Willis “Doc” Halliday, Cornelius Beaden and Henry Gole all asked the same question when the Korean War erupted 60 years ago today. “Where is Korea?” they wondered. They’d find out.

More than 5.7 million Americans served in the armed forces during the Korean War from June 25, 1950, to July 27, 1953:

33,741 U.S. troops were killed in combat in Korea and 2,833 died there from other causes.

103,284 Americans were wounded.

35 Dauphin County residents died in the war along with 33 from York County, 14 from Lebanon County, 12 from Adams County, 7 from Perry County and 4 from Cumberland County.

Halliday, now 78, of North Middleton Twp., was already a private in the Army when communist North Korean troops invaded U.S.-backed South Korea on June 25, 1950, triggering the first hot conflict of the Cold War. Two months later he was hip-deep in the war.

Beaden, 78, of Steelton, got to Korea in the middle of the conflict and helped to ensure that the massive U.S. and United Nations war machine kept rolling.

Gole, 76, of Silver Spring Twp., arrived in time to see the war end in July 1953 with an uneasy truce that prevails to this day.

Their war, sometimes called "the Forgotten War," was brutal, but necessary, the three veterans said. And they admit they didn't know what they were getting into.

The Seesaw War

Doc Halliday was just 18, but had been a soldier for three years when the war erupted. He’d been just shy of 16 when he enlisted to escape his hometown of Troy, N.Y., where jobs were scarce. Word of the war caught him at Fort Benning, Ga. “Before then, I’d never even heard the word, ‘Korea’,” Halliday said. “But I was a young, gung-ho guy.”

His unit arrived in August 1950 at Pusan, South Korea, where U.S. and U.N. forces were holding a bridgehead against communist troops who had overrun most of the country. “That was my first time in the Far East. The Koreans were still using water buffalo instead of [motor] vehicles,” Halliday said. “Everything about the place was strange to me.”

He was assigned to the 1st Cavalry Division and joined the allied push that chased the North Koreans back above the 38th parallel, the prewar border of North and South Korea. “We had Thanksgiving dinner in Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea,” Halliday said.

His unit was almost at the Yalu River, the border between North Korea and the People’s Republic of China, when swarms of Chinese communist troops entered the war, forcing the U.S. and allied armies into a hasty, chaotic retreat. “As we moved back, any vehicles that ran out of gas were just pushed off the road,” Halliday recalled. “We were told that the Chinese were in the mountains on both sides of us.”

When the Chinese attacked, they came in seemingly endless waves, he said.

The Chinese drive was finally halted and the war settled into its static phase, with both sides dug into fortified positions, mounting patrols, trading artillery fire, but not moving much of anywhere.

One of the toughest foes was the Korean winter, Halliday said. “When it was 30 degrees below zero and the wind was blowing, you bet it was cold,” he said.

Once, he said, he captured four Chinese soldiers single-handedly while on his way to a command post. “I walked right up behind them. When I realized they were wearing different uniforms I put my rifle at the ready,” Halliday recalled. “But they wanted to surrender. They had no rifles. They were looking for an American to surrender to.

“I took them back to the battalion headquarters and I got chewed out something terrible,” he said. “It was getting dark and the guys there didn’t want to have to deal with them.”

Thirteen months after arriving in Korea, Halliday was rotated home, leaving behind a war that had become a bloody stalemate.

Keeping them Moving

Cornelius Beaden was still in high school in Steelton when the war broke out. He watched as more and more of the tight-knit community’s men headed off to the fighting. “One of my neighbors was killed over there,” he said.

Beaden was 20 and working as an equipment operator at Olmsted Air Force Base — now Harrisburg International Airport— when he was drafted into the Army.

After 10 weeks of training in military construction he was shipped to Korea in 1952. He arrived after 28 days on troop ships and was assigned to the 439th Engineering Construction Battalion stationed in what is now North Korea. “We repaired the roads after the [military] convoys went through every night,” Beaden said. “We were always patrolling them, making sure they were OK. A lot of the routes we had to work day and night on.”

One of his lasting impressions of Korea, which he shares with Halliday and Gole, was the smell; a pervasive scent made up of the fish integral to the Korean diet and the human feces used to fertilize the farm fields.

Although he wasn’t in combat, Beaden and his colleagues were integral to the war effort. Without their work, the twisting and dangerous mountain roads wouldn’t have remained passable and supplies wouldn’t have reached the front-line troops. “I had a good bunch of guys and we all pitched in and did what we had to do,” Beaden said.

