6/25/1950 - North Korea invades South Korea. A small conflict in a rather remote corner of the world...
Meanwhile, at a junior
college in MS, this handsome young man with blue eyes & a great smile was
arriving from Choctaw County in SW Alabama to go to school, and to play
football on a pretty good JC team.
I believe it was the
following summer that the entire football team--that's the entire team!—were
activated into the military. (They were
all in the Reserves; full scholarships didn’t really happen back then). They volunteered their services to go take a
stand in South Korea because their country thought that was worth doing.
The details of that
conflict & the countries who participated's motivations are murky.
Which is OK, as this is not a geo-political analysis of that war. Or any
war. Today, 60+ years later, the Korean war has never officially
ended. There's a line of demarcation that's guarded on both sides, and
official hostilities have been at a cease-fire for some decades now.
Back to the point of this
entry: The young man from Choctaw County & his teammates scattered to
various branches of the service & various training centers. He
trained to be a combat medic. His training would unfortunately come in
quite handy in the months to come in the combat-laden frozen wasteland that was
much of the Korean peninsula, ca. the early 1950s.
He survived,
thankfully. (I say "thankfully" for reasons that will become
clear shortly) To his dying day, he was
still a tough guy physically & emotionally.
Mentally, his mind began slipping gears during the last couple of years
of his life. Courage beyond what I can
imagine, both during wartime and after coming home. Worked building airplanes in Mobile, AL,
before a hearing problem ended that job for him. Married.
Had a couple of children. When
the hearing problem kicked into high gear, he moved his family back to Choctaw County. He built the house they lived in on a pretty
spot of land that he cleared off to raise cows & have a few horses for
fun. His youngest child
"helped" him build, since she wasn't in school yet. Ever met a softie who's worked with cows
& horses for much of his life? Me
neither; they don’t exist. I recall
going to feed the cows with him some 25 years ago. I was in my 20s, he was in his 50s...he tossed
a big 100-lb sack of feed over each shoulder & away he went. I tried to toss one over one shoulder; it didn't
go well, & I was actively lifting weights at the time. As I say, he
was a tough guy.
I knew him pretty well
for the last 35 or so years of his life; 31 of those as his son-in-law, who
married the younger daughter who helped him build the house.
She has the same gorgeous
blue eyes as her Daddy, plus the same hard work ethic. She loves the land like he does. She is as close to a Daddy's girl as a tough
cattleman/soldier will ever have. This
particular cattleman/soldier was just crazy about his grandchildren, who added
a dimension of tenderness to him during his last 30 or so years. They, in turn, dearly loved their
"Papa."
All of that said to say
this: it's Memorial Day, a day on which we honor our military, as we should on
a daily basis in my opinion. But my challenge to each of us is to take
the time to ask questions along the lines of "so, what was it like?"
and then shut up & listen. Or perhaps a step back from that
emotional brink would be just to say "thank you" to them.
A while back, I listened to some tell
their stories on the radio while I was driving home; at times, it was rather
hard to see. (Must've been rain or fog or something...or
something...) One of the radio stories was another guy who was in Korea
& as squadron commander ordered his best friend from back home to go do
some recon; several months later, the guy found his friend about to die in a
Chinese P.O.W. camp. He buried his friend (& fellow P.O.W.) just
minutes later on a hillside there in North Korea. Another guy was just back
from Iraq a few years back, where he was at the proverbial end of the spear,
doing necessary-but-regrettable things outside the wire at night with his
unit. Some jackass HS acquaintance said to him shortly after he returned,
"So, you're like a certified baby-killer now, huh? What's that
like?" (If "jackass" is offensive & not the right
word, there are others that are more offensive and perhaps more appropriate...)
Papa's Korea stories unfolded
over several decades now, in small bits & pieces. It seems that once he had a grandson, they
unfolded a bit more rapidly & freely.
They were buried deeply within his memory, locked away until that
glorious day when the swords are hammered into plowshares & spears into
pruning hooks, at which point the stories will no longer be needed. But they did spill out every now & then. Mostly around Christmas. Especially if Christmas is a cold one. "I remember that Christmas we spent in
the field in Korea..." Usually a quick, short piece of a story,
occasionally adorned with a picture or the worship bulletin from the Christmas
Day service there. Just little glimpses into the unspeakable horrors that
we all (understandably) blow past on holidays like Veterans Day. "I remember going around from sleeping
bag to sleeping bag in the morning & checking to see who was still alive
& who had either frozen to death or suffocated when the snow covered their
face"..."See this little guy from the Phillipines in the
picture? I've seen him stack up North Koreans like rats using just his
bayonet & knife"..."I remember seeing Chinese troops line up
across the valley from us & just walk toward our lines, getting mowed down
by our fire. They figured we'd run out of bullets before they ran out of soldiers”…“I
remember our unit’s machine gun barrel starting to bend due to excessive heat
caused by shooting boxes of shells non-stop…”
I love the parades &
the pageantry of Veterans Day. I'm
descended from a long line of patriotic types, in the best sense of the word. And I married into that too. As we shake hands with those who came back
& have a moment of silence for those who didn't & as we celebrate
victories they won...PLEASE take time to try to listen to them if they'll talk
about it. (I know others who won't; I certainly am not going to insist
that they go back in their memories to the darkest days of their young lives!) Try to fathom what seeing & experienced
things like this small-town boy from Choctaw County AL experienced when he was
in Korea does to one's soul & psyche.
I close with this.
A pastor I know in small-town north MS told me that when the movie "Saving
Private Ryan" came out, he had several of his salt-of-the-earth tough guy
farmers with families & homes & such come to his office, & sit just
weep about memories they had locked away, never sharing them with anyone.
Not even their brides of 50+ years. Seeing "Saving Private
Ryan" triggered those memories & brought them to the surface. My
pastor friend said, through his & my shared tears, one guy who's a deacon @
his church & a very quiet, gentle, hard-working farmer shared that every
Christmas, every birthday, & every family gathering of any kind brought
clearly to mind the faces of German soldiers he killed in Europe in late 1944
& early 1945. The guy said it
always bothered him greatly that those young Germans would never experience
marriage or family or owning a home or children or grandchildren...
That, ladies & gents,
is so very often what's behind the sober salutes & pinning on of the medals
& attendance at the squadron reunions & the faraway stares today.
>>Take 3 & 1/2 minutes<< & be humbled, blessed, & broken as today's soldiers honor their predecessors with a LONG overdue welcome home.
Thank you, Father, that
you raise up men & women who put on a uniform & take an oath &
undergo tough training in order to be willing to ship out to places like
Normandy...North Africa...Saipan...Iwo Jima...Korea...Viet
Nam...Afghanistan...Iraq...
Thank you for the freedoms we have, which have NEVER
been free.
Thank you especially that you've promised that day...that
GLORIOUS, AMAZING day...when they will all hammer their swords into plowshares &
their spears into pruning hooks & they shall remember war no more.
Until then, may we as a nation honor them and be as thankful for them
collectively & individually as I am for Jimmy Mixon, "Papa" to me
& my children. Grant them all peace today, Father.
Gratefully & humbly,
bb
bb
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