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As part of the research for Korea: The Unfinished War, American RadioWorks conducted almost 100 interviews with veterans and historians. We've made those interviews available here. Rough transcripts accompany each interview - but these are incomplete, and often paraphrase the speaker. The authoritative source should be seen as the audio recording, not the transcription. You can listen to and/or read the interviews -but please DO NOT QUOTE from the transcript.
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Ralph Hockley interviewed by David Cline
Houston, Texas
January 13, 2003
{David Cline:} This is David Cline for American RadioWorks. It’s Monday, January 13th in Houston, Texas. If you could just introduce yourself, the city you live in and your age.
{Ralph Hockley:} I’m Ralph Hockley, Houston Texas, I’m 77.
{DC:} What unit did you serve in the war?
{RH:} I served in Korea with the 37th field service battalion, 2nd division and I went to Korea with the division from Ft. Lewis, Washington and landed in Korea August 4th, 1950.
{DC:} What was your rank?
{RH:} 2nd lieutenant at the time when I went over there which was the category of people who with the privates and the infantry get killed the fastest.
{DC:} If you could, fill me in on the history of your life up to that point.
{RH:} Well, people ask me where I come from and it’s pretty hard to answer. I was born in Germany in 1925 in a Jewish family and my dad had fought in World War I as an infantryman in the Germany army and when Hitler came to power he pretty quickly decided that as a combatant for the German Empire in World War I, he didn’t need to be insulted like the Jewish people were being insulted and he fairly soon decided to leave Germany and we went to France in 1935 and I grew up in France. So basically I always considered myself more as a Frenchman, certainly never a German whom I didn’t like.
The period in France was very difficult for many reasons. When the war started in 1939 initially my father was put in an internment camp in France. I don’t know to protect whom from whom if that was clear but they let him out for awhile until May 20th, 1940 when the Germans launched their attack through Holland and Belgium through France where they captured France in short-order. My dad wound up in a concentration camp in Gurs in the Pyrenees and he was there for about nine months. My mother and sister and I were in Marseilles, we lived in Marseilles, we had live in Marseilles since 1935, I went to school in Marseilles, I felt like another French kid that went to school in Marseilles. Even though Marseille was part of the non-occupied zone of France, there was ample evidence of Nazi forces. You could see the vehicles with the swastika flags on them which wasn’t a very pleasant experience. I had the good luck to get kicked out of school and this is part of my life is that things have happened to me in life where things that other people would say well this is bad happened to me and it turned out to be a very good thing.
It’s the old story where there’s a fork in the road and because I was kicked out of school I was 14, my mother thought I would get in trouble if I had nothing to do and so she got me a job working for the American Quakers as an office boy, a volunteer, which working for the American Quakers, I got to the point where I had total access to the American Consulate as a 14, 15 year old boy which was, if today anybody would listen to it they wouldn’t believe it, but twice a week I would go to the American Consulate with my briefcase and the guard knew me and would let me in and I had all the access to the visas and I would spread out all my papers of people in concentration camps and I would fill out questionnaires as to what the status of their applications were to go to the United States, to get a visa.
The American consul, not the consul in general, but the one in charge of the visas, Hiram Bingham, better known as Harry Bingham, his father was a senator, old Connecticut family and Hiram Bingham worked on his own against the system and personally save a couple thousand people and there are a number of books about him. There is a process going on right now of having a postage stamp in the US being issued to him next year. I was told by the gentleman that I worked for the Quakers that Hiram Bingham wanted to talk to me and so next time I was at the Consul I should see him. So I saw Mr. Bingham and he said based on the recommendations of the Quakers the Consulate was prepared to issue us visas to go to the United States but since my dad was in the concentration camp and the visas were only good for 90 days, he was going to give me a letter addressed to whom it may concern saying that the American Government was ready to issue visas to my family and they let him out.
Then we took all the steps of getting out of France, which was another issue. But we got out of France in this fashion and the ship we got out of France on got captured and it was going to Martinique and it was a Vichy ship and the Dutch working for the British was going to the Caribbean and we wound up in Trinidad and were POW to the British but they were very nice, they fed us and treated us very well and gave us tours of the Port of Spain and then we came to the United States on June 3, 1941.
{DC:} And then you joined the US Army?
{RH:} Well, I was 15 at the time. I first went to Cincinnati, Ohio where my mother’s sister and family lived and they offered to take me in because they knew that things would be difficult for my parents initially. So I spend a year and a half in Cincinnati. I graduated high school in Cincinnati at 16 and even took some courses at the University. Then I went back to New York, in October of ’42.
{DC:} Is that where your parents were?
{RH:} Yeah, I joined my parents and got a job and got involved in all kinds of things. I was very much under the influence of how much I hated Germany. And I wanted to enlist in anything to fight the Germans but it wasn’t that easy because I couldn’t enlist in the American army because I was underage and I was not a citizen. If I was a citizen I could have enlisted maybe in the marines at 17 but not being a citizen in those days you had to be 18. So on my 18th birthday I went to the platform and I said, Hey were do I go? And in six weeks I was called up and went into the Army.
I had basic training in Fort Bragg, NC. I was sent to advance telecommunications school in Fort Seal, Oklahoma and by that time it was August 1944 and then they assigned me to some heavy artillery stuff in Fort Bragg and I didn’t like that very much. Speaking fluent French and German, I thought I could do a better job serving my country in other ways if I were used with the knowledge that I had on the way to Fort Bragg I stopped in Washington, went to the Pentagon and tried to find somebody to talk to. I found a lieutenant general and I said you guys are wasting your money, I want to be in military intelligence. And he said, I’ll fix it. It took a few weeks and suddenly I got highly secret orders and my command got highly secret orders and I was sent to Maryland to the intelligence center near Baltimore. I took a course there and then the war was changing as this was going on.
I graduated at Christmas which was the time of the Battle of the Bulge and up to that time when you finished the course there you either wound up as staff sergeant or second lieutenant so by that time I was still a private so then they didn’t know what to do due to the events of the Battle of the Bulge. Then they re-trained me in, they suddenly discovered that I also knew German. They had concentrated on my French and they had put me in an interrogation course and I went to Europe in 1945. And landed in France about four weeks before the war was over. A colonel picked me up at the Intelligence Center and took me as his interpreter through Belgium to Germany and then to Bremen Germany, northern Germany. And initially I was in intelligence NCO there for a few months and then through my contacts and efforts I went to the counter-intelligence corps. I had to get a waver for that because I was too young. That was always my problem I was too young for everything. But I did get into the counter-intelligence corps which was I guess six months, the last six months of my being over there.
