Major Carey Hughes:WW2, Korea,Vietnam
Major Carey S. Hughes gave nearly his
entire life to his country, serving as a fighter pilot in not only
World War II, but also in the Korean War and Vietnam. He passed away
in 1981, at the young age of 57, but his wife Martha recently shared
her memories of his brilliant military career.
Hughes wanted to join the military at a
young age, right out of high school. “He wanted to go into the
service, as all young men did at that time, when Japan attacked us.
Everybody was patriotic then, like they are not so much anymore, but
he was too young and his parents wanted him to stay in college,”
Martha said.
Instead of enlisting right away, Hughes
honored his parent's wishes and spent two years at Vanderbilt
University. After two years of college he was eligible to become a
naval air cadet, so he enlisted in the Navy on December 10, 1942 and
became just that.
Before Hughes could complete his flight
training, tragedy struck his family. His mother became ill and was
diagnosed with cancer shortly after he left. Meanwhile, his younger
brother John, who was fighting with the Army in the Pacific Islands,
was in the process of coming home. Before he could make it back to
his sick mother, however, he was shot and killed by a sniper. Before
the family got word that John had been killed, their mother passed
away. Shortly after, Carey got word that his father was in the
hospital at Vanderbilt, but before he could get there his father too
passed away.
Hughes's family owned Merry Acres, a
dairy farm in Huntsville. Because all of his immediate family was now
deceased and Hughes had the responsibility of returning home to
settle the affairs of the farm he could not extend his time in the
Navy past the end of World War II in 1945, though he wanted to and he
did remain in the Reserve.
In 1953, during the Korean War, Hughes
decided to reenlist. This time, however, he enlisted with the Marine
Corps. “They wanted him to do that because they were giving close
air support in Korea to the ground troops,” Martha said. “When
they told him they wanted him to go into the Marine Corps they said
it was because they had lost so many Marine pilots.”
He was in Korea for about 16 months.
During that time, Martha says he wrote her nearly every day.
“Sometimes I'd get a whole bunch at one time after I hadn't gotten
any for a few days. He wrote almost every day, so I got them
frequently,” she said.
Like many veterans, Martha says Carey
never talked about any war in very much detail, but he would talk
about the countries he saw. “In Korea he bought a motorcycle, more
like a scooter, so he could travel around the countryside. He liked
to take his motor scooter and go around the countryside and he
brought a lot of pictures back that depicted the Korean countryside
showing the women washing their clothes on rocks in the streams...
and the rice patties. He liked things like that. He liked to get
acquainted with the culture and the people. He talked more about
things like that than he did the actual war. I never questioned him a
lot. Whatever he wanted to tell me was fine,” she said.
From Korea, Hughes was sent to Japan ,
and Martha had the opportunity to visit him there, but the trip
started with some confusion. “He got a telegram that should have
said I'll be there at 10 o'clock on the second, but it read two
o'clock on the tenth. So, he didn't meet me at the airport because he
was still on his way. He didn't know I was getting there so soon.
There I was, not speaking Japanese and not many Japanese people there
spoke English. The red caps at the airport grabbed my luggage to take
off and I had no where to go, so I was trying to get them to let it
go...just pulling at them because I couldn't speak Japanese. Finally
there was a Naval officer there who was a liaison officer and he
tracked Carey down for me. He was on his way, so I stayed at a hotel
there that housed civilians who were working for the government until
he could get there,” she said.
Hughes stayed in Japan for about six
months after Martha's visit. “The 1st Marine Aircraft Wing was
there and they were ordered to be back home when the war was over. It
was a big deal. They had to account for every little thing and bring
it back to the States,” Martha said.
When Hughes returned from Korea, he and
Martha were moved to Pensacola Naval Air Station in Florida where he
served as a flight instructor.
Hughes was stationed at Paris Island
when he got orders to Vietnam. Martha said that the Vietnam War was
probably the most dangerous for her husband. “In earlier wars,
being an aviator, it wasn't like the troops fighting on the ground.
They just flew their plane out and had fights in the air and then
came back to a more or less safe place. But in Vietnam it was a
closer war. There was more contact,” she said.
Martha recalled the time that her
husband was sent to Hawaii for R&R, rest and recuperation, during
his Vietnam tour. “I met him there and he just wanted to sleep all
the time. He said he never had a night's sleep because he had to wake
up and go to the bunker room if they sounded the sirens that the
enemy planes were coming,” she said.
Though this was a tougher war for
Hughes, he still wrote letters back home and called on occasion.
And, like in Korea, he liked to explore the Vietnamese countryside,
though what he saw wasn't always pleasant. “He noted that the
children in Vietnam would try to take your watch off of your arm.
