Lawrence Cole

0:00:00

Lawrence Cole:

My name is Lawrence with a “W” Cole. C-O-L-E.  I was born in Brattleboro, Vermont on 24 November 1933. At that time, my father was driving a bread truck in what is called the Winhall Valley. It was the main highway between Brattleboro and Manchester, Vermont.

00:00:35

And my mother was working in a furniture store in Brattleboro. My dad had to quit high school as a junior, in order to help support the family.  But despite the fact that he hadn’t finished high school, he was kind of an entrepreneurial and resourceful guy.

00:01:03

He saw this vacant storefront in a little town about 12 miles south of Brattleboro in Bondville, Vermont. The road at that point was not paved. Bondville was famous for the Bondville Fair.

00:01:24

And so he moved us up there in about 1938 and opened, this was still during the depression, of course, and I was born in at the kind of the depths of the depression. I can’t imagine what my parents were thinking, but anyway. So he had a country store in this little town and he was really quite innovative.

00:01:50

He had a walk-in meat cooler so that he could have fresh meat. And we used to drive over the hills to Troy, New York to the farmers market to get fresh produce and we looked like a bunch of Okies going over with stuff, coming back with crates of vegetables strapped to the car.  It was some kind of Hudson or a Packard, a big boxy thing with a box on the back. Anyway, we filled it up.

00:02:23

And so then he had somebody customize a Packard, kind of, it was not a pick-up truck but a panel truck, so it was an enclosed truck. He had somebody build an insulated box so that he could use it like refrigeration.

00:02:47

And so he delivered meat and produce and dairy products to logging camps and stuff out in the boonies.  And, in fact, one of the places that he used to delivery groceries to was a logging camp on Stratton Mountain.

00:03:12

Male Voice:

Very [unintelligible]

00:03:14

Lawrence Cole:

Before, yeah, yes, very, because the logging camps, these people were cutting pulp to be used to make paper and the people live, literally lived in paper shacks and when it got, when they finished cutting the forest, they put the shacks on the flatbed trucks and move to the next location.

00:03:40

And so I went out with him once or twice and the dining hall was just several of these things strung together.  So he had, but this was before Stratton Mountain was developed as a ski resort. So anyway, but then the war came along.  I went to a one-room school.

00:03:55

Male Voice:

So you were working with your father?   Not officially but as [unintelligible]

Lawrence Cole:

Not officially, no, I had chores.

Male Voice:

Okay.

Lawrence Cole:

I was, I was, when we moved there, I was five years old, so I went to the first three grades of school in a one-room schoolhouse.

Male Voice:

One room schoolhouse.

Lawrence Cole:

One room schoolhouse.

Male Voice:

Tell me about it. How many students were there?

Lawrence Cole:

Well there might have been ten or a dozen, so there weren’t students in every grade every year. It was all eight grades.

00:04:26

The town sent to Townsend, Vermont, where there was a public high school that had started out as a private school years ago, an academy in the early history. So you went to high school down in Townsend.  But this was a one-room school, with a pot-bellied stove up in the front.

00:04:41

There was not, the toilet was an outhouse, except it was an inside outhouse. My Aunt Susie was the schoolteacher. She had been to normal school for two years.  So when the war came along, and that meant rationing, and people had points and there were price controls, Dad didn’t want to be in the business.

00:05:20

He went to work for another grocery store for a while but then he enlisted in the Army. He was too, he was, he’d never been drafted, he was in his mid-30s. So he was in the service and when he went in the Army, the folks sold the house that we were living in and my mother moved to Keene, New Hampshire, where she had a sister and she got a job in a bank.

00:05:46

And I went to public schools in Keene, including through, into my junior year in high school. Then I transferred to a prep school called Vermont Academy in Saxons River, Vermont for three semesters.  Graduated from that in 1951. So I went to college for a year in Keene, New Hampshire. It was a state teacher’s college.

00:06:09

My dad was not willing to help me go to college unless I wanted to go to business school, which I didn’t want to do.

Male Voice:

[laughs] What did you want to study?

