A SOLDIER’S STORY from ‘The Forgotten War’
MORLEY BALINSON, WHO TURNS 92 NEXT MONTH, IS AMONG HAMILTON’S VETERANS BEING HONOURED FOR SERVING IN THE KOREAN WAR. THE OLD SOLDIER HAS NO PLANS TO FADE AWAY.
IT IS A QUIET MORNING in his North End home, the only sound playful screams of schoolchildren across the street at recess.
Morley Balinson can’t hear the voices; 92 years of living will do that, but more so repeated blasts from artillery fire.
There’s a painting in the living room. It’s him from another life: the soldier bare-chested in the heat with his Bren machine gun, framed by Korea’s purple hills.
He doesn’t remember the time 66 years ago when someone took the picture on which the painting is based.
Chapters of his life, including some from his service in the Korean War, have dissolved in the mist. But passages stick with him. “Our encampment was under attack by mortar fire,” he says. “Shrapnel came into my bunker, a hot piece landed on the inside of my left thigh as big as a quarter.” He stops. That is the beginning and end of the story. Old soldiers never die, they just fade away, said Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the brash commander of United Nations forces in Korea.
Over the years, Balinson has endured a hip replacement, a stroke, cancer, and now creeping dementia.
He can’t fade away, though. There’s too much to do.
AS HE DOES every year, he offers poppies in the Food Basics on Longwood Road South leading up to Remembrance Day.
And Nov. 9 he is invited to an appreciation luncheon for Korean War veterans at Michelangelo’s banquet hall. The annual event has special resonance with the risk of war heightened on the Korean Peninsula.
Fighting stopped there in July 1953 but a peace treaty was never signed.
“Peace is what you make of it,” he says. “And there’s a price. And we all pay.”
His second oldest brother, Alex, paid. The whole family did.
In 1942, Alex was killed in Malta, serving as a tail gunner in the Second World War.
“He was in a shelter, a bomb dropped right at the door and the concussion killed everyone inside,” Balinson says. “Didn’t leave a mark on his body.”
Their father, Henry, was never the same. Henry had immigrated to Canada in 1911 from Ukraine where antiSemitism raged. In the Yiddish newspaper he published in Hamilton, he wrote his son’s eulogy and never wrote in the paper again.
He took God to task: “What have you done for us now? Have you run out of miracles? Or maybe you think this is some big dance of life … I break off my ties with the world, and those who I held to be my most intimate.”
The next year, at 18, Morley Balinson enlisted and trained but the war ended before he was sent overseas. Five years later, he got another chance.
ON JUNE 25, 1950, North Korean forces crossed the 38th parallel and invaded South Korea; the U.N. Security Council voted to defend the south.
“I think I was ready to get away from home,” Balinson says.
In November 1950, he shipped out from Seattle with the 2nd Battalion Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry (PPCLI), and arrived in Korea 19 days later.
He later wrote reminiscences that showed the light and dark side of war.
They traded Canadian beer to U.S. soldiers in return for their much preferred helmets; he delighted in kosher salami sent from Hamilton, played rugby on a frozen rice paddy, and gave food to Korean children.
He also saw villagers carry a young girl atop a door as a makeshift stretcher, her body covered in wet newspapers and grass, after an ox triggered a landmine that severely injured her. He drove her to headquarters to receive treatment.
And he watched as an alleged spy from the North was captured, convicted and beheaded on the spot by South Korean soldiers.
“One of our fellows, who had a tough stomach, held the head by the hair,” he says.
He wore a leather vest during his tour — a “jerkin” — that belonged to his oldest brother, Robert, who served as a medical officer in the Second World War.
A Korean woman sewed sleeves on it for him, in exchange for an overcoat that a fellow PPCLI, Ken Gawthorn, had given Balinson.
The jerkin hangs in his basement. Still fits pretty well, too.
Among souvenirs he brought home were propaganda pamphlets airdropped by the enemy (North Korea was supported in the war by China and the Soviet Union.)
“Canadian soldier why are you still fighting?” reads one. “Don’t you wish you had female companionship? Let us ease your frustrations. Come to lovely Fantasia, we can offer you warm barracks, fresh rations and lots of girls.”
One day, when his unit moved to a new camp, they heard loudspeakers blaring in the distance in accented English: “Welcome, Princess Patricias.”
He served in one of the most ferocious, critical battles of the war, at Kapyong, April 24-25, 1951, just north of Seoul, the South Korean capital.
The Patricias, badly outnumbered by thousands of Chinese troops, and cut off from other U.N. forces, repelled attacks through the night, holding the line on what was called Hill 677; at one point their commander radioed-in an artillery barrage on their own besieged position.
Balinson slugged cases of Bren gun ammunition to the front, carrying them by foot over a narrow pontoon bridge across a river as wide as the Grand at Caledonia.
The stand at Kapyong saved Seoul, and his battalion was awarded the Presidential Unit Citation by U.S. President Harry Truman — the first and only time a Canadian regiment received that honour.
On leave five months later, he attended Jewish High Holiday services in Seoul.
“When I returned to the unit, I
learned it pays to pray,” he wrote. “The corner of my bunker had been struck by mortar fire in my absence.”
