Veterans reunited after half a century
Published: September 16, 2005
There they were, their images frozen in time, framed forever inside the borders of a black-and-white photograph.
Their young faces were smooth and smiling, their eyes bright and alive, their hair thick. They draped their arms around each other as they posed like a band of young brothers at a Sunday family picnic.
Their names: Miller, Coleman, Stotts, Van Giesen, Higginbotham. The year: 1950. The place: Korea.
Dozens of pictures and newspaper clippings are the only reminders the five had of each other and the time the five spent together during the Korean War.
Four of the five were together for about a year in Korea. Once the war ended, the five went their separate ways and lost touch with each other for more than 50 years.
Until Wednesday.
After more than half a century, the five men of the 99th Field Artillery, 1st Cavalry Division, headquarters battery wire section gathered for a few days in a Springfield hotel to see each other with their own eyes.
They sifted through the pictures and pages from their time in the war, although their faces today, after 55 years, are not as easy to identify anymore.
“I recognized the voices more than the faces,” said Paul Coleman, 74, of Ellis, Kan., who was 18 when he fought in Korea.
Some only knew each other by last names. That was the one and only way they called to each other during the year or so they spent together in Korea.
And that’s how they referred to each other when the five men and their wives came to Springfield for a reunion.
They came to Springfield because they heard it was a nice city. But they didn’t come to see the sights.
“This is not a vacation. It’s not entertainment. It’s us getting together for the first time,” said Glenn Stotts, 73, of Gary, Ind., who spent 33 months in a Korean prisoner of war camp. The other four thought he was dead until last year.
The remaining four, minus Stotts, had found each other through searches on the Internet. Stotts was found in a search on the Korean War Project Web site, a nonprofit corporation devoted to the study of the Korean War.
Once Stotts, who worked for the Ford Motor Co., was found to be alive last August, the reunion idea gained momentum.
Billie Higginbotham, wife of Richard Higginbotham, thought getting the five together would be good for the men. While they had talked to each other over the phone for the past few years, Billie Higginbotham said she knew her husband needed to see his buddies.
“When (Richard) talked on the phone and hung up, he was all alone and it all would come back to him. I wanted him to see all of them just one time. For years, my husband never talked about the war. I never knew what he went through. He didn’t tell his parents, no one,” she said Thursday morning when the couples met in a hotel room.
Wednesday night, after the wives went to bed, the men stayed up until 10 p.m. (”That’s late for us,” Higginbotham noted) telling war stories.
As is common with other war veterans, details of what happened and what went on are for veterans’ ears only. Little is said about their time in combat to anyone else, including family and friends.
“It’s a common bond that others don’t understand,” said Harry Van Giesen, 73, of Ripley, N.Y., who worked in the field of electrical materials and was 18 when he was in Korea.
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