Rio Grande Valley veterans remember Korean War

HARLINGEN — Sixty years ago, thousands of soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen were called to serve in the Korean War, even as Americans were still adjusting to peacetime after World War II.

The North Korean People’s Army invaded South Korea on June 25, 1950.

In what has often been called a “police action,” “the Korean Conflict” or “The Forgotten War,” U.S. and other United Nations forces joined South Koreans to stem the tide of North Korean and communist Chinese forces pushing south from 1950-53.

For most Americans who served there, such names for the war are insulting. For them, this war was all too real.

In the rush to send troops to Korea for a war that wasn’t expected or wanted, men from the Rio Grande Valley were among those drafted or joining the armed forces.

But the people of the Valley have always been patriotic and ready to answer the call.

Several Korean War veterans interviewed for this story were born and raised in the Valley. Others were Winter Texans who decided to make this area their year-round home, or had once served at Harlingen Army Air Field or Harlingen Air Force Base and returned here to retire.

They survived the hell of Korea.

After three years of ferocious fighting, a cease-fire agreement ended the war in stalemate, with the country divided at the 38th parallel. UN troops have been on guard there with South Korean forces ever since.

Of the 5.7 million Americans who served in the Korean War, 33,574 were killed in battle during those three years, according to Defense Department statistics. By some counts, more than 50,000 Americans never came home from Korea.

A total of 103,284 Americans were wounded in battle.

After the firing of Army Gen. Douglas M. MacArthur on April 11, 1951, by President Harry Truman, the United States’ concept of “limited warfare” was strictly applied, said James B. Luck of Harlingen, who was a young Army officer in Korea at the time.

“MacArthur wanted to be much more aggressive,” Luck said. “He wanted to go into China and shoot down their planes and even invade China. Truman was afraid it would start a third world war.”

While Luck remembers supervising troops and calling in artillery barrages, other Valley veterans recall weeks of sleeping in the mud, eating outdated C-rations, frostbite, malaria and warding off grenade attacks by North Koreans.

“The Korean War was an unheralded war,” Luck said. “That bugged me for a long time.”

Luck, 79, and his wife Peggy lived in the Rio Grande Valley from 1981 to 1986, residing in Harlingen, Weslaco and South Padre Island, he said. They moved to El Paso and returned to Harlingen to retire in 1990. Peggy died a year ago, he said.

Born in Napoleon, Ohio, Luck grew up in Coldwater, Mich., he said. He left Western Michigan Normal College in 1951 as a sophomore to join the Army.

“I was about to get drafted,” he said. “I enlisted with the proviso that I go to Officer Candidate School.”

He went to Fort Sill, Okla., for artillery training, but then went on to OCS, he said.

After graduation he was sent to Louisiana to spend six months supervising hastily activated Ohio National Guard troops, a situation he labeled a “hornet’s nest.”

When he got to Korea, “the thing had deteriorated to the point where it was strictly trench warfare, like the First World War,” Luck said. “But the Chinese weren’t giving up. There were a whole lot of serious battles. I got into one.

“I was a forward observer with the infantry,” he said. “I had the field artillery that I could call on. I was in the second Pork Chop Hill battle.”

The Battle of Pork Chop Hill comprised two related infantry battles during the spring and summer of 1953 while an armistice was being negotiated.

To Americans, the battles were controversial because of the many soldiers who were killed for territory of no real value.

“It was bad, in the end of April ‘53,” Luck said. “We had lost (Pork Chop Hill) and took it back and then were about to lose it again.”

In addition to field artillery, another American resource could be called upon, Luck said.

“We had the battleship New Jersey sitting off the coast and here I am, on Pork Chop Hill, and I’m calling in fire.”

Waves of Chinese soldiers came in, the first group with rifles and no extra ammunition, Luck said. The next wave carried bandoleers of ammunition but had no rifles, he said.

“They’d pick up rifles off the dead soldiers,” Luck said.

“Here I was, a second lieutenant, calling in artillery from the New Jersey,” he said.

“I got three rounds from the 16-inchers on the New Jersey,” Luck said. “When those things came in, they looked like freight trains. I swear to God! They were big, they were huge!”

After 108 days in combat, he became an aerial artillery observer, working in a small plane above the battlefields, Luck said.

At the end of his tour in Korea, a colonel tried to talk him into making the Army his career, Luck said.

Instead he went into the Army Reserve, serving until 1962, he said.

In civilian life, he began work in radio at WOWO in Fort Wayne, Ind., and later started a radio station in Lima, Ohio.

He worked around the United States, including in the Rio Grande Valley, at various management jobs, including positions at the Camelot retirement center in Harlingen, the Weslaco Chamber of Commerce and the South Padre Island Convention and Visitors Bureau.