Lawrence Cole:

I wanted to study language and I had been admitted to Lehigh and Lafayette but couldn’t afford it. Anyway, so I majored in math and social studies but I continued to take Latin and I didn’t do very well myself. It’s about a semesters’ credit out of a year’s work.

00:06:40

And I was going to get drafted so I enlisted just ahead of the draft. I got sent to Indiantown Gap Military Res–

Male Voice:

When was that?

Lawrence Cole:

That was in July of 1952.

Male Voice:

You enlisted?

Lawrence Cole:

So I went to Indiantown Gap Military Reservation for 13 weeks of Infantry Basic and after basic training, we, if you were, we all had, if we’ve all scored high enough, we had to apply for OCS, and so–

00:07:14

Male Voice

What is OCS?

Lawrence Cole:

Officer Candidate School. Ok and so I was awaiting a decision about whether I was admitted to Officer Candidate School for infantry at Fort Benning, Georgia. And so what they did was, while we were awaiting a decision in orders, we went to leadership school and they trained us to be Kadri and then we went back down to the training companies to help with the training.

00:07:41

….orders for Korea.  I shipped out with a bunch of guys that I had been through basic and leadership school with. We went to Fort Lewis Washington and we shipped out at Tacoma a couple of weeks. We went to Yokohama.  I went to Camp Drake. We were issued weapons, supposed to 0 our M1s and then a boat to Pusan and then by train up to Yeongdeongpo.

00:08:04

Male Voice:

Had you heard about Korea before when you were enlisted and, also when you were about to leave for Japan?  Did you know anything about Korea?

Lawrence Cole:

Well, I mean, I knew the war was going on and I knew a classmate had been drafted.

00:08:34

I wasn’t, when I was in, I wasn’t reading the papers closely.

Male Voice:

Did you know where it was?

Lawrence Cole:

Oh sure, yeah.

00:08:46

Male Voice:

Did you learn about Korean history?

Lawrence Cole:

No, I knew nothing about Korea.

Male Voice:

Anything about Asia that you learned during the high school?

Lawrence Cole:

Well, I paid a lot of attention to World War II in Japan and China. We all heard a lot about Chiang Kai Shek and Mrs. Chiang Kai Shek. [laughter] And that was, you know, they were part of the big five.  Is that right Stan?

00:09:15

Male Voice:

Yeah

Lawrence Cole:

The big 5, and I paid attention to the island campaign in the Pacific and MacArthur returning to the Philippines and then a little bit about the occupation.

Male Voice:

But not, not about, not about –

Lawrence Cole:

No, I wasn’t, I don’t think I was aware that we had occupied the South Korea and split it with Russia and had taken over from the Japanese. And that’s you know, I knew, I could have found it on a globe, but that was about all I knew about it.

00:09:45

Male Voice:

When you arrived in Japan, where did you arrive?

Lawrence Cole:

Yokohama.

Male Voice:

Yokohama.

Lawrence Cole:

Right.

Male Voice:

What was your first impression about Japan?

Lawrence Cole:

Mount Fujiyama.

Male Voice:

You went up there?

Lawrence Cole:

No, just, you could see it coming into the bay, into the harbor and then we quickly got on a train.

00:10:11

They served us a meal on trays.  They put the pears on top of the massed potatoes. Anyway, we ended up at Camp Drake and my first impression was that the 1^stCav had painted everything that didn’t move with a 1^stav patch on it, which you probably have heard from somebody else. And, well as I say, we were there for a few days. We were to draw organization, well draw personal equipment and our rifles and go to the range and zero them.

00:10:47

And there were some classes, but it was just a review of some basic stuff. We quickly shipped over to Korea.

Male Voice:

When?

Lawrence Cole:

Oh, that would have, that was in mid-March of 1953. So I arrived in Korea just about Easter time and we got on a train. And we got on a train in Pusan. It was a Korean train. As I say, we went to a place called Yeongdeongpo.

00:11:26

Which was the 45^thInfantry Division replacement depot because at that time, my regimental combat team was attached to the 45^thDivision in the Punch Bowl.  So, we were in the replacement depot for a while and then got transported to  where where the regimental combat team was.

