Train club keeps public memory of veteran service on track
ZELIENOPLE — A little town honors Korean War veterans with a memorial wall — a very little town whose buildings and people total inches and millimeters.
Veteran Robert Taylor, who served in the Korean War, proposed including a miniature Korean War monument into Passavant Retirement Community’s model train display.
The display is a long-standing feature at the retirement community, and is now a small town. The first building went up in 2014, and every year, new features are added.
Taylor, 93, once crossed a deadly slope lined with trenches every Friday, reporting on the amount of ammunition used to support the United Nations artillery division. He dodged machine-gun fire along the 38th Parallel, a border where fighting grew especially violent, until reaching the shelter of the bunker across the slope.
Taylor was never shot, but a stove pipe in the bunker struck him in the head when he was not wearing his helmet, or “steel pot,” as soldiers called it.
He explained that although his helmet was designed as headwear, these same helmets often served as useful multipurpose basins.
“I went to a medic ... and he put stitches in,” Taylor said. “But he didn’t have no cloth to put on there. He used super glue.”
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