Encoded for the Experiencing War web site for the Veterans History Project.
The recording of the interview with Ullrich Hermann was digitized.
This transcription was encoded with minimal changes to the original text in an effort to preserve original content and idiosyncrasies of the person interviewed. Period language and terminology are also retained. Encoding is literal with regard to the transcriptionist's capitalization, punctuation, and spelling.
We want to make you comfortable today, and if you want to stop, take a break -- water is the strongest thing I've got for you.
Water is all I ever drink.
That's what I drink.
It explains our longevity.
That may do it. But we want to make it comfortable for you. So if you want to stop or take a break or do whatever -- we're going to shoot for trying to do a couple hours.
Yes.
If it takes a little longer or less than that, fine, but we'll kind of shoot for that. And if you want to take a break or anything or just stretch or whatever, we want you to be comfortable. So -- and we kind of want you to tell your story the way you want to tell it. So I'll start out with just the stuff. Now -- they gave me some sample questions here, which I've already violated all of them. Says, "Please be aware it's got to be at least 30 minutes long, shouldn't go any longer than two hours," we can make that up to you. And I'll try not to interrupt the veteran, that will be hard for a lawyer to do, right? And we'll try to -- hopefully you'll bring up some questions that if I ask any that it will be informative and help you, but primarily we want you to tell your story. And Katrina is going to take everything down. And let's see, where is your initial thing you filled out? Let me just see that right quick.
I'll try not to morph into German and Vietnamese.
That's okay. She takes down any language.
You speak any of those languages?
So, all right, let's see, you're Mr. Hermann and you live in Corpus. And you're highest rank was colonel, primarily the Korean and Vietnam; I was primarily in the Korean. And you've done a great job of listing these items for us. And I hope you brought some pictures for us today too perhaps.
I just brought a few.
That's fine. Do they include you, I hope. Do the pictures include you?
Yeah, I think they're right there.
Okay, good.
Picture wise, I have a D.V.D. tape of Vietnam, '64-'65 time frame.
Is that a copy for us, or do you want us to copy it?
It's a copy for you. It was taken on -- I took it on an 8 millimeter with reels, and then I had it professionally transferred; no sound, just pictures.
That will be great. Just give that to Katrina. Okay. If you'd like, start telling us the start of your military career and just take it from there.
Okay. I entered the Army the 7th day of September, 1948. And I enlisted, I was 17 years of age, 11th grade education. My father and I had a parting of the ways at the time. I went to Fort Dix, New Jersey, and went into the reception with people who did not have shoes. Some of these guys hadn't eaten in days. They were out of the New England states. And what had happened, the mills closed down, moved to the south. A lot of the shoe factories closed down and moved out, so New England states were devastated. The -- I went through, these guys, went through basic training. We started that about a week after. I think it's important to set the tenor of the times then. In September 1948 Truman is running for reelection, and this was before he won with a landslide. Also running was Henry Wallace, who had been his vice president. Henry Wallace was running on the Communist party. Strom Thurmond from South Carolina was running on the Dixiecraft party. I mention Strom Thurmond because he comes into my life later on. Joe Martin was the Speaker of the House, Republican. The congress was Republican. I mention Joe Martin because he comes into play later in my narrative here. The Berlin Airlift was going full strength. If you recall the Soviets were trying to force Berlin into capitulation. Just after the war we supported them with an airlift that went on for days and days. Berlin Airlift comes into play in my life because they flew C-54s into Berlin. Later when I commanded the Caribou Company the engines on our airplanes some 20 years later were the same engines that were used on those C-54s R2000 Brad Whitley. And I command a maintenance unit later, but we'll get to that. So I'm sort of trying to set the stage. The world was tense. We were expected to go to war with the Russians any day.
I remember all of that.
You do? Okay. I hope -- okay. So, anyway, I went -- I had spent the previous year before I came in the Army at Valley Forge Military Academy as a cadet. And this was my step mother's way of getting me out from under foot, I guess. And she thought she was sort of punishing me, because Valley Forge was a very strict place, had a belief system, but most of the kids there -- I say kids -- were from very wealthy North Eastern families. And they were wolves, the Romney types. And they were I mean elitists. Further complicated my roommate was George Papandreau who just relinquished authority over Greece. Now, his father was the ambassador in Washington, and they put him in Valley Forge for something for him to do. It did not work out, because as soon as he found out I came from a farm, I was a peasant. And he thought that I should shine his shoes and that sort of thing. We had a very early parting of the ways. But I just mention his name because of the way the ambassador kids were. Anyway, I got to basic training, there was an M Company 60th Infantry at Fort Dix, and I knew how to do right face, left face and stand at attention kind of thing, basic military skills taught to me. And that almost immediately put me in a leadership position. I ended up as an acting squad leader with an arm band with two stripes on it. I had dealt with military subjects that were in basic training at Valley Forge. Basic training was easy for me. Well, I had enlisted R.A. unassigned, regular Army unassigned, that means you're vulnerable to anywhere they want to put you. Well, Fort Dix decided to keep me, and they put me through leadership school, and they sent me to basic training unit as cadre. Drill sergeants in those days were called "cadre". And I was assigned to the 1st Platoon in the 84th Field Artillery Battalion. And the N.C.O. that was supposed to be the cadre there was Sergeant First Class by the name of Clyde Hilling. Hilling was in the bottle with the cork snuggly pulled in behind him. So this platoon of 50 men sort of -- I got them by fiat, because Hilling pretty well stayed drunk in his cadre room. I went from there through nine cycles of recruits, sort of being the house mother, the mentor, the guy who taught them how to march, how to salute, and taught them the subjects they didn't get during the day because of poor instruction, not paying attention. So I essentially went through basic training ten times. Now, I mention that because again it comes into the narrative later on. And I did some basic things. With that first platoon that I had it was in the winter time, we have super severe winter, and there was flu everywhere. There were sick soldiers everywhere. And what I did with my people, I made them first thing go to bed at 8 o'clock at night, second thing, I had all the windows open on the bottom side, one side of the barracks all the windows open, top side of the other side of the barracks, and the wind sort of howled through there, but when we fell out for revelry in the morning I had 50 men, the other three platoons had six, eight, ten; they were all sick. But the other advantage that created is these people were all sick and weren't eating any food, and I instructed my guys, Eat everything you can get your hands on, you know. And I never had a man get sick. Well, I ended up right away standing out. What's going on down here? Why is one -- and I didn't even do that deliberately, just trying to take care of my people. But, anyway, nine cycles of recruits, that's 450 people that I lived with, that I ate with, that I showered with, that I got to know very closely, and they got to know me, and for years thereafter I kept running into these people. And those I ran into was always to my advantage. A lot of those 450 people ended up in the Korean War, because back in those days we did eight weeks of basic training and then to combat; we didn't have the additional training another eight weeks. But, anyway, along the way between cycles I learned to type, learned the keyboard, and I took an armed forces education class with a white master sergeant who could have probably run a prison camp without any trouble. I mean, she was stern. You learned or died kind of thing. Well, then, as soon as I learned to type they made me the company clerk for awhile. You know, I add this little side story because it gives a tenor of the times. The times being a postwar Army that had been reduced to nothing, and a lot of unsatisfactory people were in the Army. But I make out the morning report, a little piece of paper, and had to be signed by the commander. Well, what I'd have to do to get it signed, I'd have to go through the B.O.Q., the company commander's name was John Onderko. And the old wooden barracks, I go up the ladder, I go out on the eave and pull his window open, go through the window, stand him up in bed, have him sign because he was dead drunk. Drop back into bed. I go out the window, down the roof and down the ladder. That's how I got the morning report signed. Every unit in the Army had to submit a morning report. Anyway... And on the 25th of June, 1950 the Korean War broke out. And what I had done before that, I pulled a lot of C.Q, they call it, "charge of quarters" at the company level, battalion level. And at the battalion level I was bored to death, but there was a whole library of Army regulations. So I pull regulations and start reading. And I read a regulation for applying for officer cadre school. And I thought, Maybe I'll just try this. And I made out the application and submitted it and went before a board, and I was accepted. I was 19 years of age. So I came up on orders for -- to go to O.C.S. At the same time the Korean War started on the 25th of June, they levied all of us to go to Korea, actually to go to Fort Lewis, Washington the 2nd Infantry Division which went to Korea. So 20-some of us -- and here we've got a flap going, because which way are they going to send me, to the 2nd Infantry or O.C.S.? They finally decided they needed second lieutenants in Korea, because at that era the life expectancy of a lieutenant in the Korean War was four and a half hours, a platoon leader. So, anyway, I ended up going to Fort Riley, Kansas to O.C.S. as a youngster, and I had accrued all these skills having gone through -- after going through basic training ten times O.C.S. was a lark for me. And I ended up being a distinguished military graduate from O.C.S. Well, the distinguished military graduate was entitled to a regular Army commission, but you can't be commissioned regular Army unless you're 21 years of age or older, so that incidentally caught up to me in the Korean War, and I was sworn in in the regular Army.
That's great.
