THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, July 28, 1995 TAG: 9507280621
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DALE EISMAN, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium: 85 lines
Flying just above the treetops toward a North Korean target 42 Julys ago, Arthur Karma suddenly found his B-26 under fire.
As enemy shells ripped into the plane, Karma pulled up sharply, then reached for his radio to call a buddy following about a mile behind. ``I warned him, and we never heard from him again,'' Karma said Thursday.
He would fly 46 more missions and come under fire again, but Karma never forgot July 2, 1953. And so it was that he found himself Thursday on the Mall, 3,000 miles from his home in Ventura, Calif., looking for his friend.
``Everyone says it's the forgotten war - and it is - but I wanted to find out what happened,'' he said.
Karma got his answer in a broiling hot tent, just down the Mall from the new Korean War Veterans Memorial. Set up there was a computer database of American casualties; at a few keystrokes from Karma, it turned up the friend's name and confirmed his death from wounds suffered that night.
``I broke down. I broke down and cried,'' Karma said. ``I confirmed what I knew. His last transmission was to acknowledge that he'd received my transmission.''
Thousands of such scenes were played out on the Mall Thursday as more than 100,000 veterans, their families and other Americans gathered to help dedicate the memorial.
Many sporting caps or wearing shirts that recalled their units and battles, the vets searched out old friends, pondered the war and its time and recalled those who didn't come home alive.
``It's unbelievable. It's like finding a long-lost brother,'' said Peter Beauchamp of Palm Beach, Fla., who by midafternoon had located a couple war buddies in the throng.
The July sun, which sent dozens of overheated vets to first-aid tents, didn't keep Beauchamp from recalling Korea's bitter winters. ``We had these Mickey Mouse boots,'' he said, ``and if you got frostbite it was a court-martial offense because you're not supposed to get frostbite with these new Mickey Mouse boots.''
``It was the coldest damn place I have ever been and the hottest damn place I've ever been,'' agreed Bob Murphy of Denver, an ex-Marine. ``I had never seen sweat roll off my fingers.''
Now almost 64, Murphy said he had been home from the war almost 30 years when he started waking up at night with dreams of combat.
The nightmares still crop up sometimes, Murphy said. They helped bring him to the memorial Thursday ``to sew up some ends I left hanging.''
Like Karma, Vernon H. Wilson found an old friend in the database, terminals, which will be housed permanently in a building near the new memorial. The death of Robert Philip Toole in 1950 had moved Wilson to join the Army - he felt guilty about ``sittin' up in class when guys I know were putting their lives on the line'' - but he always wondered how and where Toole was killed.
``We lost some pretty damn good guys. And my main reason for coming down here was to see if I could locate one of my classmates,'' said Wilson, a Montclair, N.J., native who now lives in Wisconsin.
Wilson, who wore green fatigues to the ceremonies, recalls the war as a confusing swirl of advances and retreats. Part of a light artillery and anti-aircraft battalion, he would sometimes be called forward to help lay down fire to soften the North Koreans for U.S. advances.
``They'd put us in half tracks and we'd go up and fire support for the assault troops,'' he said. ``And still they go charge a mountain or a hill and get wiped out. We didn't know what the hell we were doing.
``Then we found out (the Koreans) had tunnels. The Air Force had come in and napalmed everything. But that didn't help either.''
After a yearlong tour, Wilson came home to find his service and that of his comrades unnoticed and unappreciated.
``And me being black, (I) still had to ride in the back of the bus when we went down south,'' he said. ``So I avoided everything in the civil rights thing because there was no way that anybody was going to hose me, sic dogs on me, tell me that I couldn't do certain things - not after I'd been to Korea.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
TAMARA VONINSKI/Staff
Lamar O. Hooks, right, who served in the ``Mosquito'' 6150 Tactical
Control Group, his wife, Joan, center, and Helen Hong, left, were
among the thousands who gathered Thursday for the memorial
dedication.
by CNB