00:11:53

As I say, they were just coming out of the Punch Bowl. And then we just started.  The first 16 weeks I was in Korea, we moved east-west 14 times and were transferred to either the 3^rdDivision or the 2^ndDivision or the 45^thor 8^thArmy or 9^thCorp. [laughter]

Male Voice:

Describe to me the situation at the time that you arrived in the Punch Bowl. Was there severe battle daily, or what’s happening?

00:12:25

Lawrence Cole:

Well, the war had been stabilized along the front for about two years.  The truce talks have been going off and on since the Spring of 1951 and so the front had stabilized but there was still—

Male Voice:

A tug of war right?

00:12:50

Lawrence Cole:

There were, yes, the other side was trying to see how much, how high a price we were willing to pay to try and hold onto a price here and there–

Male Voice:

Right, right.

Lawrence Cole:

–and we were determined to make them pay a high price to change the line. It had been decided by then that the UN forces would not make any general offensives forward any more.

00:13:22

So, there was patrolling going on.  We went out at night on patrols.  You went out at night on listening posts and out posts. We were being probed.  There were artillery duels.  All you would read in the Stars and Stripes the next day, about 15 or 20,000 rounds had fallen on one hill in one night.

00:13:50

So, we kept being moved into either blocking positions or up on the front somewhere, filling a hole wherever it needed to be plugged.

Male Voice:

Mm-hmmm.

Lawrence Cole:

And that’s what we did. We were in the Kumwha Valley with the 3^rdDivision. And then we were a little further west with the 7^thDivision. And we ended up the last couple of weeks of the war in July of ‘53 we were at the front of the Christmas Hill section adjacent to the 45^thDivision.

00:14:27

Male Voice:

Um hm.

Lawrence Cole:

And there’s a guy on the Cape by the name of Dana Eldridge, who’s written a book about his experiences in Korea, compared with his great-grandfather in the American Civil War. And from the description, I think we relieved his regiment of the 45^thDivision after it got badly beaten up.

00:14:49

It was very rugged terrain. We hiked for two days to get into this ridgeline. As I say, we were, I was at the front when the ceasefire came.

Male Voice:

It must be very dangerous all the time.

Lawrence Cole:

Well, there was a lot of, we were vulnerable to artillery and mortar fire a lot of time and I, you went out on, you went out on patrols.

00:15:19

You are at risk of, in fact, you’re at risk of being shot by your own people. (Huketooses) were sent down in front of our position when we were on the Christmas Hill sector, to try and identify trees that were large enough to be cut by these work parties of South Koreans–

Male Voice:

Yeah, yeah.

Lawrence Cole:

–of Koreans, okay? We went down there to identify trees and all of the sudden we found ourselves in a mine field.

00:15:49:

Trip wires all around us about this high.  And we had gotten in there somehow without tripping any of them. We had to get out.

Male Voice:

You had to get out.

Lawrence Cole:

Oh yeah, yeah, but it was the bouncing Betties. It was our own minefield, but nobody told us it was on our forward slope–

Male Voice:

Oh, I see.

Lawrence Cole:

–and nobody told us. When we relieved the company and the people in front of us, they may or may not have known that they were down there, but they gave us no maps showing they were there.

Male Voice:

Still the most heavily mined area in the world, no?

00:16:25

Lawrence Cole:

Yeah, yeah. Yes.

Male Voice:

So now it’s a safe haven for animals.

Lawrence Cole:

Yes, and maybe some trees.

Male Voice:

Yeah absolutely.  So, were you ever wounded?

Lawrence Cole:

No.

Male Voice:            Not ever?

Lawrence Cole:

No, no. Now add a couple of close calls, but again, from incoming artillery, yeah, yeah.

Male Voice:

Oh, ok.

16:49

Lawrence Cole:

One night we were moving in, they must have seen us, and we were in pup tents, a little ways behind the lines and the artillery came in and so we, you know, we got into slit trenches.

Male Voice:

When you move from east to west and the other way around–

Lawrence Cole:

Yeah.

