Service in Army results in lifelong friendships

OTTAWA, Ill. — When Randy Rosengren graduated from high school, he could not wait to start farming with his dad, but first he chose to complete his military service.

“I graduated from high school in 1968 and I thought I would get drafted, so as soon as I was 18, I went down to the local draft board and put my name on the top of the list to get drafted,” Rosengren said.

“If you enlisted, you had to spend three years, but being drafted was the shortest amount of time you could spend in the military,” he said. “So, that’s what I decided to do and not stick my dad with a crop to harvest when I was gone.”

During the months after graduation and before Rosengren went into the Army, he worked in a factory as a welder.

“I thought the Army could use a welder, but at that time all they needed was infantry,” he said.

The young soldier completed his basic training at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri and his infantry training at Fort Lewis in Washington. At the age of 18, he was assigned to Vietnam.

“I was fortunate enough that our platoon was deployed to a small village in the middle of nowhere, where they actually farmed,” Rosengren said. “They were growing rice and vegetables.”

All the fighting-age people were gone, so the village was mostly grandmas and young kids. The U.S. soldiers befriended a 10-year-old boy and shared their candy bars with him.

“They didn’t have anything like that and he would wear our helmets and clean our weapons for us,” Rosengren said.

After living with the villagers for a few months, in January, the young boy told the soldiers that there were four to five enemies about two miles away.

“That was our job to neutralize situations like that,” Rosengren said.

However, when the soldiers got to the location, there was no enemy.

“Our little friend had sent us to a mine field,” Rosengren said. “It was considered those kids’ job — to befriend us and then do whatever they could to help the country rather than us.”

The first guy in the line of U.S. soldiers stepped on a mine and died that day, Rosengren was the next one and Joe was third in line and was wounded in his legs.

“I don’t know how he did it. He was able to crawl over, get the radio, take it up on top of the hill and get it working again to call in medical support,” Rosengren recalled.

“Joe turned into one of my best friends because of what he did with that radio,” he said. “I wanted to fall asleep because of the rapid blood loss, but he kept me from falling asleep and saved my life.”

Rosengren first went to a hospital in Japan, then Alaska and Kansas to recover from his extensive injuries.

“I never had to go through the people getting spit on in the airports because I was transported to the hospital,” he said.

Since Rosengren still had one year of service to complete, he was stationed at Fort Riley in Kansas.

“I was just killing time until I got out and it was driving me crazy,” he said.

So, Rosengren found a farm family about 10 miles from the post and asked if they could use any help.

“The first guy did not need help, but he sent me to the guy down the road who was a dairy farmer,” he said. “I got him out of bed at 9 that night and when I asked him if he needed help. He said, ‘Yes, come back the next day.’”

While at Fort Riley, Rosengren was riding in a truck that was traveling to the rifle range at about 4:30 in the morning.

“The driver dozed off, the truck went into the ditch and rolled upside down,” he said. “One of the boards on that truck broke my shoulder, so it was discouraging to end up in the same recovery ward that I came home to from Vietnam.”

At noontime that day, the farm family that Rosengren was helping was eating lunch and listening to the radio when they heard the report about the truck accident at Fort Riley that resulted in one person killed and several injured.

“My name was one of them, so they came to the hospital and gave me a flower in a tractor planter,” Rosengren said. “I took that home and kept it for 40 years until Sam came down with a brain tumor.”

“I sent that tractor back to him and he set it right on the kitchen table,” he said. “I told him, ‘It worked to get me healed up. Maybe it will work for you.’ I made a lifelong friendship with the farm family and I still talk with his sons.”

When Rosengren’s dad got sick, the company sergeant got the soldier an early-out of the Army to go home.

“I got out in December rather than March, so I spent less than two years in the Army,” he recalled.

“I married Judy in April, we moved into the house right next door and we have been on this farm ever since,” he said. “I’m the third generation from the Rosengren family to farm in this township.”

Married for 54 years, the Rosengrens are parents to Neil, Aaron, Karyl and Julie and they have 11 grandchildren.

“Neil is taking over the farm and my grandson, Rilan, is graduating from the University of Illinois and coming back to the farm,” Rosengren said.

He has operated a corn shelling business since 1982.

“We had four kids and the hogs I was trying to raise were not profitable, so I had to do something else,” he said.

“A neighbor wanted to get out of the corn shelling business and he asked me if I wanted to take it over, so we got rid of the hogs and went into corn shelling.”

During the difficult farming times of the 1980s, many farmers choose to store their corn in their cribs instead of paying for storage at an elevator.

“That’s why it was so popular when I got the sheller and we shelled over 900,000 bushels of corn a couple of those years,” Rosengren said.

“I took in a big territory and made a lot of connections with farmers through the shelling business,” he said. “I’m down to one or two cribs, but I can’t get rid of the corn sheller because it’s just part of me.”

Randy and Judy have made two trips to Vietnam in 2001 and 2011.

“The first time we had a guide and he said that they thought America was the enemy and they didn’t understand why this big country wanted to come and take over their tiny country,” Judy said about the Vietnam War.

“We tried to get some closure and it helped,” Randy said. “We stopped for lunch by the beach and I told the guide that it looked like a refugee camp that I was at during the war.”

Rosengren was at a refugee camp for two days to help them and one of the grandmothers found a sea turtle on the beach and butchered it for meat.

“The driver asked the lady running the fish restaurant if she remembered that and she was one of six kids there watching, 40 or so years before, so we had a lot of visiting that afternoon,” he said.

In 2011, the Rosengrens were within one mile of where Randy was injured in the minefield.

“I wanted to see the little village I spent so much time in and we gave up so much of our blood for,” he explained.

“After the war, the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong were so upset with the people in the village for letting us stay with them that they renamed the village and exiled all the people that lived there,” he said. “Even though nine out of 10 of us in that patrol got wounded, including two that died.”

“When I was in Vietnam, all I thought about was home and thinking about coming home to the farm helped me get through my daily routine,” Rosengren said. “That little remote village was a beautiful area, but they lived in straw huts and there was no running water, no electricity and no roads.”