I went back in spring of April 1946 as a Special Agent of the Counter-intelligence corps. I was mostly investigating de-Nazification. Colonels and special aids and suspected Nazi hangouts. And in 1946, I went back to the states, stayed in the reserves because I swore I’d never be a private again—I was a sergeant. And I was still only 20 years old and I wanted to go to college. They offered me a commission before I got back and I said, no, I need to finish my education. So I came back and I went to Syracuse University and I graduated in ’49. While at Syracuse, the same colonel of intelligence who asked me to accept the commission before I left wrote me a letter. He didn’t know where I was but they offered me a commission. But you had to either be a staff sergeant or have a college degree and I was only what we called a buck sergeant and I was getting my college degree but I didn’t have it yet. And a few weeks later he said apply under article so in so and paragraph so in so and I did. And I was interviewed in New York and I was commissioned to second lieutenant military intelligence while at Syracuse University.
And I graduated in ’49 and like so many students I didn’t have 40 cents to my name and I’d gone to the GI Bill of Rights which was very good, which in my opinion changed the country, and after school was over you had to do something and everybody else graduated in ’49 and I wanted to be in government and I started applying for jobs but the competition was enormous because there were several others who had graduated in 1949 and so initially I went to the basic course for officers at Fort Halberd in Baltimore and then I applied for the CIA and they took a year to investigate you so I decided that I would never survive that long so I put in as a lieutenant and go into active duty for a couple years while this other stuff happens. And the only thing you could do was apply for a competitors tour for active army commission.
My last two months at Halberd they accepted me, and they assigned me to the 2nd infantry division in Fort Lewis Washington with a temporary duty at Fort Seal in Oklahoma with a temporary basic officers course. You had to have a competitive tour in the combat arms. So I went to Fort Seal class of 104 artillerymen and me, intelligence guy, and I survived and I graduated and I went to the 2nd infantry division. I got there at the end of March. And I spent April, May, June and part of July there either on maneuvers or training kids.
That’s another story, but my battery out of 104 guys there was one 16 year old which is interesting, the difference of the army now and the army then. You had to teach them everything.
{DC:} What was their average education?
{RH:} Probably elementary school. But most of those kids in 1950 were in the army because they had done some mischief somewhere and some judge said if you didn’t want to go to jail then enlist in the army. What they did probably today would be considered as being choirboys but in those days—they probably got drunk and smashed a few glasses in the bar.
{DC:} What period?
{RH:} This was in Fort Lewis, 2nd Division at the end of March, 1950.
{DC:} Had Fort Lewis been integrated at that point?
{RH:} No, let me just say this, the Korean War started on the 25th of June 1950. I knew from the first day that there was no alternative except for us, the US to do something about it because what I didn’t tell you is that I graduate from Syracuse University with a degree in Soviet Area studies and I had more knowledge about the Soviet Union than anyone else in the 2nd division. And as far as I was concerned, when the attack took place in Korea there was only one thing we could do with North Koreans because if we didn’t, there was just no stopping. The US is famous for changing its mind. So I was in Fort Lewis from then until the 20th of July 1950 which is when my unit, the 37th battalion shipped out of Tacoma for Pusan, Korea where we landed the 4th of August.
{DC:} Was the camp racially integrated?)
{RH:} No, in 1950 the army was not integrated. I can’t tell you whether somewhere there wasn’t an outfit that might have been, but the normal thing was this. We had, for example, in the division we had the 503rd Artillery Battalion which was all black with white officers though I think there were some white officers. There was also the 9th infantry regiment and the 3rd battalion of the 9th infantry regiment was black so the answer is no, the army was not integrated.
{DC:} Despite Truman’s order of 1948?
{RH:} Yeah, Truman’s order had not been followed up. I don’t even know that most generals knew about it. The action to enforce it didn’t happen until the right military officers reached positions of enough importance that they would do something about it. But in Korea the first year almost year and a half the units were not integrated and the integration didn’t take place until October 1951.
{DC:} Why then?
{RH:} There were several factors that played in. Everything is based on who the general officers were, when and were. So you had a guy in Korea who was immensely unpopular who was both the chief of staff for General MacArthur and was also appointed by MacArthur to be the commander general of the 10th corps. Ned Almond. General Almond hated blacks. He commanded a black division in Italy in World War II and the division never amounted to anything and he had the old southern attitude of blacks being lesser human beings. It basically took somebody who had a different opinion to take the bull by the horns and say we’re going to change this. And that didn’t happen until Matt Ridgeway became the commander in chief. Are you familiar with his statement? What he said about blacks? What he wanted to do? He said it was un-Christian and all that. Well, there was also Clay Blair, I have a page in Clay Blair’s book where he talked about the 24th division when they came to Korea. They were black and they had a white commander and they had black officers but this time there were black graduates of the military academy but the guy in charge, if he was white, he looked down on their soldiers. So it took awhile.
To me, in my opinion, it took, I know what Ridgeway says, but the actual thing that happened to change it from one day to the next was that in 1951, General Marshall’s assistant secretary of defense was a little lady about 5 foot tall by the name of Anna Rosenberg who was an advertising executive in New York and I don’t know how General Macarthur knew her but he took her and made her assistant secretary of defense. And Anna Rosenberg came to Korea in 1951 and she got rid of the generals and she talked to the troops and somewhere she became aware of the fact that the army in Korea was not integrated. And after she researched that and asked enough questions she, at the end of her stay she got a hold of the top generals and she gave them two weeks to integrate the army in Korea. From my personal experience that’s what happened.
Whether she met with Ridgeway or whether she told Ridgeway or what she did or who she told, I don’t know. As a lieutenant you’re not very high in the pecking order. But the fact was that at the end of October or beginning of November I got called in, by this time I’d been in Korea for over a year and I was the only guy I know who got seven combat stars but the last two months after being in the 37th battalion, in the middle of October I was transferred into the 87th anti-aircraft battalion, as a platoon commander and while I had this platoon I was called in and they said okay, but tomorrow morning you’re going to receive ten black soldiers. Use them as you see fit. There wasn’t a document that was handed to me that said what the army wants you to do. I had a master sergeant who was 20 years old who lives here in Houston. Bill Hogg, wonderful guy, and what I did is these ten soldiers came in the next day and I said from the start. I have to be very careful, I’m married to a Texan and she sometimes objects to my using the word southern in a derogatory way, but in 1950 it was partially true, but there was such a thing as an attitude from southern sergeants vis a vis if they came from New England or California or the Midwest and all of my sergeants in that 82nd were southerners. Bill Hogg was from Virginia, but he was a different kind. And I told Bill that we would interview these guys one by one and I would make a decision about what I was going to do with them and I decided that it had four quads each plus HQ which made eight so I decided that I would take one of these soldiers and assign them to each squad. So I would have one at each squad plus two at HQ. There was one sergeant there were 2 corporeal and the rest were privates according to class and I assigned the sergeant as an assistant squad leader and I assigned them to different vehicles and that was my integration.
