When the call came for Canadian recruits to help in the Korean War, Smiley Douglas of Innisfail wasted no time.
“I was too young to go to the Second World War so I said to myself that I wasn’t going to miss it this time,” said Douglas, 85.
During breakfast on the morning of Aug. 10, 1950, Douglas heard over the radio that the army was looking to put together a special force for Korea.
He was in Calgary later that day.
“I was in the army by two or three o’clock in the afternoon ... I don’t think Mother and Dad thought I’d been serious when I said I was joining.”
After a few months of training and 20 days by boat — “that boat ride seemed to take forever; I thought I’d joined the navy, not the army,” said Douglas with a laugh — Douglas and his company, the 2nd Battalion, Princess Patricia’s Light Infantry, were the first Canadian troops to arrive in the war zone.
It was Christmas Eve and he was 22-years-old.
“I thought the war was going to last a couple weeks but when we got there, they (the Americans) wanted us on the front right away. Our colonel, his name was Jim Stone, said no way and kept us to train us in the mountains for about three weeks.”
The battalion stayed in an old school up on a hill on their first night.
They had to sleep on the floor until the barracks were constructed the following day, Douglas said.
Rigourous training began immediately.
“You take a farm boy like me and, well, I had no idea what I was doing. I was a greenhorn and there were a quite a few of us. They yelled at you constantly but you got used to it.”
The company saw their first action in the mountains by February 1951.
He wrote home to his sweetheart, Rose, every day. She sent him care packages of cigarettes and chocolate bars. They’d met at a dance in Pine Lake before he signed up.
In April, Douglas faced a large attack from the infantry’s position above the Kapyong River valley.
“The Chinese had lots of men. We knew it was coming. The Korean army had already left. I remember touching the Korean soldiers on the shoulder as they left, asking them where they were going. They were scared of the Chinese, I think. ... Thousands of men came through that valley. We were shooting but they just kept coming and coming.”
On the morning of April 25, Douglas was asked to lay grenades in front of the company’s position.
Some time later, he heard: “Douglas, stop those men!”
A group of men from another allied company had started walking into the area with the grenades.
“I got there just as they got there. One lad had already tripped a grenade and he was dead. Another was wounded. Just when I got there, yelling at them to stop, another one set off a grenade and it was smoking, about two steps from me. I could see it and they didn’t. I remember running to pick it up and I turned around to throw it and that’s when it blew up. And that was the end of my soldiering.”
Douglas lost his right hand.
“It knocked me down, filled me full of shrapnel and I was leaking like a sieve. Some of the other guys carried me out of there. I got a shot of morphine.”
His platoon sergeant used his boot laces as a tourniquet to stop the bleeding.
“He always gave me a hard time afterwards, telling me it’d taken him days to get any laces afterwards,” Douglas said, chuckling.
After being flown to a field hospital in India (via a helicopter like the ones in the TV series M*A*S*H, he said) and then Japan, Douglas finally made it home, taking a train to Calgary from Vancouver.
Life was an adjustment when he returned, Douglas said.
“It took me a while to figure out how to even do up buttons.”
Working with heavy machinery, clearing bush and snow, Douglas and Rose, who was a schoolteacher, married and saved up enough money for their own piece of land.
Four children and seven grandchildren later, they still live on it today, although it’s grown since 1954.
Douglas received the Military Medal for his “brave act and complete disregard for his own safety.”
Throughout the years, the South Korean government has also bestowed numerous medals and awards upon him.
“We didn’t lose very many men. We had good men. And the Chinese never got across our lines,” Douglas said. “I’d hate to ever see something like that happen again. That’s why you have to remember.”
rfrancoeur@www.reddeeradvocate.com