Historians may know the conflict in Korea as “The Forgotten War,” but for two former soldiers from Hamlet, the memory remains fresh after 55 years.

Last Friday marked the 60th anniversary of the outbreak of fighting in Korea, when the U.N. initiated a police action to stop the North Korean Communist regime from taking over the Republic of Korea to the south.

It was fought over three years and ended in a stalemate that has never been broken. U.S. troops have never left.

Over the ensuing years, there have been threats of fighting breaking out again with missile tests and the recent sinking of a South Korean warship, but they have never materialized.

“The war is often called The Forgotten War because it came between World War II and the Vietnam War, both of which were given far more attention,” veteran Bill Roseboro of Hamlet said. “The Korean War lasted three years, and resulted in 54,246 American military dead, and 103,284 wounded. While the Korean War, to the generations who have come since, may be only a footnote in history, it will never be forgotten by those who fought there, and those who had loved ones, family and friends who died there.”

One of those who recalls the war vividly now lives on Chalk Road outside Hamlet.

“I could tell you stories that would make the hair stand up on your arms,” said Henry “Hoot” Gibson.

Now in his 80’s, Gibson lives alone outside Hamlet since his wife died in 2004. He attends Faith Freewill Baptist Church on Airport Road.

Fighting broke out in Korea in June of 1950 and Gibson was inducted into the Army in September of the same year. He was in Korea during the spring and fall campaigns of 1951, fighting with E Company of the 25th Infantry Division of the 35th Regiment as a lead scout.

Gibson doesn’t mind talking about his combat experiences, and recalls extended narratives of battles that took place on hills as far as 30 miles ahead of the front lines.

His ordeal, however, began long before he reached Korea, when he fell under the crash course of Gen. Kramer at Camp Pickett, Va., made infamous because those troops were said to be made combat-ready in a mere six weeks.

“They liked to starve us to death,” Gibson said, remembering one soldier was rationed three beans for dinner. “Gen. Kramer got his star taken away after three boys died during forced marches. We never seen no milk, salt, black pepper or anything like that. A lot of the boys’ folks would drive hours to bring ‘em food up there. Mine did.”

He was then sent by train to Camp Stoneman in California, where food was plentiful, and left on a troop ship along with fellow Richmond County native “Racehorse” Gathings.

“The last thing I seen was the Golden Gate Bridge in the distance,” he remembered. “It was beautiful, then it got smaller and smaller, and finally I couldn’t see it at all.”

Aboard the ship, supplies were also scarce, and cigarettes and water ran out in a short period of time. He said the mood changed after showers were cut out, and none of the troops could get their nicotine fix.

He arrived in Korea in late January, via a stop in Japan, and was taken by train to Seoul and his first glimpses of war.

“It looked about like Safie Mill does now,” Gibson recalled. “Everything was bombed out and knocked down. We joined our company at a little town (outside Seoul), done a little practice on hill climbing, and then we started pushing up.”

While in combat, he carried a grenade launcher with four fragmentary grenades on his vest and three in the pouch, as well as five bandaliers of tracers for his M-1 rifle.

He recalled one battle in particular, when a gap was made in the American line, and he was split off from his company. He rolled down a hill in a hail of bullets, and found an American tank at the bottom of the hill that let him in.

“As soon as I got in there it sounded like popcorn all around that tank,” he remembered.

He got out of the tank once the fire died down, and heard a voice that wasn’t quite American from the bushes saying, “G.I., come this way.”

“I knew that wasn’t one of us, because the American soldiers talked (with cursing), so I booked it along that road, then a truck come up with six of our dead on the back, and I just happened to know the guy that was driving it and he said hop on.”

He rode the truck for a short while until it took a curve very sharply and threw him from it.

“He kept on going because they had two machine gunners set up on that fork in the road,” he said. “I rolled down in the ditch and there was a dead body down there all swelled up and stinking. I started hitting those machine gun stations with tracers, that was the way we showed them where to fire, and I probably killed 20 or 30 of ‘em, just doing the same thing over and over again ... Finally, they found me and pinned me down. I managed to get through the trees there and just started running.”

He said he stumbled upon a group of ragged civilians trying to get their livestock out of the combat zone, and got out of fire by walking among them.

Gibson was knocked out by mortar rounds three times, and earned his Purple Heart that way.

“The next thing I remembered after the bang was my sergeant pouring water over my face,” he recalled. The wounds were received on Dec. 17, 1951.

He was wounded on another occasion while on patrol with 20 other men, when they were surrounded in a foxhole and grenade fragments hit him on the shoulder.

“I flipped over and played dead, and that’s how I got out of there,” he recalled. “When I got to the hospital, they said, ‘I don’t think any bones are broken,’ but it had blown my parka off my back. They sent me back out.

He said along the way, he saw American soldiers who were frozen stiff with their arms still sticking up, and the wounded in the hospital looked like no hope cases.

“A lot of them were younger than I was,” he said. “There were a lot of them that needed the doctors worse than I did, so I went back to fighting.”

He also recalled another story, when he and another scout were switching off going in front, and he saw a trip wire at the edge of the woods and told the scout to pull back.

“He looked at me and said, ‘What’s the matter with you?’” he recalled. “Right then, they opened up on him and cut him in two pieces ... We lost 10 or 12 men trying to get him back, but finally had to give up. If he was alive, we’d have kept trying, but he was gone.”

Roseboro said he doesn’t want to take away from the glories of veterans of other wars, but he would like for the general public to be aware of the Korean War.

“The Korean War was also the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union. It took many years to happen, but that was really the beginning of the end,” Roseboro said.

The Korean War was also the first test of the United Nations, which had just been formed in the wake of World War II, Roseboro explained.

“At that time, the U.N. worked more effectively,” Roseboro said. “It was truly an international effort. It wasn’t just something that was done on the backs of U.S. soldiers ... I don’t really care for the U.N. anymore. There are slogans like ‘Take the U.S. out of the U.N.,’ and I tend to agree with them.”

For the fighting men who were there, however, the idea of fighting Communism in far away places is little consolation for the horrors they experienced.

“I just wasted two years of my life over there, that’s the way I feel about it,” Gibson said. “I saw and experienced some of the most horrible things you can imagine, and saw a lot of my friends die, and I didn’t get no money or nothing from it except a couple of pills and these hearing aids. When I got back here, I had to get a doctor to start pulling my teeth, they wouldn’t even do that for me in the Army.”

The obvious contemporary comparison to the Cold War is the War on Terror, but Roseboro doesn’t see the parallel as that simple.

“It was different, because there was one focus point in the Cold War - Russia,” he explained. “Our threat now, in my estimation, is radical Islam, and there’s no one central place where it is concentrated.”

Staff Writer Philip D. Brown can be reached at (910) 997-3111 ext. 32, or by e-mail at pbrown@yourdailyjournal.com.