A Korean War Memoir

by John P Collins

Overview

In the fall of 1950, I was a college student at Boston University. The Korean War had just begun, and while I had a college deferment, I felt it was unjust that other young people were fighting in Korea while I was in the classroom. Thus, in January 1951, I joined the army paratroopers with the hope of doing my part as a member of an elite fighting force. During a regimental parachute training jump, I was severely injured and later reclassified as a logistical support person. I was sent to the Korean War as a member of the Eighth Army. In this memoir, I provide readers with insights into my life as a soldier from basic training and jump school to my experiences in the Korean War. For the first time, documents from the National Army Records Archives and the US Army Transportation Museum are used in recounting the Korean War activities of my unit, the 513th Transportation Truck Company. These records are integrated with vignettes of my military life during the Korean War.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781496969750
Publisher:	AuthorHouse
Publication date:	03/06/2015
Pages:	234
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.53(d)

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A Korean War Memoir

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By John P. Collins

AuthorHouse

Copyright © 2015 John P. Collins
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4969-6975-0

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CHAPTER 1

My Premilitary Days

My name is John P. Collins. I was born on January 21, 1931, in Buffalo, New York, the son of John H. and Agnes M. Collins. My father was a research chemist without a college degree. He learned chemistry from reading library books and working at DuPont Chemical. With his innate ability, he was able to have three patents registered in his name.

Dad had started with DuPont in Springfield, Massachusetts, before I was born. He contracted tuberculosis in his early twenties while a DuPont employee, and the company's policy was to send its employees who had contracted TB for the cure, all paid for by DuPont. Dad spent two years at Trudeau Sanitarium in Saranac Lake, New York. That was where he met my mother, a nurse.

When Dad was very young he had a bad case of pneumonia and almost died. The scar tissue in the lungs was perhaps the genesis of the disease. He was never physically strong; he died at age eighty-four of lung congestion. His sister Claire contracted tuberculosis as well when she was about fifty and spent two years at the Boylston, Massachusetts sanitarium.

After he got out of the sanitarium, Dad returned to the DuPont rayon plant in Buffalo, New York and in 1939, just before the war DuPont switched him to the field of nylon chemistry, and he was transferred to the Seaford, Delaware, plant for advanced training as a process and quality control supervisor. Later, he was transferred to Martinsville, Virginia and was a supervisor in the newly constructed nylon plant. He was one of the few white people at DuPont, at the time, who had strong feelings that black people were equal to everyone else. Indeed, he was an early civil rights supporter.

During the war years, Dad's department tested the nylon batches in vats for the proper consistency which was vital to the manufacture of parachutes and tow lines for gliders. In 1945, he applied for the plant manager's job but was turned down because he didn't have a college degree in chemistry. Subsequently, he left DuPont and went into business as part owner and manager of Standard Cab, a large taxi company in Woonsocket, Rhode Island. The company also had bus contracts for schools and a large car and truck rental agency.

My mother was one of about twelve children. Her family lived on Irish Hill in Keene, New York. She was the third youngest of the clan and the only high school graduate. She had to walk close to ten miles round trip to high school. She attended nursing school in Ausable, New York, and became a practical nurse and then she started working at Trudeau Sanitarium, where she met my father who was a patient there.

When they married, Dad was twenty-six and Mom was thirty-six. She was always very sensitive about the age differential issue, but that's another story. Mom gave up nursing when she married and never returned to it; she became a homemaker. I have one sister, Patricia, who is five years younger than me. She went to college and later married Dan Fisher, an engineer; they have four sons, John, Daniel, Tim, Peter and one grandchild, Sydney.

I went to grade school at St. Paul's Parochial School in Kenmore, New York, and to public grade schools in Salisbury, Maryland, and Martinsville, Virginia. I attended high schools in Martinsville, Virginia, and Blackstone, Massachusetts; I also attended St. John's Prep in Danvers, Massachusetts, as a boarder. I ran cross-country and track while at St. John's and I graduated from there in 1949.

While attending Blackstone High, I worked during the school year and summers at a supermarket meat counter. I forget the name of it, but it was not a large chain and I also worked as a mechanic's helper at Standard Cab for two summers and saved some money for college.

