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11/10/2021 07:30 AMShaving a few years off your age in mid-life is a national sport. Don Babcock once did the exact opposite.
Don wanted to join the National Guard as his friends had. He went to meeting with them in Niantic. He got the papers. His father signed them.
Everything looked good except for one thing: Don was only 16, but then again, nobody asked.
As Veterans Day approaches on Nov. 11, Don recounted the tale at a table at the Essex Veterans Memorial Hall in Centerbrook.
The year Don signed up was 1950. In June, the Korean War started and shortly after Don’s National Guard unit was activated.
He went to Georgia for training and later was sent to Fort Devens in Massachusetts. That’s where the military found out his age, by this time 17. Still, they decided not to send him home.
“They said I was doing such a good job and anyway, I was getting closer to my 18th birthday,” he recalls.
Don did go home for a short leave and when he got back to Fort Devens, he heard a superior calling him.
“‘Babcock’—that’s what they said, they always call you by your last name. He told me there were going to be some changes. They were going to weed some guys out who were not doing well,” he says.
Don asked what was going to happen to them and was told they were going to be sent to Korea. One of the names on that list was the friend with whom Don had joined the National Guard.
“I said, ‘If you are going to send him, you are going to send me,’” Don says.
The superior disagreed.
“He told me I was doing well and they didn’t want to do that. Then a warrant officer tells me to report to the captain. The captain tells me he doesn’t want me to go. He says I am a good man and I will move up in the ranks,” he recalls.
That didn’t convince Don.
“I told them they were sending a guy I went to school with and I was going, too,” he says.
Don prevailed.
As the troops formed up in Massachusetts to leave for the troop ship in California that would take them to Korea, an officer gave Don an assignment. He was to be in charge of seeing all the enlisted men got to the West Coast.
Theirs was an adventurous trip. The plane engine caught fire and necessitating an emergency landing in Colorado. The troops had to take a second plane to San Francisco.
But that wasn’t all.
“The guys were saying they didn’t want to go to Korea. I told them to do me a favor, let me sign them in and then I don’t care what happens,” Don remembers.
Don’s troop ship landed in Pusan. He fought in battles at Heartbreak Ridge and Bloody Ridge. In his first encounter with the enemy, he recalls that when the shooting started, people were yelling at him to get his head down.
He lowered it and someone yelled to get it down further. He thought he was pinned down by fire when, all of a sudden, the firing stopped.
“I was so upset I stood up,” Don says.
And standing in front of him were two enemy soldiers. Don was able to take them prisoner. The next day he took another prisoner.
A point system determined how long a soldier stayed in Korea. Front line troops got four points every month and the numbers descended to support troops in the rear who earned one point a month. With 32 points, eight months on the front line, a soldier could go home. The challenge was to last eight months. Don did.
When he came back, he got off a troop train in New Jersey. He had no money; salaries were kept for the soldiers in Korea.
“There was no place to spend the money anyway,” Don recalls.
The returning warriors were given $20 and a weekend pass. Don decided he wanted to hitchhike home. When he got to the Quinnipiac Bridge, a chartered bus picked him up. When the passengers heard he was returning from Korea, they spontaneously took up a collection for him. He had $45 by the time he got to his parents’ house.
That wasn’t the only time that weekend he got public approval. When Don decided he wanted to bring a pizza to his family from a pizza parlor in Old Saybrook, actor Art Carney, a longtime Westbrook resident, was also there.
“He saw my uniform, asked a few questions, learned I was back from Korea, and then he paid for the pizza,” Don says.
For the remainder of his Army service, Don had an emotionally difficult stateside job. He escorted the coffins of fallen soldiers back to their homes.
“It was sad, very sad,” he says.
Don was 19 when he left the Army. His military service, however, wasn’t over. When he was 21, he joined the Navy. He served in Norfolk and New London but never at sea.
“They called me a doggie, that was an Army man; they called sailors swabbies,” he says.
Don retained the same rank he had in the Army, an E8 or master sergeant, but in the Navy it was called boatswain’s mate first class.
His service memories have never left him. Veterans Hall board member Carl Ellison, a former first selectman of Essex, sat with Don, now 88, during a meeting with a reporter in case it was necessary to jog his memory. But memory wasn’t a problem. Don’s service days are still very vivid in his mind.
Don says when he was 54, the late Ernest Cook, an Essex resident ended his military service as a brigadier general in the National Guard, urged Don to join the organization again.
“But I couldn’t; I had a business, too many irons in the fire. But I wish I had done it,” he says.
Don had his own construction business in those days.
His military service remains a central part of his life.
“I’d go again if I could. I loved being in the military,” Don says, recalling the long-ago days when he was a 16-year-old boy signing up to serve. “It made me feel like a man.”