The Wall

I took this photo in 2008 at the Vietnam War Memorial, near the Lincoln Memorial. 

There is one Sensing whose name is engraved on the wall, Capt. John L. Sensing, US Army. I never knew him, but we are some ordinal of cousin, since all Sensings (in the South, anyway) descend from one Jakob Sensing, who immigrated to North Carolina from Germany in the 1730s. One of his sons, a Revolutionary War veteran, took his veteran's land grant in Tennessee. So here we are.

Capt. Sensing was a helicopter pilot, flying an OH-6 Cayuse aircraft (right) in the Thua Thien Province when his bird was hit by an RPG near Firebase Ripchord, April 30, 1970. He was serving in B Troop, 2/17 Air Cavalry.

Also killed on the helicopter were SP5 Robert E. Masseth and SP4 David W. Staton.

In 2019, Capt. Sensing's cousin, Dave Davidson, posted a moving tribute to him on Facebook and included this photo of John:

God rest you all, John!

In 2010, Debbie Masseth sent this: 

My son sent me this article [from where it was originally posted] and it gave me chills. Robert E. Masseth was my brother-in-law and my son is his name sake. My husband, David Masseth passed away with cancer this summer. We did not get a lot of information about his brother other then he was killed in a helicopter crash on April 30, 1970.

Somehow, the circle remains unbroken. 

It's not about us

 Why Memorial Day is not about us living veterans.

____________

Farewell to father

Yesterday, my father, Thurman Sensing, died after a sudden and steep decline the night before. He lived for the past two years in Woodcrest Health Care of Nashville, basically a high-end nursing home. Because of the C19 restrictions, I was unable to visit him from mid-March until yesterday, when my brother, Will, and I were called to come in. Our older brother lives in Delaware.

Dad was 92 years and eight months old when passed from this life. Will and I were at his bedside when Dad died very peacefully at 4 p.m. almost on the dot.

Dad was a Seabee sailor during and after World War 2 aboard the battleship USS Texas and the escort carrier USS Bougainville, both in the Pacific.

For the past several years, I took Dad to lunch on Memorial Day. I was looking forward to bringing him lunch (C19 permitting) this month.

I had always feared that a morning phone call from Woodcrest would bear the news that Dad had died overnight, so Will and I are thankful we could be at his side. God is with us.

Because of C19 restrictions in Nashville, we will not have a visitation or a chapel service. It will be graveside only. While non-family will not be turned away by any means, cemetery rules at this time require that no more than 10 persons be at graveside. Others may come, but must stand well away. (I officiated a funeral like that last month. It is lousy, but that's what was required.)

Dad was a good father, an honorable man of courage, integrity and duty. I was blessed to be his son and I give thanks for all that he showed me and taught me. Fathers' Day next month will seem very, very empty, I already know.

God be with you, Dad, 'til we meet again.
By his counsels guide, uphold you,
With his sheep securely fold you,
God be with you till we meet again. 

From the 1880 hymn by Jeremiah Eames Rankin. 

Here is his obituary.

Thurman Sensing, Jr., of Nashville, passed from this life into God’s eternal presence on May 14, 2020. Born on Sept. 20, 1927, he was preceded in death in 2015 by his wife of 64 years, Angelyn Burkitt Sensing. He is survived by his three sons, Andy (Terri) of Hockessin, Delaware; Don (Catherine) of Greenbrier, Tenn.; and William (Janice) of Nashville. He is also survived by seven grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.

Thurman was a World War Two veteran, having served in the US Navy aboard the battleship USS Texas and the escort carrier USS Bougainville. He graduated from Vanderbilt University in 1950 and then worked as an agent for New York Life until well into his 80s, having earned numerous sales awards throughout his career. Thurman also served as president and secretary of the Woodmont Kiwanis club.

An Eagle Scout, Thurman was co-founder of Troop 121 at Woodmont Baptist Church

Receiving the Good Shepherd award in 2016

and served as an assistant scoutmaster and Explorer scout leader. He served as Chairman of Tenn. Committee of scouting and as the Advancement Chairman for many years. He received The Pathfinder and Long Rifle awards and was the Western District Eagle representative on the Eagle advancement board. He was a recipient of the scouting Good Shepherd award.

An avid and highly-skilled golfer, he tried to imbue his enthusiasm for the game in his three sons but alas, only one came even close to his devotion and skill. If heaven doesn’t have a golf course now, they will shortly!

A graveside service will be held at Woodlawn Cemetery, Nashville, on Monday, May 18, with the Rev. Nathan Parker of Woodmont Baptist Church officiating.

The family asks that in lieu of flowers, memorials may be given to the Scouts BSA or to the memorial fund of Woodmont Baptist Church.

