Korean war vet: ‘You could smell the garlic’ on Chinese soldiers

When Yorkville resident Jerry Sperry recalls his time fighting in the Korean War, he thinks about bed bugs.

Sperry, 83, is a veteran of the Korean War who was awarded the Purple Heart after he was wounded three separate times in combat. Sperry fought as a member of the Marine Corps at the Battle of Chosin Reservoir in November and December 1950 during a brutal winter when the temperatures dropped to 35 degrees below zero. It was there he was introduced to bed bugs.

“When they wanted to give me bed bugs, I thought they were going to turn them loose in my sleeping bag,” he said.

“You carried bed bugs around in a little vial and they could tell you when a [Chinese soldier] was around,” Sperry said. “I don’t know how it worked, I just know that you kept the vial in your right hand to keep it warm and when you are going forward those bed bugs could tell you – they would get crazy inside that vial.”

Sperry still recalls the brutally cold weather and how the Chinese soldiers’ feet swelled up because of the frostbite.

“Their feet were bigger than footballs from being frozen and they would come down in hordes. The first line that would come down would have weapons and as soon as they got [killed] the second line would pick up their weapons and keep on coming,” Sperry remembers. “They got so close you could smell the garlic on them.”

Sperry wanted to join the Marines at the age of 16 and convinced his mother to sign off on his enlistment.

“I went into the Marine Corps, man, because that was one of the best things you could do,” he said. “I got a uniform, I got trained, you got three meals a day and pay.”

After receiving basic training, Sperry became a supply sergeant and was shipped to Korea in July 1950. When he was wounded, he received his first Purple Heart.

He was then sent to Japan and returned to Korea in November 1950, earning his second and third Purple Hearts in that tour, and received a battlefield promotion to corporal.

“I still carry a piece of shrapnel around in my right arm,” he said.

He was shot two times and was in a bayonet fight with a Chinese soldier that he doesn’t like to talk about.

“Anyone that has been in a combat zone they know what it’s all about,” he said. “If you haven’t been in a combat zone, you don’t know what it is. When bullets are flying and tracers are screaming and they send mortars in after you it’s kind of scary, and anybody that’s been in a combat position knows what we’re talking about. We had to do it, that was the orders.”

When asked about war and how civilians can understand it, Sperry replied, “I hope they never know what it is. It’s hell on wheels.”

Sperry and others were brought to the front line as riflemen because the Marines’ ranks were running low. Sperry was made a rifleman with Baker Company First Battalion Fifth Marines.

“I was in supply but then men got short so we had to grab a rifle,” he said. “We didn’t have the manpower, a lot of our platoons were annihilated and we had to fill in anyway we could, so we took cooks and office personnel and supply people and stuck them right on the front lines.”

Sperry stresses that schools need to teach kids about past wars and about the world, especially geography.

“Get in the schools and teach the kids where Korea is, where Vietnam is, where Fallujah is,” he said.

He admits he didn’t know where Korea was as a 16-year-old kid from the Midwest.

“The Marine Corps sure as hell taught me where it was,” Sperry said. “I was just one person trying to save the U.S.”

Sperry explained that he doesn’t think it’s right that he, his fellow soldiers and today’s men and service women fight in wars and then jobs and manufacturing work are outsourced to the counties they fought against.

“These politicians... for instance [Bruce] Rauner, our governor – he outsourced all his businesses and he’s a millionaire or a billionaire. And what does that do to the people who live in this country and try to support it? Not much, not much,” Sperry said.