Voices from the Korean War - Douglas Rice [155]
There stands a small statue, in our yard, in his honor.
~~Fifty-Three~~
Anthony “Tony” Gurule’
Headquarters Battery of Divarty
24th Infantry Division
U.S. Army
I was born in a little coal mining village in the Purgatoire Valley of south central Colorado. Like most of the men in our village, my father worked for the Colorado Fuel and Iron Corporation in Valdez, Colorado. Life in a coal mining camp is like the Tennessee Ernie Ford song “Sixteen Tons” depicts. The men worked hard in the mines, but after the company store deducted the wages for groceries, and sundries that had been charged during the week, they brought very little money home on payday.
We left Valdez at the beginning on my teenage years, and moved to Dublin, California. In the summer of 1944 we moved to Oakland. We moved into a house off Twenty-Second Avenue, near East Twentieth Street; in an alley named Sonoma Way.
I met Leslie Frater at Roosevelt Junior High and I told him I was working at the Dutch Maid Bakery. He wanted a job, so I set him up with an appointment with Mrs. Meyer. She hired him, but he only stayed three months than disappeared.
One day in March of 1946, Leslie showed up at the bakery and he was dressed to kill. He had joined the Merchant Marines. He told me he had been to Okinawa, Guam, Midway, and the Christmas Island. He made more than five-hundred dollars in less than four months. The next day he took me to the Union Hall and Coast Guard Building in San Francisco. Here I officially joined the Union—Sailors Union of the Pacific. On my sixteenth birthday, I was ready to go; I was dispatched to the SS Shuyler Colfax, as a mess man.
* * * * * *
It was early 1951, and I went home to hang around for a month. I went back to the Union Hall for another ship, and was dispatched as a Second Cook and Baker to a ship that was anchored in San Francisco Bay. I needed to go home and get my gear, so I called my mother asking her to pack my things. She informed me I had a letter that looked to be important; it was from the President of the United States.
I knew immediately what it was—I was being drafted. However, being in the Merchant Marines, I was exempt from the draft. Anyway, I had her open it and read it to me—I was right. So, instead of going home to get my gear, I returned to the Union Hall and told them to give my assignment to someone else, because I had been drafted.
Having sailed for the last four-and-a-half years with veterans of the Second World War, I got to listen to stories of heroes, and cowards. I had decided I wasn’t going to be the latter.
Ted DuPriest, my brother-in-law of seven months, also received his draft notice. Both of us were ordered to report at 9:00 AM, on March 2, 1951, to the same draft board, located on the corner of Webster and Fourteenth Streets. Along with old friends and classmates, we boarded a Greyhound Bus headed for Fort Ord.
We soon learned the Army had many surprises for us, and there was one surprise I didn’t care for. It was late in the day and we were in the final phase of processing, when I was confronted by a corporal I guessed to be nineteen, who spoke with a German accent. He had this stern military air about him, which I didn’t like. He asked me what part of Mexico my parents were from and without hesitation I asked him, “What the hell has that got to do with me going into the Army.”
Based on his accent, I figured he hadn’t been in America but a short time. If I was right, he could have been one of those twelve or thirteen year old boys—in Germany—clicking their heels and shouting, “Hiel Hitler!” Now he’s in America, in our Army, and accusing me of not being an American. When in reality, my family background goes back to the first surname Gurule’ in 1682.
Shortly, a second lieutenant came up to us because we were holding up the line. The other guys were tired and wanted their bedding, so they could go to bed. I told him, “This German is questioning this American soldier’s American citizenship, and I resent it.” The corporal then made