According to newly appointed VSO and Senior Center director Dave Colton, Les Thompson is the oldest veteran in Oneida County.  I was lucky enough to visit with Les recently on one of Dave’s Sunday visits to his home in Malad City, which just happened to be Les’ birthday.  On Saturday, January 12, 1926 Les came into this world, 99 short years ago.

As Les cautioned that he might not remember my name, (“I’m not the greatest with names, sometimes”), Dave Colton cut in--

“Yeah, but you can still remember who you worked for back in the 30s.  This guy’s got a mind like a trap!” he laughed.

Thompson is an easy laugher—friendly and sincere in his happiness.  Unlike some folks in their tenth decade, to say nothing of those who have seen some of the most intense fighting in the last 100 years, Les has nothing but good things to say about his time in the service, and his time on this earth.  “Well, it has been a great time!”  he said.  “I’ve seen and done a lot, and I’ve liked most all of it.”  It’s an amazing attitude to encounter at any age, but there’s something extra charming about it in the form of Les Thompson. 

While not quite as active as he used to be, he’s still a busy man, with projects to attend to, including continuing to learn new things.  Now that Thompson’s eyesight has made it hard for him to read, he enjoys listening to recorded books on all sorts of topics.  His book during the week I met with him was a “spy, mystery sort of thing.”  Dave visits Les every week to check in on him and spend some time with him, and both enjoy historically based writing.

“He likes to watch westerns, but he gets sick and tired of the commercials,” Dave said.  Les laughed.  “That’s true, but I watch them anyway.  I missed a lot of the shows that 

were first on while I was working, so they’re all new to me.  I like Gunsmoke—those shows are pretty down to earth.”

That work started young, and to put it in perspective, Les started “serious work” at the outbreak of WWII, working at jobs for compressor stations to help create the infrastructure to support the war effort.  “A lot of us bigger boys started up with them.  Before that we’d done work for farmers and that, but here came these companies that were paying us sixty-nine cents an hour, and man, we were getting filthy rich!  We’d never had that kind of money—we’d been through a depression, you know.”

Thompson is one of the few Americans around today who lived through Black October, the Depression and WWII, all by the time he turned 20!  At the time, he was living in Greensburg, Kansas.  He was born in Pleasant Plains, Arkansas, which “was even smaller than Malad,” he says.  “There was a barber shop, a general store, a fertilizer shed, post office, doctor, and a blacksmith.  There was one street with anything on it.”

His father was a mechanic in Pleasant Plains and made his way to Kansas eventually because he found that his services repairing steam machinery in Kansas paid more than in Arkansas.  He remembers being a teenager in Kansas during the height of Bonnie and Clyde and John Dillinger, somewhere around ten years old.  He remembers when a “those guys that brought the newspapers into town from Newport showed up in a brand new 1936 Ford, and the whole town went out there and just gaped at them drive by in that new car!  $650 and you could by one, though that was a fortune in those days.”

When he turned eighteen in 1944, he joined the marines.

“I asked him why he didn’t join the army,” Dave Colton said.  “And he told me it was because they didn’t look disciplined enough.  That’s why he joined the marines—they looked disciplined and they looked sharp.”

“Well,” Les laughed, “I guess I am pretty partial to the corps.  I did spend a bit of time with them.  I’ve seen a lot of things that happened that convinced me that I made the right choice.”

Les spent his time in the service in the infantry.  Dave asked him why he didn’t try to transfer into something safer.  “That Sergeant Major I was talking to there on Saipan in the Marianas when I was thinking I could transfer into Moblie Transport or something said ‘what did you fire for qualification on the rifle range,’ and I told him.  He started shaking his head and said ‘You’ll never get transferred out of the line company, son.’”

It turns out he shot a 237 out of a possible 240, or almost perfect.  “Anyway, sure enough he was right.  I never did get out—I was a gravel cruncher from the day I went in until the day I got out.  It sounds funny now, but it sure wasn’t then.”

As Les puts it, “I was 18 in the Marianas, and then 19 when we invaded Okinawa.  Later, when the war ended I ended up in the 6th marine division and they sent us all into north China.  Mao Zedong was trying to take over China and him and Chiang Kai-Shek were having a bit of difficulty with each other and they sent us in there to keep those railroads coming out of Manchuria down into Peking and Shanghai with all the coal.  The communists were blowing up the bridges, so we guarded them for over a year.”

In an ironic turn of events, the bridges were also guarded by the newly-allied Japanese, who had already been posted to the area during WWII.  “So we’d been fighting them on Okinawa and now here they were our buddies working together.  They come for Christmas and they waved at us.  It was nice to see them as friends instead of shooting at them!”

Les spent the year “at bridge 54, which was pretty wide.  We lived in a tar paper shack.  We were pretty tough.”

In his time oversees, Les learned a lot.  He learned enough Chinese and Japanese to get by.  “One reason I had to learn so many numbers was that the exchange rate was something like 3000 to one!” he laughed.  

At another point, he and some of the other marines who were also just barely twenty put together money to purchase a pony.  They spent time running up and down the great wall with it, and “playing cowboys.”  

The fun, of course, belies the incredibly dangerous nature of his service.  Les was involved in firefights throughout a number of campaigns, and has stories for all of them.  After his service at the end of WWII, he took a brief “break” before heading back for the Korean war, where he was involved in the tail end of the Chosin Reservoir among many, many operations.  

Most of his activities in the mountains of Korea were “at the company level.”  “We’d take the hill we were supposed to take, and we’d hear them fighting on the hill next to us, and wonder who they were.”  Some of his stories about firefights in the Korea are harrowing, but he tells them all with a chuckle as you might expect.

His friend Dave Colton was recently appointed to the position of the County VSO (Veterans Service Officer), which likely means he’ll be spending even more time with Les in the future.  The VSO is responsible for helping coordinate services and keep veterans informed about what resources are available to them through various federal programs.  It can be a lot to keep on top of for many veterans, and the VSO is a vital part of that process.  Bob Stokes was the previous VSO, who was thanked and praised by the county commissioners during January’s meeting for his work in updating and getting the position into shape.  

Regardless of his official duties, Dave and Les have become friends during their time together, and there’s no doubt they’d spend time together in any case.  It’s easy to see why, as they’re both joyful and good natured, and they both have an awful lot to say.