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SPOONER, Glen L. 1931-1950

SPOONER

Posted By: S. Bell
Date: 5/18/2014 at 23:24:07

Glen L. Spooner January 1, 1931- July 12, 1950

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[Waterloo Daily Courier, Friday, July 28, 1950, Waterloo, Iowa]

Pfc. Spooner
Missing in
Korea Action

Pfc Glen L Spooner, son of Mrs Edith A. Spooner, 95 Riverview Drive, was listen as missing in action Friday in the latest defense department list. Spooner is the first casualty reported from Waterloo in the Korean war.

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[Waterloo Courier Article July 2000]

"Ceremony will honor first Waterloo casualty"

July 9, 2000 Ceremony will honor first Waterloo casualty,
other veterans in 'the forgotten war' in Korea

Some folks would say Glen Spooner grew up on the wrong side of the tracks. They might get an argument from his family about that.

What can't be argued, however, is that he ended up on the wrong end of what many would say was one of the most desperate battles in American military history.

It was fought a half century ago, on a northeast Asian peninsula the size of the state of Utah, known as Korea.

Spooner, a 19-year-old U.S. Army private first class, was one of the first American soldiers who fought in the Korean War -- and one of the first who died. He was killed in combat just two and a half weeks after the war began and was the first man from Waterloo to die in the three-year bloody standoff.

For years, like many of his Korean War comrades, Spooner was forgotten by everyone but family and those with whom he served. The posthumous Purple Heart his family received was lost. Records of his service did not appear on local veterans lists. His grave site did not even receive an American flag on Memorial Day.

That all changes Wednesday - the 50th anniversary of Spooner's death.

That's when Spooner, and other local Korean War dead and veterans, will be remembered in a ceremony involving his family, veterans and the city of Waterloo.

At 4 p.m. at Spooner's grave in Fairview Cemetery, the Waterloo and Evansdale AMVETS posts will present Waterloo Mayor John Rooff and Fairview board member Bob Brown with two flags, one to be flown at Veterans Memorial Hall, the other at the cemetery, in memory of Spooner and all Korean veterans. An honor guard will be present and "Taps" will be played.

"I'm kind of glad they finally got around to it," said Spooner's sister, Cora Spore. Other family members echoed her sentiments, including her and Glen's brothers, Richard and Alton.

The Spooners grew up in the Riverview area of Waterloo, a west-side neighborhood between Highway 218 and the Cedar River. Glen was the oldest of Howard and Edith Spooner's four children. Many considered Riverview a rough-and-tumble area. But the Spooners were a tight-knit bunch, and the entire neighborhood was like a family. And Glen hardly fit the image of a kid from a tough neighborhood.

"He was a very happy-go-lucky kid," Spore said. "He called square dances in high school and was involved in a lot of activities at school." He attended the old Sloane Wallace elementary school. He worked at the John Deere Waterloo Tractor Works.

He enlisted in the U.S. Army on Feb. 7, 1949, less than two months after his 17th birthday. His mother had to sign for him to enter the service, Spore recalled. He completed basic training at Fort Riley, Kan., and returned home for a dinner party in May. His family never saw him again.

He was sent to Japan after furlough, as a member of the 21st Regiment of the Army's 24th Infantry Division. It was a post-World War II army of occupation, as Japan was ruled by a provisional government headed by Gen. Douglas MacArthur. MacArthur was respected by the Japanese people, but his forces had been severely cut back and would be ill-equipped to fight another war.

Spore said Glen was writing his mother a letter home from Japan in early July 1950, but cut the letter short with a note he had just received orders to ship out. President Truman had ordered elements of the 24th Division into Korea, just days after Soviet-equipped North Korean troops invaded American-backed South Korea on June 25. They were shipped by plane and rail into the city of Taejon, about 100 miles south of Seoul, the South Korean capital, which had already fallen to North Korean troops.

When members of Spooner's 21st Regiment arrived on the South Korean mainland, "the task force was cheered by crowds waving flags. It was like a holiday," Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Toland wrote in his 1991 book, "In Mortal Combat: Korea 1950-53."

The holiday was short-lived, and the task for Spooner and his comrades was a grim one: Stem or delay the North Korean advance as long as possible until the U.S. Eighth Army in Japan could be readied for battle. But even the American infantry's heaviest weapons were no match for the North Koreans' heavily armored Soviet-made T-34 tanks. Some American units were quickly overrun and they fled, leaving helmets, weapons, even shoes behind.

Spooner's 21st Regiment was not one of those, according to Toland's book. The regiment was ordered to take a stand either at the village of Chonui or the crossroads of Chochiwon, near the Kum River north of Taejon. Gen. William Dean's orders, as transmitted to the 21st Regiment, were: "Hold Kum River line at all costs. Maximum -- repeat maximum -- delay will be effected." The regiment had to hold its positions, with no help, for four days.

That was on July 8, 1950. On the fourth day, July 12, Spooner was killed in battle. His regiment made its stand at Chochiwon. In what Toland described as a savage battle, the 21st Regiment, under Col. Richard Stephens, "fought so gallantly" that it delayed two of the best divisions in the North Korean Army for more than two days, but at a cost of hundreds of lives, before withdrawing to Taejon.

After initially being reported as missing, Spooner's family was finally told in April 1951 he had been killed in action. The specific circumstances of his death were never known to his family, Spore said. But when his body was shipped home the following October, "they said it was better if we never saw him." The casket remained closed. For a while, she said, the family wondered if he had in fact been killed.

By the time of Spooner's October 1951 funeral, U.S.-led United Nations forces and the Communist Chinese and North Korean troops, after seesaw battles up and down the peninsula, had settled into a stalemate of hill battles along the 38th parallel dividing North and South Korea. Fighting and peace talks would drag on for nearly two more years before a July 1953 armistice. Two million people were killed in the war, including 54,000 Americans and an estimated 38 from Black Hawk County. An accurate listing of all the war dead is not available because of a 1973 fire at St. Louis military records center, but the military and nonprofit groups are trying to reconstruct that list.

The Korean War, sandwiched in time between two conflicts of longer duration -- World War II and Vietnam -- is often referred to as "the forgotten war," in which a democracy was preserved without total victory.

But Glen Spooner's family remembers. And, on Wednesday, so will Waterloo.


 

Black Hawk Obituaries maintained by Karen De Groote.
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