I went from there to Fort Benning to the basic course, went to jump school, was assigned to the 82nd Airborne. First battalion 325th Airborne Infantry Regiment, which is (pointing to document.) A couple experiences in 82nd, now, I have some pictures of a parachute jump, the big pictures. Early on in my jumping experience I came down -- had a general purpose bag, and in that general purpose bag was a switchboard, and it was about three-feet long and so forth. At 50 feet above the ground you release the bungee cord, and it was on a line 50-feet long, and the theory being the G.P. bag would land here and you land here. I landed on top of that sucker and broke my right leg. And the medics carried me off the drop zone, cut my paneling off and laid me down in poison ivy. And I said, You damned fools, you put me in poison ivy. So they brought one of those little bail out bubble helicopters in and strapped me on the outside. That was the worse part of it all, flying out there on that skid to the hospital. Well, I got to the hospital, and they put a cast on from my toes to my hips. I'm saying, They laid me down in poison ivy. And the medics are saying, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So that night the poison ivy broke out under the cast, and I finally got a wire coat hanger that I straightened out and I could scratch that poison ivy under the cast. Anyway, that's the unique medical care you got. The regimental commander was a colonel by the name of Stanley R. Larson, and Stanley R. Larson took over the regiment having been promoted back to colonel at age 36. Larson had been a 29-year-old colonel in the Pacific, World War II. More leadership talent in his little finger than most people have in their whole sole. Larson -- I got -- here is how you get into trouble for being a loud mouth. We had a little officers club that used to do a sandwich for lunch if you go there, and it was terrible. It was two slices of thick bologna, slice of cheese between two slices of stale bread, and I'm sitting there complaining about it, and I'm talking to a friend of mine, I'm saying, This thing tastes like S-H-I-T. And I feel a tap on my shoulder, and it's Larson. And he says, New club officer, meet me in my office after lunch. So what had happened, there was a major who is kind of in charge of the club, this guy just absconded with $5,000 and disappeared, and the club was in trouble. And I go down to his office, and he puts -- serious -- made me the club officer in addition to my other duties. And I said, Do I have -- what kind of free reign do I have? And he says, You can have anybody you want. Well, I went to personnel, I went through the records looking for people with culinary skills. Sure enough I found a guy by the name of Rizzo whose family owned a string of pizza parlors in Chicago. So I pulled Rizzo, I get him assigned to me, and we were able to change the food service overnight with him, and we decided to have Italian cuisine night. And we had a few Italian dishes, Chianti bottles with candles in it, a guy with an accordion playing music. Had a few people the first time we did that. The word got out, and a month -- we did this on Sunday night -- we had people waiting around the block. So, anyway, what this did for me -- you know, and I'm an infantry platoon leader, I have 50 men out there. I came up with orders for Korea. So Larson called me down to his office, and by his authority promoted me to first lieutenant. So instead of going as a first lieutenant, I went as a second lieutenant. I tell this whole story because it put me in an advantageous position when I got to Korea. Anyway, I go through Japan to get to Korea, and there's about 20 of us assigned to the 2nd Infantry Division. And the first guy we meet who talks to us is the Chief of Staff Colonel Joe Stillwell. And he was the son of Vinegar Joe, and he's a colonel. And he gave us a big blah blah blah blah blah. I mention that because this comes into play later too. But, anyway, I found out later why Stillwell was the Chief of Staff. He had been relieved as a commander of the 9th Infantry Regiment, and what had happened they moved the C.P., and they moved his latrine, which was an ammo box with a hole in it. He sat down on the latrine, and a wasp bit him in the rear end. He was so mad that he wanted headquarters commandant, a captain, to sit on that latrine until he too got bitten. So this captain refused to do that, so Stillwell is trying to court martial him. So by the time it was all over with the captain that was assigned to my battalion, which is where I got the story, and Stillwell was relieved, and they made him Chief of Staff at the 2nd Infantry Division. Anyway, Stillwell comes into play later. I command a platoon, communication platoon battalion level for about four months, and then one of the company commanders by the name of -- a captain by the name of William Warner Lewis, he was a class of '45 West Point, was hit. There had been four attempts on his life by his own troops the previous month. Anyway, Lewis got hit, and battalion commander called me to go down and take over George Company, so I did. They were on the line. First thing I did, it was supposed to come with six officers, I had one, a first sergeant by the name of Sevets. And one of my platoon sergeant's name was Cox. I need to back up to the 82nd Airborne, because these two guys had gotten drunk and shot up the N.C.O. Club at Fort Brag, and I had these two guys. And first thing I did when I went down through the commo trenches, those people were filthy, dirty, under shaven, unkempt, and I'm saying to myself, I have a moral problem. So the first thing I ordered, Everybody shave. And I got their attention. They said, We don't have any water. Did you drink coffee this morning? I went down the line, test fired weapons. Of the weapons -- 50 percent of the machine guns would not work. A third of the rifles wouldn't work because they were clogged up with dirt and hadn't been maintained. I had an installed flame thrower that there was a man assigned to fire the flame thrower in case we got attacked. I walk up to him and said, Fire your flame thrower. He was so scared he couldn't; terrified of the flame thrower. So these are the conditions which I took this unit over. So I went to work, back to basic training, you know, back to the fundamentals of discipline. And one -- the ways I got myself known to the men is I recall for over two years I had lived with these people, knew I had soldiers, knew how to deal with them. At 3 o'clock to 4:00 in the morning I used to go down the line and visit with every man. I did that because that's a low time. That's the time you're going to be thinking about momma, girlfriend, all that. It got -- went along, you have to sign, countersign password thing. I would go down in the dark by myself through the commo trench, they'd say, Halt, who's there? I'd say, It's me. They all knew my voice. That's one way I knew I was effective. The other way you'll see a picture there where I've got a handle bar mustache, one of those pictures, yeah, that's it, that's when I grew the handle bar mustache. And I looked up one day to about two-thirds of my people are trying to grow mustaches, they're trying to emulate me. That's when you know you're effective. The other thing that happens to you when you're on the line like that, 200-man company, you take casualties every day. You take four people hit, six people hit, and give it 30 days you've got nobody left, they're all evacuated from being hit, also people on normal rotations and so forth. I end up down to 11 men out of a 200-man company. So they pulled me back, put me in reserve to rebuild. They started sending me people, they send me 26 Koreans, ROK soldiers. They couldn't speak English. They broke up the 65th Regiment from Puerto Rico because they were considered to be ineffective, the si seniors, so I got 39 Puerto Ricans who couldn't speak English. They broke up the 24th division, which was a black division, finally implementing Truman's executive order of about five years old, so I end up with 39 black soldiers. And then I looked up one day and here came some people being marched in a column of twos, 41 people they had taken out of the prisons, stockades in the United States. And the deal they gave those people is if you serve -- you're Private E-1, if you serve successfully for your tour, one-year tour in Korea or you get hit, then you're sentence will be commuted. And I had people who were rapists, I had people of course the awols, I had thieves, all kinds. Every single one of those people turned out to be a superb soldier. Now, I've got my -- the other fellers I got were people who were in rear area units who were given their choice of court martial or the infantry. So I got those -- a lot of those people. So I ended up with 200 people that were unique. I started training a hundred hours a week, and every morning we left at first light, full field with a horseshoe roll that's about a hundred pounds, and on the road we go. And I would go down the road and see a hill, and I would break them up, first platoon on the right, second platoon on the left, third platoon reserve. Live fire, attack this hill. And we did that day after day after day. And the discipline took hold. Of course, I had the N.C.O.s in there, squad leaders, and I would pick my strongest people and promote them. I have a picture of my first sergeant, right there. He was from Bera County, Kentucky. That man could get out -- Clay Conn is his name -- could get out in front of that company, 200 men lined up, and he'd start with the first platoon, he just sort of looked at them, and you could see a ripple. That's leadership. That is strong, strong leader. Spoke fluent Japanese, was stationed in Japan. Now, that comes into play later. I had a couple favorite soldiers. You don't admit you have favorites when you have a unit. One of them was named Richard Hammer. And Richard Hammer looked suspiciously young. And I pulled Richard Hammer in and talked to him one day. It turned out he was -- he escaped from an orphanage. He was actually 14. He was kind of a little, undeveloped body, and his head was too big for him. So I said, okay -- he realized I was going to have to process him for discharge, a 14-year-old. So to keep him safe I made him my ammo N.C.O. We had our own basic load of ammunition. Well, we came in one day from this training, and of course everybody called him "Mike", Mike Hammer for the author that was famous in those days. He's sitting there at the entrance of the company area, he's holding a 60-millimeter mortar round. And he had been unboxing 60-millimeter mortar ammunition, and the mortar, it goes down the tube, and it reverses and comes out. And there is a bull-riding safety pen on the side of that mortar round, that's what keeps it safe. When it hits the bottom it releases it, and when the round leaves the tube the pen flies out, then it's armed. Then it's point deadly. This mortar round was missing that bull-riding safety pen. And why it hadn't exploded, and he's sitting there waiting for me holding that thing. So we went out and gave it a decent burial. But, anyway, when we moved back up on line to process someone for discharge forever, he was bringing ammunition up, and a mortar round hit behind him. And the little needle shrapnel went into his back into his kidneys. And he was evacuated. Later I learned that he had been medically retired at age 14. Describe another one of my favorites, his name was Alejandro Perez (ph.sp), and I think he was from the Valley, I'm not sure. But Perez was an ammo bearer for a 57 recoiled rifle. And we were patrolling a couple months before. We were issued grape shot ammunition for this 57. The 57 recoil is when you fire it it doesn't recoil, but it has a backflash and a round goes out the front. The gunner -- and they were on patrol, the Chinese are coming up the forward slope in waves like they did -- and the gunner was hit and went down. What Perez did is he loaded that 57, go around to the gunner position, fired it, go back, reload it back and fire it. And he broke off the attack. He was just killing Chinese like they were going out of style. I mean, every time he'd fire he'd rip a hole in their lines coming at us. Well, I thought that was worthy of decorations. So I put him in for the Distinguished Service Cross. And Perez was a fiery little guy, he was only about 5'2". So I put him on a truck, we had one two-and-a-half ton truck, as a truck driver. George 6 was the bumper number on the truck. George 6 had gone through World War II and had gone through two years of Korea, and this thing was in terrible shape. You couldn't find a vehicle in all of Sinton as bad of shape as that one, including the wrecking yard. But Perez kept it going. Well, his engine finally gave up, and he's in the motor pool. And he's trying to get the engine out of this thing to put another engine in, and he's walking back to the company area, he's covered with -- filthy, dirty covered in grease. And a regimental commander goes by. Regimental commander, his name was Steven O. Fuqua. He stops this filthy soldier who didn't salute and backed up and Fuqua says to Perez, Why didn't you salute? He says, Sir, I did, and you didn't return my salute, and I was taught that when you salute an officer an officer is supposed to return your salute. So anyway...
