Korea was sliding into its second winter by the time Gerould Town reached the lines in October 1952. Frost settled in the folds of the ridgelines and engineers worked through it with pick and shovel, hammer and explosive. Demolition men like Town were often tasked with clearing old minefields, rigging bridge abutments for destruction, or carving new firing positions from frozen hillsides with controlled charges. In some cases, the very roads they built in daylight were cratered that same night to slow a probing patrol.

The front in 1952 was not fluid, but it was alive. Along the jammed hill sectors, where trenches honeycombed the slopes and outposts changed hands by the week, A Company, 120th Engineers had become nocturnal laborers. The sergeant worked by moonlight, carrying satchel charges across ridges, setting shaped charges along rock outcrops, and crawling out with blasting caps clenched in his mouth.

At times, the company was pulled into broader operations of the 45th Division. When monsoon rains swept through in the spring and summer of 1953, the battalion was hurled into emergency road repairs. Landslides destroyed key supply routes and temporary bridges vanished overnight. The 120th Engineers rebuilt them in record time, often under the threat of renewed shelling. While bulldozers and graders worked in the open, it was demolition men like Town who cleared the debris whether it be with hand tools or dynamite.

For the year he was overseas, the engineers were expected to breach obstacles, support infantry, and deny terrain to the enemy. The expectations are simple without accounting for the human fatigue.  Even in rear areas, the work continued. They sank culverts into soft earth, camouflaged tank traps, and supervised Korean Service Corps labor. Always, there was the matter of mines – finding them, removing them, or in some cases, laying them with quiet deliberation along a ridgeline no one had claimed yet.

When the armistice finally came in July 1953, it did not end the work. Engineers now turned to permanent defenses, to road maintenance and reconstruction. Town remained in Korea through November for thirteen months of effort.  Along the main supply routes, bunkers and trench laced hillsides and footpaths, along the creek beds choked with stone, and in the scars across the hills, his work remained to clear the way forward in a war where movement was rare and misery common.