Jack Goodwin
Photo by David Cline
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 You can listen to and/or read the interviews -but please DO NOT QUOTE from the transcript.
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Korea KOHP 93
Jack Goodwin interviewed by David Cline
Waco, Texas
January 2003
{DC:} This is David Cline, it is January 12th and I’m in Waco, Texas for American RadioWorks Korea Oral History Project and if you could please introduce yourself?
{JG:} My name is Jack Goodwin and I live in Waco, Texas and I’m 72 years old.
{DC:} What unit were you in?
{JG:} Three Company 21st, 24th Division, Task Force Smith
{DC:} Did you enlist in the Army?
{JG:} Yes, 1948.
{DC:} Can you tell me what was going on in your life?
{JG:} Just didn’t know any better and like all the kids after World War II, we weren’t old enough to be in World War II so we enlisted after the war after we got old enough. I enlisted right after I turned 18, and I went to Fort Ord, California, then Seattle, Washington then overseas. I was almost ready to come home when the war started.
{DC:} Where were you located?
{JG:} Kioshi, Japan.
{DC:} How was life in Japan?
{JG:} Well it would have been better if we had more money to spend. GIs don’t make a lot of money, but it didn’t cost a whole lot to go to cabarets and stuff. And we trained everyday and we were all 19, 20-year-old kids so we kind of enjoyed it.
{DC:} When did you first hear about the war breaking out?
{JG:} The day before we went over there. They told us we were going to Korea and we said where’s that. The B Company and C Company of us and they took us to the airfield and put us on a plane to Korea. And we landed somewhere north of Pusan and got on trains and trucks and trains and then trucks and then walked to Osan right below Seoul and that’s where we dug in.
{DC:} How long did that take to get to Osan?
{JG:} Well, we flew over the 2nd and we got up the hill the night of the 4th.
{DC:} Of July?
{JG:} Of July. And we were attacked the morning of the 5th and we didn’t last very long. We lost, there’s 406 of us of the infantry and about 40-50 artillery behind us, but they didn’t do no good because we didn’t have any communication with them and they—when the North Koreans attacked us they came through with tanks because we didn’t have any tanks yet. There were about 30, 40 of those tanks and they just went right around us and started shooting us from the back and it was, like I said 406 of us and there were 170 killed on that hill and I got off the hill and got captured the next morning. And it was 20 from my company captured and about another 20 from B Company captured. And when we came back there, out of the 20 that got captured, ten died in prisoner camp.
{DC:} Can you tell me exactly what happened when you got captured?
{JG:} I was in some little village. It was probably 15, 20 miles south of Osan. I don’t know the name of the village. When they captured us, me and Gardner were captured together and when we got together there were about 100 of us from B Company and C Company and Captain Dasher (sp?) was leading us south and so we got to this village midnight or past and he said, “Well, we’ll just stay here” because all the civilians were out of town, you know, gone, and we stayed in those little shacks and when we woke up we were the only ones left, they didn’t wake us up. And I won’t tell you who, and Gardner the corporal said somebody stay awake and when you wanna sleep, wake somebody else up because we need somebody awake at all times in case we have to get out of here. Well I think either the second or third guy went to sleep and we all got captured. I won’t tell you his name, I don’t want to embarrass him; he’s still alive.
{DC:} So, how many of you?
{JG:} Ten of us. There were ten of us left.
{DC:} And what happened to the other guys?
{JG:} They got out. We don’t know what happened. Captain Dasher is from Waco here and when he got out a year or so later, he was friends with people who lived next door to my family and he told them I got killed because he thought everybody got killed there. My parents didn’t know I was alive until sometime later in ’51 like almost two years until they turned our names over.
{DC:} So you’re in this hut with these nine other guys—
{JG:} That’s when John Gardner heard guns outside and he said, I need a volunteer, come on Jack. And so we went out there and as soon as we turned the corner it seemed like we ran into the whole North Korean army and that was our POW days started right there. And they were all—it looked like 16, 17-year-old kids that captured us. Then they beat us up a little bit and they started shooting through the house that we were in and Gardner started hollerin’ now don’t shoot at them, take them prisoner or something and so they quit shootin’ and one old boy, Clark I believe, shot one of the Koreans right in the belly with a .45 and that’s when they started shootin’ through the house and they all come out and they hit, Clark in the leg.
{DC:} Can you repeat what you told me before about when you came out; you had the gun in your hands—
{JG:} Oh Gardner? I had a .45 and I come out with Corporal Gardner and he had an M-1 and we seen all these gooks, we’ll call them, all these North Koreans and in his book, he said, well he had one clip and he probably killed eight or ten guys before he got shot because he didn’t want to be taken prisoner and about that time I saw Jack drop his gun and he looked at me and said, “You’d better drop that damn gun before you get your ass shot.” It was hell the next few days. They put us in a little house and it wasn’t very long until a truck come by with a whole bunch of other guys, a bunch of sergeant and I think it was about 20 other guys from B Company, C Company and then they took us to Seoul and they interrogated us for it seemed like a day or so.
{DC:} What happened during the interrogation?
{JG:} Well, the funny thing about that, they interrogated us and I didn’t recognize any of the guys, but some guys said, “Hey I know that guy, the North Korean.” He worked at the base in Japan where we came from. And they were spies in our camp and they knew the war was coming. Course they asked us a bunch of questions. We were a bunch of PFC’s we didn’t know anything. The sergeants didn’t even know anything about the war. They said get on a plane and go on over. And we got over and they said, well go as far north as you can and dig in. And then nobody knew nothing, see? And then when we got up there they didn’t know what was coming. They didn’t have the Air Force and the pictures and everybody said, did you have any pictures? There wasn’t no pictures. We got over there before the news cameras and it wasn’t like in Vietnam there was news people all over there and we got over there before the news people did. And by the time I was captured then the news people came over. But we didn’t last until the water got hot.
{DC:} So it was pretty disorganized.
{JG:} Oh, like you’re talking about a Chinese fire drill? That’s what it looked like. When they come out, when all them tanks comin’ up, B Company’s on one side, they were on the other side of the road and they come right on through. We had some bazookas, but we had rounds that they knew wouldn’t stop them tanks and we had 75 recorders that would stop them but we had dummy rounds for them, so it wasn’t any good. I read in another book where one of the lieutenants to bring that 75 over here them tanks are coming. So he set that 75 up and fired that sucker and the back blasted, and it was raining, he didn’t give it enough clearance and it came out the back instead of the front and mud flew and they had to clean that weapon before they could use it again. They didn’t get no tanks. All those tanks went right on through us, but following the tanks were all the trucks full of North Korean troops and when they come up, they all come up the hill and like the first group that comes they have guns and then they get shot and the people behind them, all they have are those wooden guns training guns. If you got that many people, you know, they said there were 20,000 coming up that hill at us.