Male Voice:

–where did you sleep?

00:17:15

Lawrence Cole:

Well, it either would have been in pup tents or just in our sleeping bags with ponchos over us to keep dry. If we were going into a reserve position, then it would have been in the squad tents, the 16. But, most, you weren’t in those tents unless you were quite aways behind the line.

00:17:45

Although, we had, in one of the, one time when we were in those tents, one of those tents were being used by the officers and by the CP and a shell came in and it goy the switchboard guy and two or three officers.

Male Voice:

What was the most difficult time or memory in, during your time in the service still that haunts you, maybe in nightmare, as a nightmare, do you have something like that?

00:18:18

Lawrence Cole:

No, I haven’t had any nightmares and I have had anything haunting me. The worst part of well, there were two aspects of Korea. I mean the artillery just scared the, you know, was scary.  But the other impression was the cold. I still get, my fingers get cold very easy.

00:18:43

We had Mickey Mouse boots and they sweat and if you didn’t keep moving, it was worse, because they got wet. Uh, but we, for a while, we only had galoshes or over shoes and then we didn’t have really good gloves.  It was a while before we got the trigger finger mittens. We had the regular leather gloves with inserts and they were just no adequate for the cold.

00:19:17

Male Voice:

Had you written back to your family, letters?

Lawrence Cole:

Yes, I wrote letters to my mother. She saved them. I have them. They’re in there, in that folder, but I have not read them for, ever since I found them.

Male Voice:

What was your favorite items in Syrasia [sic]?

Lawrence Cole:

Beans and franks.

Male Voice:

That’s what the others are saying.

Lawrence Cole:

Yeah, they were reliable and they weren’t laced with preservatives.  The hot dogs were cooked in the sauce the beans were cooked in.

00:19:53

Male Voice:

So, when did you leave Korea?

Lawrence Cole:

I left in May of 1954.  I had the points to come home sooner, but if you got back to the states and had less than 90 days on an enlistment, you got out.  So, I extended over there for 60 days and came back and got out.

Male Voice:

So, you had the Armistice signed in July 27 in 1953, you were there.

Lawrence Cole:

No, I was there, on the line.

Male Voice:

Exactly.

00:20:23

Lawrence Cole:

Right.

Male Voice:

Where was it?

Lawrence Cole:

Christmas Hill.

Male Voice:

Christmas Hill.  Tell me about it, the day you heard that there will be ceasefire.

Lawrence Cole:

Well, I’ve forgotten just what time of day we found out that the ceasefire was going to take effect at 10 o’clock at night. We found out during the day.

00:20:44

We were just told to keep out of sight. We’re not going to do anything provocative. My recollection is the forward observer who was up on the ridge line wasn’t calling in fire on the other side during the daytime. We didn’t take in, nothing incoming. But then, after it got dark, both sides used up artillery and water so they wouldn’t have to lug it out the DMZ afterwards.

00:21:20

It stopped a little after 9 o’clock and that was it, but the next day, we went up on the ridgeline and looked across and that night we made bonfires and celebrated and, as best you could, didn’t have much to celebrate with.

Male Voice:

What did you feel about this armistice, the cease fire, finally you don’t have to worry about, you know.

00:21:48

Lawrence Cole:

Oh, we were delighted. You know, we knew probably meant we were going to live.  It turns out the last soldier was killed was to our right in K Company of our regiment. I was in Fox Company and there was, K Company was a couple of companies down to the right, he was in that artillery exchange, his young sergeant from Kansas was killed. He was the last soldier killed.

00:22:24

So, you know, we figured we had made it, we were home free, but it turns out in carrying stuff out, there were accidents. There were casualties from, it was very rugged terrain, and people lost their footing, and they were carrying cases of grenades.

00:22:45

Male Voice:

You know, this year is the 60^thanniversary of armistice.

Lawrence Cole:

Yes.

Male Voice:

At the same time, it’s the 60^thyear anniversary of US-Korea alliance. The war lasted 60 years, even after we signed the ceasefire. What do you think about that?