There was always at least a hint of danger from sabotage by North Korean infiltrators. “Our people told us not to trust any of the Koreans,” said Beaden, who was a sergeant. “You couldn’t tell who was who. The North and South Koreans looked the same. I followed that advice.”

He said he also tried to keep homesickness at bay during the 22 months he spent in Korea. “I enjoyed what I was doing, and I always kept myself occupied and tried not to think much about home,” Beaden said.

The Thrill Seeker

Henry Gole didn’t have to go to Korea. The New York native had a college deferment, so he was immune from the draft. But in September 1952 he marched down to his local draft board and enlisted. “I thought it was an opportunity. You don’t have a war every season,” Gole recalled. “And like 19-year-olds from time immemorial, I wanted to test myself.

“My parents were disappointed, but my father understood. He had joined the Navy when he was 16.”

The war had been going on for two years by then and seemed locked in an irresolvable stalemate, Gole said. “By that time stories on the war were on the inside of the newspaper,” he said.

In the Army, he received only “rudimentary” training as a medic before being shipped out on a slow-moving troop ship. “Our weapons and uniforms were from World War II,” Gole said. “When we got to Korea we were shipped north in a train without windows. We were really treated like cattle. There was a great deal of callousness.”

He was a corporal when he was assigned to the 27th Infantry Regiment, the Wolfhounds, in the spring of 1953 and told he was going to be a rifleman instead of a medic.

Gole said he wasn’t given any instruction before being marched up for his first night on the fighting line. “I just followed the guy in front of me and we walked into the trenches,” he said. “The Chinese on the other side were broadcasting over a loudspeaker, ‘Welcome Charlie Company, Welcome Wolfhounds.’ They even knew the officers’ names.

“I thought, ‘How in the hell did they know all that. They knew my officers’ names and I didn’t.”

With a terrible screech, a four-barreled American machine gun opened up on a distant target as he hunkered with two strangers in a foxhole. “Flares were popping intermittently, lighting up the night. When they went off I could see a sea of barbed wire in between the lines,” Gole said. “In the middle of the night I was sent to man the machine gun bunker. I’d never fired a machine gun.”

His major contribution that first night was to mistakenly “capture” a South Korean soldier who was assigned to his unit, he said.

And so it went for the next few months. “It didn’t take long before I decided, ‘This sucks’,” Gole said. “You were physically uncomfortable. I felt I was poorly led. ... It was mostly routine drudgery rather than a John Wayne moment.”

He was in a rear area, but still within earshot of the battle zone, when the truce was declared. At the moment it took effect “there was a huge volume of fire from both sides. And then it just stopped,” Gole said. “I had mixed feelings at the time,” he said. “It all seemed so inconclusive. But I also thought, ‘I’ll live to be 20’.”

Reflections

All three soldiers are now grandparents and great-grandparents.

Halliday stayed in the Army, retiring as a first sergeant in 1969 after a tour in Vietnam. He also is retired from what is now the Defense Depot Susquehanna in Fairview Twp. He met his wife, Ruth, a former military nurse, while hospitalized for appendicitis after the war. At the couple’s insistence, all four of their children served in the military, and two are retired from the service.

Halliday is part of the volunteer Cumberland County Honor Guard that provides military rites at veterans’ funerals. These days, many of those burials are for fellow Korean War vets.

Beaden returned to Steelton, where he still keeps close tabs on some of his Army buddies. He resumed work as an equipment operator and retired from what is now the Naval Support Activity, Mechanicsburg in Hampden Twp. One of his and his wife Veronica’s five children became a chaplain with the National Guard in Washington, D.C.

Gole, also the father of a military retiree, left the Army following his Korean service. In the early 1960s President John F. Kennedy’s speeches inspired him to leave his job as a school teacher and again don his uniform. Gole served with the special forces in combat in Vietnam and retired from the Army as a colonel. A military historian and author, he still teaches at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle.

None of the veterans regrets his Korean War service.

“The war was necessary because it was the first time we were challenged to draw the line against the spread of communism,” Gole said. “We had to prove we weren’t just a paper tiger.”

“It was necessary that we were there,” Beaden agreed. “But I just hated to see my comrades getting hurt.”

The vets are still concerned about the tension in Korea to this day as North Korea, which might possess nuclear weapons, continues to threaten armed confrontation. “I think [the North Koreans] are stupid. They’re starving their own people. Why deprive your own people of better living conditions just because you’re stubborn?” Halliday asked.

“It’s ready to get back into a mess again,” Beaden lamented. “I do believe we’re going to have a problem there.”

Unfortunately, that is nothing new, Halliday said. “Ever since I was a kid there’s been a war someplace,” he said. “The Earth just can’t live in peace. It’s a shame.”