The duty was easy enough that, although part of the same unit, Canon seldom crossed paths with Springfield-born Orla Fent, who was “out of the company,” assigned to the gym and the Olympic-sized pool, where he served as water safety instructor and taught swimming lessons.
Said Fent, with a laugh, “the only time the company seen me was on payday.”
On June 25, 1950, all of that changed. War broke out in Korea, a once unified nation the Allied powers had divided along the 38th parallel almost as an afterthought in the closing days of World War II.
By late July, 3,000 of the soldiers whose official duties always had been to handle rifles, heavy mortars, engineering and artillery poured into two ships that raced across the Pacific Ocean in an effort to keep friendly forces from being pushed off the Korean Peninsula.
“Everything went,” Canon recalled.
That included a surprised Fent, who thought that being three months from discharge would exempt him from the call.
Not even the marching he did on Pennsylvania Avenue to celebrate Harry S. Truman’s inauguration could save Fent from having his service extended a year, a fate he shared with virtually everyone else in the armed services.
Canon and Fent’s 5th Regimental Combat Team arrived on the southern tip of Korea on July 31, 1950. Within days, they were thrown into combat on the Pusan perimeter, where the air was filled with bullets and artillery shells.
And there, the water safety instructor and his friend had to sink or swim.
Two jobs
“The 5th RCT was on line for 43 days without relief,” Canon recalled. And during that time, he and Fent worked side-by-side.
One of their jobs was to fire 16-pound, 4.2-inch diameter mortar shells. Later in the war, they would fire them at Chinese forces. In the early days, it was against the North Koreans. The experience was much the same.
“The heavy mortars aren’t right on the front lines,” Canon said. “We were usually back of the rifle companies by 400 or 500 yards..
“But a few times we were so close (to the front) we couldn’t fire because our minimum range was 400 yards.”
And they were always close to the mortars.
“When you’re right beside one of those guns and it fires, it makes you feel like somebody just hit you on both sides of the head,” Canon said. “We didn’t have earplugs or anything like that.”
Fent and Canon had another job: to stay alive.
“You couldn’t sleep at night,” Fent said. “You were liable not to wake up.”
Whatever the greater geopolitical aims of war, for the fighting men, the focus was a foxhole, where the assumed plan was that one of the two foxhole buddies would doze off for a time while the other kept watching for the enemy.
“The first guy, he kept falling asleep on me,” Fent said. “And I said, ‘I’ll get another foxhole buddy.’ ”
Canon was available — and a known commodity.
The problem for Canon was Fent’s willingness to abandon him by going out on night patrols.
“I was young and fast,” Fent said.
At times, he was scared, too.
“If you weren’t, there was some- thing wrong with you,” he said.
Fent was awarded a Purple Heart for wounds suffered when he was hit by hand grenade shrapnel while on a patrol from which only he returned alive.
But he harbored a fear of a battlefield chemical.
“The most frightening moment was when they were shooting that white phosphorus at us,” Fent said.
The chemical is still used as tracer material with mortars, rockets and other projectiles.
“If it got on your skin, it would burn a hole in you,” Fent said. “That really shook up a lot of guys.”
As did the Korean weather.
‘Coldest Winter’
Book and movie titles cannot by themselves do justice to the experience of a war, but they can give some sense of it. And among the books that takes on the war in detail is the late David Halberstam’s “Coldest Winter.”
That was the winter of 1950-51.
The 5th RCT served with the First Cavalry and the First Provisional Marine Brigade and had spent that summer and fall moving north up through the west side of Korea with the 24th Division of the Eighth Army, passing through the current capital cities of Seoul and Pyongyang.
“We got up into North Korea some time around September or early October,” said Canon, who turned 20 that October, “and it started getting cold. I think it was somewhere in November that we were almost up to the Yalu River,” the border of North Korea and China.
By month’s end, 200,000 Chinese troops came south, and the front that had bounced south and back north again began to return south.
With the return came a bitter foe of both sides: a winter that sent temperatures on the Korean Peninsula plunging to 30 below.
“It was very hard,” Canon said. “Until the first part of January, we didn’t even have winter clothes.”
Said Fent, “They didn’t allow us to build any fires, and the ground was so hard you couldn’t dig a foxhole. It was miserable.”
“We just stayed warm somehow,” Canon said.
Hills and valleys
Fent turned 20 that Feb. 13 as he and other members of the unit tried to hold back the Chinese charge down the peninsula while U.S. leaders debated the tactical use of nuclear weapons in the context of a Cold War reality in which the Soviet Union was also aligned with North Korea.
Both political and military fighting took unexpected turns.
Fent remembers a U.S. general being taken by the enemy south of where he was fighting.
“It’s a heckuva feeling when your general gets captured behind you,” he said.
There followed President Truman’s controversial recall of World War II hero Gen. Douglas MacArthur, MacArthur’s hero’s welcome, then his speech before a joint session of Congress.
Fent and Canon, meanwhile, were struggling over a mountainous, physical terrain that introduced them to an equally arduous psychological terrain.
“That’s what I don’t understand,” Fent said. “People get killed for fighting over a mountain, then you get chased off of it.”
A history of the Korean service of Fent and Canon’s unit appropriately is called “Hills of Sacrifice.”
Fent said he expected to be sacrificed there, too.
“To tell you the truth, I didn’t think I’d ever see the United States again.”
The beginning of the end
“Orla and I were there for one year,” Canon said.
The service included what was considered four major battles, “but we were in skirmishes almost all of the time, almost daily,” Canon added.
“We were probably on the line 300 days,” he said. And while being off was a relief, “we still weren’t that far away from danger. If we were in reserve, we could still be reached by their artillery or mortars.”
But in July 1951, that didn’t prevent Fent and Canon from smiling broadly for a camera when they were off the line — smiles that grew broader when they left Korea on July 10, 1951, the day truce talks began for a war that would drag on two more years.
Sixty years later
Canon and Fent kept in touch after their return. During his career as a civil engineer, Canon would stop in Springfield to visit Fent, who spent more than 36 years working at International Harvester Co. and its descendants.
The two also rubbed shoulders at unit reunions and last year found the picture of them taken in July of 1951 on the front of Battle Stars magazine, their unit’s publication. A current photo of the two appeared on the back.
Fent is slowing down a bit, while Canon remains active in a variety of volunteer positions, including his local Veterans of Foreign Wars post’s honor squad for funerals.
Most importantly, the two foxhole partners, who 60 years ago spent a cold winter together firing mortars and staying alive, are still doing the latter, as trouble simmers on the Korean Peninsula once again.
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