00:23:10

Lawrence Cole:

I don’t think there was, there are any reasonable options to bring North Korea to the bargaining table over a peace treaty.  I don’t because I don’t think it’s acceptable for them to further develop nuclear weapons. I don’t think the U.S. or the UN is, will accept that, and I don’t think the North Koreans will give up.

00:23:41

Well, I think in the case of India at least it’s democratic.  Pakistan has elections.

Male Voice:

But they are the source of proliferation. Actually, North Korea got it from Pakistan.

Lawrence Cole:

Yeah, yeah.  Well, I just, I think–

Male Voice:

I’m just asking.

Lawrence Cole:

Yeah, well, I think difference is that what you have in North Korea is a dictatorial dynasty.

00:24:13

I think it’s important that the US continue to play a role to preserve South Korea’s independence. I’m not sure, there may be a way, I think it might be worth trying to bargain the removal of American troops for a North Korea acceptance of an inspected verifiable nuclear non-proliferation.

00:24:49

Under those circumstances, I don’t think we need to leave troops there as a trip wire, okay?  It’s the same idea as troops in Germany were.  Chinese expansion has not gone beyond Tibet and Nepal, okay? The Vietnamese are very sensitive to any idea of Chinese expansion.

00:25:15

So, I don’t know China’s intentions are. My concern is both sides will make mistakes lie we and Japan did in the 30s.

Male Voice:

What do you do in the states?

Lawrence Cole:

Well, I came back, and I got discharged so I went back to my hometown and I worked with some college friends.  I decided, and I had a Reserve obligation, so I got back in the Reserves.

00:25:45

I went to summer camp with my Reserve unit. I decided I wasn’t ready to go back to college, so I got activated for two years, two more years of active duty, and it was terrible. [laughter] I was stationed at Fort Devens in the infantry and stateside garrison duty is just terrible, so I got out a little bit early and went back to college in September of 1956.

00:26:15

Male Voice:

What college?

Lawrence Cole:

Keene State. It was Keene Teachers College at the time. It was a single purpose institution. Graduated in 1959 and I taught public high school in a little town in New Hampshire for one year and then I went to Connecticut for two years and taught high school math.

00:26:44

And then I went to grad school at Purdue for four years.

Male Voice:

What did you study?

Lawrence Cole:

Economics.

Male Voice:

You finished your PhD there, right?

Lawrence Cole:

Well, not right away. I left with my thesis unfinished and went to UNH on the faculty and I went back in the summer of 1969 and holed up in a graduate dorm and finished my thesis.

Male Voice:

What was your thesis topic?

Lawrence Cole:

A model of the US economy from 1929 to 1959.

Male Voice:

1929 to 1959, so including the Depression, and recovery-

00:27:18

Lawrence Cole:

Yeah

Male Voice:

–and [unintelligible]

Lawrence Cole:

And World War II. Right.

Male Voice:

What is that, quickly explain that, what do you mean by a model?

Lawrence Cole:

Well, it’s a model in the sense of it is a small system of equations that represented economic relationships like consumer spending and employment, government spending, business investment, interest rates.

Male Voice:

Oh, so you put those variables together and set it up as a model to explain —

00:27:51

Lawrence Cole:

Try to explain the behavior of, the behavior of the economy and then use it, you use it to try and project. What you do is you have data from, in this case, 30 years, but there was more data.

00:28:07

So, after you built the model that fits 30 years, then you try to say, now, given, what would the model predict is going to happen in the next five years for which you have data, and how close are the model’s predictions to the actuals. Okay and then I went to the University of New Hampshire on the faculty in the business school, in the Fall of 1966.

Male Voice:

What do you think is the legacy of the Korean War and the Korean War Veterans?  How do you assess it?

00:28:39

Lawrence Cole:

Well, I’m inclined to agree with David Halberstam’s assessment in the closing chapter of his book, that regrettably, it took 30 to 35 years before Korea became democratic, politically. But, it’s become a significant economy.

00:29:10

It’s a major player. I’ve read about, you know, the industrialization and the South has changed family relationships within Korea, in old traditions and that sort of thing. But Korea is free, students come here, go back and are having some influence.

