Editor’s Note: This is the second of a six-part series leading up to Veterans Day honoring veterans of each American war from World War II through the ongoing War on Terror.
John Summers was a small-town Mississippi boy, but his experience in the Korean War took him to the other side of the world.
Although the Columbia resident didn’t directly experience any battles, the U.S. Navy veteran did serve off the coast of Korea during the war and later in the South Pacific witnessed the first explosion of a hydrogen bomb.
That level of adventure had not been the plan: After graduating from Columbia High School in 1949, Summers headed to Jackson to attend the Baptist College in 1950. But the Korean War started in mid-1950, and he enlisted in the U.S. Navy in March 1951.
“I opted for three hots and a cot instead of a foxhole,” he quipped.
Enlisting in New Orleans, he felt like he had it made: From New Orleans to Kansas City they had a private berth on a train. Reality struck when the sailors got to Kansas City and finished the journey to California in a cattle car, and then in Los Angeles a grumpy petty officer let them know that each of the sailors were replaceable.
After spending the next 12 weeks in San Diego for boot camp, he was sent to San Francisco for electronics school, where he spent the next three months learning about the then-new technology of radar.
He was then sent back to San Diego and assigned to the small carrier U.S.S. Bairoko, where he first went to Japan before going to Korea and operated in the Yellow Sea. Located between Korea and China, control of the waterway was part of the dispute between North Korea and South Korea – one that has continued through the ensuing decades, with significant naval confrontations in the Yellow Sea between the two sides in 1999 and 2002.
Summers said the first tour lasted six to eight months before returning for a brief period back to the U.S. and then heading back to the Yellow Sea.
On the carrier were corsairs, which were airplanes with wings that folded up, allowing more aircraft to fit on the carriers. The airplane was mainly used in World War II and the Korean War and was flown by a Marine Squadron.
Summers said during his second tour he was transferred to another ship by highline, which is a tensioned cable between two ships where the passenger holds onto a slide and rides the cable to the other ship. The first time he went from his ship to a Canadian destroyer, and the next day he transferred to an English carrier, the HMS Ocean, and spent two weeks aboard that ship.
“I was just a guest on there,” Summers said. He said the British had a practice of having a portion of rum before the evening meal and with Summers being a guest, the British sailors wanted to share their portions with him.
He didn’t fight in any battles because North Korea did not have a navy. He said the ship did lose a few planes but not many. There was one real scare, he said, when the Navy heard of a possible threat of an attack. After being on high alert for a week, nothing came about, though.
“I cannot claim to be a veteran or a hero or anything because I was not in the thick of things,” Summers said.
After returning to the U.S. a third time, Summers said the ship then went to the Kwajalein Island area in the South Pacific in 1954. The mission there was to be in a convoy of ships to detonate the first hydrogen bomb, Operation Castle. He said they were upwind from the site from where the bomb would be detonated on one of the islands, but the wind shifted. He said the sailors were all contaminated.
“That was quite a scare,” he said. “Everyone was running around washing and hosing down to get rid of the radiation.”
He said what he remembered the most was if the sailor was not on duty, they had to report to the flight deck, turn their backs to the site, close their eyes and put their hands over their eyes when the bomb was detonated.
“I have never seen anything as white as that was,” he said. He said the bomb was much stronger than the scientists realized.
“I was glad we never had to use one,” he said.
After the ship returned to San Diego it was decommissioned and sold to Japan to be melted down. During the World War II Japan had used most of its scrap metal and to keep its industries in business, so the nation needed scrap metal as it was rebuilding.
Summers said he was not scared but he did see some bad things during his military service. Once he witnessed a man walk into the back rotor of a helicopter and also saw a few planes fall off the aircraft carrier deck trying to land.
After completing his service, Summers worked 37 years at Cal-Maine Foods in Bay Springs. He later ran a lawnmower shop in Magee before retiring to Columbia.
In 2000 he received a phone call from one of his sailor buddies and, some 45 years after enlisting, attended a reunion for the ship.
He started searching for his old shipmates and began his own reunion in 2005. They have been doing one every year, with as many as 15 attending, and the oldest member still making it at 93.
And soon Summers will be going out to sea again: The 88-year-old has a Caribbean cruise planned in November with his sailor buddies.
