at Seoul City Airport, once. Someone had stuck a knife into a #10 can of peanut butter on one of the bench tables. It was like King Arthur’s Excalibur sword stuck in a rock but it didn’t become unfixed. You yanked at it and it just went ‘twang’. That knife and can of peanut butter are probably in a military museum somewhere.”

            U.N. facilities in Korea were on the spartan side. They were particularly rustic during the early part of the war when U.S. led forces were boxed in around the area of Pusan—the ‘Pusan Perimeter.”

            Wilkinson: “As Bob says, we’d sometimes eat with the GI’s in military mess halls. That’s how I got hepatitis. I learned later there were 800 or 900 cases of it there. I was in a Seventh Day Adventist hospital for awhile and then back stateside to the Mayo Clinic. Nice little vacation”.

            “Now and then, when UN-99 didn’t return to Tokyo for the night, we left the U.N. people off and flew to a military base in southern Japan,” Chernich recalls. “We’d have a warm shower, a good meal and a soft bed in officers quarters. Then back to Korea the next morning.”

            At times the U.N. folks would interpret their ‘investigating atrocities’ charter rather broadly. On one flight from Tokyo seats were removed and the cabin was loaded up with booze – cases of scotch, bourbon, gin, vodka and a variety of fancy stuff, all top shelf. Despite tribulations they knew how to enjoy life.

            Now and then media people would bum rides on UN-99, which wasn’t really proper. Among them was Bill Stapleton of the Associated Press, Bill Lawrence, later a mogul in the National Press Club, and various others. When UN-99 landed in Seoul or Pusan it would occasionally be accosted by a bundle of media types asking, “What’s going on?” Wilkinson recalls; “Sometimes we would take exposed film from the newspaper people back to Tokyo. Their people there would meet the plane and pick it up. The pictures would be in the U.S. papers the next day.” (Dramatic for those days. There was Wirephoto then but TV hadn’t yet brought wars into the living room).

            The non-combatant Swedes had medical detachments in Korea. Bob remembers often having a husband/wife medical team aboard UN-99 going to various Red Cross and related hospitals. “Her name was Ingrid Jarnald and she was a true Swedish beauty. A real knockout,” says Bob. “A month or so later I saw her on the cover of Life Magazine,” (Issue of September 25, 1950).”One of the U.N. types became highly protective of her,” Wilkinson noted. “Any time we were going where she was he wanted to go along.”

            Chernich also recalls a brief, humorous encounter with Strategic Air Command chief, General Curtis LeMay. “But I didn’t know who he was until later.”