{DC:} And they just kept coming?
{JG:} Yeah, you shoot ‘em, we had Florentina Gonzalez and a guy named Wade had a machine gun up front and I talked to Florentina’s son the other day and I told him that he was a hero and Gonzalez said he wasn’t no hero, Wade’s the hero. Well, Wade got killed and Gonzalez took the machine gun over and fired until we got captured. They said he must have killed 50 or 100 of them people with the machine gun. And when I emailed his son the other day asking for a picture and I told his son about him being a hero and he said don’t mention hero around my dad because he don’t want nobody to think he’s a hero.
{DC:} He never received recognition?
{JG:} Well, yeah, he got a Silver Star or something out of that dude. But he didn’t want nobody to think he’s no hero; he’s just average guy. But he wanted Wade to take all the—course Wade got killed, you know.
{DC:} So, we were talking about after you got captured and there were 30 of you together and you were taken to Seoul.
{JG:} Yeah, that picture I showed you? We were all over there and they interrogated us and I have pictures of the guys coming and out of the, it wasn’t that capitol building, but the city hall of Seoul, a big city hall. I don’t think they interrogated me. I don’t remember it. If they did I wouldn’t have known nothing, other than name, rank, field number. I remember one incident where one of our guys had a seizure, epileptic seizure. And one of the guards was going to shoot him because he didn’t know what that was and one of the guys started hollering, you know, that he was sick. And so they didn’t kill him. I’m sure he died before we got back though because when the guys were all together there was almost 800 of us and only 200 of us come back, so the rest of them all died over there.
{DC:} So tell me where you were taken from Seoul.
{JG:} Seoul, from Seoul we went to Pyongyang by train. That’s the capitol of North Korea and we staying in a huge schoolhouse.
{DC:} What was the train trip like?
{JG:} Oh, they just moved us at night because it was dusty. And American planes would fly by and they would shoot the trains. It was dusty and no water. I forget how many days, 2 or 3 days it took us to get up there and we had no water during that time. We didn’t lose many guys but it was a real, real rough trip. And we got to Pyongyang and got to the schoolhouse and we stayed there. A month or two until the Americans started, until Inchon landing. When they got to Inchon, they started moving us out.
{DC:} How many guys in the schoolhouse?
{JG:} About seven, eight hundred. All of us was all one group in Pyongyang. After the 24th, us got captured, the 34th come in, 34th Infantry, they got a lot of their guys captured and killed and they come up with us too.
{DC:} You mentioned the 24th?
{JG:} Well in the 24th you had the 19th and the 21st and the 34th Infantry all in the 24th Division and the 21st, we were the first ones up there. And after we were captured you had the 19th and the 34th in the battle and a lot of those guys got captured and then they were in our group. And then later on there’s maybe 15 or 20 guys joined us later on, stragglers. Every one of them got different stories you know that joined us.
We had one guy under the Chinese that went to the hospital, what they call a hospital there and they sent the wrong guy back to our camp. Then they sent the other guy back there, but the guy that came back by mistake, they wouldn’t let him go back to his camp again because he heard all the stories about how they treated us. That was later on under the Chinese. But our group was under the Koreans from July until later in, all that year and then […] when the Chinese took us over. When the Chinese took us over they fattened us up. We lost 500 men under those Koreans that died of all different, mostly freezing.
{DC:} At that schoolhouse?
{JG:} Well, no when we left Pyongyang we went to Mampo then we, Mampo is way up north. Then the Americans, see the Americans were almost to the Yellow River there before the Chinese came into the war. And the Americans were catching up with us and then they put a guy in charge of us called the Tiger. That’s where the Tiger survivor deal come up over there. We called him the Tiger. I didn’t know his name.
{DC:} Where was that?
{JG:} That was in Mampo and he took us over and it started, what we called our death march.
{DC:} Do you remember the first day when you saw him?
{JG:} Yeah, the first day, he had a little speech like he wanted us to keep up you know. Course a lot of guys had been wounded, a lot of guys were barefooted and we’d been sleeping in the cornfield for about three or four days with a foot of snow on the ground, about a foot of snow on the ground. We lost quite a few guys in the cornfield and then he took us over and then the death march started.
{DC:} About how many guys were alive at that point?
{JG:} We hadn’t lost hardly any.
{DC:} So still around seven, eight hundred?
{JG:} We lost one guy in Pyongyang, maybe two. The guards were standing on one side of that schoolhouse and the guards were cleaning their weapons and one of the guns went off and killed one of our guys upstairs. And I think we had one or two more guys die that maybe was wounded, that died of wounds. And when we started the death march we hadn’t lost a lot of people. But we, there was, I know there was about 15 or 20, he told us it was going to be a long march and when we left the edge of town there was a bunch of guys sitting there and over a dozen. And they told them they’d take them to the hospital after we left and we wasn’t gone ten minutes and they shot all them guys. You could hear the guns. Anyway, we were all wounded and we had fatigues on and we were all straggling there and they had an officer in charge of each bunch of guys. 13 or 14 different groups and probably 25 to 100 in each of these groups and the Tiger stopped and had us all gathered up there. And said who was in charge of this group right here and Lieutenant Thorton said, I was, and he just damn shot him in the back of the head. And they were warned. Of course those lieutenants they couldn’t keep us in line because we weren’t capable of walking. Of course if you get a long string out you know, if you’re back to back, you get strung out further and further as you go.
{DC:} That’s the group you were walking with? Lieutenant Thorton’s group?
{JG:} We walked about eight days and they fed us about two or three times in eight days. And you know it was freezing, snow on the ground. And we lost, in eight or nine days between the ones that died and the ones that were shot we lost between 80 and 100 of them. If you fell back, when they fell back, they were shot. And guys would try to help guys, you know and you’d help them as long as you could, and they’d just keep falling back, falling back and then the guards make you let go of them. Then you’d try to catch back up. And then they’d shoot him.
{DC:} When did the nickname the Tiger develop?
{JG:} I don’t know when that happened. I don’t even know, I don’t remember that during that march, somebody I guess, somebody after the march just thought of the name Tiger. And after we come back from the war that’s when we called ourselves Tiger Survivors, because we survived that march.
{DC:} What did he look like?
