Dad's slide photos from the Korean DMZ 1956-7
Visiting my parents in Iowa recently, I made good on a longstanding threat to ransack the family photo stash for digitization. During my storage closet dig, I stumbled on a box containing 35mm slides chronicling Dad's time in the Army along the Korean DMZ.
Dad, fresh off the farm, had just finished basic at Fort Bliss and training as a radar operator at Fort Lewis when he was shipped off to serve with the 2nd Battalion of the 19th IR in '56, staying 18 months. In this photo he would have been 19 or 20.
The rest of Dad's photos (taken with an Argus he bought at the PX) are below, as a Flickr slideshow. Happily, no exciting bloody combat scenes; Dad's outfit saw heavy casualties in the war that had only ended a few years previous, and the peace was an uneasy one. Just a visual slice of an infantryman's life: training, digging holes, clowning with buddies, talking with the locals and, er, working girls outside the camp fence. Not M*A*S*H, but the closest thing my dad ever got to a diary.
