On a hill in Cherokee County, a resting place waits for the well-rehearsed ritual to play again, another veteran's burial in this high place, the new Georgia National Cemetery west of Canton.
Taking their places, seven riflemen will fire in unison near an open grave. Together, the snap of rifle bolts, a spoken command, and a second solid report will pierce the afternoon. Bolts again, a final firing, and peace will settle on the spot that waits, a place for a soldier whose battles are over, a sailor home from the sea.
Then riflemen will stand at attention while two uniformed veterans fold the national flag. They will place the blue triangle of white stars in a mourner's hands and speak words of gratitude on behalf of the government represented. And from a distance, a bugler will blow his plaintive farewell, that wordless lament that speaks of glory remembered and duty fulfilled.
Often now, sometimes twice in a day, the veterans who perform this service are honor guard members from the Jasper chapter of Disabled American Veterans. All are acquainted with duty fulfilled. Their squad leader is Eddie Lee Washington.
An African-American, Washington joined the Army for a job in 1951 when his America was still racially segregated, but the military was not. He entered basic training in autumn at Fort Riley, Kansas. He was 20 years old.
He learned the work of an infantryman. He came to know the rifle, the machine gun, the mortar. After basic, Washington returned to Pickens County to touch home before heading to his duty assignment.
"I came home for a few days and ended up in Washington state," he said, "Seattle, Washington. From there, I went up to Alaska. They sent me up there for a ski trooper. I said, 'I ain't slidin' up here off these mountains'."
Washington had Army friends fighting overseas. "I volunteered and went to Korea," he said. "That was a bad mistake, too."
Sometimes called "The Forgotten War", the Korean War raged from 1950 to 1953. Just five years after World War II victory saved Europe from the Nazis and the Far East from Japan's imperialism, the United States found its former World War II ally, Soviet Russia, pushing communism down the Korean Peninsula.
Like a pendant, the Korean land mass hangs below Chinese Manchuria into the Sea of Japan. For decades preceding World War II, Korea operated as a rural Japanese colony, a bread basket to her Japanese conquerors.
With Japan defeated at the end of World War II, Russia agreed with Britain and the United States to partition liberated Korea along the 38th parallel of latitude. Northward a communist government would reign––southward, a representative republic.
But in June 1950, communist North Korea broke that agreement. Backed with Soviet weapons and the blessings of Soviet dictator, Joseph Stalin, North Korea's army overran the South.
Stalin (a tyrant as given to genocide and political extension as the Nazi regime he formerly fought against) aimed to spread communism against the West through third-party nations like Korea.
In the newborn atomic age, the possibility of nuclear annihilation made a direct confrontation between Soviets and Americans seem like a bad idea even to Stalin. Korea was the first shooting war in the persistent, protracted "Cold War" between the Soviet Union and the United States that lasted for most of four decades.
On the ground in Korea, communist forces had all but overwhelmed the South when President Harry Truman sent in ill-prepared American occupation troops from Japan to face the onslaught. The role of this Taskforce Smith was largely sacrificial. Pushed almost into the sea, American troops finally managed to hold a defensive perimeter around the harbor city of Pusan.
The course of the war reversed in September when General Douglas MacArthur landed an American army up the peninsula behind the North Korean army and forced a communist retreat. American and United Nations troops chased the North Koreans up the peninsula all the way to the Chinese border and thought to end the war by Christmas.
But near the end of November, considering its border threatened, China entered the war, throwing in massive manpower against the Americans. The fortunes of war reversed again. The American army retreated south, driven below the 38th Parallel.
But the Americans turned to fight again. They fought their way back north and stabilized a battlefront near the 38th Parallel by mid-April 1951. The ten-month dance of death had returned to its starting place and a stalemate.
By summer 1951, peace negotiations began as war continued. Talks dragged on for two years. Only small pieces of territory changed hands while war-making went on with undiminished intensity.
Americans fought and died in pitched battles for nameless, numbered hills along their battlefront. Along with the dead were thousands of wounded, some maimed for life while leaders bickered at the negotiation tables.
This is the war depicted in the popular television series, M.A.S.H.. This was Eddie Washington's war.
An individual volunteer for Korean service, Washington was joined to the 180th Regiment of the 45th Infantry Division in Korea early in1952. The division was actually the federalized 45th National Guard out of Oklahoma. Washington remembers their assigned mission. "You had to push the enemy back to the 38th Parallel," he said.
But after reaching that objective and fighting back and forth a while over the same ground, the young infantryman could see this was a different kind of war.
"I realized this ain't nothin' but . . . seemed like to me what it was doing . . . it was all politics," Washington judged.
Except when moving out to attack another hill, Washington's outfit held an entrenched position "on the line," he said. A points system determined how long each soldier remained in this exposed place.
