Welcome to Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbus. Our guest in this addition is
Patrick Finn. He is a US Marine Corps veteran of the Korean War.
He is also one of the Chosen Few, the Marines who found a way
to escape Chosen Reservoir despite being completely surrounded and badly outnumbered by Chinese forces.
Mister Finn, thank you so much for being with us. You're certainly welcome.
Where were you born and raised their Minneapolis. Was there a history of
military service in your family? Oh? No, none whatsoever. Well,
I had a brother that was a Navy I'm sorry. Now you actually joined
a little bit earlier than you should have, right, Yes, well,
some of the other guys were doing it, and it looks kind of romantic,
nice uniform, and you could go into the beer hall and so on
and so forth. So I fudged my age a bit, and I was
on a three year enlistment and when that expired, I thought I'd have enough,
but they told me I had to bring back my uniforms and so on
and so forth. So or paid ninety two dollars. That's awful lot of
money, and I swettered my options as well you could re enlist, so
I relisted, and within a year I was in Korea. So you ended
up in Korea because of ninety two dollars exactly not very smart. But now
you were a rifleman in Korea? Where you trained initially as a rifleman?
Yes? And what type of weapon were you trained? And one? Did
it come pretty easily to you? Were you good marksman? Fairly decent?
Coming from Minnesota. You do get involved with guns a bit, so that
was a fairly decent martsman. What unit were you attached to? The fifth
Marines? When did you find out that you were likely going to Korea?
Probably August of nineteen fifty, late July, or shortly after the war broke
out. The war broke out on June twenty fifth, so sometimes shortly after
that. Before then, did you know much about Korea? I didn't have
any idea. I didn't know where it was or anything about it really.
So when you arrived in Korea, what was the situation there? Chaotic?
Things had happened awfully fast for the Koreans and for the US support, and
so things were They seemed chaotic, but they were actually pretty well orchestrated you
know, if everybody did their job, it was. It all worked good.
But to me, as a former civilian, it looked like it was
to hands. When in nineteen fifty did you arrive? Were we still in
the Pusan perimeter or were we around in Chao? So I came in at
once on wance On Harbor. We had to wait out in harbor for a
while because they had a lot of mines that they had to sweep out first.
So as soon as they got that done, we joined the group started
our track toward the Chosen Reservoir. At first the track was going well correct,
Yes, it seemed like all of the tools that the war was almost
over. They did a little mopping up to do of some North Koreans that
were still there. But we found out a lot different after the Chinese centered
the war. Well, that was obviously the game changing event there in November
of nineteen fifty. How did you find out, Well, we took some
captives and found out. But the people in Tokyo that were supposedly running the
war wouldn't believe that there was a Chinese there. They said they would never
come in. Well, they were there, but the Chinese did a real
good job of camouflizing themselves, so they were completely around us before we had
any idea they were. There was roughly one hundred and thirty thousand people Chinese,
so they did a real good job of They would only move at night,
not during to day, so we didn't have a clue until they were
coming after us. So you had North Korean prisoners telling you that the Chinese
were coming, and the higher ups didn't believe it. We had Chinese tell
us that the Chinese that we captured, they said that they were. In
fact, they were very open about what we were against. They even said
that there were a couple of hundred thousand more on the other side of the
Yellow River. In case the first patch didn't get the job done, Explain
what's happening as you discover you're surrounded, What orders are you getting, what's
the atmosphere like with you and the other men. It happened very suddenly in
the middle of the night. It was about one or two in the morning.
We heard these bugles and clattering and whistles going and people screaming. Really
made you wonder what was happening, And there that was the Chinese coming after
us, and by the time, we knew that they were all around us,
and the first thing they did is just came in and looked for anybody
in a sleeping bag and they would stab them. So that was our awakening
to it. Then we realized that we were completely surrounded, so you had
to be very careful so that you didn't shoot some of your own people.
Everybody kind of well, they did their job, so it worked out too.
It was supposed to be at workout took the toll of a lot of
Chinese. The bad battle. I was in un hill number fifteen to twenty.
