War stories: Korean War hero opens up, part 1

MARINE VETERAN Dick Grinnell, 75, recalls his days of service in the Korean War. Grinnell lied about his age and first enlisted at 16. Village Life photo by Krysten Kellum

It’s been 58 years since El Dorado Hills Korean war veteran Dick Grinnell told his story to a reporter. Back then he was lying flat on his back at Balboa Hospital in San Diego, healing from wounds suffered during a heroic rescue mission in what’s now called North Korea.

A grateful military awarded him the nation’s third highest commendation, the Silver Star, for his efforts, then took it back when the reporter discovered Grinnell was just 17 years old when he earned it.

Like many combat veterans, Grinnell isn’t comfortable talking about what he saw and did.

His son, Ed Grinnell, a Naval Academy graduate and Desert Storm pilot only recently got his father to open up to the family about his Korean War experiences.

“We probably still don’t know the whole story,” said Ed, who lives near his parents in Serrano.

Dick Grinnell is 75 years old now and in poor health. He shared his story here in hopes that it will raise awareness of the sacrifices local veterans made, and garner some support for the planned Veterans Memorial Park in El Dorado Hills, and the Fallen Warriors Car Show next weekend in El Dorado Hills Town Center.

In the understated voice of a combat veteran, Grinnell described his childhood in Spokane, Wash., as “tough,” and his mother as “insecure.” His father abandoned the family when he was just 11, leaving behind four children and an emotionally unstable wife, who soon lost custody of her children. The eldest, Dick, was dispatched to live with grandparents in Concord.

The young boy thrived. He worked after school and sent most of his pay back to his mother. But it wasn’t enough. A court ordered his return to his mother.

The now 15-year-old Grinnell began getting into trouble. The situation came to a head when he punched his mom’s boyfriend.

In January 1952, just a couple of days after his 16^th birthday, a judge ordered him back to Concord. He was given two days to get a “release” from the prior judge, who had ordered him to Spokane, or get sent to reform school. He recalls standing bewildered in the courthouse, wearing a T-shirt and Levis while the temperature outside was well below zero. “I had no coat, no money, no friends, no nothing,” he said.

His only advocate was a Spokane police officer named “Joe,” who was dating Grinnell’s cousin at the time. Officer Joe put him in the back of a squad car and drove to a friendly printer, handed him a $20 bill and instructed the boy to “tell them you lost your birth certificate.” With a wink he also suggested that the boy might want to subtract a couple of years from his birth date. At 18, boys could enlist in the military without parental consent.

“He dropped me off around noon with ink on that fake birth certificate still wet,” laughed Grinnell, who told the recruiters he was in a big hurry to serve his country.

The war in Korea raged in 1952. The Air Force, Army and Navy were all hiring, but required a couple of weeks to process him in. The Marine recruiter, however, looked at his watch and said “Is 2 p.m. soon enough?”

It was. On Jan. 6, 1952, with the U.S. Marines dug in on the 38th Parallel, Dick Grinnell became a member of the Semper Fidelis brotherhood.

“I was so scared they’d find out I wasn’t 18,” he recalled. “I just kept my mouth shut and did what I was told.”

Five months later he stepped off a troop ship in Pusan, Korea. A sergeant asked Grinnell and his buddy if either could drive. “I saw a chance to stay behind the lines so I volunteered,” he said, thus committing the first significant act of a courageous and sometimes bizarre 11-year military career that was both fulfilling and disappointing.

Grinnell soon learned that he’d volunteered to drive a “flame tank.” Ironically, his friend became the company clerk.

His son Ed described the now obsolete flame tanks as “death traps — rolling napalm bombs,” capable of dispensing one 11-16 second burst of highly volatile and sticky “ammunition.” They were short-range weapons that attracted a lot of enemy fire.

Grinnell ultimately proved tougher than his tanks. He sank the first one in a rice paddy. The crew scrambled out the top hatch just before it went completely under.

