We Went as Boys...We Came Back as OLD MEN!

The Infantryman

His emotions are impenetrable, yet his shoulders are soft for someone to lean on. His hands are firm, yet know exactly where to be. If he has his arms wrapped around you, you're either in the last moments of your life or the safest place you could ever be. He's stubborn but will let you have your way just to see you smile. He's deadly with a rifle but gentle with a child. He plays poker with the devil but guards the gate of Heaven. He curses like no other but is the perfect gentleman. He has a thousand-yard stare, but when you look into his eyes, it's the most comforting thing you've ever felt. The US government trained him as a weapon but raised him as a lover. He knows every part of his rifle and every curve of his woman. There is no other man like him. Whether you love him or hate him, both are a privilege. He could be your worst nightmare or your best friend.

I am a seventy-five-year-old former infantry soldier with eight months of "hazardous duty" pay under my belt. I made my Sergeant E-5 stripes the hard way; I earned them while patrolling inside the DMZ for over four months. The patrol/ambush teams that I worked with took part in a number of small firefights, leading to three confirmed enemy kills and numerous wounded enemy forces.

The North Koreans almost always carried off their wounded and dead soldiers, so the U.N. would have no evidence of them violating the truce agreement signed in 1953. That doesn't mean we didn't kill and wound more of them; we just could not recover their bodies. Our team suffered one casualty during our five months in the DMZ from August 7, 1968, to January 7, 1969. Our company had at least three patrol teams available each and every day, but there was no communication between the teams, so we had no way to know what they were running into on a daily basis.

While on the barrier fence positions, I had one incident where I fatally wounded a North Korean infiltrator who managed to take shelter inside the fifty-yard-deep minefield, after which he died. I was involved in a vicious firefight along with a nearby foxhole as we fought against a much superior force of North Korean infiltrators, which resulted in three North Korean soldiers' bodies being recovered.

The "quick response force" the next morning found many pools of frozen blood, used combat bandages, and bloody drag trails headed back toward North Korea, close to two miles away. The QRF leader later told us we were up against a force as large as thirty men, and we were instrumental in stopping them while other forces were sent for. By the time they arrived, we were all down to our last bullets for our rifles and had already put our bayonets on the end of our rifles, expecting a full assault on our two positions.

My last firefight was while on a woodcutting detail inside the DMZ, very close to the MDL, or the dividing line between South and North Korea. A medium-sized North Korean force, totally camouflaged in white, managed to get within one hundred yards of our location before they were spotted, and a firefight took place as we fled the scene, leaving our tools and precious wood behind. The next morning, we returned with a full platoon of armed soldiers and found many blood pools on the ground, and bloody drag marks where dead and injured soldiers were carried away to North Korea, about one-half mile north of the battle scene. With the added guards, we completed our mission to gather the much-needed firewood for the troops on the line and got the hell out of there! Two days later, our unit rotated to our camp south of the Imjin River.