‘Every day a blessing’ for Korean War veteran
Bernie Hill had barely arrived in Korea when enemy mortar shells started dropping all around him.
“They told you it took quite awhile for the mortars to zero in on you — one ahead and one below, like that,” Hill, 74, a Lawrence veteran of the Korean War, said recently. “In my experience, there was one ahead of me and the next was in my hip pocket. So it’s kind of scary, because I thought I had more time to get in a foxhole than I did, really.”
Bernie HIll, Lawrence, spent 13 months on the front lines during the Korean War. He's now active in Lawrence's American Legion.
Hill, an Army infantryman who was a truck driver in civilian life, was drafted in March 1951 and arrived in Korea in August 1951 for a 13-month tour of duty on the front lines.
There, American, Korean, Chinese and other forces battled over hill after hill, neither side gaining the upper hand for very long.
“When they did hit us, they hit us with such a swarm of soldiers, you know what I mean?” Hill remembered. “It was one swarm come, you’d try to eliminate them, and then pretty soon here come another one. Pretty soon they’d overrun you. They were just vast numbers. You couldn’t fire fast enough to do it.”
Hill said he was “lucky” to survive the experience.
“I remember one night, mortars were coming in,” he said. “We were losing quite a few guys to artillery. I said then, if I made it through that, then every day was a blessing to me. It was an extra day to live.”
Hill didn’t return to Korea after the war — but was amazed by what he saw of Seoul on television nearly 30 years later.
“I couldn’t believe when they had the Olympics in Seoul, how well they built back,” Hill said. “There was nothing left when I was there.”
These days, Hill is an active participant in Lawrence’s American Legion. Three or four times a week, he helps round up an honor guard for the funerals of elderly veterans, mostly from Korea and World War II.
“We always come up with a firing squad, three flag holders,” he said.
Though Korea is now regarded as America’s “forgotten war” — and North Korea remains a source of international tension — Hill said he had no regrets. Besides, he said, more people have been paying respect to Korean War vets in light of the country’s current military struggles.
“I’d do it all over again,” he said. “It made me grow up. It made me have more responsibility.”
Audio clips: 
Bernie Hill, part 1
‘Every day a blessing’ for Korean War veteran
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