Pictured: Gerrit Kroontje of Leota served as a cook in the army during the Korean War. He has enjoyed putting together model airplanes (pictured behind him) in his spare time. (photo by Jill Fennema)

As we have said in previous articles about local veterans, every individual had a unique experience during their years of service to the Unites States armed forces. Gerrit Kroontje of Leota is no different. His experience was unlike any other of our local vets – he learned how to cook in the army.

The weather was so hot that summer that it is Gerrit’s main memory of the whole experience.

“We were out on the rifle range and they called off training because it was 110 degrees. We were about 4 to 6 miles from our camp area. When they called training off, the truck drivers had gone back already, so we had to walk back. There were guys keeling over on the side of the road,” he recalls. “They told us just to keep marching.”

Several men on the march collapsed and had to be picked up with Jeeps later. Gerrit recalls that a soldier near him fell over into a deep ravine. When they got back to base and a head count was performed, that guy was still missing. He was in pretty tough shape when they found him in the ravine and he had to go to the hospital.

At the parade field in similar weather, the commanders had them stand with their backs to the sun. The sun beat down on their necks and there were guys passing out from the heat. Gerrit was standing at attention and says he felt the rifle fall out of his hand. He fell to one knee. When he fell, his head cleared and he started to get up. Two guys grabbed him and told him not to stand. They carried him to shade where a lot of other guys ended up too.

Gerrit recalled that just before that day, all the soldiers had their immunizations and he wondered if that might not have been part of why everyone was so faint.

One time when his unit came back from the rifle range he was called over the loud speaker to report to the orderly room. Walking there, he was a nervous wreck, wondering what he had done wrong. At the orderly room, he was told to report to the officer’s office.

“Boy, then I was shaking,” he recalls. He was rehearsing what to say in his head: “Private Kroontje reporting, Sir!”

His commanding officer shook his hand and said, “Congratulations! You had the highest score on the rifle range.”

Gerrit, being the modest man that he is, said he thought his good shooting was due to the fact that he had a newer rifle and many other soldiers were using rifles that were old and in bad shape.

He wrote letters home to Harriet and his young son quite a bit. A disappointing thing – or maybe it was ironic – was that a few weeks after Gerrit was in basic training, the government changed the draft rules and fathers were no longer drafted.

Basic training lasted eight weeks and then he was sent to Ft. Meed, Maryland, to food service school, where he learned to cook. Harriet and Virgil moved out to Maryland and their little family lived in an off-base apartment for the remainder of Gerrit’s time in the service.

In cooking school, the soldiers were taught in teams of two. Gerrit’s partner was John Humphreys from Boston, Mass.

“We got along good together,” Gerrit recalls. “He was a good Christian man. He had gone to school to be a priest, but met a girl and gave that up. When he dropped out of school he was immediately drafted.”

Gerrit and John worked well together. Together, they had the highest score in the class. The rest of their class was deployed to Korea and they were sent to the Army Chemical Center in Maryland, a facility that no longer exists.

“We were sent to a consolidated mess,” he said. They cooked for a detachment of female soldiers in the Women’s Army Corp (WAC), medical personnel, military police, and so many other different people.

They prepared three meals a day – breakfast, lunch, and dinner – and made everything from pancakes and eggs to casseroles and shrimp.

“Fridays was always fish or shrimp,” Gerrit said. “I hated shrimp because the night before we would have to peel them all, and our fingers were raw by the time we were done.”