They counted the next day that there were three hundred and forty two Chinese
dead, and I'm I'm not sure if our count It was like in the
twenties. So our training paid off. What kind of orders were you given
once you were surrounded? What were commanders telling you? Well, at first
it was a fifty percent watch, and we put up the trip wires and
so on so that we'd know of anybody coming in. The words came that
there were bord Chinese or people out there than they imagined, so they pressed
one hundred percent moments and then, like I say, suddenly all we hear
was these bugles and all those terrible racket and it was intimidating at first we
realized what was going on. That's the way they told their men what to
do. We battled until I believe it was it was starting to get light
at six o'clock or so in the morning before we had a chance to really
kind of every group, and it was kind of a kind of a rude
awakening to this whole thing that, you know, we thought we were told
that we'd fight our way up through North Korea and there's ships waiting for us,
we'd go home, we'd be there for Christmas. So this is quite
quite a change in agenda. You mentioned that they were the Chinese were stabbing
or bayoneting sleeping bags, trying to kill the Marines. At the same time,
you've got horrible weather conditions there with the cold. Explained just how cold
it was, Well, we had two enemies, the Chinese and the weather.
The weather was I'm from Minnesota, so I was kind of used to
weather, but this was something else. We were twenty They say thirty blows
there a weather then in Minnesota. But it's cool like that. You've got
a place you can go in and get warm, and so on. In
Korea, we couldn't. I mean, you were just out of it all
the time. The sleeping bag incident where the two guys were killed at first
on the first attack. So from then on we didn't dare use our sleeping
bags, so we might wrap around our feet or wearing like a jacket for
a while. But the weather was just it was horrible. Uh, we
weren't trained for that. We had to learn how to cope. For an
example, that everything froze, the food froze, the water froze, and
we learned to take food that we wanted and seven inside of our shirt and
so eight hours or so later to be warm enough that you could open it
up and eat it. The other thing was that if you didn't keep moving,
you'd freeze to death. There were a lot of bodies that were absolutely
well frozen in the position that they were last in, whether it was with
the rifle or sleeping or whatever happened that that was that was pretty grotesque.
We had a lot of things happened that we weren't used to, just things
like that that we had to learn fast. And I was lucky. I
was a reserved. What I went, I was like excuse me, first
replacement draft when I got into Greer uh, and so I budded up to
a fellow that was a regular marine and had been through combat. And so
that was that was a real lucky break for me because he he gave me
the quick education on what did you foxhoil a little deeper and uh that type
of thing. In fact, he actually saved my life twice. One of
them was, uh, when the Chinese came to my side and I made
a move to cheot him, and my rifle approached just a click and this
man Riley shot and killed the Chinese. So saved my life. Uh.
He taught me a lot of things about don't don't be satisfied with it with
a shallow foxhil, keep taking even though the ground was like rock. That's
exactly I was going to ask. Could you dig a foxhole when the grounds
that cold? It was hard? You take your your k knife or canine
knife and just break it up much you could. It was very tempting to
stop and not do it. A lot of the guys took a little piece
of wood and so and so forth and built a kind of a barrier around
the fox showl. His advice to me. It was really well taken.
Sometimes I didn't want to do what he suggested. But one night a mortar
but off right behind us and killed two guys right behind us. And if
we hadn't had a deep Fox show we'd been, we'd have been dead.
We were kicked out of the Fox show like the concussion. But if we
hadn't, if we'd have been more towards the surface, we'd have been either
killed or seriously wounded. So he used my safe. Here's my guardian angel.
That's Patrick Finn, a veteran of the US Marine Corps and the Korean
War, describing how he and other Marines were surrounded by the Chinese at Chosen
Reservoir after an ambush in late nineteen fifty. As you just heard mister Finn
say, there were two enemies for the Marines at Chosen Reservoir, the Chinese
and the weather still ahead. Mister Finn describes the brutality of hand to hand
combat against the Chinese and how the Marines finally broke out from Chosen Reservoir.
But when we come back, we'll talk more about the horrifically frigid temperatures.
