Oral history interview of Eugene Daniel Guy, Sr., part two of two

Collection:

Veterans History Project: Oral History Interviews

Title:

Oral history interview of Eugene Daniel Guy, Sr., part two of two

Creator:

Wallace, Fredrick C.
Guy, Eugene Daniel, Sr., 1926-2010

Date of Original:

2004-11-19

Subject:

Cold War--Personal narratives, American
Political prisoners--China
Espionage--China
World politics--1945-1989
Guy, Mildred Agnes Martin, 1926-1992
Grenada--History--American Invasion, 1983
Kissinger, Henry, 1923-
Downey, John Thomas, 1930-2014
Walsh, James Edward, 1891-1981
Fecteau, Richard G., 1927-
Smith, Philip Eldon, 1937-
Flynn, Robert J., 1937-2014
Kosh, Gerald Emil, 1946-2002
Mao, Zedong, 1893-1976
International Committee of the Red Cross
Cruz Roja Cubana
Chinese-American relations
Cuban Red Cross

People:

Nixon, Richard M. (Richard Milhous), 1913-1994

Location:

China, Beijing, 39.906217, 116.3912757
China, Hong Kong, 22.2793278, 114.1628131
Paracel Islands
United States, Georgia, 32.75042, -83.50018
United States, South Carolina, Beaufort County, Parris Island, 32.3352, -80.69233

Medium:

video recordings (physical artifacts)
mini-dv

Type:

Moving Image

Format:

video/quicktime

Description:

