Vets Still Conflicted Over Korea

Walter C. Benton retired from the Army as a first sergeant with almost 30 years’ service, including Korea, Vietnam and Desert Storm. He had three children, seven grandchildren and a boxful of decorations. He was numbered among the “Chosin Few,” a group of soldiers whose bravery and endurance against overwhelming odds during an epic battle in Korea places them in the very first rank of U.S. fighting men.

But of all his experiences, the one that still haunts him occurred Christmas Eve 1950, on a bitter-cold beach at Hungnam, North Korea. It was there, amid the chaos of an army reeling from defeat and awaiting evacuation in the American equivalent of Dunkirk, that 18-year old Pfc. Benton encountered the aged, half-frozen Korean woman.

He drew her into the circle of GIs huddled around a bonfire. He heated cans of tomato soup and fed her. He pieced together her story of lost family and exhaustion. He struggled in vain to convince her she must move quickly to a safer place. And, minutes after a landing barge carried him off the beach, he saw her blown to pieces--killed by American demolition charges set off to destroy abandoned munitions.

When he first saw her, Benton remembers, the Navy was playing “White Christmas” on a loudspeaker. When the smoke cleared, “there was nothing left.”

Like the soldiers who recently broke their silence on No Gun Ri, the village where scores of Korean refugees were apparently killed by American troops who feared infiltrators, Walter Benton kept the story of that Christmas Eve buried inside him for decades. “You just never talked about it, kept it bottled up, I guess,” he says, even though “there’s never a Christmas that goes by that I don’t think about it.”

Benton and countless other combat veterans of the nation’s forgotten war occupy a unique and painful niche: For most of the half century since they marched off to keep the world safe from communism, many struggled in silence with emotional wounds that threatened to destroy their lives--with nightmares, alcoholism, violent tempers, family problems, difficulty holding civilian jobs.

Only fairly recently have some found release in speaking out about the experiences that trouble them still.

Korea was never like other wars. Fought from 1950 to 1953, it was the first armed conflict of the Cold War, and it ended in bitter stalemate: Communist North Korea’s surprise invasion of South Korea swept down the mountainous peninsula and nearly drove the ill-prepared U.S. garrison into the sea. Gen. Douglas MacArthur turned the tables with the brilliant Inchon amphibious landing behind enemy lines and U.S. forces quickly pushed all the way to the Chinese border--only to be overwhelmed and driven into bloody retreat when China entered the war.

The three-year conflict, which ended in an uneasy truce, claimed 36,914 American lives and left 103,284 wounded, compared with 58,167 killed and 153,303 wounded in the nine years of Vietnam.

And those who fought in Korea belonged to a different era. Raised in the stoic, deal-with-it-yourself culture of World War II, combat veterans of Korea were exposed to the same kinds of psychological damage as those in Vietnam and other wars. The difference is that Korean veterans came home to a country eager to forget the war they had fought. And, whereas”post-traumatic shock syndrome” was recognized and routinely treated as a medical problem after Vietnam, most men who fought in Korea struggled alone.

Not only was little counseling offered, but many considered it weakness to seek help.

“Especially the older generation, they had the idea that it’s personal and they didn’t want any outside interference,” Benton, now 67, says. “They think they can handle it, and often times they can’t.”

Paula Schnurr, a professor of psychiatry at the Dartmouth University Medical School and an official at the Veterans Administration’s National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, says the post-combat emotional problems of Korean veterans were neglected by the government and by research scientists alike.

“It’s unfortunate that a number of the Korean veterans have suffered,” she says. “If they haven’t talked about it and they have the sad memories, the nightmares after all this time, they may think they’re going crazy. If they’re sitting there in a chair and start weeping, they need to know it’s normal.”

“There was a lot of research done after World War I and a lot after World War II and then the psychiatric literature moved on to other issues. It wasn’t until later that it was realized that some of these problems hadn’t gone away,” Schnurr says.

As a measure of how Korean veterans were overlooked, Wong Suey Lee of Anaheim, now 73, recalls visiting the Long Beach Veterans Administration hospital a few years ago. Information about benefits available to different veterans was posted on a wall. There was material for veterans from World War II, Vietnam and the Persian Gulf War, but no mention of Korea.

“All of a sudden it went from World War II to Vietnam. They forgot all about Korea,” Lee says.

Forgotten or not, the stories of their lives, as they near the 50th anniversary of the Korean conflict, are records of pain and heroism in another kind of war.

