Korean War veterans will never forget ‘America’s forgotten war’
A friend of mind introduced me the other day to the story of Staff Sgt. Reckless, whose brave and loyal service during the Korean conflict is remembered to this day. Reckless was a Mongolian mare, purchased by U.S. Marines from a Korean stable boy who needed money to buy an artificial leg for his sister.
Day after day during that brutal war, the Marines, members of a recoilless rifle platoon, depended on Reckless to plod up rugged mountain trails carrying ammunition and down those same trails with wounded soldiers on her sturdy back. Wounded twice, she was promoted to sergeant and received nine medals before retiring to a comfortable stall at Camp Pendleton. A plaque at Pendleton and a statue at Quantico, Va., commemorate her service.
Marshall native John B. Jackson served in Korea, as well, although his homecoming wasn’t as auspicious as that of the heroic horse. As an African-American growing up in East Texas, he served with an Army mortar company and found that for the first time in his life “race had nothing to do with it,” but when he got back to Texas after his discharge, it didn’t take him long to realize that race still had everything to do with it.
He rode the train from Washington State to Houston and then caught the bus to Angleton — relegated to the back, of course — on his way home to Freeport, where wife Georgia anxiously awaited. Angleton was the last stop, so Jackson’s plan was to hitchhike the final 15 miles.
Soft-spoken and
unfailingly courteous to this day, the son of a Baptist minister had walked about a block, Army duffel bag in hand, when the Brazoria County sheriff drove up beside him. “Where you going, boy?” the sheriff wanted to know.
Although they wouldn’t meet until years later, Korean War vet Max Johnson grew up not far from Jackson’s hometown, in Shreveport, La. An LSU engineering graduate who received his commission through the university’s ROTC program, Johnson built airstrips in Korea. Growing up in Louisiana, his contact with African-Americans was minimal, but in Korea, 94 percent of the troops under his command were African-American.
“The guys who taught me how to run the equipment, all of them were black, from all over the United States,” he recalled earlier this week. The young segregation-era southerner saw the world differently after that.
Defining moments
Unlike Reckless, neither Jackson nor Johnson received a hero’s welcome. Few, if any, Korean War veterans did. The fighting came to a sputtering end on July 27, 1953, with nothing like the ceremony aboard the battleship Missouri that had marked the end of the war in the Pacific eight years earlier. Back home, there was no raucous celebration in Times Square, no jubilant sailor photographed kissing a young woman amid joyous crowds.
“Washington greeted news of the Korean truce yesterday with a matterof-fact attitude — quietly, without evident jubilation,” the Washington Post reported. In a 2013 Atlantic magazine article, historian and former Marine James Wright wrote that the men who fought in Korea were not honored with a victory parade until New York City held one — in 1991.
Like most veterans of “America’s forgotten war,” the two men I talked to this week came home, put the war behind them and got on with their lives — Jackson with the Veterans Administration and the U.S. Postal Service, Johnson as an engineer with Mobil and later owner of an insurance agency. Their war — their “police action,” officially — was a long time ago, and yet both men agree that those few years represent defining moments in their lives — a defining moment, they believe, in the history of this country. So does historian Wright, who contends that the strong democratic government in South Korea today is evidence that Jackson and Johnson and their fellow veterans accomplished what they were sent to do.
“It was the first time that we stepped up and stopped communism. That’s where we stopped it,” Johnson said. “I think that’s a story that ought to be told.”
Ought to be, but isn’t. Johnson said that he’s spoken to school groups about the war, and often the young people listening have never heard of it.
Johnson knows that nearly 1.8 million Americans served and sacrificed in Korea from 1950 to 1953, including 289,000 Texans. On this Memorial Day weekend, he knows that 36,574 died.
Like their World War II brothers-in-arms, the Korean War veterans didn’t talk much about their experiences.
“We know people who didn’t even know J.B. had been in the Army,” said Georgia Jackson. She herself knew little about her husband’s combat experience, although she knew a sadness lingered that he rarely acknowledged. (The Jacksons have been married 64 years.)
Many did not care
Jackson’s reticence began to thaw in the early 1990s, when he got involved with helping organize a Texas chapter of the national Korean War Veterans Association in Houston. (He would later serve as president.) “I was happy when he started opening up,” Georgia Jackson said. “He used to be sad. Now you see him with his chest out.”
In 1990, the Chronicle reported, it was hard to round up enough Korean War veterans to march in that year’s Memorial Day parade, much less from a veterans’ group. Nat Young, one of the organizers and the group’s first president, echoed Jackson and Johnson.
“We came home, and we melted back into society,” Young told the Chronicle. “Neither my friends nor neighbors cared, or gave a damn that we had served. And we were anxious to make up the time we had lost, and get on with college or business. Only thing is, we left behind a lot of guys who would never get the chance.”
These days the Texas Lone Star Chapter/ Korean War Veterans, founded in 1991, has about 200 members. They’re proud of several accomplishments, including the placement of a memorial in the Houston Veterans Cemetery and a Korean War Memorial on the Capitol grounds in Austin. They’re also proud that in 1997 state Highway 6 from the Red River in Hardeman County to its intersection with I-45 in Galveston County was officially named the Korean War Veterans Memorial Highway, although Jackson is a bit miffed that no one ever calls it that. “It’s the forgotten highway for the forgotten war,” he says.
Dwindling numbers
Chapter members volunteer at the DeBakey VA Medical Center, participate in parades and Memorial Day ceremonies and on June 17 will be guests of honor at a Houston dinner sponsored by a 40,000-member Presbyterian church in Seoul, Korea. They also ponder their organization’s future, its near future.
Johnson is 88; Jackson, 86. Almost every time their group meets, they see dwindling numbers. What happens when they’re all gone? Will family members soldier on? They don’t know.
I’ve never seen the Korean War Memorial in Washington, D.C., but I intend to. I’d like to see the Reckless statue too. And I’ll remember what Max Johnson told me about his long-ago war.
“We need to get the story out,” he said. “We need to keep it alive.”