90 years of life, 70 years of marriage

BY ROBERT WILLIAMS Perham Focus

PERHAM — Robert

“Andy” Andersen, a Korean War veteran who turned 90 on Aug. 8, has accumulated quite a few interesting stories since he was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1934. He and his wife Donna were married in 1954 and they celebrated 70 years of marriage together on June 12.

Andersen turned 17 years old in 1951 and joined the military on his birthday that year.

“When I went out and got sworn in, I went out to Fort Omaha and they had a room full of guys and the guy in charge pointed and said ‘Now you, you, you and you are marines.’ And one of those guys passed out.

I’ll never forget that,” Andersen said while laughing.

Growing up in Nebraska, Andersen’s father ran a small grocery store and would do the meat cutting there. When he got on a bus to leave home, Andersen said the bus drove by his family’s store and his family stood outside so they could wave to each other before he left. That was the last time he saw them for quite a while. He found out he could

stories of service, life

go to Hawaii for basic training, so he volunteered to go there thinking it might be nicer. He also found out later that infantry training does not take place in the nice areas of Hawaii.

“We crawled up and down every bad spot on the island,” Andersen continued. “They didn’t train us in the good sections. They trained us in the bad sections. In the muck.”

But it wasn’t all bad. While recollecting his time in Hawaii, Andersen laughed and said he did have a funny story from that adventure. He was too young to drink at the time, so when they would go into town to have some fun on leave, he was the one who’d get everybody back to camp. One time they had a runin with the Hawaii Air Shore Patrol.

“We were down there walking the street, and here comes this little drunken sailor. And he was not very big, but he was just all over the place,” Anderson said. “Well the HASP got him. They started to put him in the back of the van and all of a sudden he turned and laid all three of those guys out cold. He was a lightweight champion boxer in the navy, come to find out. So we just got out of there.” Andersen agreed that’s one of those things you probably couldn’t get away with these days. After basic training, he was sent to Japan to go to cook school for 30 days because he was only 17. After that, he rode on a train across Japan to a place where they loaded soldiers onto landing craft bound for Busan, South Korea. From there he rode another train that went through Seoul.

“I went through Seoul and I think the biggest building I saw there was maybe a corner and a half of one side of a building,” Andersen continued. “Everything else was blown away. Nothing was there. And then they ran us up into North Korea and I went into the 987 Armored Field, which was self-propelled howitzers.”

Despite being in a war zone, Andersen did remember a couple of funny stories from his time there. One was about a fellow soldier who decided to use the restroom shortly after an intense firefight. Well, the fight wasn’t totally over, and the North Korean forces started shelling their base while he was on the toilet.

“They started shelling us, he got his drawers up, he’s running like mad and they’re dropping shells right in behind him as he’s running up,” Andersen said. “He got up by our tent and I jumped out, grabbed him and pulled him in behind the sandbags.”

Another story Andersen told involved their medic tent blowing up after some incoming fire set the tent ablaze. The explosion wasn’t from the incoming fire, but rather the tent exploded because of some homemade booze that was being stored inside. The containers the booze was stored in got so hot they blew up.

“We had a bunch of incoming fire one time and it hit the medic’s tent. The tent was burning like crazy and we’re trying to get it out,” Andersen continued. “All of a sudden it blows up and the colonel jumps all over this doctor saying, ‘What’s going on! You’re not supposed to have any explosives in there!’ Well, the medics had been coming up and taking the leftover fruits or whatever we had and were making raisin jack in 5-gallon cans.”

After the war was over, Andersen came home to Omaha in January 1953. He said it took him a week to ride a ship to Japan from Korea, then a three-week ride on a ship to Hawaii before another two-week trip to Seattle, Washington. From there he boarded a train to Carson, Colorado, where he met a sergeant from Iowa.

That sergeant had just bought a brand new 1953 red-bottomed, black-top, big V-8 Buick convertible. He gave Andersen a ride back to Omaha in that car, and Andersen said he drove about 100 miles per hour the whole way. Once he finally made it home, Andersen said he met his wife Donna shortly after.

“When I got home, Donna, her sister and her brother had been taking my two sisters to church and that’s how I met her. She reminded me of Daisy Mae, always barefoot,” Andersen said.

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