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Frank W. Marchan Sr., of Port Isabel, was a corporal in the 224th Regimental Combat Team.
He was drafted in November of 1950.

“There were two buses of us from the Rio Grande Valley,” he said. “We went to Corpus Christi for physicals, then to Fort Sam Houston. In four or five days we were at Camp Cooke, California.”

In Japan, his group had extensive training, he said. In Korea, his worst combat experience was June 16-17, 1952, a night excursion raid to capture prisoners, Marchan said.

Although enlisted men knew the terrain well in the area of Castle Rock, his unit’s officers got lost. When they finally asked enlisted soldiers to show them where they were, they huddled under a poncho with a flashlight to look at a map, Marchan said.

“That’s when all hell broke loose,” he said. “Artillery fire, grenades, burp guns.”

Their commanding officer was killed instantly and the next-in-command was seriously wounded, Marchan said.

“I was knocked unconscious for a few minutes.”

Although medics ordered him to go to the rear, he refused because he was handling the Browning automatic rifle, which his unit needed badly, Marchan said.

“Out of 80 men, we had 55 percent casualties,” he said. “Also some of the South Koreans were killed, too.”

Eventually he and other survivors got back to an aid station, but within a few weeks, they were back on the front lines, he said.

He served in Korea from Feb. 3 to Oct. 26, 1952, Marchan said.

But the experience affected him the rest of his life, including post-traumatic stress disorder for which he still receives treatment, he said. Nightmares, alcoholism and temper outbursts have ruined much of his life, he said.

“There was nobody to receive us when we came back,” he said.

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Marchan was in the same unit, the 40th Infantry Division, as several other Valley soldiers, including former Cameron County Judge Moises Vela and Harlingen auto dealer Herman Wise.

Vela said he had hazardous duty for a time. He was a company clerk and was assigned to messenger duty because the previous messenger was killed by mortar fire.

“I was shot at by mortars,” Vela said. “I was snowbound when I was a messenger, but I was moving like a bat out of hell. A mortar almost hit me, but it did not explode.”

Although he was an enlisted man, he was later the information and intelligence officer for his unit, he said.

Later in his service in Korea, he was transferred to battalion headquarters, Vela said. He was promoted to sergeant first class.

“That came because I was a hell of a typist,” he said. “That helped me in the war and it helped me in law school.”

Wise was a mortarman from November 1950 to October 1952, he wrote in a letter to the Valley Morning Star.

“Early in 1952, we were sent to the front lines in Korea,” he wrote. “We fought in the central front on the Kumsong-Kumhwa area, also known as the Iron Triangle.”

He recalls an incident at Kumsong in April 1952.

“We were digging on the side of a hill to build a bunker when all of the sudden a mortar increment ignited and there was an explosion,” he wrote. “Fire trapped all of us. One of our comrades, Pfc. Garrison, tripped and fell and caught fire. We ran to help him and took his clothes off, but he was badly burned.”

On June 8, 1952, an enemy mortar round ignited a mortar storage shelter and ignited more than 100 mortar rounds, Wise said.

“Pfc. Marquez ran out of the bunker engulfed in flames. We tried to provide our comrades with first aid to what would be their fatal injuries.”

Wise received the Purple Heart for injuries he received on June 15, 1952, he wrote.

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Glen Williams received his draft notice in September 1950 after graduating a year early from high school in Williams, Minn., he said. He reported for duty in February 1951 and soon was on a ship bound for Korea.

“There were 5,200-plus GIs on that ship. … After running into a typhoon, practically everyone on the ship was seasick except me. I got to do KP for three days in a row because I’d never been seasick or airsick.”

There was little additional training before going into combat, Williams said.

In Japan, there were only a few days of training.

“They called it mountain training and it was in that black volcanic ash on the sides of Mount Fuji,” he said. “It was very hot, very dirty and no wind in the daytime and you’d sweat, sweat, sweat,” he said.

“They put us on another ship. We docked at Pusan, Korea. They put us on a train with a bunch of flatcars, no sides, no nothing, with a steam locomotive and we headed north.

“The train stopped up in the mountains, east of Seoul, at a little crossroads called Ouijonbu,” he said. “The town was mostly destroyed.

“There were bleached bones on the ground and everywhere,” he said. “We started marching north, we crossed the 38th parallel. It was getting dark and there was a pretty hefty firefight going on ahead of us. There were airplane strikes, artillery and tracers.”

After being held in reserve for a few days, his unit remained on the front lines until he left on Feb. 29, 1952, Williams said.

During a patrol in September 1951, he and fellow soldiers decided it was safe to take a bath in a river, Williams said. They hadn’t bathed for a month.

