NORMAN — My father, Al Horne, was 20 years old when he was drafted out of the oil fields and into the Army in 1950 during the Korean War.

He was legally blind in his left eye and should have been classified 4F as unfit for duty. The Army said they would take him anyway but he would never leave the states. When he got orders to go to Korea, he protested but was told, since he was a supply sergeant, he would stay behind the lines and never see action.

During one of the battles, a friendly fire episode killed a large number of infantry men and all available personnel were pressed into front line service. He saw action at Hill 1179, Bloody Ridge and Heartbreak Ridge before being sent back to work in supply.

He was very proud of his Combat Infantryman’s Badge which, at that time, was only awarded to soldiers who had been under enemy ground fire for 30 days.

Here are some unvarnished stories from the Korean War.

Hunger over prejudice

His story begins with basic training at Fort Lee, Va. In 1950, much of the country was segregated and, like many people at that time, he was prejudiced.

The Army was one of the few institutions that did not segregate blacks from whites. He was disdainful of blacks and refused to eat with them.

When a black soldier would sit down at the same table he was at, he would immediately get up, scrape his plate and leave. The black soldiers noticed this and made a point of sitting with him. After several days without eating, hunger won out over prejudice.

Hard work pays off

Having spent the summer in the oil fields, he was in excellent shape. One rainy day with not very much to do, the men went to the gym and were ordered to do as many sit ups, push ups and pull ups as they could do.

He didn’t know the results were going to be tallied and posted. He did as many as he could do but didn’t really push himself that hard. He came in second out of several hundred men.

Passing through Hiroshima

On the troop ship to Japan, he didn’t get seasick, but almost everyone else did. The decks of the ship were slick from all the vomiting. He took a troop train across Japan that went through Hiroshima. There was nothing but ruble for as far as the eye could see.

Casualties of war

When he got to Korea he was assigned to the 2nd Division which is still stationed in Korea. On one of his first days there he was watching puffs of smoke in the sky when someone yelled at him to get down and take cover before he gets killed by shrapnel.

The next day someone told him to go over and help with a load another solider was trying to carry. The load turned out to the first dead soldier out of many he was going to see which was a middle aged officer with gray hair who had received a mortal chest wound. Korea was a UN police action involving units from other countries. He thought the Dutch were especially indifferent to casualties and saw their dead solders stacked up like cordwood.

Several close calls

He was never wounded but had several close calls. He was walking with his friends Bevino and King when a door gunner started firing from a North Korean plane flying overhead.

They all three scrambled for cover into a small indention in the frozen ground not really big enough for one man. The last burst of tracers hit the ground three feet away from him.

On another occasion he was driving a supply truck with another soldier and stopped to look at a pheasant in a field. The soldier on the passenger side reached across and shot the pheasant with a pistol out of the driver’s side window. They went into the field to retrieve the pheasant and when they got into the middle of the field noticed a chain of small metal triangles linked together. This meant the field was mined and not cleared. They carefully retraced their steps.

On another occasion he was driving a supply truck and became disoriented and was following another truck, the driver of which claimed to know the way to their destination. He kept seeing dug-in tanks and thought they were passing the second or third line of resistance. They finally gave up and came back the way they came and found out they had been driving around in no-mans land in front of the first line of resistance.

The North Koreans and Chinese could have easily blasted them with artillery fire. He thought they held their fire because nobody would be stupid enough to drive supply trucks around in no-mans land and it had to be a ploy to get them to fire and reveal their positions.

On another occasion he and Bevino and King came under fire and they decided to separate and come at the enemy soldier from different directions and then meet up again. He went out alone and when the time came to meet again at first he could not find them. When he finally did find them they had been killed by shrapnel. He was very angry and bitter about Bevino and King getting killed and did some things he later regretted.

At one point he came down with malaria and his fever was so high they stripped him naked, laid him on a table and poured ice water all over his body.

Promotion vs. re-enlistment

One day when his tour and enlistment was almost up he was told he was getting a promotion and was expected to re-enlist and stay for another tour. They wanted him to take part in putting down a revolt at a POW camp on an island off the southern coast of Korea.

He said no thanks and returned to the states and eventually back to Norman where he had gone to high school and to his family home on Acres Street.

Everyone said he was different when he came back form Korea. He had survivor’s guilt in that he came back without a scratch while Bevino and King were killed in action.

He came back without a physical scratch but not without a psychological scratch. For the rest of his life he would have problems related to what is now called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder but back then there really wasn’t a diagnosis or a name for it.

He had nightmares and would involuntarily jump at unexpected loud noises. He didn’t care for the noise from fireworks on the Fourth of July at all. On the subject of war he spoke matter-of-factly about it as someone with first-hand experience.

Epilogue

The forgoing were the stories he wanted to tell his son. There was probably a lot more he didn’t want to talk about, since he didn’t tell any stores about Hill 1179, Bloody Ridge and Heartbreak Ridge, only saying that he was there.

This isn’t an epic “Band of Brothers” saga but the story of Norman boy who was sent off to war and considered himself lucky to make it back alive.