Posted on 02/18/2007 7:31:46 PM PST by Van Jenerette
Lost chapter - The DMZ War in Korea
By KEVIN P. CRAVER - kcraver@nwherald.com
Pvt. Robert Haynes awoke from his first night in his new post in South Korea to a nightmare. The hustle of men and the metallic clicks of loading rifles roused him from his sleep Nov. 2, 1966, before a truck pulled up with seven bodies. Six Americans and one South Korean on patrol were ambushed by North Korean troops. Their bodies, filled with grenade shrapnel and bullets, had been mutilated after death. One American survived.
Haynes, an 18-year-old vehicle mechanic in the 2nd Infantry Division, witnessed the opening moves of a three-year war.
He found himself thrust into a reconnaissance unit, where his M14 rifle became his toolbox for three months. He shot at North Korean troops, and often they returned the favor. Haynes’ relief that he was sent to South Korea rather than Vietnam was dashed that first night.
At first Haynes’ story sounds like a tall tale – the U.S. began committing troops to South Vietnam a decade after the armistice ending the Korean War was signed in 1953. But that’s because the Korean War found in the history books had ended 13 years before Haynes arrived.
The one that isn’t in the history books had just started.
The DMZ War
Veterans of the 2nd and 7th infantry divisions that saw the brunt of the fighting call it “the DMZ War” for the demilitarized zone separating North and South Korea. From 1966 to 1969, communist North Korea stepped up raids along the demilitarized zone to test the resolve of a U.S. increasingly committed to Vietnam.
Haynes, 58, now retired and living in Johnsburg, calls it a forgotten chapter of what Korea veterans call The Forgotten War. He and others hope to change that with a plaque on the Korean War Veterans Memorial in Washington to recognize the troops who have served and died since the 1953 cease-fire.
“It was really, really hard, even with this stuff going on, sending letters home and telling family and friends what was going on; they didn’t believe me,” Haynes said. “All they saw on the news was what was going on in Vietnam. And probably rightfully so – the focus was there.”
The zone, 155 miles long and 2.5 miles wide, is the world’s most heavily guarded border and stands today as the Cold War’s last remnant. About 35,000 U.S. troops remain in South Korea, but were pulled off the DMZ in 1991. The 2nd and 7th divisions defended about 18.5 miles of it, their sectors totaling about one-tenth the size of McHenry County.
Haynes sat in his home office with a list of troops killed in action that he said was almost 40 years overdue for focus, or at least recognition and respect. Black-and-white photos of his time on the line, including aftermaths of bombings and vehicles destroyed by mines, covered his desk.
The first attack that Haynes witnessed took place a month after North Korean leader Kim Il Sung gave a speech that Communist nations everywhere should harass U.S. forces. To retired Maj. Van Jenerette, who wrote one of the few papers on the DMZ War, the timing was not coincidental.[note: http://www.koreanwar.org/html/dmz_war.html]
Jenerette was an Army private headed to South Vietnam in January 1968, but he and thousands of others ended up in Korea – the North Koreans tried to assassinate South Korea’s president and seized the Navy ship USS Pueblo within a three-day period. In Vietnam, the Tet Offensive began a week later.
“I think politically to sit there and bring out the fact that you’ve got fighting going on in two different places is as messy as you’ve got it in Afghanistan and Iraq – one gets above-the-fold headlines, and the other gets the back page,” said Jenerette, now a college professor living in North Myrtle Beach, S.C.
Headlines aside, Jenerette said, the government kept Korea low-key so as not to further agitate the strong anti-war movement.
“With the realities of having two fronts in Asia heating up your people, the people at the top of the Pentagon and the political structure made the decision for Korea to stay classified,” Jenerette said.
The government has never commissioned an accounting of DMZ casualties, said Ted Barker, who co-founded the Dallas-based Korean War Project. A 1992 article for the Veterans of Foreign Wars stated that at least 80 U.S. troops died between 1966 and 1969, which includes a spy plane shot down and the one sailor killed on the Pueblo.
Unlucky luck
Haynes used to think that he was an endangered species – he knows of no other DMZ War veterans living in the area. But he and others began to meet on the Internet.