CHAPTER 2

Two-Boy Scouts

I was a Boy Scout in Martinsville. I was eligible to join when I turned twelve, but my mother, a conservative Catholic, didn't want me to join because Troop 61 was affiliated with a Protestant church. The meetings were held in the basement of the church, and each meeting was opened with a "Protestant" prayer.

After some coaxing from Craig, one of my Catholic friends, and my father, who was more liberal, my mother relented, and I joined the Scouts when I turned thirteen. Since my friends, who had joined when they were twelve, had moved up a rung or two as Scouts, I felt I needed to catch up. I was highly motivated, worked very hard, and I earned the rank of Eagle Scout when I was fourteen and a half. I still have the clipping, picture, and the local paper's write-up on the event. I had set a record in terms of the least amount of time to achieve the rank of Eagle Scout in Virginia or perhaps the nation. I flunked one merit badge test (twenty-one badges were needed to become an Eagle), but I passed on the second go-around. The badge was for reptile study. That's amazing because I probably remember more facts about that area of study than all the rest of my merit badges.

Later in my career as an educator, I always promoted the idea that education was a lifelong journey and that independent study is an important skill along the way. You don't always need a teacher to learn if you're motivated. I learned that from my father, who was an independent learner.

Boy Scouts meant a lot to me because I was a year younger than my classmates and small for my age, which meant I couldn't compete in school sports at the junior high and high school level although I played touch football and some baseball. Little League was just getting organized in the 1940's. I went out for a team, and I waited in line for a uniform. I was last in line, and guess what? They ran out of uniforms just as they got to me. So I played 'sans' uniform, but I didn't play much. I played right field, but that was always in the ninth inning when the score was twenty to one or better.

I gave up baseball, so scouting and related activities were all I had outside of school. Martinsville, which was a small town of about 14,000, is in the southwest corner of Virginia close to the North Carolina and Tennessee border. I was surrounded by woods, and I loved the outdoors and scouting, which was my life at the time. I also admired scout Don Fendler, who was lost in the Maine woods sometime in the late 1930s; he was a city kid who survived in the woods with his scouting skills. He's still alive, giving motivational talks to young people. Don is about four years older than me.

CHAPTER 3

World War II

No one in my family served in the military during World War II; my father was busy at DuPont as a chemist and supervisor making nylon which was very important to the war effort.

DuPont required its supervisors and foremen to have victory gardens—each family was allotted about a half-acre of land to grow vegetables and so forth. Although I did most of the work because my dad was so busy, although he was dedicated to the idea of victory gardens. Our school in Martinsville had tin can drives, and I worked collecting and bringing them to the distribution center.

My dad was a great fan of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt; he felt he was a great president, especially during the war. Dad felt he was making a good patriotic effort, as well, in his work as a chemist. He was also very loyal to the various drives, including the tin can drives and conserving gasoline for the troops.

After he graduated from high school, my father learned Morse Code and became a radio operator on an oil freighter sailing the Great Lakes and down to South America through the Panama Canal. The name of the ship was the USS Grammar, as I remember. I have a photo of it somewhere, and I have his log as a radio operator. During the war, he listened to Morse Code messages on our radio and deciphered (nothing secret, of course) pretty routine messages that were sometimes war related.

When I worked at the cab company as a teen, I got to know several cab drivers who had served in the army and marines, and several were former paratroopers. These were tough guys, all with French ethnic backgrounds, as Woonsocket was at the time predominately French (and still is). They had made combat jumps in Europe and talked about their jump training, which was not the three weeks I had when I joined the paratroopers some years later, but perhaps ten days or so. They talked about hooking up on the static line just before their jumps and made no bones about their fear. Some made night jumps during combat. They talked about the cold weather in the European Theater. These men were proud of their airborne status, saying it was better than being "straight legs" (the regular army). They showed me patches, their wings, and so on. Although these ex- troopers didn't talk about combat much (I'm sure it had been traumatic for most of them), their stories made an impact on me. Hence, when I joined the military, I joined the paratroopers.