After War, a New Battle Begins

Gilbert Towner, now 71 and living in Lapwai, Idaho, is one of those whose experiences in Korea were terrible but whose life afterward may have been more painful still.

A member of the Tututni Indian tribe, he went ashore with the 1st Marine Division at Inchon in September 1950. He was part of the combined Army-Marine force that rolled back the North Korean invaders, only to be almost annihilated when tens of thousands of Chinese troops entered the war unexpectedly.

Like Benton, Towner was among those surrounded at the Chosin Reservoir just below the Chinese border. The survivors, who fought their way out against vastly superior forces and sub-zero cold, became the “Chosin Few.”

After that, he could have been rotated out, but he volunteered to accompany a friend back to the front, just as another Chinese offensive began.

The War He Almost Lost

On the night of April 23, 1951, serving in a mountainside foxhole, Towner was wounded twice. His foxhole mate, whose name he never learned, was hit three times. Without medical help, the 23-year old Towner decided, his partner would die.

“I couldn’t stand up. I thought I could stand up, but when I got out of the foxhole, I found out I couldn’t,” Towner says. He lashed the other soldier’s wrists together and crawled, dragging him up over the ridge and down the back of the mountain to an aid station.

Along the way, Towner encountered three Chinese soldiers who had broken through the line. “I got all three with my side arm,” he says.

Refusing treatment himself, Towner returned to his position. “They carried me off that mountain the next morning,” he recalls, suffering from wounds involving both legs, his arms and his head.

A comrade, who received the Medal of Honor for his actions that night, told Towner he deserved a Silver Star for what he did. “But I was new to the outfit--I came up that night--and nobody knew me,” Towner says.

He stayed in the Marine Corps until 1958. Then, he says, unable to meet new physical requirements, “I took my discharge and went home.” It was the beginning of his second war, the one he almost lost.

“I was a logger before I joined the Marine Corps and tried to go back to the same job,” he says, “but I couldn’t do the work because of the wounds.”

“I just went home and tried to pick up my life where I’d left off, but I couldn’t do it. . . . Because of things I went through, I used to have some real bad dreams. I was in real bad shape. I drank an awful lot. I tried to use alcohol to overcome my problems, but I found it didn’t help.”

For eight years, he wandered the streets, working when he could. His first marriage failed; so did a second.

Somehow, Towner turned the corner. He married again, had children. He found a place in the Postal Service, the first of a series of government jobs that would last for 25 years and earn him disability retirement.

And he reconnected with his Indian culture.

“I give all credit to God for helping me to get through these things,” he says. “I relied heavily on my Indian culture, using the sweat house, to straighten myself out.”

Like many Korean War veterans, Towner also credits the military reunions he began to attend in the early 1990s. Although veterans’ organizations existed all along, interest in reunions surged in the late 1980s and early 1990s--partly because the 50th anniversary of the war was approaching, partly because many veterans finally felt a need to reconnect.

Many found an unexpected benefit. “These reunions have had a big healing effect for us,” Towner says.

Today, he still lives with the pain of his wounds, and with the consequences. In winter, the skin on his hands cracks at the joints. Degenerative arthritis--the result of the severe frostbite he suffered in Korea--slows him.

And like others who went through such experiences, he still breaks down when he summons up those memories.

Yet at long last, he seems to be at peace. He has been married for 20 years now, has four children and five adopted step-children. He is also an honored figure in his tribe.

“I don’t feel sorry for myself at all. I just thank God I’m alive and able to meet the new day,” he says.

A Bittersweet Homecoming

Aurelio R. Salas of Whittier spent his 21st birthday in a foxhole in Korea manning a bazooka. “In my battalion, I was the first guy to knock out a Russian T-34 tank,” he says. “I got a Bronze Star for that.” Not long afterward, he also got a sniper bullet half an inch from his heart, wounds to his ankles and severe damage to his hearing.

And, tears choking his voice, Salas recalls a night when his position was overrun. “I was the only one who survived. They told us everyone for himself, pull back. My bazooka partner said, ‘You go first.’ I jumped and rolled down the hill. I never saw him again.”

“When I came home, I could count on one hand the guys who survived from my platoon,” he says.

Salas married and started a family after his discharge, but the new struggle began immediately. “My wife couldn’t handle me,” he says. “She just couldn’t handle me.”

He chokes repeatedly and there are long silences as he struggles for control amid memories of that period. “I had a bad habit of drinking heavily and I would go berserk. I would just go crazy.

“I was stressed out, depressed. . . . The veterans hospitals then were not prepared for us and the service was very, very bad,” he says, echoing a common complaint among Korean War veterans.