Quick thinking.
So where are you going walking down the road? And he says, I've been working on my truck. Perez says, Are you the guy that runs this regiment? And he says, Yeah. He says, How about getting me a new truck? So the regimental commander loads him in the Jeep, and he brings him to the unit there, and I was there and told me what happened, you know. Perez got a new truck. Also -- he also got his Distinguished Service Cross, which is one down from the Congressional Medal. But it asks for interesting asides here, and those are two of my favorite people. I interviewed, tried to, everybody that came into my unit. Of course, I didn't do very well with non-English speakers. But I had one soldier I interviewed and asked him what he did, because these draftees were all 25, 26, 24 age, and they had established themselves in civilian life, and then got jerked out of it by being drafted. This guy's name was Sheppard, and he was a barber, and that's one thing you don't have in a rifle company. So he would start on the left limiting point and he cut everybody's hair. And it took him about ten days to cut all 200 heads. And I had the best looking, cleanest-looking soldiers in this world. I got a sergeant, sergeant first class, and I interviewed him, his name was Jackie Alexander. Jackie Alexander had been a bandsman. He was a trumpet player. And he had cut all the official Army records playing all of the bugle songs. And what am I going to do with a senior N.C.O. in a rifle company that blows a trumpet? Well, I go out and sit down under a tree, and I call, Hey, I'm sending this guy back. No, he's yours, you've got him. So I called Alexander back in, What else do you do? Well, in those days they had what they call series 10, series 20, series 30 correspondence courses you could take. Series 10 was for lieutenant, 20 for captain, and 30 was for field grade, for major. He had taken all those courses on his own. Well, it turns out this guy was talented otherwise besides being a trumpet player or bugle player. But he had his bugle, so he used to play all the calls. We were in reserve at the time, of course, and people would stay awake at night to hear Taps.
You know, that gets me too.
Anyway, to kind of finish this on Alexander, ultimately he ended up as my first sergeant. And the last time I talked to him he was a warrant officer, band master, the Army band marshal. You have to excuse me. I have allergies, and I also have PTSD. Don't put this. We left that position, and we had to make an overnight march. We were in Western Korea to Eastern Korea, and the next morning jump off in the attack. And it was successful. My runner was a man who was one of Walt Disney's cartoonists who was drafted. He had a heart attack, according to that -- he was just a young man. I incidentally saw him years later on T.V. where he'd taken Pinocchio or something and put it in animation. But I had a second lieutenant by the name of Mike Booze, West Pointer, and I had been up for days. And I had a wooden box -- ammo box for a desk and a pair of yellow leather gloves laid down on my desk, and look up and this replacement lieutenant let me know right away that at one time his father had been a regimental commander for that regiment. I said, Wonderful. I assigned him to the first platoon, and this is when we were still on line. And Sevets was the platoon sergeant. And Sevets had no use for officers, except when the shooting started. Anyway, in about 15 minutes Booze comes back and he says, What's your problem? He said, There is no place for me to live, there is no quarters. There is a C.P. bunker. He said, I can't live in a bunker with enlisted men. I said, I tell you what, you see that pile of timbers out there? You build your own damned bunker. But, anyway, in that position we were on a finger, and the Chinese were up here about 300 yards away, and what we used for latrines was an ammo box with a hole cut in it, and you try to put it on the reverse slope. So this was a facility, the Chinese could observe it. And you knew enough to go down, hit that latrine and get off it before they could get their first 76 round off at you. So a 76 millimeter is pretty hefty. Well, they don't tell Booze, so Booze gets his stars and stripes and goes down for a leisurely sit on the ammo box, and the Chinese are (making swishing noise of bullets), they didn't hit him, they missed him. He went head first off this box, pants down around his ankles, face down in the dirt, and this cartoonist got him, got him. And I think he turned out a hundred copies of that cartoon. Anyway, that is one of the vicissitudes of war. The shooting stopped on the 25th of June, 1953. We were on the line, and it was a very foggy night with the moon breaking through, and the instructions were that firing would stop at 11 o'clock at night. And at 10:45 it quit.
Can we take about a two-minute break? (Short break taken.)
I have to back up and recall a couple incidents. One of the problems that never got solved in the Korean War were logistics. And I think this is critical on any kind of record. We had shortage of ammunition. And there was a big flap in the United States over shortage of ammunition. And Congress sent people over to inventory ammunition to ascertain if there was a shortage or not. And all of a sudden my deuce and a half, new deuce and a half and Perez got pulled, and after he came back I debriefed him. And what they were doing, they had this team that would go into an ammo dump, they would inventory the ammo, and they would be through about 3 o'clock in the afternoon, and they'd take a break, and then they'd inventory the next ammo dump. In the meantime, every truck available in Korea was moving that ammo dump to the new one. And these people were inventorying the same damned ammo time after time. And that's where my truck was, hauling ammo at night for their -- so they could inventory it the next day. But, anyway, we were -- do you understand?
Was that his new truck or his old truck?
That was his new one.
All right.
But the point being they moved the same ammo dump all over Korea, and the congressional people inventoried the same ammo dump time and time again. We had what we called an ammunition supply rig, A.S.R., ammunition -- and we were restricted. Now, we're on the line, we're in a war, riflemen allowed to fire six-tenth of a round per week. You could throw a half a grenade per week. I mean, this was rigid. And my 60 millimeter borders could fire a half a mortar round per week. Well, anyway, we're in position, and we get attacked. And it was my first platoon on the right-hand side, and Mike Booze was the platoon leader. Mike Booze was out here on a patrol and pulled 17 people out of this platoon, so they were short people. And what we had in the Korean War we had what we call "flash fires". You call your flash fires, it was basically a wall of steel that came down in front of your position. And the way the Chinese attacked, they attacked in waves. The first wave didn't even have weapons. And the name of the game was for you to use up your ammunition on them, and then the subsequent waves would come in. Lost communications with the first platoon, took off with Sergeant Alexander to go down there. It was in the dark, of course, and we ended up -- when I got there these people were in hand-to-hand combat with the Chinese, my first platoon people, and we got in the middle of that fray, which is very interesting. The platoon sergeant was a young man by the name of J.C. Pearson, and Pearson was somewhere here -- somewhere from here in Texas. And I could hear a soldier yelling, Their artillery is falling on top of us. Pearson said, I ordered it that way. He didn't, but he was trying to keep the moral up and so on. But we killed 238 Chinese, and what happened -- and it was -- not only was it dark, it was rainy. The Chinese -- we were tied in with a Capa ROK division on my right side, they were tied in with us. They infiltrated an entire division, the Chinese did, through the Capa ROKS and set up position behind them, and then they attacked with another division from the front, and the Capa ROKS folded. What that meant there was a clear shot all the way to South Korea all the way to Seoul. We were holding that right shoulder, and that's when we got a diversionary attack that we were involved in. Well, anyway, the next day -- by this time my truck was back. The next day the regimental commander came down there, came to my unit specifically to relieve me of command because I had exceeded the ammunition supply rate. And as he was shaking his finger in my face saying, Why did you exceed the ammunition supply rate, that deuce and a half went by and they had put too many bodies on it and it was stacked up. And as it went by a Chinese -- dead China man fell off and went "splat" in the mud at their feet. I said, That's why we exceeded it. He had no response to that. The China man kept me from getting relieved. Then another favorite of mine was the assistant division commander, Lewis Truman, a nephew of Harry Truman. Lewis Truman and I seemed to not hit it off well. There was a big push that everybody carry their authorized T.O.D. weapon. Well, mine was a carbine. You try to go through the muddy trenches with a carbine, all you do is collect mud. And I had a 45 on my hip. Truman shows up, I report to him, and I don't have my carbine. He says, Where is your T.O.D. weapon? I said, In the bunker. He says, You're relieved. Threw him a high five, walked around him. He said, Where the hell are you going? You just assumed command of my company. Get your ass back here.