"It was four points on the line, three points blocking," Washington recalled. Blocking soldiers were a little farther back, but not much. "You were not on the line but still in a dangerous place," Washington explained. "I stayed up on the line until I got my 36 points," he said.
Days at the front gained points toward your total. When a soldier accumulated 36, he was eligible to move back off the line for a respite, provided a replacement was available.
"A lot of guys got 36 points and got killed up on the line, 'cause they didn't have somebody to replace 'em," Washington said.
On the line, soldiers lived and slept in the same holes they defended. "You dug them," Washington said. "Once you make a push, to hold your position, you dug in, because you're gonna be counter-attacked right back. You've got mortar fire coming back at you. Combat is no fun. People dying. People getting killed."
At night, Washington pulled patrol duty. On reconnaissance patrol, his squad moved forward until they spotted the enemy. On contact patrol, they moved up until the enemy spotted them and the squad came under fire. Then, Washington and his fellow soldiers fired back.
"Sometimes you'd run into an ambush like that, and you'd wind up in a barrel," Washington said. "I never liked those patrols at night, but that's where a lot of things happened."
Soldiers stayed up on the line for as much as a half month at a time: no showers; no shelter; the same set of clothes; cold rations from a can and no fires. You slept in a hole, expecting the enemy in the night.
"Ten or fifteen days, and then you pull back," Washington said. "That's your life."
“I was up on hill 290, eating a can of corned beef hash on Christmas Day, so cold you couldn't stand it,” Washington recalled. “Korea is a cold country––snow on the ground––but you still had to be there.”
The cold did its own nightmare work. Washington's feet became frost bitten.
"I can't do a whole lot of walking after my feet froze," he said. "And I got concussion up there on the line."
The concussion came from a mortar shell. "Those big 81 mortars, when they came in, they took out a hole about as big as this room here," Washington explained. He was taking cover in such a blast hole when another mortar round nearly landed on top of him. A soldier beside him disintegrated in the explosion that buried Washington in a mound of earth.
"Next thing I knew, I was in M.A.S.H. hospital," he said. Part of the week he spent there the Army had him listed as missing in action.
"I was lucky," he reasoned. "Just my feet froze."
"All that stuff you can't remember," Washington said. "All that stuff that happened to you. No way. Most people don't even talk about it."
Washington said war's disabling work follows a man all his days and alters his life at home. "It takes a good woman to put up with stuff like that," Washington said. "It takes a real good woman to do that."
Peace negotiations finally ended the Korean War in July 1953, redrawing the North-South boundary near the 38th Parallel.
"I'z in Korea from the first of '52 and up into '53," Washington said. "I left Korea about 30 days from when the war ended. I can't remember what day it was, but I was glad to get out from over there."
For his Korean service, the Army awarded Washington the Combat Infantry Badge (earned under fire), the National Defense Service Medal, the United Nations Service Medal, the Korean Service Medal with two bronze service stars.
"Those are battle stars," Washington explained. "You get those for how many battles your company's been in or your regiment had been in."
On his return to the States from Korea, Washington was due to depart the Army at Fort Benning, but he did not. "I didn't separate," he said. "I re-upped to get out of Fort Benning, and I went overseas to Japan."
He re-enlisted four more years. At the end of that time, he was discharged at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. "It was on June 15, 1956," Washington remembers. He returned home to Pickens County.
By then, his country was beginning to change. A young Baptist preacher was already in motion. That man’s service would be calling his country to take seriously its Declaration "that all men are created equal."
In years after that, Eddie Lee Washington rose to lead the Jasper DAV chapter as full commander. He has since stepped down from that position and heads the honor guard today. The new national cemetery in Cherokee County keeps the squad busy.
"Since the beginning of the year, we've done 24 funerals," Washington said, "and three or four this month."
It is arduous duty for veterans now up in years. Most veterans in the Jasper DAV served in World War II or Korea, Washington said, though the chapter includes some Vietnam vets.
"I'm 75 years old," Washington said. "Most all these guys are my age or older. Young people don't participate in it."
He would clearly like to see that change. "We're looking for people to join up with us," Washington said. "Any veteran can belong. You don't have to be disabled. As long as you've got a clean record, an honorable discharge from the service, that's all that matters."
The DAV gives members the opportunity for continued service. It also offers them the brotherhood of experience in common, the shared understanding of men who knew combat up close.
Washington said he seldom talks of his war experiences. His children never asked.
"I never talk about it except with things that come up with other guys in the DAV," he said. "Other than that, we never talk about it." |
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| In his DAV garrison cap, 75-year-old Korean War veteran, Eddie Lee Washington, holds his youthful portrait as an Army corporal. |
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