Rex Comley can still tell you the day he enlisted. Feb. 6, 1951. He’d gone to a recruiting office in Kansas City, Missouri, expecting to join the Navy.
“There were six of us went over to enlist in the Navy, and the line was too long,” he recalled. “So we looked over at the Marine Corps line, and there wasn’t many people there. So we ended up in the Marine Corps.”
Comley told that story at the Nov. 3 Olathe City Council meeting after Mayor John Bacon called him forward to accept the city’s Veterans Day proclamation. In February, at age 94, Comley had finally received his Purple Heart for a wound he suffered in Korea more than 70 years earlier.
A machine gunner in Korea
From the recruiting office, the next stop was Camp Pendleton in California. Comley told the council he spent eight weeks in training there. He had 10 days of leave back home before he returned to camp and got ready to go to Korea.
Comley said he spent about a year in Korea with the 5th Marine Regiment, part of the 1st Marine Division. He operated a heavy machine gun. The friend who enlisted alongside him served in an anti-tank role.
The regiment fought on Korea’s east-central and western fronts during the war, according to the Marine Corps’ unit history. The fighting ended with an armistice on July 27, 1953.
Comley said a mortar round struck his position in 1952, wounding his face. He returned to the line days later.
The conversation that brought the medal home
Decades later, it took a conversation about a Marine Corps cap to bring Comley’s Purple Heart to light.
The man wearing the cap was Don Puchalla, a chaplain with the Lenexa Marine Corps League. As the two got to talking, Puchalla told Comley about his son, a Marine who died on active duty. In a later conversation, Comley told Puchalla how he had been wounded in Korea. Puchalla asked about the Purple Heart. It was listed in Comley’s military records, he learned, but Comley had never received the medal.
Puchalla turned to veterans organizations for help. On Feb. 15, family members and fellow veterans gathered in Overland Park to see Comley receive his Purple Heart. Among those there was his grandson, Shaun Comley, a retired Air Force veteran who served 24 years.
As Comley accepted the medal, he spoke about the people he had served with. “I remember a lot of the fellas I was with that didn’t make it back,” he said.
Forty years on the power lines
When Comley came home from the Marines, he went to work for the Board of Public Utilities, which supplies electricity and water in Wyandotte County.
“And I spent 40 years there putting up power lines,” he told the council.
He moved to Olathe after that and has lived in the city for about 20 years. On Nov. 3, the American Legion Post 153 color guard presented the colors before Bacon read the proclamation recognizing Wednesday, Nov. 11, as Veterans Day in Olathe. Bacon thanked Comley for his service.
Comley summed up his trip from a Kansas City recruiting line to Korea and back home in one sentence. “So that’s about the extent of my travel,” he said.
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