Fri, Jul 18 2008
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Published August 07, 2007 10:02 pm - Ray Eidson couldn’t help but listen in as the guy at the table next to him in the coffee shop was telling his story. It was 1960, and Ray was having his morning cup of coffee at a little place in Avilla. The guy next to him, who Ray had never met, was telling an interesting story. Mike Pound: Coffee shop stories help unite soldiers as friends Ray Eidson couldn’t help but listen in as the guy at the table next to him in the coffee shop was telling his story.
It was 1960, and Ray was having his morning cup of coffee at a little place in Avilla. The guy next to him, who Ray had never met, was telling an interesting story. The story the guy was telling happened in 1951 somewhere in the mountains of Korea. Two large military bulldozers were clearing a path through a narrow, sorry excuse for a road when the dozer in the rear struck a land mine, killing the driver. The guy driving the first dozer pulled over just as a military truck carrying 10 or 12 U.S. soldiers sped past him. Before the driver of the dozer could say anything, the truck ran into a minefield just ahead, killing everyone in the truck. It was a grim sight. The driver of the dozer let his machine idle and sat in a stunned sort of way that would be expected of someone who had just seen a dozen men blown apart. As the GI sat on his dozer, a military jeep with a flag with two stars on it pulled up. A young lieutenant got out of the jeep and walked over to the dozer. He told the driver that the general in the jeep wanted to talk to him. The GI, also young, looked down at the officer for a second, then told the lieutenant that he figured it was just as close for the general to walk over to him as it was for him to walk over to the general. It was not exactly the way privates in the Army were supposed to react to a summons by a general — a two-star general at that. But this private was in a pretty bad mood and wasn’t much interested in talking to a general. The young lieutenant shuffled his feet and looked at the ground for a second. Then he asked the driver, a little more politely, to walk over to see the general. The dozer driver nodded his head and climbed off his vehicle. When he walked over to the jeep, the general looked at him. Then he spoke. This is what the general wanted to know minutes after two explosions had littered the ground with the remains of a dozen young men. Men with wives and children, with parents and siblings. Men who minutes ago had a future. The general wanted to know why the GI didn’t turn off his dozer. Didn’t he know he was wasting gas? The dozer driver looked the general right in the eyes and said: “Because it costs more to start it up again on gas than it does to let it idle on diesel.” Then, the driver walked away without so much as a salute. When the guy in the coffee shop finished his story, Ray walked over to him and tapped him on his shoulder. When the guy turned around, Ray smiled and said, “I was the guy driving the dozer.” Yep, nine years and thousands of miles later, two men who witnessed the same horrific event ran into each other in a small coffee shop in Southwest Missouri. But there’s more. A few days later, Ray was in the same coffee shop, and another guy he had never met was telling another story. This one was about seeing a U.S. plane crash into a mountainside. The plane crash happened on the same day as the incident with the land mines. Again, Ray walked over and introduced himself, and told the guy that he was at the same location in Korea and witnessed the same plane crash. Ray told me this story while we sat in the living room of his home east of Carthage. The two men he met in the coffee shop in 1960 became two of his closest friends. Ray told me that their last names are Garner and Weldy. He said the men still live in the area, and he told me that he didn’t want me to use their first names. You have to know Ray to understand that when he asks you not to do something, you tend to do what he says. So I agreed not to use their first names. It turns out that Garner and Weldy knew each other before the war, but they never ran into Ray in Korea, even though they likely crossed paths many times. Heck, the three even rode the same troop ship home, but they never hooked up until those two encounters in that Avilla coffee shop. I don’t know why Ray wanted to tell me his story, but I’m glad he did. See, I know that there are thousands of men like Ray with stories to tell. Stories that need to be told. I was honored that Ray wanted to tell me his story. 
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