Davis, Ward

              Eric Walz History 300 Collection
Ward Davis – Life during the Korean
War
By Ward Davis
February 15, 2004
Box 1 Folder 6
Oral Interview conducted by Natalie Duffy
Transcript copied by David Garmon September 2005
Brigham Young University – Idaho
ND: What was you early childhood and life like?
WD: I was born September 8, 1931 in a small town in Oregon which is in the southeast
part of Oregon and it was during the Depression, the 1930’ s Depression, and everybody
was kind of poor. My dad worked for JC Penney Company and things were kind of bad.
In California was my mom’s family and we decided to go and help them out. We had a
hundred- pound- bag of beans and some other items that could help a family live for a
while. They put the hundred- pound- bag of beans on the fender of the car and me in the
back window of the 1928 Chevrolet Coupe and we started the long trip from Oregon to
California, and in those days the car couldn’t go faster than thirty or forty miles an hour.
So we had to go over the Grapevine. In those days the Grapevine was really hard to go
over, and it took several days for us to get to Cedar [ Sierra] Madre, California where my
grandparents and my aunts and uncles lived. They all lived in the same house because of
the Depression. They all went to work and tried to provide for the family and get things
done. While we were there, my sister was born, Anne, and I remember that, though I was
only a year and a half old, I remember the house was a bustle. And after that we moved
to a little town called Chico in northern California for a short time then we moved back to
southern California to a town called Maywood where we spent a lot of our time. That is
where I first attended Fishburn Avenue Elementary School. I remember going to school
there and having friends.
ND: Where were you in life when the Korean War started?
WD: When I was in high school, the Korean War broke out and my friends were drafted,
so I joined to see the Air Force. We were all concerned about the Korean War but we
didn’t quite understand it, it was kind of like an adventure. But I didn’t want to be a
ground captain in the Army and I thought I’d try to get a career that the Air Force could
teach me so I joined the Air Force and became a sheet metal technician in Los Angeles,
and they shipped us on a train all the way to San Antonio, Texas to Kelley Air Force
Base which was a boot camp there.
ND: What can you remember of your early Army experiences?
WD: The boot camp was so crowded that they took our squadron and transferred us to the
base called Sheppard Air Force Base in northern Texas and we finished our basic training
there, and then a couple of us got shipped to Oakland, California to the sheet metal
technician school there. So we were there for several months. Because it was so close to
home I used to fly home on weekends on leave and see my friends and family, and after
we finished school I was transferred to a permanent station in Florida called Eglin Air
Force Base, it was about thirty miles from the Alabama border right close to Pensacola in
a little town called Friendship. The Air Force Base was a big Air Force Base and had
about six of these fields and the fields had all technical operations and ammunitions. In
our base I was stationed in Field Three and ours was a drone Air Force Base, and we had
all these old B17’ s and World War II bombers and half of the B17’ s were converted to
drone aircraft which were operated by radio control and then the other half were mother
aircraft they called them, where the pilots actually flew them and they had these other
remote control pilots to fly the drone airplanes. So it worked out that in those days where
they was a Jeep that had all the radio equipment and the Jeep would start the drone
aircraft up and taxi it out to the runway, get it in the beginning of the runway, and the
mother ship had already taken off and it was coming in behind it and the Jeep and the
airplane would be in contact with each other and the Jeep would take the drone aircraft
off. And when they got off the ground the mother ship would take over control and they
would fly the drone ship out over the Gulf of Mexico, which was a big target range out
there, and they would shoot it down and use it for target practice.
ND: What did you think of your commanding officers?
WD: Base commanders were like gods and we really respected them in a military
manner, and he [ his commanding officer] was a good commander, but one time he was
killed over the Gulf. One time they were developing new weapon systems to go in this
jet called the F94, and they had a good cannon in the doors of the ship and they were
operating the gun sight by radar control and the systems were perfecting it. So they had a
big test with the Pentagon and members of Congress to come out and see how all the
money they appropriated was working. And so our commander of our base was flying in
the mother ship with some Generals from the Pentagon and Congressmen from Congress
in the plane and they moved the drone aircraft over the Gulf of Mexico in the target
range, and the jet that was supposed to shoot the drone down zeroed in on the wrong
airplane and shot the mother aircraft down. So the Generals were killed and the
Congressmen were killed and our base commander was killed. And for the next seven
days we flew a criss- cross grid pattern over the area where they were shot down trying to
find survivors, but we never did. For a while the flags flew at half mast. So after that I
spent about a year there in Florida and then I got orders to report to San Francisco and
then I would be shipped over to Japan.
