Please don’t call me a veteran
Opinions writer Harold Pockriss of Freeport, center, without a hat, in his Army days during the Korean War. Credit: Provided by Harold Pockriss
A nurse in the Winthrop University Hospital cardiac unit asked me, “Were you in the military?” It was Memorial Day weekend this year and I was there for a heart procedure.
“Yes,” I replied, knowing what was coming next.
“Thank you for your service.”
“You’re welcome,” I mumbled, suppressing a cringe.
What I had wanted to add was, I never saw combat. At 85, I felt like a draft dodger.
I was drafted into the Army during the Korean War in 1952. At age 22, I got a farewell party and an identification bracelet as a gift. I went to Whitehall Street in Manhattan to be sworn in, but my urine showed an abnormal level of albumin, a common protein sometimes found in egg whites. Unlike the other inductees, I was sent to Governors Island to pee for three days — to make sure I wasn’t spiking my urine to escape service.
I was deemed fit for 16 weeks of infantry training at Fort Dix, New Jersey. At Dix, the other guys in the company and I were nervous about going to Korea. We lucked out by getting two new noncommissioned officers who were warmhearted. As it happened, both were black, not common in those days.
Our first sergeant was soft-spoken, powerfully built and fatherly. He gently tried to teach us to soldier. “Take care of your M1 rifle,” he’d urge, “and it will take care of you.”
At the end of training, the company sat in bleachers outside and he addressed us emotionally.
“I wish I could go back to Korea,” he said. “I would get you back safely.”
We believed him.
His sergeant first class, built like an icebox, had a gold tooth and would squirt saliva through his teeth as he shouted orders sprinkled with expletives. We loved him, too.
When most of the company shipped out to the Far East, I stayed behind because I had signed up to learn foreign languages. While waiting for my assignment, I moved officers’ furniture and did other chores at the base.
On the home front, we fought our own battles.
One day, I was working in the office of judge advocate general. A guy my age, dressed in pristine olive drab instead of fatigues, was in charge. He was a private like me, but perhaps a lawyer in civilian life.
He grabbed a book I was carrying. Startled, I grabbed it back. Normally, I love to share books, but his action was a contemptuous yank.
He scowled. “I’m going to have your [expletive],” he said.
I worried. Where was I headed?
I told the first sergeant. His eyebrows furled. “Nobody’s going to do anything to you,” he said.
And they didn’t.
Next, I wound up in Augsburg, Germany, as a clerk in an office for military intelligence. (I never did get to study languages.)
Then I shifted over to the public information office to write press releases for hometown newspapers, and news stories for Stars and Stripes, the armed forces paper. I also went to a three-week leadership school in Munich and eventually became a corporal.
While I was in Europe, the Korean War came to its uneasy end in 1953, with the establishment of the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea. More than 33,000 American soldiers died in that conflict.
In 1954, I was sent home and discharged. My toughest jobs during my two-year tour were latrine duty on the USS Darby troop ship en route to Europe, and garbage duty on the same ship back to America.
About two years ago, I was drafted to speak to my grandson’s elementary school class for Veterans Day. Four other vets showed up. They, too, had not seen combat, though the youngest had yanked people out of the brine for the Coast Guard.
There’s no doubt that an army travels on its stomach, with a cadre of support staff and paper pushers, but please don’t honor me this week for being a vet.
The guys who were in harm’s way deserve the accolades.
Reader Harold Pockriss lives in Freeport.
