PDA

View Full Version : Cold warrior recalls service



thedrifter
07-23-07, 11:14 AM
Cold warrior recalls service

By SHERREE CASPER / Journal Staff Writer

BERKELEY SPRINGS — It was February, 1956.

The Korean War was over and the one in Vietnam had yet to begin for U.S. troops.

Still there was a draft. The Cold War was in full swing.

Seeing many of his friends drafted into the United States Army, 17-year-old Richard J. Byrne opted to drop out of high school and enlist in the Navy.

Byrne wanted to serve in the submarine program like his father, Michael, but too many fillings in his teeth prevented him from serving in that capacity. In 1955, the U.S. Navy launched its first nuclear submarine, and requirements became stricter for serving in the submarine program, he said.

“My father was an old submariner,” he said.

Back in the 1950s, there was a mindset that one served his country; there was no running off to Canada like many did to avoid serving a tour in Vietnam, he said.

“You had to enlist or be drafted.”

Byrne said when he entered the U.S. Navy as a seaman recruit in 1956, children in school were still practicing the “duck and cover” drills in case a nuclear attack was launched against the United States.

“We had this constant threat,” said Byrne, a 68-year-old native of Baltimore. “There was no peace because we were always under a threat.”

Byrne calls the Cold War, which was fought from just after World War II until November 1989, as the real forgotten war and laments that many service members who served during the Cold War are not eligible for membership in the American Legion because they do not meet service date criteria.

“It’s sort of a shame that a veterans’ group is not open to all veterans,” Byrne said of the American Legion. Byrne, who served as an assault boat coxswain during a mission to Lebanon in 1958, said he is a life member of Veterans of Foreign Wars because that organization recognizes his combat service.”

Achieving that milestone was an adventure in itself.

After undergoing naval basic training at the Bainbridge Naval Training Center in northeastern Maryland, Byrne worked in the Naval Intelligence School’s print shop at the Anacostia Naval Receiving Station in Washington, D.C., from May 1956 to January 1957.

Next, he was assigned to the USS Taconic, an amphibious communications ship, stationed at Norfolk, Va.

After being stationed aboard the ship for six months as a printer in the print shop, Byrne set his sights topside.

“I wanted to be a part of the real Navy,” he said. “I decided that since I was in the Navy that I wouldn’t stay below the deck, so I volunteered to the First Deck Division.”

“They were the ones that ran the ship,” Byrne said.

After the transfer, Byrne found himself at amphibious assault boat school in Little Creek, Va., training to be a coxswain on a personnel carrying landing craft, called a Higgins Boat. As a coxswain, Byrne was instructed on how to maneuver the boat, which was designed to put 36 combat-ready Marines on a beachhead.

Byrne recalled how an instructor at the amphibious training center said that if coxswains made it back to the ship they were lucky. While the plywood craft had armor near where the Marines were, nothing protected the coxswain.

“I was never under fire, fortunately,” Byrne said.

On July 15, 1958, Byrne was tasked as a coxswain with the USS Taconic to help put Marines on a beachhead in Lebanon to help prevent the overthrow of its government. In total, the U.S. 6th Fleet delivered 1,700 Marines there.

In mid-November 1959, Byrne’s enlistment with the U.S. Navy was over, and he separated as a seaman first class. His tour in the U.S. Navy took Byrne to the Mediterranean, Caribbean and to Greenland.

For nine years he worked in various print shops before getting a job with the city of Baltimore’s print shop, where he worked for nearly three decades.

Byrne and his wife, Lu, have been married for 15 years. The couple moved from Baltimore to Berkeley Springs in the late 1990s.

Now in retirement, Byrne is a part-time bookkeeper for St. Vincent de Paul Catholic Church in Berkeley Springs. He is an active member of the Knights of Columbus in Berkeley Springs and is a fourth-degree Knight of the Martinsburg Assembly.

— Staff writer Sherree Casper can be reached at (304) 263-3381, ext. 182, (304) 839-1521 or scasper@journal-news.net

Ellie