Doing my job sometimes emotionally affects me very deeply

A column by John Estridge

Warning: this column does pertain a lot of boring facts even more so than most of my columns, and it will probably be a lot longer than normal because of the boring facts probably very few really care about. Remember, if you continue, you have been warned.

When I got fired from what was my dream job at the time — being editor of two small-town weeklies the Brookville Democrat/American and the Liberty Herald after about 30 years in those positions – I was devastated.

However, on a whim, I applied at the Brookville Library. When I sat down for an interview with three supervisors at the library, I gushed like a teenager in love for the first time. I told them I had always had a dream of either working in a book store or a library, because I have always been in love with books.

And I told them I would do it for free. Students, not yet in the workforce, and for those already there, that is not a good thing to tell prospective employers so try to refrain from gushing that much. However, they hired me and actually pay me.

After working at the library, and following the reopening as my hiring coincided with the pandemic shutdown, they moved me to the basement where the History and Genealogy departments are located. They tell me it is because I am a good researcher and I did not abjectly fail at being a clerk. However, when I look in the mirror, I can see I have a face meant for basements, especially for someone who deals with the public.

But I really like my job in those departments. I do research. An example of genealogy research is some people from somewhere knew, or thought they knew, their whatever grandfather was born here in 1804, John Huston Williams. That ancestor’s father, Ralph Williams, was well documented, and many of John Huston’s siblings were also well documented, but their purported ancestor was not. John Huston died in the 1840s in Madison County, it is thought. They wanted to prove their ancestor was actually the son of Ralph Williams.

A person being born in this wilderness in 1804 would not generate a lot of paperwork, if for nothing else, paper was really hard to come by and there were not many officials let alone officials worrying about keeping track of people being born and dying. In the 1840s, there were really no obituaries and maybe not even a marked grave. But, I was able to find a possible link in a land sale from Ralph Williams to JH Williams in Madison County (Anderson) in the 1830s or early 1840s. I also found information from Madison County history books that seems to talk about both Ralph and maybe John Huston. It is tenuous, and the family will have to venture to Madison County to view more extensive documents to make a more thorough study and an evaluation.

However, they were happy.

History-wise an example is a woman was working on a paper or a book concerning blockhouses in this area during the pre-state early European settlement phase. After some serious, time consuming and frustratingly unsuccessful attempts, I found some articles about blockhouses in the Indiana Magazine of History. That has been a great publication since around 1913. And I knew nothing about it until I started working at the library. It and other sources such as the Reifel’s Franklin County history tome, had enough information I was able to write her a nice report with total attribution.

I know all of this would be and is boring to 99.9 percent of the populace, but – for better or worse – I am that .1 percent that is fascinated by it. That unique and really boring club may actually have a membership at less than .1 percent of the population.

My latest history endeavor came from local resident Sam Samford. Sam has been involved in POW/MIA research for the past several years. He wants to do a local presentation on MIA soldiers from Indiana during the Korean and Vietnam wars. He was able to get the information on those who are still MIA, but he had a hard time finding photos. He plans to have photos of the soldiers on a screen while talking about the soldiers.

I was having exactly no luck in finding additional photos, when my boss, Julie Schesselman, came to my rescue and suggested various avenues where I might find them: Ancestry, Family Search and Newspapers.com to name three.

And lo and behold, there were many along those avenues and other avenues I stumbled on while doing the research.

First, I was amazed at the number of MIAs from Indiana. It was mind boggling for me, but most everything is mind boggling at my age even things I learned the day before because sometimes I learn it anew the day after.

A note here is Sam was able to find all but one of the Vietnam MIAs’ photos. Thus, almost all of my research was on the Korean War MIAs.

It became a quest for me. I would take a name from a long list supplied by Sam and go through the various sites looking for photos of those soldiers. It was very time consuming. I really wanted to find those photos as I believe seeing the photos will personify their individual stories.

And I quickly learned those photos personified those soldiers to me. Because, while I yearned to find those photos, once I did find them, those photos broke my heart as there were children, often smiling, staring back at me.

Another area where I am somewhat unique and boring is I like nonfiction. There are several types of nonfiction I read, but the bulk is military history. Thus, I know quite a bit of the history of America’s different wars including the Korean War.

All wars are brutal, but with the Korean War, our soldiers were not only fighting a ruthless adversary, but they were also fighting the elements. I worked many years at the Old Whitewater Publication with the late Burton Sintz. He was a Veteran of both World War II and Korea. He said when he first came under gunfire in Korea, he – as any soldier who wanted to live did – hit the dirt, so to speak. Koreans at that time, I do not know about now, used human excrement as fertilizer. That was his initial welcome to Korea and the war.

One of the major battles of the Korean War was in North Korea. The Americans were in the middle of routing the North Korean Army.

And to bore you further, let me give you some perspective. North Korea had almost won the war immediately during the summer of 1950 as they invaded South Korea in a surprise attack without a previous declaration of war. It was sort of like Pearl Harbor only over on a peninsula in the Far East.

