Turning the rules upside down
Ed Britt proved he was one of the Army's most unconventional soldiers

By PAULETTE PERHACH
paulette.perhach@staugustine.com
Posted: Monday, April 23, 2007

The September 1953 issue of Stag magazine featured a story on a man they called "The Army's Zaniest Hero."

"Some say he's the Army's bravest screwball; others maintain he's the screwiest hero in the armed services," the story began.

That man is Ed Britt, now 82 and just another retiree enjoying life, with a house in St. Augustine and a sail boat. Britt spends most of his time working on that boat, the Shirley V, named for his late wife. He's planning on sailing down to Guatemala in a few weeks, perhaps to live.

"I love excitement," said Britt. "I always have."

He's stuffed the history of his military service into a scrapbook, where proclamations and awards are always dropping out of one side or another.

"I've got so many of these things," he said.

One reports him dead from injuries sustained in Korea.

The story from Britt, and from the Stag article, which he says is entirely accurate, makes it seem more amazing that he's still alive.

Britt went AWOL at least a dozen times in three wars. But he wasn't running from battle, he was charging toward the front line.

He fought in WWII, Korea and Vietnam. He's lost count of his Purple Hearts. "Oh, I think about six," he said. Stag lists his awards at eight.

His body carries 15 pieces of shrapnel and a bullet and is scarred with phosphorus burns and a bullet hole that soldiers sewed closed with telephone wire.

Running to a fight

Perhaps it was the excitement of the unknown or perhaps it was a strict father that drove Britt to run away at 15. Using his deceased brother's identification, he signed up for the military.

He got kicked out and went back to school, but when that got boring, he ran away again and got a job on a dredge barge.

When he heard war broke out, he couldn't get off the barge fast enough. He had to swim to shore. He was waiting, soaking wet and freezing, when the Army recruiter's office opened that day.

Because he was only 16 and still too young to get in, he paid his friend Freddy five bucks to take the physical for him. Britt grabbed the papers from him then swore in himself.

After boot camp in Carlisle, Pa., he went to radar school in Athens, Ga., then off to San Francisco to board the M.S. Brastagi with the 471st Antiaircraft Artillery Battalion.

Frustrated with his position, he tried to jump ship as soon as the craft landed at Pago Pago to join up with a detachment of Marines.

He was caught by the military police on the Marine ship. He jumped off again at Wallis Island because he heard Marines were fighting there, but returned on his own when he realized it was a leper colony.

A few nights later his ship landed in the Solomons. Britt went AWOL, running toward the sound of gunfire. He caught up with a Marine unit, traded dog tags with a dead Marine, and tagged along.

"You just move up and they think you're a new recruit," he said. "I'd say, 'They're sending my papers. They'll be here in a few days.' They never came, but nobody noticed."

He soon got the first jolt of the excitement he'd been running for. He also got a wooden bullet to the back.

After a week of fighting with the Marines, he rejoined his unit.

At one point he left to join up with 11th Airborne. He had never seen a parachute before, but the idea of parachuting interested him. He collected pieces of a trooper's uniform, changed out of his fatigues and the lined up with other paratroopers to board a C-46.

The Stag article quotes him as saying, "They gave me a chute. The officer in charge looked at me like he wondered who I was, but he didn't say anything. We took off and I jumped with all the rest of the guys."

After getting three jumps and a paratrooper's badge, he returned to his battery.

On Jan. 9, 1945, his unit went ashore on Luzon. He left White Beach to go find the action, taking two of his buddies with him.

The three caught up with a rifle division under fire. They took out an enemy machine gun then volunteered to take a wounded man to the rear, starting back with an eight-man stretcher team. Retreating, they fell under fire from enemy mortar. Half the group made it out alive, with two of them injured seriously. Britt and one other man were the lucky ones who were "lightly wounded."

Britt's new company received orders to attack the next morning. More than three-quarters of the men died or were wounded before they were a dozen feet from their foxholes. The unit, the 172nd Infantry Regiment, pulled back to reorganize.

Britt returned to his unit and was promptly arrested.

Pleading that he had gotten lost and was "pinned down for 14 days," he was deemed "not guilty" at his court martial.

That had him on good behavior for three days. Then his wandering trigger finger wandered over to the 1st Cavalry Division fighting in Manila. He took an 11-day vacation to fight. When he returned, another AWOL charge and a medal for heroism awaited. A fellow GI conveniently lost the records for the AWOL. As for the medal, he couldn't accept because he'd been on AWOL status when he performed his feats. "When they'd tell me they were going to court martial me, I'd just go up the hill," he said.