In part two of this two-part interview, Eugene Guy recalls his work with the Red Cross after World War II. He worked with Americans imprisoned in China during the Cold War delivering packages and communicating with the families. He was working with the Marines during the invasion of Grenada; he describes the diplomatic difficulties in transferring an injured Cuban soldier who had been treated in Puerto Rico back to Cuba.
Eugene Guy was in the U.S. Navy in World War II.
Eugene Guy Veterans Oral History Project Atlanta History Center With Fred Wallace, Volunteer for the AARP November 19, 2004 Transcriber: Joyce Dumas [Tape 1, Side A] Interviewer: Today is Friday, November nineteenth, two thousand four. This is the beginning of the interview with Mr. Eugene Guy. Mr. Guy served in the United States Navy and with the American Red Cross during World War II, Korea and Vietnam and he also had assignments in other locations throughout the world. This interview is being conducted at the Atlanta History Center. My name is Frederick Wallace and I'm the interviewer. Mr. Guy, as I have explained, this is your story, your opportunity to tell about your experiences in the military and with the Red Cross. I want you to begin by telling us where you were born, where you went to school, when, where and why you went into the military and then from that point on, take us step by step through your various careers. This is your story. Will you begin, please, Mr. Guy? Guy: Thank you. Thank you. As he said, my name is Eugene Guy. I was born in Birmingham, Alabama, a little suburb of Birmingham called Vinesville. I was the fourth of five children. Had two brothers and two sisters. Two brothers older and one sister older and one sister younger than I. We went to school…I went to school at Central Park Grammar School, Fairfield Grammar School, Inglenook Grammar School and we moved around a lot. But the last part of my high school was at John Herbert Phillips High School in Birmingham and I went there for the complete four years. This was in 1939 when I entered high school and we had the opportunity to take courses in two different directions. One if you were going to be into manual arts, two if you were maybe going into college preparatory work. I chose the college preparatory because of the influence of my sister who was a brain, still is. And so it was with that background that when the Navy and Army and the Merchant Marines started coming around to the schools in nineteen forty-two, after we had gotten into the war, they were coming around recruiting the guys that were not draft age yet, but had potential they thought. And they were offering them opportunities to go certain ways in the military. If you wanted to go in the Merchant Marines, you could go in to make money. If you went into Army, Navy then it was mainly for the military service. Anyway, I chose the Navy and they offered a program whereby they sent you for training at different places and with a possibility of a commission later on. Interviewer: How old were you at the time? Guy: At the time that I signed up for this I was sixteen and I had my parents' consent. But they did not induct me into the Navy until I graduated from high school and I was seventeen at that time. But they sent me to two different schools. First, they sent me to Tulane. I got in roughly a quarter there of both Navy instruction and just being an undergraduate there at Tulane. And from there, they sent me to Emory University here in Atlanta and I was here for about another quarter. Again, doing partly military, partly regular school. From there, they sent me to Northwestern University campus in Chicago and that was where they had the midshipmen school. I went through the midshipmen school, got pretty good grades there. We were commissioned in forty-four and we were given the opportunity to go into…we had the opportunity to express a desire to go in. They sent you where they wanted you. But I had an aptitude for communications and so they sent me to communications school at Harvard. And I completed that course. By this time, the…it was evident that the war wasn't going to last as long as originally planned and so they had all these young officers that they had to do something with besides send them off to sea. Interviewer: So this was during the tail end of the war? Guy: During the tail end of World War Two. Interviewer: Okay. Guy: And so when I finished the communications school at Harvard, they first sent me to several fairly long TDY assignments. I was down in New Orleans Eighth Naval District for a while, just decoding, encrypting and decoding messages coming in through the communications center. Other part of the time I was working with the RPIO, that's the Registered Publications Issuing Office where they have codes and ciphers that are renewed periodically. And they didn't send that kind of thing through the mail. What they did was they sent that with couriers and so I was a courier for a while doing this. And I got to travel around. I went out to Texas, I got down to Puerto Rico and some other places taking registered publications. And then, they detached me from that and sent me to the Panama sea frontier in Panama where I worked on the coding board there and also in operations. Then an opening came open in Honduras at the Navy five oh nine at Puerto Castilla, Honduras. They operated an advance base where they had fueling facilities. They could take care of amphibious aircraft and they also had a weather station. We also maintained the equipment for the UDT teams, underwater demolition teams, that had the job of exploding all the mines that were drifting down south from up in the Atlantic. And every once in a while, we'd have to take these out…guys out and they would go under the water with their gear and we would back off for a good ways and they would swim up, strap on a charge and blow the mine up and come back. Of course, they got out of the way. They came back and got on the ship. But like we say, the war was winding down and so they decided to close that. We'd gotten all the mines out that we knew anything about. And… Interviewer: What were living conditions like in Honduras? Guy: Actually, they were great. [laughs] In wartime, you hate to say that. But that was exactly true. We went into Honduras and got the facilities of the old United Fruit Company banana plantation there. So it had the big house. It had all the out buildings. It had…it already had many of the facilities that a base would need. And it was just wonderful. I shared a five-room house with the officer in charge of finance and all that sort of thing. Interviewer: Just the two of you in the five-room house. Guy: Of course, we had a cook, too. Interviewer: [laughing] I suppose as an officer you had maid service. Guy: She came in every day. Yeah. And like I say, it was not like most… Interviewer: Not like wartime. Guy: Not like wartime at all. Good fishing, too. But it was something that the Navy said we had to have. Because we did provide a lot of good information for them on weather and all these other things that they…that weather was one of my…one of my responsibilities. On that base we only had four officers. Only two of us were line officers. There was the skipper and me. We were the only two line officers. Therefore, I became commanding officer of the crash boat because the skipper had chronic seasickness and he didn't go out anywhere. But then we had a doctor and a supply officer. Interviewer: So you did go out on the ships? Guy: Oh yeah. Yeah. Interviewer: What type of ship was it? Guy: It was a PC. Actually, we used a PC for the demolition people. We had other small boats that only had six or eight men aboard. But we used those for refueling and that sort of thing. But when that wasn't happening we used them for fishing, so that worked out real good. But I had a lot of opportunity to learn a lot of things. I learned how to be a storekeeper because one of my jobs was the ship's service, which is the PX of the Navy. That was one of my responsibilities. The skipper and I divided those things up. He mainly worked with…working with the civilian populations because we had a little town, Traheel [phonetic], right across the bay. We had a little town right outside the gate that grew up just from providing workers for