MAY 2015 SUNRAYS | 37
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explosions rendered him temporarily
blind. As he threw himself to the ground,
Red never even saw the grenade rolling
under his chest.
Without warning, Red was blown to his
feet, his gun still in his hand. Pierced by
shrapnel, struggling to breathe and un-
able to lift his right arm, Red was alive.
Two bandoliers of ammo strapped across
his chest had absorbed and deflected the
worst of the blast. Rolling into a ditch,
chaos and fighting continued around him
– he expected a Chinese bayonet in his
gut any moment.
“I had never been to church until I joined
the Army,” says Red, “and they marched
me to church every Sunday.” But in that
moment, it was the Lord’s Prayer that
came to his mind.
Suddenly, appearing out of the chaos, a
medic with a stretcher jeep screeched
to a halt and loaded him in, departing
as swiftly as they had appeared over
a painstaking route through Chinese
forces to the closest MASH unit for care.
Red grins when he remembers the nurs-
es’ first order of business. The nurses
stuck what looked to be a bicycle pump
up each arm and shot clouds of DDT be-
tween his clothes and skin. “We’d been
weeks in the field,” he says, and lice were
a very real issue.
There was no delicate removal of what
turned out to be 81 pieces of shrapnel
in his body. In the kind of “meatball
surgery” made famous by the TV se-
ries
MASH
, plugs of flesh riddled with
confetti-like shrapnel were gouged out,
over and over. When the job was done,
Red was flown back to Japan for three
months of recovery.
But Korea wasn’t done with him just yet.
The Army desperately needed fighting
men, and Red was ordered back to the
same platoon and company he had left.
Of the 800 men in his original battalion,
fewer than 200 had survived the mas-
sacre at Unsan.
It was Red’s next injury - shrapnel in
his ankle - that finally got him out of
Korea for good. Following a brief break
from the military, during which he got
married and had three children, Red
found himself reenlisting and train-
ing in counter-intelligence. He was so
successful in his work that during one
assignment in Vietnam, Red had to be
transferred out due to a late-night at-
tempt on his life. Back in the States, he
received additional training in the art
of safe cracking, and began doing back-
ground investigations on people under
consideration for government jobs with
top-secret clearances. One individual
was a music teacher President Johnson
wanted to hire for his daughter.
In his final military assignment, Red
put his safe-cracking expertise to use
as a “lock man” for Supreme Headquar-
ters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) in
Belgium. “I was tailing people and put-
ting bugs in places that would create
an international incident if they were
known,” he recalls proudly. Although
Red loved the work, he gave it up for his
11-year-old son who didn’t want him to
travel anymore. He retired as a Master
Sergeant with two Purple Hearts and a
Bronze Star for Valor.
Red worked another 18 years as a civil
service employee at Darnall Army Medi-
cal Center at Fort Hood, functioning as
an admitting clerk.
A total of 33,000 Americans and 415,000
South Koreans died during the three-
year Korean War. Some estimates put
the North Korean and Chinese casual-
ties at over 1.5 million. Korea was not
the only narrow escape in Red’s life,
however. He counts 14 times when an
accident or event could have killed him
and didn’t, the most recent of which oc-
curred 13 years ago when several skin
cancers led doctors to tell his family that
he only had six months to live.
“I pray every night on my knees because
I know God has given me life,” he says,
adding that he doesn’t want anyone to
think he’s a hero. “What I did wasn’t
something that required great courage; it
was just something that had to be done.”
And according to Red, he must still be
here because God has more for him to do.