ND: Why were you shipped to Japan?
WD: The Korean War was still going on and so they were rotating some other people
over there and going to take over to replace them in Japan. So this is during Christmas
holidays in 1952- 1953 and I spent thirty days leave at home during the Christmas
holidays and then January I had to report to San Francisco to board a ship and sail across
to Japan because in those days you had to be in the system to launch and we sailed.
ND: How was your journey to Japan? And what are some of your memories of Japan?
WD: We had a very interesting time, a lot of people got seasick but I didn’t which I was
happy about. And most of the time it was very boring, and most of the time we played
cards and played P- knuckle and read books and sat around and talked because it was
very, very boring; and we had duties sometimes and we had to stand watch and things
like that but it was barely enough to go around and everybody had a chance because most
of the time we were just bored sitting around. And we finally got into Yokahama, Japan
which was a big port there, right here in Tokyo and that’s where we docked and they got
us off a ship and put us right on a train, and the train went about nineteen to forty, fifty
miles to a little town called Tachakawa, Tackakawa Air Force Base, and I was stationed
there. This is during the winter and I never realized how cold it was in Japan, how much
snow they had but they really had a lot of snow there, like two or three feet of snow on
the ground at the Air Force Base and the Japanese made two to three foot ice sculptures.
So I spent a few months there and then they came out with orders and I got transferred
down to the southern island Keooshoo, and to a little town called Hashia [ Ashiya] which
was where the Ashiya Air Force Base that was used in WWII as a Japanese fighter maze
which the Americans had taken over now and used it as a maintenance squadron where
we fixed aircraft that were used for flying our soldiers, especially the Air Force over
Korea and dropping them for the war over there. And it was the 43rd Squadron and they
worked on all the airplanes and made sure that they were in shape so they could fly over.
I can remember all of the trucks; and truck after truck of endless amount of road line of
trucks that coming through the base there the 2nd Airborne. And we worked on about
thirty or forty airplanes and held like about probably a hundred people each; and they
were all loaded with their full backpacks and weapons and everything ready to go to war.
And we loaded them all on the airplanes and the pilots took off in Japan, and flew them
over there; they all jumped out of the airplane to participate in a big event.
ND: Where were you when you heard that the war had ended?
WD: Then after I was there about six months the war ended, but before that I remember
working on the airplanes. There were two airplanes that used to fly back and forth to
Korea and bring dead soldiers back. We had the Army Base that was like the mortuary
and they would take them there and send them back home to their families. It was a
really sad thing, we knew these airplanes, we could tell them by their number, so we were
sad when we saw them coming back with our dead soldiers. And once in a while we had
worked on them and they had a really very bad dead odor about them, like I said, I
remember that. So I was there about six months like I said and the Korean War ended
and everybody was pretty happy about that. And so our airplanes were used a lot to bring
a lot of the boys back home, bringing them where they could get back to the United
States or go to the hospital or whatever they needed to do. So we did that and that was a
group thing you know we really enjoyed getting to know those guys who were there
fighting, back and getting them sent on their way home.
ND: What did you do when the war was over? Where did you go?
