Baby Rocking Badass

My Dad was a baby rocking badass.My dad loved to rock babies. In his last few years on this planet that was what he called “my job”. It was why God put him on Earth. My dad rocked babies that were born to young women addicted to crack. He did it every day, but my dad was also a badass. My father was born in Southern Illinois in a little town by the name of West Frankfurt. My grandfather used to send my dad out with 5 bullets for the 22 rifle and if my dad didn’t come home with 5 squirrels, he got in trouble.

West Frankfurt was the type of place where a 5′ 4” guy might wind up on the basketball team, or the boxing team, or the gymnastic team. People always underestimated my dad, they looked at him and couldn’t help seeing a short guy, not a basketball player. My great aunt once paid my dad a quarter to go beat up another kid who was a lot bigger than my dad was who was bullying her son. The guy never saw him coming, too short I guess. My dad liked to refer to himself as “The Little Old Fat Bald Guy”. But there was a lot more to him than what you see on the outside. If you wanted to know my dad (I mean the real dad and not just the Little Old Fat Bald Guy), you would need to know one word, Taejon. There is a lot of Taejon in John.

My dad was good at several things. One of them was moving very quietly around and not being seen. (He called it being a Sneaky Pete). Sneaky Peteing was a verb my dad used a lot when he taught me and my brothers to hunt. Another thing my dad did well was shoot a gun. Even as a middle-aged man who wore bifocals, he could hit a target about the size of a match head from 25 yards, and do it over and over.The first time I heard anything about Taejon I was in the 6th grade. I had pretended to be sick so I could stay home from school. I was Sneaky Peteing (looking for Christmas presents) but what I found was Army paperwork. My father never spoke about what happened to him in either WW2 or Korea when I was a kid. I read the report and found out that in a place named Taejon, my father had taken out 2 enemy machine gun nests using a BAR. He was being promoted to Sgt. for this act and receiving a bronze star with a V device for valor. What the paper did not say was that a BAR was short for Browning Automatic Rifle (a type of machine gun that is fed by a clip, not a belt). I thought a Bar was something like a S T I C K. I thought, “Holy Cow! He took out not one, but two machine guns with a stick!” He just looks like harmless bald guy but this guy is really a wicked badass. It lead to interesting thoughts during those “My father can beat up your father conversation that kids have on a playground.” Much later my Aunt Liddie showed me a stack of pictures my father had sent her from Korea. The pictures were from Taejon. I was horrified by them. The pictures were of about 7000 dead civilians that were killed by the North Korean forces after they took over Taejon. My dad would come across these bodies after the battle for Taejon, during his second trip from Pusan to the 38th parallel.

My dad was stationed in Japan as a member of I Company 3rd Bn, 34th regiment of 24th Infantry Division when the North Koreans attacked. The 24th Infantry Division became the first US unit sent into Korea. They were sent “to absorb the initial “shock” of North Korean advances, and delay the much larger North Korean units” to “buy time for the deployment of additional forces.” Let’s call it what it was, a suicide mission. The North Koreans outnumbered our men 2 to 1, they had tanks, and we didn’t. Our bazooka rounds bounced off of the North Korean tanks, and our artillery batteries had only a few armor-piercing rounds. The Americans had almost no radios and no batteries for the ones they did have. My dad said he once got a message dropped from a plane, folded up in a coffee can on a little parachute telling them that they were surrounded and needed to slip through the enemy lines.

My father was involved in a lot of what he called shoot and scoot operations. The kind where you are trying to slow a vastly superior force down. The kind where you have absolutely zero chance of winning. His unit was completely surrounded three times and once left completely alone due to supporting units abandoning their posts during his time in Korea. I did not hear about any of this from my dad until a few years ago when we were out playing golf. I learned more about my dad in one day than I had known my whole life.

