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Service in Seabees merits" med
(Continued from page 1.)
well that his son-in-law is headed
back into the battle zone and that
his daughter has one of the unhap-
py chores of an Army wife: attend-
ing military funerals at Arlington
National Cemetery and giving
comfort and care to the families
of the men in her husband's unit
who have perished in Iraq. "Molly
gets called with the chaplain to
help deal with the problems of the
widow or the mother," her father
said,
The former Molly Eveleth, 1982
Forest Festival queen, attended
the public schools in Shelton,
as did her parents and her hus-
band, Colonel Bruce Parker. As
an Army wife she is the mother of
three girls and a link in an unof-
ficial chain of command within
the extended family of the XVII
Airborne Corps. "There is always
a responsibility and a relationship
to the other wives, and Bruce's
commander's wife is senior to her,"
Eveleth said.
The colonel's commander is
Lieutenant General Lloyd An-
derson, who with Molly's help re-
cently 1Sinned the silver eagle of a
full-bird colonel on Parker before
a gathering that saw Lieuten-
ant Commander Chris Olson of
the Navy present Eveleth with
numerous decorations for his un-
recognized service in Korea as a
carpenter in the Seabees, who get
their name from the C.B. in Naval
Construction Battalion. His tour
of duty came during and after the
fight against communist elements
in Asia that was stopped by an
armistice on July 27, 1953. Med-
als were not a high priority in the
hurly burly that attended the end
of the war.
"They were a little nonchalant
about handing out.stuff," Eveleth
said. "If they didn't have them
in hand they didn't give them to
you."
COLONEL PARKER learned
about this oversight from the fam-
ily and learned from his Army
buddies that the U.S. and its allies
were willing to make amends in
such cases. On the same day that
the son-in-law graduated from
lieutenant colonel to full colonel,
the father-in-law was presented
with the Korean Service Medal,
United Nations Korean Medal,
Republic of Korea War Service
Medal, Fleet Marine Force Com-
bat Operation Insignia, Republic
of Korea Presidential Unit Cita-
tion and the Naval Good Conduct
Medal.
Eveleth's conduct had much to
do with pounding nails and laying
a foundation for a cease-fire that
will have held for 54 years on the
27th of this month. He knew Mol-
ly's morn in high school and mar-
ried her after four years of Navy
time, joining up after graduation
in the hopes of going to sea to see
what he could see of the world be-
yond the Shelton area. After boot
camp at the Naval Training Cen-
ter in San Diego, he was assigned
to the duties of a landlubber and
deployea to duty in the Far East
with the 103rd Naval Construc-
tion Battalion.
His first assignment was to
build homes for American soldiers
on Chichi Jima, a Japanese locale
with a name that translates into
English as "Father Island." Chi-
chi has a storied, if little-known
history. Eveleth cites a 2000 edi-
tion of Bulletin of Atomic Scien-
tists asserting that "the Fat Man"
was stored on Chichi in the years
after World War II. This was the
nickname of an atomic bomb of
the kind that destroyed much of
the Japanese city of Nagasaki on
STANDING BY the flag is Norm Eveleth with medals he
received for his service in Korea.
August 9, 1945, five days before
the unconditional surrender of" the
Japanese brought World War II to
an end.
"Now I know why we were there
and what we were building homes
for," Eveleth writes. "It was all
secretive then. We were told we
were building a base to serve as
a stopover place for submarines
patrolling the Japanese-Korean
waters."
THE PROBLEM with the Fat
Man is that the U.S. had promised
the Japanese government that it
would not place any atomic weap-
ons on Japanese soil. While it is
not at all certain that the Bulletin
of Atomic Scientists knows what of
it speaks, cybersources like Wiko-
pedia have given their blessing
to this report and Eveleth seems
convinced that he was involved in
some heavy-duty duty as a young-
er man. He thinks the houses he
built on Chichi were for the scien-
tific types who kept the Fat Man
on ice until such time as the un-
thinkable occurred.
