96 Year Old Korean War Veteran Has Called Japan Home for Over 50 Years
It is pretty amazing this veteran was able to spend his entire 20-year Army and later Air Force career in Japan:
At 96, Arthur Picotte still drives himself to the home of U.S. Forces Japan, where he recently recalled a military career that he says took him from postwar Japan to wartime Pyongyang and eventually back to the Tokyo area for good. Picotte said he arrived in Japan as a 19-year-old soldier in 1949 and deployed from there to Busan, South Korea, in July 1950, shortly after the Korean War began. What he expected to be a three-week mission turned into more than a year at war, he told Stars and Stripes at Yokota on Sept. 24.
“As young kids we thought we were going to go over there and kick a few butts,” he said. Picotte said he advanced with Eighth Army headquarters as far as the North Korean capital before an influx of Chinese troops drove United Nations forces south. More than 75 years later, Picotte said his memories of Korea remain vivid. He recalled attending a show by vaudeville performer Al Jolson in Busan and riding in the back of a truck in freezing weather during the retreat from Pyongyang. His saddest memory, he said, is looking over a wall and seeing a woman and child lying frozen in the snow.
You can read much more about his life at the link.
