Happy Birthday America – 1974

     Independence Day in 1974, at Camp Casey South Korea, was not one of your normal celebration days. The Second Infantry Division commander and his staff planned a big 4th of July. I was the commander of a combat engineer company, Company A of the 2nd Engineer Battalion, and although we were quartered in a separate military compound, it was clear that the Commanding General wanted everyone in his division to be at the celebration. I joined my company at Casey, drank a Budweiser, ugh, and after making sure everyone was behaving, I headed back to my BOQ (Bachelor Officer Quarters) room at Camp Castle, about a mile north on Military Supply Route (MSR) 3. 

     At 0300 hours the next morning alarms went off in the battalion headquarters. I walked along the BOQ wondering what the hell was happening. It didn’t take long before Kim, our BOQ custodian, came running in to tell us we were going to war! The North Koreans under Kim Il Sung, the same guy who had invaded South Korea back in June 1950, were bombarding the port of Pusan from a North Korean warship. Next word arrived from battalion headquarters that I was to evacuate the compound with my company combat-loaded and encamp at a predesignated position in the Korean hill’s west northeast of our position. My NCOs were good and the company was loading up and moving all our equipment out of our motor park and forming up into a column of trucks heading away from our permanent encampment. I took the time to head back to my BOQ room and pile things into my duffel bag, including family photos.

     By that afternoon it became obvious the North Koreans weren’t invading over the DMZ, which was only about fifteen miles north of us. Orders came down to return to Camp Castle and settle down. The South Koreans sank the North Korean warship that had been shelling Pusan, and things became relatively quiet. The attack on Pusan didn’t make it into newspapers back in America. A few months later, it was discovered that the North Koreans had dug fifty-two tunnels under the DMZ – the Navy captain who had first explored them was killed by a booby trap. Some of the tunnels were large enough to drive trucks through them. My company was tasked with maintaining the American combat outpost line along the border with North Korea and an infantry sergeant dragged me down into a trench when I had tried to sneak a view of Pork Chop Hill across the border. This was a  time when we in the Second Infantry Division were getting combat pay since the North Koreans just north of us were still shooting like it was the Korean War (twenty years ended by Armistice in 1953). Later in 1976, MAJ Art Boniface, USMA 1966 and my old table commandant when we were cadets, was savagely killed at Panmunjom while he was trimming a tree in the demilitarized zone.

This was Army life as American soldiers protected the frontiers of freedom in the Cold War.