A Country Boy Goes to War

Homer Y. Riddle was the only sibling of nine Riddle children who served his Country proudly in the Korean War.  His three older brothers were married by that time with families to raise. Times were hard with the war going strong.  I believe he tried to help his parents out with the farm, but by that time I had came along to live with my grandparents while he was still a very young man at home.  Homer was more like a big brother to me, cared for me as a baby while my grandparents worked the fields, and was there for me during my clumsy toddler years.  I remember a couple of times when he rocked with me and sang "Take Me Back to Tulsa for I'm too Young to Marry".  

I think he knew that eventually he needed to get an better education in order to have a future other than farming so he enlisted in the Army in 1947.  My grandparents had very little education, they could read and write, but never knew anything other than farming and growing peanuts.

 Uncle Homer took his basic training in North Carolina at Ft. Bragg.  He spent a lot of his early army days at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma, but did tours of duty in just about every city with an Army post.  He retired as a CWO-4 and returned to Lawton, Oklahoma with his family to live out his retiring years.  

When Homer left his country home and his mama, daddy and me, he took two pictures with him.  He carried these pictures until he returned home from Korea and gave them back to me.  One is of me with his mom and dad--the other was one of my baby 
  Both pictures were very tattered and almost fell apart when I held them in my hand, but I saved them in an album and still have them today.  

I think I was around six in the picture with my grandparents. I was 10 when he returned home.  He wrote to us many times and sent pictures of him with some of his buddies. He never mentioned the bad times or the war much. Once he sent me some red silk kimono pajamas and a miniature camera from Japan.  I kept those things close for many years until those pajamas were actually in shreds and Grandma threw them out I think.  The camera had real film but I never developed any pictures from it because I kept opening it to check out that tiny film.  I don't know what happened to the camera but I found one on eBay, of course.

Homer was sent to Japan and from there into Korea to help lay radio wire communications. He was there until he received a leg injury from shrapnel and was sent back to the States after that.  He returned home in 1951.  My Aunt, one of his twin sisters, sent Grandma a newspaper clipping out of a Tulsa newspaper and his name was listed as one of the troops coming into Seattle on June 6.  I believe that year was 1951.  She ripped out the clipping rather hurriedly so the year wasn't showing, and wrote, "Isn't it wonderful--look mom, he's coming home."  At the very top of the clipping, she writes, "welcome home darling."  My Aunt and Uncle, along with their four children, met him at the airport in Tulsa and drove him to Muldrow.  Oh, happy day--my Uncle Homer came home from the war!  

It was around this time that Opal Juanita Plank entered his life.