FREDERICKTOWN — Paul James is modest and unassuming about his role in the Korean War.
“Everybody was in the service,” James said. “I didn’t do anything different.”
But there is one thing about his service that offers a less common perspective on combat: At his father’s request, James and his brothers signed up as conscientious objectors. James’ father, a Seventh-day Adventist, wanted his sons to support the war effort, but without rifle in hand.
Thus James ended up in the Medical Corps, despite having no experience in medicine. He was sent to Camp Pickett, Va., where he received eight weeks of combat training and eight weeks of medical training. At that point, some were put into service in hospitals, others on the front lines.
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James figures he must have been reasonably good, because he was sent to the front lines, just in time for the last three months of the war. His unit, the 40th Infantry Division, was stationed in “The Punchbowl,” an area near the 38th Parallel, which served as the rough borderline between North and South Korea. When the Chinese Communist army attempted to break through the American lines in an attack now known as the Battle of the Kumsong River Salient, James’ division was pulled up to the trenches along Heartbreak Ridge.
Between there and Christmas Hill, James went out on contact patrol every fourth night. Contact patrol meant that the patrol would keep going until it made contact with the enemy, typically by getting shot at. The medic on duty during that patrol would take care of any injuries on the spot. Although James did not have a weapon, he was vulnerable to the same gunfire that threatened the rest of the patrol. Fortunately, he was usually too busy to think about it.
“A medic’s job is to take care of the wounded,” he said. “That’s your full-time job.”
James said that he wouldn’t have wanted anyone else to have to take care of him.
That’s not to say he’d take the same route through the war if he had it to do over again.
“I’d never do that again,” he said. “But, you honor your parents.”
It’s when James thinks of his wife, Irma, whom he married while at home on leave from Korea, that he chokes up. He wrote her a letter on the last day of the war, which was the one and only time James, as he quietly puts it, “told her some things,” such as the time he was caught in combat and his position was hit with 42 rounds in 15 minutes.
“War is not fun,” James said, choking up, momentarily unable to continue.
He worries now for the United States soldiers in Iraq.
“At least we knew where our enemy was,” he said.
After a truce was negotiated in late July 1953, the fighting in Korea stopped. The troops were pulled back in steps until the Demilitarized Zone was established, separating the two Koreas, as they remain today.
James spent further time in Korea and Japan, and eventually concluded his service with six months in the dispensary at Fort Knox in Kentucky. There, he screened people and prescribed medicine, a task the fort surgeons didn’t wish to spend their time doing.
When he returned home to Ohio, the Chesterville resident moved to Columbus and spent 36 years in the Columbus school system, teaching elementary school in German Village. He later served as principal of several different schools. He ultimately became director of food systems, overseeing the supplying of food to 165 schools.
In 1995, James and his wife moved to Fredericktown, cattycornered from his brother, Morris James, former Fredericktown school superintendent. Teaching evidently runs strong in the family, as three out of Paul and Irma’s four children are also school teachers, just as Paul and two of his three brothers became teachers. The entire family appears to have a calling for educational service to others.
In the end, James might say the same of teaching that he said of military service, that it is all just part of a person’s duty to society.
“It isn’t any big deal,” James said. “We did our duty.”