WD: And then one day while all of that was going on, the war in Korea was quite a doubt
over, I got my orders to pack all my clothes and tool box and go to the fly tent and pick
up some special equipment, and so I did that and I went to the fly tent the special
equipment I picked up happened to be a rifle and some ammunition, so that was kind of a
shock and I didn’t know what was going on and it was all secret orders, nobody could tell
you, nobody would tell you what was going on. So there were about sixty of us that were
all ordered up to the flight line, and boarded these aircrafts. When we got in the air the
pilots came on and said, “ Well, I’m gonna open the orders now and tell you where we’re
going.” And so he opened the orders and said we were instructed to go to Okinawa. And
then he said he had another set of orders that after we left Okinawa we were going to
leave to somewhere. And so we went to Okinawa and refueled. Okinawa if you
remember was a very heavily fortified island during WWII, it really had a lot of
casualties on it, kind of a hot spot for an island. But anyway, we went there and refueled
the airplanes and when we got in the air again he [ the pilot] opened the orders. And the
orders were to fly to Clark Air Force Base which was in the Philippines, right close to
Manila the capital. So we flew to there and we got off and it was very, very hot and
sweltering and jungly and didn’t like that very much. But we were there for I don’t know
two or three months and they removed all the insignia off of our airplanes, the American
insignia, and they put the French insignia which is like a bull’s eye with the color of their
flag on it, white and black bull’s eye on there. And we were told, “ Okay, everybody
report to the flight landing, we got to go to our next place now.” And nobody knew
where that was but we had a good idea because the French airplanes they now looked like
and so we had a pretty good idea we were going to French Indochina which turned out to
be Vietnam. But the French had colonized that area so it kind of belonged to them but
the Vietnamese didn’t like it so they were fighting so we flew over there and we landed
in the city called Haphong which was in the north part of the country. And so after we
were there a few weeks they divided the country in half like they did Korea, like North
Korea and South Korea, and they had North Vietnam and South Vietnam and we were in
the northern part so we had to pack up all our stuff again and go on the airplanes to the
south and we went to the base there. I don’t know which city is the closest to the name of
the base, the French base called Pour [ A] n and that’s all I know. I don’t know which city
it was because they changed all the names when the Vietnamese took over the country,
they changed all the French names into Vietnamese names so I can’t remember what any
of those towns are. But I was there in Vietnam for several months doing maintenance on
the airplanes and there wasn’t much to do because the French, they were flying the
airplanes, never got a shot at because they were para- dropping supplies into this little port
called Yam Yam Foo, and that was because they were trapped in there surrounded by the
communists, the Vietcong, would get all the supplies and they liked that so they wouldn’t
shoot at airplanes, they didn’t want to discourage them because they got a lot of good
stuff too. And so one day, one of the pilots from France decided, “ Hey they’re not
shooting at us you know that’s pretty good, you know we could put some bombs in the
airplanes and then just leave the clamp shell doors off the back and then when we go over
their gun installation we could push these bombs out on top of them and they wouldn’t
know what hit them.” So they started doing that, and they used Napalm and some other
kinds of things and gasoline and all kinds of things and then they started shooting at the
airplanes, because that was happening because they were great big airplanes they were
called flying box cars, they were C190’ s. Flying box cars were huge and they were
targets so they started shooting at them and they’d come back full of holes and there were
a lot of wounded on board and so we had to repair them and clean them up and
everything like that, and a couple of times they came back so badly shot up that we had to
do temporary repairs and have them flown back to Clark Air Force Base to do more
extensive repairs because we were just a forward kind of repair field, we did minor
things.
ND: Were you discharged soon after the war ended? How long were you in Vietnam?
WD: So we spent several months there and then I got orders you know that, when we
were there a couple of our boys got captured, they were parachute reapers and they rigged
the parachutes and para- dropped over into the fort because they were pretty cocky guys,
they thought they could do anything. A couple of them took off one day in an Army
vehicle called the weapons carrier which was bigger than a Jeep and they were going to
go to the beach because they were hot. And the rule was that whenever you did that you
had to take somebody along to guard the vehicle but these guys didn’t, they left their
guns and everything in the weapons carrier and they went out swimming. And when they
came back they were surrounded by communists and they captured them and took them
away and we never heard from them again. We heard some rumors that they ended up in
China and the United States and Vietnam were in some negotiations about swapping
prisoners and I think they finally got back to the United States, but they were in big
trouble. They were caught over there and Americans weren’t even supposed to be there
and so they got in a lot of trouble, they were probably court- martialed. So then one time I
was there and we had to do maintenance in the place up where we were and the French
had a little prisoner of war camp on the base there and my Sergeant put me in charge of
the detail for the day and I had three or four other guys with me and we had to go pick up
a half a dozen of these prisoners and take to go around all the base collecting all the
garbage cans, putting them on the truck and then take them out to the dump, which was in
the north. And we had a French interpreter his name was Danny and he told us, “ Once