{JG:} He was older type guy and I would imagine he was a major and I’m sure he’d been dead for years now. But we heard later on after we got back that he was in charge of the ones in the Tunnel Massacre where the Americans after they were coming in China and they had about 25 hundred POWs in this tunnel and the Americans were catching up and the Tiger shot them all. He was the head of that group and he shot all them. We heard later on that he shot all them. I guess he was just doing his job, but—
At the cornfield there before the march started, we were in between the line see. And all the North Koreans were running back through us and they had no weapons and half their clothes on and they just looked like a defeated army, but in that same day we saw the Chinese coming across the river by the thousands. And the Americans didn’t know the Chinese were coming and that’s when Americans really caught hell. Americans really had the war won, and that’s when they started running into hundreds of thousands of Chinese and they weren’t taken a hill a day, they were taking 20 miles a day and all of a sudden when they come to the Yellow River that’s when they started running into all these Chinese. And I know at the Chosin Reservoir that the Marines run into them there and boy they had hell there and they had to fight there way out to get on the ship and get away.
{DC:} Did anybody try to escape?
{JG:} Yeah, we had a few guys try to escape but nobody ever made it. I had an article about two guys escaping and one of them got killed and they brought the other one back and then we had a lieutenant, sergeant, try to get me to go out of camp with him one night. He was a heavy smoker, Sergeant Hanson, and he got out of camp two or three different times to get some food and some tobacco. And he talked some officer into going with him, I think it was a flyboy; we had two or three flyboys who got captured and joined our group later. But anyway, he tried to talk me into going with him and I said, no I don’t want to do that. Anyway, about two or three o’clock I heard a gunshot behind the building and a few minutes later here comes Sergeant Hanson in. And they killed that officer, and I might have gotten killed if I had gone with him. But I wouldn’t have gone anyway. We were too weak to escape, but Sergeant Hanson, he was an older guy. We were like 19, 20 and he was close to 35, 40 years old and he was a heavy smoker. And not having a cigarette that just about ruined him. But he made it back; he died a few years later.
I forget, either Surhap (sp?) or Booker was the lieutenant that got shot coming back in, but we had, the Chinese used to tell us, if you want to escape, let one of us go with you because you’re gonna get caught or you’re going to freeze to death out there. We were so far north, we were 2,300 miles from the line and if the Koreans were to see us and not turn us in, then they get shot. We never had anyone escape that was successful. I’ve read a lot since then about guys that escaped after they got captured but they were closer to the front-line and they escaped and got back alive but there was very few of them. And a lot of the guys that tell this you can’t tell if they were captured or not because if you’ve read about the POWs, we’ve got a whole bunch of wannabes. And have you heard about those? I read here the other day about when they started the POW organization that started a monthly magazine and they got a list going and if you went through that list there were a lot of guys that weren’t POWs. They went through that list and mailed out every guy a letter and said you’re off the list, but if you want back on this list then you write us and prove that you were a POW.
I got a thing from Shorty today, a bunch of pictures and he sent me and it had one on top pointing to a guy that said this is a phony. One of our wannabes. I don’t know why guys did that. I guess the get a kick out of telling their wives or their girlfriends and drinking a beer about when they were POWs or something like that.
{DC:} How do they make you feel? Do they make you angry?
{JG:} Naw, I don’t care. They can say what they want to. Everybody gots big stories they can tell, see. Its like these people burning the flags. People say, well you’re a veteran, what do you think about these people burning up the flags? And I say, well I wish the cameramen would just back up and quit taking pictures of them. Then you wouldn’t have all that stuff. If a guy buys that flag, he can do what he wants with it, but just don’t take pictures of him. It’s just as much the cameraman, the newsman’s fault as the guy burning the flag. You know it don’t bother me. It’s his flag; he’ll have to buy another flag. You know I’m just as patriotic as the next guy, but things like that don’t bother me. I got my flag out there, my American flag and my POW flag out there and people say, Jack you got to have a light on out that at night. I said, well I ain’t got to have no light on it. You’re supposed to take it down in bad weather, at night. And I say, well it’s my flag and I can fly it when I want to. If you’ve got your flag you can take it down when you want to. I got that iron pole and it takes a long time to get it down so I just leave it up and I just put a new flag up the other day.
{DC:} So tell me about the rest of this death march that took you about eight days.
{JG:} Oh there’s not a whole lot to tell you. They didn’t feed us a lot and one of those guards, he broke it down and told us how many miles we walked everyday and how many men we lost everyday. Of course he went through Johnson’s list and took everybody, the date and the time and everything. And he’d tell it and it was hell because he didn’t get hardly any food.
{DC:} Can you tell me what Johnson’s list is?
{JG:} Yeah, Wayne Johnson snuck a list out that had probably 500 names on it that lists guys that died as POWs and he got that list out and the government didn’t say […] and here about six, eight years ago, he’d been telling Shorty that he had a list and Shorty had been working on a list for years and course he didn’t have near the list Shorty had. And Johnson said, well here, I got a list for just about everybody and the Red Cross give us toothpaste. I told you about the Red Cross packages. I got one. One Red Cross, I’d been in the war for 38 months, I got one Red Cross package two days before I crossed over. That’s where Johnson kept this list in that toothpaste. He took the toothpaste out and that’s where he kept the list. Anyway, by the time that he, this was years and years later, by the time he got that list out the list was just about ruined. And they, him and that Casey, one of our honorary members and Casey and Johnson got that list and they took it to the government and they went over that list and toothpaste was all over the list from where it was folded over. Well if they could find one or two names on it, they could make out the guy’s name. And they got one or two guy’s names and then they had a bunch of question marks, but Shorty says they got just about everybody now.
And then just last year we got the last guy so Shorty says the list is complete now. So from the 8,000 people that the government says are still missing over there that list is wrong because the 500 of our guys that died over there are on that list. But we know they’re accounted for because we know where they’re buried. So that 8,000 that’s unaccounted for but we know of 500 that are accounted for. And I talked to, oh I forgot his name, but I talked to a guy on the computer about that. I said, how come those Tiger survivors that died over there are on that list, that died over there? He said, well the computer, they shouldn’t have been on there but they’re on there and it’s really not right. So actually there aren’t that many. You always hear 8,000 you know, but there’s 500 on that list that should have been taken off. I mean they’re over there, but they’re accounted for because they died, because we got ‘em on that list.
{DC:} They died in camp or on the march?
{JG:} Just 100 of them died on the march. We lost most of our men in ’50. It got to be about 40 below zero and here we are, we were captured in fatigues in July and that’s all we had. From July until almost about one and a half years later we had the same clothes on, we had never shaved, we had never had a bath, we had never brushed our teeth and nothing. And the worms got us. Most of the guys died of worms, and lice. Lice just about ate us up. Everyday it’s warm outside you’d take your t-shirt off and kill all the lice off of it. Because we slept in straw you know. And of course lice just stay in that straw.
{DC:} This is the winter of?
{JG:} Winter of ’50, in that book, we were losing 10, 12 guys a day.
{DC:} You’re in Camp Three at this point?
{JG:} No.
{DC:} Where are you?