The one thing he says you had to do to stay alive in those conditions
and much more. I'm Greg Corumbus and this is Veterans Chronicles sixty Seconds of
Service. This sixty Seconds of Service is presented by T Mobile. T Mobile
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our military community. In Cadillac, Michigan, a program at the Veterans Serving
Veterans Park is helping to memorialize the sacrifices of their local heroes. The group
has a goal to assimble one hundred memorial picnic tables to place on the park's
brand new pavilion. So far, they have about seventy of them put together,
and it's been done with the help of several community groups. It costs
fifty dollars to have a veteran's name engraved into the table. Each one is
built from the ground up, with much of the material donated by the Home
Depot. They tell us it takes anywhere between forty five minutes to an hour
to assemble just one table, but they say it's well worth the time and
effort. The Manton High School cross country team is scheduled to be on hand
next to put together tables next week. For more great veteran stories, just
go to National Defense Network dot com. This is Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg
Corumbas. Our guest in this edition is Patrick Finn, a veteran of the
US Marine Corps and a survivor of the horrific Battle of Chosen Reservoir during the
Korean War. Mister Finn and the other survivors are often known as the Frozen
Chosen. We now pick up mister Finn's story as he explains what he and
his fellow marines tried to do to generate some warmth in the bitter cold and
really just stay alive. One of the things we had to do, whether
you wanted to do or not, was keep moving. If you didn't move,
like some people that were wounded and so on, and they had to
stop, they froze to death. It was just as simple as that.
You could. We knew it was on the other side, so in the
daylight when they weren't attacking us, we could wrap the sleeping bags around us
and so on, and we could build a fire and warm some chow.
But that night you just, uh, you were on guard all the time,
and that's kind of what wears you down too. You get so exhausted
and the cold weather also helps exhaust you, and you can't you eatn frozen
chow, so you get a lot of strikes against you. But we wouldn't
have made it out of there, I don't believe unless it was as well
orchestrated as it was. I mean, uh, the air force was uh
protecting us and keep firing at the communists and keep their heads down. So
it gave us a chance to to react more if if they'd have been able
to swarm in in the numbers that they had had been bad. But uh,
in the Marine Corps, everybody looks out for the other guy, so
and that worked. That worked. Everybody remembered it, and uh, you
were very dependent on the guy next to you and see on you. The
training that they gave us was well worthwhile. But they didn't know that we
could have this weather thing to contend with, and that was really that was
really a crippler. We were very fortunate, I think in our commanding general,
man by the name of Opie Oliver Oliver Smith was uh. He was
combat savvy. He he knew exactly what the and he didn't do exactly what
they asked him to do with Tokyo because he knew better what should be done.
And he wasn't insubordinate, but he was. He slowed things down where
they'd fit. In other words, Tokyo wanted to go right up to the
Yallou River. Well, that would have meant a supply line that was probably
seventy miles long, and General Smith knew that that was not safe, and
so he had any reason to slow it down, he would do that.
And the other thing that I knew about there was he stopped and built an
airport runway. Should say that's crazy, but he knew that it really got
bad. He wanted the place to be able to take the dead and wounded
out and bring replacements in and also supplies. So he did those kinds of
things quietly. But he's amazing General. I think personal thoughts, I wasn't
quite as impressed with those that were trying to run the war from Tokyo.
I understand why, yes, how did they resupply you when you're totally surrounded.
A lot of it was by parachutes before they blew up the bridge.
There's only one supplier out one road, and when the Chinese watched us go
into the trap, but once we were in there, they blew up the
only bridge that we could get out through. And so therefore we were pretty
much dependent on air drops of supplies both AMMO and food whatever we needed,
and parts of the bridge to rebuild it. Right. Yeah, that was
that was amazing. It was one of the miracles of the war as far
as I'm concerned, that they could take And somebody remembered that there was a
sedgeway bridge over in Japan, and they put their thoughts together and flew over.
They dropped one first, and the parachutes weren't enough they didn't support the
part of the bridge, so it kept crashing down. So after that they
had extra parachutes and so on, and you dropped eight of those position then
it was our way of survival. I just marvel at that all keep together.
How big of an area is it at chosen reservoir that you are in
as you're encircled, you know, I don't know if I can answer that
because it kind of tapered off, but it previous sized area. I guess
I can't tell you exactly, but it went up toward the Yalu, which
was I think twenty or twenty five miles north, and then first we had
to fight our way south as the Chinese had you encircled, how did they
try to attack you and how did you try to to respond or take the
fight to them. We more often took a defensive nature because of that.
There was a few of us compared to how many of them there were,
and they would manpower didn't mean anything to them. They just keep waves.
In fact, the first wave often times they wouldn't even have rifles, wait
till somebody else was killed, and then they'd take that rifle. So it
was like a shooting gallery really a lot of the time. It had to
be for us to do that with that many of them versus what do we
had. So they did not value their soldiers' lives. No, No,
they were more interested I think in trying to get food if they if they
made an advance or whatever. And they weren't for the most part, weren't
dressed very well. I didn't have one case where friends in our group named
David kind of disappeared. Well, you know, we're did you go worzy.
