Reflecting on service

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November 5, 2015 - 12:00 AM

Walter Jones saw, at most, two or three weeks at the front line.
That was plenty enough.
Jones was less than 2 miles from the “Main Line of Resistance,” where the fiercest fighting of the Korean War occurred.
Jones reflected on his military service this week, days before Americans recognize the country’s armed services for Veterans Day.
“I guess I’m proud of it,” Jones, 80, said humbly. “You like to think you’re proud.”
Fresh out of high school in the early 1950s, and recently married, Jones — who had been working building terraces for Moran contractor John McAdam — had a hunch his number would be called by Uncle Sam. (It was.)
And he also figured he’d be shipped overseas to the Far East — Korea, in particular. (He was.)
But there were a few curveballs along the way.
Jones joined the Army and trained in Texas, for what he figured would be as part of an artillery unit.
“But when we we went overseas, we got to Tokyo, and they said they’d send us to medical school,” Jones recalled. “I didn’t know what to expect.”
Even though Jones wouldn’t be directly fighting the enemy he was still going to see plenty of action in his role of transporting injured soldiers from the front line back to a distant aid station.
Turns out the North Koreans also didn’t mind much shooting at medical aid workers, either.
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “They dropped rounds in there all the time.”
Jones spent most of his spare time huddled in a bunker.
“The rounds were still hitting pretty close.”
The most seriousy wounded were taken to a regional hospital — if they made it that far.
“We had a sergeant come in that I had to take in,” Jones recalled, “and he had 60-plus rounds across his body. They just cut him into two.”
The sergeant didn’t make it.
Within a few weeks, Jones was moved to the aid station.
“I spent the rest of my time there,” he said. “Boy, that was a relief. I didn’t have to be outdoors anymore.”
More importantly, the aid station was far enough from the MLR that it was largely ignored by the North Koreans.
“We were pretty much out of danger then,” he said.
It was shortly after that he learned a Korean bomb had landed in Jones’ old bunker.
Nobody was in it when it was bombed, “but they blew it all up. I felt really lucky after that.”
He and wife Arlene wrote when they could.
“She was good about writing letters,” he said. “That’s about all you could do. You couldn’t call. She did a good job at keeping things going at home, but I was glad to be home.”

JONES earned his discharge, and returned to his native southeast Kansas.
Upon his return, Walter bought a milk route and delivered milk until they bought a farm in 1960 south of LaHarpe. Walter still lives there, but admits to being much less active.
Son Roger helped found Microtronics, while daughter Regina Young eventually took her mother’s old teaching position when Arlene fell ill.
Arlene died in 1992.

WALTER IS uncertain if he’ll attend Saturday’s Veterans Day activities.
“I haven’t heard anything about this year,” he admitted. “I went to last year’s Armistice parade, and I’ll probably go again.”
He has no desire, however, to return to the Korean peninsula.
“No, I’ve never gone back, and don’t want to,” he said. “I’ll leave that up to the other people.
“From what I understand, it hasn’t been that successful over there since we’ve come home. I keep reading how they’re having flare-ups again.”

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