"I was just a kid off the farm
at Bucks Prairie," he said. "I was
not a war-hero type. I was just one
of the millions who served in the
military and had some interesting
experiences."
Prior to the American victory in
the Pacific Theater of World War
II, the island served as a radio sta-
tion for the Japanese and a sup-
ply base fbr Iwo Jima, its more fa-
mous neighbor. An American pilot
by the name of George Bush, who
was the son of a U.S. Senator by
the name of Prescott Bush, was
shot down while trying to drop a
500-pound bomb on Chichi.
"George escaped, but all of those
the Japanese fished out of the sea
were beheaded," Eveleth writes.
OF COURSE, George went on
to become the 41st U.S. President
and the father of the other George
Bush who is Colonel Parker's
Commander in Chief and the man
who ordered the invasion of Iraq.
"Even back when it first started,
in my mind I thought we shouldn't
go there," Eveleth said. "I never
felt we belonged there from the be-
ginning to now."
A few weeks after Eveleth re-
ceived the medals for his service in
Korea, the President's press secre-
tary floated the idea of a Korean
solution to the conflict in Iraq.
White House spokesman Tony
Snow said President Bush thinks
Iraq will develop along the lines of
"a Korean model" and defined that
to mean a situation in which the
United States has an "over-the-
horizon support role" which would
"provide security as long as seems
A
* Residential* Commercial* Guaranteed Quality
Same-Day Service on Most Glass
-Auto Glass Specialist
New Shower Doors
Mirrors Contractors
Discounts
Rock Chip Repairs
1714 Olympic Highway North
.. Monday-Friday 8:30-5 '|
["/, .Call 426-3163
Page 6 - Shelton-Mason County Journal - Thursday, July 12, 2007
reasonable to the Iraqi people" as
they conduct "the lion's share of
the business."
The Korean War ended after
more than 54,000 American and
allied deaths with the country di-
vided between north and south.
A peace agreement was never
signed, but hostilities were end-
ed by an armistice that has been
more enduring than the one that
put an end to World War I. It is
called "the Forgotten War" because
it has been overshadowed in the
American imagination by the ma-
jor conflicts which occurred before
and after it: the victories of World
War II and the disappointments
of Vietnam. Just because the war
was forgotten doesn't mean it was
meaningless.
"It was short, relatively short,
and it was very successihl," Evele-
th said. "We drew a line across the
country that created north and
south and that was the end of it.
That brought it to a conclusion and
it has created South Korea, which
is a country which has never had
any internal conflicts or conflicts
with us."
WITH SOME prompting Evele-
th talked about how he views the
current conflict in the light of his
own experience. He said Korea
has been "a very good ally" and
notes that American troops are
still guarding the line that sepa-
rates the north of Korea from the
south. "I think if we achieved the
same thing in Vietnam or the same
thing in Iraq, people who would be
pretty happy and Bush wouldn't
have egg on his face the way he
does," he said.
This is not to say that South
Korea has enjoyed smooth sailing
in the years since this Seabee re-
turned to Shelton. Since the end of
the Korean War there have been
five fhiled attempts to establish a
home-grown democracy and eight
years of increasingly corrupt civil-
ian rule followed by 27 years of
strong-man rule by two military
men, General Chun Doo Hwan
taking power after General Park
Chung Hee was assassinated by
the director of the Korean Cen-
tral Intelligence Agency. The first
peaceful transfer of power in Ko-
rean history took place in Febru-
ary 1988 with the beginning of the
sixth republic just prior to Korea's
hosting of the Olympic Games.
Since then, democracy has de-
veloped hand-in-hand with a vig-
orous economy. Korean cars have
found a place on the American
road, Korean athletes have been
added to the lineup of American
baseball teams and a Korean film
recently has played to rave re-
views from certain sectors of the
American audience. Things have
changed since Eveleth was there
in 1953-1954 and the end of a long
occupation by the Japanese and
three years of civil war.
