke. Afterwards he
went to check it out, and looked inside the turret. He declared that I didn’t want to know what
he saw. When I didn’t bite, he
volunteered that the crew was "just hamburger." He never peered inside a destroyed tank again.
He demonstrated how he had washed
his hands in the brackish water of the Yalu River. He recounted with particular satisfaction that
after the Inchon landing, the North Koreans were in retreat and he felt
duty-bound to shoot every one of them he could get in his sights. He raised an imaginary M-1 rifle to his
shoulder as he said it, as if to show me how it’s done. His war ended when a mortar round struck near
him as his unit was on the march. It
killed the man in front of him, and the one behind him. His wallet slowed the fragment that entered
his hip.
After recovering, he married, raised
a family, and drove a delivery truck in Kansas City for 38 years. Just when my number came up to go the pharmacy
window, his eyes lit up as his wife approached and took a seat beside him. She smiled as we exchanged season’s
greetings, and I gave them both a salute – with my heart, if not with my
hand. As I stepped away, it was almost
as though I could hear an aging Private Ryan ask of his wife at the cemetery in
France: “Tell me I’ve led a good
life. Tell me I’m a good man.”
The greatest generation. Don't miss a chance to hear their stories.
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