you get across the air field over there you’re in communist territory,” he said, “ so if they
break and run for it you need to shoot them.” And I really was kind of afraid of that, I
didn’t was to shoot anybody, that’s not what I joined the Air Force for, so I said, “ Oh,
okay,” and I tried to figure out a way to make them scared so they wouldn’t try it. So I
took some extra ammunition along and then all of us that were guarding them and
everything did some target practice while we were out there in the dump and that really
scared them. They sat down in the back of the truck all huddled together and they didn’t
try to run or escape. We took them back and put them back behind the barbed wire. So
after that, there was a few months and they rotated me back to the United States. So I
went back to Japan. Clark Air Force Base is no longer in existence, that’s where they had
the great big volcano eruption a few years ago and the volcano absolutely buried the
whole Air Force Base there, so that Air Force Base is no longer there. But there was this
great big Air Force Base there at one time. Anyway we came back to Japan and all my
friends that had been there before had left and were all gone, they had all been rotated
back to the United States. So I had to make some friends; I wasn’t there very long and I
had to prepare to go back to the United States too. Oh, the other thing that happened
while I was in Vietnam on the Air Force Base, we had to make some special parts for an
airplane one time that had a broken sheet metal and we didn’t have any tools to do it
with, we had to make the part. So we asked the French if we could use their equipment
and their sheet metal shop to build it and they said “ Yeah, go on over there.” So we went
over there and they were just getting ready to break for lunch. And the French are a very
loose people and all these guys that were working in the shop there, they made us stop
work. They had made a bunch of musical instruments with all kinds of sheet metal and
they started playing; they were singing and dancing and they brought out the bottles of
wine and they had a leg of lamb cooking on the grill and they had a huge lunch. And that
lasted about an hour and then they all laid down and took a nap for two hours. So from
about two to three, we couldn’t do anything, they wouldn’t let us work or nothing we had
to join them and they just had their lunch and happy little siesta and that’s what they did
every single day. So anyway, back in Japan I got ready to come back to the United States
and I came back. Instead of coming through San Francisco we came back through
Seattle, and I had an aunt and uncle who lived there. My uncle died but my aunt was still
alive so she had met me at the dock and gave me a nice dinner, and that night I had to
catch a plane to Los Angeles. And I went back home, I got to be with my family again
for a thirty- day leave; I had a thirty- day leave, after three years I had thirty days off so I
spent that with family getting reacquainted with everybody and then I had to report to
San Antonio, Texas again, right to the old place where I did my initial basic training,
Kelly Air Force Base. And I was only there just a few weeks and they came out with
more orders and transferred me all the way back to California to Norton Air Force Base,
to the mountains of San Bernardino there in California. And I spent like the rest of my
time there, it was like about six or eight months and that’s when I met my wife and after
that I got discharged July 1955 and then I got to leave in September.
ND: Are there any feelings you have about your experiences in the war?
WD: All this time that I was in Vietnam nobody in the world knew we were over there,
but it was in 1954 and I still have letters that I wrote my mom and dad when I was over
there, that are addressed from there and I was telling them all about the stuff that was
going on. And then I even tried to get on my discharge papers the fact that I needed a
campaign medal or ribbon they called it, campaign ribbon, for Vietnam. But they
wouldn’t give me one so I wrote them a letter because they wouldn’t honor it because
they said that nobody was there at that time. And so I tried to argue with them but it
didn’t do any good, but I was there in 1954, probably one of the first Americans along
with the other sixty guys that I was with in Vietnam. But the Korean War was a very
interesting war because I saw most of it being a civilian. And in Air Force, it was going
on but I was only for six months in Japan helping support so that’s about it.
ND: What are your feelings about the various peoples that you came in contact with
during your military experience?
WD: The Japanese people were great people, they knew that you were a serviceman and
they like it because you had money and you would spend money; and that’s about all the
relationship that I had with the Japanese people except for one story. I was out doing
photography and me and my friends were out in the Japanese countryside one day and we
met a lady who spoke some English, and asked it we would come and paint her house.
So we went, she grabbed us by the arms and started pulling us and we went to see that her
dad was a farmer of rice patties and next to the little Japanese house there was an
American style house. It turned out that she had been married to an American Air Force
guy and he had gone back to the states and didn’t want to take her and, so I don’t know
what the whole deal was there but he built this house while he was there. So we helped
her paint her house and get it all fixed up and she said that she’d like us to kind of rent it
from her. So we did, and went to get some furniture and we bought a bed and some
things and put it in the house and we used to go there on weekends and get away from the
service life and she used to cook for us and we had nice meals and refreshment and we
would farm with her and they were really nice people. But, that was during the time of
the Korean War that was going on. The Korean people I don’t have any interaction with
but I remember that being in the service you didn’t like them because they were all
communists and being in the military, it was fighting communism, we didn’t like them.