our base. Interviewer: How many men were on your base? Guy: Less than forty. Interviewer: Oh, okay. You're a small unit. Guy: Very small. Actually, we had a huge medical facility. And the doctor got an awful lot of good experience there because when he didn't have anybody that was sick from…from the few people we had there, then he brought the civilians in and he treated them. And it was great experience for him. It certainly did the people around… Interviewer: Helped the locals quite a bit. Guy: Helped the locals and they really appreciated it, too, because the government of Honduras at that time was just not in any position to provide any of that sort of thing. But anyway, that good story came to an end when they decided to close up Navy 509 and they sent me back down to Panama sea frontier where I served on the coding board and in operations for the rest of my time in the Navy. I was still young at that time and so it took me a lot longer to build up points to get out than it did a lot of people because…let's see. I got out when I was…I guess I was nineteen when I got out. Nineteen? Yeah, nineteen. And so, when it came time for me to get discharged, they assigned me as the executive officer and the communications officer aboard a small ship going back to New Orleans for going into mothballs. And that was a hectic trip, too. We left out of Cocosaul [phonetic], headed north up to New Orleans and we got right opposite the Gulf of Tehuantepec in Mexico and that's a big cut in the land mass between the United States and South America. It's usually…the mountain range is almost solid all the way down except in that Tehuantepec area. And the winds blow through there like crazy. And we were rolling seventy-five degrees sometimes. I didn't feel too good for a long part of that period. But anyway, we went up to New Orleans and I got a out of the Navy in…I think it was August of nineteen forty-six. Then….ah, oh. And my…the girl I'd been going with and dating while I was in Emory met me in New Orleans with her family and we got married and I got out of the Navy the next day. And we came back to Atlanta and I entered the University of Georgia. I think they called it the University of Georgia extension center in Atlanta. It's now called Georgia State. It was in an old parking lot. It was a four- or five-story parking lot that they chopped up the ah… Interviewer: Parking garage. Guy: The parking garage and made school rooms out of it. And uh… Interviewer: What was your field of study? Guy: Education. I was going into teaching. But when…I went back into Emory when I first got out of the Navy. I went back to Emory. But then my wife got pregnant. She and her mother decided that my mother-in-law needed grandchildren, so. But when she became pregnant, I knew I couldn't make it on the G.I. Bill and the little stipend we were getting from them and besides that, they wouldn't let people with children out there in that housing where we were. So anyway, I started looking for a job and lot of jobs open, lot of business booming. But when they asked me what I planned to do, I told them I planned to teach. Well, no one wanted to hire me because they were looking for permanent people. And so, I got kind of discouraged. I went down to the dean of men and told him what…I needed a job. They said, “What kind of skills do you have?” And I says, “Hey, I can type.” Because in the Navy, all of the crypto machines, they have normal, almost normal, keyboards for a typewriter. And so this guy says, “No sweat. Got lots and lots of applications or desire for people that can type.” And so he handed me the list and the phone numbers. First one on there was American Red Cross. And so I called them and they…got an interview, went down, they hired me. And so I was in school there until nineteen forty…[sighs] let's see. Interviewer: So you were working with American Red Cross while going to school. Guy: While going to school. I was working…I handled the aerobic typing machines. Nobody ever heard of aerobic typing machines that's living today, I don't think. But what it was was a manual typewriter that sits down in this little well with a little wire attached to each of the keys. And it…you typed out…you typed a thing like a piano roll. If you remember what a piano roll was? Big, wide sheet of paper you punched the holes in it? You punched these things in there and the machine after that would type that letter over and over and over again. Interviewer: Oh, I see. Guy: And so, this was our answer to… Interviewer: And did you complete your school work? Guy: I got to the point where I was eligible for a teaching certificate. I didn't finish college. I didn't finish the thing. But the schools were hurting for people. And so, I could get a job teaching school down at Moultrie, Georgia, as a matter of fact. And I did that after we got through with the spring quarter at Georgia, University of Georgia. And so, I went down to personnel at Red Cross and told them that I was going to be leaving in the midsummer, cause I was going to teach school. And they said, “Gee, we're sorry about that.” And so, I got a call from the deputy director of the Red Cross down there. And he said, “Hey, Guy, did you ever think about staying with the Red Cross?” I said, “Well, I don't . . . want to do something better than this.” He said, “I know. I'm talking about going back and working with the military.” And I had to know a little bit about that from just reading stuff around the Red Cross. And I said, “Well, but I know from just the applications I've seen that you've got to be at least thirty-five years old to get a job doing that.” He said, “Well, we're setting up a new program to see if we can't get some of the younger people in to counsel with the military people that we work with.” I said, my first question was, “How much does it pay?” [laughs] Because I knew what the school was gonna pay and this was about thirty-five or so dollars a month more than the school system. And I said, “Well, I'll try it for a year.” Well, I tried it for almost forty years. They sent me to Benning for some training. Interviewer: To where? Guy: To Fort Benning [in Columbus, Georgia]. Interviewer: Oh, okay. Guy: For some training with an old-time Red Cross director that had been working down there for a number of years. And he had a training course that he had me study and then he came around and checked on me every once in a while. But I enjoyed the work. It was…and still is the job of helping the young soldiers adjust to life in the army because they're leaving home, they have problems back home, they don't know how to deal with them. And so, Red Cross as a non-military organization, non-military in the sense that we don't have any authority over them or that…we can't influence anything that happens to them. But they could come in and feel free to discuss anything they wanted to with us because they knew it wasn't going any further than that unless they wanted it to go. And I enjoyed it. I enjoyed that concept of counseling. Interviewer: Did your family move with you to Fort Benning? Guy: Not right away. Because during this training period, it wasn't certain that I was going to remain at Benning after I completed that. So the family stayed in Atlanta. They did come down later. But…let's see. Interviewer: So after your training where did you go? Guy: Okay. Actually, I stayed at Benning. [laughs] And then Operation [Fortress? a training exercise] was announced. At Benning, there was the Third Infantry Division…was at Benning. Or at least the headquarters of the Third was there. They had two of the regiments there and one regiment up at Fort Devon, Massachusetts. But they were gonna have the first big Army, Navy, Air Force operation coming after World War Two. They had the first jet aircraft to use in that. And they were using a lot of new concepts. And so, when the Army asked for Red Cross to accompany them on this thing, my boss down at Fort Benning said, “How would you like to go?” And I said, well, I thought I'd like that. So, we went up to a base up in North Carolina somewhere. And we staged out of there with our troops with the Marine engineer, boat and shore regiment, with their Air Force. So that we all could get down there approximately the same time. But we were going to be fighting. This