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CN CT Chapter One Active Duty The adventure began when, at the age of seventeen, I joined the navy, in part because of the traditional teenage longing to go to sea and in further part to avoid being drafted into the army.1 It was the spring of 1945, and neither I nor my fellow farm boys who enlisted for similar reasons had the slightest idea that the war would be over by about the time we graduated from boot camp or that, alas, only a lucky few of us would get to go to sea. In the following fifteen months, until as a yeoman third class I was discharged honorably for “Fidelity and Obedience,” I, as one of the unlucky ones, was stationed at Terminal Island Naval Base, which fronted on Los Angeles Harbor. Out of the navy in 1946, I enrolled as a freshman that fall at the University of Washington in Seattle, where during the next four years I majored in anthropology and, most important, married the bright and beautiful Susan Lombard Horsley to whom this book is dedicated. The navy still held much appeal. The University of Washington had on its campus a naval ROTC (Reserve Officers Training Corps) unit that, as a result of the Second World War, offered former enlisted men from any branch of the service two years rather than the usual four years of university-level classes. This shortened program, if completed successfully, would earn its candidates commissions as reserve ensigns. Naturally, I wished to apply, but to my astonishment I was told at their front desk by a large imperious civilian woman that I would not qualify because, as she noticed, my teeth did not have the proper “bite.” Afterward it occurred to me that I should have insisted on seeing a navy officer about this 23 24 C h a p t e r O n e supposed deficiency. But intimidated as I was, I walked over to the air force ROTC building where, after completing a similar two-year program, I was commissioned a reserve second lieutenant on June 10, 1950. The first shots of the Korean War were fired fifteen days later. Unaware of the imminent outbreak of war, Sue and I, following spring graduation in which Sue was awarded a BA and I became a reserve second lieutenant, paid off our landlady and in anticipation of a summer on the Columbia River, moved across the Cascades to Yakima County. Professor Douglas Osborn, a University of Washington anthropologist, had earlier that spring signed us on as a two-member archaeological survey crew to explore a stretch of the river’s basin that in the near future was to be flooded by the Priest Rapids Dam. Yakima County was our home territory, our closest relatives lived there, and the house of my mother, Doris Campbell, in her orchard on Route 1, Selah, Washington, was to be our base. But on June 26, when the North Korean attack was described under black headlines in the Yakima Daily Republic, we shelved the Columbia project, expecting that I would be ordered momentarily to active duty. The Republic and its sister the Yakima Morning Herald were owned by Colonel W. W. Robertson, a colorful western newspaperman. Both were good papers; in addition to readers in the town of Yakima, which in 1950 had a population of less than 35,000, they were read widely up and down the Yakima Valley, keeping the county informed of national and international news. On June 26, 27, and 28 the Republic, to which my mother subscribed, carried one-inch front-page headlines that in turn announced “U.S. PLEDGES ARMS TO SOUTH KOREA,”“U.S. WILL DEFEND KOREA, FORMOSA,” and “U.S. IN KOREAN WAR.” On each of these consecutive days the bold headings were accompanied by descriptive and interpretive stories that on June 26 included an opinion from Tokyo that if the United States “openly aids South Korea this conceivably could lead to a shooting war with Russia,” and through summer and fall the paper continued to provide us with detailed war news. On September 15, the headline proclaimed, “KNOCKOUT BLOW AIMED AT ENEMY,” in regard to our invasion at Inchon (see map) and elsewhere on Korea’s coasts that would push North Korean forces out of most of the South Korean territory they had overrun. But then, on November 27, with Communist China coming in on the side of North Korea and with China’s...

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