Article from the Limestone Spirit
From Pacific patrols to Korea's cold ground
Wednesday, November 04, 2009
By Erica Jacobson
ericalejacobson@gmail.com
Limestone veterans share common hope future generations will
listen.
Wendell E. Powers was just a Limestone County boy looking to get
home and start working in construction again.
James Patteson still had fresh memories of the remote Japanese
island where he had climbed dead volcanoes and camped on weekend
trips off base.
And
Clarence R. "Bob" Smaltz was a West Virginia native who had just
spent months processing other soldiers and sailors out of the
service.
None of the men, whether it was Powers and Patteson finishing
their service during the Korean War or Smaltz being discharged
from the Navy in April 1945, thought of themselves as a veteran
right away. It would take decades before they wanted to connect
with others who had served, to tell stories as well as listen.
Ten years ago, Patteson wandered into the Alabama Veterans
Museum and Archives in Athens. He's been back regularly ever
since as a volunteer.
"I
liked what I saw and like the people in here," he said. "There's
a lot of good stories in here."
Each man, each veteran, has his own story.
Powers
For Powers, a past president and now vice president of the
museum, being drafted into the Army in 1952 during the Korean
War meant leaving behind his job driving a dump truck in
Limestone County. In the whirlwind of the next few months, the
man who had never gotten far from northern Alabama found himself
in Tennessee, then North Carolina, and then California.
Just before he shipped out to Korea, he was
able to see for a few hours his brother, Bobby Powers, a U.S.
Marine. Bobby Powers had just come in on the General Gordon, the
same boat Wendell Powers was due to leave on in just days. If
the two talked much about Korea, Wendell Powers said, he doesn't
recall the specifics, but one bit of brotherly advice was
invaluable.
"He gave me some seasickness pills," the
Athens man said. "He told me to take the pills and don't quit
eating so I didn't get sick.
"I'll tell you what, it was a lot of them
sick and they were really sick. Some of them, we hadn't got out
of the Golden Gate Bridge."
The ship crossed the International Date
Line just in time to completely skip May 7, 1952, what would
have been Wendell Powers' 21st birthday. Once in Korea, he was
sent north to patrol the area right around where leaders from
both countries met regularly.
He often saw the poverty of the country -
Koreans working in their rice fields directly in the line of
fire and small children rooting for food in the Army dumps or
snatching watches off the wrists of soldiers offering them
candy. Other times, during night patrols, it was so dark he
couldn't see his hand in front of his face. Within days of
reaching the combat zone, one of the men he had been in basic
training with had been killed, another taken prisoner.
The Southerner devised a way of rolling
into his blankets and sleeping bag to stay warm while he slept
outside. Still, it got so cold that he would wake up with frost
on him. He got used to the gallows humor.
"They pitched me a flak jacket," he said of
reporting to a company of fellow soldiers one evening. "They
said, 'I hope you have better luck than the last guy who had
it.'
"Every day was the same. You didn't know
whether it was Sunday or Wednesday. They were all the same."
On the boat ride back to the United States
at the end of his tour, Wendell Powers found the ship's chapel
very different. Where it had been packed on the way to Korea,
there were now plenty of empty seats.
"I guessed they passed the danger," the
77-year-old man said. "That's the opinion some of them had."
Patteson
Patteson, too, spent time hunkered down in
a sleeping bag overseas during the Korean War, but he didn't
make it past the Japanese island of Hokkaido. There, when it
snowed nine months of the year, he did mostly clerical work and
explored the cold, mountainous region with fellow soldiers on
the weekend.
One of his first forays off base was to see
a movie in a nearby town. He and some others paid their yen and
settled in among a purely Japanese crowd to watch a John Wayne
movie, only none had given much thought to what day it was.
"It was the anniversary of Hiroshima and
they started showing film of that," Patteson, now 80, said.
"When we could, we got up and we left."
He had enlisted in the Army near San
Antonio on April Fool's Day 1952 because a cousin tipped him off
he was about to be drafted. And while some couldn't wait to get
to combat, Patteson, now an Athens resident, said he was happy
with his desk.
"I was glad nobody was shooting at me," he
said.
Smaltz
The day after the Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese
attack on Pearl Harbor, Smaltz tried to join the Navy in
Baltimore. The doctors detected he had a heart murmur and sent
him away. He was drafted, and accepted, two years later.
He spent the war on a 30-man, 110-foot
wooden convoy escort ship, hop-scotching from one miniscule
Pacific Island to the next as a way to get closer to eventual
landings for such battles as the invasion of Okinawa.
Smaltz and his fellow sailors listened to
the ship's broadcast of sonar pings off of enemy submarines and
rolled and flung depth charges from the deck. At other times,
they patrolled the waters around landing sites, calling in news
of approaching Japanese kamikaze fliers over tropical waters.
"We never had to use heat on the ship at
all," he said. "A lot of times, it got so hot down in the
compartment we slept on deck and watched the flying fishes go by
with the phosphorous in them."
Each man gradually slipped into
acknowledging his veteran status as he recognized that the
gravity of what his war meant has slipped in modern times. They
watched as others in their generation slipped away without ever
talking, without ever sharing their war experiences.
Now, they share a common hope that future
generations listen to what they have to say.
"A lot of them don't know what their
fathers or grandfathers have done because they don't talk about
it," Smaltz, now 85 and living in Ardmore, said. The same goes
for observing Veterans Day at 11 a.m. on Nov. 11 with the
ringing of church bells and a national pause. "People have lost
interest."
Not so for those who lived through the
conflicts.
"You get older," Wendell Powers said, "and
you have more time to think about it."
