By Steve Long, slong@cbs4qc.com
1953 is a year Bob Horton of Moline will never forget.
That's the subject of this edition of "Rock Island Arsenal: Inside the Gates".
The Korean War has been called by some, the forgotten war. But to Bob Horton, a 15 year volunteer at the Arsenal Museum it's anything but forgotten.
Watching Korean War Veteran Bob Horton admire the M115 Howitzer, is like seeing a reunion between friends.
"This was a beauty. It was a honey", Bob says.
6 decades ago Horton was in the National Guard, where they trained with a much smaller version of the Howitzer. "But this thing I'd never even laid eyes on one of these before the first day we were in our unit there," he tells us. It was an 8 inch Howitzer, and on January 1st 1953, Horton was added to a gun crew, in the mountains of Korea, in the midst of a war.
"You worked in with the gun crew as the bottom man on the totem pole and you learned your trade there pretty quick," he says. Set up about 3 miles from the Main Line of Resistance, he lived, ate, and worked with the crew.
They nicknamed their Howitzer Miss 8 inch, and she packed a powerful punch. "Fired a 200 pound projectile around about a maximum about 12 miles," Bob tells us. "You've got to know all the jobs on the gun because one night you'll be the gunner, the next night you might be the canoneer and you might be on the crew handling the shells.
And if the big gun needed moving, it was pulled by a tractor like vehicle, Bob knew how to do that too. But mainly they stayed in one place, waiting for a phone call with directions and targets.
"So then they'll say ‘ok prepare to ready to fire', ‘fire'. The guy pulls the cord and it's on its way. And it's noisy, it makes a lot of racket, it goes off, there's probably well about 20 pounds of powder in that thing," he tells us.
Since war is a round the clock business...half the guys slept during the day, half at night. "We had a pretty much of a fortified bunker with sandbags and logs and the day guys slept in there so you could get a halfway decent night sleep," Horton recalls.
This was the furthest Bob Horton had ever lived from home and the furthest he's ever lived since. "You got the mail every couple of days and you sent a couple letters home to your parents and my girlfriend," Bob tells us.
He met his girlfriend on a blind date just before leaving for Korea. They wrote a lot. He says he sent her 111 letters.
He was there for 6 or 7 months until the cease fire in the summer of 53. Bob says, "I'm proud. I'm very proud of it. I did my duty. I feel I did my part."
Love letters and gun fire, war and peace.
"About a month after I came home we got engaged and about 2 or 3 months after that we got married, it must have worked it's been about almost 60 years," He says.
Bob and his wife Elaine raised 3 kids together. 2014 will mark their 60th wedding anniversary.