It's one nobody knew. And three or four days later somebody shot a
Chinese soldier and wearing David's clothing. Those kinds of things are they're hard to
look at. I mean, it's just painful. You mentioned that they parachuted
in supplies of weapons and food and the parts to create the bridge amazingly.
How did they deal with wounded service members? How did you evacuate? Well,
that was that was a problem. Uh, it was hard to evacuate
them up from the reservoir once we got down a further breaking out of there
than we could. But uh, it was a case of making him as
comfortable as we could. The corman, Uh for plasma's when they'd have to
put in their mouth to keep it from freezing, or morphine, you know,
pain killer. Uh. The wound that it was really hard because they
almost had to stack them up and a lot of them are on the trucks
and if there were wounds to bed that they couldn't be mobile at all.
It freese enough and we saw all of that. That is Patrick Finn,
a US Marine Corps veteran of the Korean War and one of the frozen chosen
the Marines who survived the horrific Battle of Chosen Reservoir. When we come back,
we'll spend time discussing the brutal fighting at Chosen Reservoir and how a lot
of the fighting was hand to hand, and later mister Finn tells us how
the Marines finally broke out from Chosen Reservoir, what happened after that, and
his unforgettable return to Korea decades later. I'm Greg Corumbus, and this is
Veterans Chronicles. This is Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbus. Our guest in
this edition is Patrick Finn, a US Marine Corps veteran of the Korean War
and the brutal Battle of Chosen Reservoir. In a few moments, we'll hear
how the Marines finally broke out of Chosen Reservoir and what mister Finn has to
say about the price of freedom. But now mister Finn takes us inside the
intensity of the fighting at Chosen Reservoir. As I asked him if he had
engaged in hand to hand fighting, Yeah, it was. It was so
close in As I mentioned earlier, you're cautious in your shooting because you didn't
want to shoot your own people, and we had a close combat like that
that can be a problem. So yes, there was there was hand to
end. What's that like? You know, when it's over, it's scary
what's happening? You're just so busy doing what you're taught to do that don't
I don't remember ever being scared when it was happening. The boy. After
it was over, it you know, it's it becomes a reality then and
it's it's uh uh I'll say it, but it's it's shakes you. When
I got back to the hospital of Japan, I was really, uh a
kind of overwhelmed or concerned with what I'd done in the hand to end and
whatever. Killing somebody is it's not my nature and uh we had some good
advice and so on and kind of tempered that, but it's it's, uh,
you know, they're they're there. They didn't want to be there anymore
than we didn't want to be there. So it's just uh, kill ery
killed. Were you? Was this with fists? Was it with knives or
whatever you could grab or well? Yeah, usually it was uh was made
at if you had or or a butt or uh. There wasn't too much
of that. Usually we had uh enough uh latitude that we could shoot or
throw over an aid or whatever. It was an experience that I wasn't raised
to uh be involved in. I mean, this is so different than anything
I'd do. The thing that really kept it glued together is people doing their
own job, from the general, the air force, and the medics,
the chaplains of everybody took chaos and it was chaotic and did what they had
to do or we should have done to get us out of there. And
that plus some prayers that got us out. Talk about the defensive strategy,
how much was it explained to you based on where they positioned you and so
forth, what they thought was the most effective way of stopping the Chinese from
attacking. I wasn't high enough in the management to get all the inside,
but I can give you an example of the hill that I had the toughest
time, the hill number fifteen twenty. The Chinese were already embittered up,
and they had foxhols and so on, and we were told to take the
hill, and we did. That's always harder when you're going up and they're
already there. But we did manage to take the hill. And we were
holding it, and we sent down for more AMMO and the AMMO carriers got
ambushed, so we didn't get the AMMO, and we kept firing until the
Chinese were kind of quiet. Then they knew that as soon as that machine
gun we were down to one machine gun stopped firing, that it was open
game for them. And twenty of our guys are eighteen, I'm not sure
the count went down the hill and there were six of us, one machine
gunner and five riflemen still up there, and when that machine gunner ran out
of ammo, we had to go, and we took a trail down the
side to the mountain. We regrouped. There wasn't enough of us left to
have a company, even so they joined us with I think it was how
company, and they went back up again the next day. It took the
hillow again. That's kind of the way it operated. You did what had
to be done at the time because there was no real there's no real game
plan is to you know what they're going to do, or we just have
to react to it. That at some point, did you injure your leg?