Now you have to understand an anti-aircraft platoon is all over the place. There function is to protect artillery and so they were not together or cohesive. If some artillery commander said I need one of your half-track or 40 track vehicles to protect me on this hill, you’d send them out. So they were not the field artillery where the battery were together. Anti-aircraft weren’t that way. Because the half-track vehicles with their quad 50 machine guns could spit out a lot of fire they were used in many places just to hold off the enemy. So these vehicles were all over the place and you couldn’t just go somewhere and say hey, how are you guys doing? So I sat back and said, well let’s see what happens. Well, nothing happened. Let’s say 4 weeks later all the sergeants—by the way, when I assigned them to these vehicles I told them you’re getting these (black soldiers) as far as I’m concerned they’re American soldiers they’re going to be treated no better or worse than any soldiers that you’ve had and continue to march. So four weeks later they asked to talk to me.
{DC:} Where these black soldiers coming out of another unit or were they all new?
{RH:} They were all from the 9th infantry. They busted up the 3rd battalion of the 9th infantry, the black battalion. In so doing everybody got some of their soldiers. For the black soldiers I guess it was a good deal because in infantry you get shot at all the time and in anti-aircraft you get shot at only some of the time depending on the situation but they were all from the infantry so they didn’t know much about anti-aircraft materials.
{DC:} When you met with them personally were they mentally prepared for integration?
{RH:} You know something? The word integration was never mentioned. The conversation that I had was simply the guy would report to me and I said you’ve been assigned here and as far as I’m concerned he was a soldier being assigned to me. If he had been pink it would have been the same thing. I couldn’t care less—he was a soldier and would be treated as soldier. That’s it. The word integration while I realized what was happening was the consequence of integration, I never had any prejudices in the first place. I never thought that having black units was right but as a lieutenant I couldn’t do anything about it. And I probably should have, if I stopped to talk about it that this wasn’t my opportunity to prove anything. Like I told the sergeants these are American soldiers they will be treated like American soldiers that was the end of it. I got to know everyone of them however much you could get to know somebody in ten minutes but still, that was all.
Four weeks later the sergeants asked to talk to me. You must have been in situations like this before, everybody is, that when somebody asks to talk to you, you don’t know why, but your mind starts saying what problem am I going to confront. Sergeant Hogg and I shared and artic tent, it was 1959 and things were a lot better than in ’50, in ’50 you froze to death, so the sergeants came into my tent where there was a nice stove, it was warm. And I said, okay, you came to see me, who’s your spokesman? A guy by the name of Gainy if I remember. And they said, lieutenant, we have heard that the army or the division is being cut back by ten percent which I knew nothing about, probably a rumor in the first place. But we just wanted to ask you, if you have to make a decision on releasing ten percent of the platoon that you keep the black soldiers to the back of the line. Inside of me, I was laughing. I was pleased. I said, well, okay, well number one, I haven’t heard that the division is being cut back and number two, if it does happen I will make sure to keep in mind what you’ve said, but you owe me something. You’ve got to tell me what makes you say that? And they said, that they wanted me to know that since the black soldiers had been assigned to the platoon, morale problems had absolutely disappeared. And you have to understand that the layout—that this outfit was all over the map, so the tracks and the M16s and M19s were by themselves and these guys—the people of America have got no clue what combat is like. They wave flags and it’s nice, our boys in the service, but combat is seven days a week 24 hours a day. There is never a minute and no reprieve. So these guys on these tracks were together seven days a week, 24 hours a day and they got on each others nerves like anybody else would. And, apparently what happened, is that when the black soldiers came in, individually by squad, which I’m very honest, that was not part of my calculation, but when there was a black soldier that came into each track, this black soldier became the track’s entertainment guy.
Blacks have a much better sense of humor than we do. They are much more outgoing and by being separated from each other they each became much more kidding than some of the white guys. Anyway, the bottom line is that sergeants told me that all morale problems had gone away since the blacks soldiers were on these tracks. I told Bill Hogg I couldn’t be more pleased. We did something right. There is some kind of moral to this story. It is true I have the experience in the US with the 503rd Artillery Battalion which was all black, there were some negative comments expressed because as long as they were all black they had some kind of relationship that we did not always understand and they were not always the best. The guys who were bad had an opportunity to have influence on the guys who were good and it doesn’t take many bad guys to influence. But once the integration took place that went out the window. So I thought that was the only fair thing to do. And I have never had the opinion…a soldier whether black or white is a soldier. He can be a good soldier or a bad soldier, but whether he’s black or white, doesn’t mean he’s good or bad. My experiences have been that it’s the individual who counts, not his background of any type.
{DC:} You mentioned 1950 that your level of equipment was not good. Can you tell me where you were fighting originally in Korea and the equipment that you had?
{RH:} Yeah, the…as far as I’m concerned there are two steps to this. At Fort Lewis, the fort we left before the Korean War started in 1949 before my time, they took most of the division to Hawaii for training once, and between the time of March of ’50 and July of ’50 when we went to Korea, they took us to Yakima, Washington for five weeks of training. They had a firing range up there and they trained the battalion to do firing. So they trained the battalion, I would say that the battalion was reasonably trained in firing its 109mm Hollister’s I knew not of anything negative about that. It’s the general soldiering that I had some questions about.
In 1950 the selective service act didn’t expire but in 1950 when I got to the 2nd infantry division, there were no draftees in the army. The draftees did not come back until after the Korean War started and they needed more troops. The draftees, the last draftees had been discharged in ’49 but there were no draftees, some will tell you differently, but every soldier on my morning reports were RA, regular army. The draftees would have a US in front of their name and the National Guard would have an NG in front of their name. Everybody in the 2nd division in March, April, May, June of 1950 was regular army. The mothers of America in that time frame thought that the military was mistreating their little darlings and there were all kinds of movements afoot on how the army couldn’t do this, that or the other thing which if anything probably condemned the soldiers to the death if nothing else.
