Korean vet remembers his buddy

The winter of 1951 was bitter cold when Al Meridith and Grover Towery, both 19-year-old inductees from Chester, arrived in Korea fresh from boot camp at Fort Ord.

For many Americans, the Korean conflict is one of this nation’s forgotten wars even though 54,246 died, 103,284 were wounded, and 8,177 were listed as missing in action. But for those who fought in it, like Cottonwood resident Meridith, now 77, or who were saved by U.S. intervention like Korean-born Kim Chamberlain, 60, of Anderson, that war is anything but wiped from memory.

“I had known Grover for three or four years when we both joined the service to avoid getting drafted,” said Meridith, who left his job at the Collins Pine Lumber Company to fight overseas with several of his buddies.

“I was a grader for a molding machine. We did all kinds of specialty molding out of sugar pine and some ponderosa. I’d worked there for about a year, having moved to Chester from Westwood,” Meridith recalled.

Still a tightly-knit community today, Chester was even smaller back in the early 1950s.

“Chester is a real small town and we pretty much knew everybody. Grover had a big old Buick convertible, probably a 1949 model. It was black with a white top. We double-dated in that car. We were always together. We’d have picnics and campouts together,” said Meridith, who keeps an 8-inch by 10-inch color portrait of his friend in a battered photo album that contains many treasured memories.

After boot camp, Towery and Meridith ended up on the same troop ship heading for the Korean port city of Yong Dong Po, in the southeastern portion of the country, just opposite Yamaguchi, Japan.

“We were both in the infantry, although I had originally trained to be a truck driver,” Meridith recalled. Because he was 6-feet tall, Meridith was issued a Browning Automatic Rifle or BAR and several bandoleers of 50-caliber shells.

“They put us all on these trucks and it was 50 degrees below zero there,” Meridith said. “There was no heater in the back of those canvas-topped trucks. Our first bivouac was several hours away, and by the time we arrived, they had to lift us out of there and put us in field tents where we could get warm,” Meridith said.

Although it was early January, the U.S. Army had not yet issued the men winter uniforms, so they turned extra socks into gloves and lodged another pair of socks under each armpit to keep them warm before putting them on their feet, he remembered.

“We were put on the front lines in February and March. We would spend four or five days on the front lines, then spend a couple of days on R-and-R (rest and recreation) sleeping in tents. Our front line accommodations — we called them hotels as a joke — were bunkers — basically trenches — that we sandbagged and then covered over the tops with tree trunks and dirt. We had bunks three or four guys high along the walls inside. We spent a lot of time each day sitting around inside the bunkers because the Chinese and North Korean forces were shelling us all of the time with artillery,” Meridith recounted.

“At night, we would try to get a little bit of fresh air outside, but then we would see across the valley the Chinese cook fires glowing and the music playing. The Chinese army and the Republic of Korea army would hardly ever attack us during the daytime, but after dark, they would flood across the front lines and there was no stopping them,” he said.

On the night of Oct. 9, 1951, after more than six months on the front lines at Heartbreak Ridge, Grover Towery and Al Meridith were in adjoining foxholes waiting for yet another enemy attack.

“It was early evening. We could hear the bugles blowing. We knew then that they would be coming,” said Meridith as he wiped away the tears that flowed easily from his glistening eyes. “We couldn’t see them yet, but I heard a Chinese burp gun, one of this big-caliber jobs that could cut a tree in half with one round, and then I couldn’t hear Grover’s return fire any more. I looked over at him, he had been on my left, but I could see that he was gone. There was nothing I could do for him. They filled him so full of shells . . . . So I’ll be lifting a glass to him this Memorial Day.”

Several moments passed as Meridith regained his composure.

“It’s been 57 years ago now, but still remember it as vivid as if it happened yesterday. You don’t forget something like that,” Meridith said quietly as if to himself. “Even today, I always kind of dread going back to Chester because I always run into his sister, Ruth Bunch. She must be in her mid-80s by now. I always feel a bit guilty because I came back from that war, and Grover didn’t,” Meridith added.