Come back here.
That was one incident with Truman. Another one when we made that forced march across Korea, I mean, we started in the dark we're doing all this, one of my soldiers doesn't have his pack on, he's carrying a guitar. I never did find out what he did with his pack. So Truman stops -- I'm the lead company on this march. Truman stops me in the middle of the road, and he's eating my butt out over this soldier with the guitar. In the meantime what happened, I was the only one who knew where we were going, and it had to turn -- left turn in the road. Truman is chewing on me, my people go right through the intersection, because they don't know they're supposed to make a left turn, and my first two platoons step through, I got away from Truman, took off down there, stopped them, turned them around, and by the time I turned them around and got to the intersection, the next unit behind us was there, and now we've got two companies tangled up just because this general is chewing my ass over a guitar in the dark. Then the third time -- last time I saw Truman we were in reserve, and I look over there and here this brigadier general is in my latrine -- one of my latrines. I thought, What in the hell is he doing there? So I go over and report to him, and it turned out the division manager, Colonel Fry, got mad at him for something, and ordered him to inspect every latrine in the division. So he was one of my favorite characters. I should probably put him on my favorites on my computer. The war ended, and we were put in -- they used my company to block the withdraw. We didn't know what the Chinese were going to do. So they spread me over 4,000 meters across the line while the other units went through. Had an inspector show up from division, he was a quarter master. And this lieutenant colonel had a yellow scarf on, the quarter master color. And I had just gone from end to end. He shows up, and he wants me to escort him. And I said, Go 2000 meters that way and 2000 meters that way. And he got all upset, you know, and tried to make a big issue of it with General Fry. But General Fry, the division commander, had started off as a second lieutenant in the company I commanded, and he knew me, because he paid a lot of attention to that company and paid a lot of visits. And forgive me, Katrina, for this, but there was all kinds of pressure on V.D., that your troops not get V.D. And it was a reflection on your leadership ability if they got V.D. Now, I never did figure out how to stop the world and everybody get off. But I had six cases and that brought General Fry to visit me, because I was leading the entire division. My figures were honest, everyone else was probably lying. And he was shaking his finger in my face, and he says -- I said to him, General, if they won't F, they won't fight. And says, How did I end up with all the fighters in one company?
He was ready for that one, huh?
He was waiting for me. Anyway, we pulled back after three days and living on sea rations and so forth -- we went back to line Kansas, which they had the lines of withdrawal they had named after states, and they had bulldozed a path of a draw, it was raining, it was black muck, and this was the first food my troops got in a long time, decent chow, because they were living on sea rations. I had a machine gun team, Thomas and Johnson. Thomas was the gunner and Johnson was the ammo bearer. Thomas was a big husky black with a big, big watermelon smile. And that smile never left his face. They were going through the chow line, and they got their mess kit, and the canteen cup, and Johnson is following Thomas. The troops are all sitting around in the mud eating. Thomas -- no, Johnson slipped and fell in the mud, and he's trying to save his food, his canteen cup. And Thomas looked back at him and said, Get up from there you M.F., you've had your ten-minute break. It was enough in the tension that the troops just howled. Of course these two characters were funny anyway. Another incident with Thomas and Johnson, we were on the line, the corps commander, his name was Ruben Jenkins, a three-star, came to check the troops on the line, you know. And we get to Thomas and Johnson, and he's got a couple congressmen with him, Jenkins does. And he says, What's your security up front? And Thomas said, Right at the end of the finger there is a listening post. I'll tell you more about that listening post. Exactly where is it, soldier, he says. It's right there at the end of that finger unit. He takes his five fingers. And Thomas says, I'll show you, goes with the first machine gun fire. So that kind of took that three-star back. And he says to Thomas, trying to show off to these congressmen, he says, Soldier, what is the cycling rate of fire of a machine gun? Thomas looks at the machine gun, and he looks up at me, and he looks up at those three-stars, looks back down at the machine gun, and he looks back up at me again, and he says, I don't know, General, but when I pull this trigger this mother goes boom boom boom boom boom boom boom. He handled a stupid question. It was a cyclated fire, well, the damn thing worked, you know. The other visitor I had on that particular position was Adle Stevenson who just lost an election, and Adle was touring the troops in Korea. Maxwell Taylor was with him. Maxwell Taylor had been chief of staff in the Army to the ambassador. Had a Bull Kendal who was a three-star corps commander at that time. And we had to go up about 140 steps, sandbag steps to get up the hill. I met him at the bottom of the hill and reported, and Bull Kendal says, I don't want more than three people going up this hill at one type. Yes, sir. I'm the company commander, I'm number four, and I'm not staying back and let these idiots run loose. So I went by Bull Kendal, he pulled me by the seat of my pants, pulled me back, and I shook him off and got back to take the lead. Get to the flight zone, we go back to the back side, and I faintly hear, Fire in the hole, fire in the hole, fire in the hole. I had a 4.2 mortar platoon back there, and they're blowing a new sump for their garbage and trash. (Making explosion noise) Well, Taylor and Stevenson takes off on a run to the commo trench. They get there, and Taylor is slapping Stevenson on the back, said, Well, boy, you've been under fire. All these guys were doing was trying to get rid of the garbage there. Anyway, they finally put us into an area, we got out of the mud, and the war is over. And a West Point captain class of '45 shows up and says, I've come to take command of your company. Well, I had some choice four letter words for that guy after I'd fought this company for eight months, and he left and went complaining to the battalion commander. Battalion commander was Sammy Holman. And Holman says, You better stay away from him. Because I was rotating it, matter of fact, to Okinawa. I did turn over the company, and Mike Booze took over the company, and Jackie Alexander was the first sergeant. That's when I left. Left the company on a hill 3,000 feet high. We were digging a new position, we had to go up that thing every day. We'd done that by the time we left about 30 days. First time we went it took us two hours, then we were able to make it in 19 minutes, because we went up and down every day. We had -- I was also on demolition pay because I played the demolitions. And the way we did this trying to dig into the rock, it was actually kind of a granite -- not granite, but a loose rock soil. We would take a 40-pound shape charge, blow a hole, and the 40-pound shape charge put a hole about this big around and down about six feet, and then we put a 40-pound crater charge and blow that, that's how we were able to dig in on that hill. I went to Okinawa. I had a tough time getting there. I got out of Korea and got to Japan, and I had a little message is all I had assigning me to Okinawa. What I'd done is put in for an inner theater, and I was kind of expecting to go to the one in the 73rd Airborne in Beppu, Japan, but I didn't. And what -- the reason I was delayed is because they had alerted my wife -- they had moved her, or she had moved to the West Coast and was on a ship. And I was going to make a decision whether I was going to go to Okinawa or back to the states. If I'd gone back to the states, she'd be in the middle of the Pacific, and that would have been an unhappy lady. Anyway, I get back to Japan, they cut a set of orders sending me back to Korea instead of sending me to Okinawa. So I threw those in the waste basket, and I went down to Katsukawa Air Base at the bar, and I said, I'm looking to hop a ride down to Okinawa, and talked with this guy, and he says, Oh, yeah, we're fearing some B-26s down to Vietnam, and we're turning them over to the French, and we have to make a refuel stop in Okinawa. Okay, will you give me a ride? Sure. Well, I get to the airplane, and my ride was the nose gunner's position. And the nose gunner was gone, and they taped it over with some kind of tape.
Duct tape.
Duct tape, yeah. And I'm sitting -- and my instructions were when you land, pull up your feet in case the nose gear collapses it won't break your legs. So I take off roll, and that tape went (making ripping off noise), so for a thousand miles I'm sitting there (making sound). I get to Okinawa, middle of the night, nobody there. I finally conned the Air Force to give me a ride -- no, they gave me a B.O.Q, the next day I got a ride to the 29th Infantry regimental B.O.Q, and I didn't have anything except what I was carrying. My stuff was all in storage in Japan. I was filthy dirty from Korea, handle bar mustache. I get down to the B.O.Q the next day, and the B.O.Q. sergeant assigns me a room, and says, Do you want a maid while you're here? I said, No. So he lines up all these gals that it's pretty damn obvious what they all were. I behaved myself for 14 months, now I'm not going to change that. So I pick the ugliest one, who turned out to be a superb maid. She later went on to her quarters. Neat little gal.
What was your rank at that time?
I was a first lieutenant.
Okay.
