I was nineteen in Anaheim living with my mom Alberta. I enjoyed serving others as a hospital orderly, so I asked Mom how to stay in this line of work and still make money. She told me physical therapists made ten times as much money as orderlies. I talked to a Physical Therapist at Orange County General Hospital. She told me she had become a Registered Nurse to qualify for entry to Physical Therapy school. I decided to follow her example and passed night college algebra and geometry that summer to qualify for nurses school. But school was delayed.
The Korean war started and I volunteered for active duty with a Navy Reserve Fighter Plane Squadron. Several of my high school buddies and I were pictured in the Anaheim Bulletin newspaper as the first boys leaving town for war. I was a pole vaulter on the Navy track team at North Island in San Diego. I went on shakedown cruises on two airplane carriers recently taken out of mothballs. Some of the machinery still had black tar preservative covering it to prevent rust. One of my jobs was to clean the preservative off twenty caliber machine guns used on F4U4 Navy fighter planes. The F4U4 airplanes had inverted gull wings and were used extensively off carriers during World War Two. Our pilots and mechanics learned to work with newer jet fighters. Working as an aircraft ordinance man was not interesting to me. I felt the Korean war would be over soon, and I would need to find work as a civilian. I wrote letters asking to be transferred to Hospital Corps School. Instead, they sent me to Agana, Guam where my new squadron pulled targets for the Marines to shoot at with anti aircraft weapons. This is exciting flying, and we received hazardous flight pay.
For recreation we went to Tumon Bay. Some of us skin-dived there every Wednesday afternoon and on week ends. While swimming we heard the juke box on shore wafting music over the waves to us. The scenery and climate was romantic. We became sunburned every week at the beach. My best friend was Larry Zabel. He was twenty one, tall, blond, blue eyed, wide grinning, and full of fun. Besides, he was an Anaheim boy like me, and we had grown up together. He drove a gas truck and filled the airplanes with fuel.
The gas truck drivers lounged at the gas shack and Larry kept his radio there with a sign on it that read, "No shit kicking music allowed on this radio. Signed, John Browne, the most rough house sum-bitch in the whole world." Lucky for me, nobody tested me.
On the note he sketched my face wearing a sailor cap. He used my name and face as a joke. Larry used my broken fountain pen to write letters home full of humorous sketches. He liked the pen because it made a wide line but when turned over, it made a fine line for his drawings. Larry loved Jazz and Sarah Vaughn. Although he hated country music, he later became a cattle rancher and a cowboy artist. After the Navy he became a professional artist, movie maker for the Government, and retired on his own cattle ranch in Montana as a western art oil painter.
When the war ended, I had been schooled and worked in the Navy as a Hospital Corpsman after transferring from the fighter squadron. At Balboa Naval Hospital in San Diego, corpsmen do all kinds of jobs. I worked on medical wards, was ping-pong champion of the locked psychiatric ward, and worked alone on an open psychiatric ward with fifty patients. The psychiatric patients were given liberty and they raised hell in San Diego.
Later, I drove a medical supply truck, and finally I served as a medical brig guard. I was not a war hero. My younger brother Vic was one of the first American Army servicemen to cross the 38th Parallel into North Korea. He was one of many war heroes who fought in Korea.
I was released from the navy after serving three years. The war was over.