Sidney Fox

I was raised in Southern Ontario, near Leamington, Ontario. I decided to join the Army in August of 1949/1950. Yeah, 1950. And I just wanted to get away from vegetable farming. Yeah. Well, I kind of thought it would be adventurous. I guess I was a little like my father in the First [World] War. We landed in Inchon [Korea] and went straight to our gun position. That was quite an experience. Spent quite a bit of time digging new positions and stuff and it was interesting, yeah. There wasn’t a lot of activity, continual activity as far as the artillery went. Like we were always on alert but it was fairly quiet at times. And at times there would be an outburst and yeah. That was a few times that we had to go up into no man’s land and help put up our [barbed] wire. That was an experience. Because the enemy knew you were there and they were putting flares up. And you were supposed to freeze but you were using sledgehammers and steel posts, and don’t make noise. Seeing the countryside [in the modern day Korea], how it’s progressed and the cities, how it’s really built up and that, and they have train services that we don’t have here. The part that really kind of struck home a little bit was going to the cemeteries. That was a little different. But it was, we kind of got over that a bit. You still get the odd feeling, you know, like I do right now. Well, it’s just you know that some guys, most are dead and they’re, they haven’t come home. I didn’t know too many of the ones that were killed, I didn’t know actually any of them, we only had one on our gun position that was killed in action but it was from one of our own shells. It burst as it went out of the barrel. I kept in touch with my father, he had been in the first war and he says, what’s it like over there? I says, ‘well, we’re busy digging or going in slit trenches and we can’t come out’ and he said, ‘good lord, are they still fighting like that?’