'It was a job to do': Marine remembers Korean War

In an interview with The Paducah Sun, when asked what he valued most from serving, he thought quietly in his living room for a moment.

“You become real close to your buddies,” said Morehead. “They were with you when you fought. You took care of them, and they took care of you.”

This August, Morehead celebrates his 90th birthday. He’s in good health, with most of his hair, and a sharp conversationalist. He’s at the gym each morning — “Can’t walk well,” he said, smiling, “But I’ve gotta keep doing something,” — and does his own yard work at his home in Calvert City.

American men born in the first half of the 20th century faced a minefield of drafts and wars. Luther Morehead Sr. was too young for World War I and too old for WWII, but his son was just in time for the Korean War.

Morehead enlisted in January of 1952 at 19 years old, after five months at the now-defunct Pennwalt plant in Calvert City. Before his 20th birthday, Private First Class Morehead arrived at Vegas, an outpost north of the main resistance line, near the 38th parallel border dividing North and South Korea.

“I knew exactly where I was gonna go,” Morehead told The Sun, and he said something for the first time he would repeat. “I didn’t think anything about it, really. It was a job to do, and somebody had to do it.”

He led a squad of 12 men — “Good Ol’ Boys,” he called them — on ambushes to capture enemy forces.

“It was mainly Chinese soldiers we fought,” he said. After United Nations Command invaded North Korea in 1950, the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army crossed the Yalu River to join the fray.

“We would go out on an ambush two or three times a week, and when it was our turn, we had a captain we met,” he said. “One time, while someone was drawing out on paper where we’d go, and we were looking it over, figuring it out, this captain looked at me.

“He said to me, ‘I don’t know what you’re going to do when you get out of this outfit — if you get out of this outfit — but you won’t never have as important of a job as you’ve got right now. Your job is to get your men back any way you can.’

“He really had a way of making you feel good,” said Morehead, laughing. “Saying he didn’t know if you were gonna get out alive or not. But it was that way.”

Morehead lost no men, despite “a few hot battles.”

In January, 1953, enemy forces rained grenades on Morehead’s squad during a skirmish. The stick-attached explosives used widely by Communist forces in Korea, modeled after the Soviet RGD-33 grenade, killed at 10 yards and wounded with shrapnel at 30.

“We didn’t even get fully up a hill; they just started throwing those grenades at us,” he said, adding, “their grenades weren’t very good; if they were, we wouldn’t be here today.

“I didn’t think I’d make it. I was laying up there, trying to direct our men, too, and get them back first. Me and one boy — he got hit in the back, I got hit in the legs — just hugged each other and rolled downhill. We had stretcher bearers down there; I didn’t leave until I made sure all of ours were off.”

Morehead took shrapnel to his legs, back and shoulder. Today, he walks with a limp caused by years of back pain.

After one month in a Japanese hospital, he returned to the U.S. in March, 1953. The Battle for Outpost Vegas, one of the war’s bloodiest conflicts, began weeks later, killing more than 1,000 Americans and twice as many Chinese.

Morehead recuperated for months at a hospital in Millington, Tennessee. During this time, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin died, spurring talks for the Korean Armistice Agreement. The war drew to an end as Morehead left the hospital on weekends to see his girlfriend Martha Ann, who had waited for him since his deployment. The two married before his discharge in November, 1953.

“(The military) wouldn’t keep me after the injury,” he told The Sun. “Had I not gotten hit, I can’t say I wouldn’t have served longer, but … I sure was glad to get back home.”

He later returned to Pennwalt, retiring in the late 1980s.

“I try to forget about everything, and that’s the reason I can’t remember like I used to,” Morehead said. “I don’t want to remember, honestly.”

One thing he remembers is the enemy’s nighttime tactics.

PVA forces under Mao Zedong had orders to fight close-quarters, preventing U.S. artillery and airpower. South Korea-allied men commonly faced wave attacks of Chinese infantry with bundled grenades, rushing trenches and outposts in the darkness.

“We’d throw grenades like they were rocks,” he said, describing the conflicts as one-sided at times. “A lot of them didn’t have weapons, even if they had a lot of hand grenades.

“Their dead bodies got to swelling up. Stinking. Even after (Korean ally civilians) carted some of them off — well, they couldn’t get them all. There could be at least 100. You could smell everything in that.”

He recalls one encounter that ended peacefully.

In the 2001 anthology “Western Kentucky Veterans: Lest We Forget,” he writes, “Some of my experiences during the Korean War were remarkable in that they resulted in obtaining medals and honors. Yet some of the most memorable and moving instances, understandably, would never receive recognition.”

In Morehead’s submission, “Scary Night,” he describes a “dark, dreary” morning when his squad conducted an ambush at 2 a.m., only to find enemy soldiers facing them 200 feet away.

A four-hour standoff ensued, each side waiting for the other to open fire. Eventually, as the sun rose, both parties slowly passed to return to their outposts.

“As it turned out, there is no doubt that the enemy felt the same way we did,” he wrote. “Brave, yet scared, but the most important thing we had in common is that both sides wanted very much to live. Luckily, that night, we all did.”

“It was all out in the open and would have been suicide,” Morehead told The Sun, 20 years after writing. “They went their way, and we went our way, and nobody fired a shot.”

In October, 1953, General Lemuel C. Shepherd Jr. presented Morehead with a Silver Star at the former National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland.

“When he walked out of the room, he said to somebody, ‘make that boy a corporal,’ ” Morehead said. “I was getting out of the service — I didn’t care if I was a corporal or what I was … I was glad to be back home.”