Using big Russian tanks and a host of men, the North Korean army was almost completely through South Korea when the Americans showed up like the cavalry in a western. The initial American soldiers were taken from Japan. World War II ended in 1945 and this was five years later. Our occupation army in Japan had relatively easy duty, and they were largely unprepared, in training and equipment, for combat. But they went anyway and were able to somehow hold off the North Korean army in what was called the Pusan Perimeter. Fighting was desperate, and soldiers were asked to sacrifice their lives for people they did not know in a country many had never heard of to gain time. Often, the North Korean army would cut off our soldiers and our soldiers were either annihilated to a man or they were captured. Very few of our cut off soldiers lived to fight another day.

Americans who were captured at that time deep in South Korea were forced to walk to North Korea. It became known as the Tiger Death March. While reading much of Korean War history, I did not learn of the Tiger Death March until Sam’s study. Men were ruthlessly killed along the way. They were not given food, water and/or medical attention. Once the survivors made it to prison camps, they were beaten, starved, left to the extreme elements and were fraught with disease.

Meanwhile, things were desperate as the South Korean and American soldiers were running out of real estate and were in danger of being pushed back against the Korean Strait and the Sea of Japan. Note: Pusan is now spelled Busan, which I also did not know.

General Douglas MacArthur, who I am not a fan of, had maybe his greatest idea: make an amphibious landing at Seoul, South Korea, get behind the North Korean army and annihilate them. Seoul has tricky tides so no one, but Douglas, thought it could be done.

Our soldiers, sailors and Marines did do it. And we had control of the skies with Naval, Air Force and Marine aviators interdicting the North Koreans’ long supply route. Thus, the North Koreans were having a hard time getting things like food, ammunition and spare parts for its army.

America was unable to annihilate the North Koreans, which came back to bite America. However, we chased them deep into North Korea. We were nearing the Yalu River, which is the boundary between North Korea and China.

China had a new government at that time, communism headed by Mao. When talking about ruthless, murderous dictators, Stalin and Hitler jump to mind, but they were amateurs when compared to Mao. It is unknown how many millions of Chinese died under Mao’s rule in the course of reeducating that populace. However, Mao did not want to have the Americans on his doorstep, and there is a school of thought Douglas was not going to stop at the Yalu but head on north into China. He even had inclinations, it is thought, of dropping a few A-bombs at or near the border so it would be uninhabitable for awhile.

Mao sent hordes of his Army south across the Yalu.

This was very unfortunate because Douglas did not believe the intelligence coming in about what was happening. He had split his forces heading north and they were unable to support each other because they were on opposite sides of the Chosin Reservoir. The Marines were on the west and the Army was on the east.

The Americans got hit, and they were decimated. It was the beginning of November, which meant in North Korea, the temperature was below zero and it was snowing. Many of our soldiers did not have adequate winter clothing because many, especially those in the military hierarchy who should have known better, thought the war was over, and everyone would be home by Christmas. The Chinese hit the Americans with human waves, which we could beat off with superior firepower, but eventually the Americans ran out of bullets before the Chinese ran out of relatively warm bodies.

This caused both the Army and the Marines to retreat on their separate sides of the Frozen Chosin or as Marine General Oliver P. Smith told newsmen at that time: “We are advancing in a new direction.”

That was easy for him to say because he was relatively safe, but those poor young men alone in the inhospitable elements were trying to get south to safety along one road apiece surrounded by mountains and the Chinese held the mountains, raining bullets, mortars and artillery shells down on everyone, alive, wounded and those already dead but with their buddies trying to carry them out.

There were attempts at sending reinforcements, but the reinforcements were all killed or captured by the enemy holding the high ground who set very successful traps and road blocks on those single roads. There was no going around end as Douglas had earlier done. It was all up-the-middle, very bloody and deadly stuff.

For those Americans who fell then, their bodies were mostly never recovered. More people went to POW camps to die terrible deaths, and their bodies were never recovered.

We were pushed way south beyond Seoul again but our air power once again made supply for the enemy problematic, and we pushed them back north. After some more ebb and flow, it eventually settled down into World War I-type trench warfare, which is horrible, deadly and debasing. People on both sides died for little reason until an armistice could be pounded out in 1953. Officially, that war continues to this day.

For my relatives still reading this: when I would find a photo of a child – at least to my old eyes – young males of 17, 18, 19 at most 22, and knowing they were killed in a terrible environment, they died in many instances alone, I could not keep from crying. Sometimes, all I would find were student photos, some from their grade school days.  

At least two of the boys died on their birthdays, one on his 18^th birthday. I cannot imagine. On my 18^th birthday, I was unsuccessfully chasing girls and successfully drinking beer not facing a horde of Chinese soldiers, blowing bugles and coming out of the dark in subzero weather.

While all the missing soldiers I was searching for were from Indiana, some were from Batesville, Lynn, Vevay, New Castle and other relatively local places. I know wherever they were from should not have affected me differently, but those who grew up close to here were even more poignant for me.

This history assignment, which I finished early Friday evening for my relatively new job, has really touched me deeply, as those few still reading, hopefully can tell.

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