Why Me? The Luck of the Outlier
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, June, 1950
At the age of 19, I had just been promoted to the exalted rank of Corporal, having served as a Private First Class (PFC) since my Basic Training in Texas. I was in the US Air Force, now stationed at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in
Dayton, Ohio.
On Saturday, June 23 of 1950, after dinner, having nothing better to do, I went to a movie at the base theater. I don’t remember the name of it, but during the movie, someone tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Come outside.” The person who tapped me had a First Lieutenant’s silver bar on his collar and, therefore, outranked me—I was at this time a lowly Corporal with two little stripes on my sleeve - and, without question, I walked out with him. There were three or four people standing outside, including another officer, a captain, who said to me, “North Korea has just invaded South Korea.” I was thinking (but, of course, not saying) “What the hell does that have to do with me?”
And then the four words that no GI ever wants to hear: “Get your stuff together.” I found out later that everyone in the Air Force who had been through the Air Force Radar School and, specifically, anyone who was familiar with the AN/APQ-13 radar was rounded up to be shipped out to the B-29 bases that were being built in Asia. The roundup began only hours after the North Korean invasion.
The B-29 was the primary heavy bomber used during the Korean War. And the radar APQ-13 was the bombing radar for the B-29.
They gave us an extra day to track down our laundry and write a few letters. Then the order came, “Be at the flight line at 0700 tomorrow, bag and baggage.” Each airman has a duffle bag, a huge sack that will hold everything he owns. When stuffed, it weighs 40 or 50 pounds. We boarded a C-47 (the commercial equivalent was a Douglas DC-3, a twin-engine tail-wheel transport.) We flew from Wright-Patterson to Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma City to refuel and take on new passengers. The temperature there in June was probably 100°. In the non-air-conditioned plane, we were sweating. The next stop was Fort Frances E. Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne, Wyoming. By now, the sun had set, and the temperature at the 6,000-foot altitude in Cheyenne was probably 40°. We were freezing in the unheated rear bucket seats of the C-47. From Cheyenne, we loaded up more airmen and took off for what is now Travis Air Force Base 50 miles northeast of San Francisco. In those days, it was called Fairfield-Suisun Air Force Base. We arrived at a very early hour in the morning. From there, we were bussed to a WW II Army base, Camp Stoneman, on the San Francisco Bay near the town of Pittsburgh, CA.
First Visit to San Francisco
After a few days of orientation at Camp Stoneman, we were transferred by bus to Yerba Buena Island in the middle of the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge. The small Army camp there on the island had served as a replacement depot (GIs called it the “repple-depple”) for World War II soldiers returning from the Pacific War in 1944 and ‘45. We spent a week there, getting some indoctrination on Korea along with more vaccinations against Japanese B-type encephalitis and God-knows-what-else.
The Bay Bridge in those days was, as it is today, a double-deck structure. Today, the westbound traffic is on the upper deck, and the eastbound on the lower. In 1950, all automobile traffic was on the upper deck and truck traffic on the lower. On the lower deck, there was also a train system, the “Key System”, trains that took passengers back and forth between San Francisco and Oakland. We wanted to go to San Francisco, of course. Our problem was that the lower deck of the bridge was several hundred feet above our barracks down on Yerba Buena Island. Believe it or not, a group of three or four of us would walk up the 267 steps to the lower deck and catch a train to San Francisco. My first visit to this magnificent city! I was 19 years old.
From the train station in San Francisco, we walked to Market Street with its bars, restaurants, movies, and almost anything else we could desire. We would head for a bar to get a beer, and being a group of young GIs in uniform (of course, the Korean war had just started), the bar customers would line up to buy our drinks. We could not take our wallets out of our pockets.
This happiness lasted only five or six days when we got the word that we would be shipping out. We were taken by bus to Fort Mason to board our ship. Off to War at the age of 19!