was going to be a little war and we were going to fight the sixty-fifth RCT, regimental combat team, at… Interviewer: It was a training exercise. Guy: It was a training exercise. And so, we offloaded off of…out of North Carolina as a troop ship. Everybody had the same gear. I had the same packs and all this other stuff that everybody else had. In addition, I had my typewriter and my bag full of forms and that sort of thing. So, we got on this troop ship. It was the Bexar County, B-E-X-A-R County out of…Bexar County in Texas, as a matter of fact. And they didn't know where to put me since I…so they had me travel with the chaplain and the doctors. Interviewer: Oh, okay. Guy: So we were on this one ship. We also had a lot of troops on there. And oddly enough, we took our first casualty getting off the ship. Because these ships had high pre-board and so what they did was they'd throw this big net over the side of it and you'd climb down the net into a waiting boat down below. And you're climbing down with all these packs and stuff on you, which you're trained to do back at your normal duty station. But this young lieutenant, oddly enough he was an Indian, a Navaho or something. He was climbing down. He got on the net and started down. Had his rifle strapped across the back of his…and as he was going down the net, he fell and that…he fell on his back and it broke the rifle and it stuck him and killed him. That was the only death we had in the whole exercise. We had a lot of injuries because we had the 504th and 505th airborne units out of Fort Bragg that dropped in there. And that was…the DZ down there was not…plush and it didn't have good, thick grass and so that we took a lot of casualties down there on landing. They don't do that anymore. They land standing up. Interviewer: Where did you go? Guy: We were on a little island in the Viegas [phonetics]. Interviewer: Oh, in Puerto Rico. Guy: Off of Puerto Rico. Yeah. But that was great training for me, too. Because it gave me a chance to see what working out in the field with troops was like and the problems that come up. Communication was sporadic. We got our messages in, our emergency messages for guys because even in that situation, if an emergency comes up at home and we know about it, we can get the word to the military and they will cut orders on him and send him back. It usually involves…well, down there it could be death in the immediate family, illness…serious illness in the immediate family. Some…and for some, family problems, too, that couldn't wait till we got through with the exercise. They would let them return. And then of course, the guys had situations where they're not getting mail from home and that sort of thing. So we had…we sent…for the whole time I was in Red Cross, a great part of our work was just keeping families in touch with each other. We called them health and welfare messages. Interviewer: And how long were you working with this particular group? Guy: Actually, we came back about three and a half months on this exercise. We came back from that, I think it was in April of nineteen fifty. And we'd just got unpacked. Takes a while to unpack. And when the North Koreans came across the border in Korea and invaded the South, within that…let's see. That was June. That was June the twenty-eighth, I think, nineteen fifty. The word came out almost immediately that we were gonna…Third Infantry was gonna go. That and one other outfit out of Texas and of course, there was a couple…there was a division or two already out in the Pacific. The twenty-fourth, I think, was still out there. So, when they got the word, then the G-1, the guy in charge of personnel for the whole division, he went to my boss and said, “Well, can Guy go with us on this, too?” And so, he posed the question and I told him, yeah. I'd go. So anyway, then there was the problem of relocating the family. I brought them back to Atlanta. Her mother was happy to have them there since she could baby the grandchildren. And so I went with the…I didn't go…I didn't go over in the same trains or anything from here. But what…what happened was that they cut orders on me for the Far East, the Department of Army did. They cut orders on me. And I went through Japan and then joined them down in Jumungee [phonetic] in the south island of Japan. We were down there. We went through some training. I need to back up a little bit. There was some difficulty with…this maneuver showed us we had difficulty. We were under-manned. Of course, this is post World War Two. The Army had drawn down. So that all units were short. They were short handed. So at Benning, where we had two regiments, we took the fifteenth and the thirtieth and in effect, combined them into one unit. We had the seventh up at Devons and had this floating regiment down in Puerto Rico. So what they did was they beefed up the seventh, combined the two here and took the sixty-fifth from Puerto Rico. Actually, they sent the sixty-fifth from Puerto Rico directly over because they were in full strength. That was one…the only full-strength regiment, I think, because there was an awful lot of people from Puerto Rico [who] could make more money in the Army than they could working out and about. So they sent them in and they attached them to somebody over there. I'm not real sure who they attached the sixty-fifth to. Cause the sixty-fifth got into Korea before we did. But after we got into Jumungee and sorted ourselves out a little bit, the Korean government sent us several thousand brand new bodies. Most of…these were just Korean youngsters that had never seen a gun and couldn't speak any English. Of course, our guys didn't speak any Korean. They had few interpreters and we just had all kinds of problems over there. But we had to take these things in just to have enough bodies to carry the rifles that needed to be carried in there. Get the…in other words get that many boots on the ground. And the…there's some horrible horror stories about what went on in Japan because they didn't like our food. Our food made them sick. Interviewer: The Koreans didn't like your food? Guy: Yeah. Interviewer: No. Guy: The food made them sick. So they were disciplined for taking the food that we provided here, taking it down and trading to the Japanese for rice and for the things that they used. I don't whether…I'm not gonna tell that story. Interviewer: Okay. Guy: There was one horror story that is just too bad, because it changed the whole idea that the Americans in our unit had for the Koreans. Because it involved the way the Koreans treat their own people. [inaudible] Interviewer: So how long were you at this location? Guy: About two months, I guess. And then we went and offloaded in…it was in…I guess it was in October of fifty that we got on ships at Kokura [phonetic] and we made a landing at Wonsan, which is in North Korea, up just below Hamhung and Hungnam. And then we turned north from there. Interviewer: What was your duty title? Guy: I was the assistant field director for the American Red Cross assigned to the Seventh Infantry Regiment. In fact, I'm a life member of the Seventh Regiment organization. In fact, I got a big thing from them yesterday. But it…the division was made up of three regiments plus the division headquarters and all the attached stuff like armored units and artillery units and that sort of thing. But for the infantry part of it, you had three regiments. Interviewer: So you were assigned…attached to the unit? Guy: I was attached to… Interviewer: And you moved to the unit…with the unit? Guy: I was…everywhere they went, I went. I ate out of the same mess hall. They provided communication services to me so that I could communicate with the Red Cross offices back in the United States. Because for every problem that we knew about in Korea or anywhere on the military installation, everywhere the installation was, for every problem we had, a similar problem was handled by a local Red Cross office back in the United States somewhere. Because…for instance, if this guy was concerned because he hadn't heard from his wife or concerned about he hadn't heard that she had her baby or something, you know, that sort of thing. They just worried. So they would come to me and I would send a message back to the Red Cross in the United States nearest to