Lt. Col. William R. Beuch United States Army Reserve

In rememberance of my father on Veterans Day

My dad was born in 1925 in Spokane Washington. He married my mom in 1944 which effectively ended his short football career at the University Washington. He was in night classes and was enrolled in ROTC when his country called him to duty. He shipped of to Korea as a Second Lieutenant in the infantry. Dad was in Korea a short time when a closed trench he was in took a direct hit from an enemy mortar. Dad had shrapnel all up his legs and into his back. Because it was a back injury they hung the stretcher upside down on the medivac chopper and took off. It was at this time that dad watched an enemy rifleman shoot the chopper down. It was not dad’s time to go. He received two purple hearts and went on to serve another 22 years on active duty.

In 1954 dad completed his courses in Romanian at the Army foreign language school and we moved to Frankfurt, Germany. Dad was stationed at Camp King but spent most his time elsewhere. We had a lot of stuff from Turkey so you can make some basic assumptions.

In 1958 we moved to Ft. Sill Oklahoma, where dad went to artillery school and then served as a battery commander. It was known as Air defense by then and included nuke capabilities.

In 1962 dad went to S. Vietnam with the first 200 American army advisors in country.
He earned a Bronze Star and the Air medal while there.

Dad came home in 1963 and the family was posted to Ft Riley, Kansas while dad went to Commanding General Staff College in Leavenworth, Kansas and finished earning his college degree at the University of Omaha. In 1964, after graduating second in his class at the Commanding General Staff College, we moved to Virginia and dad started to work at the Defense Intelligence Agency. For the rest of the war dad weekly and often daily met with the Joint Chiefs to brief them. When dad retired from the Army he went right back to work at the DIA. After eight or ten years there he retired again and went directly to work for SAIC.

When dad finally retired for good, he and my mom moved back to Oklahoma. They liked the people in Oklahoma and the cost of living made it a great place to retire. Two of my brothers lived in OK City at the time and that made it even better.

In 1994 my dad went into the hospital to have a kidney removed that he had injured playing football so long ago. While in the hospital he contracted a MRSA infection that succeeded in doing what the communist could not do for so many years. He rests in peace in the Old Post Cemetary at FT. Sill where some legendary native Americans, such as Quannah Parker and Geronimo had been interred. Geronimo’s grave was moved from Old Post out to the Wichita National Wildlife Range to prevent desecration by tourists.

My dad started his military career fighting the communists and lived to see the Berlin Wall come down. That’s a hell of a ride. I will always be proud of him and hope he would have been proud of me today.

God Bless you dad, and God bless all the Americans that have served our country, and God Bless The United States of America.