Carroll L. Monsen

Age 82

Born in Rake, Iowa in 1934

Now lives in Esterville, Iowa

U.S. Army Korean War Veteran

Carroll Monsen grew up during some pretty tough times on the family farm in Iowa. “We didn't have electricity on the farm,” he remembers. “I walked behind a team of horses, mowing 20 acres of hay.”

Monsen was 19 years old when he “had a little riff with my brother and dad on the farm. The next day I went to town and volunteered for the Army.” That was in November of 1953. He would find himself in the Korean War by April of 1954, spending a year and a half there with the U.S. Army.

“I drove Jeep for the Combat Engineer's company commander,” Monsen recalls. “One day he asked if I could cook, so I became a cook.” Cooking didn't exclude him from other duties. “When the sirens went off, I grabbed a 50 caliber machine gun.”

Monsen was also in charge of taking enemy prisoners to the stockade when they were brought in from the front lines. “The commander said to me, 'If they try to escape, kill 'em.' That really stuck in my mind,” he says. “I'll tell you, that's a weird feeling to have him tell me to do that.”

Another war memory for Monsen was when he was told to take a case of hand grenades up to the hills. “The pins in those grenades had almost rusted though, making them very dangerous,” he recalls. “The commander told me to just set them out up there and leave them. He didn't want me to try and set them off. He said if I did, I would have been the first guy in orbit!”

Ranks were frozen at the time for many soldiers, including himself, so Monsen left the Army in September of 1955. “They tried to get me to re-enlist, which would give you another stripe

, but I said no way. I got a bunch of milk cows waiting for me back home.”

Story and photograph © 2015 Joseph Kreiss Photography