where this family lived and they would go out and check with them, get the information, put it in the message and send it back to me. That…the communications speed was not great back then. But first of all, this is the first time they had ever done anything like…the people in the Army then were not the same people that had been in the Army during World War Two and had undergone, you know, training and had problems that they had to work on. And so, we had to learn it again. We had to learn everything almost new again. And the military, the military had changed. Some of their [sighs] concepts about people. For instance, when we got to Korea and a guy's mother died, today…if that happened today in Iraq, he would be home on the next plane. Over there, sometimes we didn't get the message for two days and he certainly couldn't get out of there in two days or three days or even…maybe he couldn't get out for a month. Forget any transportation back. So what the Department of the Army decided was that if it involved a death, then there would be no emergency leave. Only if the situation were such that a doctor could say that they expected the person to die within thirty days did they give them emergency leave for illnesses. And again, it was strictly for the immediate members of the family. That's your mother, father, sister, brother, wife or children. Or somebody that took the place of a parent during your childhood. Interviewer: So it was your job to work on behalf of the serviceman… Guy: Yes. Interviewer: …with the Army. Guy: With the Army. Interviewer: Okay. Guy: They did have one…they had one thing I thought was pretty smart though. The Army in Washington D.C. set up a thing in the Pentagon there. They had an office that made judgment calls on all this stuff before we ever got the message. What happened was the Red Cross locally, like Atlanta, if you had a son in the Army and your wife got sick and you wanted to try to get him home, then the Red Cross would, first of all, would verify all this stuff with your wife's doctor and get that out of the way. And they would incorporate this in a message or a request for leave, send it to our office in Washington. We literally took those requests over in baskets to an adjutant general section in Washington and they made decisions right there on whether or not emergency leave was going to be granted. If it was then the Army would send a message to the command authorizing this man to come home if he wanted to. We, in the meantime, the Red Cross in Washington sent us a message telling us what the problem was and whether or not emergency leave had been approved. If it was we would go out and tell the man and ask him if he wanted to go home. Oddly enough, some of them didn't. Had some odd reactions from people. But… Interviewer: So how long were you in North Korea? Did you move down to South Korea? Guy: Yes, we did. We got kicked out. After we brought the Marines out of the Chosin Reservoir area…I want that known. Marines don't admit it, but the Third Battalion of the Seventh Regiment walked the ridges for the Marines to get out of the Chosin Reservoir. I met some Marines later in my life that confirmed. Anyway, what was I saying? Interviewer: We were talking about moving from North Korea to South Korea. Guy: Yeah, okay. After the Chinese came in, the Chinese were the deciding factor because we had the North Koreans on the run. Because we had gone fast. The…so anyway, when the Chinese hit us, we were in bad shape anyway because the weather over there had been so bad. It was thirty below lots of times and we only had summer gear because the reason the Third Infantry was so prepared back at Fort Benning when this happened was that we were planning a transfer to Europe. And so, they hadn't drawn all that winter equipment and everything. And as a matter of fact, they thought when we went over there, that we would have this knocked out in about a month or a month and a half and then we'd just go straight from there on to Europe. Interviewer: You're going to have to move along because we running out of time. Guy: Okay. Oh, God, I didn't even think I…I haven't got a foot in yet. But anyway, we…the Chinese forced us out of North Korea. We left there in December of fifty. Left it burning. Not the city. Our goods that we couldn't get out of there. I left North Korea on the Hunter Victory sleeping on five hundred tons of ammunition and that's the only way we could get out of there. But anyway, went down and we…went down to Pusson [phonetic]. We got our supplies. We got re-supplied. We got lots of new personnel. Because in the meantime, they'd been drafting people and so we had people over there, the reserves and the National Guard had been called up. And lots of unhappy people, guys that had been operating their business a week before were now in Korea, trying to figure out which end of the gun was the thing you shoot out of. But so, then we…after we got geared up, we started going northwest out of Korea because the Chinese had moved down south of Seoul. They pushed all the refugees down into the South. We went up, went across the Han River at Seoul. And then for the next six or seven months, we fought up and down that valley that goes north from Seoul up into the north section. Interviewer: Where you say “we” as if you were really a part of a… Guy: I was. Interviewer: …the military. Guy: I was. Interviewer: Were you in danger of being shot? Guy: [laughs] Often. Interviewer: Often? Guy: Well, I mean, you know, if you're with a unit as small as a regiment, you know, you can't…there's no way you can not be. Interviewer: So even in combat situations you were right there with the unit? Guy: Well, when we were making contacts during the fighting. Now I didn't go into this, you know, blindly. I didn't just go say, “I'm going to go up and see so and so.” But I would go by and check with G-3, which is the people that know what situation we're in right now. And if I got a message in that this guy was having a family problem back in Podunk… [Tape 1, Side B] Guy: The tides of war over in Korea were…involved fighting back and forth up through this corridor north of Seoul and there were beginning to be talks in the UN, United Nations, about some sort of settlement for Korea. They finally started to try to define a demarcation line, a separation of the two Koreas. And so during this time, the fighting was still going on but it was beginning to go down, the intensity was going down and they would fight for just short periods. So by this time, I'd been over there about a year or a little over a year. My time came so I rotated back to the United States for assignment back at Benning. I did training at Benning training new people in Red Cross for a short period of time. Got promoted. Went to Fort Stewart. Was pulled out to go with Operation Sagebrush, which was mostly airborne. They were testing new tactics, taking people up in helicop…taking up to the front in helicopters, inserting them and extracting them when they had their situation covered. After that, I went down to Puerto Rico. They asked for a new opening of a base down there. I went down and set up an office there and established relationships with the military, the civilians and with the…yeah, some of the islands over in the Caribbean because Red Cross in its disaster function had a lot of contact with the Caribbean countries. After that, I came back to the United States and was assigned to the Space Center down at…in Florida, down at Cape Canaveral. I was there for a year and during this time we drew blood for all the astronauts just before they'd fly off. We would draw a full blood supply for them in case there was a problem. Correct type and cross-matched and everything. Interviewer: So the job there was different from what it was with the military. Guy: Well, this was an Air Force base at… Interviewer: Oh, okay. Guy: This was Patrick Air Force base in Florida and that's where I was assigned is Patrick Air Force base. The only time that they had a tragedy down there, they didn't…the blood was of no value to them because all three astronauts were killed right on the…in the vehicle as it sat on the ground. But one thing about it, astronauts were really nice to the Red Cross and the volunteers. They gave blood and did all the other things