HAROLD LACASSE

Korea Veteran

MARCH 24, 2003 · For a veteran like Harold Lacasse, who served in Korea, the new war in the Persian Gulf has brought up a lot of old memories and feelings. In Lacasse's diary, he reflects on the strange ways the war is affecting his thinking.

For me personally, these times have been very trying.

I was making one of my usual runs this morning, down to Danville out of Chicago. And there's a route called Route 49 that runs the length of the state. And there's a lot of cornfields out there. It's a lot of open, barren land. And seeing that land before me makes me think of these soldiers that we have serving in the desert. This is about what they're seeing, just a different terrain.

And I was driving down the road and then I would begin to think about how I could move soldiers across this terrain, this open terrain. You see a town coming: "How would I approach this town? How would I effectively move the troops through this open area that I'm seeing here?"

I pass a refueling point in the middle of nowhere. There's a tank farm and a pumping station for gasoline. And there's no security around this place whatsoever. As I approached that, I cleared the objective. I visually looked that over as if it was an objective. I really did do that.

Your thought process and your own activities that you used to do before you departed on a mission somewhere, those kind of things have come back. You tie your shoes in a certain way, so they don't come untied. You put things in a more organized fashion. You stick to a plan. These are the things that our soldiers are thinking right now, and doing. But these are the things that I started thinking this morning more vividly than I have in the past. It's kind of hard not to. And I can't be the only man who's thinking like this right now. This kind of stuff brings these memories back.