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Adopted by soldiers - Now 61, Smith reunites with his '200 fathers'
BY LARRY GIERER Posted on Sat, Jun. 23, 2007

The soldier had his daily orders.  To not carry them out meant possible demotion. Or worse, being sent to bed without supper . . . It was 1950 when then 4-year-old Pete Smith joined the 728^th Military Police Battalion.

He wasn’t Pete Smith then, just a naked, nameless child found alone in a ditch near Seoul, South Korea, by U.S. soldiers.  He possibly had been separated from a family among hordes of North Korean refugees headed south.

“I was picked up by military police, and became their most precious possession,” Smith said.

For more than four years during the Korean War, he lived in a tent with soldiers from A Company, being kept a secret from commanding officers who might have frowned on the situation.

He would eventually be adopted by one soldier and taken to America, where he would excel in sports and his studies, join the Army and eventually retire as a lieutenant colonel.

Earlier this week, members of the 728^th held a reunion in Columbus.  Among those gathered was Smith.

“I remember that if I was good, I was promoted; if I was bad, I was demoted,” he said, sitting in a hospitality room at the Holiday Inn-Airport North.  “I once reached the proud status of second lieutenant, but it was short-lived.”

His main duty was to get educated.  “The soldiers gave me a dictionary, one dirt-black from usage.  I had to learn a certain number of words every day,” he said.

Later, when he came to the United States, teachers were amazed at how many English words he knew.  Having been raised in an Army tent, he said, laughing, “I knew a lot of four-letter words.”

He also had to learn the nation’s states, plus the names of every U.S. president.  “The soldiers quizzed me. It was great home-schooling.”  Smith, as usual, was glad to see old friends this week.  The reunions have been going on since 1994, but only recently did he get involved.

Robert Jean, 70, is a retired truck driver living in Marshfield, Mo.  A battalion member, he was hosting a reunion in Springfield, Mo., when he got a telephone call from Branson, Mo. Smith was on the other end.  “He asked me if he could attend the reunion. He said his name was Pete Smith.  Jean asked if he was in the 728^th.  Smith said he wasn’t, but ‘I was a part of it. “  Jean called another member, Aubrey Smith, and asked if he knew a Pete Smith.  He didn’t but he did know a Pete—a boy he helped care for during the war.

Aubrey Smith, 78, lives in Locust Grove, Ga. Last year he retired as a salesman for Smith & Wesson.  He was a pistol judge in the 1996 U.S. Olympics in Atlanta. A Louisiana native, he lied about his age and enlisted when he was 15 in 1945.  “They wouldn’t have cared,” he said of the government.  “They needed bodies.”

He has fond memories of his Korean-born friend.  “I was not an MP myself,” said Aubrey Smith, who rotated out of Korea in 1953. “I was a mess hall sergeant. Whomever had that role was in charge of Pete.  When the soldiers first found Pete, we thought he was dead.  Everyone just fell in love with him.”

There was an attempt to place the boy in a home.  “We couldn’t put him out on the street.  The orphanages had more than they could handle and not nearly enough food to feed those they had,” he said.  “They figured he’d be better off with us.  That’s OK.  We didn’t want to get rid of him anyway.”

“Even to this day I am fascinated by the affinity for children that American soldiers display in times of war,” Pete Smith said. “They have a lot of compassion, especially when it comes to children.  I’ve seen hungry soldiers give the last piece of candy out of their pack to a child.  I think the child, for a brief moment, helps him forget the war, the misery and the hardship of his environment.  For a brief time, he can think of home of his own child and his family.”

And in his case, an American soldier became his family.  It was after Aubrey Smith left Korea that a supply sergeant, John Wesley Smith, a man who had earned a Bronze Star and Purple Heart during World War II, took the lead in caring for the boy in the Yong-Dong Po area where the camp was located.  He put the boy in a Korean public school.  Later, he would call his wife, Thelma, and ask her if he could bring home a son.  “One day, he asked me if I wanted to come home with him,” Pete Smith said.

Before they left for California in August 1955, soldiers raised $650 for his college education.  This was at a time soldiers made less than $70 a month, Jean said.  The boy’s first sight of America was San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge.  “I was in the cockpit with the pilot as we flew into Travis Air Field,” Pete Smith said.  He was the only child the Smiths would have.  “They were the sun and the moon to me,” he said.  The family lived in Arroyo Grande, Calif., a small farming community. 

On Dec. 15, 1961, in San Luis Obispo, Calif., he took the oath to become a U.S. citizen.   “I became one with America,” Smith said.

An Eagle Scout, he would become student body president, go to Chapman College to get a degree, then use an ROTC scholarship to get a master’s in psychology.  As a soldier, he would serve three tours in Korea, once as the assistant chief of staff comptroller for the 18^th Medical Command.  He is proud of the economic power that his homeland has become, emerging from its war-torn scars and “dead bodies lying in the street,” he said, remembering images from his childhood.

“My father said that whatever task I was undertaking, give my best and see it through to completion, and that’s what I’ve tried to do,” he said.  Now living in San Antonio, he has a company that makes military and patriotic coins.

“I retired in 1992 and have had several businesses.  They all failed,” he said, “until this one.”

Both of his parents died in the 1980s, but he still has plenty of family, many of whom he visited with here.  “In a way, I’ve had more than 200 fathers,” he said.