{JG:} We were in a camp that they later on called Seven. There were no camps. We were just a group. There weren’t no numbers or anything. But later on they told us we were in Seven camp, but I didn’t know. We didn’t, the numbers came when the Chinese had us.
{DC:} Can you describe the camp? What it looked like.
{JG:} All we stayed in was the camp […] a bunch of different places. For a while we were in an old Japanese, the Japanese ruled over Korea from 1905 to after World War II, and we were in an old Japanese building. It looked like where the GIs, where the Japanese army, where they trained. That was one of the better places we stayed. Then they moved us up and put us in the, about 10 or 15 from there, where most of the guys died. And they put us in some little village. They probably just ran all the civilians out and put us in it. And there’s one little building there, I guess about 40 feet square and a lot of us guys were in it and the rest of those guys were in different houses and a lot of the guys froze to death. A lot of them didn’t have ends on them, half the house would be gone. And a lot of guys froze to death.
And I got my feet frozen real bad when we had to go out; they’d make us go out and bury guys and so we’d have to go out maybe about a mile or two away and here it’s 40 below wind-chill and the wind is blowing about 90 miles per hour and there’s about 2 feet of snow on the ground and they’d give us a pole and we’d take a guy and bend him over the pole and then we’d carry him out and you couldn’t bury him because the ground was frozen. We’d take him and it looked like, where we took them, it looked like where the army used to train. And it looked like a foxhole but it wasn’t very deep, maybe 1 foot deep and we’d put the bodies in there and cover them up with corn shucks and snow. And it took about an hour to get up there and come back and when I come back there were more and they made us go out again and I was out there too long and my feet got frozen real bad and I never did get over it. We got a lot of guys that don’t have any toes or others half their feet’s gone. And a lot of guys like me that had their feet frozen because all this stuff, the marching and all that, a lot of guys did that barefooted. I was lucky, I got a little bitty foot and they didn’t take my shoes away from me. They took the shoes away from most of those guys that got captured first. The North Koreans, they had cloth shoes, little canvas shoes the weren’t worth a dime and they take them shoes off and give 'em to our guys. And well, our guys couldn’t wear them, they were either too big or too little and they couldn’t wear our shoes, but they took our shoes and gave us theirs. We didn’t have no choice. And the guys that got those shoes, they’d have to cut the ends off and stick their feet through them. And the guys, they’d have the ones with the, a shoe that was three inches too long, but it was still better than those little canvas shoes that they had you know. Yeah, we walked from Pyongyang to as far as you can go. I guess we walked about 300 miles.
{DC:} What were the dates of the death march again?
{JG:} The death march started about the first and ended about the 10th, 9th or 10th.
{DC:} Of 1950?
{JG:} Of November, yeah. We went to several different places after that. All through that march we just stayed in fields and before that we just stayed in cornfields. And on my death list there I could tell about where they died at. Like if they died October 28th through the 31st, well I know they died in the cornfield because that’s where we were. If they died between November 1st through November 8th well I know they died on the death march. And some of them that died, ones that died, on that list, they were the ones that were shot see.
{DC:} So the area that was later called Camp Seven, that’s where you went on the march?
{JG:} We were in about four or five different locations when the Koreans had us and that group, I didn’t know we were in Camp Seven until they turned us over and put us in Camp Three, the Chinese. The Chinese had numbers for all those camps. See we were the only group that the North Koreans had. All the rest that were captured were captured by Chinese. And they just kept us by ourselves. They had one truck that would come out and feed us, but half the time that truck would break down and they wouldn’t feed us. And all the guys with me got captured between July 6th and July 20th. We were all captured, all 600 of us during that ten or 15 day period. And I said to someone, I says, I lost my train of thought—
{DC:} You were with the North Koreans -
{JG:} Yeah, there wasn’t no number until they turned us over to the Chinese. We were just a group of guys. Oh yeah, we were captured in July and I weighed about 145 and I’m just an example. Everybody didn’t weigh the same as me but we were all doing the same thing. But a lot of the heavy guys, and guys that worked out, the bigger guys, they had it rougher because there were just more of them.
{DC:} So you started at 145?
{JG:} I got to weigh, on duty, work duty they brought me over to this bin where they were keeping some of our corn, dried up corn and there were scales in there and I weighed 63. Now that’s just me. Now all the rest of the guys they lost half of their weight. And you walk outside and if it was muddy, it’s funny, but you’d get stuck in the mud, or the wind would blow you down. You walk out of the building and you’d have to go to the bathroom and there’s a path, but you’d have to wait until the wind died down because the wind would blow you down because you were so week.
{DC:} “Bajo,” Oscar taught me that.
{JG:} “Bajo” that’s right. “Beokee” is sick. I was in Japan a couple years and when I was first in the war me and a little Japanese boy, we had a little Japanese boy that was captured with us and he was a cook. He wasn’t in my group, but was in another group, but he was captured in my group. And he was Japanese, but he got captured with us and he just took up a serial number and he stayed there the whole three years. But all the time I was in the war, some were easier times when it was warm you know I’d get him to teach me Japanese words. And I learned a lot; of course I forgot most of it. But I was in Japan for a year and a half before I went to Korea.
{DC:} So you weighed 63 pounds and you got stuck in the mud?
{JG:} I weighed 63 pounds, I got stuck in the mud and you had night blindness. You’d go outside and you couldn’t see. And many times, there’s a gravel path down to the “bajo” and if you got off that path you couldn’t see a lick. You’d get night blindness, your eyes get dilated and then a guard would have to come get you, bring you back. Course they knew why you had night blindness, but, well I had that for two, three months, all of 1950. And they fed us in soybeans, and you know that protein in soybeans cured that night blindness.
{DC:} Before you got the soybeans, what were you eating at that time?
{JG:} Millet and maize. That’s all.
{DC:} How often?
{JG:} They fed us a bowl in the morning and a bowl in the evening. They fed us a bowl about a softball size. A lot of POWs that got captured by the Chinese and they said all we had was rice. Well I’d give my right arm for some rice. I tell you a story about some rice later on. But no, we had millet and maize and then you’d drink water and then your belly would swell up and you’d be full for a while, but an hour later you’d be hungry again because there was no protein or vitamins in that stuff. A bird eats it and flies but there wasn’t much there but birdseed. But that’s all we had. The Koreans fed us all we had until they turned us over to the Chinese.
{DC:} And when did that happen?