I know that at Fort Lewis I would get my battery up at 5 in the morning and I would take about a 2,3,4 mile run. That was not officially permitted. But the training, the basic training of the soldiers, it was miserable. It was so bad that I can only give you one example. Admittedly we got some fillers in when they left the United States, they tried to fill us up to full strength and on the ship going from the US to Korea, we threw cans, empty cans overboard in the Pacific Ocean so that our soldiers could learn how to shoot their weapons by hitting these cans. If they had all been well trained you wouldn’t have had to throw cans overboard for them to learn how to use their weapons. So there was the training. You basically, its obviously any situation, even with the marines with their high fluting training methods, you can’t prepare people or have people totally prepared to be shot at by an enemy. You can set up for the enemy that’s the blue, green, red forces, but if they hit you, they say you’re dead.
One of the biggest differences between being told that you’re dead and being dead. So there is a limit to what you can train people. But you can have them tough. If anything was needed in Korea. it was people not to be so fort. The guys they shipped off to Korea from Japan they were so soft they couldn’t climb the first hill. Korea, you have to understand that Korea from the south to the north is an ever-increasing number of hills. The more north you go the higher it gets. So the biggest challenge in Korea was physical endurance. The guys who were way ahead in Korea, the guys who were at the front firing guns didn’t have to be as tough. The guys like me were forward commanders with the infantry. They climbed every hill that the infantry climbed. So physical preparedness was absolutely vital in Korea and I suspect it was in any war.
You have to be prepared. If you’re not physically prepared you may not survive. Admittedly there’s this other thing to it. Age. All of my GI’s not the sergeants but the GI’s were 20 or younger. The sergeants, there were a few older sergeants in there but the majority were not over thirty but even at thirty climbing hills one after another isn’t that easy, even for me.
{DC:} You were still in your 20’s?
{RH:} I was 24. I was 24 when I went to Korea. I had my 25th birthday south of Seoul after we broke out of the Pusan perimeter. I landed in Pusan 20 July ’50, we went in the Pusan perimeter. All we had left was the Pusan perimeter. The Pusan perimeter this was the coast the Pusan perimeter was that. My first commitment—not saying assignment because in combat its not assignment—was right here.
{DC:} Which is basically the corner of the perimeter.
{RH:} Which meant that we could get shot at from here and from here and from here. If you’re here you can only get shot at, you had a better chance of getting shot at here. They were so much in need of any troops, that they would take you piecemeal which normally is not done. They would take you piecemeal and send you wherever there was a hole. Artillery usually operates by battalion, battalion stays together, there are 3 firing batteries and a HQ battery but there are three firing batteries of 6 one of 5 artillery pieces each. They took my battery C [...] and they split it up and sent it up to, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of John MacAlias, he’d been a commander in the war, he was a young West Pointer. He was a legendary figure who commanded the 27th Regiment Warfront [...] of the 25th Division. And the wolfhounds were holding this area here and Taegu is about here and this thing got to be known as the bowling alley and so our first commitment was in the bowling alley. And our division was supporting MacAlias. We were there supporting the first ten days or something like that.
{DC:} You’re behind the wolfhounds?
{RH:} I’m with the wolfhounds. The first few days we were somewhere waiting for our equipment and we got it and they put us on line. But the first night the […] commander who didn’t like me and who I didn’t like, he was a captain and he sent me back to Taegu to pick up ammunition. I went down to in my jeep. We turned around, it was middle of the night and we turned around and headed back up and got caught in an ambush. They were firing a machine gun at us. And I decided since it was two or three hours before, you couldn’t see anything, because you turn off your lights and you’re driving in the dark and the highway—that’s a nice word—it’s just wide enough for a truck. We were driving and we hit this not a river, but a gully, and we were going through this, when they started firing at us. So I decided that wasn’t very healthy. If they hit the ammo I’d have two blown up trucks. So I decided to turn around, well how do you turn around?
In those days we had trailers, and we never used trailers again because you couldn’t turn around. You had to hand-attach them and while you’re getting shot at that’s not fun. But I didn’t know any of these guys on the trucks, but this kid, 18 years old, Orville Swote, I didn’t know his name at the time, he looked like a tough cookie and I said, can you turn this truck around and he said, oh yes sir. And he, Orville at 18, went in there like he had never in his life done anything else but turn around 2.5 ton trucks with trailer on them while he was getting fired at by a machine gun. Absolutely nothing fazed him and he turned both trucks around and one of out trailers fell down. So we went back to service battery and couple hours later we went back up. We made it. The minute it was daylight you could tell and we made it. I put Swote in for the Silver Star.
After I wrote about him in my book, somebody knew who he was and Swote was a good old boy. A truck driver all his life from El Paso Texas and some other truck driver said, Swote were you in the Korean war? And Orville said yup and he said, well there’s a guy that wrote about you. So his wife who is French, she found me and we established a relationship and on the 25 of January, 2001, at a ceremony, Lieutenant General McPharon presented Swote with a Silver Star. Turned out it was not my Silver Star but he was written up ten days later but I didn’t find that out until I read the citation. The Silver Star had been awarded to him but the soldier gets transferred. He was sent to France and it never caught up with him.
{DC:} So he never knew?
{RH:} He had heard but it never caught up with him. So I had this ceremony for him and it was a beautiful ceremony in San Antonio where he was awarded the Silver Star. And the next night they, there were three of us foreign observers which is total insanity but we didn’t know about combat, it was insanity because I was not with an infantry commander. How could I fire the artillery if nobody tells me to fire the artillery? I can’t fire the artillery by myself. I don’t want to kill any friendly forces.
{DC:} And you had no means of communication?
{RH:} Yeah, but the first half hour I was up on this hill facing northeast and my radio operator I had with me. The foreign observer team has a sergeant, a radio operator and a jeep driver. The jeep driver you normally keep back with the jeep so nobody steals your jeep. The radio operator told me, Lieutenant, my radio isn’t working. We did have a telephone and the telephone went from me to the artillery liaison at the infantry And the artillery liaison at the infantry who is another son of a bitch and when the radio operator said that the radio wasn’t working I said, well then dig yourself a foxhole, we’re in the front lines here. He looked me straight in the eye and he said, “go fuck yourself Lieutenant.” And all of my military training stood there and said, hey a private isn’t supposed to say that to you lieutenant, and this was not the time or place to do anything about it and you know I didn’t tell him to dig me a foxhole. I didn’t understand the logic. Well he wanted out of there probably.
So I sent him back to the [...] So I had my sergeant and me. My sergeant was a former boxer about 30 years old and then I had four infantrymen all 18 years old and we were the front line.