Yeah, well it froze them. Yeah, very embracelest today because of
it. It's uh. And then the trigger finger. You know, you
had the gloves which you couldn't wear the gloves all the time because you wouldn't
be able to fire at a short notice. So we had to cut the
chips up of the gloves, so we had our fingers. I've got some
problems from that, but it's I was lucky compared to a lot of the
guys. How long did your recuperation take? Wait? I was in three
different hospital in Japan. It was just kind of a gradual thing and it
never did really go away. It changed into neuropathy in later years and that
type thing. It got better. Yeah, they said it would get better.
It did. We had to watch out for fumus or something after that
because your feet were very sensitive to it. A lot of the guys lost
toes and lost feet, and yeah, I was. I was very fortunate.
Are you still sensitive to cold? Oh? Yeah? Was that the
end of combat for you or did you come back after recording? Oh?
We fought our way down. Every every able bodied person had to do that,
and we had a wounded and did in the trucks. Then we would
guard the trucks as best we could and keep them, but as I said
earlier, a lot of them frosed to death anyway. So tell me how
you finally escaped from Chosen reservoir. Was it once the bridge was completed,
Yes, that's that kind of opened a way, But we had to fight
our way all the way down. I mean, the Chinese were not going
to give up that easily. What was that like? Describe that fighting well?
Sporadic. What they would do is try and slower a convoy down and
they would shoot the drivers of the trucks or jeebs or whatever. That was
a favorite because that would stop everything. And every time that happened and the
possession stopped, you have to, you know, start combat again to break
it loose and get the clear the nest and get rid of the Chinese.
Even if it meant pushing the truck over the edge of the mountain. You
did what you had to do. A lot of it was text and a
lot of it wasn't that. The parts that really kept things going, I
think is the fact that everybody's supporting each other. If they hadn't done that,
if they just kind of ran rampant and scrambled, we'd all been buried
up there. How was the escape organized? Where were you and the convoy
and and that sort of thing. Well, we were towards the end of
it. Item company was to carry up the rear. When we first we're
leaving the reservoir. We kept our big guns at the end, of course,
and kept lobbing them over into the Chinese and you can see them coming
over the over the ridges as we proceeded out. The kind of eerie feeling.
You feel very powerless. I mean, you have to do what you
have to do, and you want to do that, but you feel like
you'd like to do more, and you know you're kind of lovered it.
Once the evacuation started. How long did it take you to get out of
there? I can't tell you exactly. I'm guessing twelve thirteen d's. That's
a guess, because we did it more or those two parts. I did
anyway down from the reservoir down to hagar Ree and then met up with some
of the others and continued on from there. Now, the thing most Americans
take from the story of Chosen Reservoir is the fact that the Marines were able
to escape. They weren't annihilated there, but What sometimes gets overshadowed is it
still came at a very heavy cost. Terrible, terrible woodman is a heavy
cost. But this was a lot of men, A lot of men would
and I think if I remember correctly, there is thirty five thousand killed in
a war. That's some people from other countries too, of course. Yeah,
that was that was uh uh very expensive war in the way of human
beings and and uh disabilities what have you. Yeah, it's hard and you
lost some close friends there. Oh no, that was that was hard.
That's Riley I was talking about. That saved me so many times. On
uh December third, he got killed and a couple others, real close friend.
December third, for some reason, Uh was the toughest on my friends,
you know. But uh, yeah, it's painful. It's painful to
to see a wounded person that you can't really help in a way. Well,
for example, let's tell you what. The six of us were coming
down the side of the hill. We weren't quite sure we were coming down
into uh our territory. But on our way down, I heard this real
hard mourning and crying, and we stopped and here was a gunny sergeant the
bars that he was this she was just really badly shot up. He died
later, but then hauling him down the hill. Uh. It just there
so many of those things happening that. Uh, there's a lot of stories
any others that stand out to you. One of them was, of course,
on our way out, we were afraid that we weren't going to be
having air support because it was cloudy and the guys couldn't fly well. And
the night before we really took off, we looked up in the sky,
uh, and here was a star came through it, almost like the Star
of Bethlehem. And we knew then that they that the weather was clearing and
that we had a chance of getting out. That was there was things like
that that do stand up about that, and the bridge and individual things.
The touchy roll story has been told so many times where we were running out
of ammunition and everything had a code name, and mortars were called tutsi rolls,
and they got out the radio and said, Japan said we need toutsier
rolls really bad. And the next day, I think it'd be nineteen over
there, the flying box car came through it through palets of toutsyer rolls.