{JG:} September, October of ’51. And you know they put us—by that time, we’d dwindled down from 800 to about 24—and they put us on four or five boats and brought us down to the Yellow River and a couple times we stopped on the Manchurian side to go to the bathroom or something. And we got off these boats and got into Camp Three and we saw a bunch of American GIs and we hadn’t seen an American in about a year and a half. And later on I heard what those guys said about us. They said, that was the filthiest bunch of people you’d ever seen in your life. They didn’t know we were Americans. We hadn’t shaved, we hadn’t changed clothes, nothing in a year and a half. And they, the Chinese had great big pots of rice and told us to go ahead and start eating. Well we were used to starving to death and not having no food and we did have food. You’d get all you could, steal all you could. If I hadn’t stole a bunch of food I wouldn’t be here today. All the city guys and all the guys that had it easy all died first. All of us country boys were the ones that made it through this ordeal. The easy guys didn’t make it because they wasn’t used to putting up with stuff. Anyway, we saw this rice there. Great big pots of it and they said go ahead and eat all you want to. Well we started lining our pockets with it, we thought it was our last meal. And all those other guys were laughing at us because they’d been POWs for about 6 or 8 months and they were fat on rice. And here we are, we didn’t weigh nothing. Of course when the Chinese took us over, we quit dying. We were about 230, 250 or something like that. We only lost two or three more guys and I think—I think that officer, if he hadn’t got shot, he would have come back because we didn’t have no guys die after that. So his chances of coming back would have been real good.
{DC:} How else were the Chinese in treating you, feeding you?
{JG:} Well see, they took our group over and they tried to teach us the same as the other group they had there. And they had it easier. They send them to school and tried to teach them about communism and how Americans weren’t any good. Our group was like, we ain’t puttin’ up with any of that shit, we been through our little stuff and you say it ain’t good and they pulled us in and had these damn interpreters and they started telling us how good China was and all that shit and we just laugh at them and said, that’s a bunch of shit. What you said about America and how good China is and I know one guy said they wasn’t no prostitutes in Hong Kong. And a guy said I bet you ten dollars you could […] and start a damn stampede over there you know? And we used to, a whole bunch of those guys, they’d act like they were riding on motorcycles and vroom, vroom and Goddamn those Chinese would get mad at us. We just flat wouldn’t put up with the stuff because at that time we learnt that they turned our names over to the Americans. And we were pretty well sure that they weren’t gonna kill us after that and as far as going to that school all those other guys in that other camp, they made them go to that school, but they just gave up on us. They just flat gave up.
And we had one guy of our group that stayed over there and his name was Kyle. And Kyle stayed over there for one reason. Kyle wet the bed. And of course after we were turned over to Chinese, we were right there by the river and you could bathe in the summertime to keep clean. Well he could never keep clean and they put him with a group of guys that ran him out because he couldn’t keep clean and he just turned over and stayed over there. But he was just an uneducated boy from Georgia. He didn’t know anything. And he stayed over there, he and about 20 other guys stayed over there. And he came back, probably a year or two later. And I heard, he’s dead now, but I heard that he retired from the VA. He stayed over there as a turncoat and came back, went to work for the VA. But they probably didn’t have a charge against him.
{DC:} Where there any other guys who collaborated or helped out the Chinese?
{JG:} Oh, we had a bunch of them. The last year we were over there, they’d give cigarettes to these guys who had turned red. Most of them didn’t bother our guys. We had two or three big groups getting together, saving some rations and stuff and we figured if we had enough food to escape, to last them awhile they might make it. And some of them guys got turned in before we left and they think some of those guys might have turned them in. But they got a little bit of extra rations and stuff, but at that time we were getting plenty of food anyway, but they might have gotten some candy and cigarettes and stuff. I know they gave us a sake ration one time at Christmas time and they’d give them a sugar ration or something like that. But the Chinese fed us; they took pretty good care of us. The first year and a half we just lost—it was just hell.
{DC:} Were there guys that you knew were collaborating?
{JG:} Yeah, they just hung around by themselves and some of those guys come to the reunion right now.
{DC:} How do you react to them now?
{JG:} Oh that’s too long ago. They didn’t do anything bad. I didn’t think they did. There’s one guy lives over in, well I won’t give the name of the town, but he comes to reunions all the time. He comes and he stays a day, a day and a half and he leaves. He comes to the banquet and stuff and another guys comes. Another guy was a medic and he comes and I got a little book that all the guys signed it and I made a check by each one that turned red. And I showed it to Shorty, Shorty had a reunion about three months ago and I said, Shorty do you know what that’s for? He says, I know, I know what they’re for. I wish you could go interview Shorty. He’s something else. He got twice as much energy as the rest of us and all this Tiger Survivor stuff cost him his wife, he got divorced and this little guy, talking about this little Japanese guy and when we came back we had back pay coming and the U.N. gave us a bonus. They gave us 250 cents a day for every day we were over there. Well this Japanese boy, he didn’t have nothing coming. And when we got out, they gave us money before we went on the ship and we took up a donation and we got about 2,000 dollars to give him.
Well he was in Japan and somehow Shorty got him coming over to the U.S. And he lived with Shorty a while and Shorty got, he was an interpreter for us and he took a lot of beatings for us and Shorty took him to Goldwater, Goldwater, Arizona, the congressman, the senator. And he got this little Japanese guy American citizenship. And he lived with Shorty a long time, that’s probably why Shorty got divorced, and he went to school, got out of school, I think he joined the Army and became a colonel. We’re talking about a little Japanese boy. Shorty spent so much time working on this list of the POW survivors and finally his wife said, its me or the Tiger Survivors and so he packed up and moved to California and a few years later he married this Filipino gal and his boy, Mike, his boy comes to the reunions with him. Mike is out in California. He went out to live with his boy. And old Shorty’s a shoe salesman and Shorty didn’t have total disability until three or four years ago, but I bet he was a good one because he could sell just about anything.
{DC:} Is that Japanese boy, is he still alive?
{JG:} He lives in Japan now taking care of his mamma. And I got an article about how he wasn’t even in the army, he went from a cook in the army to being a POW to colonel to getting his citizenship.
{DC:} What was Christmas like in the camp?
{JG:} That first Christmas when we were with the Koreans, we didn’t even know that it came by. We didn’t have no calendars or anything like that. But when the Koreans had us up there that was the worst situation that anybody could of ever been in. You can imagine 10, 12 people dying everyday. You can imagine what kind of conditions we were living under. I tell you how cold it was. We’d go down to the, right near the river. And we’d go down to the river and we’d cut a hole in the ice a foot or so deep. And we had a bucket that would hold about 30 gallons and we had wire going across it and we’d stick a board through that and carry it by our shoulders and by the time we got back that damn ice would froze up again. It’s just—people just can’t imagine. You go outside and you’d just cry. You’d go outside and we all had mustache and beard and your mustache would get all frozen up and here you’re wearing little fatigues and little shoes. And it snows so much, you’re looking up there and you couldn’t even see the street, the street was gone.