{DC:} What kind of weapons did you have?
{RH:} They had rifles, one of them had a scope on it you could see quite a ways. I had a (?) and a 45. And the sergeant probably had a (?). There was nobody to tell us what to do. All I was doing was being an infantryman and I was in charge so I was in charge of the infantrymen. And it was raining and it was miserable. It was August, not cold, but miserable. And all we had in those days, it was before the good old days, all we had was we had our uniforms and our field jacket. And once your field jacket got wet then it went through all of you and it was not very pleasant. But that’s combat. And then it got to be night and I had these four guys lined up. I did what I thought I should do and they all four went to sleep and in the course of the night I told the sergeant to kick them in the ass and wake them up and this is no picnic there are enemies right under our nose and about four o’clock in the morning, there are a lot of theories about this but it was said that the bugles of the charging enemy scared the hell out of them and God made apple pie. Anybody who is going to tell me they’re going to attack me, that’s wonderful. And so when they blew that bugle I told the sergeant now you kick these guys once more and I’ll personally shoot them if they don’t wake up. And they’d had their nap so they were alright and fine guys, but nobody taught them what combat was like. So it didn’t take very long, about fifteen minutes and we saw the first guy come up and he had a rifle with a bayonet on it that was long.
{DC:} Three feet long?
{RH:} Oh it was longer than that. The rifle with the bayonet was probably 6 feet long, from the old times so there was a lead element coming up towards us and I decided he was mine and I took my carrageen and I tried to shoot him. And my carrageen didn’t work. It was wet. Now the Pentagon will tell you that if you maintain your carrageen well it will always work, and you’ll run into people who say the same thing that I do, but, I had my 45 inside my field jacket in my holster. And I pulled out my 45 and I shot the guy and that was the end of him. At this time my GI’s had got alive, we had this little knoll as protection and we were able to shoot down and they fired at the next elements and I don’t know how many they killed or wounded or whatever but they got the next guys coming up this hill, one of whom with his sniper scope which was easier. The other one used, there was one using field glasses, maybe it was me, and would point out where there was somebody moving and then the guy with the rifle would shoot at it.
Anyway, I don’t know how this worked, but about 20 minutes later a company of the wolfhounds came up behind us and threw us. I don’t remember having communicated with them but they came up through us and went down and started chasing these guys and the six of us were home free. That was just a war story.
You might ask, about the officer who was a son of a bitch, well, I knew this guy from the states and he had always been very fitting under that description. He was a World War II type big something, He was a guy, my two friends, my two forward observers, I don’t you there were three of us there up these hills and two of them were 1950 graduates one of Sanford and one of U of Utah and had gotten regular army commissions and I was on competitive tour federal army commission and on the ship going over this individual the officer had told the three of us, well you know I’m a reserve officer, you know, you guys its your career you’re going for and I’m a reserve officer…That night, well that morning about 3, 4 o’clock all I had was this phone and he was somewhere in the back and we turned on the phone and it rang which I was not pleased about and I spoke into it. I was the senior of the three of us so I felt I needed to speak up and I told him, I said, look, don’t ring this telephone. You’re giving away our position to the enemy. And he said, Hockley, Rayboldt, Hathaway, this is your career, I’m only a reserve officer. This is what you’re supposed to be doing, you’re getting experience. And I said a few unkind words to him and told him to stick it somewhere. And that was the end of that.
So you don’t only have that, you have an enemy in front of you and one behind you and so the next few weeks we kept moving and moving and moving. Every time they needed us somewhere we moved somewhere else. All in the Pusan Perimeter, knockdown perimeter, and our job was to hold the Knockdown. If we hadn’t been able to hold the Knockdown they would have tossed us into the sea of Japan. And I can only tell you this. In the first 28 days I was over there, I lost 35 pounds and I wasn’t fat. I was just a skinny kid. I think I went down too.
{DC:} Okay, so you were saying—
{RH:} We ate army rations, but it was something. They were chemically prepared so they were good for you. How bad they tasted, it didn’t make any difference, but never, in the first 28 days I never laid down to sleep. Now you know, some people slept. I didn’t because I can’t sleep if I think somebody is going to stab me while I sleep. So after that I was probably also, because the battery commander and I disliked each other intensely. So there were a number of reasons why but I know of know reason. Whether he was prejudice. A lot of these guys, some of these World War II officers, I experienced that in the states, but they resented some of these young lieutenants who were college graduates because they were not. So you could dream up a number of reasons and somebody once asked me if it was because I was Jewish but I have never had any evidence that anybody had that against me. I think they didn’t like college grads who knew more and were educated.
{DC:} Did anybody ever question your loyalty to America because you were foreign born?
{RH:} No, in Korea, you wouldn’t. You’re fighting. That question has been asked me differently. The only thing that ever happened and that had nothing to do with loyalty at all, loyalty was never a question, was in one of my efficiency reports in ’51 the battery commander who wrote it put in the sentence, and you usually don’t see your efficiency reports but in the basement of the Pentagon you can look at them, but he wrote in there “his heavy German accent was an asset to the enemy”. Now this guy didn’t know me from Adam. I probably met him three times in my life. Because I was in the infantry and he was in the back. Secondly if you want to be analytical, but the only reason you would say that is that on the radio when I give my firing commands they could identify me from somebody else because I had a different accent, but not the Chinese or North Koreans, perhaps in Europe but not over there.
But that’s the only time I ever had anybody say anything of this type, after that I became the ammunition train commander in service battilery and I did that until November. We broke out on the Pusan Perimeter when MacArthur did the Inchon landing on the 15th of September 1950. 2nd division broke out of the border and started heading north. Basically by the 15th of October things were getting organized. Then very quickly things got much better and basically by the 15 of October things got much better.
{DC:} When did you get new equipment?
{RH:} We didn’t get different clothing that year. Not until ’51. What happened to me is we went north and the end of October we went into North Korea across the 38th parallel and first my battalion when to a place called Haeju which is on the west coast of Korea and we spent about a week there for the first time in a building and we were in reserve. I had different jobs, I gave myself jobs, the other guys partied, but even then I was ostracized because I wasn’t drunk.
{DC:} Did you finally get some sleep?