While they were washing up, a group of Chinese soldiers attacked, so the Americans quickly grabbed their clothes and weapons to run for cover, he said. But suddenly he started running back to the river’s edge.

An officer yelled, “Williams, don’t be a hero.”

Williams replied, “Hero, heck! I need my teeth to live.”

He had left his upper plate on a rock while bathing, he said. The Chinese were so startled to see a tall, naked, red-headed man running toward them they stopped firing long enough for him to grab his false teeth and retreat, Williams recalled.

When his platoon leader was wounded in an artillery attack, Williams proclaimed himself platoon leader because he didn’t want to take orders from inexperienced Tennessee National Guard soldiers, he said.

When he was wounded, he refused to be sent away for medical care because he didn’t want to lose the position of platoon leader, Williams said.

His memories of Korea include dirt, smoke and phenomenal noise, he said. He recalls boils on the back of his neck in Korea and suffering from malaria in Japan.

After returning home to study at the University of Minnesota, he found the economy was very bad on the home front. So he joined the Air Force, became an officer and pilot, remaining in the military for 24 years.

While stationed at Harlingen Air Force Base, he married Julia Bishop of Rio Hondo.

In the Air Force, he flew missions over the North Pole, served in the Strategic Air Command and flew fighter planes in the Vietnam War, Williams said.

In later years, he earned a master’s degree in meteorology, taught physics and math at Texas State Technical Institute (now College)-Harlingen and at South Texas High School, Med High and the Science Academy, Williams said.

He feels fortunate because he was crippled by polio as a child and his parents ignored doctors’ advice to give up on him. They pulled him to school in a little wagon and he gradually was able to learn to walk again, he said.

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Dennis Bennett, of La Feria, was born and raised in Rockton, Ill.

He quit high school after his freshman year to work at a factory where door hinges for cars and other products were made.

While angry at his employers, he let his friend, Chan Fisher, talk him into joining the Army, Bennett said.

They were sent first to Kansas and then deployed to the Far East in November 1949. But his friend Fisher was soon given a medical discharge.

“He had asthma,” Bennett said. “And I got stuck there.”

“I didn’t even know my brother and three other guys had signed up,” he said. “When we went to get sworn in, we all were there. We all took basic training at Fort Riley, Kansas.”

When the Korean War started, he was in Japan in a unit with soldiers who had been occupation troops in Korea after World War II, he said.

His unit was suddenly shipped back to Korea with old weapons, out-of-date C-2 rations and no cold weather clothing, he said.

“Half the hand grenades wouldn’t explode,” Bennett said. “There were no front lines, more like guerilla warfare. We got our hand-to-hand (combat) and bayonet practice in Korea. We never did go to Mount Fuji (in Japan for training). The Japanese knew we were going to Korea before we did.”

He served in the Fifth Cavalry, 1st Cavalry Division, 5th Regiment, Co. B, 1st Platoon, 1st Battalion, Bennett said. He was in Korea from July 1950 until May 1951, he said.

Bennett said Americans and other UN troops had already defeated the North Korean Army in 1950, but weren’t allowed to finish the job.

“We took the North Korean capital (Pyongyang) and went on north from there,” he said.
But the war entered a new phase later that year when a huge force of Communist Chinese “volunteers” suddenly intervened.

“We were within seven miles of the Yalu River when we hit the Chinese,” he said.

The war then became a long two-year struggle toward stalemate, but the fighting did stop the march of communism where it began — near the 38th parallel.

“All the schools had pictures of (Soviet dictator) Joe Stalin, which we shot to hell,” Bennett said. “We couldn’t shoot him, but we shot his picture.”

He has bitter memories of Korea, Bennett said.

“A lot of people lost their feet, their toes, to frostbite,” he said. Army issue “shoe-packs” caused feet to sweat, then freeze, he said.

The M*A*S*H television series, a comedy based loosely on mobile field hospital units that operated in Korea, didn’t impress him, Bennett said.

“No, it was all Hollywood,” he said.

“I wouldn’t even watch it,” he said of the popular program. “There wasn’t anything even close to that (type of battlefield medical care),” he said.

Months of living in combat areas and sleeping in foxholes with no showers, clean clothes or hot food is what he remembers, Bennett said.

After returning to the United States, he was in the hospital with malaria, Bennett said. “They gave me some kind of shot. Then they sent me to Fort Benning, Georgia … We trained school troops on all the weapons at Fort Leonard Wood (in Missouri).

“I was out in November ‘52.”

The Korean War left him with a bitter taste, Bennett said.

“It’s the forgotten war, except for the ones that were there,” he said. “We don’t forget.”

Allen Essex is a reporter for the Valley Morning Star in Harlingen.