Monroe+E.+Keller

Korean War
media type="file" key="Keller.mp3" width="240" height="20" Audio Narrative of Mr. Keller's service Full transcript of Mr. Keller's interview.



__Early Life__
Mr. Monroe Keller grew up in Buffalo Springs PA. His father started a ford dealership in 1921 at their home. The pictures below are pictures of his childhood home. Mr. Keller was born close to Schaefferstown, Pennsylvania on May 10th, 1930. His father started a car garage near their house, which is still family run and successful, even today. Mr. Keller had a fairly uneventful childhood, until he was about seven years old. One fateful day, as he was riding his bicycle home from the garage, his father accidentally hit him with his car. Mr. Keller said, "And here now I looked, and I saw my dad coming from the homestead in the Lincoln Zephyr, and I thought I could miss him, you know? So I quick turned my bicycle this way, and as soon as I did, it threw me right against the rearview wheel, and that's when he broke my leg." As a result of this, Mr. Keller's leg was broken and his collarbone cracked. His father rushed him to the Good Samaritan Hospital, where back in those times one only had to pay about a dollar a day for medical services and such. They bound up his leg for a while, and after they removed the bandages, Mr. Keller realized that he would never be able to play sports. His leg would hold him back for the rest of his life, but his collarbone healed perfectly and never gave him any trouble.

Teenage Years Before being shipped to Korea, Mr. Keller went down to Florida a few times during his teenage years to have fun and be with his friends. A little later in his life, Mr. Keller met his wife, Ruth. She had worked as a secretary at his father's garage, and they got to know each other, and after a while of dating, they got married. After his marriage, Mr. Keller built his house himself. Ruth became pregnant, so they had to work on the house in order to start their family. While painting the house, his wife's water broke, and the doctor had to go out to their house and deliver their daughter at home. After his daughter was born, Mr. Keller recieved the letter that told him he was being drafted into the Korean War. He was surprised that they drafted him because of his bad leg, but they took him anyway, and then he had to travel to Fort Gordon in the south for his basic training.

Mr. Keller's War Experiences
Mr. Keller was stationed at headquarters, which were located in the mountains north of Seoul. Headquaters were set close to the 38th Parallel, because the artillery surrounding their encampment had to be close enough to the Koreans in order to fire at them. Mr. Keller was allowed to stay in the same bunk as the Colonel while everyone else had to sleep outside in tents partly because the Colonel liked him, and partly because there was no special tent for his job. In the bunk with the Colonel and Mr. Keller, there was a Korean man who also wore the uniform of an American soldier. His job was to interpret the Korean language if headquarters ever took any Korean prisoner. Mr. Keller remembered that the interpreter never left the bunker, because if he had left and had been captured by the enemy, he would have been killed immediately for being a traitor. Mr. Keller had no idea what to expect for his job as the mailman. He thought that he would get the mail, then would have to deliver it to everyone else, but it turned out the mail was sent directly to him, and the people in his camp came to him to get it from him. So he didn't actually deliver the mail, he was more in charge of making sure nothing happened to it and making sure that it went to the correct person. He was sort of glad that his job didn't call for any traveling on his part, because he thought he would get picked off easily if he had to travel anywhere to get the mail.

This clip shows how many variations of artillery and the uses for them media type="youtube" key="jIb-dMS-zYs" height="344" width="425"

This clip shows how affective Artillery was from the Korean Perspective

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