00:29:39

You know, I think, I think President Truman did the right thing. I think there were some mistakes made in the way the war was conducted.

Male Voice:

And even before.  Even before, because U.S. made a decision and it was, you know, there were no choice, but they withdraw all the troops and then they declared that the American defensive perimeter will be withdrawn.

00:30:09

Lawrence Cole:

And that didn’t start with Dean Acheson.

Male Voice:

Right.

Lawrence Cole:

That was the Joint Chief’s of Staff policy before he became Secretary of State.

Male Voice:

Yeah, yeah, Defense Department.

Lawrence Cole:

Yeah, so we make mistakes, but by and large, I think it was the right thing to do and yet you have to say that, while you know we say, we drew a line in the sand and we proved that aggression was not going to pay.

00:30:38

It didn’t prevent Vietnam. And they adapted their tactics to a different kind of war. And we’re still trying to determine how to deal with insurgencies and guerrillas. And don’t know how.

Male Voice:

Did you see the web site that my foundation put up?

Lawrence Cole:

Yes.

Male Voice:

The Korean War Veterans Digital Memorial?

Lawrence Cole:

Yeah, I’ve been there.

Male Voice:

What did you think?

Lawrence Cole:

I have to study it some more. I’m glad an academic is doing it.

Male Voice:

Mm hmm.

00:31:08

Lawrence Cole:

There are, there have been other efforts made. We tried to start one ourselves, of an oral history type. I don’t, and there’ve been attempts to establish a Korean War Museum that have sort of floundered, but I’m well, and I’m glad you’re doing it before we’re all dead.

00:31:40

[laughter]

You know, when I went to the Marine Corps Marathon, I toured the memorials on the Mall and you know and there was a group there, what is it called?  Is that, it’s not Angel Flight is it?  Freedom flight?  The people who are bringing World War Two veterans, flying them in from various parts of the country to see it. Well, the whole thing got started decades too late.

00:32:10

Understand that our children are in their 50s and our grandchildren are in their late 20s or early 30s and I have a granddaughter that’s in the Marines. Those who served in Korea since the ceasefire are eligible to join the KWVA, we just haven’t been able to attract anybody.

00:32:36

After all, most of them are still working for a living and they don’t have time for weekday, afternoon meetings.

Male Voice:

Do you have any comments for young generations for both Korea and the United States about your service?

Lawrence Cole:

When I think of Afghanistan and Iraq, what I think of is that we, I don’t think about Korea. I think that we didn’t learn the lesson of Vietnam.

00:33:06

I mean, that was a complete and utter waste and we did it again and worse than that, it was done by an administration that consisted primarily of Vietnam War draft evaders.  I think young people who are either thinking of volunteering or are in a country that are eligible to be drafted, you’ve got to be careful not to be conned into being sent into a war that’s ill advised, that is unnecessary.

00:33:34

I mean, you can’t trust leaders to do your thinking or you. You’ve got to be involved in the process and keep track of what’s going on. Otherwise, things, decisions get made about which, over which you didn’t have any chance to express either an opinion or exercise any control.

00:34:06

Male Voice:

What is your lifetime project that you want to complete, the rest of your life, Is there anything?

Lawrence Cole:

Well, there’s a lot of stuff I want to read that I haven’t read yet, before I go to the other side, because I’ve invented this new religion that says the quality of life on the other side depends upon ho much learning you take with you. Oh, I want to go to England and I’d like to go to China.  I want to go back on a revisit tour to Korea.

00:34:34

Male Voice:

You’ve never been back to Korea?

Lawrence Cole:

No.  I want to go to Australia and I want to go to New Zealand. Yep.

Male Voice:

Larry, thank you very much.

Lawrence Cole:

You’re entirely welcome. Glad to do it. I’m glad you’re doing it.

Male Voice:

Precious time and thank you for your service and sacrifice. There is no Korea without Korean War Veterans.

Lawrence Cole:

Yeah, thanks.  Yep.

Male Voice:

Thank you.

Lawrence Cole:

You’re welcome sir.

[End of Recorded Material]