A mortar round blew up the turret in his second tank. Grinnell quickly ejected out the bottom. His two crewmen perished. He’d been in Korea three months.

They made him a tank commander and promoted him to “buck sergeant,” which just meant “you had to stick your head up higher in battle.” After he lost a third tank to enemy fire, Grinnell began to wonder how long his luck would last.

Anyone who served in Korea during the winter will testify that the weather was as big a concern to the soldiers as the enemy. As a flame tank commander, Grinnell was exposed to the worst. While grumbling about the cold one day, a warrant officer suggested Grinnell join him in the First Reconnaissance Battalion, “First Recon.” When he requested the transfer, his commanding officer tried to convince him of the deprivations and dangers of recon missions.

“Those guys have to eat bugs,” the C.O. said. “They’ll kill you over there.”

“You’re killing me here,” he replied. “I’ll take my chances.”

He served under Platoon Sergeant and “crazy Texan” J.W. Rabb. Grinnell’s eyes glaze over and he slips into a monotone as he recalls the day he won the first of three Purple Hearts, but lost his teeth and nearly his life.

He’d been on patrol, “on point” for four days straight, he recalled. Weary and distracted, he turned a corner and got the butt of a burp gun squarely in the mouth. A North Korean soldier stood over him and prepared to finish the job, when a shot rang out.

“Several shots actually,” said Grinnell. “J-Rabb got the guy and saved my life.”

His second Purple Heart was earned in December 1952 during the mop-up behind MacArther’s famed Inchon landing.

“We were reclaiming villages one by one,” he said. “It seemed like every window had somebody shooting at us and it was so cold you couldn’t even squeeze the trigger sometimes.”

Only three members of a platoon of 27 men escaped uninjured. Grinnell wasn’t one of them.

“It was a big firefight, real bad,” he said. “You walk along and all the sudden the guy beside you is gone. You don’t even know what got him. That’s hard.

“After the first couple of fire fights you take this attitude that you aren’t coming back anyway, and just want to be there for your buddies and serve honorably,” he continued. When you survive, “You feel guilty because so many of your friends didn’t come back.”

A “Bouncing Betty” antipersonnel mine ripped into his hip, leg and knee that day. He still carries parts of it with him.

With weapons like that in play, “A lot of times it felt like we were just cannon fodder over there,” he said.

Shortly after the casts came off his arm and leg, he rejoined his battalion a “senior guy,” he recalled. He’d just turned 17.

Next week: Eating bugs, earning a Silver Star, then losing it.

Short URL: http://www.villagelife.com/?p=7887

Posted by Mike Roberts on May 23 2011. Filed under Feature Photos, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry

War stories: Grinnell wins, then loses Silver Star

WOUNDED WARRIOR — Veteran Dick Grinnell won, and lost a Silver Star for a heroic rescue mission into North Korea. The commendation was rescinded when a Stars and Stripes reporter discovered that he enlisted with a forged birth certificate, indicating he was 18. Grinnell had just turned 16 when he enlisted. He’s currently battling cancer. Village Life photo by Krysten Kellum

This is the second part of Dick Grinnell’s story he shared with Village Life. The first part was published on May 25 and can be found on villagelife.com.

Last week we met 75-year-old former U.S. Marine Dick Grinnell, who used a fake birth certificate to enlist at age 16 in 1952, during the Korean War. We followed his progress right up to the rescue mission that would define his unusual career.

Dick Grinnell recovered from injuries inflicted by a “Bouncing Betty” anti-personnel mine and returned to his First Reconnaissance Battalion early in 1953, ready to get back to work.

“I’d never jumped out of an airplane before,” he said. Neither had any of the other six men who volunteered to retrieve an Air Force lieutenant colonel shot down in a tiny reconnaissance plane over North Korea.

“He shouldn’t have been where he was,” said Grinnell. “He had all kinds of intel we didn’t want the Chinese to get, and we knew they’d torture him to death if they had to.”

The team was told to “either get him out of there or put him out of his misery,” said Grinnell.