Still, most of this I had to find out on my own.Taejon started for my father in a battle on the Kum River (just North of the city). Enemy troops (including a tank) were advancing on his position under the cover of a destroyed bridge. He was blown out of his foxhole by a shell, and a limb the size of a tree landed right where he was in the fox hole. How he didn’t die from being blown out of a foxhole by a tank round is a complete mystery to me. He didn’t get shredded by shrapnel, he didn’t die from the concussion, he didn’t get crushed by the huge tree limb. I guess it wasn’t his day to die.

In Taejon, dad’s 24th Division was up against the North Korean 3rd and 4th Infantry divisions and the 105th Armored Division as well. The first thing the North Koreans did was attack the American gun emplacements, food, and ammo supplies, leaving my father’s unit (the only regiment left in Taejon) without food, ammo, or artillery support. It was one understrength Regiment (now less than 1,000 men) against 15,000 people with tanks. The escape routes for the Americans had all be cut by North Korean who had set up roadblocks at this point.

Some new 3.5 inch Super Bazooka’s had arrived and the Commander of the 24 Division, Major General Dean, was out on the front line leading a patrol killing tanks. I’ve never been to war. I spent 5 ½ years in the Army in relative comfort repairing secure communications equipment. But I’m pretty sure that when a Major General feels compelled to go out and start taking out tanks, you would have to say the shit has hit the fan.

General Dean wound up getting separated from his men, and was eventually captured. He was the highest-ranking officer captured during the Korean conflict. While General Dean was busy getting himself separated from his men, my father was busy fighting his way out of Taejon. His unit was surrounded yet again, and the roads were blocked. Dad had orders to evacuate on a train, but nobody knew how to operate it, so dad found himself on a deuce and a half racing through the town and straight into a machine-gun emplacement in the town square. As fate would have it the men manning the machine-gun had stepped away from their post, they were cut in half by the 50 cal mounted on the deuce.

My father escaped Taejon by the thinnest of margins. When they got out and dismounted from the deuce an officer was reciting volunteers to go on a rescue mission back into Taejon to find and rescue Gen. Dean. The volunteers were told that if they decided to go back they could have their choice of weapons. My father volunteered and took another guy’s BAR. They decided to go back into Taejon via the railroad tunnel, and not the road, and as they Sneakey Peted and crept along the track covered by the raise of the railway on their left and a cliff on their right, they soon became aware that along the wood line to the left of the tunnel there were 2 machine-gun emplacements on their flank. Dad and the others of their small patrol crept up until they were in line with those emplacements and could place enfilade fire on those machine guns. That was when my father did something I’m not sure I could have done, he stood up. He placed the gun sideways with the ejector facing down used the strap for the BAR to hold the gun level so as he fired it ejected the shells and tried to pull up he could control it and keep it traversing the line with the 2 machine guns, and then he stood up. He fired his BAR and controlled it with the strap as it pulled up and used the gun to take out those two emplacements. Then he lost his balance and fell off over the edge of the cliff. The other members of his squad hoisted him back up from the ledge he landed on with the same sling he used to control his BAR.

My dad and the others in his unit were never able to locate Dean, but they did their best. My father survived both WWII and Korea. When he went into Korea there were over 2,000 men in his unit, when they got down to 198 men the unit was disbanded and folded into another unit. My dad came home, and went on to become a Warrant Officer 3rd class and became a Nike Hercules missile inspector. These missiles were stationed around the edge of the nation so his job took our family from Lockport, NY, to El Paso, TX, Anchorage, Alaska.

My dad didn’t die in Germany, nor did he die in Korea, but when he worked with those rockets that protected all of us from USSR bombers during the cold war he got to fuel and de-fuel them, a lot. According to his doctor working with liquid hydrocarbon fuel and red fuming nitric acid oxidizer that they used as fuel for these rockets caused the cancer that took my dad’s life. So, as far as I am concerned my dad gave his life for his country. It just took him 84 years.

Here is to you Sneaky Pete, I love you.