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| Vol. 18, No. 13 | Dec. 3, 1998 |
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| Vol. 18, No. 13 | Dec. 3, 1998 |
"You know the old saying, 'Let George do it!' Well, he did. And thanks to his dedication and perseverance, this group is formed. It takes a special person to complete this task. Thank you, George."
George is George Fuller, a Korean War veteran and former UD plumbing supervisor, who organized the Iwo Jima Black Pearl Veterans Group (USAF), and these words are on the "above and beyond" award presented to him at the group's last reunion in Nashville.
More than 60 Pacific veterans got together to renew old friendships and talk about the experiences they shared. It was all thanks to Fuller, a former commander of Korean War Veterans in Delaware, who got the chain of communication rolling.
Fuller, a HVAC technician and then plumbing supervisor at UD for 22 years, had the misfortune to break his leg just when he retired in the early 1990s. It was a complicated injury requiring surgery, and he was laid up for months.
"You can only watch so much TV, and I needed something to do as my wife doesn't drive and I couldn't drive," he recalled. "I started going through boxes of things that had belonged to my mother and found stuff from my days in the service, when I was a staff sergeant with an equipment recovery group during the Korean War.
"What our outfit essentially did was to locate, salvage and distribute used military equipment to the outfits that needed it. We called it the commander's 'need it/want it/find it wish list.' They'd tell us what they needed in terms of equipment, and we tried to locate it and retrieve it for them. We also would secure and hide equipment when the U.S. forces left a region."
Headquartered in Iwo Jima, Fuller and his outfit moved all over the Pacific from Wake Island, Guam and Korea to Quaemoy Island off Taiwan, salvaging runway lights, generators and parts of planes and burying or unburying electric cables.
"We were even sent to Indochina, now Vietnam, to retrieve a downed plane. We landed in unmarked planes with nothing to identify us but our dog tags," he recalled.
As he remembered those experiences some 40 years later, Fuller wondered what had happened to his old Air Force buddies. With one letter from a now deceased friend and a few names to start him on his quest, he turned to the Veterans Administration for help.
He found a sympathetic person at the VA, Carol Waters, who told him that while they could not give out information or addresses, if he wrote letters, stamped them, including his address inside, they would send them off. That way individuals' privacy was protected, but anyone who wanted to get in touch with Fuller could do so.
After six months of trying, Fuller located exactly eight people. He enlisted their help, asking them to look at whatever they had, such as old orders and written documents, for names and addresses, and the numbers began to multiply.
"It was worth it when the phone rang and someone would say, 'I didn't think anyone cared,' or they said how much they appreciated or were touched by my efforts," Fuller said.
Fuller eventually discovered the whereabouts of the chaplain of the outfit, called him and said, "Do you remember me-George Fuller?" The response was quick and to the point-'How could I forget you? You were crazier than hell!"
The Black Pearls now number more than 300 veterans. They have had three reunions with the next planned in Puerto Rico in 2000.
What binds this group together?
Fuller expressed this in the Suribachi Sentinel, the group's newsletter named after a mountain in Iwo Jima. Looking back at his Pacific experiences, he wrote, "You know this meant eating, working, playing, joking, yelling, suffering, and yes, even fighting, day in and day out.
"At first you were strangers, soon you became friends, someone you may have avoided or never met in the 'real world.' But you know it was more than friendship. You depended on each other in order to get the job done, to defeat boredom and came away with an experience only those who were there know.... A reunion offers a chance to remember, fill in the blanks, to rediscover long-lost friends, share again experiences forgotten."
-Sue Swyers Moncure
Photo by Jack Buxbaum
