Raymond Wiers recalls serving in Korean War
In July of this year, 50 years after the war ended, Wiers traveled back to Korea.
WILTON – Raymond Wiers says he wasn’t a hero in a stand against communism.
He was just another soldier doing his duty when he was shot twice on the battlefield during the Korean War, he said Monday.
Wiers considers himself just like the other veterans who have fought to preserve freedom.
The 72-year-old East Wilton man had quit school at 17 to join the United States Army. He later would finish high school and work his way up to being a manager at G.H. Bass Co.
At 18, he and other soldiers in the 2nd Infantry Division, 23rd Regiment, were the first unit from the states sent over to Korea in July 1950 to fight communism.
He was an automatic rifleman on the front line.
“Everybody was scared,” Wiers said. “Anybody who says they aren’t scared … there’s something wrong with them.”
Wiers said there was a lot of ground fighting in the mountainous country.
“You could see the enemy, and they could see us,” he said.
Soldiers slept on the ground in foxholes, and they knew when the enemy was coming.
“They would strike before dawn,” Wiers said.
They used a lot of bugles to sound the advance.
They used psychology, he said; a lot of them were doped up.
His unit moved all the time, he said.
Temperature extremes
It was very hot in the summer, and very cold in the winter. Monsoon season lasted from April to August.
Wiers saw fellow soldiers killed in the war.
About six months into the fighting, Wiers was seriously wounded. He doesn’t remember everything about it, but does remember his unit was fighting on a mountain.
“We got overrun,” he said. “The Chinese were all around us. We tried to fight our way back out of it and I got hit. I was shot in the thigh area. I went down … I applied a tourniquet, a belt, to stop the bleeding. Then I lost consciousness. The next thing I knew they (the U.S.) took the ground back.”
From that point on, Wiers was transported to a field hospital, and then on to a hospital in Pusan, now known as Busan, and then to a hospital in Japan.
He stayed in the hospital a long time, he said. He was assigned to the hospital on limited duty and after that came back to the states where another operation was performed to remove a second bullet that had lodged in his hip.
He earned the Purple Heart, but being wounded didn’t stop him from serving his country. Though he never saw combat duty again, he served nine years in the Army.
Returning to Korea
In July of this year, 50 years after the war ended in 1953, Wiers traveled back to Korea with other veterans for a re-enactment of the signing of the armistice agreement.
South Koreans welcomed veterans from 21 nations who had fought to preserve peace and defend their independence, Wiers said. There is a monument over there, he said, that has more than 30,000 names of soldiers killed in the war.
The country was war-torn when he had last been there, he said. But now, “it’s a very prosperous county.”
The bridges at the border of North Korea are wired for explosives, some fields are mined and there are armed guards at the border, in case North Korea decides to strike again, he said.
“It was a good feeling to see it built back up again,” he said. “There was a lot of emotion; it brings back a lot of memories.”
dperry@sunjournal.com
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