The Marines parachuted in near the crash site. Four of the seven were shot dead before they hit the ground.

North Korean soldiers immediately captured the three survivors, Grinnell and two privates — Hunter, who was uninjured, and Decker, who was shot in the shoulder.

Grinnell’s lasting recollection of his Korean captors is their youth. “They were just kids, 14- and 15-year-olds.”

The Americans were thrown into an impromptu jail, “a pig sty under a house,” said Grinnell.

In the first bit of good fortune in a theretofore disastrous mission, the colonel they were sent to retrieve was already in the sty, wearing tattered and muddy dress blues. “They’d already pulled out some of his fingernails, and he’d lost his mind,” said Grinnell.

The details and duration of their confinement in the mud beneath that house are either lost to Grinnell or too painful to recount.

They decided to make a break for it before their Korean captors’ Chinese superiors returned. After overpowering their guards in the middle of the night, they set out on foot with the colonel, “still in his tattered dress blues, still out of his mind,” said Grinnell.

The duration of their cross-country trek is similarly hazy. “We spent about three weeks dragging this colonel through Korea, trying to keep out of sight,” he said. They stumbled upon an ammunition depot, broke in and armed themselves. Despite his injury, Decker rigged the depot to blow when the enemy returned.

But it didn’t detonate. Decker returned to the depot to fire it manually. “He didn’t make it out,” said Grinnell. “But he created a diversion that let us get away.”

Food was scarce. As his former CO had predicted, insects were a mainstay.

Three weeks later the trio fell into the arms of a forward American platoon. But because their mission had been secret, and because they’d been gone so long, “They didn’t believe our story,” said Grinnell. “It was like they gave us up for dead.”

Gen. Chesty Puller, who became the most decorated Marine in history, eventually confirmed their story and put Hunter and Grinnell up for a Silver Star. And the colonel? “I got Christmas cards from him for 27 years,” grinned Grinnell from his Serrano patio.

Grinnell and Hunter each got their Silver Stars, but only one got to keep his.

Their story attracted the attention of the “Stars and Stripes” military newspaper. The reporter listened in amazement to Grinnell’s story, and dutifully contacted his mother in Spokane for a comment about her son’s feats of bravery. But she had no idea that he’d enlisted, and immediately hired a lawyer and threatened to sue the Marines for putting her underage son in harm’s way. He confessed to being just 17, and to enlisting with a forged birth certificate.

“After that, everyone came down on me, including the Marines,” he said. “They accused me of fraud and threatened to throw me in jail.”

Except that he was a hero. The Marines had a PR problem.

His mother eventually negotiated a deal that gave her all his back pay, “and every cent I made until I turned 18,” said Grinnell. His military record prior to age 17 was expunged, and his Silver Star rescinded.

Did he have to return the medal? “They’d already sent it to my mother,” said Dick Grinnell. “She eventually hocked it.”

Grinnell remains a proud Marine veteran. He stayed in the service another nine years, and in 1961 went to Laos and Cambodia to distribute old Marine M1 rifles to anti-communist forces.

“A lot of those rifles disappeared into the jungle,” he recalled. “It was clear that it was going to get messy.”

He realized that if he wanted to retire a Marine, he’d end up in the middle of it. Grinnell left the service and spent the next 40 years in the car business. He became part owner of San Jose British Motors.

Grinnell now lives with his wife in Serrano, and has battled cancer for the last 25 years. It recently spread to a kidney, which was removed. He’s currently recovering.

“For years I never talked about any of this,” Grinnell said of his war stories. “You leave it and want to forget everything you’ve done.

“I’m not looking for any recognition, no glory. It’s too late for all that,” he added. “I just want kids to appreciate what we sacrificed to get them where they are. That’s what the veteran’s memorial over in Promontory Park is all about.”

mroberts@villagelife.com

Short URL: http://www.villagelife.com/?p=7889

Posted by Mike Roberts on May 26 2011. Filed under Feature Photos, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry