Richard Colborn didn’t set out to go to war. Growing up in a small rural community in southwestern Pennsylvania, one of six children, he simply couldn’t find work after high school. So in September of 1951, he did what a lot of young men did: walked into a recruiting office and joined the Air Force. What happened next was a life that would take him from the stalemate front lines of the Korean War to Cairo, Egypt, to a management office in Chicago, and eventually to a quiet afternoon in Utah where he sat down to tell all of it to us.
Richard served as a teletype communications specialist, stationed at Kimpo Air Base about 20 miles outside a bombed-out, blacked-out Seoul. The base sat just south of the 38th parallel — close enough to see the flash of artillery in the night sky, far enough that the “bombing” amounted to North Korean Piper Cubs sneaking in low to drop hand grenades. He was 18 when the Air Force made him a shift supervisor in the classified communications center, responsible for a crew of men many years his senior, sending encrypted messages across the world six hours on and twelve hours off, seven days a week. He still isn’t entirely sure why they picked him. “I just learned on the job and did the best I could,” he says.
What makes Richard’s account of Korea so compelling isn’t the combat, it’s the quiet, human texture of a war most Americans have forgotten. There was Lee, the Korean boy of about 10 or 12 who kept their hut clean, ensured the oil furnace stayed lit, and brought their laundry home to his mother. When Richard and his bunkmates were invited to Lee’s family home, they found a lean-to built against a bombed-out factory wall and a family that treated a group of American airmen like honored guests. “We always made sure to bring things when we came,” Richard says. There was also the afternoon he grabbed his M1 rifle — unloaded, because ammunition had to be purchased from the Marines — and simply hitchhiked through the war zone to visit a cousin stationed further south. He got a meal, a place to sleep, and a ride back the next day.
After Korea came Andrews Air Force Base, two promotions, a doctor who told him he needed “a change of venue” from a difficult girlfriend situation, and an assignment to French Morocco that launched a second act as adventurous as the first. R&R in Rome and Madrid. A post-military career with Westinghouse Electric that took him to Istanbul, Cairo, the Indian reservations of New Mexico, and a manager’s office in Chicago. A wife who followed him everywhere and loved every minute. A mother-in-law’s sudden death that pulled them home from Egypt. Through all of it, Richard kept a diary for his grandchildren, he says, so someday they can read what grandpa did and where grandpa went.
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