FAST FORWARD to the early 1970s: Morley Balinson, who raised a family in Hamilton with his wife, Joan, and ran a printing business, wears a new uniform: RCMP.
He was hired as a special constable to help beef up security in Pearson Airport following a terrorist attack at the 1972 Munich Olympics where 11 Israeli athletes were killed.
Balinson loved the work, the camaraderie.
On his cap he pinned a dark blue ribbon bordered in gold metal: Kapyong.
“Some of the guys in the RCMP had a sour look that I was wearing the Presidential Unit Citation,” he says, a playful light in his grey-blue eyes. “I said, ‘I’ll wear it, you can try and take it off.’”
He will no doubt wear it at the Nov. 9 luncheon, where 35 Korean War veterans from Hamilton and beyond are expected to attend.
The event organizer, HooJung Jones Kennedy, calls Balinson a dear friend and a hero.
“These soldiers fought for their country but also for Korea, a country they didn’t even know,” she says.
In three years Canada contributed 27,000 troops to the war, including sailors from eight destroyers, and airmen who flew combat and transport missions; 516 Canadians died serving in the conflict.
Coming as it did on the heels of the Second World War, and prior to fighting in Vietnam, it has been called “The Forgotten War” — a perception that Kennedy has worked for years to change.
In 1987, at 22, she came to Canada from South Korea and her family lived near Hamilton Harbour at the foot of John Street North. One day, her mother was amazed to discover the HMCS Haida docked here — the Haida, whose crew in one operation in the war helped save refugees, including her.
“Serendipity,” Kennedy says. “The way things begin, and end.”
She worries about war in her former home. If it goes nuclear, she says, millions will die in the first half-hour.
“It is very upsetting. I lose sleep on this one.”
One of those who could perish is Morley Balinson’s grandson, Daniel, an American soldier who was recently deployed to South Korea.
Balinson hopes it doesn’t blow up again.
“But my hope has no bearing on the realities.”
IN 1953, after returning from Korea, he joined the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, the storied regiment in Hamilton. On occasion, he suits up in formal dress and dines in the officers’ mess. (His son, Scott, a Hamilton police officer, is the Argylls’ pipe major.)
As for the PPCLI, their unofficial motto is: Once a Patricia, Always a Patricia.
He wears a T-shirt a fellow Patricia gave him, and jokes it’s a propaganda shirt: black, featuring a skull, and “Dirty Patricias,” and the names of a dozen countries where the regiment served “Doing Canada’s dirty work for 100 years.”
This week, he wore his PPCLI beret in Food Basics, holding a box of poppies. A woman thanked him for his service. A man apologized for not having money on hand to donate.
Joan Balinson, who is 78 — “He had the good sense to marry a younger woman” — is with him.
She doesn’t typically help, but Morley recently fell in their home and is tired. Still, he won’t abandon his traditional post.
On Nov. 9, he won’t have energy to do both the luncheon and the poppies. He will need to choose, and for him it will be a tough call.
Joan laments Morley cannot share all his memories and reflections, because so many are gone. “It is too late,” she says.
It was a few weeks back that he sat in his f avourite chair in the living room.
“Ready for a nap, Dad?” his daughter, Tamara, asks.
“I’m ready for a doughnut and a coffee.”
He offers no secrets to long life. Tamara marvels at how he eats fruit: seeds and all of an apple, or if it’s an orange or lemon, the entire peel. Nothing wasted.
In recent years, he’s attended many funerals and placed poppies on caskets of veterans. He turns 92 on Dec. 7. “Pearl Harbour,” he says, referencing the significance of the date, the infamous attack on the U.S. naval base in Hawaii in 1941.
Ask him if he’d like to live to 100 and he jokes about his pension. He won’t go there.
But years ago, he made plans. Above his grave will fly a flag: the pre-maple leaf Canadian Red Ensign he served under that bears the Union Jack. He has one in the basement.
He’s not picky about words on the stone, other than one. It will read: Patriot. The morning grows long. Out of the blue he says: “Ken Gawthorn died.”
Balinson had hoped his friend and fellow Korean veteran would be interviewed by The Spectator, too, but Gawthorn passed Sept. 13, at 93. He lived in Kitchener.
Gawthorn also served in the Second World War and was awarded the Legion of Honour, France’s highest decoration.
The funeral was emotional, Balinson concedes, but his eyes stay dry talking about it.
“It was a comfort to have him on your side.”
He could now be the oldest Korean War veteran in the area, or at least, he knows, the rare soldier from the war in his 90s who moves so well.
The grey-blue eyes stare into the distance. Maybe he’s seeing his fallen friend, or the Red Ensign snapping in the wind. Or nothing at all.
He plants his shoes firm on the carpet and rises from his chair.
His raspy voice cuts through the quiet. “I’m the last man standing.” Morley Balinson, Argyll, Patricia, Presidential Unit Citation, is on his feet, the old soldier casting a shadow, all right, one larger than life.
“When I returned to the unit, I learned it pays to pray.” MORLEY BALINSON He’s not picky about words on the stone, other than one. It will read: Patriot.