for them. They would sign their blood card. Each one of them, of course, had a different blood type. They would sign the cards for them. Anyway, I was there just a little over a year and then I got my opportunity for the one assignment I had been waiting for for as long as I'd worked for Red Cross and that was an assignment to Europe. And we were assigned to Nuremberg, Germany. Got to take the family over with us. We lived like normal human beings over there for a long…for three and a half years. The main event, I guess, of the European tour was the invasion by the Russians of Czechoslovakia in nineteen fifty-eight. I think it was fifty-eight. They invaded Czechoslovakia and all the Americans, all the foreigners in Czechoslovakia at that time, tried to get out immediately before the Russians took over. And so there was a convoy that came out of Prague coming into Germany and it just happened that it was in our sector. And so, we're the ones that went down and met them at the border. They got out of there with only the clothes on their back and maybe whatever they, one bag they could throw into, something they could put on one of these trucks that came out in this convoy. The most notable member of that convoy was Shirley Temple Black who happened to be in Prague at a meeting. She was an ambassador to one of the African countries. But she was in Prague for a meeting. But she came out with this group. All these people when they came in, our military intelligence people, of course, descended on this group as they came in because they wanted to debrief them about what was going on over there, what they saw. So a friend of mine had Miss Black as an interviewee and they put them in little rooms and they didn't come out for…it usually took about ten minutes, max, with one person. Thirty minutes later, this door hadn't open and our commander…our area commander was getting upset. Finally, [inaudible] came out and I asked Chris, I said, “What the heck you all been doing in there for this period of time?” And he says, “Guy,” he says, “I got everything out of her in five minutes that I needed to know,” he said. “But that woman just won't stop talking.” [laughs] So any…but that was a frantic time. People came out of there again, like I say, with no money and no…basic clothing is all. And…but within…but within a week we had them pretty well shaped up. Red Cross was used to transmit money back and forth. We put…our high school over there was an area high school. So we had students that came in there and lived on the base during the week and then during the weekend they would go to their home at some other base, fifty, sixty miles away. Interviewer: What base was this? Guy: This was at North Bavaria District Headquarters in Nuremberg. Interviewer: Was it in downtown Nuremberg? Guy: No. It was out…actually, it was at…isn't that terrible? My… Interviewer: An Army base? Guy: It was an Army…it was a…Darby Kocern [phonetic]. Darby Kocern out there. By the way, I went by there and saw that about a year and a half ago. Flat. Nothing there. But they kept the children from coming into the school for a week to let the refugees use their rooms. And we took over the Army hotel. The first night we were in I raided the PX and the commissary and got necessities for the women and the babies and all this other stuff. Our volunteers over there were just great. They were all Army dependents and they really helped out. But anyway, that was the most exciting thing that happened in Germany. I guess the next most exciting thing though was that…it was during this time that Korea…I mean that Vietnam had been going on for about a year. And so, the people that…the Red Cross people that had gone to Vietnam with their units were getting ready to be replaced. And so, this team was going through asking if there was anybody that wanted to volunteer for direct assignment to Vietnam. And I said…I knew my time was getting close and so I volunteered. Took me about forty-five days to get everything packed up and the car shipped and the kids shipped and get to Atlanta, where I bought a house, bought another car and got…and I was…within forty-five days I was in Vietnam. And went in with the Twenty-fifth Division up at Cho Chu and I spent a year…well, a little longer than a year. And the reason it was a little longer than a year was that about two weeks before I was due to leave, there was…one of the Red Cross girls was killed in Vietnam. She was murdered one night in the women's compound. We had a compound there for the ladies with barbed wire all over it and all this kind of stuff. But somehow somebody got in there and killed this lady. Beautiful little girl from here in Georgia, as a matter of fact. They…I stayed around. First of all, my headquarters thought I ought to stick around anyway just to see how things were going. So I stayed there about an extra month. But they could not find any hard evidence against anybody. Now I heard later, about a year or so later, they did try somebody over there. But I talked to a man, a Red Cross fella, that had gone in there as an observer at the trial and he said he couldn't have convicted that man. So they never found out who killed her. But uh…anyway, that was a hard thing. The work there…different kind of war. You didn't have the up and down fighting like you had in Korea. You didn't have that trench warfare like you had in Europe during World War Two and that sort of thing. This was war from a main base and they had what were called hard spots out in the Delta area where we were. And because you had water around a lot of it. And so, you'd find something that was a foot above water level and you'd build a little base on it. But sometimes you only manned it during the daytime. At nighttime you pulled in somewhere else. Strange. You did all your travel, all your tactical travel by helicopter. Very few roads. Are we getting close? Interviewer: Yep. Go ahead. Guy: But so…but the work was not more difficult because you had better guidelines from the military's part. And you had better facilities for the people so they could go out and get recreation. Like we had R and R to Hawaii if you want to meet your wife there. Or head to Japan or Okinawa or Australia or wherever you wanted to go. And so, when I…I got out of there in nineteen [laughs]. Ah, let me think. Nineteen sixty something. Hold it. Got it. Isn't that terrible? God. You have senior moments. Nineteen seventy is when is was. Okay. [tape stops] Interviewer: This is the continuation of interview with Mr. Eugene Guy, which is being done on Friday, November nineteenth, at the Atlanta History Center. Mr. Guy, will you continue, please. Guy: Okay. Thank you. I came out of Vietnam in the summer of nineteen seventy. Came back to the United States for assignment at Fort McPherson in Georgia. That was really nice for us because we got to go back into the house that we owned, that we had bought previously. Had a great time here for two years. And then, for me, it was back to Korea. Went back to Korea for a short assignment with the Seventh Infantry Division over in Korea. Uneventful. It was just marking time as they're still doing over there now. And then I got re-assigned into Japan where my family joined me. And uh…one of the…one of the things that was going on was the POW parcel program we had for the prisoners that the Chinese…the American prisoners that the Chinese were holding. They got in jail for a number of reasons. The Chinese put them in jail for a number of reasons. First of all, they took most of the religious leaders, the Catholic and some of the other Protestant people had the schools that they were conducting in China. You had a lot of businessmen that regularly did business with China. And when Mao took over, he saw them as a threat so he imprisoned them. And then later on, there were other people that wound up there. Some tourists, I guess, were brought. Anyway, over the course of time, there were as many as sixty at one time over there. But anyway, the people there that were in there were not provided with normal communications, facilities. They couldn't write letters, for instance. Relatives couldn't send them anything. And when the International Red Cross got concerned with this, then they started thinking about it a little more. And in nineteen…in the