With difficulty, he acknowledges that he was sometimes violent at home. “I sure was,” Salas says softly. “I sure was. I was real mean to my wife and my first couple of kids.”

Work Ethic Saved Him From Himself

Twice, he got into his car intent on committing suicide.

What saved him, he says, was that “I was a workaholic--I guess because I wanted to forget.” Most of the time, he held two jobs and went to school. Eventually, he also got help from a friend who was a psychologist.

“I started to educate myself. I got my high school diploma. I went to business seminars and conferences. I wanted to become more than I was.”

First he learned to be a barber, then went into real estate. He and his wife stayed together. All six of their children have now graduated from college. And for 15 years, Salas served on school boards in Whittier.

The painful memories of buddies killed and wounded never left him, nor the scenes of battlefield violence and brutality. He still gets angry over suggestions that episodes like No Gun Ri reflect a callous or uncaring attitude among U.S. troops. “Things like that just happen,” he says.

Salas, now 70, works as a volunteer in a homeless shelter. His assignment: helping veterans, especially alcoholics who served in Vietnam. “It’s good therapy for me,” he says.

“Just because nobody did that for me doesn’t mean I shouldn’t help others.”

‘It’s a Tragedy’

Arthur W. Wilson of Portland, Ore., now 81, already had two Purple Hearts from World War II when he went to Korea. He earned another one there, and a battlefield promotion to company commander in savage fighting near the Yalu River.

“When I went into the company as a platoon leader, we had 213 men and myself. I came back with 58 men. You might say I inherited the company. I was the only surviving officer.”

Wilson also knows what the men at No Gun Ri endured. Early in the war, he faced a similar mass of refugees, also wearing the traditional loose white robes of Korea peasants, that ignored his order not to approach American lines.

Twice he had his interpreter tell the column to stop. Each time, there was no reaction. Wilson ordered a burst of fire in the air. Still they kept coming. Desperate, he ordered a shot fired into the mass.

Finally, the column stopped and obeyed an order to lie down on the ground. “We searched all of them and found three North Korean soldiers with weapons,” he says.

“I was not there at No Gun Ri, but it could have happened to us, to any group of soldiers. It’s a tragedy, and the milk never gets put back in the bottle.”

Wilson left the Army in 1954, partly crippled by feet and hands that had frozen as he fought in snow and 30-below zero weather. He too found the return to civilian life unexpectedly hard.

“I was asked to go through a mental therapy session, but I declined,” he says. “I figured I’d take care of myself.”

He was married, with two children and had worked as a chemist between the wars. Now, he found a laboratory unbearably confining. “I drifted,” he says, working at various sales and marketing jobs with big companies before starting his own business as a landscaper and stonemason.

Throughout most of his working life, Wilson was plagued by emotional problems. He had recurrent nightmares, difficulty controlling his temper--which he blames for his permanent estrangement from his eldest daughter--and inability to remember anything at all from two lengthy periods of his military service.

“I’m not crazy. I thought I was. I thought I’d lost a few marbles along the way,” he says.

What troubled Wilson’s later life was not World War II, though he saw brutality during his months in the Pacific that he would never forget. In World War II, “I was younger and yeastier. It was a war I thoroughly believed in--I quit college to be part of it,” he says. And, as a squad and platoon leader, he was responsible for only a small number of men.

In Korea, Wilson was older, less able to shrug off painful experiences, and “I had more men die under my command.

“You give orders. Men get killed obeying your orders. It weighs on your conscience. . . . You know you’re not God. You know you’re not omniscient. You keep asking yourself, ‘Could I have done better? If I’d done a better job, would fewer men have died?’ ”

‘The Older I Get, the More I Cry’

Eventually, Wilson got professional help, even produced a book called “Faces of War” in which scores of veterans recounted their experiences. But it took 30 years and a series of reunions with other veterans to shake off a continual nightmare.

“It was not about something that actually happened,” he says. In the nightmare, “I’d just know I was in Korea and know we were about to be attacked. I’d know it was coming. I’d look down and my cartridge belt was missing. Then my weapon was gone. Then I’m buck naked and the enemy is there.”

“The more you talk about it, the more you get rid of it,” he understands now, but for many years after Korea there was no one to talk to who could understand. Anyway, you were supposed to deal with it yourself.

“The attitude was, only babies cry,” he says, but “the older I get, the more I cry--and I’m not ashamed of it now.”

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Times staff writers Judy Pasternak in Washington and Peter Hong in Los Angeles contributed to this story.