And I had a couple friends from high school that were killed over there and so that was
pretty hard. One of the guys, Paul Miller, was a nice guy and he was killed in the Korean
War. When we went to Vietnam we were with the French, because they didn’t want us to
do anything in town. Now we were allowed to go in town and we did a couple of times
and we ate at some restaurants there and I enjoyed that. They had some French cooks
and we had some nice dishes. One of the dishes that I remember was spiced tomatoes
and onions and it kind of soaked in vinaigrette to kind of soften. I remember how good it
tasted and the spaghetti with that. And then I went there a couple of times and bought
perfume, they had a lot of French perfume. But the Vietnamese, it was hard for them
because you didn’t know who was a communists and who wasn’t, it was very treacherous
at night time. The communists would walk the streets of the cities and nobody ever went
into the cities at night, we could only go during the daytime and every single night the
airport bases were attacked by small- arms fighters. And the French had these black
Moroccans, and they were big guys, they were really tough- looking and they had tribal
scars, cut up their faces and they were dressed in the French uniform with these kind of
hats tipped up at the side like sombrero hats. And they were the ones that stood on the
wall around the fort every night and protected everybody inside the Air Force Base and
we had guns by our beds and ammunition and we were told not to try and help them, not
to go out to the walls at night and everything like that, that they were there to protect us
and if anybody broke through then you protect yourself, you grab the gun, fight like that
but that never happened. But that’s what we were told to do. And I do remember at
night there was nothing to do but read and so what we did was stayed with, and had sent
over all these motion pictures, and we had this portable screen, kind of like the kind they
have at church that you put up. Before they had television we had these little motion
picture screens, portable screens, we put that up outside because it was so hot and then
we would watch motion pictures all evening, and do motion pictures, they would put
them on and we would watch all these movies and then we’d put them on the airplane
and send them back to Clark Field and tell them to bring us back some new ones. And
every once in a while when we’d be out like that at night watching them you would hear
the small army firing, going all around the perimeter of the base and once in a while a
stray bullet would ricochet off the barracks. The barracks we lived in were like Quartson
huts, they were made out of steel and they had a funny little roof at the top that was wide
open so that the heat wouldn’t rise and go out and we had ventilation, but the barracks
were all made out of steel, so that was kind of interesting. The French were interesting
people, they were friendly to us because we were supplying them with airplanes and
people to help work on them and trying to help them with their little colony that they had.
And so they were okay, I don’t have any way or the other about them at that time because
they are kind of slime bags now because of what they’re doing. The French have always
been kind of a weird people, they gave up their country in WWI, they gave up their
country in WWII to Germany; I mean they don’t have much backbone for fighting.
When we were over there we were in our barracks one night and all of a sudden real
scruffy guys came in and they were Soldiers of Fortune that were flying these airplanes
for the French, fighter airplanes— they were old WWII fighter airplanes and they were
helping them, they were Soldiers of Fortune and some of them were part of the old
original Flying Tigers during WWII. And they didn’t know anything else but they flew
airplanes and shot at things and that’s what they did for a living. The French had a
contact with them, they paid them a lot of money to fight for them, but most of them were
Americans. So they came over when they heard that Americans had come to the base;
they came over and talked to us and wanted to know all the news about America and
things like that and we talked to them about all the adventures that they’d been on and
Soldiers of Fortune. And one time they threw a great big party for us and we all went out
to the beach, I think it was a Saturday, Sunday, I can’t remember when it was, and
several of us who didn’t drink had to guard the party and they had just cases of beers that
they had brought out for everybody to drink, and swimming and just having a party and
those were the flight type guys, but they weren’t attuned and all the beach was covered,
littered with beer cans. And all these little naked children, these little kids they didn’t
have any clothes on, they would just go run around there and pick up beer cans and
disappear and come back and they were cleaning the whole beach up. And that night and
the next few nights our base got attacked with homemade grenades and homemade
bombs made out of those beer cans, so it was really interesting to see the ingenuity of
these Vietnamese people and how they sent their kids to collect these cans because they
could make little bombs out of them. But I have a lot of pictures taken with these little
kids and they’re in some of my files someplace, but there were a lot of little Vietnamese
kids over there.
ND: How did you feel towards the government for not acknowledging that you were in
Vietnam?
WD: Originally I was kind of angry about that until I finally just decided, you know I
know I was there, and it didn’t prove anything for me to have it on my record so I just
decided not to be worried about it. At first I was angry with them but then I understood
that sometimes the government has to make everybody happy in their quiet way for the
benefit of the rest of the population. And we live in this free country and the government
protects us and sometimes they have to do things that maybe the rest of the people
wouldn’t understand, in order to protect us. So I imagine they’re doing that right now too
with this upcoming war with Iraq and the war with terrorism and all that stuff. I’m sure
there’s things going on right now that we probably wouldn’t like if we knew about it but
they are to protect us. So originally I felt bad about it but I don’t anymore.
