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Cover Story In M \K I I \ 1T( )l \ ( outyibutil ditor Korean War veteran Ron Broward’s search for a fallen friend V .T V :> . W.irrvn "Jackson" R.i.nck (loft) ami Ron Broward relax at a military outpost in (his tattered IVS I sfi.ipxHot. Ron Broward, 73, removes a ragged black-and-white snapshot from his wallet and recalls a birthday gift given to him 55 years ago by his childhood friend and fellow U.S. Marine, Warren "Jackson” Rarick. The photograph shows the young men smiling for the camera while relaxing at a military outpost in South Korea during the Korean War. That day—April 3, 1951 —remains vivid in Broward’s memory. “Jackson said, I have something for your birthday,”’ Broward recalls. “He took out a little mayonnaise jar and said ‘open your hands.’ Then he poured dirt from the jar into my hands and said, ‘This is Downey dirt.”’ The soldiers grew up together in Downey, Calif. Broward rubbed the dirt between his fingers before carefully pouring the hometown memento back into the jar for safekeeping. The gift was typical of Rarick, a strapping 6-foot-4 soldier with a personality as big as his frame, always in a jovial mood and cheering those around him. Three weeks later, Broward saw his friend for the last time as they fought waves of Chinese troops on Horseshoe Ridge near Chunchon, South Korea. A mortar shell landed between them as they ran down a steep slope choked with trees and vegetation. Both were wounded, but they got up and kept running. They slid about 20 feet down an embankment where a U.S. tank waited to take out the wounded. “The last time 1 saw Jackson he was loading his squad leader onto a tank," says Bro ward, now a businessman in Davis, Calif, (pop. 60,308). Page 8 • www.americanprofile.com