Preserving The Oral HistorIES of Combat Veterans
6:26 | He joined the Army on a lark and trained in a tank outfit. Then, Bob Jewitt got a surprise when the Korean War broke out and he was on his way across the Pacific. As he disembarked, there was one thing that astounded him, something not even his farming background could match. He got another surprise at the barracks when he looked around for the latrine.
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In his Korean War tank outfit, Bob Jewitt met a soldier named Peter Isabella. On the ship, the World War II veteran told funny stories and also remarked that he felt he would not return from this fight. Bob dismissed that talk and began to learn what combat was all about as he got shot at and responded in kind, answering a question he had posed to himself. Part 1 of 2.
The explosion in the tank happened in a second and Bob Jewitt didn't even know what just happened. "Get the hell out of here!" came the order, but first, under fire, he pulled another crew member from the forward hatch and dragged him to safety under the tank. But there was one more crew member. Part 2 of 2.
Bob Jewitt was out of action for a couple of days and when he returned to the front, flame throwers had replaced the machine gun in the front of the tank. "Well, they didn't ask me," he thought. Later, mistakenly thinking they had been ordered to advance using the new weapon, they ran right into a land mine and the tank was disabled. Bob decided to give the turret a try.
After securing Pyongyang, some elements of Bob Jewitt's tank battalion moved further north to link up with the 183rd. They had thirty thousand Chinese troops waiting to launch an attack.