A Prayer at Taps, from the Song and Service Book for Ship and Field, 1941, a publication of the office of the chief chaplains of the War Department and the Navy Department, and used during World War Two:

Before we go to rest we commit ourselves to thy care, O God our Father, beseeching Thee though Christ our Lord to keep alive thy grace in our hearts. Watch Thou, O Heavenly Father, with those who wake, or watch, or weep to-night, and give thine angels charge over those who sleep. Tend those who are sick, rest those who are weary, soothe those who suffer, pity those in affliction; be near and bless those who are dying, and keep under thy holy care those who are dear to us.

O Lord, support us all the days of this troublous life, until the shadows lengthen, and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done. Then of thy great mercy grant us a safe lodging, and a holy rest, and peace at last. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Update: We received the death certificates right after the service. The cause of death is listed as cardiac and pulmonary arrest. We believe that is the correct determination, especially since Dad had already had a heart attack in his late 70s, and it is fully consistent with the suddenness of his terminal condition and the symptoms he exhibited until 4 p.m. of the day he passed.

When I visited North Korea

The boundary line between North Korean and South Korea is the Military Demarcation Line, MDL. It bisects the peninsula east to west, except in the western portion, where it runs mostly north to south. Seoul is only 30 miles south of that portion of the MDL. The terrain on 2.5 kilometers on either side of the MDL constitutes the Demilitarized Zone.

Panmunjom village was located near what became the MDL during the Korean War. It was there that final negotiations between the US and its allies and the Chinese and North Koreans were held. Prisoners were also exchanged there upon the cease-fire agreement. That village had actually been destroyed in the war before the negotiations started. The place now called Panmunjom, above, is a wholly artificial construct designed for ongoing military-to-military contacts between the United Nations Command (meaning US/ROK) and N. Korea, officially known as the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea.

Panmunjom actually straddles the MDL; it is free on one side and communist on the other. There are several buildings there, one of which is used for the meetings, which have continued fairly regularly for several decades. The negotiation table inside this building (more like a shed) sits exactly centered on the MDL:

One side of the table is in South Korea, the other side is in the North. When I visited there were no N. Koreans in the building, so we were allowed to walk around the table, thus technically entering North Korea, though obviously only by a few feet. Somewhere I have a photo of me standing on the Northern side of the table.

Panmunjom sits inside a four-kilometer-wide strip of the DMZ called the Joint Security Area. The JSA, including Panmunjom, is staffed on our side by a combined ROK/US detachment. The DPRK side is staffed by North Koreans, obviously. There is a low hill on the DPRK side of Panmunjom. Atop the hill the DPRK built a high and wide building, as you see in the first photo, above. It is meant to overawe us with its foreboding. It’s a joke because the whole building is really a façade that is only two meters (6-1/2 feet) from front to rear.

The 1953 Armistice established a Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission (NNSC) as an independent, fact-finding body for maintaining the armistice. Originally it was composed of senior officers from four noncombatant nations. We selected Sweden and Switzerland, the DPRK and China selected Czechoslovakia and Poland.

The Czech component was forced out by the DPRK early in 1993. The Polish component was forced out by the DPRK early in 1995. Note that those are the years those two nations shrugged off the last of their communist chains. The Swedish and Swiss delegations are still encamped in the southern half of the DMZ adjacent to the JSA. The former Polish and Czech camps are now used by the North Koreans for their own purposes.

I did not take these two photos; they are from Business Insider's photo-essay about the DMZ. It seems pretty much nothing has changed in the last 35 years.

Except for my trip to this site and a few trips I made (heavily armed) to the two US posts inside the DMZ, I spent my DMZ duty at what was then the only active firebase in the US Army, Firebase 4P1. I wrote about  I wrote about that singular experience here.

Firebase Four-Papa-One, Korean DMZ, 1978

I talked about the Korean DMZ and the Joint Security Area in a different post. Just outside the DMZ during my tour in Korea (77-78) was an artillery firebase called 4P1, pronounced Four-Papa-One. Because the DMZ runs north-south in that part of the country, 4P1 was actually east of the DMZ.

I spent my Korea tour as a lieutenant assigned C Battery, 1st Battalion, 38th Field Artillery, whose motto was "Steel Behind the Rock." "Steel" referred to artillery fire, "the Rock" was the 38th Infantry Regiment, which earned the nickname Rock of the Marne for its heroic defense near the Marne River in France in 1918. My battery's standing mission in Korea was to provide artillery fire for the 1st Battalion, 38th Infantry. We were all part of the 2d US Infantry Division, which is still stationed in South Korea.

In 1978, 4P1 was the only combat firebase in the Army. The division's artillery units took turns rotating through duty at 4P1. My battalion's turn came up in the summer of 1978. There were five batteries in the battalion, three of which were firing batteries with howitzers. Each of those three spent 35 days there. We went up with our six 105mm howitzers in late May, commanded by Capt. Bill Brophy, an outstanding officer. (Bill retired in 1999 as a colonel and is now a vice president of Usibelli Coal Mines, Inc., in Alaska.)

