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RD: Gets interrupted for the draft, and suddenly they're scraping the barrel. It's the Korean War, and the standards are changed. My eyes aren't any better than they were when I tried to enlist. I tried to enlist in the navy and then tried to enlist in the army which had lower standards, and couldn't get into either. This was in 1944 and 1945. I tried to enlist on my birthday each year, and it didn't work. But now that I didn't particularly want to go, they wanted me. I could have protested with my back and probably gotten out of it. The physical examination I took was a farce. The doctor who was an older man, I don't know he... he seemed very old to me, I don't know how old he was. Not very clean, dirty fingernails. And he asked me, "What's that scar?" I said I had a laminectomy. And he says, "What's that?" The nurse had to tell him. But I thought about it and thought, "Well, why don't I stay in? If I stay in for ninety days, I'll have veteran status." So I didn't protest, went to basic training, the signal corps training, basic training, which was less rigorous. I had a c profile, and was grabbed by the local public relations people. They saw my background and needed somebody, and right out of basic training, I went into what most people considered a cushy job at camp headquarters. This was at San Luis Obispo. I thought if I was in the army, I ought to be in somewhere interesting. San Luis Obispo was not an interesting place.

TI: And what year was this? What's the timing of this?

RD: I go into the army the day after Thanksgiving of 1952. So in 1953, I'm twenty... what?

TI: Twenty-six?

RD: Yes. No, this is '52, so I'm twenty-five. So I apply to go overseas. I figured with my language skills -- I could read and write German and French.

TI: And this is during the Korean conflict?

RD: Yes, this is during the Korean conflict. And everybody tells me, "You may get sent to Korea." Says, "Well, if I get sent to Korea, I will get sent." But I figured that I could get into intelligence, and I applied for that, and they were very interested in me until they looked at my file and discovered that my mother was born in Hungary, and that was a communist country. Well, that somehow disqualified me from being in intelligence. And they said, I remember a sergeant who told me, "Son," he says, "you'd have to apply for clearance, and by the time we got clearance, you wouldn't be in the army anymore. Now, if you want to sign up for a five-year enlistment," or whatever it was, I think it was probably a three- or a five-year enlistment, "then we can consider you." Well, there's no way I was going to do that, so I took my chances and went to Korea. Got pulled out of the pipeline once we got there. I was signal corps and trained as a photographer, but I got pulled out and sent to an engineer unit because -- I later discovered -- the man, the sergeant who was in charge of the personnel, he'd been there for years, was going home, there was nobody good in there. He had gone to the two replacement depots, one in Pusan and one in Incheon. And the 2nd Engineers were a beer supply place. One of the units was... so he had lots of beer to use to get bribes, so he worked it out with the two sergeants who ran those repo depots, that he wanted somebody whose scores were in the 99th percentile, and they sent him to me. And he told me that there was a good desk job here, but that I would have to spend two months reading and boning up on all the army regulations. He said, "You know how to study, you can do that." And then he had a job for me, which would mean I would get promoted and etcetera. So I did that, and did it successfully, and eventually, very quickly, despite being a two-year draftee, which usually meant that the highest you could get was private first class, I was very quickly made sergeant. Because he had a job for me, and being in charge of a number of other people, and then the rank went with that particular job.

So I wound up doing all kinds of very interesting things, had a comfortable war, got shot at by accident a couple of times. I learned something I didn't know before, that I had a great deal of executive ability. I could run and manage. I'd managed small restaurants, but that's nothing. I had a complicated staff. I was assigned to the 2nd Engineer construction group, which was a large, regimental sized group that had units all over Korea doing important work. One unit was in charge of the railroad in Pusan, Seoul, another unit was building the prisoner exchange establishment up at the DMZ, another unit was building bridges like highway-style bridges across the Imjin River, etcetera. So it was a very large, complicated operation. And I did inspections of all of these places.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2013 Densho. All Rights Reserved.