I Cannot Forget: Imprisoned in Korea, Accused at Home

Prologue

prologue 13 Johnny Moore was born into humble circumstances in West Texas in 1932, and he never really felt good about himself until he joined the army. His father was a farm laborer, operating tractors and other large equipment, and the family moved from one small house (or shack or tent) to another at least once a year, living on the farms where his dad worked. He attended a oneroom school, where—as in their living quarters—there was no indoor plumbing . Johnny did have, though, an old worn-out mare, a dog, and eventually a BB gun, and he enjoyed riding and hunting and overnight campouts. For a while his family moved from house to house in Crosbyton, Texas, where with his cousins he enjoyed occasional family gatherings at his grandmother’s home. He heard tales of his mother’s family’s farming in Texas since before the Civil War and having at one time a small overland freight business. And he learned that two of his great-uncles had died in France in World War I and two of his uncles had served in World War II. When Johnny was about ten and one-half years old, his father “got sold a bill of goods that there were plenty of jobs in California, life was better, and there was more opportunity,” so the family “piled what little we had into and on top of my uncle’s car and began the long drive to California.” Things there were no better; the family moved often from one side of McFarland in the Central Valley to the other to be near work, and his father took to drinking and gambling a lot. The children got transferred from school to school and had trouble fitting in. Johnny, as a young teenager, was very aware of being poor in comparison to most of his classmates. Johnny never liked school and never tried very much to learn. He remembers himself as a D student and “a show-off and smart aleck.” He was small for his age and spent a lot of time running away from bullies. prologue 14 prologue As soon as he turned sixteen, he talked his father into allowing him to quit school and go back to Texas to look for work. He talked a man who was heading east from McFarland into letting him ride along and soon was looking for work in Crosbyton and then nearby Lubbock, while staying with relatives . He worked in a candy factory until December, but decided to look for a better-paying job. Then some friends told him it was not hard to alter his birth certificate and join the military. In the end, he convinced the army recruiter that he was eighteen, and at the age of sixteen and one-half he set off for basic training at Camp Chafee, Arkansas. He was proud that he was able to keep up with the eighteen-year-old recruits in physical training, and he put his mind to the classroom part of basic training. “Almost immediately, [he] decided, ‘That’s what I want. This is it.’ I liked it because you were given orders about everything to do, and when you did what they asked, you felt good about it.” While on leave after basic training, he went to McFarland to see his family and friends. “I wore my uniform proudly the whole time I was there.” This time, when the worst bully picked a fight, Johnny stood up to him. After training, the army sent him to a rifle company in Camp Otsu in Japan in 1949. On the ship the army made available a “little pamphlet [on learning Japanese] that had what you wanted to say and then the phonetic breakdown that told you how to say it.” Johnny spent a lot of time trying to teach himself to speak Japanese as he crossed the Pacific. He was appointed company clerk and eventually became assistant to the company supply sergeant. For a while he spent his free time training for boxing under a master sergeant; he won his first three bouts, moving “one step right up to the next.” After a skinny little guy out-boxed him—“I didn’t remember even hitting him, and I remember him hitting me every time he wanted to”—he decided to give up competitive boxing. His regiment went on training maneuvers once or twice at Mount Fujiyama, but as supply assistant he stayed in the...