Gerald Barrett (Primary Source)

Transcript

[Serving as an artillery observer in Korea] For the most part advancing, we advanced across the 38^th Parallel [separating the two Koreas] on my 21^st birthday. I remember doing that, that is borne in my brain but you’re taking the land away from them. And once you’re there, you dig in and you wait until they tell you to continue on. And if they do that, you just defend what you’ve got. When we crossed the 38^th Parallel, we went 16 miles, as the crow flies, climbing over mountains in three days. And it was pretty tough because I had a wireless set in my back rations, a weapon and a bedroll. And I couldn’t do it today. In fact, I have trouble going up the few steps I’ve got on my house because I got my back hurt over there and I lost the hearing in my right ear, on two separate occasions. But the daily life, sometimes it’s quiet, most of the time, you’re sitting there looking at them. They’re across the valley, whatever, and you see any activity going along, you’d draw fire on it. They liked to come up at night, they liked to do their bombs eyes or whatever you want to call them at night. You had your target areas already laid out, as we advance the, you have a map and you mark, you’re looking over the territory in front of you and you think if they’re going to come at you, they’re going to come down this valley or they’re going to come over that ridge or they’re going to do this, this. So you’ll take one gun out of one troop and you will drop a round where you want it to be. And when you find the gun is, you’ve got the gun, dropping it where you want, you record that map reference. So you’re on your map, you’ve got all these map references. When they come through the area, you just say, target so and so and so and so, they just know where to go. And we could drop anywhere from, well there are four guns in a troop, we could drop 24 guns or two guns or five guns even, rapid fire or just two rounds, depending on how heavy it was over there. Well, our regiment was 24 guns and the English had a regiment over there and we had several regiments. I could call them all on if it got really bad. But most of the time, we were just moving along. We went 16 miles as the crow flies, on the map, and we went up mountains and down mountains and it wasn’t heavy fire wise doing it because I think when they pushed everybody down to the southern point of Korea, they over extended themselves. So they were having trouble, the North Koreans were having trouble maintaining their people that far with ammunition, food and everything else. So we moved up relatively easy. And when we crossed with the 10^th Philippine Combat Team [10^th Battalion Combat Team, a unit of the Philippine Expeditionary Forces to Korea], in the afternoon of the second day, I was so exhausted, I tripped and fell. And I said, this is as far as I’m going. I’m not going any further, I don’t care what the hell they do, they can shoot me, do whatever. But I’ve never been that exhausted in my whole life before or since. And I fell asleep. And I woke up about 4:00 or 5:00, the way we were going was up to a ridge, we were maybe a half a mile from it, or maybe less even, when this happened. And the commander of the Philippines, my officer took my radio and the commander of the Philippines said, you, you, you, you and you, stay with him until he wakes up. And I woke up about 5:00 or 5:30 or 6:00, whatever it was, I had this little circle of Philippine infantry around me. And you do feel kind of foolish. And they were having their rations and sitting there with their rifles across their laps. And when I woke up, then we all went up the hill and I proceeded to get back into the groove of things again. But these are experiences to recall and whatever. It was demanding, yes. The 300 set [the SCR-300 portable radio transceiver] weighed around 55 pounds with a battery. And then I had my sidearm and my weapons, my bedroll and rations. Well, the idea of the Canadian force in Korea at the time it was put together was six months. And I got my back injured after I hit a mine. I was sitting on the machine gun ring on the half rack and it blew it off the road and it ended up on its side down about 12 feet. I was half in, half out and the machine gun came around and hit me on the left-hand side, just about took my head off. And I got my first helicopter ride. That wasn’t very exciting, I had a couple of shots of morphine by the time I got to 8063 MASH [8063^rd Mobile Army Surgical Hospital], I’d had a couple shots of morphine and didn’t give a damn who won the war. And I was there for a little over a week and then I went back into what they call a, I guess it’s a pool, anybody who gets over what’s happened to them and they’re fit to go back and do what they were doing before, they go into a pool. And if the infantry needs or anybody needs replacements, that’s where they get them. So I could have ended up lord knows where and I wanted to get back to my own regiment, so I jumped out of the truck, taking everybody back and I hiked her back up to my own regiment. But at the time, I think that was about four or five months, because we were thinking, we were only going to be there for six months. And with a back injury or a knee injury, you can swing your way home, it was easy. Because they couldn’t fix it over there and they wouldn’t take any chances with those particular things. And I thought, well hell, I’m still walking, I want to go back to my own regiment and it’s only going to be a couple of more months. Well, it was about eight more months. If you get discouraged in a situation like that, your only way out of it is you have to think, if it weren’t for me, I wouldn’t be here, it’s my own damn fault, so let’s make the best of it. And Captain Hemmingston was an excellent captain, he was very very good. He was a Second World War man and he instilled in us, well, we were talking and he was saying: ‘If you’re going to be in an area for two hours, three hours, five hours, three days, it doesn’t matter, spend half that time making yourself comfortable.’ And that was something drilled into me, well, not drilled into me, he mentioned it and it was something I went by over there and it worked. Because if you’re going to be there for two days, spend the full day making yourself comfortable dig, put things over to the, a lot of the infantry, they made the mistake until they smartened up, is oh, we’re moving off in the morning, what’s the point digging a hole. Well, the hole is nice to be into if somebody’s blasting the hell out of the area around you. And but that’s a creed I guess of the way I work things, through [what Hemmingston taught me].