The Excitement of War: An Interview with Richard Sanger

On May 26^th, 2003 at 3:00 in the afternoon, I rode to the office of Richard C. Sanger, Attorney, for an interview with Korean War veteran Richard Sanger. I was running in from the rain, trying to keep my notebook and tape recorder from getting drenched; but in all honesty, the rain was helping to cool me off because I was downright nervous. As I entered his door with a RING RING of the bell, he shook my hand and plainly told me not to be nervous. I was calmed by his words and soon heard stories of his work as a pilot, one of my own life’s ambitions. He served from 1952 to 1958. This transcript that follows is the words of a Korean War pilot.

Q: This is Richard Sanger of the Korean War?

RS: Yep.

Q: O.K. Let’s start with your branch and rank.

RS: I was in the Air Force and I went to Trinity, I graduated from Trinity and I was in the R.O.T.C. program and I got out of there as a 2^nd Lieutenant. I was assigned to Rapid City Air Force Base in South Dakota and I was there for two years and Morocco for two years. Then I came back for another two years in South Dakota. Then I was discharged to captain and I went to law school.

Q: So you’re an attorney now?

RS: Yep.

Q: Let’s hear about your training. Now, I’ve heard that training can be very difficult for the Army and Air Force. What kind of training did you have to go through?

RS: Primarily our training was in R.O.T.C. in college. It wasn’t particularly rigorous. In the Air Force out in South Dakota once a year we had to go out in the woods in the Black Hills for five days and there was no rations, we had to make our own way and that was kind of fun. Uh, different. And we had to learn to catch fish with our hands or make a wire net that would catch them and we’d have something to eat. But, umm, and berries. Lots of them.

Q: Hmm that’s interesting. Now, what is R.O.T.C.?

RS: Uh, Reserve Officer’s Training Corps. It’s a Federal program with, ah, many colleges throughout the country. All land–grant colleges. University of Connecticut and the University of Massachusetts and so on have to have it. But then for others it’s voluntary and Trinity volunteered for it and it’s the end of that. The first two years you just have classes and the last two years they paid, umm, 200 dollars a month. And then we’d have two weeks of training in the summer of junior and senior year.

Q: What year were you dispatched?

RS: I, umm, I got into the Air Force in 1952 and the Korean War ended in October of 1953.

Q: So, you served in Morocco, you said?

RS: Mm – hmm.

Q: So you traveled a lot?

RS: Yeah, actually when I was in Rapid City I was in a job with the, umm, what they called Flyaway Kids. And we would go on temporary duty tours to a lot of places. I went to Guam for four months in 1955. I went to, uh, Greenland twice for about two and a half weeks each. I went to Alaska and, yeah a lot of traveling.

Q: I always thought it would be a nice way to see some sights.

RS: Yeah, well, I was married over there, err, I was married in South Dakota, but Eleanor came over to Morocco and we traveled all over Europe during our 30 day, umm, [Pause] vacation we had each year. And we went to Germany, Belgium, Holland, Austria and we traveled all over Morocco by car and that was fun.

Q: What was the longest time you ever stayed in one place?

RS: Hmmm [Pause], after I got out of service and came here. [Laughs] I’ve been here since ’58.

Q: Well I guess that would be the longest. So, you were in Morocco for how long?

RS: Two years.

Q: Are there any important missions that you went on during those two years?

RS: Well, I was a supply officer so we were involved with logistics and a wing of aircraft would come over from, umm, they call it the 2^nd Air Force at the southeast United States and I guess that there were eight bases there. They’d come over for about 90-day stretches and we would have to service them. Then just as one left in ’58, err, ’56 rather, the Suez crisis came up and Israel and Egypt and Syria and the whole thing was a mess. So in one day we had four wings of aircraft and that was 180 airplanes plus their supply planes and their fuel planes came and we had to split them up somehow. So we got about 1,000 tents. [Laughs] That was about the same time as the Czech Rebellion against Russia. We were helpless to be able to do anything about that because we didn’t have any awareness at all to do anything to protect the Czechs. That was a shame. [Sighs]