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Paul Swartz displays the medals he re-ceived during his 30 years of military In Inchon when a bomb blew up right Inservice. He was severely Injured In 1963 front of him.Hutch man recalls brush with death in InchonBy Jim HitchTh«* Ilutrhlnaon Ni*ws“I have laid in that bed many a night and wondered how in the hell I ever got out alive.”Unbuttoning his shirt, Paul Swartz, 810 East 2nd, revealed the scar that runs from his lower abdomen to his upper chest.Swartz, 45 at the time, was leading a patrol in an assault on Hill 304 north of Da Nang in Vietnam in 1963.“An artillery shell exploded right in front of me and tore me wide open.”Swartz, a career soldier who retired in 1970 after 30 years, says the wound left him none the worse for wear.Little wonder. It was only one of eight times that he was wounded, three times in World War II, three times in Korea and twice in Vietnam.His wounds were from mortar, artillery, land mine and sniper.Swartz wasn’t even in Korea when Gen. Douglas MacArthur pulled off his famed amphibious Inchon landing 35 years ago today. But the Inchon area was one place where he was wounded.The North Koreans had driven the UN-reinforced South Korean army into a small beachhead around Pusan-hung in the extreme southeast. Further retreat was nearly impossible.MacArthur sent the Marines ashore at Inchon on the Yellow' Sea coast west of Seoul and flanked the invaders, who either surrendered or fled in panic.Swartz didn't get to Korea until eight months later. But three months after that he was leading a patrol north and east of Inchon when he got hit.Swartz enlisted in the army in November of 1940. Late in 1942 he was at Guadalcanal. “We went in right behind the marines.It was while he was in the Solomon Islands that he was wounded first. “I was on a navy ship when the Japanese bombed it. I took pieces of shrapnel in both legs.” lie was hospitalized for three months.At the end of World War 11 Swartz had a field commission of first lieutenant. When he re-in-listed in 1946, he reverted to his regular rank of master sergeant.He spent some time in Europe and then, in 1951 went to Korea where his first lieutenant commission was restored.“I joined a unit just out of Inchon and we moved north and east along the river (Han gang).The patrol was moving through a rice paddy when Swartz stepped on a land mine. It got my right leg and right arm. Thank God it was in the rice paddy, because it was under water and it wasn’t nearly as effective as it would have been if it were out in the open.”He was moved back to a M-A-S-H unit and then back to the states. 1 was in the hospital four months.He hadn't finished his tour, so he was shipped back to Korea when he had recovered.This time his unit was under fire from mortars. “There weremortars coming in all around us. I jumped into a hole and ttfis one came into the hole with me.”This time Swartz took shrapnel wounds in both legs and the lower abdomen. That ended his action in Korea.He went to Vietnam twice, in 1961 and again in 1963.The first time he went over as an infantry advisor. He was on patrol in a wooded area near the Cambodia border when he took a 25 caliber rifle shot in the right shoulder.In the late 1960s, Swartz was scheduled to be sent back to Vietnam a third time. He was 48 years old “I said ‘No, I’m not going. I quit. I’m going to retire.”Swartz was reared in Salina. In 1940, “1 was working for $1 a day and board and room. A guy came along and offered me $21 a month and room and hoard and clothes. I took it. Ho was an army recruiter.He loved the army and still does, I loved the regimentation. I learned discipline from dad’s razor strap.”In kill or be killed situations, I took quite a few of them with me. In World War II I shot snipers out of trees, threw hand grenades into bunkers, things like that.To most of these events he applies the “It was a job and they were the enemy wartime philosophy.But he remembers one incident, in Vietnam, that still haunts him.“This hurts me more than anything else. There was a young kid, about seven, walking toward us. He had his arms tucked tightly against his sides. There was only one way to stop him and that was to kill him. I shot him and his arms came up and two hand grenades fell from under his arms and exploded.
Newspaper Details
Hutchinson News
Hutchinson, Kansas, US
Mon, Sep 16, 1985
Page 66
Full Page
Clipped by
Hutchinson P.
KS, USA 17 Oct 2024
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