Drafted to Korea

EYOTA —  Ron Dickie has spent most of his life in the field, not the battlefield. Even so, his time as a combat medic in the Korean War has stuck with him.

He prefers not to think back on his military deployment; however, for him, it is not so important what he did or when he did it. Instead, it is more about the country he did it for.

“We’ve always had some sad things happen, but (America) is still the best country to live in,” Ron said. “We have lots of freedom here; we have freedom of religion, which you don’t have in lots of places, and there is always turmoil and war going on. … You look at the whole picture, we’re still the best place in the world.”

Ron was born and raised in the area around Mankato and St. Peter with his three brothers and one sister. Their father, Merlyn Dickie, lived on farms as he bought and sold them for a living.

“We didn’t have a telephone or electricity,” Ron said. “My dad was handy at doing things. The farm he rented was about 240 acres, and he did all the electrical work. It was different back in those days; you don’t dare do electrical wiring now. … You’ve got to have a license.”

Growing up through World War II and into the Korean War, Ron recalls how the draft swept through the area during both conflicts.

“The Blue Earth draft board drafted everybody,” he said. “They wouldn’t give any deferrals to anyone, so everybody went. A lot of the people I went to school with at that time, some of them didn’t make it back. … (During World War II), a lot of the neighbor boys went off to war. Every farm was about 40 or 80 acres back in the day, so almost every farm was touched by someone going into the military.”

Ron had several family members who served, including one cousin who taught pilots and another who was lost in the Bataan Death March in the Philippines in April 1942. Later, Ron’s younger brother, Steve Dickie, would serve in the Vietnam War.

Ron’s draft number came up in 1951 when he turned 18. He received his orders from Fort Sheridan, Illinois, and was sent to Fort Knox, Kentucky.

“General (George) Patton had a name there; he was a tank commander from World War II,” Ron said. “It was a good training camp, and when I finished my training there, they sent me to Camp Pickett, Virginia, and I took my medical training there.”

After his training and a brief furlough home to Minnesota, Ron was deployed to Korea as a combat medic for the California National Guard 40th Infantry Division, replacing another medic. It was a 16-day journey by ship, landing at Incheon in present-day South Korea before heading north.

“I got 4 points every month, and if you got 36 points, they took you out and sent you home,” Ron said. “I was there nine months, in combat all the time.”

Ron was never in a village. Out in the Korean wilderness, it got so cold that he could not turn off any vehicles because, if he did, they would not start again. Ron drove an ambulance made out of a Dodge van; many of his fellow draftees came from New York and did not know how to drive because, in the city, they did not need a car.

Out in the field, the ambulance needed to have its white cross covered so the enemy would not target it.

“A lot of the people who were our enemies were Mongolians,” Ron said. “They were used to standing in the cold.”

The commanding officer for Ron’s unit was a World War II veteran. Ron volunteered when they needed paratroopers, but the officer turned him down.

“He said, ‘No, you’re going to stay right here; … I was a paratrooper, and your time of living is limited because 50% of paratroopers don’t make it,’” Ron said. “He probably saved my life there.”

Serving in a combat zone, Ron had a lot of mortars whistling overhead and exploding nearby; he attributes that to some of his current hearing loss.

The only medications Ron had with him in the ambulance were penicillin and morphine. For more care, patients needed to be taken to the rear hospital, farther from the front, and every night, Ron needed to wash the blood out of the ambulance.

When Ron earned his 36 points, he sailed to Seattle and went from there to Fort Carson, Colorado, until his time of service was up. Upon discharge, he returned to help on his father’s farm in Minnesota. He also went to ag school for four years, after which he married Margie (LaSalle) Dickie in 1988; they had a son and a daughter, and Ron went on to work for Hubbard Milling Company for 10 years and Midland Co-op for 20 years. Today, Ron and Margie live in Eyota, and they grow and sell strawberries and garden other produce.

Ron does not talk much about his military service — and tries to forget about some of it — but he stays involved with Veterans Affairs and the Eyota American Legion. He has not been able to reunite with the soldiers he served with in Korea, but he has met up with classmates who were drafted at the same time he was, although most of them have passed away now.

“We need to think about our country’s brave people who served in the wars,” Ron said. “They put their lives on the line, and our country is still the best country to live in.”