By Jill Fennema –

Lloyd Schelhaas was born to Hannah and Bert Schelhaas of Edgerton on December 24, 1930. His father passed away when Lloyd was four years old. His mother later remarried Harm Eckoff. 

In February of 1952, the Korean Conflict was still going on. Lloyd was drafted and was required to report to Minneapolis on February 29, where he was inducted into the Marine Corp. He was 23 years old. At the time he received his draft notice, he was working as a bricklayer for the De Stigter Brothers Construction in northwest Iowa. 

He had a physical in Minneapolis and then was sent to San Diego, Calif., where he was in bootcamp for 10 weeks. 

“I tell you what, I made it,” Lloyd recalls. “It was not the nicest, but there were others who were treated rough. I got taken care of pretty well.” He said the hardest part of bootcamp was having a drill instructor hollering at him and all the marching and pushups. “I just wasn’t used to that,” he added. 

After basic training he had a furlough back to Minnesota for 10 days before reporting to Camp Pendleton in California, which is where they trained him to go overseas. On the voyage across the ocean, they had rough seas, but Lloyd did not suffer from seasickness. “I think the skipper and I were the only ones who didn’t get sick,” he said. They landed in Incheon, South Korea, which is a city near Seoul. They spent about a day there before they were loaded up and delivered to an outpost near the front lines. The outpost was known as Little Berlin.

“Where that was I don’t know. It was out in the boonies,” Lloyd said. For several months Lloyd’s time was divided between the outpost and the front lines.  He had been trained as a wireman with the H&S Company of the 7th Marine Regiment. He would be on the front lines until the the fighting ended.

As a wireman, he was responsible for constructing, operating, and maintaining the phone networks among various headquarters, outposts, and sometimes forward observers. Specifically, Lloyd had to lay wires in trenches for hand telephones. 

“We didn’t have telephone poles there – we put the wires in trenches so they didn’t get blown to pieces right away,” he said. 

“You were on your own. The wires were in a donut, as you walked around, the wire peeled out of the side of the donut. You could go a good mile with a donut of wire. The spool of wire weighed about 25 pounds or so. The telephone was another 15-20 pounds. The phones were used to communicate with the troops at the outpost. They were in continuous communication,” Lloyd recalls.

The sergeant had a phone. He had a line from that sergeant to the front line and then a line to the bunker where the other officers were. 

“I had some really close calls, but when you are on the front lines or the outpost, you are always in danger,” Lloyd said. His only protection was a helmet and a flak jacket. A flak jacket is a type of body armour that was supposed to help protect the soldier from flying fragments from explosives and artillery.  “You were protected to a certain degree,” Lloyd said. “But that did not take care of your face. Your vital organs were covered, but that was it.”

Lloyd suffered no injuries during his time in Korea. But he had some close calls. “God was good to me,” Lloyd said. “He was always with me.” 

Lloyd said that he did not make friends with any other soldiers. “Nobody was nobody’s friend. Wiremen and radiomen didn’t make friends. You were doing your duty furnishing the lines. I don’t think you needed friends out there,” he said.

On the front lines, there was a bunker where he could sleep sometimes. That was where he also received calls to say where he was supposed to go. Other times, he just had his sleeping bag and slept wherever he could.

The Berlin outpost was built on a hill and near that was a rice paddy. The enemy – the People’s Volunteer Army (the armed forces deployed by China) – was on the other side of the rice paddy. “When there was a lot of noise, you didn’t worry,” Lloyd said. “But when things got quiet – then you knew there were people trying to come across the paddy.” 

“It’s hard to explain to someone who has not been there. When that happened, we would fire mortars into the paddy and that would light up the sky and you could see the enemy. It was nerve-racking,” Lloyd said. 

In late June and July of 1953, Lloyd experienced the battle of the Berlin Outpost. This was a particularly important battle at the end of the Korean Conflict and prompted the return to truce negotiations. Lloyd remembers there was a lot of mortar fire.