They'd do primitive things, like put feces on nails so that they
[American soldiers] would step on it and get infections. These
weren't military things, that was just what Vietnamese civilians
did,” Martha said.
Hughes was awarded the Bronze Medal for
Valor during his military career.
He retired from the Marine Corps on
June 30, 1971, at the age of 47. By this time, he and Martha had
built a home on Roseberry Creek in Scottsboro, where they lived with
their two sons, Carey, Jr. “Butchie” and John. After his military
retirement Hughes worked as the personnel manager at Halstead, served
as the President of the Rotary Club and ever the aviator, he owned
and flew his own Cessna airplane.
___________________________________________________________________________________
Don Hodges: Vietnam
Don Hodges was in the middle of his
college career, working to become a pharmacist, at Samford University
in Birmingham when he enlisted in the United States Army. Until that
point he had been deferred from the draft, but because he could not
afford to attend school full time his deferment ran out. “I was
afraid that if I was drafted, because of my pharmacy background, that
they might make me a medic. That, of course, was a very high risk job
in Vietnam, so I went ahead an enlisted so I could pick my choice of
school,” he said.
“I certainly was not chomping at the
bits to go to Vietnam, but the main thing is I knew so many had
served before me in all the wars, but especially World War 2 because
that was the greatest generation. A lot of people don't even know
about them now, but if we had lost World War 2 we would certainly be
living differently today,” Hodges said. “I just thought about all
those that had gone before me and knew it was my duty to go too.”
Don was 23 years old when he enlisted,
several years older than most people he served with. “I really wish
I had gone sooner and gotten it over with,” he said.
He began his basic training at Fort
Benning, Ga. in 1967. After basic, he went to Advanced Individual
Training where he became a Microwave Radio Specialist. “I had
always been interested in electronics,” he said, “ yet, I only
ended up doing that maybe less than a month in Vietnam and then I
became a company clerk and I ended up driving truck.”
By the age of 25 he was in I Corps,
where he would spend eight months, next to North Vietnam.
“The main thing about my story,” he
said,” is I was just scared to death.”
“I'd never been in a war before. The
main thing that scared me was there were people I didn't know, and
they didn't know me, and they were trying to kill me. I never had a
narrow escape episode or anything but when I was up north I had some
that were too close for comfort.”
He was stationed in a place called Phu
Bai, where he says there were many attacks, mainly at night
Though he was scared, he said he was
lucky in many ways. “I was always back at at established base at
night. I never had to spend a night out at what we referred to as the
boonies. I ended up seeing more action than I wanted to, but the main
thing is I didn't have to stay out at night,” he said.
The last six months of his tour, Hodges
spent at a battalion headquarters near Cam Ranh Bay. “There wasn't
much action there and that's where I started driving a truck. It was
called a ration truck and I'd go get food and supplies.” he said.
“This place was not one of the main sights for people coming in to
the country, but it was a sight where people go home. It's also the
sight of a big mortuary. Most people went home with their bags. Some
went home in a bag,” he said. “But, compared to I Corps, where I
was stationed at first, we had very very few attacks. It was a pretty
secure area.”
Hodges had gotten married before he
was sent to Vietnam. “We missed each other a lot. There certainly
were a whole lot of letters,” he said. “We also had tape
recorders that had a reel on them and we would make tapes and send
them back and forth. When she would visit my mother, my wife could
let her listen to my tapes and she'd make me one. The mail was
everything. It'd probably take five days, maybe seven, for mail to
travel between home and Vietnam, but when you got it, it was
current,” he said.
He was also able to make a few precious
phone calls back to the states while he was away. “ I can't
remember if it was the Red Cross or the USO, but if you were ever
close enough to where you could get to a place they had, of course
the line would always be long, you could call home. I'd call home in
the middle of the day there and it'd be the middle of the night here.
I made several calls to my wife and mother and that was real neat
because that was the farthest from home I've ever been.”
Hodges says he doesn't like to talk in
too much depth about his war stories. “It was pretty rough. And, I
don't like to talk about it much either because it was such an
unpopular war,” he said. “When I was in I Corps I had to run down
to Da Nang and do a courier run. There was a CBS news crew there that
interviewed me, and I don't know if it ever got on TV or not,but the
main thing they asked me is 'What do you think about all the protests
going on in America now, especially by people your own age?' My reply
was 'Well I wish they were over here and I was home.' I didn't want
to get into politics or anything like that, but that's just what I
told them.” he said.
