What happened to Hoover Jones? The question loomed over Ida Dickens’ life for nearly seven decades. When she last saw her younger brother, he was waving from the back of a taxicab, a lanky 18-year-old farm boy headed to Korea, a country he knew nothing about.
Hoover had enlisted as an infantryman in one of America’s last segregated units, even though he had never handled a weapon, let alone fired a shot in anger. In his mind, joining the military was a chance for a better life, an escape from the bitter racism of central North Carolina, Ida says. But he soon found himself in a poorly trained unit struggling with equipment that would fall to pieces in numbing subzero temperatures. In a Nov. 17, 1950, letter that Hoover wrote his mother from inside his foxhole, he described “very cold days” and the hope that he would be on his way home by Christmas.
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