nineteen fifties, when we were in Vietnam, we had a number of military people that got shot down in China and they were imprisoned there. So we started trying to negotiate. But the war in Korea was still going on, so China was not feeling too kindly toward the United States. And so it wasn't until after that, when the Chinese began to feel the need for getting out into the world and the world commerce and this sort of thing, that they began to loosen up a little bit. And you had Henry Kissinger made a visit to China. We had the Chinese that invited ping pong players over. And then President Nixon made a visit and during that period, things began to ease up. The war in Vietnam was closing down. We had, at that time, along about this time, we had a number of them in there but they were…the Chinese were gradually releasing them for any number of reasons. For instance, Bishop Waltz [phonetic] got sick and so they let him come. Bishop Waltz was one of the more famous prisoners that China had for a number of years. They said they released him because he was ill. He fooled them. When they let him go he came back to serve for many years at a church up here in the middle part of the country. But anyway… Interviewer: Where were these prisoners held? Guy: Beijing. Interviewer: In Beijing. Guy: Yeah. Interviewer: Okay. Guy: Well, at least that's where the military people were. I know them better. Because when I got there, the only people left in the Chinese jails were military. Interviewer: But you were in Vietnam. You were not in China. Guy: No. I…I went out Vietnam back to the States and then went back to Japan. Interviewer: Okay. Guy: Right. Interviewer: So the situation you were talking about occurred while you were in Japan. Guy: Oh, oh. Well, all these prisoners were in there during the time that I was in Vietnam and I was…the prisoners mainly were in there from nineteen fifty-five, starting in nineteen fifty-five. And of course, I didn't get over there until nineteen seventy-two to work with any of the POW people. So by the time I got there, there were only four left. And one of them was John Downey and Richard Fecteau [see www.pownetwork.org for extensive information on these men and other prisoners in China], who had been CI…who were CIA agents that were inserting and extracting agents in and out of China. They got shot down and everybody else on the airplane was killed. But they got out. And then they had…the two others were Major [Philip E.] Smith, Air Force, and a Lieutenant Commander [Robert J.] Flynn, who was Navy, that had been on missions over China, got shot down and were in jail. So, by the time I got there, these were the only four left. I didn't immediately go into any direct contact with the program until the fella that was doing it before rotated back. So when he left, I was given the assignment. Interviewer: So you were assigned there for another purpose. Guy: Just to carry on the normal Red Cross programs. Interviewer: I see. In Japan. Guy: In Japan. But this was just a side thing. Interviewer: I follow you. Guy: Well, and it was…it made sense that it be where I was because I was at the Air Force base that provided airlift, both from the United States to Japan and then from all parts of the Far East. Interviewer: What base is that? Guy: Yukota Air Base. The program came about or evolved into a program that the Chinese permitted. Everything was controlled by the Chinese. But they would let us bring into China each month five kilos of material for each prisoner. It could be food or it could be…it was mainly food that they wanted. So the families would prepare the packages back in the States and send them to us for delivery. Well, the Chinese had rules and if you didn't abide by the rules, no delivery. So the situation got so bad that we finally got all the families to agree that they would send us the stuff, let us repack it. So we knew it would conform to what the Chinese would permit. And then we would take that down to the [lower?] border crossing each month, last day of the month. Thirtieth day of the month. Sorry. Thirtieth day of the month. And hand it over to a Chinese Red Cross person there and they would take it and deliver it to the prisoner up in Beijing. So this had been ongoing since nineteen fifty-five. We had this…like I say, we had this program from nineteen fifty-five, delivered over three thousand of these packages. Never missed a one of them. There was one time when the guy going out of Yukota could not get to Hong Kong in time because of weather. They got weathered in at Taipei. So we called the British Red Cross in Hong Kong. Luckily, somebody had sense enough years before to say, “Hey, this might happen.” So what they did was they had dummy packages. We knew about what each guy wanted, liked to get. So we would have packages stored in Hong Kong in case this ever happened. That the British Red Cross could take them to the bridge and hand them over at the appointed time. That happened once in the eighteen years that we had the operation. Thought that was a pretty good record. But then, as the war continued to wane in Vietnam and the peace settlements were coming on…the fighting was over. But you had all this squabbling going over. Several countries down in Southeast Asia were still holding Americans prisoners. The Vietnamese were holding some prisoners. The Chinese were holding these. And so, in the era when all of them were trying to establish good relations with the United States, they had what they called this “great outpouring of mercy” [laughs] and they had a time when they were going to release all the prisoners. So the Chinese said they would release the two American military people. President Nixon got in contact with Chou En-lai or whoever was heading up the Chinese government and asked if they could also release Downey. John Downey was a CIA agent. He and Fecteau were CIA agents. Fecteau when he got sentenced following his trial in China was given twenty years. Downey, because he was the leader of the group, got life. We had made arrangements for families to visit him off and on during the years. But anyway, China said, “Okay, we'll release Downey, too.” And so, I happened to be the one to effect this thing. And so I went down…they gave the dates when it was going to be done. And I went down and got with our counselor people down there. We didn't have an ambassador down there because it was a British colony. A British crown colony. And so you don't have ambassadors there, you have consulates. Interviewer: You said when you went down there. Went down where? Guy: Hong Kong. I'm sorry. Interviewer: Hong Kong. Guy: Yeah. All the POW stuff went through Hong Kong because there was a shadowy figure down in Hong Kong that people dealt with. He was the head of the Chinese travel bureau in Hong Kong, but he had great ties over in the mainland and so, anything you wanted, anytime you wanted to get something done over there, Mr. Wu [phonetic] was the fella to do it for you. And so when…at the height of the switch of prisoners, we had a time that the Chinese said that they were going to release our fellas. Oddly enough, they released Downey first. I would've thought they would do the military first, but they didn't. John came out and I went over…I didn't know what to expect over there. But they let me…Mr. Wu went with me really. And so we got over there and there was a very somber setting. I went in and this Chinese official in the black suit gave me a lecture on the ills of espionage and the fact that they were going to expel from China this criminal that we had sent over there. Finally it got down to giving them a receipt, in effect, for Mr. Downey. And he asked me to write a receipt. I said, “Well, I happen to already have one.” Well, I had read the material that other guys that had been doing this exchange business had and there was a couple times when prisoners had died over there and when they did, they prepared things the Oriental way, which meant that they gave you a box with some of the bones in it and the hair and the fingernail clippings and that sort of thing. Each time the Chinese required a receipt. So while I was waiting around at the consul, I typed out one for him. So when he asked for that, I pulled this out and gave it to him and he was very…he was shocked