Cranberry VA recognizes 71st anniversary of Korean Armistice Agreement
CRANBERRY TWP — Stationed at his military base in Dongducheon during the Korean War, letters to Frank Finlay from his girlfriend arrived in bunches.
Finlay’s then-girlfriend, whom he married less than five months after returning to the United States, wrote him a letter every day while he was deployed, he said. At home, she joined the ranks of other women whose loved ones had either been conscripted or left before the official notice arrived by post.
“I didn’t have any definitive plans other than I wanted to get married,” Finlay said.
Finlay joined veterans who served during the Korean War as they were recognized at the VA Community Clinic in Cranberry Township Friday, July 26.
The three-year conflict is often called the forgotten war, wedged in history books between World War 2 and the Vietnam War.
The event marked the 71st anniversary of the signing of the Korean Armistice Agreement.
Finlay was in his early 20s, studying horticulture at Penn State University when he volunteered to join the Army during the Korean War.
“I volunteered for the (Army) because I couldn’t get a job out of college because I was draft bait,” Finlay said. “I volunteered to get it over with.”
Finlay was deployed around October 1954, he said — “after the fighting had stopped” — but skirmishes were still happening.
During basic training, Finlay was “singled out” for a medical lab technician job because of his studies in chemistry and bacteriology. He ended up being trained as a combat medic. Out of a whole training company, Finlay said, only 17 were sent to the Asia-Pacific. Finlay was one of three sent to Korea.
“It was almost a nonevent, except my first night, I was actually up on the 28th parallel where the camp is — there were fires in the hill and ammunition exploding,” he said. “I thought the war had started again.”
“It was a terrible war,” he said. “I saw all the devastation. There were no trees left, and there was a lot of live ammunition. We pulled two Korean boys that were out picking up scrap, and they got live shell exploded on them.”
“That happened more often than we’d like to think that it happened,” he said.
Finlay returned to South Korea in the ‘80s on business trips. Everything had changed from how he remembered it postwar.
“It was a much different place,” he said. “When I’d left Korea in the Army, Seoul was bombed out. It was a bombed-out city. It was a lot of devastation. When I went back, it was a metropolitan city.”
Finlay also revisited Camp Casey, the military base in Dongducheon where he had been stationed decades before. Where there had once been tents were barracks.
Jim Keefer, a Navy veteran from West Sunbury, spent 21 months during the Korean War on a vessel in Norfolk, Va., before being transferred to three different aircraft carriers. He was 18 — freshly graduated from Butler Area Senior High School — when he joined the military.
“Work was hard to find in 1950,” Keefer said. “It was harder when I got out in ‘54.”
Keefer, who was born in Harmony and lived in Butler for a time, said he applied to a host of jobs to no avail. The day he signed up for the Navy, he picked his mother up from her work.
“She says, ‘They want to talk to you in the office, and they want you to start working next week,’” Keefer said. “I said, ‘I can’t. I just signed up and got a job with the Navy.”
Keefer’s first job out of the military was working the 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. shift, six days a week, as a night attendant at a service station. His work in the Navy resurfaced in a variety of jobs he later took on that involved heavy machinery, including at ARMCO.
Reflecting on his first week of boot camp, Keefer said he wondered what he got himself into.
“Mostly, I think, it was discipline and learning to take orders fast,” he said. “Listen to what your superiors — your leaders — said. And everything was on a timed schedule.”
“We had to document everything we did,” Keefer said. “To this day, I still do that.”
This article was updated July 29 to reflect that it the 71st anniversary of the agreement.
