Korean War still fresh to Army medic

Historians have nicknamed it “The Forgotten War,” the three-year struggle against communism that taxed the resolve of Americans who were more concerned with rebuilding their lives after World War II.

But Dolores “Del” Hainer has forgotten nothing of the nearly two years she served as an Army medic during the Korean War. She can still recall the pained faces of the wounded young soldiers she cared for back then. She remembers their cries, and her own feeling of helplessness in the face of all that suffering and death.

“Oh, I’ll never forget a moment of that war,” said Hainer. “If I lived to be a thousand, I’d remember it as if it happened yesterday. I’ve prayed for those boys every day of my life.”

As the country prepares to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the armistice that ended the Korean conflict, on July 27, 1953, Hainer reflected on her experiences overseas that led to her long career as a nurse in Bangor.

“I found out who I was in the military,” said Hainer, who is 72 and lives in Hampden. “The war taught me how precious life really is.”

Hainer’s father, who was a barber in Caribou, moved the family to Bangor during the Depression. After graduating from John Bapst High School, Hainer decided she wanted a little adventure in her life, “to lick the world at 18” while being of service to her country. She joined the Army, where she trained to be a medic shortly before the fighting began in Korea in June 1950. Two days after Christmas, in 1951, she arrived at the Army hospital in Okinawa, an island about 100 miles off the coast of Japan.

The wounded poured in steadily from the mobile field hospitals, the M.A.S.H. units hastily assembled across the Korean battlefields. Hainer and the other medical personnel stabilized the injured who would be going home and comforted the dying.

“The first war injuries I saw, during my training, were the frostbites of soldiers who were coming back from the Chosin Reservoir,” Hainer said. “The kids who went in there were not prepared for the weather. I had never seen an amputation, and it gave me such a feeling of helplessness. There were kids whose limbs had been blown off, and kids who were blinded.”

Hainer looked into the eyes of the dying and told them they would be all right.

“You had to leave the boy with some hope, even if you knew better,” she said. “They would cry out for their mothers, and I would try to answer in the voice they needed to hear. I just turned 21 on Okinawa, and yet I saw those boys as being so much younger than me.”

Hainer was discharged from the Army in January 1953, six months before the armistice that ended the fighting that killed 36,570 Americans, including her brother-in-law. Back in Bangor, she got married, had six children in eight years, and later was divorced. She began working as a nurse at St. Joseph Hospital in Bangor in 1967, and stayed until her retirement from the cardiac unit in 1995. She has remained active in the Burton-Goode-Sargent Chapter of the Korean War Veterans, and helped to build the Korean War Memorial in Bangor, where she frequently eats her lunch “just to baby-sit the place” and chat with visitors. Hainer also talks regularly with schoolchildren about the fighting that many war-weary Americans dismissed as an ill-conceived “police action” 50 years earlier.

“Over the years, I’ve met many vets who would never talk about Korea,” she said. “Like the Vietnam vets, they never felt appreciated. … All we want is for the country to say that we did our best. That would be a nice thing to hear.”