by this. And he was suspicious about this. He conferred with the interpreter he had brought and we didn't communicate well at all. And things were beginning to get a little touchy. And Mr. Wu, who had been standing against the wall over here, came over and interceded, looked at what I had given and he explained to them what it was. So it went on okay after that. But uh…so I got Downey. The only thing Downey had when he came out that he had when he went in was an overcoat. And he hung onto that coat. By the way, I talked to him not too long ago. He's retired now. Judge. And he's still got it. He still has that coat. Interviewer: And this exchange took place? Guy: At Lo Wu, the border crossing between Hong Kong and mainland China. It's up…it's actually a part of the mainland. Interviewer: Across from the city of Hong Kong. Guy: Yes. Right. Right. Yeah. It's part of the mainland. It's called the New Territories. Interviewer: New Territories. Yes. So you were there alone, just you and Mr. Wu? Guy: Yes. Just me and Mr. Wu. Well actually, that's not true. There was a consul. There was a foreign service person with me. There was a military liaison officer. Interviewer: And an interpreter. Guy: No. We didn't have an interpreter, oddly enough. And there was…Colonel Borg [phonetic] was there. Oh. And we had a doctor that…the British military hospital provided us a doctor just…just to observe and see if he could see anything that might create a problem. He also wanted me to talk to Mr. Downey before we got over into Hong Kong about security. Didn't want him to get into any conversations with media people or any of that sort of thing. Actually, there was no media people up there except the information services for the Hong Kong government. Those were the only ones that could take pictures. That's the reason that all the pictures that you'll see in this material that I gave you were there all “on her majesty's service,” information services bureau, Hong Kong. So anyway, he came out. They got him on an airplane down to Kai Tak [phonetic] in Hong Kong. And he went straight back to the United States. His mother, by the way, was ill up in Connecticut. So he went straight on up there. Interviewer: And what did you do after that? Guy: Well, two days later…I stayed in Hong Kong. And two days later, they released Smith, Major Smith and Lieutenant Commander Flynn. And whole different ballgame with that release. Everybody was happy through the guards that came down with them. They had known each other for years and years and had played games together, I guess, up in jail up there. Interviewer: Chinese guards? Guy: Yeah. And when they…Downey came out with just his coat. Smith and Flynn came out with…each had three big duffle bags full of gifts and stuff that they had bought in China. Because the Chinese took them on a big buying spree before they brought them down to turn them loose. You know, the only was that Flynn, he wanted something different. He was still a gung-ho Navy pilot, even though he'd been in jail for a long time. So he saw—I smoked cigars back in those days and I had a, you could get Cuban cigars in Hong Kong. [laughs] So I had one and so he was puffing a cigar when he came across the border. But that wrapped up the parcel program. Like I say, eighteen years and nary a missed delivery. Pretty good. About ten months later, up in Japan, we took the local English language newspaper. Mi Nitshe Shimboom [phonetic]. And I saw a little article down at the bottom of the page about this American that had been picked up in the Paracale Islands when the Chinese and South Vietnamese were haggling over who owned the Paracale Islands. They became important because oil was discovered there. And so the Chinese just decided to take them over again and they did. And they had some…the South Vietnamese had some Army contingents there. And when they took these people back to China, they took wounded as well as able-bodied prisoners. When they sorted through them, lo' and behold, there was an American, Gerald E. Kosh. He was an enigma. Nobody knew what his function was. There was a lot of talk later on…and if you go to the Internet you can find him and you can hear several of the stories, several stories told. But the Chinese were kind of embarrassed, I think, by the fact that they had this American. So they got a message off. You'll find copies of the thing in the stuff. The message came from the Chinese Red Cross to the American Red Cross in Washington. And so, what they were doing was asking for someone to come down and pick up Mr. Kosh. So I guess the headquarters did some checking around and I was there and so, you'll see a message that said…that went back to the Chinese that says that I'll be down to pick him up. It was funny because at this same time, there was a big contingent of wounded South Vietnamese people there and they had notified the International Red Cross about them. The Chinese had notified the International Red Cross. And so, the International Red Cross sent a man to take…to help do the repatriation of these guys. But that was the big whoop-de-do. We took Kosh over and ran him through little procedures and stuff to get him out within just an hour or so. They had a big gala for the other folks. Cameras and videos and all that stuff. But that was the last…that was my last big doing in Japan. We went…let's see. Where did we go from there? Just a moment. Have to check. As we wound down through things in Japan, the family and I came back to Atlanta. I was reassigned at Fort Benning for a while and then I got another assignment back to Korea. I'm an old Korea hand by this time. I spent a tour there with the Seventh Division this time, the Seventh Infantry Division as differentiated from the Seventh Regiment I was with when I was with the Third Division. But I spent a year there and came back, not to Fort McPherson, but they needed somebody down at Parris Island, South Carolina. And I went down there and spent another year at Parris Island. This was the first Marine Corps base I'd ever been assigned to. A good tour, but I couldn't see separating the family and the family did not come down there when I was there. My daughter was in high school and didn't break her away from her schooling and her friends. So, they said, “Well, if you…if there's not any other assignments you want right now, what we'll do is we'll assign you down to Puerto Rico for a tour.” Well, I knew the guy down at Puerto Rico. Some of them had stayed down there forever. So anyway, I said I'd take it. My daughter, in the meantime, had graduated from high school, got married and so my wife was there by herself. And the tour down in Puerto Rico was just ideal for us, we thought. A great place to spend the rest of the time before you retire. And it was. It was a good…it was a good thing. Good quarters. Nice area. Secure cause we lived on the base and that sort of thing. And the only thing we had to worry about was hurricanes that came through every summer. There was a lot of those and a lot of hard work. Cause every time you went through it, it was a total disaster. People never learn that hurricanes are gonna come back next year, too. So you have that recurring problem all the time. The one that did happen was that in Grenada we had a lot and I mean lots of students there. Grenada, for instance, you could go down there and get a medical degree in just a few years. So lots of folks were down there. And I'm not exactly sure how the conflict started, but all of a sudden the Cubans were in there and trying to take over the island. The United States did not like that, so we got together many Spanish-speaking troops, Army troops, Navy troops. And we went in there to get the Cubans out. That we did. Interviewer: And this is your unit from Puerto Rico that went in there? Guy: Actually, no. It wasn't. At Puerto Rico what we had was a hospital that was close by. So they brought casualties up to us. Well, they took them other places, too. You had some good facilities at the VA hospital in San Juan and it wasn't too far to bring them back to Bethesda. [end of tape]

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Veterans History Project collection, MSS 1010, Kenan Research Center, Atlanta History Center

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