I was the battery fire direction officer (FDO), in charge of the fire direction center, FDC. (Yes, I know, you didn't sign up for an acronym lesson, but that's what the military uses.) We also had three lieutenants as forward observers (you guessed it, "FOs"). Our FOs went to duty inside the DMZ.

There were two guard posts inside the DMZ. One was called GP Ouelette, so close to the boundary line with North Korea you could have spit on communist soil. The other GP was maybe 400 meters further away; I don't recall its name. Under the terms of the armistice, only military police are allowed inside the DMZ. So we had two infantry military police detachments inside the DMZ, one detachment at each of two guard posts. Each was at least of platoon strength and very heavily armed. Every time I went to Ouelette I became a military policeman, too, complete with arm brassard, rifle locked and loaded the whole time.

M102A1 105mm howitzer

Our guns fired projectiles weighing 35 pounds with a maximum range of 11 kilometers. A 105mm high-explosive projectile had a casualty radius of 30 meters. Our six guns could fire a total of 180 rounds the first three minutes of a fire mission, then for weapon-safety reasons, had to drop to three rounds per gun per minute for sustained firing. The guns were arranged in the open in a pattern we called a "lazy W,"with 25 meters spacing between guns laterally, and alternating front to rear about 15 meters.

My FDC was inside an underground bunker at one end of the gun line, about 30 meters up a rise. The FDC served as the operations center for the battery, with our bunks at the far end. We had radios to talk to the division command post-forward, which had a secure line to the main division command post in the south. We also had radio to the infantry operations center at Camp Liberty Bell, just outside the DMZ, where an infantry battalion was stationed at high alert. We had a radio to each guard post to talk to our observers and we had field phones to Capt. Brophy's ready room, each of the guns and the executive officer's battle station. We were up and running 24/7. Our main job was calculating ballistic firing solutions for the guns.

There were 125 prearranged targets inside North Korea and the DMZ for which we had to recalculate firing data four times per day. Weather has great effect on artillery ballistics, and four times per day a "metro" section, not part of our unit, flew weather balloons that collected weather data and radioed it back to the ground. These data were converted into a very lengthy numeric voice message which was radioed to us. Receiving metro messages was very exacting and time consuming. Fortunately, 4P1's bunker had an electronic artillery computer called the Field Artillery Digital Automatic Computer (FADAC, of course, pronounced fay-dack), but only my FDC sergeant, Sgt. Gosinski, and I had been trained on it. Without it we could not possibly have manually recalculated data for 125 targets four times per day. Sometimes, we got the weather data on punch-hole tape, which FADAC could read.

The permissible response time for fire missions was very short. The guns were laid on a target inside the DMZ, which we could have shot within seconds of receiving the radio call for fire. To keep us on our toes, the division had a practice mission called, "speedball do not load." At any time of day or night, no matter the weather, a division-staff officer could direct an FO to radio a call for fire to us - but obviously not to be shot. The stopwatch was ticking, and excuses were not accepted!

A breath away from war

To distinguish these missions from real missions, the call for fire was slightly changed. The FO would call us and say, "adjust fire, speedball do not load, over." That way we knew it was a practice mission. As I recall, though, we only had three minutes to report ready to fire, except that we did not actually load a round into the howitzer.

We'd flip a light switch by the radio that started a siren above the bunker. Across the fire base, every cannon crewman and battery NCOs sprinted to their guns if they weren't already there. Meantime, the FO completed the target information, we computed the firing data and read it on the field phone to the guns.

After just a few days we in the FDC could tell right away when the FO had a SDNL mission because of the stress in his voice.

So one afternoon the radio comes to life and I could tell it was a SDNL mission. But instead of saying, "Adjust fire, speedball do not load, over," he said, "Fire for effect, at my command, over." That was a real call for fire. I hit the siren.

There had been a breach of the MDL by a platoon of 40-50 North Korean troops. They had crossed to our side of the DMZ. On the division radio network I heard the infantry military police on patrol inside the DMZ being ordered to set up an ambush and kill them. Capt. Brophy was off site in his jeep. I called him on the radio and gave him a code phrase to return immediately.

We quickly computed firing data. I directed the mission be fired with three rounds per gun (18 total) of high-explosive rounds, using impact-detonating fuzes instead of air burst fuzes. Sgt. Gosinski sent the firing data to the guns. Some gun chiefs were a little confused about whether this mission was practice or real - the ones who were Vietnam vets weren't confused! I briefed the XO by field phone and he got the gun chiefs straightened out. Each crew loaded a high-explosive round and placed two more, ready to fire, in the ready rack. Things were very tense. The battery commander came in and I briefed him, then he went to the gun line.

I don't know how long we stayed ready to fire, probably 20 minutes. Then the FO called. My FDC soldiers were wide eyed when they heard him. I probably was, too! We knew that 4P1 could get hit by more than 600 North Korean artillery rounds within 10 minutes. We would have been atomized in such a barrage.

"End of mission," said the FO.

The enemy had crossed back over the line before they reached the ambush. So they lived to see another day, and so did we.