No, wait a minute. Yeah, I was a lieutenant. I went to the regimental headquarters to report in. The regimental adjutant was a man by the name of Morley. Next to him was a warrant officer by the name of Owens. Morley took one look at him, and he was still blurry drunk, so the warrant officer is going to take -- the warrant officer started off by saying, Yeah, nah. I reoriented him of what the position of a soldier at attention was, that he was a warrant officer and I was an officer. That brought the regimental commander out of his office. Bill Bassett. And I hear behind me Bassett saying to Morley, What's that? And Morley saying, This is a Hermann. And he says, Tell the Hermann to get lost until he gets cleaned up and gets rid of the God damned mustache. Okay, I got the message. So I go back down to the B.O.Q., run into a guy I'd known in the 82nd Airborne by the name of Guy I. Tutwiller. Tut and I, we interchanged families at Fort Brag, that kind of thing, the guy was a captain. And Guy and I decided to go to the movies that night. We had an officers club in this B.O.Q, and we're coming back from the officers club -- I mean from the movies, and there is this crashing and banging of tables and chairs in the officers club. And we took off to see what the hell was going on. Here is this guy bald naked chasing the waitresses, and they're trying to get away from him. So we tackle this guy and take him, put him to bed because he's drunk. And I said to the guy, Who is that? He said, It's Dave Barr. Okay. I got that name. Anyway, I finally report in, I meet my new battalion commander who had a twitch, the troops all called him "Twitchy 6". And Twitchy 6 is not interested in my background, experience. He had to tell me all about his experience in graves registration in World War II. Well, graves registration is undertakers. So he says, You're assigned to Company C. So I go down to Company C and report in, and who is my company commander? Dave Barr. He was drunk enough that I don't think he remembered me putting him down.
Or you hoped he didn't.
The other thing that happened in Okinawa, during the Korean War a team of psychologists made a determination that people had to have a certain score before they're effective in combat, and if their score fell below that level they would not be effective, so they would strip these people off and send them to Okinawa. So I went from company commander in combat to commanding a platoon again. I got the third platoon. We have reveille. My platoon sergeant was a black N.C.O. by the name of Free Randell. And Free Randell was a super soldier who had a fourth grade education and couldn't read or write. But other than that -- so we each had reveille, and I told Randell to turn the platoon over to me. I called the platoon to attention. I said, Right face, forward march, double time. And after we ran five miles we got back to the company area, they understood what I said when I called them to attention. That is the way I started it with that bunch of people. I did that job for awhile, and then I got every crappy detail in the regiment. And the reason is because these guys were all reserve officers, I'm regular Army. And one of the things you might be interested in, additional duty I was the trial counsel in special court. And before that -- I was the only one that tried 180 cases.
Wow.
They were simple awols and all that sort of thing, but it was a wonderful introduction to the whole Uniform of Military Justice. And that stood me in good standing the rest of my Army career having that knowledge. Somebody thought they were putting me on another crappy detail. Well, then another crappy detail, we were going on an amphibious operation, the regiment, and one of the requirements of going on an amphibious operation people had to know how to swim. There is a regiment of 4,000 people, a thousand of them can't swim. And I got the job of teaching them how to swim. I didn't teach -- I actually taught them drown proofing, how to keep from drowning themselves. We weren't going to the Olympics with this bunch. Another crappy detail I got was to take every one of the rifle platoons of that regiment through the infantry tank team live fire attack trial. There was like 27 platoons. And we're on the first one, and it was the infantry tank conversion on a protective. We're out on a lake, and first time we run this thing, when the tanks went up the hill live fire they didn't depress their muzzle, and as a consequence their rounds went over Mount Anadachi, the center of the island, and landed at the Voice of America Radio Station. The range officer came charging out, 26 had just showed up, the range officer came charging out to figure out who they were going to court martial, and he said, Who is responsible for this? Twitchy 6 says, I am. Right on. But I successfully ran those people live fire without getting anybody injured or killed, which that's the reason I got the detail. But, anyway, I ended up being a company commander of Company D, which was a heavy weapons company. Heavy weapons company had 81 mortars, heavy machine guns, 75 millimeter recoilless rifles. This time it wasn't a logistical problem, the problem was people, didn't have enough. I had people who were in detail all over the island painting rocks and so forth, and I was supposed to be ready to go defend a nuclear storage plant in 45 minutes, which I could fall out six people and supposed to have 200. And finally -- finally I got replacements that had no experience in any of these weapons, so we started from scratch again. But, anyway, before it was all over with 21 companies in that regiment, 20 of them were commanded by captains, I'm the only first lieutenant, I'm the only company that gets a superior Inspector General inspection. All that did was make a bunch of enemies for me, professional jealousy, these guys. My wife was a nurse, and she got a job working for the Army hospital as a GS-7. And we got -- she got to deliver a lot of babies for a lot of our friends. As a matter of fact, I'm going to tonight talk to one of those babies. He's 56 years old. He's a commercial fisherman in the Northwest. But, anyway, we -- I'm going to skip a lot of Okinawa, because it's not a happy time. We get on a ship and come back to the states. The ship was the E.D. Patrick. I'm the senior guy, and I'm the Army troop commander. I have 600 troops. And we go from Okinawa down to Taipei, Taiwan, take on more people. We go to Japan and pick up more people. The people ashore are the ones that loaded the ship, and they had P.F.C.s we picked up in Japan living with their Japanese wives in cabins, and officers with their wives six in one state room, husbands six in another, the wall bunks. So as soon as that ship got three miles off Japan I reloaded that sucker. And the P.F.C.s went in the hole kind of thing. We caught a typhoon, we caught two tropical storms, and we caught another storm coming in the Pacific. Six hundred troops and the only ones that would show up were the K.P.s. Everybody was sea sick.
Sick as can be.
The dependant kids we picked up, they were having a ball. The main recreational lounge had a linoleum floor, and what the kids would do is get up against a bulkhead, and the ship would roll, and they would slide down, and they would turn around. And all day long they had this biggest slide in the world, you know. But when we crossed under the San Francisco Bridge, the Golden Gate, there were a lot of happy people to get there. But from there I went to Fort Benning, Georgia, and this started another enormous episode. Fort Benning I was assigned as a scheduling officer for the R.O.T.C. summer camp. We had 1800 cadets coming in, and they were divided into ten, 180-men companies. They were going to be there for six weeks. They had to have 248 hours of training, everybody had to have the same training. And this is at the infantry school where they also have competition for the training areas and so forth. I went to work on that in January, and they finally showed up in June. And this was before computers, way before computers. And it all went off finally without a hitch. And there is a picture right there me getting promoted to captain at the end of that, 10 August. Then I went to the headquarters Fort Benning as a G-3 special projects officer, G-3 being operations. I end up with all kinds of projects. One of the things I ended up with -- well, I have to go back to that R.O.T.C. summer camp. The guy that's pinning on my captain's bars, his name is Ed Duda. Ed Duda was one of those people that got out of the Army after World War II, and he was the editor of the Toledo Blade newspaper in Ohio, Toledo, Ohio. He was recalled back to duty, along with a whole bunch of other people and decided to stay. Well, I arrived there, and I'm short on education, I'm still carrying my 11th grade credentials. And the first couple of things I wrote, Duda called me over and he gave me some pointers. And he realized -- we had a conversation, he realized what it was, and every day I got an English lesson from Ed Duda teaching me how to write. It was wonderful, which stood me in good stead. Now, my writing style is short sentences, not long, flowing sentences.
Good military style.