But it was a good thing for us because all of our food was frozen,
so we could take these toutsyer rolls and shove men against our bodies and
have something to nourish us. But there's a lot of those kind of stories.
Did they finally send you mortars at some point? Oh? Yeah,
they correct that. You know afterwards you could laugh at it. At the
time, it was very serious. The tucci roll people come to our conventions
every year. They very good supply as what's yer olds with? What was
it like when you were finally free from that horrible situation? Unbelievable. I
got flown through uh Japan as in the hospital, and we were we were
hungry because we weren't eating right, you know, we're eating anything frozen.
And I remember they told you you could you can have anything you want to
eat. Would you like it? Oh boy? The chocolate balt pool that
down and ask came right back up? I was. I got so sick
because my body wasn't used to that. But for a long time it didn't
think it didn't feel possible that it was that it was out of there,
and had such terrible memories of what it was like. Uh, the country
was leveled and the UH civilians were distraught when we heard there were cold,
tired, exhausted. I should see, hungry for real food and all the
other things necessities of life. And a few years back I had a chance
to go back there, and I didn't know if I even wanted to go
back there, but I did, and I'm so glad I did because I
saw that what we did was right. It was the right thing to do.
The the Koreans have taken them, made a beautiful country out of it,
and they're so appreciative. Right to this day, they're just it's like
it happened yesterday. They're wonderful people as far as I'm concerned. We've talked
about South Korean people a little bit, but just when you see the difference
between North and South Korea, now, how does that make you feel?
It's amazing. It tells me it was the right thing to do. Painful
as it was, and I wouldn't do it again, but I'm so glad
I did it. You know, I really started to think about this was
worth going to a country I didn't know, fighting for people, and I
didn't know. But when I look back at it now, if they hadn't
decided to fight that war. It's not the communist they had kept going.
I really believe that they would have felt pretty powerful. Nobody said no,
and I think they would have gone to Japan and the Philippines. Well,
you know, they kept going, So we did the right thing. You
have seen the price of freedom up close. You know what the cost is.
What do you want people to know about what it takes to preserve the
freedoms in this country? In a lot of ways, I think we really
need to wake up and realize that how valuable our freedoms are. I think
a lot of us, because we've been free for you know, a long
time, but I think a lot of us just taken for granted that it's
always going to be there, and that is necessarily true. As I say,
even then example of Korea, I think if we don't let that happen,
there'd be nothing to stop them. They just kept going. So I
hope become more aware. I think of how valuable it is. A lot
of people would just love to get into this country and live and enjoy our
freedoms. They don't have it. You need to be thankful for them,
very much, very much. Just a couple of questions remaining. Sir,
First of all, what are you most proud of from your service? The
end result? I think of going back there and seeing what the Korean people
made out of it. You go back and they've the streets are clean,
there's no graffiti, and that people are are happy, and they're they're dressed
comfortably and on, and we know what's happening in the earth. They don't
have that, In fact, they don't even know it exists. I guess
I'm proud of that. And lastly, sir, what does it mean to
you to have us at the American Veteran Center record and share your story.
Well, I think it's a story that has to be kept fresh because of
the freedom part of it. In fact, are chosen few. You know,
we're all getting old. I'm ninety two, and we're kind of disappearing
group that we started what do we call a legacy, and that's for our
children or grandchildren, widows or whoever to pick up the story and learn what
did happen there in Korea. They really, even little kids know what happened.
They're so aware. When I was there, we were in a museum
and they had an exhibit of chosen reservoir, and I get cheers I think
of this, but there are a lot of little kids, maybe twenty five
or thirty kids and two teachers, and the kids kept looking at us.
The kids will do. And teachers said something to him, and they all
got big smiles on their face, taken before us, and I said,
we love you and thank you. So that just broke me up. That
makes it worthwhile. Mister Fann, I can't think of a better way to
end. Thank you so much. It's been an honor to speak with you.
We appreciate your time today and thank you so much for the service you've
given to our country. Patrick Finn served in the fifth US Marine Division during
the Korean War, particularly at the brutal Battle of Chosen Reservoir. I'm Greg
Corumbus and this is Veterans Chronicles. Hi, this is Greg Corumbus, and
thanks for listening to Veterans Chronicles, a presentation of the American Veterans Center.
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