Lawrence Dickerson's Analysis

I never gave much thought to how I would die. Maybe it would happen of old age, silently in my sleep, or maybe I’m that one in a million that gets struck by lightning and is mentioned all over the news. For my grandpa, Lawrence Dickerson, it was also something he didn’t give much thought about until he was sent to fight in the Korean War. He explained the agony of being on constant alert because one wrong move could kill you or compromise the safety of your unit, that while in combat you can physically hear the sound of your partner’s heavy heart beat thumping against their chest, and the unsettling thought that any moment can be your last. He went from being a teenager isolated by a small town in West Virginia to a solider who was fighting
The wealthy were losing their assets and the poor were scraping for a living. But, my grandpa’s was simple and good. His family wasn’t well off by any means and money was always an issue, but even so he thinks he was too naive to know any better. He lived on a small farm in Oak Hill, West Virginia; with his mom and younger sister, Mary Kathleen. His father left when he was a baby because he wasn’t ready to take on the responsibility of having a child at eighteen. It didn’t seem that his mother knew about parenting either. She would beat him with anything she could get her hands on. Whether that be a belt she was wearing or the frying pan my grandpa took a piece of bacon from when he wasn’t supposed to. My grandpa was left to raise his sister Mary Kathleen on his own, he couldn’t bare to watch her get hurt by the cruelty of their mother, so he protected her in anyway he
After my grandpa enlisted in the Marine Corp, he was sent to “boot” camp for training. Twenty-five days into camp his platoon was shipped to Inchon Harbor, Korea. Everything happened fast. Within a short period of time my grandpa went from a kid in the boondocks of West Virginia to a fully armed solider. He landed at Inchon harbor, and travelled through Seoul, which was in rubble, out to Munsan-Ni on the 38th parallel. My grandpa never saw any of the country outside the war zone, which was mountainous and bare from mortar and artillery fire. He fought for the 1st Marine Division, British Commonwealth Division, and an Army unit, where they were dug in on a trench line like in World War I, along the 38th parallel. The 38th parallel was designed as a temporary division of Korea at its coordinates of 38°N latitude into the North and South. His job was a Marine Corps Combat Correspondent, writing articles for military and civilian publications. He was in Korea for a year and lived mostly in a tent with two other men about a mile behind the "line" and in a sand-bagged bunker when online. They slept in winter sleeping bags on canvas cots and had some hot meals and ate "C" rations (basically little cans of food: like Beans and Franks or Ham and Lima beans). My grandpa’s work as a journalist enabled him to take a back seat to combat most of the time. However, my grandpa vividly remembers when his line ended up being attacked by a