With honor

Frontiersman

MAT-SU — Roy Burkhart of Willow has seen combat, but not from the seat of a military airplane or in the trenches on the front lines. His vantage was a radar post in South Korea.

Burkhart served in the U.S. Air Force from 1955 to 1959, spending a majority of that time overseas as part of a brutal conflict between nations.

“I was 17 years old and it was an experience,” Burkhart said of joining the military. “I grew up in a coal town in Pennsylvania and never traveled even 10 miles out of that area. In a coal-mining town, things are pretty primitive, but it was uptown compared to what Korea was like.”

A young, scared and relatively uncultured Burkhart joined the U.S. Air Force, progressed through boot camp and was immediately ordered to Japan. He said good-bye to his family, flew out of California and got to Japan. When he arrived, his orders had been changed. It was 1955 and Burkhart was going to Korea.

“When we got there, our job was to run DMZ [demilitarized zone] radar surveillance so when the MiGs would come south and cross the line, we’d scramble our fighters and go and get ’em,” he said.

Burkhart remembers the Korean conflict as bloody and brutal, where many of his close friends and colleagues wee lost. Even so, many of the memories he holds dearest are fond ones. While Burkhart wasn’t involved in hand-to-hand combat, he remembers the sudden and loud siren calls on base signaling him to get to his radar station where, most times, Korean planes were entering the DMZ. He would watch the aerial combats as blips on his radar screen — there and then gone.

“You don’t forget those things,” he said. “The most memorable moments are with the friends that I made. These were the best friends that I’ve ever had, and I’ve made many over the years.”

Five decades years later, Burkhart volunteers as an AmVets Post 9 commander in Wasilla, overseeing AmVets membership responsibilities.

“The actual work, as in any organization, is done by the officers and the members, so if there is any glory to be had, it’s theirs,” he said.

Burkhart moved to Anchorage in 1960 and worked as a real estate agent. He moved to the Nancy Lake area in 1989 and has since retired.

Over the past year, Burkhart began wondering what had happened to those loyal friends he made overseas. He turned on his computer, a feat in itself, and began to search.

“Maybe this is what old friends do,” he said. “I went on the Internet and tracked some of them down. I found one of the guys I served with, but then found out that he had died six months before. This happened several times, each time I was just too late.”

Burkhart eventually gave up his search as it turned out to be more disheartening than he imagined, but will always have the recollection of his time served in the Air Force.

Burkhart will again visit the Valley’s Wall of Honor and the AmVets on Veterans Day, as he has done for many years.

Frank Bird moved to Palmer in 1984 following his retirement after completing the last leg of his military service at Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage, where had been stationed since 1977.

Born and raised in South Dakota, Bird’s father worked for one of the most notorious and largest industrial corporations in the United States, Swift Co. slaughterhouses. His father was an engineer for Swift while his mother was on the killing line where she dedicated her time to de-feathering chickens and collecting eggs.

“My mother had asthma really bad, so we moved to the country north in farming community,” Bird said.

One summer afternoon, a 4-year-old Bird grabbed his favorite comic book and went to the couch to enjoy it. Moments later, when he tried to get up, he couldn’t move his legs. He panicked. Frantically, his mother called the local doctor who came out to the farm.

“Doc said, ‘Don’t take him to the hospital, there’s no room,’” Bird recalls. The doctor said it was polio, an epidemic that had coursed through the Midwest during the 1940s.

“Thirty minutes later, my brother came down with it too,” he said. “He had polio in the throat and I had contracted polio for 18 months in my legs. He didn’t need the iron lung, miraculously. I was one of the lucky ones too.”

When old enough to work, Bird started working as a hired hand in the western part of South Dakota. He found that as soon as he would get comfortable, the family would again move to find work.

“One year I went to six different schools. It was hard on all of us,” Bird said.

In 1961, he eventually graduated Worthington Senior High in northern Minnesota. One month later, he was Air Force-bound and enrolled in basic training.

“I went through technical school for vehicle maintenance and it was my first time away from home,” Bird said. “‘Boy,’ I thought, ‘what am I doing?’”

One day a senior officer came into the barracks announcing three assignment posts needed to be filled overseas. Two in England, one in Morocco.

Bird jumped on board, spending four years southwest of London at the prestigious RAF Brize Norton, the largest station in the Royal Air Force. Content overseas, he married an English woman and was transferred to Clinton-Sherman Air Force Base in Oklahoma.

“I stayed for about a year, but then got orders to come to Alaska in 1967,” Bird said. “When I got here I was assigned to the 21st Air Base Group ground maintenance staff.”

For Bird, something was missing. He left the Air Force for 625 days, after which he was court-martialed and sent to a retraining group at Lowry Air Force Base in Colorado.

“I had seen why I loved the Air Force so much,” Bird said. “I got the bad conduct off my record and went back to duty in retired in honorable conditions.”

Bird traveled to Florida, cross trained in heavy equipment operation and when he retired from the Air Force in 1983 began working for Mat-Su Borough Parks and Recreation as a small engine technician. Bird credits the Air Force for his discipline and life training. He has been happily married since 1972 to his third wife, whom he told at their engagement that her time may be short married to him.

“I said, ‘You’ve got nine years!,’ because I had been married to my first wife for three years, second for six,” he said. “She gets mad when I say this or when I tell people I got married in prison, meaning when I was sent to the retraining group.”

Bird said he doesn’t understand the current backlash against supporting America and its troops in the war in Iraq.

“It irritates me to see how some people bad-mouth the military and disrespect the flag,” Bird said.

Although he never got to serve in combat, Bird said he feels proud of his service to his country and the Air Force as an organization.

“I would have liked to have gone to Vietnam, but I never did,” he said. “I wanted to be a part of. I didn’t want to go to be labeled a baby killer or anything, but I had seen a lot of benefits of being in a war zone.”

Bird respects the local veterans organizations he’s a member of. “We all do out part, and that’s all we can do,” he said.

Contact J.J. Harrier at valleylife@frontiersman.com or 352-2269.