As the newspapers write, and that's also the military style. That was a real plus. Anyway, I got to special projects. The commanding general, Herbert G. Powell, major general, and we used to call him "Herbert Gracious Powell", for the G, because he never missed a hand to shake. And I used to watch General Powell come from his quarters over to the headquarters every day. And every day he stopped and he talked to the janitor who maintained this great big building. And I thought it was kind of curious, I started thinking about it. And one day we had a conversation, and he found out everything that was going on in Fort Benning through that janitor. And he made the point, You take care of the little people, they'll take care of you. But, anyway, his name was Shy Meyer. Shy Meyer was a golfer. Shy Meyer had a lot of visitors come to Fort Benning, V.I.P.s, they all played golf. Shy Meyer would go play golf with them. Shy Meyer got to be the chief of staff of the Army, got to be a four-star. Shy Meyer couldn't write worth a damn, and he was a West Pointer, too. So I ended up handling all of the general's personal correspondence. And he called me down, he hands me this letter. He had verbally accepted an invitation to the country club in Columbus, Georgia at a sort of non-descript. How does this one look? Looks suspicious. My wife and I were going to a church in town, we got to know a lot of the civilian community people. So I touched on some of my contacts and said, Oh, that's a scheduled democrat political rally. Well, commissioned officer in uniform can't be caught dead at one of those things. So I call and tell General Powell what this one was all about. And he said, Get me out of it. So I thought about that for awhile, and I said, General, you're going for a flight this weekend. So we flew him out of there. Exigencies of the service. But I handled projects, like we had an organization, Military Order of World Wars that was all retired generals. And I got sent down there, they were having a big meeting, and they wanted to have a big ceremony downtown, "Rededication of the Colors to Peace" is what it was entitled. And the guy that's in charge of this is Ruben Jenkins, the same one that this black soldier had gone "boom boom boom boom boom," he was retired. So I said -- something came up, I said, General, we can't do that, it's illegal. And he looked at me, and he says, I will tell you something, Captain. A commissioned officer can be guilty of deliberately violating regulations, but a commissioned officer cannot be guilty of poor judgment. Well, that stood me in good stead for the rest of my Army career. When I violated regulations it was within -- the judgment was there, defensible is really what he was saying. And I did a lot of crazy things too. And with that ceremony came off we had annually -- twice they had the J.C.O.C., I don't know if you've ever heard of it, Joint Civilian Orientation Conference, where they take people out of civilian sector, CEOs of big companies, people who write plays, and a great hodgepodge of what you would call true V.I.P.s, the elites in our society. They take them to the Air Force for three days, they take them to the Navy for three days, they take them to the Army for three days. Well, this is pretty elaborate, and there is a lot of equipment that gets involved in this having to be brought in. I'm the project -- special projects officer on that. Well, one little flap. They put on an artillery demonstration, and we put a requirement in as part of the Army for an eight-inch self-propelled Howletser, and that's a big weapon. And what they had arranged was coming out of a depot in Seattle, Washington, was going to come to us, we were going to use it for the demonstration, then it was supposed to go to the Marines in Albany, Georgia. Two days before this thing is supposed to arrive I get a message, it was going by rail is the only way, it's stuck in the tunnel in the Rocky Mountains. So I call the artillery people, artillery committee, and the artillery committee chief went directly to General Powell and said we're not supporting him. And so Powell calls me in, I go down there, and I told him what happened. And I said, I diverted so we wouldn't have to pay the transportation for that damned thing, because it's not going to get here anyway. But in the meantime this Colonel was really -- that was one of the little funny incidents that came out of this. From there I went to regular advanced class, my job. We had an advanced class 200 officers, lieutenants and captains, almost a hundred percent were combat experienced from Korea, all infantry officers. Out of that class came at least a dozen general officers later in years, Shy Meyer being one of them, another one Rosco Robinson got to be a four-star, the black officer, first one we had. In the meantime what happened, they changed the organizational concept of the infantry, and they went from what they call the old triangular to the row sit. But the infantry school hadn't cranked up to teach us the row sit. They are still teaching the triangular, which is obsolete. So here is 200 discontented people. And in the meantime General Powell was slipping a little bit too. The first flap -- in the meantime, he got us all dressed in piff helmets, short-sleeve khaki shirts, shorts and high socks, still so brown-shoe Army. And we were all like we're going to Africa or something, just absurd. Then he gives an order that we'll all carry swagger sticks, and we figured that one out. That night we wiped out all of the hardware stores in Columbus, Georgia of their plumber's helpers. And so the next day we all came to class with our plumber's helpers. The first one -- oh, yeah -- the first one that General Powell saw was a captain by the name of McElwayne. And McElwayne was coming across the street from the officers club carrying his plumber's helper, when he gets to the building, General Powell falls in behind him. And McElwayne was late for class, he sat up front, and he came down and he put his plumber's helper on the table, took his hat off, hung his hat on the plumber's helper as the two-star general tapped him on the shoulder. It cost McElwayne 250 bucks. Then he canceled that order. And he said we would quit straggling to class, it was unseemly, 200 officers at lunchtime in the morning come straggling to the headquarters, that we would be marched from the unit area to the headquarters. Classrooms are all in the headquarters building. So the first time we form up to march -- and back in those days -- you remember Mickey Mouse Club? Two hundred captains singing, "M-I-C K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E". So we had second thoughts about that one. We had a reputation of being hell-raisers. Anyway, my faculty advisor was an engineer lieutenant colonel, and I'm an infantry officer and this is the infantry school. And this guy puts on my evaluation that I was weak in tactics. And the way infantry school worked they have a tactical problem and they have a set solution, and if you didn't find their solution on the exam you got cut, they cut you. And if you're a free thinker and you've been in combat, you're screwed, because you're not going to come up. So this engineer guy says I was weak in tactics. Well, anyway, the orders come out, I'm assigned to the tactical department at the infantry school, and I'm assigned to the airborne air mobility committee, and the committee had five people. Well, this was before the birth of the helicopter and the use of a helicopter, but we were teaching it. Well, anyway, this tactical department director, a Colonel Eisenhower, was anti Army aviation, so he broke up this committee I was on after about four or five months, and we were writing the field manual for this. The field manual number is 57-35. People got reassigned, I end up in the company tactics committee with the field manual, not even in a complete draft. So I worked for the next year completing that field manual and got it published, which was a major project. In the meantime, I was teaching raid, I was teaching air mobile operations, I was teaching the simple back for planning sequence, which was ground tactical plan, laying plan, movement plan, loading plan, fire support plan. And I got so enthusiastic about it. I was not an aviator, so I put in an application to go to flight training. In the meantime, the transportation corps was -- they figured they're going to no longer be in the truck business, and they were trying to take over Army aviation. And the transportation corps approached me and said -- of course, I still don't have a college education. I've gone to school at night and all that business -- they offered me flight training and to send me to get my college degree if I would transfer to the transportation corps from the infantry. I whip in my application. A call comes in from Washington, infantry branch, for me to go to Washington to see General Ruben Jenkins, who is the head of the infantry branch. So I get to the Pentagon, and he's got my application, and he's livid, and he's got this thing in his hand, he says, We don't let our outstanding officers go to the F.ing transportation corps, and he tore it up. He says, Dismissed. I said, Not so fast, General, how about flight training? He consented to send me to flight training, but screwed me there too. I got orders for flight training, which is Camp Gary in San Marcos. Camp Gary had a Job Corps Center that was a primary flight training for the Army. Sent me T.D.P.F.O., Temporary Duty Pending Further Orders. Well, I had government quarters at Fort Benning. I couldn't store my household goods because they didn't have the authority to do it. I couldn't -- no authority to move my wife, she was supposed to sit there on top of our house, I guess, for nine months. So instead of doing that I locked the front door and left, still having those quarters at Fort Benning. Went to Camp Gary, and I found regulation A.R.T. 1014, which I will go to my grave remembering that, that said if you're T.D.Y. at a station that has housing in excess of the needs of the permanent party there at, then these quarters can be drawn based on date and rank basis. They had quarters at Camp Gary, so I ended up with two sets of quarters, one in Texas and one in Georgia, which worked well, because we had friends graduated from the advanced course, and they would stay in our quarters at Benning, come by, give us the key while theirs is being cleaned and so on. They decided Camp Gary should be closed. And the way this was decided Lyndon Johnson -- no, it wasn't Johnson -- Sparkman, Senator Sparkman from Alabama was going to support Lydon Johnson on his first run for the presidency, and the deal was if Johnson moved Camp Gary to Alabama to Fort Rucker then he would support him. And then as a sop for the people in San Marcos, they built Canyon Lake. That is how Canyon Lake came about. And Camp Gary then became a Job Corps center. So that was the political deal made on that. You get around San Marcos in those days there were people that just hated Lyndon Johnson with a flame for a lot of chicanery. And they closed Camp Gary. I was the last -- and what they were doing, had to have 110 hours to move to Fort Rucker, Alabama, and people were paying hours right and left. I would not do that. I was going to fly my hours. And as a consequence, the place is closed, I'm still flying. And I landed over the X on the end of the runway with 108 hours, and I ended up going to Fort Rucker with 108 hours, not 110, do something about it. Give me an airplane for two hours, yeah, but I would not. And incidentally, that's a key to success in a military career that you always be unscrupulously honest, never compromise that, and stay with the truth. When people are stealing, you don't steal, when they're taking pencils home, you don't take pencils home, pens home. I left a lot of people by the wayside because of that one variable. I get to Fort Rucker, I'm in a B.O.Q. -- oh, my wife had to leave early at Camp Gary, also that complicated things. Before we left Fort Benning we had had dinner with Colonel, now general, Larson who was at Fort Benning with he and his wife Nell. And we had no children. And we had been on the adoption list in Georgia for something like four years. And it was pretty clear they weren't going to give a Georgia baby to a couple of people from Pennsylvania. So we talked about this with the Larsons over dinner, just my wife and I. And about a week later Nell Larson called my wife and she said, You have a baby. Turned out that a young lady who was in the women's Army corps had gotten pregnant and we -- and she was going to be discharged -- we agreed to support her through having the baby, I got the Army hospital to agree to deliver the baby. Larson insisted they be the God parents.
Well, certainly.