{RH:} Yeah, once we got out be even before that. After the 15th or probably the 1st of October we were able to sleep. The minute we’re not on the front lines we could sleep we never had a bed, a cot or something. But the minute you’re not in the front lines you can find a cot to catch sleep. But in Haeju, now you have to remember that I got graduated in 1949 only a year before and Haeju was the first place in the history of the US after World War II that we were anywhere that was part of the Soviet Empire. That had been sealed off the 38th parallel had been sealed off. And so we wound up in this school and I found out that they had thousands of books in the library and a lot of them were from the Soviet Union. And so the week or ten days that I was there I got myself three or four of my GI’s and I worked my way through all of the books in the library, some of which were of intelligence interest. Some of which you wouldn’t get anywhere else and before I left Haeju, I packed 8 boxes of books. I had offered them to the battalion intelligence officer but he couldn’t care less and so I packed eight boxes of books and I had somebody take them to Seoul and had them ship them to the head of the Soviet Studies dept at Syracuse, U.
And he had his guys go through them and they sent a few of them to the Pentagon. My reading of Russian was good enough to know what it was all about, but there was one book, the Harbors of Siberia. Well, obviously the Pentagon would be interested in knowing what the Soviets write about the harbors of Siberia. So that’s what I did in Haeju. And I did one other thing. They sent me out in Haeju and this Haeju is here and the North Koreans had expected us to land here.
{DC:} So this is north of the Onjin Peninsula?
{RH:} The Onjin Peninsula before 1950, it was below the 38th parallel and the only way you could get to it was by boat and it was not part of North Korea. I was sent on a trip with my driver to spot ammunition cache that they had in every hill. Every hill had a hole in it where they hid ammunition so I got the job of looking and then getting trucks in there and going and getting the ammo and blowing it up. And in this exercise I went down the Onjin Peninsula to the town in there and I was the first American in a jeep that had gotten into this town of Onjin and the people stared at us and they didn’t know whether we were Martians or what and finally they found one of the Catholic priests and the Catholic priest spoke some English and so I had an international meeting with the Catholic priest and it was very nice and I said, well how’s it going and he said, okay and expressed his religious needs and he said, I have nothing to take care of my flock, I need this and this and this. And I said well write down on this piece of paper what you need and I’ll give it to the Chaplain and see to it that you get this material—so that was my experience in the Onjin Peninsula.
After that, while I was in Haeju, the latter part of Oct. the vision commander told the officers that he had good news and the war would soon be over and we would all be out of Korea by Christmas and somebody said, where to? And he said, I can’t tell you but you’ll like it. And so the conjecture was either Hawaii or the US.
(interview break)
This is historically interesting that he said the war was over just about end of October…
{DC:} This is 1950?
{RH:} Yeah, 1950 and a few days later my guess is it could have been the 30th or the 31st we got orders to go north and they put us on trucks. We went all the way from here through P’Yongyang to a place about thirty miles north of P’Yongyang, a place called Soo Shan (?), and that’s how far we went in that initial exercise.
{DC:} How large a group?
{RH:} Well my battalion, but the whole division was sent up there. In the meantime the Chinese had already infiltrated into North Korea. The first cavalry division was up there, the 7th cavalry division and the 8th cavalry had already got hit by small elements of Chinese, we didn’t know that. But MacArthur met Truman on Wake Island on the 15th of October and told Truman that the Chinese would not intervene. Even though on the 15th of October there had been individual reports of Chinese being spotted.
MacArthur devised this thing in November, one step back, we got to Soon Chan (?) the 3rd or 4th of November or something like that and about the 5th or 6th of November, I got a message from the Red Cross that my dad was dying. So they took me out of there and they flew me back to the United States on the 6th of November. Two of my guys took me by jeep P’Yongyang to the airfield and little did I know but those hills were full of Chinese. Nobody told us that. In small groups, they weren’t massive. And I got to P’Yongyang and I had to wait a day. They were just evacuating the airbase from Yamoo (?) that night and they kept us there a night and put me on the airplane and I was supposed to go to Seoul but a plane had crashed there and they took me to Taegu instead and then they flew me to Japan, Tokyo and the US. So I was out of there the 7th of November.
And on the 25th of November they served all the troops, that’s what they do before the final kill, they served all the troops turkey dinner and MacArthur had already decided that he was going to attack to the Yalu. Nobody’s ever proved or disproved to me that he was going to go beyond the Yalu but at least to the Yalu. And to me that’s totally unpardonable. It was ignoring the fact that there were a bunch of Chinese there. And right after Thanksgiving we were supposed to launch the final attack. Then we could go home. We had now liberated all of Korea. We hadn’t meant to liberate Korea, all we wanted to do was liberate South Korea to the 38th parallel. Nobody is going to argue about a few little blips here or there, but on the whole our mission was to kick the North Koreans out of South Korea. So he never stopped he even flew on in his airplane looking at how things are going when he gave that order to attack on the 26th of November. He was in total disregard that the Chinese were attacking us.
So we started getting hit very badly. Everywhere. The Chinese used the same tactic that the North Koreans had used which is, if this is the front line then the South Korean army was for some reason or another always in the middle and then the Chinese would always hit in the middle. And the marines in the 7th army division were on the east side, 10th corps of the general army, and we were on the west side, 8th army. As a historical fact, the normal organization of the army was that you had an army HQ in Korea that was the 8th division of the US army, the UN command with all the rest of the countries represented and if you had a corps, we had the 9th corps and the first corps, and under the 8th army, but the tenth core over there was not under the 8th army, General Almond reported directly to MacArthur because he didn’t like General Walker who commanded the 8th army
And so this communication this way didn’t work and when the Chinese went through the middle you had two separate commands it was just inexcusable. And the rest is history. They came out, we had to evacuate from the east from the reservoir, the 7th division and the marines and from the west they pulled back the 25th division, the 24th division and 2nd division and they assigned my division the rear-guard, the middle to hold up the Chinese. We held up the Chinese at the cost of 4,500 people from the 2nd division. Either killed, captured, wounded, who knows, POW, missing in action. I missed this by three weeks. Nobody knows why. Same thing happened to me in France. Why? So we got kicked back, US-UN forces, got kicked back below the 38th parallel and considerably Seoul was recaptured by the enemy and they drew a line across Korea where we were going to stand by some freak of life. General Walker who had been the chief of staff of Patton in Europe was commanding general and killed on Christmas Day in a jeep accident and if he hadn’t been killed I don’t know what would have happened. Not that he was incapable but that’s the momentum that was there and General Ridgeway came in and Ridgeway said we’re going to hold. We’re not going to let them push us back down where we started.