"South Korea was a rubble pile
that stretched from one place to
the other with piles and piles and
piles of bricks," he said. "The coun-
try had no industry at all. There
were a lot of' peasant fhrmers. It
has changed. It has really, really
changed. Women carrie.d water
from the reservoir on their heads
in jugs and beat their laundry on
rocks with a stick in the stream."
Contrary to what President
Bush and his press secretary may
say, Eveleth does not hold out a
lot of hope that the people of Iraq
will be able to follow the Korean
model to any significant degree.
He thinks a redeployment of U.S.
forces "into a perimeter of some
sort" would reduce American casu-
alties but doubts that a continuing
U.S. involvement would do much
good for the Iraqis.
"THOSE PEOPLE have so
many conflicts based on their reli-
gious differences that the Korean
people don't have and I think the
Korean people are just more ame-
nable," he said.
His view of Korea
to 18 months of military
Pyongtaek where the
worked on Airfield K-6
First Marine Air Wing.
months as supervisor of
carpenter shop, Eveleth
teered for a job
rean laborers in a
"They were fun guys to
the Korean work force,"
said. "These are guys who
their 30s who had
war years fbr the
borers and they knew
concrete."
Their main objective
down a concrete
ephant Huts,
structures big enough to
craft flown by Marine
(Please turn to
SUNDAY, JULY
Call today tor a
FREE ESTIMATE
on a new Trane system!
'rK Olympic Heating &
Sales * Service Installations
h Hard Stop A tu.: Repairs Heating * Air
Conditioning Refrigeration
426.9945 * 754-1235 1-800-400-9945
OI,YMIqlC968IA
exhaust
City of Shelton - Public
Sidewalk Plan and In:Lpact Fee i
Open House
Date: July 18, 2007
Time: 5:30-7:00 p.m.
Shelton Civic Center
525 West Cota Street
Come and hear staff, and the City's consultant She
Carr, & Jewell present important information on
planning and funding sidewalks for our city streett
Contact Public works at 426-9731 for more information.
Refreshments Availab]
Service in Seabees merits" med
(Continued from page 1.)
well that his son-in-law is headed
back into the battle zone and that
his daughter has one of the unhap-
py chores of an Army wife: attend-
ing military funerals at Arlington
National Cemetery and giving
comfort and care to the families
of the men in her husband's unit
who have perished in Iraq. "Molly
gets called with the chaplain to
help deal with the problems of the
widow or the mother," her father
said,
The former Molly Eveleth, 1982
Forest Festival queen, attended
the public schools in Shelton,
as did her parents and her hus-
band, Colonel Bruce Parker. As
an Army wife she is the mother of
three girls and a link in an unof-
ficial chain of command within
the extended family of the XVII
Airborne Corps. "There is always
a responsibility and a relationship
to the other wives, and Bruce's
commander's wife is senior to her,"
Eveleth said.
The colonel's commander is
Lieutenant General Lloyd An-
derson, who with Molly's help re-
cently 1Sinned the silver eagle of a
full-bird colonel on Parker before
a gathering that saw Lieuten-
ant Commander Chris Olson of
the Navy present Eveleth with
numerous decorations for his un-
recognized service in Korea as a
carpenter in the Seabees, who get
their name from the C.B. in Naval
Construction Battalion. His tour
of duty came during and after the
fight against communist elements
in Asia that was stopped by an
armistice on July 27, 1953. Med-
als were not a high priority in the
hurly burly that attended the end
of the war.
"They were a little nonchalant
about handing out.stuff," Eveleth
said. "If they didn't have them
in hand they didn't give them to
you."
COLONEL PARKER learned
about this oversight from the fam-
ily and learned from his Army
buddies that the U.S. and its allies
were willing to make amends in
such cases. On the same day that
the son-in-law graduated from
lieutenant colonel to full colonel,
the father-in-law was presented
with the Korean Service Medal,
United Nations Korean Medal,
Republic of Korea War Service
Medal, Fleet Marine Force Com-
bat Operation Insignia, Republic
of Korea Presidential Unit Cita-
tion and the Naval Good Conduct
Medal.