So we set her up in a place to live, and we had a friend and his wife look after her to make sure she didn't go off the deep end and so on, and gave her a monthly allowance. Anyway, the baby came. And my wife drove back to Fort Benning and took possession. There is a real sad sequel to that. This very day this baby is 54 years old, and she's in prison because of drugs, which all occurred when we were in California when she was a teenager. But the Larsons insisted on visiting their God child from time to time. So we had a strong relationship with them. But this is one of the human sides of being at that post, it could happen in any career. I went from -- went to Fort Rucker, went through the second phase of flight training, and I stayed for instrument school. And this is the typical way the Army does things. You're supposed to have four hours flying, four hours ground school. They were running short of funds, so we ended up eight hours flying and no ground school. I was still assigned to Fort Benning because I was T.D.P.F.O., and I was assigned to Larson Army Aviation Command Fort Benning. I have a good-size airfield there and so on, and I was assigned as the assistant S-3 there. Two big projects I did as assistant S-3 -- well, maybe one and a half. I wrote the Civil Defense Plan for Savannah, Georgia, which took months. And Savannah, Georgia is complicated, because Savannah, Georgia is four feet below sea level. But I had tabs of every nurse, every doctor, every emergency, and wrote this plan and turned it over to them. And that was going on all over the country, that the military is writing the Civil Defense Plans for these various cities, because they claimed they didn't have the capability, the money, blah blah blah, all these excuses. The other thing I did I wrote the Basic Manual for Entry Level Aircraft Mechanics. I wrote program text for them. But I went to the first aviation company, which was Caribou Company, got Caribou- qualified. I came up on orders to go to Command and General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, and that was in January of '63. In the meantime there were all kinds of reserve units called to active duty all over the country. You may remember the hunger strike and all that business. We had a reserve unit there, the 414th Transportation Company Aircraft Maintenance Direct Support. They were called up from Greenville, South Carolina. The day before they were called up, they were a trucking company, and now they made them an aircraft maintenance company. On the 23rd of February there were two black soldiers in the company. Company commander got drunk with the troops and tried to lynch those two black soldiers. The next morning I was in command. And here I am regular Army, a guy from Pennsylvania, commanding a South Carolina unit. That unit had been on active duty since October, and supposed to produce 18,600 hours of aircraft maintenance per month. They did not have a screw driver or a pair of pliers. Every one -- I had 146 troops, and every one of them was a shirttail cousin of Strom Thurmond, who was the Senator from South Carolina. I had interesting, unique people. My first sergeant was head of the Bell Telephone Company, my company clerk was head of the Household Finance Corporation office.
I'm familiar with them.
Huh?
I'm familiar with them.
With what?
Household Finance.
That was my company clerk. And I had a soldier who had a Ph.D in chemistry. A little side story on him. I sent him to the C.B.R. school, Chemical Biological School, at Fort Benning, because you have to fill these quotas. And it was a six-week course. The second week they called me and said, We have a soldier we're sending back to you because he's cheating. I said, Have you looked at this man's record? No. You know he's got a Ph.D. in chemistry?
He was too good.
He would take -- what made him suspicious, an hour exam he would take in ten minutes and he would walk out. His name was Belieu. And we would go to the field, and Belieu had to have somebody to hold at all times, because he would step in holes and into trees. Anyway, I took camp on the record on the 23rd of February, and had to get permission from the reserves and everybody for me to be able to do that. I got 13 visitors in 13 days, and I'm trying to get a company on its feet and so on. The last visitor that came was a guy by the name of Rogan. And I was up to here with visitors. And I started off my briefing by saying, Look, there have been 12 people in the last 12 days wasting my time, I haven't done anything for this unit. Why don't we have a cup of coffee and have a chat and you can be on your way and I can get to what I'm supposed to. He said, Go on with your briefing, Captain. I knew something was suspicious, because the commanding general was with him, Hugh P. Harrison was the commanding general. And when I said that Harrison just straightened up in his chair. And Roland pulls out a notebook. And I said, Look, this unit has been on active duty, blah blah blah blah, don't have a screw driver or pair of pliers, and they're supposed to have all this shop equipment, all the allied trades. And Roland just nodded and took notes and left. Ten days later 21 rail cars pull up in the Fort Benning siding with all of these tools and equipment, all in Cosmoline, which is a preservative, a real gooey preservative. Now I've got my hands full. In the meantime, these troops decided they're going to do the hunger strike thing. And what the hunger strike consists of instead of going to the mess hall to eat they go to the P.X. snack bar. So I had the first sergeant follow them out, get on field gear, and we did a 20-mile run/march in the Fort Benning Reservation, and we went up there to commute with nature for a week, and everybody was happy to get sea rations. Nobody went hungry, so we got that put to bed. I did illegal things there in that company; for example, I had several of my soldiers were farmers around Greenville, and if they didn't get their fields plowed and get their crops in -- because they're going off active duty in August -- they were destroyed. So what I did is I put these people on temporary duty, no expense to the government, at their home address. So they were covered by orders, of course I wasn't. I was taking a chance. I grew up in agriculture. So, that's one of the major illegal things I did. Using poor good judgment, violating a regulation using good judgment. Anyway, the military has unit readiness reports that have to be submitted every quarter, and it gives the -- they break everybody down by military skills, how many you have, how many slots you can fill and so forth. I couldn't get airplanes to work on because there was a fixed shop at Fort Benning, civil service civilians. They did the aircraft maintenance, and if we did the maintenance they would be out of a job. So they flat refused to give me any airplanes to work on. So on this unit readiness report I wrote, "This unit is not combat ready, and will not be combat ready until it has an opportunity to work on aircraft for 90 days. To this point we've been refused." The unit readiness report went through Fort Benning. It was a reserve outfit, no one paid attention to those readiness reports. They got the STRICOM in Tampa, Florida. STRICOM is responsible for all the units in the continental U.S., the U.N, U.S. They took this report to General Paul D. Adams, a three-star who is a STRICOM commander. And Paul Adams only smiled when there was death occurring at his feet. Paul Adams had been Donovan's assistant in the O.S.S. in World War II. And this guy was nothing but mean and tough. Anyway, I happened to be at the operations at Larson Field when a Convair pulls up, General Sorels was there and General Harris was there. I said, What the hell is going on? They open the door, and it's General Adams. The alert crew was gone, there was nobody to push up the ladder to get him down, and Adams is screaming, Get me out of this G.D. airplane. So two generals and this captain, we push the ladder up. And Adams comes down the ladder, and he's got my unit readiness report in his hand. And he turns to General Harris and says, I want this unit to have airplanes within the hour. This is about 6 o'clock at night. Do you understand me, General, he says to General Harris, and stomps back up the ladder and the airplane is gone. And Harris looks at me and says, What the hell is that all about? I said, He had my unit readiness report in his hand. I'm the unit he was talking about. So that was a little interesting aside with that. Now, I was on orders to go to Commander General Staff College, the unit was going off active duty. And I would not -- to stay with the unit to the end I would not have had any time to get to Kansas. So I went to see General Harris, I said, Not only I can't do it, I'm going to lose leave. He says, I lose leave every year. That's okay, General, just approve that leave request, because I had over 60 days. And I said, Look, I've endured everything, I've endured it from your staff who has treated me like a reserve officer, and I've endured your command maintenance inspections. Every unit has to be inspected annually, C.M.I. it's called, Command Maintenance Inspection. And the people from headquarters Fort Benning came down, and they're inspecting my unit, and they're gigging people for things -- or gigging us for things like tarp loose, the string on a tarp. This 250 pound guy, you know, pull himself up on this tarp and gets the tie loose. I ran them off. I flat ran them off. Told them to get out of my area. Set off the biggest storm you've ever seen in your life. Nobody had ever done that. Well, it was about time, because they were treating me like reserve. We'll get these guys. Anyway, I told General Harris that I had put up with a lot of this for X number of months. And he finally said he would let me go. And I turned the unit over to a lieutenant who took him off active duty. I wasn't there for that. I had enough indignation. But, you know what, some of those people -- that was 1963, some of those people still call me at Christmas, a hundred years later. But, in the meantime, I activated a similar unit, the 335th Aircraft Maintenance Support. The other thing -- the other way I got work for, we had a Caribou Company at Fort Benning. The Caribou is a 28,000-pound airplane, twin engine that had the C-54 engines in them, the R2000. They all had to be modified for overseas flight. We flew them to first Thailand and then to Vietnam. In order to get those aircraft modified I took over the modification, and I ran this reserve unit in three eight-hour shifts around the clock, and we got every one of those airplanes ready in time. I test flew every single one of them, 18 airplanes. Had problems with only one that lost an engine about a hundred miles outside of Turkey. And they went to Meto Power with a good engine, which burned it out. We ended up changing two engines in that airplane, but the other 17 trouble free. Makes you kind of proud.
I don't blame you.
Commander General Staff College, I arrived there the regular course, and I was promoted to major en route, and they assigned us quarters, four families to a converted barracks, the old wooden barracks. And they looked at those, and man, if this is what happens to you when you get promoted, make sure I never want to make lieutenant colonel. One of the families, the wife, Adrianne Hollander greeted me, and said, What class of West Point did you graduated in? I said, I didn't graduate from West Point. Oh, well, where did you get your R.O.T.C. commission? I don't have an R.O.T.C. commission, I have an O.C.S. commission. Oh, she says, well, how much education do you have? I mean, this is an Army wife interviewing me. And I said, I have one year of college. She said, How did you get here? The Army is a large, administrative organization that makes a lot of administrative mistakes, and I'm here obviously as a result of an administrative error.
Great answer.
And she and her husband proceeded to be a pain in the neck for the next coming year. As a matter of fact, he retired as a lieutenant colonel. And that in fact -- I was 31 years of age, I was the youngest officer in the class, we had 13 Ph.D. students who were Ph.D.s, and you know what the hell they were doing for the last dozen years of their whole Army career, going to school at government expense.
Sure.
