[Leica] [img] korean war vet

[tedgrant at shaw.ca (Ted Grant)]

Hi Kyle,
As strange as it may sound.... you might have your next book beginning! The
success of book publishing is have another ready for releae right on the
coat tails of the first.

Your "gun's & roses." ;-) will build a following of "reader-picture lookers"
that should be anxious for your next book release. So maybe a collection of
"Korean vets" with their tattoos might just be the ticket along with short
anecdotes of how and why they got the tattoo as you have with this Marine.

Never mind the tattoo behemoth fat slob morons of today, get the old Korea
guys as their stories will mean a heck of a lot more. Besides the vets will
have a big following as there's still lots of those lads still alive!  

ted

-----Original Message-----
From: lug-bounces+tedgrant=shaw.ca@leica-users.org
[mailto:lug-bounces+tedgrant=shaw.ca@leica-users.org] On Behalf Of Kyle
Cassidy
Sent: Tuesday, June 12, 2007 7:17 AM
To: lug@leica-users.org
Subject: [Leica] [img] korean war vet

Some of you may know that I'm batting around this idea of doing an
extended series of portraits of members of the military and their
tattoos. 

I give you Robert Berns, USMC, July 12, 1950 - July 11, 1954, Item
Company, 3rd Battalion, 7th Regiment, 1st Marine Division whom I ran
into this weekend while I was walking out of a store. This is why it's
always good to have your Leica with you.

http://www.kylecassidy.com/warpaint/robert.jpg
 

"I have an Marine Corps bulldog up here, wearing a hat, and down here
there's a flag that says USMC underneath it. They're kind of faded now,
I got them fifty years ago. 

It was some time near the end of 1950. We were getting ready to go to
Korea, we went to San Diego to pull liberty. As I came out of a store,
there's a tatoo parlor. It was like peer pressure. Everybody was going
to get them because we were Big Tough Guys going to Korea. We were all
17 years old. 

They wouldn't put them on both arms, they said "there's a story going
around that if you're captured and they see these tattoos, they'll cut
off your arm and make lamp shades and stuff out of them." I don't know
if that was true or not, but that was what he was telling us. That's why
both of mine are on the same arm. I don't know how true that is, he
might have just been trying to scare us a little bit.

We got aboard the ship the first week in January. I had my 18th birthday
on there -- not that I remember it, because I was sea sick. 

Korea was cold. It's hard to explain, it was a landscape like you never
saw, it was all hills -- whenever there was a low spot that was level,
that was rice paddies. Which would come in handy, the rice paddies were
great in the winter, because they froze over and that gave you a level
spot for the helicopters to come in and take out the wounded. Otherwise,
it was very difficult to land there. winter had it's drawbacks, but in a
way it was helpful to us. In the summer, I guess it was just like any
other time. If anything moved out in front of you you were allowed to
shoot at it, if it was out in front of you, it was fair game. Now, you
didn't deliberately shoot at civilians -- you could tell them by their
dress. And the Chinese, you could tell them apart, they had a different
look about them. 

 


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