Scars of war remain
By Steven P. Wagner
The Forum - 06/13/1999

For Cpl. Norm Fosness, the Korean War is not forgotten. The impacts of war are a vivid reminder of life in rural North Dakota.

Aboard the second planeload of U.S. troops sent to Korea in July 1950, Fosness remembers the excruciating horrors of war.

He still recalls the chilling memories of his life there: humid 95-degree summer days, 30 below winter nights, too few men, inadequate artillery and ammunition.

Fosness, 68, grew up on a farm near Rugby, in north central North Dakota, in a family of 11. His dad was wounded in World War I and two of his brothers served in World War II.

He grew up during the Depression. For a rural farm boy, Fosness understood tough times.

"Neighbors found it hard to find help, so they would hire young kids," said Fosness, who began working on a neighbor's farm when he was 12.

"Making a few bucks during those tough times was nice. We just got out of the Depression."

His family, like all those in the United States, faced rationing of every sort. Gas and sugar rationing impacted the Fosness family most because they grew most of their own food and raised livestock. But the family still needed sugar for baked goods.

"I remember people going around selling war bonds," Fosness said. "If you couldn't afford a bond, you would buy stamps until you got enough to trade in for a bond."

The country's ultimate success in World War II gave most people a good feeling about life and the military.

"We were taught you had to go into it," Fosness said. "You didn't have anyone protesting wars like you do now. If they did, they would be outcasts in the community."

When Fosness was 17, his parents signed papers allowing him to join the Army in 1948. "Me and my buddy went in together," he said. "We thought there was something else in life than working on a farm."

His friend signed up for four years, giving him the choice of where he wanted to go. He chose Germany. Fosness signed up for two years and served occupational duty in Japan.

"World War II was over and who expected another war, and you're young so you want to experience different things," said Fosness.

In late June 1950, North Korea invaded South Korea.

"We were very confident and cocky," Fosness said. "They said it was just a bunch of bandits crossing the border."

A week later Fosness and his buddies from the 1st Battalion, 21st Infantry, found themselves in a war. The North Koreans strafed the Army's camp and soon the soldiers were on the move north.

Fosness was one of the first 400 U.S. soldiers to come into contact with the enemy. They fired a 75mm recoilless rifle at enemy tanks, but soon were surrounded.

"Shells were hitting all around our hole," he said. "There wasn't much of a hole left. They finally disabled that 75."

It became obvious to Fosness and the rest that they would have to retreat.

"We held out for eight hours and most of the ammunition was gone," he said. "It was time to retreat. It was every man for himself."

They ran through rice patties and ditches while dodging enemy fire. "The machine guns when we were retreating, they got a lot of them," he said. "We had to leave the wounded behind."

Fosness' unit received a special certificate of valor for its efforts that day, a battle known as Task Force Smith.

"As hungry as I was, I couldn't eat," he said. "I had a can of C-rations, but it was all built up, what had happened."

In his platoon of 36 soldiers, Fosness was one of nine who survived.

"When the replacements came, it made you sad to see the new guys standing where your friends did," he said. "You felt they didn't have any business standing there."

Fosness lost nearly all of his close friends in that one battle, embarking on the darkest six months of his life.

"There's a part of you that wished you got killed with them," a tearful Fosness remembers. "But after a couple of months you didn't feel that way much. There were just too many more battles ... They just kept putting us up on the line. The enemy just kept rolling over us."

On Valentine's Day, Feb. 14, 1951, Fosness' unit was defending the Han River. Shortly after midnight, enemy forces attacked and he heard something nearby. He pulled the pin on a grenade, which exploded as he threw it.

He lost parts of all five fingers on his right hand. His commendations include a Purple Heart and Bronze Star Medal.

In the United States, he returned to a society which didn't talk about the events in Korea.

"It was no big deal to people, but to us it was. Nobody wanted to talk about it," Fosness said. "It really bothered us when we were over there and the president (Truman) called it a police action and all your buddies got slaughtered ...

"We didn't really feel like you were defending anything. You were just following orders. You were fighting to stay alive. I don't think all those lives were worth it. I think a lot of guys in my outfit felt the same."

He married in 1956 and moved to Fargo, eventually landing a job at the Post Office, where he retired in 1986 after 25 years. For awhile, the pain and memories subsided.

"When you're working and raising a family, it's a lot easier because you're busy," Fosness said. "When you're older, you have a lot more time to think about it. Things remind you of it."

Sometimes seemingly inconsequential things will conjure up memories: bitter-cold winter days on the prairie, an abandoned field or hill, a scene from a movie.

The life of a soldier was much different than those post-World War II portrayals by Hollywood. War didn't seem to make sense, especially for a farm boy growing up in the 1930s and 1940s.

"Your parents worked hard to feed you during the Depression, and then you go over there to blow each others' guts out," he said. "It doesn't make sense."

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The Rev. Robert Pettitt grew up in Fargo, graduating from Central High School in 1941. He worked for the railroad, and was in Lincoln, along the border of Todd and Morrison counties in central Minnesota, when he received his draft papers in 1944.

"We went into the service because Uncle Sam needed you," he said. "The U.S. could have been part Germany, part Japanese. A lot of people don't realize we were close to losing the war."

But Pettitt knew what life was like in the United States during World War II. It was not glamorous, especially if you were a man. It was not easy, especially if you were a woman.

"If you weren't in the service, you weren't worth a darn," Pettitt said. "It prompted everyone to join the service."

With the men gone, women worked the factories and manual labor jobs.

"There weren't many young men," Pettitt said. "The farms were being run by older men. Many of them fought in World War I. A lot of the girls didn't have boyfriends anymore. They were gone."

