• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

* * * * * *

Finally, March arrived and so did the ship that began my journey home.

~~Forty-Seven~~

Kenneth Flynn

7th Cavalry Regiment

1st Cavalry Division

U.S. Army

I was born on June 23, 1933, in Brooklyn, New York, to John and Catherine Flynn. Three weeks after my seventeenth birthday—on July 18, 1950—I enlisted in the Army.

I was sent to Fort Dix, New Jersey for my basic training. Upon my arrival, it looked as though the barracks had not been cleaned since the end of the Second World War. As we new recruits entered, there were newspapers scattered all over the place; they were all dated 1945. Our first order of business was to get the barracks back into living conditions.

Our training consisted of marching, long hikes, stripping and cleaning our weapons, bivouacking, and how to survive under extreme conditions. During basic, the Airborne Division visited our company to recruit new members. They used the incentive that whoever volunteered would no longer have to clean the cosmoline off the new machine guns, which was a messy job. So, some of my buddies and I signed up. However, when it was time to leave, I was in the hospital with pneumonia. Before leaving, my buddies came by to say their goodbyes, along with a case of beer. Later I would find out that they were all injured, or killed, during their training.

After completion of boot camp, I was assigned to a Quartermaster Company there at Fort Dix; this was a sweet deal. I volunteered for permanent KP duty, which was seventy-two hours on and forty-eight off. So, every three days I went home to Brooklyn. However, being the wise guy I was, I stretched a ten day leave out of a three day pass, and the 4th of July; I was gone most of July. When I returned to camp, the first sergeant called me into his office and chewed me out. He told me to check the bulletin board the following day; sure enough, there was my name—I was headed for Korea. Shortly afterwards, I was on a troop-train headed for San Francisco.

My Uncle Danny had been in the Navy during the Second World War, and he gave me some tips about being seasick. He said regardless of how sick you get, always force yourself to eat. This would help settle your stomach, plus if you did throw-up, it would keep you from getting the dry heaves. His advice came in handy, because for three days we chased our own wake in a typhoon.

After a short, unscheduled stop in Okinawa, where they removed the captain, we finally arrived in Korea; it was August 1951. Rumor had it, that the captain had freaked out during the typhoon and some of the junior officers had to take over the ship.

I was in a group of sixteen guys that were to be assigned to Quartermaster Companies; therefore we had not been issued weapons. However, having been in some heavy fighting, the 1st Cavalry was in dire need of replacements. So fifteen of us were issued M-1 rifles, loaded into trucks and, in the blackness of night, were hastily driven to the front lines. Here I was assigned to the second platoon of Fox Company, 7th Cavalry Regiment.

I was then—in the darkest of night—taken up a hill to a forward position and assigned to a foxhole, which was to be shared with a veteran soldier. The first words he spoke to me were, “Thank God. Maybe now I can get some sleep. The ‘gooks’ have been hitting us every night for the last three days.” I told him to point me in the right direction, and then asked him what I should be listening for. This he did, then he told me to wake him if I heard any noise at all; he then crawled into his sleeping bag.

I thought it would be best if I loaded my M-1, but it had been over a year since I last touched one. Between the dark, the cold, and being scared to death, I forgot how to load the ammo clip. My foxhole buddy heard me fumbling with the clip and asked me what was going on. When I told him, he had some choice words about me, the Army, the damn war, and how it was being run. Needless to say, he didn’t get any sleep that night.