David Townsend’s recollections of the Marine Corps in Korea and visiting John, as told to Marissa Gawel.

My father was in the First World War, and so ever since I was a little boy, I had wanted to join the Marine Corps. I didn’t join before the Korean War, because the Marines were often used simply for guard duty, and there’s nothing more boring than guarding something. On Wake Island, there was a Marine base of probably a hundred guys, but they were guarding the base on an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean – nothing there, no town, no nothing – and I knew that these guys go out there for a couple years and they go crazy. Like, literally.

So I didn’t want that, but at the same time, I didn’t want to be drafted, and then the Korean War came and the draft was beginning to breathe down my neck. So I said: this is the time. There’s going to be some kind of action – I’m not going to just be guarding a bunch of garbage cans. I’m going to join the Marine Corps and do what I’ve always wanted to do.

That basically was it, and I think that was probably more or less what drew John into it too. John was in the First Marine Division. They were all US Marines. Although I was in the US Marine Corps, I was stationed with the First Korean Marine Corps Regiment, so everybody around us were Korean Marines, good guys. When we got out of boot camp, everybody was assigned to some part of the Marine Corps. Most people went to infantry. I happened to be a radio operator, because I had gone to radio school in San Diego, and so I was randomly assigned to this outfit called ANGLICO: Air and Naval Gunfire Liaison Company. The air part was what I was a part of.

We would be told by a Korean marine officer “If you look at the map here, there’s a North Korean tank and he keeps shooting at us and hits sometimes. We would like you to take him out.” We would then call into a base – we had no idea where it was, but it was behind us somewhere – and say “We have a tank at such and such a place on the map, and we want to take it out.” They’d say “Okay, thank you very much.”

Maybe an hour, or a few hours, or a couple of days later, we would get a call on our radio that said “We’re going to send you a squadron.” Where these guys came from, we never knew, but they’d say they were going to show up at twelve o’clock and they almost always did. We’d look and we’d look and see little tiny black specks in the sky.

Our officers would get in touch with the pilots – mostly fighter pilots because that’s what we used, single-engine fighters – and basically direct these planes onto these targets (at the speed they were going they literally couldn’t tell when they were right over or about to be right over the target), and then the officer would say “Okay, you’re getting close to it. I’ll give you word in a minute.” When our officer thought it was right, he would say “Mark,” to tell the pilot of the plane to drop his bomb, and, with any luck, he’d hit something. We used napalm. Basically, it was jelly gasoline and God help you if it got on you. And now, nobody’s allowed to use it – it was pretty revolting.

It was damn interesting, but there were plenty of times – even like days sometimes – that nobody gave us airplanes, so we didn’t have anything to do. So we’d get a bunch of hand grenades and we’d go down to the river and fish. We never caught anything. Or we’d set up targets and just shoot.

Where I was, the front lines for North Korea and South Korea were very far apart – what they called No Man’s Land. It’s the space between the front lines, unless the lines are right together – which happens – but in a lot of cases, like in the First World War it’s like 100 yards or 200 yards.

In our case, it was over a mile, so we would walk out there and look for targets, and if we saw something that looked like it was something that oughta be blown up, we’d go back and call into this mysterious unit behind us and tell them “We just saw a lot of guys milling around in such and such a place.” They’d decide if they wanted to… I don’t know what, but they could make their minds up, and they did or didn’t.

I was in Korea twice. I was there about six months, and then went back. The first time we went, half of us knew nothing and the other half (about five guys) would’ve been there before so that they could train the new guys (they didn’t want eight guys going over there doing a fairly complicated, important job who didn’t know anything about it). Second time we went, we were the half that did know, because we had been there before.

One day, John or I found out where the other one was stationed, and what it would take for me to get over there to see him. Because I was with the Korean unit, with our own US officers, we didn’t have to go by the rules – the chickenshit “you can’t do that, you gotta do this” – that John did. All our commanding officer cared about was that we got the job done, whatever it was, and that we did it well. So if we wanted to go to Seoul and screw around, he would say “Sure, go ahead.”

So I said “I have a very dear cousin who’s what they call a platoon leader in the First Division, and he’s not very far from here. I’m going to go and see him.” And he just said “Go ahead. Do whatever you want.”

I took a jeep and drove over there to see him, and it was great excitement for both of us. When I first saw him, I got out of the jeep and I saluted him. Which I probably wasn’t supposed to do, because if there were snipers – which indeed there were – if they saw that, they would say “Well, this guy’s important. He’s an officer if he’s being saluted.” And they would shoot that guy. I believe that the regulations were that you didn’t salute, but I couldn’t resist it. And John, of course, saluted back. We were very amused by the whole thing.

He showed me around, showed me his bunker, showed me how he lived, introduced me to a couple of his men and we got a picture taken.

And then some fairly high-ranking officers – I think brass probably – showed up at John’s part of the front line, and they wanted to see what it looked like looking out of the trench at North Korea (because that’s where it was – right on the other side of the trench). So the four of them, and then John and I, went and looked, and snipers started shooting at us.

That happened to me all the time where I was, so it was no big deal at first. (The sniper at our place, we knew where he was more or less, but we left him alone because he couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn, and we thought that if we got rid of him – which we could’ve done – they’d just replace him with someone who could hit the broad side of a barn.) I thought that John’s snipers had probably gone to the same sniper school as our guy had, because they couldn’t hit anything either.

But then they started getting a little close. I remember that one shot went over my head – so close that I could hear it zinging – and I said “Oh God.” But I said to myself: “I’m not going to let these guys know that I’m nervous.” Of course, they were all thinking exactly the same thing. None of us said a word. Finally, the snipers stopped.

Later, John and I laughed that nobody wanted to let the other guys know that they were affected in any way by these guys trying to kill us.

That’s really the excitement that happened when I was with John that time for an hour or two, and then I had to get back. We shook hands and I never saw him again until we were both out. I probably saw him next up in Cape Cod, where his mother lived.

(Editor’s note: John and David remained very close until the end of John’s life, and saw each other every year, without fail, at Thanksgiving gatherings at John’s mother’s house on Cape Cod. After John’s mother died, they often continued to meet up at Thanksgiving at various rental houses on the Cape. David came down from Connecticut to visit John in hospice in New York City shortly before he died.)