I came back in February. That’s weird because the 12-15th of February the Chinese had us pinned down, us meaning my regiment, my artillery battalion, we were the direct support battalion of the 23rd infantry regiment, the 37th field infantry battalion was direct support battalion of the 24th division and the 23rd, with the French battalion, part of the 23rd held off the Chinese in a place called Chipyong-ni in probably one of the most epic battles of the Korean War and managed to turn the tide and I came back 3 or 4 days later. I missed Koonali (?) by three and a half, four days on one end and I missed Chipyong-ni by a few days on the other end. They learned from Koonali (?) because at Chipyong-ni Colonel Paul Freeman who was the commander of the 23rd decided they were going to do a perimeter defense and if the Chinese were going to beat them they’d have to come and get them. They held them until help could come from the outside. After that there were a number of battles.
{DC:} Did you say the French battalion?
{RH:} Yes. French battalion came to Korea in either December or January ‘50/’51 and they were assigned to the 23rd infantry division as was the Dutch battalion. And the Dutch battalion, you know the second infantry division had three infantry regiments—the 9th, the 38th and the 23rd and the Dutch battalion was assigned to the 38th and the French battalion was assigned to the 23rd, as an additional battalion. So we had four additional battalions, usually three. The initial French battalion was commanded by a guy by the name of Ralph Monclar. And Monclar was a three-star general who had himself demoted to lieutenant colonel so that he could serve under Colonel Freeman. Now he was about 60 some odd years old, he’d been wounded 13 times all the way from Norway to who knows where, the guy was fearless and he had an amazing personality.
So the French battalion was a part of the 23rd infantry and they fought very well. At Chipyong-ni they did the main assault and later on in October during Heartbreak Ridge, it’s the French who actually, on the 12th of October 1951, took the last peak of Heartbreak Ridge. So they need not be underestimated. I served with them for a while and I’m very close to them to this day.
{DC:} You must have felt a special affinity to them?
{RH:} Well actually when I came back I’ve told you about the bad officers now I’ll tell you about the good ones. Carl Freeman as the 23rd commander when we went over in Chipyong-ni was a magnificent soldier. My battalion commander was a general by the name of John Hector. And John Hector was a magnificent person. You just had to work your way past the ones who weren’t. When I came back Colonel Hector had me in his tent, I didn’t realize it then because I didn’t know the last detail. I didn’t know what Chipyong-ni had been the week before and he talked to me in his tent for at least two hours, which doesn’t happen too often—he was lieutenant colonel to be with lieutenants. But he had always liked me because Colonel Hector was an intellectual and he liked to be able to talk to somebody about things other than one of five artillery weapons, and he gave me, while I sat there with my mouth closed. He gave me a complete analysis of what went wrong at Koonali (?) and who made what mistakes. And then he said, now I got to talk to you about your new assignment and I said, well sir I would like to be the liaison lieutenant to the battalion. Mind you I was still a 2nd lieutenant. He said, well I gave that job away. But what about battalion motor officer? Battalion motor officer was a captain’s rank and I was a second lieutenant but he was a battalion officer he could do anything he wanted. I said, well I suspect I could change a flat tire but what I know about motors is not to be talked about.
Well he said, you’ll learn and you’ll have me to back you up. Just remember I’m an old supply guy, I know that anything in equipment is written off the books. Remember that you sign your name, my name anywhere and get what you need. And I did, I had great success. I went all over Korea. I got myself a sergeant, I fired the motor sergeant and got myself a new reserve sergeant who had his own motor business back in Minnesota and I made him motor sergeant and I said, sergeant you’re going to run the motors. I’m the motor sergeant but you’re going to run it. You give me a shopping list. My job is going to be to see that you have everything you need to keep the vehicles and the guns going. It worked beautiful. I’d go down to some of these outfits who had absolutely no responsibility towards us and I’d say here’s my shopping list. And they’d say well we can’t service you and I’d say, look, do you want the Chinese army to come down here and run over you because that’s what’s going to happen. I got everything I wanted on the front line there was nothing I didn’t get. So that’s that.
{DC:} And you weren’t on the frontline anymore?
{RH:} No, I wasn’t on the frontline anymore. But I knew that the day that Colonel Hector left my days were numbered because I was the captain slot and there were a lot of guys who wanted that slot because it was safe. It was relatively safe, didn’t mean you couldn’t get killed, but it was relatively safe. If you got killed it was falling into an ambush somewhere but I didn’t feel endangered and Hector promoted me to first lieutenant so I was glad I was out of 2nd lieutenant status.
Then he left. The day after he left the new battalion executive officer called me in and said, well Hockley we have a new job for you and I said, well I expected that major and so they offered me HQ battery motor officer and I said the HQ battery motor officer has worked for me for the last 5 months and I’m not going down, thank you. And I said, if anybody told you that I was afraid of being a forward observer, you are misinformed. Oh, he said, so they assigned me to B Battery. I had been in C Battery when I came over and then its service battery and engineering battery and HQ Motor officer. Now they assigned me to B Battery as an artillery forward observer.
I was B Battery as a forward observer from the end of May to the beginning of September ’51 and that included the periods called Bloody Ridge and Heartbreak Ridge and I remember absolutely nothing about Bloody Ridge except being absolutely miserable. I don’t remember who the infantry, well I was with G Company of the 23rd infantry, but it was pouring the entire time. I had wet everything and couldn’t touch a thing the entire time on Bloody Ridge. It was so overwhelming. In Korea it was either ice cold or so dry that you’d choke from the dust or you’d sink into the mud. There was nothing ever normal so all I can tell you is that Bloody Ridge.
When I got off Bloody Ridge this is what it looked like. I was totally worn. Then they sent me to Japan for R and R. What a difference it made. Five days later, six days later. But then Heartbreak Ridge which I describe Heartbreak Ridge, well I don’t you I didn’t know anything about Bloody Ridge but I know everything about Heartbreak Ridge to the last moment. I spend the first two weeks with the French.
{DC:} What was the date?
{RH:} The 12th of September 1951 until about 26 or 27th of September. We were on one set of hills, we attacked to another set. I thought that the Heartbreak Ridge plan of attack was insane—again I was a lieutenant and you do what you’re told. In retrospect I saw exactly how this was going and I thought it was insane. Heartbreak Ridge went southwest, northeast and the top part of it was here and we attacked from this side and this hill was held by the North Koreans, which meant that when our troops attacked we went this way, they came down on stretcher this way, these guys could shoot at them.
{DC:} They were completely exposed.
