Harold Jerome Nelson

Taylor, Wisconsin

January 17, 2005

Lived most of his life in Westby, WI.  Had lived 3 years in La Crosse, WI.  He passed away at home due to emphysema and cancer.

Harold is driving the jeep.

This is a great website you are starting to set up......I have no pictures or articles, I am a 25 year old man, and my biggest hero EVER was in the Korean war. My grandfather was a young boy and just starting high school when his grandmother could not raise him anymore and he decided that the only thing left to do was join the Army........ever since I was a little boy he has claimed that ALL he was was a radio man and did not have a significant role in the war. I hear once a statement that was very appropriate for one that he would say to me when I was a little boy I would ask grandpa, were you a war hero, and he would reply......I wasn't but I stood along the side of men that were. I used to always sit on his lap when I was a little boy, and the older I got obviously I could not sit on his lap anymore, and by the time I was in middle school my grandpa shook so bad I always asked him why he shook.....the story goes that he ALWAYS drove the same path everyday to a certain radio tower....unfortunately one day he was so sick he could not move and his best friend that he always rode with drove it that time.....turns out that that night the Koreans had set up mines all along the trail, and well his buddy was blown to pieces and my grandfather could never shake that image. He came back to the states after the war and worked as hard as he could to give us all a good life (and it is a great one).........and as we speak he is laying in his bed on meds his lungs filling up with fluid and having hopefully another week to live........I have all my life wished that there would have been a way that it was ME that was in Korea and him in my shoes now.....there is nothing I could ever do to make him as proud of me as I am of him, and I am jealous of that......