And, anyway, I'm there about a month, the Department of the Army calls me and says, We have a problem. Oh, yeah, what's your problem? Well, you don't have a college education. Hey, if you want me to have a college education you send my butt like you did the rest of these people. And they said, How many credits do you have? Trying to scrape everything together, I think I've got up to about two years. And then I got a call to go to the Education Center and take end-of-course college tests. So I picked up 16 more hours taking a test, because if you're test wise, all those standard tests are easy. So then they had me in a position where I could go to Park College in Parkville, Missouri on boot strap, at no expense to the government kind of thing. And that's how I got my undergraduate degree at a civilian college, which is good for a lot of stories. They had other people they gathered up around the country that went to that same class, probably 15 of us. They had a reception for the new students. So then our class leader was Lew Millet. In our military, Lew Millet had the Congressional Medal of Honor. Lew Millet got the Congressional Medal of Honor in Korea leading a bayonet charge when they ran out of ammunition. Lew was a flamboyant character, always had a handle bar mustache, very good guy. So, he went to the college president and said, We have been segregational. So he had a reception in his house just for us, so we decided we'd do it formal. So the wives in formal gowns, officers all in dress blues, and Lew came in late with a Congressional Medal around his neck. Now, we decided to reciprocate, and we decided to reciprocate on our terms. And our terms were we're going to have a party at the Hunt Club at Fort Leavenworth, Fort Leavenworth is close at hand. And we invited all these professors and their wives. And we had the usual thing they had in the military, hour of cocktails and then dinner and so forth. Well, this was a Presbyterian college, so these professors were all watching the college president what he was going to do about the cocktail thing. And when he stepped up to the bar and said, Give me an old fashioned, that was the checkered flag. So these guys were having such a good time after the first hour, we extended the cocktail hour another hour for a second hour. That was a mistake.
Should have had dinner.
Halfway through that said, Go get your professor and get some food into him. So this party went until 3 o'clock in the morning. These guys had the time of their lives. Monday class, my department director Dr. C. Stanley Urban, first class, he says, I would like to apologize to you people. He said, I would like to apologize, I don't know what for, but as drunk as I got, I must have done or said something. And his second comment was he could not get over the dignity with which we treated our wives and the dignity with which we treated each other. He and his fellow professors felt like a bunch of clods, you know, so that was a nice compliment.
It was.
Now, the problem when I left the Command and General Staff College --
Do you want to take a break. (Off the record discussion.)
Okay, I ended up going to Vietnam in May of 1965 after having gone through the Defense Language Institute and learning Vietnamese, after I went through the Special Forces School at Fort Bragg, I took command of the 61st Aviation Company, which again the unit was in shambles. The reason it was in shambles is because they had gone over as a unit the year before, the whole unit rotated at the same time after one year tour. The first aviation company had been there, they had been withdrawn out of the Caribou Company, because McNamera's thousand-man pull back. The war was over. That was in '64. We relinquished command of the unit in October '64 and moved to support command staff where, because I was a Leavenworth graduate, General Odem, Delk M. Odem, said he needed me on his staff, and I was being wasted as a company commander. And I did end up being the Phase 1 build up for the build up of U. S. Forces in Vietnam. And we had a troop list of a quarter of a million people. The first units arrived the 1st of May, 1965. I rotated the 20th of May, my tour was over. I went to the 4th Infantry Division. The 4th Infantry Division not long after they got there got alerted for Vietnam. They were short of troops, so we took in 8,000 people from the street, put them through basic training. I was the division training officer, basic training again. I was given -- sort of given an option whether I wanted to go back to Vietnam with the division or be reassigned. And I had two little kids that were adopted, my wife said, I'm entitled to a husband, they're entitled to a father. So I opted not to go back with the division, and I was reassigned as the Inspector General at Fort Rucker, Alabama. And that I could spend eight hours on. Inspector General gets his authority from Congress, and it goes back to Otto Von Stueben at Valley Forge. That is when the Congress authorized the Inspector General, and for me to be detailed Inspector General they had to run a mini bill through Congress. And I was a brand new lieutenant colonel, which gives you one hell of a lot of authority, particularly when I was investigating my own commanding general. It was kind of complicated, because he also made out my report card.
A little check and balance there.
And it's an assignment where you don't make any new friends, you lose a few, which you should have lost, and your good friends stay with you, because you inspect, investigate. One investigation there were 32 less officers on active duty kind of thing. Hard on my wife because at ladies functions she would go up to a group and they'd say, What does your husband do? She's say, He's the Inspector General, and they would turn and walk away.
She learned how popular you were.
If you are behaving yourself you don't have a problem with the Inspector General. One incident that happened while I was there that is worth telling, we had a chief of staff, what was his name, but anyway, he lived next door to the general in quarters, and there was another colonel, his wife lived next door. Reynolds Condon was his name. Reynolds Condon tells his wife he's going off on T.D.Y. for the weekend. What Reynolds Condon did was sneak next door, because that colonel was gone somewhere. The house catches on fire. The two of them are drunk, passed out, and the house catches on fire from a cigarette. The fire department goes in and drags them out, both of them stark naked on the front lawn. Reynolds Condon's wife shows up, and she sees who it is, and she is standing there kicking him as hard as she can. He's passed out drunk, she said, Reynolds, you son of a bitch. Anyway, Fort Rucker was a bit of a Peyton Place. I have to stop there, because that second tour in Vietnam, it justifies telling. If you want to stop, I'll tell him. I was divorced the 7th of September, 1975. I might put -- I might add 7 September is a significant day in my life. That's when I went in the Army, that's when I was divorced, that's when I was entered in the O.C.S. Hall of Fame.
Is your birthday in September too?
No, but it should be. And my wife and I split the blanket. She went to Pennsylvania with our down syndrome son, who was five years old, and the daughter who is now in prison. Our son went with me and ended up going in the Army, spending 20 years, retired as a master sergeant, and is head of a construction materials distribution center in Boca Raton, Florida; four kids, couple of grand kids, now a couple of great grand kids.
How nice.
And I led in with that because I am highly skilled in public law 82-282, Uniform Services Former Spouses Protection Act. At almost 37 years after -- since the divorce I'm still paying that $26,000 to my former spouse as community property. Now, to say the least, that doesn't -- losing that much money doesn't make for a comfortable retirement. So I was retired one day and went to work -- kind of a unique area. A neighbor across the street was working on remodeling a house, and he'd seen all the furniture that I had made, wood working I had done, and he asked me to help him with the finished work, because he couldn't find someone to do that. And then I got picked up -- now, that guy was a big deal -- what the hell's his name, you probably know his name -- so I got picked up by other people to do work for them. What I ended up doing is from here to here every house has something wrong with it, every house has got a drippy faucet, leaking toilet, broken window, and I ended up doing from there all the way to adding rooms to houses and a hell of a lot of painting and so forth. I did that for ten years, and I was working about 80 hours a week, and was in order to keep the wolf away. I worked myself into a heart attack with that. In the meantime, we have two daughters, my present wife and I. We home schooled them, because basically we couldn't afford to send them to public school. That was one of the aspects of it. The other aspect is that I had written my masters thesis on the educational system in South Vietnam. And what intrigued me was that the Vietnamese are 98 percent literate in their language, and how does that happen? Where I'm sitting in Corpus today it's 60 percent. It's because of family member teaching family member, elders teaching their kids and so forth. So we let the kids go to high school, because they were both athletes. Both graduated top -- right in the top of their class, second or third. Katie got a four-year scholarship to Rice -- five year -- five year. She did it in four years with a double major. Josh got scholarships with the University of Dallas. Now, they both worked waitresses, all kinds of -- as a matter of fact, Katie worked at Giorgio Armani's in Dallas for awhile. Katie -- both went as missionaries to Belize; they were there a couple of years. Came back. Josh went to Dallas, worked for a loan company, Katie went to Texas A and M, got her masters, graduated with a G.P.A. of 40. Katie -- that put her in a position of selecting any college in the country. She selected College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. Got her Ph.D. 2nd of December. She is currently assistant professor at Ole Miss. Started her first classes the 17th of January. Natasha is a nun in a convent. She's currently in Bosque, New Mexico, also having some physical problems. Physical problems as a result of the Nepal tour. She's got non-infectious autoimmune hepatitis that the University of Mexico is working on the problem, along with Mayo Clinic. So that's the kids. My wife is a sewer, and she's at home right now sewing, quilting, the whole sewing thing. Now, we're just an average family of four, we've got four bachelor's degrees, two master's degrees, one Ph.D., and one high school drop out, that's me.
Well, I see you're going to be 81 this month.
Yes, sir. How about you?
I was 80 in September.
Oh, okay. Just a kid.
That's right. That's right. You've got, what, eight or ten months on me.
Yeah.
Well, do you prefer to be referred to as "Colonel" or "Inspector"?
Rick.
Now, come on.
I've been a colonel for over 40 years.
I thought maybe the title of "Inspector" was more -- was superior to "Colonel".
That's history.
Isn't that superior to colonel in the ranks?
Don't know. I never got into that discussion.
I don't know either. I don't know either. I want to thank you. I thoroughly enjoyed visiting with you and listening to you. And I could relate to an awful lot of the things you talked about and the people you talked about. And it was a pleasure to meet you. And I want to thank you for serving our country.
You're quite welcome, and thank you for your service.
No, not as long as yours.
We could get Katrina signed you.
I wanted you to know, I appreciate it.
I used to be able to step out on a platform in an infantry school and talk for eight hours one day and four the next as an instructor.
It was a pleasure.