I found it on the floor of Daddy’s closet in the final sweep of the house that we were preparing to sell. It is literally the very last thing we carried out, a tiny, long forgotten remnant that hadn’t seen the light of day in years. Maybe decades. And it seemed altogether appropriate that it had held on to the end, carried out only when the house echoed with emptiness.
More than all of the combined photos, more than every piece of clothing, more than each carefully preserved letter, the little keepsake metal button resurrected from the closet floor is priceless in its simplicity but deep beyond measure. On the front are the words “Korea Veteran” with the dates 1950-1953 and a map of Korea. At the bottom it reads “Forever Proud.”
He probably got it as a thank you for subscribing to the VFW Magazine. A cheap, mass-produced memento that had no purpose other than to recognize, if just for a moment, the sacrifice made by so many. It probably cost no more than fifty cents to produce.
I thought about tossing it.
Daddy was only in Korea for a couple of years. Yet, you’d swear it was for a much longer stretch, as embedded as it was in his very existence from that point forward. In fact, it was the cornerstone upon which rested much of his identity throughout his life. It was a defining moment. He had been a soldier. He hadn’t asked to be. He hadn’t practiced it or dreamed it certainly.
And he’d be the first to say he wasn’t a very good one. But he went when called. And it became part of him forever.
His dad had joined the same army in Europe during WWI, returning to the family farm to pick up where he had left off as soon as possible. Were it not for the mustering out bond that he spent each fall to buy new shoes for his children, his family would never know he had been to war. Either he wasn’t all that affected, or he simply wanted to forget. Probably the latter.
Unlike his dad, mine talked about it, telling vivid stories that made you feel like you had been right there with him. More than once, I heard him laugh about how when WWII was winding down and he had just turned 18, the Army found him flatfooted and ineligible for service. But when Korea fired up, his flatfooted problem just disappeared. He was exactly what the Army needed. He was suited up and on his way in no time. Front and center.
Of all his friends, he always knew who had been in service. The man who hired him in 1958 to teach at Florence State College had been a fighter pilot in Europe during WWII. One of the first accounting instructors Daddy hired had almost frozen to death in Korea. His best friend at church, Gene Pickard, was a WWII veteran. As Mr. Pickard began to show signs of dementia later in life, Daddy made sure to help steady him down the aisle to his seat during the church Veterans Day service, as comrades do.
They could pick each other out in a crowd.
Like most veterans who were lucky enough to come home from a combat situation, he built a family and made a career doing what he loved, spending about 10 times longer teaching college kids than in the Korean mud during his relatively short stint as a soldier. And yet, he was defined by that time of service in a bone-deep sort of way. It gave him depth and substance and somehow a larger place in this life than he would have had otherwise.
It probably helped that his experience was a bit more tame than it could have been. Unless he was keeping some stories to himself, there didn’t seem to be much to need to forget so he didn’t bring home a lot of wartime scars. At least I don’t think so.
His family and his career in education occupied a much larger chunk of his years on this earth. Yet, most of his stories revolved around the two spent on the other side of the world. Stories that were awe inspiring in their gritty details, no matter how often they were repeated.
And he repeated them. And he wrote them. “Korea Remembered for Allison,” is on the cover of one three-ring binder of stories and photos, while “Korea Remembered for Jennifer” evens the score for another granddaughter. Then there’s the book of letters he sent home and photos that are each painstakingly labeled. I don’t think there’s much I don’t know about that chapter of his life. And I’m so glad that’s the case.
The grainy black-and-white photos of Korean women leading barely clad children through bombed out streets, and Korean men harvesting the contents of outhouses for rice paddy fertilizer share photo album space with those of army buddies that he spent every waking moment with for a couple of years and then promptly lost touch with afterwards. We’d occasionally take the photo album down and he would narrate its contents, but he always took far more interest in it than we did. I think you had to live it. Those were years spent in black and white, not color, anyway.
During his brief military career, he not only collected photos and memories, but life lessons. He’d be the first to say he grew up in a hurry, probably because in the early twenties there’s a whole lot of growing up to do. When he disembarked in Japan from the Army transport ship, he reported to an office for his assignment, fully expecting front line duty. Instead, a soldier to whom he had been kind when serving as his supervisor in the States suggested that Daddy be assigned to a personnel audit team, one that headquartered in Pusan—just about as far south in South Korea as you could get.
At that point in the memory, he’d always pause and say, “The moral to that story is be careful who you step on when going up the ladder as you just might meet ‘em on your way back down.”
He learned raw empathy and the art of figuring out what to do in a tough situation when he and his fellow auditors “adopted” a starving Korean orphan who wandered into their compound on the island of Koje Do one freezing winter day. Hu Sung Hang tearfully begged to work for food and shelter, as his entire family had vanished during the push from the Pusan perimeter. He was hungry and cold and alone and scared to death. And just ten years old with nowhere to go and no one to care.
They got him the smallest Army uniform they could find, cajoling the supplies officer with a vague threat of an upcoming audit to get him to comply, and then put Hu Sung Hang to “work” keeping the tent organized and swept clean.
They found a local school for the boy and gave him a billfold with a few pictures of the audit team. More than once, they spied him out with friends from school proudly showing off the billfold pictures of his camp family, the only one he had. He belonged to the U.S. Army, as far as he was concerned.
Hu Sung Hang probably survived the war and maybe lived a long and happy life in South Korea. At least that’s what we like to believe. We’ll never know as Daddy left abruptly on emergency leave when his younger brother broke his back in a farming accident. By the time the crisis was under control, his enlistment was up so he never went back.
From that point on, though, he was a veteran. He apparently didn’t like it well enough to reenlist, but like Hu Sung Hang, he would always belong to the U.S. Army, even when he didn’t.
For about the last ten years of his life, his most favorite cap was black, with the U.S. Army emblem on the front. A gift from a cousin, the cap got him more than a few free meals and door openings and appreciations for his service. People are good about that. It’s the one thing most of us can agree on.
I took another look at the little button in my hand and turned it over. “Never Forget” was etched on the back.
Thanks to Daddy, that is not an option.
I put the button in my pocket, turned off the light, and closed the door.
