Salute to a Veteran
He Served His Country in 3 Wars: WWII, Korea, and Vietnam Robert D. Wilcox fter graduating high school, John Lauer enlisted in the Army Air Corps two weeks after we were attacked at Pearl Harbor. Little did he know then that his military service would last for 28 years … and take him to four continents stretching from Asia to Europe. First stop for Lauer was Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Miss., for basic training. Then it was to Angel Island off the coast of San Francisco, where he was one of 7,000 men who squeezed aboard the former luxury liner SS Mariposa for a 20-day trip to Melbourne, Australia. They were accompanied by the HMS Queen Elizabeth and a single destroyer escort and zigzagged all the way across the Pacific. What was it like to have that many men on one ship? “Well,” he says, “the bunks were stacked four high, and you hardly had room to turn over. “But a bigger problem was the food. They served two meals a day, breakfast and midday. You got in this long line of guys and inched your way forward for breakfast, and by the time you got your food and ate it, it was time to get back in the line again to be able to get your midday meal.” When he finally got to Melbourne, what was that like? Grinning broadly, he says, “With all the young Aussie men at war and with all those Aussie girls without them, believe me, it was paradise.” But after two months there, it was to Brisbane where, at RAAF Base Amberly,
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rifle and helped turn back the Vietcong, who fought to the last man before the assault was quelled. When his hitch in Vietnam was over, Lauer returned to the U.S. and retired from the Army in 1969. He went to work for the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry for the next 12 years. As part of the Work Incentive Program, he played a major role in the resettlement of 30,000 Vietnamese who had been brought to Fort Indiantown Gap. Working with a Vietnamese interpreter, he interviewed thousands of Vietnamese in the course of settling them in their new homes and preparing them for meaningful work. He retired in 1982 and now lives in a local retirement home. Thinking back, he says he fondly remembers a Mrs. Gingrich, who was his sixth-grade teacher. “She did more to set me straight than anyone else,” he remembers. “She impressed on me the importance of learning things … and then remembering them.” As if to prove that, he reels off the names of all 67 Pennsylvania counties, in alphabetical order, from Adams to York. Then he asks with a grin, “How’s that for something I learned 82 years ago?” Today, at age 94, he enjoys sharing yarns with other veterans and benefiting from the many quiet diversions of a pleasant retirement life. Colonel Wilcox flew a B-17 bomber in Europe in World War II.
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he was trained in Not long after that, he stainless and aluminum was on his way overseas welding of aircraft. And again, this time to a base a year later, he crossed near Taranto, Italy, where the Coral Sea to New he again headed the pay Guinea, where he spent section. He says the two years patching up climate there was so C-47s. great “that millionaires Then there was from all over the world another year on the had homes there to enjoy nearby island of Owi. it.” Lauer was liked by a He remembers that a Bcolonel there who once 24 crash landed in the flew him on leave to bomb dump there “and Greece. Lauer then took about blew up the a hydrofoil to a Greek island.” island that was the place He was then moved where Gregory Peck, to Tacloban, Leyte, the Private John R. (Bud) Lauer in David Niven, and little town on whose Australia in 1942. Anthony Quinn were to beach General later make the classic MacArthur would later film The Guns of Navarone. wade ashore in his return to the Then it was to a base near Paris for a Philippines. Then the bombs were year before returning to the U.S. Lauer dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, spent 1967 at Malstrom AFB, Montana, and the war was over. where temperatures of minus 40 degrees Lauer returned to the U.S. and was were not unusual. There he headed the discharged as a staff sergeant. After a pay section and made master sergeant. month, he thought better of that and That was followed by training in reenlisted, giving up a stripe to do so. California on handling the automatic At Bolling Field, Washington, D.C., rifle before he was flown to Vietnam. he got his staff sergeant stripe back and Tan Son Nhut Air Base, where he was trained in accounting and finance, landed, was a huge field that he says and that’s what he did all the following “handled more traffic than O’Hare, in years in the service. There was a five-year hitch in Panama, Chicago.” Living off base, he came to the field where he made tech sergeant. Then it by bus one morning to find that 3,000 was to Korea, where he spent five Vietcong were assaulting the base. It months in 1954 heading up the payroll section at his base before returning to the came as a surprise to a base that was thought to be “secure.” He was handed a U.S.
April 2014
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