{DC:} Did the Chinese issue you different clothes?
{JG:} Yeah, cotton petty clothes. I’ll show you a picture. The Chinese took us over September, October and I got a picture, some news guy took a picture of all us guys from Texas and there was snow on the ground and we were fat. They fattened us back up. Its three years of hell boy. And all of us guys at the reunion, we all get together because, there weren’t a lot from our state that were POWs and I don’t tell anybody I’m a POW.
{DC:} Why’s that?
{JG:} I don’t know, I guess it’s like those wannabes. Its like you’re bragging about something. And we got one more Waco boy. One more Waco boy that was a POW and I went over to see him. He was a Spanish guy, maybe I shouldn’t say this, anyway, he had a checkmark next to his name. And he was a big old fat guy and I see these old guys and I had a picture to put in my book and I saw a check beside his name and that’s probably the reason he don’t go to the reunions. We got the same group of guys that go to the reunion all the time, about 35, 40 of us. And we have different locations all the time. If we have it on the West Coast you’ll have a lot of West coast guys there. Most of the time its around Louisville, Tennessee and Kentucky and there. But the reunions are nice because every year we get to go to a different location. Last year we were in Louisville and I missed a few years on account of wife had a stroke and I couldn’t travel. I missed about six in a row but I’ve been to about 20 of them. I’ve been to Buffalo, Denver, St. Louis, Memphis, Portland, Minneapolis.
{DC:} Were there different groups or units in the camp?
{JG:} Well when they turned us over into Camp Three they separated officers, sergeants and Spanish. They took all the Mexicans and put them in one group and all the officers went to group two and I forget what the sergeant’s camp was called and they left us in another camp.
{DC:} What did they do with all the Hispanics?
{JG:} I don’t know. One of those guys that comes to the reunion all the time, his name is Tim Reisa. He’s not Mexican but he looks like a Mexican and they put him with the Mexicans and he doesn’t speak Spanish. He couldn’t speak a damn word.
{DC:} They were put in another part of Camp Three?
{JG:} They were separated from us. It wasn’t in Camp Three. There wasn’t a number. The officers were camp two and the sergeants were another. Didn’t this man tell you? What’s his name?
{DC:} Oscar.
{JG:} Didn’t he tell you what camp he was in? He could have been in Three but that was later one. We were in Camp Three and then right before the war was over they brought a bunch of people over to us. We were across the river you see. But there were eight or ten different camps. A lot of the guys I never did see.
{DC:} Were there any black POWs?
{JG:} No, there wasn’t no segregation when I was in the war. The segregation started while I was POW.
{DC:} Integration.
{JG:} Integration, yeah. We had some black POWs but they were captured after I was. The blacks didn’t get into it until, I believe some blacks got into it in Taejan there, in Kum River. I got captured July 20th and just shortly after that blacks started coming in. They put a few blacks with each platoon. There were no blacks with us.
{DC:} And never in the camp?
{JG:} Never. I never seen a black until right before I got to Freedom Village. Right before I was turned over in Panmunjom. All the group I was in, there wasn’t no blacks. At times some guys would visit our camp and there may have been some blacks there. We had guys that came to our camp and used to give lectures, but we’d just give them hell. Camp Three was on this side of the river and I don’t know if this was Camp Three or not, but the end of this riverbed it looked like a theater. And they brought us all in there one day and brought one guy from another camp in there to speak with us about how good China was and all that you know. And we had a guy that was a ranger that ended up in our group. I think he was captured later on. I don’t know how he was captured. He was just there. Nobody knew where he came from and he wasn’t from our group. He was a great big guy and he was trapped just like we were. And in the school house the guy give some names of people who were going to come speak with us and this ranger, he stood up and he said, would you please read those names please. They drug him out. Lots of funny things happened.
We had an ox with us. They used this ox to drag ox carts and stuff and he and another guy were in charge of that ox. And they’d feed that ox corn and they’d eat the corn after he went through the burrow. People think that’s crazy, but when you’re starving you’d eat anything. Before they turned us over to the Chinese, they brought us to the valley and they just turned us loose. They couldn’t feed us. And we got into the Mama San’s melon patches and cucumbers and Mama San hit us with a broom, that didn’t hurt. They used to take us out and just turn us loose in the valley there and I used to go catch frogs, little frogs about an inch long. And I used to take the stomach out and eat the head and the legs. And those people wouldn’t eat something like that and they’d die. And they’d march us to a cornfield and the growing season over there was short on account of it was so cold. And the corn would only get about a foot tall with little ears on it. And they’d march us to a cornfield and we’d eat it all. And other times they didn’t do that. It was just too cold to get out. The only duty we had in the winter of ’50 was to bury guys. And that’s what killed a lot of our guys. You’d go bury somebody and the next day you’re dead. We had guys that would just give up. When you give up, you’d only last a day or two. You knew a guy was going to die because they’d just quit eating. And all the guys that would die, we’d take all their clothes and their shoes and make gloves out of them. I got caught one time with a pair of scissors. I was cutting clothes up and making a pair of gloves. You’d take an old towel and use the string, make a needle out of some straw or something. And I was going to make me some gloves. Anyway, I got caught with a pair of scissors somebody stole and I got caught with them and I got the hell beaten out of me. They took me outside and beat me up and left me out in that damn cold for about a half day.
And another day I got caught with a sack full of corn that we’d stole and I put it in a sack and they went outside and dumped all that corn in the snow about two foot deep and they sit there and make me pick every damn cornel and put it in that sack. Freezing to death. There’s much more stuff that they did to me that I wouldn’t tell nobody. They used to beat you all the time just for the fun of it. The guard, here they are, they haven’t seen their family in years and they just go on us. They never get to go anywhere except in that compound we was at. And they’d smoke opium and beat the hell out of us just for the fun of it.
{DC:} This was the North Koreans?
{JG:} North Koreans, yeah. I remember one time, they threw me outside and this little flunky, he didn’t have the authority to shoot me and I knew that. And he threw me outside, I’d stole something and he caught me. And he brought me outside and he pulled my shirt up over my head and he cocked that gun and I said, Dozo. Dozo go ahead. And he come up here and he said Dozo? And I said Dozo. And he cocked that gun, but I knew he wasn’t going to shoot me. I was out there in that cold I didn’t care if he shot me or not. We were dying 15 or 20 a day anyway. And you didn’t know whether tomorrow was going to be your day or not. And we didn’t know if we were going to get out of there. The first one and a half years, we didn’t know whether we’d ever get out of there or not. And we’d live with that day in and day out. Plus you’d be burying your buddies everyday and it gets on your brain you know. All you’re trying to do is live. And I was a thief. Anytime they wanted somebody to get something I’d get something. And I knew where that bin was and I knew where that corn was. And as skinny as I was, I’d get that damn corn. And I’d fill that sack up and I’d eat all I could and give some of the other guys some. A lot of the guards didn’t care. They’d be fringy (?). As long as you’d help them carry. They’d have some chore for you to do.
