It was the winter of 1950. Earl Vining had only been in Korea for a few months, and already he’d been wounded twice.
“When they sent me back again, I knew I was going to get killed,” Vining, now 78, said.
Then, one day, a lieutenant popped his head into the hospital tent and asked the question that Vining credits with saving his life:
“Does anybody know how to run a bulldozer?”
I just got back from an interview for my next Backroads story, due out Monday. This will be the third Backroads in a row to profile a local veteran — the series is a lead-in to Memorial Day at the end of the month.
I interviewed Earl Vining, a 78-year-old veteran of both Korea and Vietnam. Earl is a talker, and reporters love talkers. The problem, though, is that you wind up with more material than you can possibly fit into the column inches allotted to your story.
I guess that’s why the journalism gods created blogs.
Anyway, here’s a story that Earl told me during our interview today.
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