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    The Korean War and Aftermath: A Personal Story
    The Korean War and Aftermath: A Personal Story
    The Korean War and Aftermath: A Personal Story
    Ebook99 pages1 hour

    The Korean War and Aftermath: A Personal Story

    By Donald W. Bray

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    About this ebook

    Drafted into the Army upon graduation from Pomona College in June, 1950, Donald W. Bray was plunged into the Korean War. Killing was not in his nature. His incredible experience as a soldier resonates with that of the millions of Americans swept into international conflicts. Assigned to an African-American unit, his involvement in the desegregation of the Army offers an insiders view of that process. He reflects on his understanding of life, death, and war. He regains a measure of mental balance living on the Spanish island of Ibiza, working with street kids from New York, doing research in Mexico and Chile for advanced degrees, and teaching in the first Peace Corps program at Notre Dame.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisheriUniverse
    Release dateFeb 14, 2011
    ISBN9781450288514
    The Korean War and Aftermath: A Personal Story
    Author

    Donald W. Bray

    Donald W. Bray is a retired professor emeritus of Political Science at California State University Los Angeles. He received a B.A. from Pomona College, M.A. from the University of California Berkeley, and a Ph.D from Stanford University. He was drafted into the army at the outbreak of the Korean War. This is a story of his military experience, autobiographical background, and post-war aftermath. He writes this both to share his wartime experience with others and as a record for his family. He thinks he has some particular revelations about the Korean War which left him troubled. Included, then, is a story of how he overcame his wartime turmoils. Donald W. Bray lives in Southern, California and has a wife, four children, and three grandsons.

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      Book preview

      The Korean War and Aftermath - Donald W. Bray

      Contents

      Acknowledgment

      Dedication

      Prologue

      Sparta, Wisconsin

      The American West

      Pomona College

      The Military

      Ireland

      Ibiza

      Berlin

      New Jersey

      Berkeley

      Mexico City

      Berkeley and Mexico City Again

      Berkeley Last Act

      Stanford

      Chile

      Stanford Again

      Notre Dame

      Epilogue

      Acknowledgment

      missing image file

      This undertaking was a family project. Everyone played a part. Gwen inspired us all with her strength to confront adversity and carry on. Laura proposed the idea and devoted hours to making suggestions, proofing, and finding long-lost photos. Joyce, a professional librarian, worked hours on the manuscript, bringing her intellectual and mechanical skills to bear. Richard, who teaches college English and creative writing, has been struggling for years to teach his parents how to write more effectively. Marjorie, a university professor, is the schoolmaster of us all. She edited every word. This would not have been done without the urging and encouragement of grandsons Cole, Richard, and Thomas. My sister-in-law, Betsey Coffman, is a neighbor and has been an insider and participant.

      missing image file

      The Grandchildren (clockwise from left) Richard, Thomas and Cole

      Dedication

      missing image file

      For Marjorie, my partner in all things and a legendary editor.

      The Merry Band:

      Joyce

      Gwen

      Laura

      Richard

      The Grandsons:

      Cole Patton

      Richard Fessler

      Thomas Fessler

      Betsey Coffman

      Friends, colleagues, and students

      Prologue

      missing image file

      June 1950

      About to graduate from Pomona College in Claremont, California, I am summoned to the department chair’s office. We have decided to send you to the PhD program in government at Harvard. I had never discussed graduate school with him and had only a vague notion of where Harvard was. Before coming to Pomona, I had worked in the western United States as an itinerant farm worker. For after graduation, I had lined up a job as a janitor in an orange juice factory. Still, I was surprised and excited by the prospect of higher education. I liked learning.

      All of this became moot two days later, when I received a telegram from President Harry S. Truman, ordering me to report for induction into the army the following Saturday morning.

      December 1952

      The day I arrived there from Korea, I stole out of a hospital in Kyoto, Japan, feverish, delirious, crazy. Between Claremont and Kyoto had lain the Korean War.

      Sparta, Wisconsin

      missing image file

      Companionable Innocence

      As a boy, when people were unkind to others, it made me sick to my stomach. I had never imagined being in the army, carrying a rifle and being expected to kill others. That would be impossible.

      I had grown up joyfully in the luscious rolling green of western Wisconsin. The Great Depression of 1929 did not diminish the joy. My family and that of an uncle had to move to a shared dairy farm. Two cousins, my two siblings, and I all lived like brothers and sisters. We owned the world of nature. There was always enough food, fresh and preserved. In winter, we took ice from the creek for homemade ice cream. I wouldn’t do it now, but then, we shot a lot of squirrels and deer for meat. I guiltlessly loved the taste of both.

      We walked a long way to a one-room school. When my older sister entered second grade, the teacher told her to bring her little brother even though I wasn’t old enough. She needed another body in first grade. She would announce first grade, and all three of us would snap to attention. She then said sequentially, stand, turn, pass, be seated. The first grade was now up on the stage in front, getting its learning. This diminutive young woman filled me with admiration. When the held-back, overgrown-for-grade farm boys got into a fight, they would seek refuge in the boy’s outhouse. She would go in and pull them out by their ears. What a woman.

      Before the Depression ended, we moved to nearby Sparta, where my father established a practice as a chiropractor. He had been trained in Chicago after a chiropractor was credited with saving the life of his allegedly doomed mother. He had a good business straightening out the abused backs of farmers. Sometimes they paid in delicious produce. My father was a good and tolerant man but, in the tradition of his German farmer parents, did not communicate much with his children. Instruction at the Sparta elementary and high schools was limited. There was a public school anti-intellectualism in the high school. One teacher was fired for suggesting humans had a common ancestry with whales. Saving the day was an exceptional French-Canadian English teacher, Miss Coté, who inspired me and some close friends to go to college. She made us like poetry. Don’t tell anyone at the pool hall. Although, come to think about it, Stu Coffman and I used to sit on the beer cooler there, kicking our heels against it while exchanging thoughts about life, history, and even poetry.

      Due to my early enrollment in first grade, I graduated from high school at 16, after two years of intriguing courses at the University of Wisconsin, I returned to my hometown, Sparta, to seek summer employment. The first day back in the pool hall, where too much of my youth was deposited, I talked to three fellow Spartans, who were about to leave for Snoqualmie Falls, Washington, to seek work in the lumber forests of the Pacific Northwest. Without hesitation, I accepted their offer to join them. My world travels began. But what happened between 1948 and 1961 was bizarrely foreign to the imaginings of someone with a Lake Woebegone childhood.

      In

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