CHAPTER 4

Joining Up

After I graduated from high school, I was accepted at the University of Notre Dame. I decided to major in business administration. I had a vague goal of hooking up with a major company as my father had done at DuPont. I remember going to the town hall in Blackstone and signing papers that declared I was a college student and so I had a yellow draft deferment card. I stayed at Notre Dame for a year (1949-1950) and continued some running while I was there, although I was not on the track team. I was, however, on the boxing team and made it to the Bengal bouts, but I caught the flu and couldn't compete in the final bout as I was in the school infirmary for several days.

I transferred to Boston University and completed a third semester (Fall, 1950) before I decided to join the military. I had seen movie newsreels during World War II of paratroopers making combat jumps, and I liked the idea of the physical challenge. I had wanderlust and felt some guilt that men my age were serving their country and I wasn't. The GI Bill for education was appealing; it would let me finance my college education after I returned from the army. The paratrooper program seemed exciting, as I had heard so much about it from my cabbie friends during my summer employment. I wanted to become part of an elite military group, the paratroopers.

Initially, I tried to enlist in the marines as I had heard that they had jumpers as well, although I believe it was only a small number, however. But I had flat feet—I guess from so much cross-country running in high school. Also, I flunked the eye exam because I had a hard time distinguishing shades of color, although I could make out some primary colors. By the time I took the army physical, I had learned to curl my feet so my flat feet weren't easily observed by the doctor, who was handling many exams. I don't remember a visual color examination in the army physical--- just a traditional vision test. Passing the physical was the only requirement to join the army; I guess that, at the time, the army needed as many warm bodies as it could get.

When recruits finally entered jump school after basic training, the washout rate was fairly high; that in a sense, was a built-in screening device. Since jump school washouts went straight to Korea, I guess for the army, it was a win-win situation. If we made jump school, fine. If not, then we would fill the badly needed quotas of straight legs for Korea.

My friend Norman Picard from Woonsocket, Rhode Island, joined the Army Airborne with me, and we went through basic training at Fort Bragg and jump school at Fort Benning together. When we joined, we were assured that we would wind up in jump school, but there were no guarantees beyond that. It was strictly up to us in terms of our performance during the rigorous training at jump school. Unlike me, Norman was a great athlete as he had been a high school quarterback and was an all-state track star, especially in the pole vault. He was an excellent springboard diver as well, but gymnastics was his real forte. His older brother was a staff sergeant in the 82nd at Fort Bragg, so Norman had the motivation and innate skill to be a great paratrooper. He made it through jump school in a breeze while yours truly had to struggle.

My parents were very unhappy that I had left college, and my enlistment in the Army paratroopers deepened their unhappiness; they felt that jumping out of airplanes was a high-risk occupation. My sister also was not happy, and I am sure she had her moments of disappointment. Since there was a five-year age difference between us, and at that time, five years was a chasm, I didn't confide in her on a daily basis but she assured me that Dad and Mom were not happy with my decision, to which I paid little attention. Now happily, my sister and I are very close.

On the day of departure I took a bus from Boston to Fort Devens, Massachusetts, for processing. My assignment to Fort Devens was titled, "Orders, EM Concerned, dated January 17, 1951, issued by HQ, US Army and US Air Force, New England Recruiting District, Boston Army Base, Boston 10, Massachusetts." It was not the first time I had been away from home, of course. Besides my year at Notre Dame, I had been a boarding student at St. John's Prep in Danvers for two years. However, departing for the army, especially during wartime, was a little different.

When I joined the Army Airborne, I knew very little about Korea—the terrain, people, and so on. I was aware of some of the international political issues of the day, such as Dean Acheson and his famous speech about Formosa (later Taiwan) and, by implication, Korea being outside the sphere of influence that would be protected by the United States. President Truman shortly thereafter acted swiftly to defend South Korea even though it was, arguably, outside the "sphere of influence" policy.

I considered Korea a real war. Early reports of the war about high casualty rates and the battle at the Chosin Reservoir assured me that certainly this was, indeed, a real war. I understood that the 38th parallel had been agreed upon as a demarcation line and that it had been violated by the North Koreans and the Chinese. I agreed with the philosophy of the time that the United States had to take a stand and back their agreements. I was fully supportive.