{RH:} It was completely insane. Its not until the end of September that somebody had the idea the there was another valley over here, the Mundung-ni Valley, that you needed to go up this way and attack from this side simultaneously as they did here. The minute they did that it took another two weeks, but the battle was won. Unfortunately at the lost of 1500, half of my best friends got killed on Heartbreak Ridge and I knew exactly what was going on because I could hear it on my radio. I knew all the codes and I knew what was going on and so I got relieved the 25th of September.
{DC:} What kind of losses did you suffer on your team?
{RH:} I didn’t suffer any losses. Always went for the premise that 50 percent of what you did was preventative actions like digging good holes so that if they’d have to hit you straight. But the other 50 percent was sheer luck. Some say God. I say fate.
{DC:} But you got your guys out?
{RH:} Yeah, I got out, but we were replaced. We got notification that from over here the French were going to be committed over here to replace…I think it was the second battalion. And I said my sergeant was a 20 year old kid from Pennsylvania who was very devout Catholic, Ken Matting. I told him—I said Ken you’re just as smart as I am. You know exactly where we’re going and what our chances are. They’re not very good and I said, you know I’m going to ask you to ask your God to pedal our bicycle for us because we’re going to need some help. If I were to do it, he’d tell me, Oh, where were you before? Why now? And so we went down the hill to the valley to go over there to go up there and I go a message from HQ that my team was being relieved from their post. And why? We were up there longer than anybody else but I didn’t know why and on the way back we ran into the team that was replacing us. I knew the lieutenant who had two sergeants with him who were ready to go home. We’d lost so many forward observers—we had 18 forward observers or 14, and of the 14, we lost 11. Either killed, wounded, not captured, and I met this lieutenant and he said to me, well, you must have pull with the old man. And I said, what did he mean, when he said old man because in my experience old man meant the commanding officer. And I said I don’t know him from Adam.
Anyway, we went back and they went up and the new colonel said to me, you and your team go back and sleep for a couple days and talk to me. We were back there for a couple days and then I go malaria because the French didn’t believe in malaria pills so it came out and then within 48 hours I got the news that the lieutenant and his two sergeants had been killed. And that was the only time in my entire career, I got the shakes. Not because I was afraid, but because I couldn’t believe it. I said, what is it that gets me out of the way and the guy that takes my place gets killed? How do you rationalize that?
And I went to see the colonel and he wanted to reassign me. I had been over there longer than anybody else and I thought there was something behind this and the liaison officer after the French was a guy who wasn’t as bad as the first guy. He was just a flake. He was a guy that was older also. He was a first lieutenant, he’d been in Japan and they kicked him out of Japan and to Korea for punishment because they caught him shacking up with his commanding officer’s wife. Some of us went to Korea for patriotic reasons; some people went there because they were being punished.
And he decided, he was fairly old, and he decided he needed to get promoted and in the battle of the Chinese defensive, he and his sergeant had gotten lost for a few days and then they were found again and they wrote each other up for Silver Stars and he got the Silver Star and then this guy also—one of his other weaknesses was he loved the bottle. So he showed up when I was in service battle and I thought I’m a real nice guy but I also know how to use means of mass destruction. I got a bottle of whisky and I poured it into him and that wasn’t hard to do all I had to do was put it in front of him and that was that. After he got loaded enough I said hey, I got to ask you a question, what did you tell the old man about the, I needed to know and he said, well you had this special relationship with the French. The French bypassed and they went directly to me and the operations officer, the French operations operator would call me directly. When I asked him, when the line was shot by shells, I asked him to put a new line in and he said I can’t risk the life of my soldiers.
My answer to that was, well what do you think I’m doing here? Anyway, it turned out that he felt threatened by me. He was still a first lieutenant and his last chance of making captain was pretty much there and so he made captain and so I don’t know what he said to the colonel but whatever he said he used some devise to try and get rid of me as a forward observer to the French and he succeeded. I can’t be too mad at him because I probably wouldn’t be sitting here telling you about it if he hadn’t.
The colonel offered me a job as an intelligence officer but you had to sign up and I said colonel I think I stretched my luck to the limit. So he sent me over to the 82nd until my number came up. I was over there two months exactly before I came home. So that’s the story of my comrade.
{DC:} What was your homecoming like?
{RH:} Some questions are hard to answer—you just hit me right between the eyes. My homecoming—the homecoming, the interesting thing about the Korean war, contrary to the Vietnam war is that we went over as individuals and we came home as individuals. I was on a troop ship but I didn’t know any of them. So there were no cities in America to welcome us, but honestly I personally didn’t expect to be welcomed by the country. I had gone and done my job and I didn’t have to have gone overseas for the second time. I volunteered. My heart was with my guys in Korea.
They wanted to sent me to Fort Worth, Texas in the 2nd Armored Division and had visions of getting claustrophobia of being in the tank and stuff like that. I wanted to go back to Korea. That’s me. Its me because of World War II. Because I have a great sense of loyalty to the job and to doing what I needed to do. I was totally convinced. I never had a problem in Korea of believing that our cause was not totally just. I could have stood up there and told the whole general staff why we had to be there. Because of my studies. I was well prepared.
{DC:} Did you see a connection between what had motivated you to fight in the Second World War and your motivation to fight in the Korean War?
{RH:} Yes. This may be hard to visualize today with all this going on but I saw the American military as a tool to help the downtrodden, the overrun, the people who were at the mercy of dictators. And that to me applied to Korea as well as to World War II. World War II, I had a personal stake. Part of my family got wiped out by Hitler. It’s more personal than Korea, but I understood Korea and I understood Stalin and I understood international communism. And I had no illusion as to what they had in mind. And so up to and including the Korean War I saw the American army as a tool of accomplishing a mission.
The 25th of June, 1950 I went up to Seattle to see an uncle of mine and I heard on the radio in the car by going there that the North Koreans had marched into South Korea and I told them at lunch I said, we have no alternative we’ve got to get involved. We’ve got to stop them and if we don’t stop them they’ll take over the whole world. And I believe that to this day.
The future wars were different. It’s hard to categorize, but the Vietnam War was not the same thing. The Korean War to me was a classic war to stop the bad guy, to make it simple. That’s what it was. Later it got more involved. But I was saying on the ship coming home, there was a young captain with me, I didn’t know him, and he asked me what is your impression of this experience that you’ve just had? I thought about it for a moment and I said, well, let me put it this way, now that I’m standing in front of you alive without any holes, God knows why I never got wounded, now that I’m standing here, going home, I think the experience was probably the most important experience of my life. Because I found out about myself between me and me, I found out what I could take and how far you could be driven. How far you could go physically.
Even though I had a difficult childhood, it was a protected childhood in the sense that I
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