A.B. Haggard
I couldn’t think of a better one than the untold story of A.B. Haggard. Why is he significant? I guarantee you will at least be in awe of the situations in which he finds himself.
To give a back story, most people called him A.B., my name for him, was Grandpa. For my entire life, A.B. Haggard had never discussed his time in the US Army, until I retired from the Army in 2019. He was already a man of very few words, but when he did talk, everyone listened.
So, what did he tell me and how did I get it out of him. It’s simple, a veteran wants someone to listen and to relate to them. He was no different but was very reserved. The first story he told me was simply amazing and it shocked me so much that he actually shared it with me. I couldn’t keep it to myself and shared it with my mom immediately after leaving his house.
Anyone who has been to Korea or even looked at it on google maps, knows that it is extremely mountainous. He didn’t tell me the details of the battle he had just been through, but the part of the story he told me painted a picture of “Embracing the suck”. We were talking about getting a rifle that he had bought before being shipped off to the Korean War and he wanted me to pick it up from his brother-in-law in Birmingham, Alabama. This started the conversation of me wanting a M1 Garand for my collection and I had opened up a memory that led to him telling me a lot that I never knew about.
He talked about how they had just completed a gun fight and had to retreat as relief troops moved in with more supplies. The terrain was hilly, muddy, and just seemed to rain nonstop at the time.
He told me how he walked down the mountain with his rifle in two pieces, held together by the sling and completely out of ammunition. His boot had no sole left on it, so he was essentially walking in the slippery mud with nothing but a sock and some of his boot still attached and tied up on his ankle. As he and his Battle Buddies made it to the resupply point, he walked up on some crates in the shape of large rectangles. He stopped his walk, opened a box, and there was a crate of M1 Garands that were brand new, not used in WW2. He said he just stared at them in amazement, then he said he let his M1 Carbine drop to the ground, picked up a M1 Garand and kept walking, ignoring everyone around as he picked up ammo and headed to a pile that his fallen or wounded fellow Soldiers boots were kept and picked up a pair that fit. I asked him, did anyone stop you or try to take the stuff from you, he only stated, don’t know, didn’t care.
We sat in silence for a few minutes after the story, my mind wondering what hell he went through up on that mountain that makes a disciplined Soldier just say screw you, I’m going to do what I want. I never asked him anything else about it, I never pushed the issue or tried to get him to tell me more stories and it is one of my biggest regrets. This man, who had been through so much in a short time, never vented, never complained, never burdened his family with horrifying details.
A few years later, my grandpa was about to reach his 90’s and was still living alone, never remarried after the love of his life, my grandmother, passed over 20 years before hand.
We decided to reach out to the VA, he never submitted a claim for himself after he got out. I always thought it was due to nothing serious being wrong. He worked for the railroad for 27 years after coming back and getting out of the army. He was strong, as well as strongheaded. He would tell me how he had fallen, and it took some time to get back up. This was no big deal for him but scared all of us. While filling out the paperwork for a claim, my mom would ask him the questions and I would do the research. We started to go down his problem list to find service-connected issues and he said, well, I guess my ankle. And then he proceeded to state that he had taken shrapnel to the ankle but wasn’t bad, so he thought nothing of it. For seventy years, this man held onto that secret, never received any percentage from the VA, never even awarded a Purple Heart.
He was the most disgruntled battle buddy I will ever know, and he didn’t even tell us about it until his later years. It wasn’t a big deal for him, it was the biggest deal to me and just added more reason why he was a great man and my hero. He is one of the reasons why Disgruntled Battle Buddy was created. This story, like many others, are only told if someone tells it and we want to help.
My Grandpa, A.B. Haggard, born on February 4th, 1932, in Quinton, Alabama, served in the US Army, deployed to the Korean War, sadly passed away on January 30th, 2023, at the age of 90.