ND: What were some of the sights you saw and traveling you did while in the war?
WD: I really enjoyed traveling. While I was in Japan too, I don’t think I told you this,
but one of my high school buddies was in the Navy and he was stationed up in Tokyo.
And he was not aboard a ship, he was stationed in a Naval Base up there and I found out
about it, I think one of my friends originally told me about it, his name was Wayne
Buckley, and we went to high school together and he was a member of the Church and
his mom and dad and my mom and dad were good friends, and his brother used to be a
barber in Maywood. So Wayne was stationed up there so I took a three- day pass and I
hitch- hiked— see I was down on the southern island and he was on the main island on
Honshuu and Yokohama Naval Base and so I got to the base up there and he and I went
to his quarters and spent the night there and we went in and he showed me the city of
Tokyo, and we got to go around there. So I’ve been quite a few places in Japan, it’s a
very pretty country and we used to go on passes once in a while to Mooshoo [ Mushu] and
there was a little town that we went to, I can’t remember the name of it, but they had a
little place called Monkey Mouse and a little place full of monkeys and it was very, very
beautiful. Oh, I remember the name of the town was called Hipoo [ Hipu] because it
means mineral waters or something like that and they had this hotel up there, that was a
beautiful hotel and they had all these natural warm springs, and we would just go up there
and take these mineral baths and so we took train rides on weekends and picture- taking
excursions and stuff like that. On the weekends sometimes we would travel and spend
the night in another little town called Poowoka [ Puwoka], and they had a cinema motion
picture out there and they used to have all of these American motion pictures and the
latest ones would come there, even better than the motion pictures we would get on the
base and they had a great big cinema scope screen, and so we would take the train ride
there and then have dinner and catch the train and come back home. And that was really
a fun trip; we used to do that quite a bit while we were in Japan. But I saw quite a bit of
the country there but not too much of the country in Vietnam because we weren’t allowed
off base very much, but it was interesting to travel. In the Philippines we were able to go
off base quite a bit there, while we were there but we couldn’t go very far though because
we never knew how soon we were going to complete our airplanes and we had to leave
so I didn’t get to see too much of the Philippines; but I saw a little bit of it just around
Clark Air Force Base there, a little town called Bangel which was right outside the base.
JD: How did you and the other soldiers feel towards the President of the United States?
WD: President Eisenhower was the President at this time and everybody liked him quite a
bit because he was an old Army General, and was one of the great generals from WWII.
And he was a very popular President and all of the military liked him as the President, all
of us really supported President Eisenhower.
JD: How were you and the other veterans treated after you returned to the United States?
WD: We were treated fine. I was discharged in 1955, I joined in 1951 and I discharged
in 1955 July. And nobody really recognized that you were a veteran with the war or
anything like that. It wasn’t like WWII, and you came back you had parades and all that
kind of stuff; and it wasn’t like [ the] Vietnam War when you came back everyone called
you baby killers and all that kind of stuff. It was kind of like in- between those two and it
was like a non- entity, you just don’t get treated any way, you didn’t get treated badly,
you didn’t get treated good. That was the Korean War. It wasn’t a very popular war with
the citizens, most people called it a policing action, it wasn’t even called a war, but it was
a war. But we didn’t get treated badly, but we didn’t get treated wonderful so I don’t
know, it was just kind of like in between WWII, everybody came home and got treated
like a hero, and the Vietnam War and everybody came home and got treated like traitors.
And the Korean veterans were just kind of like forgotten, not too much of anything.
JD: What was your rank in the Army?
WD: I was a sergeant, I started out as a private, and I went up to private corporal as a
sergeant. When they were getting ready to discharge me, they tried to persuade me to
stay and make me a staff sergeant, but I was going to get married and go about my life on
the outside. So they wouldn’t give me that extra rank.
JD: How did you feel about not receiving the extra rank?
WD: It was alright, I just wanted to leave. It really wasn’t that big of a deal because I
wasn’t going to be retired from the Army; and the more rank you have the more money
you get when you retire so that wasn’t going to affect me, and the extra pay that I would
have got would have been only for a few months anyway, so it was better for everybody
that it just didn’t happen. I just wanted to be with my wife, get home and raise a family
and that’s what we did.