World War II ended in 1945; the Vietnam War began in 1959. In between, the United States fought the Korean War from 1950-to-1953 after North Korea invaded South Korea.
“The Forgotten War is what they call it,” said Pipestone resident John Halbersma. “But there’s more missing in action from the Korean War than there is from the Vietnam War yet.”
A total 8,176 soldiers are unaccounted for from the Korean War — bodies not identified or recovered — and of those, 4,245 are classified “missing in action,” according to U.S. Military war statistics. Total deaths in the Korean theater number 36,516.
Halbersma, 82, is one of those forgotten-war veterans from the Korean War, PFC Army, one of the fortunate ones who came home to Pipestone to marry wife, Lorraine, in 1952, and to raise four children on the same Pipestone farm his father bought in 1941.
He missed World War II — he went for his physical, but the Big War ended one month later — but then his number came up in September, 1950, three months after fighting broke out Korea.
“Everybody was so tired,” Halbersma said. “It was only five years after the Second World War. When it (the Korean War) started, everyone just went,” he shrugged. “All the equipment and trucks we had were left over from the Second World War. I never heard anything when I got back. ‘Oh, he’s home.’ That’s all. But, we’ve got to live with it; you get killed just as well.”
Halbersma was the first of a group of six Pipestone men to be drafted for the Korean War. He was 23 years old.
“I was an alternate; another guy was supposed to go,” Halbersma said. “He was supposed to go on Monday. He had a car accident on Saturday night. He broke his leg. So I had one day to get ready to go.”
After training on American soil, Halbersma spent seven months in Japan before his eight-month service on Korea’s front line.
Halbersma’s was a front-line company and since the line had stabilized north of the 38th parallel into North Korea, that’s where he remained for eight months, driving an Army truck with the laundry outfit.
“Twice a week maybe I went down to Seoul, which was 35 miles, but the roads were so bad it took us a couple hours,” Halbersma said. “I hauled clothes down there once they couldn’t be worn anymore and I’d take new ones back.”
Hauling laundry was Halbersma’s official role, but he said, “You never went to the front line empty,” so he hauled just about everything from ammunition to bodies.
“The worst part of it was I had to haul dead soldiers back from the front line,” Halbersma said. “That was the start of their trip back home. That was terrible. When they unloaded my truck of the bodies, they were in a bag and they had to open the bag and I had to be witness that there was a body in there. There were about 30 altogether (bodies hauled); that’s too much.”
He said the terrain was mountainous, the roads narrow and poorly constructed. In the winter, ice coated everything.
“It was bad, bad driving,” Halbersma said. “You didn’t want to drive them; but we had to go. Many a truck went over the side into a ravine. You start sliding and you can’t stop it.”
Though IEDs (improvised explosive devices) weren’t a danger for truck drivers back then, snipers were.
“They’d sit up in trees and shoot guys in trucks,” Halbersma said.
Halbersma said that one thing this country can do for its veterans is provide better medical care.
“Veterans don’t get the care they should,” he said.
Another thing this country can do: don’t send more soldiers to war.
“A war never settled anything yet,” he said.
