Did You Know?
• The names of 39 local servicemen who died or are missing in action are on the Clark County Korean War Veterans Memorial on the Vancouver VA campus. It’s near the Vietnam War Memorial Garden, west of the county Center for Community Health, 1601 E. Fourth Plain Blvd.
George Raynor hasn’t forgotten the Korean War.
After Raynor was wounded at Chosin Reservoir almost 64 years ago, he was loaded onto a truck with dead soldiers. You don’t forget that.
On Thursday, Raynor was among those who gathered to dedicate a Korean War mural on Vancouver’s Remembrance Wall.
The conflict had started 65 years earlier, on June 25, 1950.
“Some people called it World War 2½,” said Jerry Keesee, the founding commander of the Richard L. Quatier Chapter of the Korean War Veterans Association. It’s also been called “The Forgotten War,” Keesee said, and that’s what artist Guy Drennan painted in the lower left corner of the panel.
By the time hostilities ended three years later, about 36,000 American troops were killed or missing in action, and 103,700 were wounded, Keesee said.
“The reward was the success of South Korea as a nation,” said Harold Olson, past first vice commander of the veterans association.
Raynor said he could easily have been one of the 36,000 who didn’t come back. He was with U.S. Army’s 3rd Infantry Division during the Chosin Reservoir Campaign, in November and December 1950. After he suffered a leg wound, “The Marines saved my life,” Raynor said. “They got me out.”
Those Marines had actually been sent to recover the bodies of dead troops. “They had a little bit of room to throw me on the truck,” Raynor said.
The focal point of Drennan’s mural panel is an image of Marine Capt. Francis Fenton taken from a 1950 photograph. When David Douglas Duncan snapped the photograph, Fenton had just been told that his unit is running out of ammunition.
The Korean War panel joins several other depictions of American military history on the railroad berm just south of City Hall, along Phil Arnold Way.
Participants in the event included Patricia Quatier, wife of Korean War veteran Richard Quatier, who died in 2011. He is the namesake of the veterans group, which he helped organize.
“He did it all for his brother Bobby,” Patricia Quatier said after taking part in a ceremonial release of 51 white doves.
Robert “Bobby” Quatier had been in Korea for less than 10 days when his unit was overrun on July 16, 1950.
In his keynote address, former Army Col. Larry Smith said that he was stationed in South Korea in South Korea in 1980. That was 27 years after the two sides halted hostilities, but they never have signed a peace treaty.
On their patrols, “We handled it as if we were in combat,” said Smith, Vancouver city councilor.
Guest speaker John Kim, who was born in South Korea, spoke of the willingness of American soldiers to respond when his homeland was threatened.
“They asked, ‘Where is Korea?’ ” said Kim, who went on to become an Oregon state legislator. “But they went.
“I was proud to be a houseboy for GIs in Korea,” Kim said.