From here the Army and Marines got tangled up in the question of what to do with Pvt. Edward J. Britt. He'd been picked up on at least 10 unit morning reports, he'd been reported dead on several occasions, and several units from different branches that he adopted wanted to commend him for his work with them, as illicit as it was.

All the mystery of the man who appeared and disappeared created a kind of folklore around his name. His parents back home became weary of the telegrams which would always begin: "The Secretary of War regrets to inform you"

Britt was in a hospital bed in Manila, healing from one of his many injuries, when the war ended.

Another war looms

Britt was alive but declared physically unfit for overseas duty. In the interim between wars, he refused limited service assignments.

When the Korean War began, he demanded to go. The medics protested.

Stag quotes a former Fort Lewis medical officer as saying, "We begged him to accept a total disability pension. There wasn't a piece of him that hadn't been broken, cut, gouged, mashed or macerated at one time or another. He refused."

Britt landed in Korea on July 29, 1950, as a forward observer for a 4.2-mm mortar company.

In September, he rode in a convoy carrying 4.2-mm mortars, gasoline and food north. The trucks suddenly fell under heavy fire by 120-mm mortars. Britt pushed the convoy through, "despite incredible danger," a commendation reads. It stopped just short of their destination and carried their guns and ammo up a hill. They spotted the source of the fire in a valley and opened fire. In the battle, Britt caught the better part of a 120-mm shell burst in his stomach, lungs and liver.

He was thrown into an ambulance and taken south.

The last thing he remembers is the ambulance coming to a stop, then someone mentioning the enemy.

Then shots.

About a dozen days later Marines found Britt naked, shot up and lying on the Korean snow.

He doesn't remember what happened during those 30 days. Marine records showed that no Chinese had been in the area for at least two days prior.

In the meantime, his family got another "sorry to inform you letter," which they had long ago started considering junk mail.

Britt was sent back to Valley Forge General, where he was already on a first-name basis with many of the medical staff. His buddies there had to remove most of his intestines and gall bladder, yet still left pieces of the metal in his lungs and liver.

Back on the firing line

A year later Britt was on the front line in Korea. The medics had tried to declare him unfit for combat service, but he threatened to sue the Army for breach of contract. He had taken a disability discharge, but then found the right recruiter to waive the disability and reenlist him.

By March of 1952 he was back with the Second Division, promoted to first sergeant in Item Company, 23rd Infantry Regiment.

During a fight near Mount Baldy, Britt earned another of his 34 decorations. His platoon was down to a dozen after starting with 58 men. He led them, without food or water and under heavy fire, in an attack against the enemy. A WP round -- an artillery shell carrying burning white phosphorus -- wounded three men, and Britt carried them, one by one, sliding down the rocky mountain. He later received the Korean Wharang Medal for valor.

After dropping off the last of the wounded, Britt realized he was in pain, and it wasn't just from the rocks. Surgeons later pulled 14 pieces of shrapnel from his body.

This time Britt had to punch his way out of the hospital, and an aide and a male hospital social worker learned the hard way not to stand between Britt and battle.

He returned to his unit. Two days later, a letter labeling Britt as "dangerous" and demanding his court martial for desertion reached his regimental commander from the hospital. Instead of a court martial, it got him a promotion. He was offered a soft job, but of course volunteered for combat patrols.

His service continued in this way, with him always bailing out of the boring for the exciting. He went on to be a motorcycle racer. And he started the original Army Parachute Team and ended with 1,270 jumps over his career. Oh, and he happened to be the 1948 Welterweight champion of the 2nd Division.

"I was always getting into fights anyhow," he said. "I don't think it ever scared me. The more of a challenge, the more thrilling, the more I liked it."

He retired twice, once as a master sergeant and once as a warrant officer. His collected medals include Purple Hearts, Bronze and Silver Stars, campaign ribbons and presidential citations.

Even in his civilian life, Britt didn't calm down. He and his wife had five children, and together the family traveled the world, following Britt's career as a contract administrator in Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Asia.

He's lived in St. Augustine off and on for about nine years. Home, he says, "is wherever I hang my hat."

In a few weeks, he'll be off to a new adventure sailing to a foreign country.

"I don't regret a thing I've done," he said. "It's all been a thrill."

Ellie