{DC:} So you just had this will to survive?
{JG:} Oh man. I left home when I was about 14 years old and went on a carnival. I went on Doc Tate’s Medicine Show. Then I was on the carnival. I was on the carnival for a year or two and I came out and I was on my own. I went in the army when I was 18. I wasn’t back living in my house since I was 14 years old. Guys like us are the ones that made it and old farm boys, used to work on the farm. They’re the ones that made it. There aren’t any New York City boys that made it. They all died. City boys all died off.
{DC:} Did you ever get to a point where you thought you just didn’t care anymore?
{JG:} Well, everybody wants to live. On the death march two or three times you’d feel like this was your last step and then you’d hear somebody getting shot behind you. Then you’d take three or four extra steps. And many a time I’d just get to my last step and then have a break. And one time there were some castor beans there and I didn’t know what castor beans were—Oh that’s my family—
{DC:} How long have you been married?
{JG:} Fifty years.
{DC:} Congratulations.
{JG:} The wife had a stroke in ’92 and she hasn’t talked since. She doesn’t talk. She’s getting so she talks more and more every day but we, I talk about we, but I say mama we had that trouble, we had a stroke. We were in wheelchair for a couple of years and then we got her out of that wheelchair and she’s getting around pretty good. She lost her whole right hand side. Her right leg and her right ankle, she has a brace in there that keeps her ankle from turning. She understands and she can say shit or God damn it and that’s about it. But she can get her message across. I can tell what she’s going to say, because I’ve been with her for so long.
She’s the one that I wouldn’t have been where I’m at today if it hadn’t have been for her. I retired from the post office and opened a tackle and fish shop.
We ran the tropical fish shop from 1964 to 1992 when she had the stroke and I had four buildings and two house down there and two more houses and I gave it all to the daughter. I took all the cash and gave her all the headaches. She sold two of the houses and she’s got two of them. But she’s still got the fish shop. Next year will be our 40th year we’ve had that fish shop.
{DC:} Do you have some fish at the house?
{JG:} No. I got some outside in a pond. But I used to live next door and I had a little bitty back yard. And a woman lived in this house and I said to her one day, boy I wish I had a back yard that big. I’d put me a garden in there. She said what are you talking about? My husband would sell it. So I said, have him come talk to me. He talked to me that night and I bought it. And then she got mad at me for buying her house. I bought this house and I got me a garden and I rent the house next door. One of my granddaughters is in college, so I gave it to my granddaughter to live in, but boy that was a mistake.
END TAPE 1, BEGINNING TAPE 2
{DC:} It seems like most of the POWs I’ve talked to were captured really early on. Why were there no POWs captured later?
{JG:} The last year and a half they were negotiating and there was just battle-to-battle. There were a few stragglers captured. But there were a few captured in 1951 but hardly any after that. In ’52 there were maybe five or six and not many more than that. Our group was all captured between the 5th and the 24th of July and after that there were the 34th really had it rough and the 19th and there are 305 of us and 170 got killed. I can tell by the amount of POWs that come to the 34th. They had it rough. My war lasted a short while. There were a few guys that got captured on the hill, but I got captured the next morning.
{DC:} After basically a day right?
{JG:} I got captured at daybreak. We got run off a hill. They say we fought seven hours, but I don’t believe we lasted that long. I believe we got off the hill around noon. Of course the officers wanted us to last longer see, but I’m still in touch with one officer. Chief Waldrich, you heard of him? Chief Waldrich? He was a colonel last I heard but he was a lieutenant in Task Force Smith. You seen any of these Task Force Smith guys?
{DC:} No
{JG:} Well see they’re, Task Force Smith, those were the ones that got hit initially. Task Force Smith lasted July the 5th and that’s it there wasn’t no more Task Force Smith. It was one day and that was it. One the computer all the time and people would be looking for somebody and they’d say well he was in Task Force Smith and he got captured like July the 4th or 5th and all them people would be looking for, 25 or 30 people who said that their daddies or their uncles died with Task Force Smith. But they wasn’t see? I could tell you what outfit, but we were all B Company and C Company and we had two guys from D company and eight guys from M Company and all the other guys I knew see? If they were captured, even us Task Force Smith guys there were only about 100 captured after the 6th. Out of Task Force Smith C Company there are just four alive and out of B Company the only one I know of is Lee Patterson. So there aren’t many of us left. Maybe eight altogether. We were the first ones over there, the first ones captured and the first ones hit. And all the other regiments the guy put it what it was, but out of the 31st we were the first ones hit. Anyway, they flew us over there and trusted us up and the 34th all came over by boat and they came over the 4th and well we landed the 2nd, July 2nd.
{DC:} So you were fighting on the 4th?
{JG:} Mostly on the 5th.
{DC:} How did you spend July 4th?
{JG:} We walked until two o’clock in the morning, we got up on this hill and they told us to dig in. I was in the mortar section so I was back behind the hill and that ground was hard as a brick and it was raining, we had our ponchos and when I woke up I heard gunfire. And we got orders to start firing our mortars and I was on the rifle team in Japan and about two weeks before war started, I got transferred to the 4th platoon. I was a rifleman; I didn’t know nothing about no mortars. And when I went to Korea I was the mortar section with John Christianson and we fired around four or 4 rounds and the brass plate busted. And our war was over right there. So Lieutenant Waldrich told me to go up on the front-line. And I had a carabine was supposed to shoot four, five hundred rounds a minute but it didn’t. You had to kick it then shoot another round. It was weapons we were training with. And other guys had the M-1s and it was the same way. They weren’t any good. I got that .45 from somebody. When I got off the hill we come off the hill and behind the hill there were these rice patties. You know how it is in rice patties. There are no straight lines. It goes this way and that way and zags. And they were firing at us. It looked like rain in these rice patties here. And I got to the other side and on the other side there was a railroad track and when you got to the other side of the railroad track then you were free and they couldn’t shoot anymore at you. And the medics were set up. Somehow I got a pistol from one of those guys over there because that carbine wouldn’t shoot. And I had that .45 when I was captured. All the weapons you have there wasn’t any good. They were weapons you train with and they sent us over there. Everybody—I’ll tell you about the guy who lives in Waco, Ruben Cruez, Tiger Survivor. A few years ago he came down to shop and my daughter comes in and says, Daddy there’s a guy out front whose got POW license on his car and his wife had come in and I wanted to talk to him. I got to talking to him and he was one of our group. And I talked to him about 30 minutes and me and him, it was like we were in a different war. I didn’t remember anything he remembered, he didn’t remember anything I remembered. Like a different war. And I went back in and the wife said, did you know him? And I said, I knew him but I think he was in a different war than I was in. He was in that Spanish group and he was separate from us.
