A Half-Century After Korean War, a Son Probes His Father’s Secrets

Seven bullets were missing from the .45-caliber gun clip that my father kept in a dresser drawer, partly hidden.

He showed me the clip once when I was a boy, curious to know the story behind the little black box. Unlike the unarmed mortar shell my father had brought home from the Korean War, the clip was no simple souvenir.

I sensed it meant something more, but my father refused to share it.

As the years passed, I forgot about the gun clip. Nearly 25 years later, as the world marked the 50th anniversary of the Korean War, the mystery again began to haunt me.

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The first time I saw Paul Peter Sloca really cry was on Memorial Day, when I was 12. Through his tears, my father talked of those who had died at his side in the war.

Before then, he’d rarely talked about the war.

When I had asked about it, he told stories about boot camp and the grenade shrapnel that tore up his knee, earning him a Purple Heart. To a boy, combat seemed like the neatest thing a father could have done.

But my father never glorified it, and often he cut our conversations short, closed the door on them as he’d closed the dresser drawer where he kept the clip.

We lived together, alone, from the time I was 10 until I left home at 16. My older sisters had all moved out, and my father had long since divorced.

We talked a lot, took trips together, cooked dinner for each other. We were a couple of bachelors, my dad used to say, especially on trips to Disney World and the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y. We made the best of things.

We are separated now by thousands of miles. Recently, at age 34, I resolved to learn my father’s secrets about the war that helped shape him, resolved to learn more about him before time and his failing health made knowing him better an impossibility.

I thought he owed it to me to talk about the 21-year-old who went to war a half-century ago and returned to rear a son and four daughters.

My father was a member of the 101st Airborne in 1951 when he was shipped to Korea, where he served with several units. He made seven combat jumps and spent long nights on patrol.

On one terrifying day, he had been forced into hand-to-hand combat, looking into the eyes of the enemy, armed with only a bayonet. It happened just once.

“And once was enough,” he said over the phone recently, offering no details.

This time, I pressed him harder to tell me about the war.

As I heard him take another drag off a cigarette, he told me for the first time that he’d kept a diary in the war. He had searched for it but could no longer find the little black book.

He still smokes--against the advice of his doctors and everyone else--although Player’sLights have replaced the Pall Malls of Korea and afterward. What was in the diary, I asked.

“Things that happened,” he said flatly. “It had the names of some of the guys I served with. We lived together, became friends.” He can’t remember names, just their home states: Tennessee, New York . . .

In war, he said, it’s best not to get too close to people.

“Guys are going to die, and being too close would make it hell to live with.”

He carefully measured his words.

“I don’t believe in glorifying any kind of war. I don’t like to brag about it. I just keep my mouth shut and live with it,” he said. “We were all getting shot at. There were guys that were real heroes. I learned from them. There were a lot of good guys that didn’t come back. Every Memorial Day I remember those guys.”

And I remember the tears.

A single dad who reared his children with military discipline, he worked two jobs, his main one as a meat cutter. Often his legs ached from the cold of a butcher’s freezer and the hours standing as he sliced meat.

Now 71, he doesn’t get around so well. He’s gray-haired and more mellow than the disciplinarian I remember from my youth. He sleeps a lot, a result of heart problems and hip surgery. He’s remarried, but she works; so most days he’s alone with his dog, Sam, at home in Hamilton, Ontario.

His children have scattered. At night he watches movies and enjoys his growing coin collection. He’s partial to Westerns and anything with John Wayne. But he wasn’t as unflappable in combat as “The Duke” is on the screen.

“I was scared,” he said. “You fight like hell because you want to survive. There was no such thing in war as not being scared.”

There was no bravado in his voice, only sadness.

“I went there and did my duty,” he said. “I did the best I could. I was lucky to survive and come home. Happiness is coming home. I didn’t want to get any medals. To hell with the medals.”

He’d been emotional, though, 10 years earlier when I gave him a wooden shadow box containing ribbons and medals he had earned in the war. The war had changed him, he said now, after some prodding.

“I was a little different when I came back. It took a lot of starch out of me.”

My father could have chosen not to go to Korea at all. Just a year before getting his draft notice, he had emigrated to New York from Canada, where he’d grown up on the family farm in Saskatchewan, the son of Ukrainian immigrants. He could have just gone back north with his wife and infant daughter.

“The United States took me in as a citizen, and I had an obligation to live up to that,” he said. “So when I was drafted, I went.”

He was wounded on night patrol after just two months in Korea. “A lot of guys did not come back that night, but I’m not going to tell you how many didn’t,” he said, his voice trailing off.

There was a lot he still wouldn’t tell me, and I’ve since learned that many combat veterans are reluctant to discuss wartime experiences.

Hal Barker, who helps run the Korean War Veterans Project in Dallas, had a similar experience with his father, a Marine helicopter pilot in Korea. In the group’s June newsletter, Barker pleaded with veterans to open up to their families: “Sit your children down and get it out before it is too late.”

My father agreed Barker has a point. But war is a terrible thing that’s not easy to discuss, he said.

He had once discouraged me, a U.S. citizen who had grown up mostly in Ontario, from joining the Army, which to him meant combat and death. I ended up serving in the Air Force and flew a desk during the Persian Gulf War.

Korea “was only supposed to be a police action,” he said. “We didn’t think we were going to get into a full-scale war.”

He still wouldn’t say exactly what had happened to him on the front lines.

“I’ve got enough of my own problems to worry about without having to worry about the problems I had back then,” he said. “I’m trying to make a life of my own here.”

And the gun clip?

“I just don’t want to say anything about it. It’s something I keep private.”

What about the seven missing bullets? I was pressing again.

“I won’t tell you that,” he said. “I don’t think you need to know.”

We talked a little while longer, then said our goodbyes. I grabbed a cigarette and pondered. At my computer, I typed something I’d known all my life: Dad was my hero.

But perhaps there have to be secrets between fathers and sons.

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On the Net, Korean War Project:

www.koreanwar.org