When 15-year-old Eugene Roper took a job working for Western Union in February 1946, he didn’t realize he’d be delivering death notices to the families of fallen soldiers.
“We were told not to leave them,” says Roper, now 80, of the telegrams. “If there was nobody home then we’d bring them back.”
After turning 16, the Gainesville, Ga., native forged his birth date and his mother’s signature and enlisted a year early.
He graduated from basic training at Fort Knox, Ky., and then volunteered for jump school even though he wasn’t enthused about the airborne. His reason? He missed Georgia.
“Fort Benning is only 150 miles from Gainesville,” Roper says, “so I knew when I graduated at some point I’d be going home and I was a little home sick and worried, you know, considering the way I got in.”
After graduating from airborne training, Roper was preparing to ship out to Japan when a captain asked him how he got in the Army.
Roper didn’t lie.
It was a long bus ride home, he recalls. Still, Roper is recognized as a World War II veteran because he joined after December 7, 1941, and served through December 31, 1946, according to the United States Department of Veterans Affairs.
When Roper turned 17, he joined the Army Air Corps and worked on P-61s, then later returned to the infantry.
On Sept. 15, 1951, while conducting combat operations in the mountains of Korean, Roper was shot in the abdomen.
Later that month, Roper’s mother received a telegram not unlike those her son used to deliver in 1946. Tears welling in his eyes, Roper reads the letter aloud 58 years later:
“The secretary of the Army has asked me to express his deep regret that your son, Master Sgt. Eugene Roper, was wounded in action in Korea...”
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