Course I remember a lot of highlights but there are a lot of things I don’t remember at all. There’s a couple of black spots from the time I was captured until the time I came […] and then we got into the trucks, but I don’t remember crossing the river or how we got across the river because the bridge was blown out. Somehow or another we got across that river. And of course the trucks couldn’t cross it and I’ve seen pictures of GIs crossing the bridge. Walking across it hand over hand where the bridge was blown up. And I read a thing about that bridge, of course they bombed it, they bombed that bridge with civilians going across it, leaving. There were thousands of people going across that bridge when they bombed it. They killed a bunch of people on that bridge when they bombed it. That bridge was pretty bad; you could still cross it if you went hand by hand.
{DC:} Who bombed it?
{JG:} The Americans. Our planes bombed it or blown it up. The bridge might have been there when I was captured but I don’t remember crossing it. I think I read somewhere that they bombed that bridge with a bunch of people on it. Civilians. But those damn civilians were coming through and we didn’t know whether they were them or what. I was only over there one day so there weren’t too many civilians coming through there, but the guys that fought a week or two after we did there were civilians going by the thousands and they didn’t know. And when we were marching up north the civilians were still coming south and most of them had white shoes on and you couldn’t tell whether they were a soldier or what see. And I know some places there that bridge that people talk about, they shot people underneath that bridge well if people shoot at you, I don’t give a Goddamn what it is if you don’t shoot it.
War is hell see and everything that you think is supposed to be done, when somebody’s shooting at you and you’ve got your buddy down by the side of you, Goddamn you don’t let anything go by you. Everything is different. Its just like a, and when we got off that hill it was everybody for himself. And the guys that got off, there were guys a week or two later showing up. We had one lieutenant, Lieutenant Peppe.
{DC:} Did you hold your positions?
{JG:} They told us to retreat. Some move back and as soon as we started going they started firing at us from up on the hill. My lieutenant said, lets withdraw and I thought lets get down that damn hill. Every step you take was about 100 feet and then when you got back down to the bottom there then you had to zigzag and a lot of people got—a machine gun was shooting at us from that hill. And when somebody is shooting at you with a machine gun, whatever people tell you to do, that don’t really mean a whole lot. I mean if they said hold your position; it wouldn’t have meant a whole lot anyway. I’ve got a dossier that Chief Robert wrote when he was going to turn around and give orders and he said by the time I turned around, I was all alone.
{DC:} You know the story of the 25th Division, 24th Infantry? They got a pretty bad rap.
{JG:} We got a bad rap because a lot of people wrote about how easy we had it in Japan we had people shining our shoes and cooking for us. We didn’t have that. We trained every day. And I’ve had people calling me, wanting to interview me wanting to know what kind of treatment we had in Japan. I said I’m not going through that. I know exactly what you’re after. I said you’re not going to get me to tell you that we didn’t train hard in Japan and that we had an easy life. I know what you’re after but I don’t mess with you. I’ve had several guys who want to interview me. There’s a lot of guys want to talk about Task Force Smith. Did you see the Korean thing on TV the other night?
{DC:} No, I didn’t.
{JG:} I’ve got all that on Oliver North deal, but I’ve got all that stuff on tape anyway. But I’ve got book of a literature about Task Force Smith and I’ve got names, I’ve got all the names.
{DC:} Can I ask you what you thought of General MacArthur and did the news get to you at camp?
{JG:} No, we didn’t know anything about it until we come back. If they would have dropped that atomic bomb on us like some of them thought we’d have been right under it. I don’t think that would have been a good idea. But I would imagine Truman done the right thing because from what I’ve heard and what I’ve read and I’ve been through MacArthur’s museum up in Newark. Is it Newark, NJ?
{DC:} New Jersey, yeah.
{JG:} Is that where the Navy is?
{DC:} I don’t know.
{JG:} Anyway we had one of our reunions there and I’ve been through where he’s buried and you know he’s got all his stuff up there on the wall there. He was kind of an arrogant son of a bitch. You know he got divorced and remarried to a young woman and when I was there they had a place for his wife but she wasn’t dead yet but she’s dead now. I imagine, see Truman wouldn’t let him bomb the other side of the Yellow River. If they’re flying their things from there, every day we look up and see their jets fighting our jets see. And hell them jets they never shot anybody down, maybe once a month somebody would get shot at and (clap, clap) them guards would go like that. I think one time a woman got shot down. A Chinese woman, she come by in a jeep. She was still in her flight uniform, she bailed out. But maybe once a month and of course when they’d bail out you know we’d never see them. We didn’t know whether it was our planes or their planes. We were right there by the Yellow River you see. We call it MIG Alley where we were at. See our planes had to fly 2 or 300 miles just to get there and the MIG just had to come across the Yellow River. But as soon as they’d see the MIG they’d drop the wing tanks and that’s what scared the hell of us because those damn wings were full of kerosene, the damn fuel.
We had one come through one of our buildings one time. And one hit on the, right behind us was a lake and it’d freeze over just solid and that wing tank hit there and just bounced about a half mile there. Anyway, we were afraid of those damn wing tanks. Anyway, we would watch them dogfight everyday but very rarely would anybody get shot down. And soon as it start getting like they were going to shoot somebody down, well they’d all go across the river. MacArthur wanted to go bomb where they were coming from see and Truman told him don’t do it, stay out of it. And he badmouthed Truman and Truman fired the son of a bitch. See I’ve read all these stories about it and all that stuff see. Truman met him out on some island out there and told him to get that God damned corncob pipe out of his mouth and get that damn hat off and get in uniform. He said you don’t have to respect me but you have to respect the God damned office I’m at, I’m holding. Because Truman was just a captain. Anyway, they met at this island somewhere and anyway, he went back and then MacArthur said something about it and so he fired the son of a bitch. He said you’ve got to understand there’s just one leader and I’m the boss right now.
And you talk about people having a hard time. When Roosevelt died, Roosevelt didn’t have a God damn thing to do with Truman. Truman didn’t know anything about the atomic bomb. Roosevelt wouldn’t let him come to the damn meetings. So when Truman took office he didn’t know anything. He said I’ll do the best I can and then after that he learned about that atomic bomb. Roosevelt didn’t let him know anything. All that was dropped on his lap and here he was, just a little guy, run a little store, and a little captain. But the Pantograph took him out. The Pantograph were like a mob. They had all the money from where he came from. And they put him in office and after he got in office, after he got President then they tried to get him to pass some things for them and he wouldn’t
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