
DATE: Wednesday, September 17, 1997         TAG: 9709170051

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY PAM STARR, staff Writer 

                                            LENGTH:  159 lines

FINDING THE FORGOTTEN GROUP'S EFFORT TO LOCATE VETERANS CULMINATES IN ANNUAL REUNION AT BEACH.

THEY DIDN'T have a welcoming parade, an official thank you or any kind of recognition.

For veterans returning home, it was as if the Korean War never existed.

Stung by the indifference, they got jobs, started families and tried to forget the most traumatic three years of their lives.

But, like the memory of a first love, their combat experience stayed tucked away in the deeper recesses of their minds through the decades, awakening when an old photograph, or a smell, or simply a look on someone's face threw them back into the bowels of Korea.

Then they would remember the awful, bone-numbing cold. The torrential rain that never ceased. The hordes of hungry women and children refugees. The terror of facing enemy soldiers in combat. Buddies dying in their arms or captured as prisoners of war.

And they would wonder what happened to those men with whom they had formed such unbreakable bonds during the war but had not seen since 1953.

That's what drives the men of the Kore an War Veterans Reunion Inc.

They're trying to locate more than 1 million combat veterans still alive in the United States. They want to complete the circle of their lives that began the humid summer of 1950 on the 38th Parallel in Korea, the Land of the Morning Calm.

They call themselves forgotten warriors of a forgotten war.

And when they meet again in October at the Virginia Beach Oceanfront for a third annual reunion, they will greet each other like the long lost brothers they were another lifetime ago. There's a bond, even though many have never met.

It's a nearly impossible task to find every combat veteran, admits Richard Gallmeyer, the nonprofit group's president. Only a minute percentage - 1,000 - have attended each reunion, but Gallmeyer hopes most of the 3,000 veterans they've located will come this year.

The odds don't faze Gallmeyer, 66, who was a radio operator and forward observer for the Army's 58th Field Artillery. The idea of a reunion has consumed him since 1991, after a cerebral hemorrhage left him severely depressed.

``I gotta have something that keeps me wanting to be alive,'' says Gallmeyer, a jovial man who frequently punctuates his sentences with short bursts of laughter. ``This is what the rest of my life is devoted to, because it makes me happy.''

He didn't really start pursuing the idea until after he underwent a colostomy operation in 1994. Laid up for several months, the retired Army master sergeant began sifting through black and white photographs from the war.

He realized that the young men in the pictures were his only link to a past he had to acknowledge in order to continue in the present.

Gallmeyer leafs through a photo album whose pages have yellowed with age and points to a grainy photograph. ``See these two guys?'' he asks triumphantly. ``I found him, on the right, two weeks ago. And he's coming!''

The headquarters of the Korean War Veterans Reunion is a cramped office in Gallmeyer's sprawling ranch house in Kempsville. There he sits in front of his home computer every day, sometimes 10 hours a day, poring through a software program that has 300 million names from telephone directories.

``I just type in the last name, first name and middle initial,'' he explains. He's communicated with more than 3,000 people that way.

He and other committee members - Floyd Newkirk, Jerry Brown and Phil Egert among them - pore over letters they receive from people wanting to find someone, and they mail registration forms and other information as people request it. They send press releases to newspapers and radio stations across the nation, asking for help in locating their lost buddies.

It's not as simple as it sounds.

For starters, they have no budget. Because the group charges no membership dues and receives no funding, members voluntarily do everything from public relations and advertising to filing and mailing. Most of the time, they have to dig into their own pockets to keep the project going.

The group used to lease an office but couldn't keep up with the rent.

``Funding would be very nice,'' says Gallmeyer, swiveling around in his steno chair. ``If we could rent an office, we could hire someone to do the easy work.''

Their work would be easier if the government wouldn't ignore them, Gallmeyer adds. Other U.N. countries such as Korea, Belgium, the Netherlands, Canada and the Philippines have sent and are sending representatives to the reunion, so it really irks Gallmeyer that no one from Washington will even acknowledge their efforts or send a representative.

``We asked President Clinton to attend the first reunion, and his people said no,'' Gallmeyer recalls. ``So then we asked them to make a news announcement about our search. It doesn't cost the government one penny to do that.

``We volunteered for America for three years; now we're asking America to volunteer for us. Children in the schools don't even know about the Korean War. We need that formal recognition.''

Floyd Newkirk turns the pages of a navy blue binder filled with personal letters as Gallmeyer speaks. Newkirk served in the 1st Division of the Marines as an 18-year-old heavy machine gunner, holding back Chinese and North Korean soldiers in Panmunjom, a city right on the 38th Parallel.

``At our first reunion, one woman took her children out of school just so they could meet Rudy Hernandez,'' he says. Hernandez is a Medal of Honor recipient from North Carolina who has attended every reunion. ``She wanted them to know what he did for our country.''

``Before the war, South Korea was a Third World country,'' adds Newkirk, 65. ``It's now an industrial giant. If not for us, there would be no South Korea.''

Gallmeyer, Newkirk and Jerry Brown are listening to a cassette tape of a poem written by North Carolina veteran Fred Lane and set to music by Bobby Pender. Lane and other Marines were surrounded by the North Koreans at the Chosan Reservoir and were either killed or taken prisoner.

The three men sit very still in Gallmeyer's family room, blinking back tears, as Pender sings about the enemy pouring gasoline on 34 truckloads of bodies of Marines and setting them on fire. The captured Marines were forced to watch their buddies go up in flames.

``This hits us deep,'' Gallmeyer says, punching his heart with his fist. ``I get goose bumps every time I listen to this.''

When the song ends, the men stay silent.

Newkirk, like Gallmeyer, never mentioned the war to anyone after coming home. They learned to swallow the memories. Several years later, his wife, Yvonne, asked him how he got wounded. That one question opened the floodgates.

``I told her and we started crying together,'' Newkirk says. ``We never told war stories to our families.''

Exchanging those stories - some sad, others hilarious - and renewing old friendships are the main reasons veterans attend the reunions. For Newkirk, who suffers from non-Hodgkins lymphoma and melanoma, it is a life extender. Yvonne Newkirk credits the reunion group with helping her husband keep his mind off the disease.

``This keeps him going, it's the best thing in the world for him,'' she says by phone. ``These men gave up their families to fight, and when they came back, they went on with their lives. The public forgot them, they really did.''

It doesn't matter to these men that none of them served together in Korea. Their shared experiences make them brothers. That's how they feel about every veteran, and that's why it's so important for them to find their lost buddies.

The time, money and effort they expend to reunite the veterans is more than worth it.

``Yes, this is a lot of hard work, it's a 24-hour-a-day job,'' says Gallmeyer, ``but I don't want the credit. I want the results.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photo

COURTESY OF DICK GALLMEYER

Richard ``Dick'' Gallmeyer of Virginia Beach, right, located Korean

War buddy Rudy DiGeorgio of Staten Island, N.Y., last year.

Color photo by D. Kevin Elliott

Gallmeyer works out of his home office...

Graphic

REUNION EVENTS

Oct. 15 - Check-in at the Surfside Inn, 13th Street and Atlantic

Avenue Social at 6 p.m.

Oct. 16 - 8 a.m. Welcome family breakfast buffet at Surfside Inn.

Tours, shopping, golf, bowling and other activities during day.

Oct. 17 - 9 a.m. Displays and photography from the Korean War. 7