Former sniper recalls the heavy fighting he experienced in the Korean War,
Jim Gunn, 79, tells ZEV SINGER about his time on the battlefield at the annual Take a Veteran to Dinner Night at Ottawa’s Tudor Hall.
Jim Gunn was a sniper in the Korean War, a job that matched his name more than his talents.
But Charlie Company was short-staffed at the time.
“Gunn, you can hit the side of a barn. You’re now a sniper,” is how he remembers getting the promotion.
He wasn’t old enough to be in Korea, either, because the Canadian Army had a rule against sending soldiers younger than 19. Gunn had used his older brother’s birth certificate to sign up.
Although there are principled reasons to serve one’s country, those did not weigh heavily on the mind of the then-17-year-old.
“I was young, stupid, didn’t want to work, didn’t like school. All the wrong reasons,” Gunn, now 79, said Sunday at Ottawa’s annual Take a Veteran to Dinner Night, held at the Tudor Hall.
This year marks the 60th anniversary of the end of the Korean War. During cocktails, before the Sunday dinner began, Gunn was asked to describe what that young sniper found after forging his way into action. It included heavy fighting and months as a prisoner of war.
By early May 1953, Gunn was already a fairly hardened veteran — still only 18, but with a year of fighting under his belt. He was attached to 8 Platoon of the 3rd Battalion and was among those on Hill 187, a Canadian position that came under heavy attack.
So many thousands of rounds of heavy artillery and machinegun fire were flying through the air in that battle that the hill itself was practically demolished, to say nothing of the soldiers, Gunn said.
“They were digging guys up there 11 days later.”
He and a fellow soldier tried to defend their position from a trench, but it was being overrun by the enemy.
His partner was hit badly and Gunn was standing, looking for bandages, when a concussion grenade landed behind him. He was stunned by it — he wears hearing aids to this day as a result — but it was better than what might have happened. Dozens of Canadian soldiers died in that battle. When he stopped seeing stars, he saw Chinese soldiers surrounding him. He was taken prisoner.
He was helped by one precaution he and his partner had taken at a certain point in the battle. Because their sniper scopes weren’t going to help them at that point, they hid them so the enemy wouldn’t know what job they had held.
“They weren’t very kind to snipers,” he said.
He came out of the PoW camp four months later at 5-foot-10 and only 120 pounds, and still remembers the “dinner” he most wanted.
“All I wanted was a cold glass of milk,” Gunn said.
Gunn stayed in the military for another seven years after the war before transitioning to civilian life, where he worked in sales. That buffer may have helped him; he says some of his buddies who left the military immediately after the war ended up with drinking problems.
These days, the big battle in his life is the one his wife is fighting against Alzheimers disease. He says that’s probably even harder to deal with than the war.
With his wife in a nursing home, though, he appreciates being taken to dinner all the more — for the dinner itself and the recognition — because as fortunate as he has counted himself, the memory of war always remains.
“You just never forget it.”