“I often dwelled upon it, but no one was interested in talking about it,” Haynes said. “The story of the time was Vietnam. I just kept it inside until about five, six years ago.”
It was not until the Iraq war started in 2003 that Mark Hartford let his experiences along the DMZ come to the surface.
While Haynes was unloading the bodies from that November 1966 night, Hartford, an infantryman in another company, waited in ambush for the North Koreans sneaking back over the line. They never crossed paths, but other encounters would follow.
Now 59 and a semi-retired consultant in Columbus, Ohio, Hartford has something else in common with Haynes. Almost always, people who ask about their service call them “lucky” for avoiding Vietnam. And it always makes them angry.
“Almost to a person, their response was, ‘Wow, you must have been lucky,’” Hartford said. “That bugged the crap out of me. That demeaned what I and other soldiers did.”
Hartford decided to commission a plaque and leave it at the Korean War memorial, much like how veterans and family members leave items at the Vietnam Wall. But then he decided to start searching on the Web for other veterans, and came across Haynes and others.
Hartford shared his plan for a plaque, and the idea was born to get it officially placed at the memorial. U.S. Senate Bill 2914 was introduced in May to begin the process of working through the government and National Park Service. And among Haynes’ grainy black-and-white photos is one of him and other DMZ veterans gathered at the memorial on Veterans Day 2006 to gin up support for its placement there.
In a way, the government did recognize the DMZ conflict – soldiers eventually received combat pay and the right to wear the unit combat patch. But while Haynes wants people to write Sens. Richard Durbin and Barack Obama to support the plaque, he has another motive.
Veterans of the 2nd and 7th divisions now are eligible for compensation for exposure to Agent Orange, a toxic defoliant that the Pentagon only recently admitted was sprayed along the border. Haynes receives veterans benefits for Type 2 diabetes.
“There are a lot of guys who died, who left behind widows and families, that haven’t got a clue where they got these illnesses from,” Haynes said.
More importantly, veterans want people to know that the sacrifices were not in vain – North Korea’s efforts to test U.S. and South Korean resolve failed.
“We won,” Haynes said. “The North Koreans basically stopped.
“We won that war.”
thanks!
Van - http://www.jenerette.com
BUMP!
BUMP!
To make a long story short, he became a scout/observer/sniper in an Arty battalion, and saw some ferocious fighting in the DMZ that went wholly unreported. He's told me some hair-raising stories about the North Koreans and the four-day patrols he had to do in the DMZ that often ended in hand-to-hand combat. Nobody ever slept during those patrols, because if they did, they could end up nailed to a tree with their throats slit.
Pretty hellish stuff that went on there...
Served with the 3rd/23rd Inf., 2d ID on the DMZ in 68-69. Pulled 44 patrols in the DMZ [plus a couple of Guard Post stints]. In the 13 months I was there, they killed 14 of us.
May I ask you a question? I have heard from a variety of sources that he ROK are fearsome. Are they as good as their reputation?
I was in the 7th from 67-68 and the only people that got combat pay were those that were hit and they only got it for 1 month. Did you see anything different?
It didn't end in 1969, either. We were still engaged in firefights, skirmishes, and worse when I was there in 1978-79 and 1981-82. Still think that everyone who served there after 1953 deserves the Army Expeditionary Medal.
We pulled combat pay anytime we were stationed north of the river. I was up on the Z about six months two eight months , and got combat pay for each of those months. There was no requirement for wounds or actual combat [there was for the CIB].Same basic rule for when I was in Nam.
Only units in RVN who WEREN'T hit on TET. They were some of the toughest roops I ever saw anywhere. I remember seeing a ROK Inf. Bn. on a sweep for infiltrators. Only 1 jeep in the Bn. - for the CO. Everybody else was walking.
There apparently were scores of unreported DMZ casualties in the first 12 months after the July 1953 armistice, although the first official US Army DMZ "hostile death" did not occur until 1961.
Filthy communists abroad
and here at home
ping
Fascinating-thanks for the info.
Long, drawn-out successes like that make one wonder how Democrats could ever get the idea that we should only fight wars if no one dies or is injured.
Would today's Democrats have preferred leaving the South Koreans enslaved and starved, under Kim il-Sung and his son Kim Jung-il?
It seems likely.
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