I realized I might not return from war. My cab driver friends were models of patriotism and they admired me for leaving college and volunteering to go to war. What I didn't realize, however, was the travesty of being a wounded soldier—someone who has lost a limb or who had been badly burned by napalm or hit by friendly fire—until I saw some cases in Korea.

Having visited wounded soldiers from Iraq at the Landstuhl Hospital (my son is a retired full-bird colonel and was chief of staff at the hospital), I realize the problems of the badly wounded and the impact on their families.

CHAPTER 5

Fort Devens

At Fort Devens, Norman and I processed together, but he ended up in a different barracks. It was at Devens that I got an introduction to open commodes. The toilets with closing doors were a thing of the past. This was a bit intimidating to me at first, and I became constipated until I got used to the idea.

My processing at Fort Devens took place during January 1951. The base was bitterly cold, and there was plenty of snow. We were all "enlisted" into shoveling walkways and other areas.

I met Vincent Cawley, a streetwise kid from Boston, with whom I became good friends. We saw each other throughout basic training. On one occasion, Vincent taught me an important lesson. We bunked together—he on top and me on the bottom bunk. One evening, when I was taking a shower, I innocently left my wallet on the bed. When I returned, it was gone. Vincent had taken it and given it to the barracks sergeant. Frustrated that I had my wallet taken, I asked my comrades if they had seen it. Many of them had seen Vincent take it and knew what he had been up to. After about a half an hour, the sergeant came out and gave me the wallet with the admonition that leaving a wallet on a bed was unwise. He used strong language to make his point, but I never forgot and never had my wallet taken again.

Another thing I learned at Fort Devens was to avoid kitchen police (KP) duty at all costs. Those assigned to this duty had to get up at 4:00 a.m. or even earlier and report to the mess hall, where they were usually met by an overweight mess sergeant who hated the world and especially new recruits. I seldom met a mess sergeant I liked, and I got into a fight with one in Korea. However, I am sure there are many mess sergeants today who aren't overweight and who are nice guys and good soldiers. I just never met one during my time in the military.

I usually wound up cleaning grease traps, a disgusting job. The cooks poured their grease and food particles from the pans into this hole, and we would clean it once a week. There were leavings from eggs and milk and other food that had turned sour or gone bad. We had to pull up a large filter that was placed in the cement floor near the cooking area, clean it, and empty the smelly contents into a big tin container. Then we had to pull the liquid that was stored there up and out of the hole. We did this with a ladle-like tool and placed the liquid in a tin container. After cleaning the filter, we had to hose down the hole with soap and water. The smell and odor during this operation was sickening. At least on one occasion I vomited while performing this task. The smell was overpowering. I don't know why they weren't cleaned daily. I'm sure that in some mess halls that was the case, but at Devens, I think they waited for someone like me to show up. I was very young looking for my age and barely weighed 135, so perhaps I looked like the vulnerable type. Later, I'll explain how I avoided this chore on the troop ship I took to Japan.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from A Korean War Memoir by John P. Collins. Copyright © 2015 John P. Collins. Excerpted by permission of AuthorHouse.
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Table of Contents

Contents

Chapter One-My Premilitary Days, 1,
Chapter Two-Boy Scouts, 4,
Chapter Three-World War II, 7,
Chapter Four-Joining Up, 9,
Chapter Five-Fort Devens, 14,
Chapter Six-Basic Training at Fort Bragg, Home of the 82nd Airborne, 19,
Chapter Seven-Jump School, 47,
Chapter Eight-508th Regimental Combat Team, 62,
Chapter Nine-Injured, 85,
Chapter Ten-Fort Sheridan and Fort Riley, 94,
Chapter Eleven-Off to Korea, 104,
Chapter Twelve-New Arrival, 110,
Chapter Thirteen-513th Truck Company: A History, 115,
Chapter Fourteen-Command Reports, 129,
Chapter Fifteen-Lieutenant Philmon, 151,
Chapter Sixteen-Members of the 513th Truck Company, 155,
Chapter Seventeen-My Tour in Korea—Vignettes, 157,
Chapter Eighteen-Rotation Home, 187,
Chapter Nineteen-My Military Decorations and Awards, 189,
Chapter Twenty-Afterword, 190,
Chapter Twenty-One-Final Reflections, 192,
Photographs of my Tour in Korea, 210,