It wasn't until ten years ago, on a
hike in the Smoky Mountains, that some one thanked Don for his
service. “That was the first time that had ever happened. It's
happened a lot since. It's not that I'm looking for thanks, it's just
that I remember when I came home. I flew in to Huntsville. I had on
my uniform and when I got off the plane there were some people who
shot me the bird and called me a baby killer.”
Hodges was born in Scottsboro to L.C.
“Mess” and Elizabeth Hodges and though he only spent his first 18
years in Scottsboro, it is still the place he calls home. He is a
member of VFW Post 6073 and even comes back most years to help at the
county fair.
When Hodges returned from Vietnam in
1970 he got to go back to school in Birmingham, where he has lived
ever since. He is now a retired pharmacist.
____________________________________________________________________________________
Michael Kirkland: Afghanistan
When I asked my husband why he wanted to be in the Army he told me that he had wanted to since he was just a kid. Part of his reasoning for this was because he wanted to be like the good guys he saw on television. "I always thought those dudes were cool, running around shooting guns. That's why kids want to be in the Army, because that's what they see on TV. They see dudes beating bad people," he said.
"It's just something I wanted to do. It's just something you want to do or you don't and it was something I wanted to do."
He thinks he was destined to be where he is today. He said he thought that true because when he was a little kid he and his cousin Patrick built forts together all the time. "When I was really little I'd just built them out of sheets and furniture in the living room. Then, when we moved out in the country I'd go out in the woods and build forts and brush piles and bridges and walls and paths. That's a lot of fun," he said.
He almost joined right out of high school but says that his dad wanted him to get a college education first, and so he did. But as he was finishing school he realized he still wanted to be in the military, so he started looking at the process of enlisting.
In March of 2011 he left for boot camp at Fort Benning. "It wasn't hard. You wake up early and stand in formation and go to PT and whatever training we had for the day we'd go do. It wasn't physically hard. I expected it to be like the movies where you get yelled at and beat up by the drill instructors, but that's not how the military is now."
During basic training a recruiter came and talked to him and the others about being a Ranger. "I didn't know anything about it, but it looked cool. I already knew I wasn't going to like the job I was supposed to do (satellite communications). It seemed like a better place so I volunteered for it and went to AIT at Fort Gordon. I was there for 11 months and I went to airborne school in April of 2012 and I started the Ranger Assessment and Selection Program in August of 2012 and finished in October."
(Because he always tells me to Google it when I ask him what a Ranger is...)
The 75th Ranger Regiment is a lethal, agile and flexible force, capable of conducting many complex, joint special operations missions. Today's Ranger Regiment is the Army's premier direct-action raid force. Each of the four geographically dispersed Ranger battalions is always combat ready, mentally and physically tough, and prepared to fight our country's adversaries. Their capabilities include conducting airborne and air assault opertions, seizing key terrain such as airfields, destroying strategic facilities, and capturing or killing enemies of the nation. Rangers are capable of conducting squad through regimental size operations and are resourced to maintain exceptional proficiency, experience and readiness. The Regiment remains an all-volunteer force with an intensive screening and selection process followed by combat-focused training. The 75th Ranger Regiment is a proud unit and a team of teams – serving the nation.
After that he was stationed at Fort Benning, where he remains, with the 3rd Battalion 75th Ranger Regiment.
Michael was well aware that he joined the military in the middle of a very long war, and knew it was likely he would be deployed.
"That’s the point of joining the Army;you know at some point you’re going to have to go . If you don’t want to fight in a war you probably shouldn’t join the military."
He said they went through a training cycle to prepare for deployment. "We did a lot of scenario based training... of what we should expect overseas."
He deployed to Afghanistan at the end of the August of this year.
He said what he experienced was almost exactly like what happened in training, and that they continued to train even while overseas.
He said that the living was pretty cramped, but it could have been worse.. "It was really dry and there were big changes in temperatures between night and day. It wasn't horrible living conditions. I imagine it's a lot better how we lived than how they did in other wars. It wasn't bad how we lived. We had indoor plumbing, we had laundry rooms and computer rooms. So, it wasn't horrible."
The food, he so eloquently stated, "sucked."
He wasn't able to tell me a lot of the details about what went on while he was in Afghanistan, except that they went on missions. And during those missions they accomplished that thing that Michael dreamed about as a little boy building forts...they got the bad guys.
"It was pretty rewarding when we got to go out and catch whoever it was we were looking for, because that meant there was somebody less in the world that was going to try to hurt people"
They had to deal with mortar attacks on a daily basis and while it was unnerving to Michael, it made him a better person.
"Being overseas and being away from everyone you know and love, and getting shot at on a daily basis...when you get home you appreciate those things more when you wake up in a peaceful place...you are a little more thankful for every day that you have."
He made it back safely to the U.S. on Thursday, October 24.