Eveleth's conduct had much to
do with pounding nails and laying
a foundation for a cease-fire that
will have held for 54 years on the
27th of this month. He knew Mol-
ly's morn in high school and mar-
ried her after four years of Navy
time, joining up after graduation
in the hopes of going to sea to see
what he could see of the world be-
yond the Shelton area. After boot
camp at the Naval Training Cen-
ter in San Diego, he was assigned
to the duties of a landlubber and
deployea to duty in the Far East
with the 103rd Naval Construc-
tion Battalion.
His first assignment was to
build homes for American soldiers
on Chichi Jima, a Japanese locale
with a name that translates into
English as "Father Island." Chi-
chi has a storied, if little-known
history. Eveleth cites a 2000 edi-
tion of Bulletin of Atomic Scien-
tists asserting that "the Fat Man"
was stored on Chichi in the years
after World War II. This was the
nickname of an atomic bomb of
the kind that destroyed much of
the Japanese city of Nagasaki on
STANDING BY the flag is Norm Eveleth with medals he
received for his service in Korea.
August 9, 1945, five days before
the unconditional surrender of" the
Japanese brought World War II to
an end.
"Now I know why we were there
and what we were building homes
for," Eveleth writes. "It was all
secretive then. We were told we
were building a base to serve as
a stopover place for submarines
patrolling the Japanese-Korean
waters."
THE PROBLEM with the Fat
Man is that the U.S. had promised
the Japanese government that it
would not place any atomic weap-
ons on Japanese soil. While it is
not at all certain that the Bulletin
of Atomic Scientists knows what of
it speaks, cybersources like Wiko-
pedia have given their blessing
to this report and Eveleth seems
convinced that he was involved in
some heavy-duty duty as a young-
er man. He thinks the houses he
built on Chichi were for the scien-
tific types who kept the Fat Man
on ice until such time as the un-
thinkable occurred.
"I was just a kid off the farm
at Bucks Prairie," he said. "I was
not a war-hero type. I was just one
of the millions who served in the
military and had some interesting
experiences."
Prior to the American victory in
the Pacific Theater of World War
II, the island served as a radio sta-
tion for the Japanese and a sup-
ply base fbr Iwo Jima, its more fa-
mous neighbor. An American pilot
by the name of George Bush, who
was the son of a U.S. Senator by
the name of Prescott Bush, was
shot down while trying to drop a
500-pound bomb on Chichi.
"George escaped, but all of those
the Japanese fished out of the sea
were beheaded," Eveleth writes.
OF COURSE, George went on
to become the 41st U.S. President
and the father of the other George
Bush who is Colonel Parker's
Commander in Chief and the man
who ordered the invasion of Iraq.
"Even back when it first started,
in my mind I thought we shouldn't
go there," Eveleth said. "I never
felt we belonged there from the be-
ginning to now."
A few weeks after Eveleth re-
ceived the medals for his service in
Korea, the President's press secre-
tary floated the idea of a Korean
solution to the conflict in Iraq.
White House spokesman Tony
Snow said President Bush thinks
Iraq will develop along the lines of
"a Korean model" and defined that
to mean a situation in which the
United States has an "over-the-
horizon support role" which would
"provide security as long as seems
A
* Residential* Commercial* Guaranteed Quality
Same-Day Service on Most Glass
-Auto Glass Specialist
New Shower Doors
Mirrors Contractors
Discounts
Rock Chip Repairs
1714 Olympic Highway North
.. Monday-Friday 8:30-5 '|
["/, .Call 426-3163
Page 6 - Shelton-Mason County Journal - Thursday, July 12, 2007
reasonable to the Iraqi people" as
they conduct "the lion's share of
the business."
The Korean War ended after
more than 54,000 American and
allied deaths with the country di-
vided between north and south.
