Korean veterans don’t always agree with each other.
Charlie Doby grows young at a reunion.
Charles Blankenship probably would, too. Half a century after the Korean War started, he’d love nothing better than getting together with some of those guys he fought the Chinese with up on Heartbreak Ridge, but he’s never had an opportunity, and he isn’t quite sure how to go about it.
But Gilbert Mesimer?
He was on Old Baldy in Korea when the communists launched a grenade attack, and he found out in a hurry what death looked like — and smelled like.
He’s never been to a reunion, and he has no interest at all in going to one.
He believes the American people have forgotten the Korean veterans, he says, “and I try not to think about it. Every once in a while, it comes back, but thank God, I’m standing on my own two feet.”
Still, he relents occasionally and shares a bit of his experience as a soldier.
“I was drafted in 1950 by give-’em-hell Harry Truman. ‘You are hereby notified to report .... ’” he says.
So he quit his job at China Grove Drug where he’d worked for two years and got on one of that gaggle of buses that nearly filled the north side of the first block of West Innes early on Aug. 10, 1950. They were picking up 139 young men in front of the old U.S. Post Office in downtown Salisbury and heading to Charlotte for their pre-induction examination — and Korea.
Gilbert’s mother, Mrs. Frank Mesimer, shared one of his letters about his first battle experience with the late Mack McKa, a writer for the Post.
And Ira Lee Baker and Franklin Scarborough quoted that letter in their China Grove history, “From Chinaberry Trees.”
“We rode on trucks a while,” Gilbert wrote his mother, “then walked down a road to the foot of a steep hill. Our tanks and mortars were blasting away at the hill. During the night some straw houses were set on fire, so we could see the Chinese if they attacked us, but they laid low and did not attack.
“At daybreak we started up the hill, ran into enemy fire, and we fired for 20 minutes. We took some prisoners there. We moved up, threw hand grenades into another hole and wounded two Chinese. They could not get out of the hole, so our boys shot them dead.
“Along a bit further we ran into another hole with a machine gun in it. It started barking and we went down.
“Those bullets were going over my head about five inches. We started to move back and the guy next to me got it in the throat. He was dying and I could not watch.
“They finally got him moved back, but we were still pinned down. One of the boys in my squad got it in the shoulder, and another in the leg. ...
“We took some prisoners, and I helped take them back to the captain. They were from 19 to 25 years old, and they were afraid of us as they thought we might use our bayonets on them.
“The second platoon put the machine gun out of action and we moved slowly up the hill, threw hand grenades and cleaned out the Reds. That night we dug in on top of that hill. The smell of death was all around. It was a sweet, sickening smell. It made me sick, and I could hardly sleep. The next day we went down in a valley and rested beside a stream.”
Later a hand grenade was thrown into his foxhole. Shrapnel struck him in the arm and leg. The man with him was hit in the windpipe.
“He died before we could get him off the hill.”
Gilbert got home in 1952, went back to work for the drugstore where he still works — and was mayor of China Grove for several decades.
Charles Blankenship came home in 1954, went to work in the kitchen at the VA Medical Center in 1957 when it was a hospital and still new — and retired in 1982. Now, he says, he plays around with a few cows on his place at Woodleaf.
But he can’t hear very well, and his ear hurts. And that, he believes, was caused by the Korean War. He was in Company H, the Indian Heads 23rd Infantry Regiment, which fought the Chinese in the Battle for the Hills in the fall of ’51. “We were on Heartbreak Ridge,” he says, “and what I
remember most is before the battle the Chinese were on top of a mountain, and we was at the bottom, and we just sat there and watched them. The planes would come in and shoot that napalm. When it hit the trenches, it would burn everything off. They thought they killed ’em.
“The company was trying to take the hill, and I was on the mortars.
“We’d drop mortar shells in. I’d grab five up in my arm, and drop ’em. I dropped a 100, 200 rounds, trying to eliminate the Chinese trying to take the hill.
“And the sergeant came up and pointed to me, and said to somebody, ‘Can’t you see he’s hurt? The blood’s running down his ear.’ So they sent me back. One of the boys walked with me to the firing station, and the next day I went to the lieutenant, and he wrote it down and give me some of them infection pills, and brought another guy to be second gunner. I’d been second gunner. They made me third gunner. Then later I had a job driving a jeep.”
His ear never really got better. It would heal over and be all right and then it would give him trouble again.
The trouble’s still with him.
And so is the memory of what the radio operator told him about that battle. He was up where he could see better than Charles.
“And he said he could see arms and heads and legs flying everywhere. That battle was the worst I ever seen. It wiped the whole outfit out just about. Company H was heavy weapons, machine guns. It had all that stuff.
“They was killed in action, missing in action, almost the whole line that was taking the hill got killed.
“We had a big hole dug with a second gunner in it, and when the Chinese run in on us, every ammo bearer jumped in that hole. I said, ‘What about me?’ But there wasn’t any more room. I had to stay out in the open with shrapnel flying everywhere. But I didn’t get hit.”
He stops a minute to think.
“I’d like to have a reunion,” he says. “I could put the pictures on a computer, and I could get in touch with them maybe,” those guys in his outfit. If they’re alive. A neighbor told him that could be done.
“But I don’t have a computer.”
And if he had one, he doesn’t know how to do it.
If he did and could work up a reunion, he’d like to see them and talk about the way those hills looked and the rocks that hung out of those mountains like they do at Blowing Rock.
His daughter, Cathy Allen, who lives next door and worries about his hearing and the pain he still suffers, says she’d like to help him find some of the guys who were with him in that war.
“There weren’t many left,” she says.
And they’re gone as far as he’s concerned. Gone, sort of like his hearing.
“I can’t hear thunder out of that ear,” he says.
But he remembers when he could hear, just like he remembers his old buddies, and it would be so nice to see them again and talk about what they did — and what they saw — half a century ago when they left home and went away to war.
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