Pettitt, engaged to his wife Elizabeth, enlisted in the Marine Corps.

"It's tough to be away from your loved ones," Pettitt said. He knew his wife long before they were engaged, spending summers at his grandparents' home in St. Cloud, Minn., across the street from her parents.

He served for two years in the 3rd Division as a rifleman, arriving in Guam after basic training, and stormed the beach at Iwo Jima in the South Pacific during the third day of the invasion of that island.

"I promised my wife that if I lost my eyes or a leg or arm, I wasn't coming home," Pettitt recalled. "She told me that was a bunch of baloney, but I think a lot of guys had the same idea: They didn't want their loved ones to see them maimed."

For Pettitt, the possibility of being wounded or killed was very real.

"We saw the dead coming back," he said. A lot of the group in the 3rd Division were veterans. I wasn't a veteran."

At age 21, he was older than many of the men, but Pettitt didn't have combat experience.

He remembers riding ashore in a Higgins boat, and the Marines were under heavy mortar shelling from the Japanese, who were holed up in the island and held the high ground.

"They were shooting at us but we didn't shoot them. ... We couldn't see anything," Pettitt said.

He and his buddies fought to capture the island's airfields, while the 4th and 5th Divisions also landed on the island.

"It was strictly hell," he said.

He still wonders what the world would have been like if there hadn't been a war.

"Those were all young men who are dead," he said. "Just think what this world would be without war."

After the war, Pettitt came back to a country that had changed. Overall, life was good, but there were side effects.

"When we came back, we were protected," he said. "I had a job when I came back. Even if they hired somebody to replace me, they had to give me my job back."

After he returned to Minnesota in 1946, Pettitt and his wife were married. She remembers the nightmares he endured.

During the war, Elizabeth Pettitt went to nursing school before she was employed at the veterans hospital in St. Cloud.

"There were so many young men coming back, blown to bits. I don't mean physically, I mean mentally," she said.

Her husband suffered, too. "When we were first married, he would wake up wringing wet and talking in his sleep," she said.

And she remembers the rationing of food and supplies, both during and after the war. The couple used their sugar rations to give to the lady who baked their wedding cake.

"You had to do with what you had, and that's what we did," Pettitt said.

He proudly displays a Marine Corps sign in one of the windows of his south Fargo home, along with other memorabilia and pictures in the living room.

"I don't think about it everyday, but I fly a flag everyday," he said. "I think we should have a way of protecting the flag. That's what I was fighting for - the flag, the Constitution, the people."

In 1954, he studied to become a lay reader. In 1980, he began studying to become a minister and is still a regular priest in the Episcopal Church.

"I think it made me conscious of people," said Pettitt. "I never thought about the ministry. I think I saw so much death and destruction that it helped make up my mind."

Harris Peterson was fresh out of Fargo's Central High School in 1943, enlisting in the Marine Corps days after his 18th birthday. He carried on the tradition of his father, who fought with the Army in France during World War I.

Peterson also was a rifleman on Iwo Jima with the 4th Marine Division. He was a combat veteran, wounded in the previous battle at Tinian when an anti-aircraft shell exploded and lodged a piece of shrapnel the size of his thumb in his back. Peterson received a Purple Heart for his injury, but can still remember four men who were killed by the exploding shell.

"I was just a kid, but this was a full-blown war," Peterson said.

Growing up in Fargo, Peterson was a lot like other boys his age: he went to school in the day and worked nights as a bicycle delivery boy for a local grocery store.

But, unlike most of the other 237 men in his company, Peterson came home alive. He was one of

13 men in his unit who survived Iwo Jima without being killed or wounded.

"I was one of the fortunate ones," said Peterson, who remembers scrambling up the volcanic shore as the Japanese fired from above. "It was no easy operation, but we had to succeed so we wouldn't lose so many planes on our bombing runs to Japan."

He still limps today, although during the war, medics removed the shrapnel and had Peterson back on the firing range in eight days - just in time for Iwo Jima.

Peterson still remembers the elaborate meals, known as The Last Supper, served to soldiers before they were sent to invade the heavily-defended islands in the Pacific.

"We had our last supper every time before you went to a beach at 3 in the morning," he said.

The men were suffering from stress before each new mission, not knowing if they would return home.

Peterson, the oldest child in his family, cherished the letters sent by his family. "They were wonderful, hearing from mom and dad," he said. "I wrote quite a bit."

The mission, not the task, was simple.

"It was either kill or be killed. You have to think of it that way," Peterson said. "If you don't want to kill, you're going to be killed anyway."

Peterson proudly keeps his books, pictures and newspaper clippings as a reminder of why the United States needed to defeat Germany and Japan. A picture of Peterson in his foxhole is even portrayed on the cover of one book, "A Soldier's Tale."

"We have the best freedom of anybody in the world," Peterson said. "Freedom is not free. You have to defend your country. What would be the alternative? We spent a lot of lives to protect our freedom, but we have it."

When Peterson returned to Fargo, his parents were waiting at the Great Northern Depot. He was ecstatic to be home, but like most of the returning veterans, felt compelled to serve his community.

Peterson went to work for the Veterans Administration in 1946 and in the early 1950s took a job with the U.S. Post Office in Fargo. Peterson, like Pettitt and many others, remains committed to lobbying for health care for veterans.

"We just wanted to do something. We wanted to accomplish something in our communities," he said, always cognizant of his friends who did not come home alive.

"If those guys had lived, they would have been great community leaders," Peterson said. "They had the same attitude as I did. We wanted to do something with our lives."

Those who survived believe World War II could have continued for several years as Japan was preparing for an Allied invasion.

"If Harry Truman didn't drop the two atom bombs, between 1945 and 1950, we would have lost a million men," Peterson said.