A peace agreement was never
signed, but hostilities were end-
ed by an armistice that has been
more enduring than the one that
put an end to World War I. It is
called "the Forgotten War" because
it has been overshadowed in the
American imagination by the ma-
jor conflicts which occurred before
and after it: the victories of World
War II and the disappointments
of Vietnam. Just because the war
was forgotten doesn't mean it was
meaningless.
"It was short, relatively short,
and it was very successihl," Evele-
th said. "We drew a line across the
country that created north and
south and that was the end of it.
That brought it to a conclusion and
it has created South Korea, which
is a country which has never had
any internal conflicts or conflicts
with us."
WITH SOME prompting Evele-
th talked about how he views the
current conflict in the light of his
own experience. He said Korea
has been "a very good ally" and
notes that American troops are
still guarding the line that sepa-
rates the north of Korea from the
south. "I think if we achieved the
same thing in Vietnam or the same
thing in Iraq, people who would be
pretty happy and Bush wouldn't
have egg on his face the way he
does," he said.
This is not to say that South
Korea has enjoyed smooth sailing
in the years since this Seabee re-
turned to Shelton. Since the end of
the Korean War there have been
five fhiled attempts to establish a
home-grown democracy and eight
years of increasingly corrupt civil-
ian rule followed by 27 years of
strong-man rule by two military
men, General Chun Doo Hwan
taking power after General Park
Chung Hee was assassinated by
the director of the Korean Cen-
tral Intelligence Agency. The first
peaceful transfer of power in Ko-
rean history took place in Febru-
ary 1988 with the beginning of the
sixth republic just prior to Korea's
hosting of the Olympic Games.
Since then, democracy has de-
veloped hand-in-hand with a vig-
orous economy. Korean cars have
found a place on the American
road, Korean athletes have been
added to the lineup of American
baseball teams and a Korean film
recently has played to rave re-
views from certain sectors of the
American audience. Things have
changed since Eveleth was there
in 1953-1954 and the end of a long
occupation by the Japanese and
three years of civil war.
"South Korea was a rubble pile
that stretched from one place to
the other with piles and piles and
piles of bricks," he said. "The coun-
try had no industry at all. There
were a lot of' peasant fhrmers. It
has changed. It has really, really
changed. Women carrie.d water
from the reservoir on their heads
in jugs and beat their laundry on
rocks with a stick in the stream."
Contrary to what President
Bush and his press secretary may
say, Eveleth does not hold out a
lot of hope that the people of Iraq
will be able to follow the Korean
model to any significant degree.
He thinks a redeployment of U.S.
forces "into a perimeter of some
sort" would reduce American casu-
alties but doubts that a continuing
U.S. involvement would do much
good for the Iraqis.
"THOSE PEOPLE have so
many conflicts based on their reli-
gious differences that the Korean
people don't have and I think the
Korean people are just more ame-
nable," he said.
His view of Korea
to 18 months of military
Pyongtaek where the
worked on Airfield K-6
First Marine Air Wing.
months as supervisor of
carpenter shop, Eveleth
teered for a job
rean laborers in a
"They were fun guys to
the Korean work force,"
said. "These are guys who
their 30s who had
war years fbr the
borers and they knew
concrete."
Their main objective
down a concrete
ephant Huts,
structures big enough to
craft flown by Marine
(Please turn to
SUNDAY, JULY
Call today tor a
FREE ESTIMATE
on a new Trane system!
'rK Olympic Heating &
Sales * Service Installations
h Hard Stop A tu.: Repairs Heating * Air
Conditioning Refrigeration
426.9945 * 754-1235 1-800-400-9945
OI,YMIqlC968IA
exhaust
City of Shelton - Public
Sidewalk Plan and In:Lpact Fee i
Open House
Date: July 18, 2007
Time: 5:30-7:00 p.m.
Shelton Civic Center
525 West Cota Street
Come and hear staff, and the City's consultant She
Carr, & Jewell present important information on
planning and funding sidewalks for our city streett
Contact Public works at 426-9731 for more information.
Refreshments Availab]