Milton Henry DeVault was born on 10 November 1921 in Syracuse, Onondaga Co., NY. He married Gayle Duncan on 12 July 1950, no children. He died on 6 September 1951 in Korea
Note from the WWI, WWII and Korean War Casualty Listing:
USMA Class of 1945, First Lieutenant De Vault was a veteran of World War II. In Korea, he was a member of Company C, 72nd Medium Tank Battalion, 2nd Infantry Division. He was Killed in Action while defending his position along the Naktong River near Yongsan, South Korea on September 6, 1950. First Lieutenant De Vault was awarded the Purple Heart, the Korean Service Medal, the United Nations Service Medal, the National Defense Service Medal, the Korean Presidential Unit Citation and the Republic of Korea War Service Medal.
MAGAZINE ARTICLE - Ladies Home Journal, February 15, 1951
My Son Died in Korea, by Mrs. David S. DeVault
Even when he was a little boy, Bud was a happy child. Everybody liked Bud. The minister said it when he came in after his death -- Bud always had a twinkle in his eye. He made you feel good.
Isn't it odd -- you'd think it would make me feel bad now to think about him, but it doesn't. I like to think about him.
You've heard about brothers who were friends too. Well, David and Bud were more than that. They were close, always close. "Why couldn't it have been me?" David said when he heard about it. "Everybody liked Bud." That was ridiculous, David is needed just as much as Bud was. But it shows you what Bud meant to him -- what he meant to all of us.
Bud was a towhead with blue eyes and a face full of sunshine. Yet he wasn't just happy-go-lucky. He was good. Not goody-goody -- but good. He liked to get his chores done before he went out to play. He did his homework every night. It's old-fashioned to talk about duty nowadays, but Bud had a sense of duty.
Maybe that's why he wanted to go to West Point. I don't know. You talk to your kids when they are young about the basic things -- like duty, and God. But when they grow up, you can't. You just have to feel your way along once they're grown up. Bud said he wanted to go to West Point because it offered him everything he wanted.
We didn't have much money then. After dad became ill, things weren't easy and Bud knew it. He knew an appointment to West Point would help -- he worked his way through one year at the University of Tennessee, though, before it came through. His competitive exams gave him the rank of second alternate -- two boys had to fail before he could get in. He never believed it would happen. He said if they placed higher on the tests than he did, then, of course, they must be brighter and better prepared and they'd make out. They didn't though. Bud wasn't really what you'd call brilliant, but he had something else. He stuck to things. He worked at them until they came out right.
Let me tell you how he graduated from West Point after those two other boys who had pre-West Point training failed. Bud had never had enough high-school math. And he didn't take any in Tennessee. So he got to West point, and maybe you don't know, but they take mathematics seriously. Bud had to go right into an advanced geometry course -- and sink or swim. Well, he worked on it. He worked so hard that his French suffered. In the middle of the semester it looked like he was gong to flunk both of them, and he called me up. "I'm going to resign," he said. "I thought you ought to know." I couldn't imagine it at first. It didn't seem like Bud. Then I thought about how he hated to fail in anything. So I said, all right, it's your life, but I'm going to come down there and talk to you about it before you do anything. I made him promise he'd wait. I took the next train down to West Point. We found out that two flunks would throw him out of school, but that if he had only one failure, he could get back in -- if he could make up the material he missed and pass tests on it. If he worked on his French now and his math later, he could still make it. There is a place he could go and get nothing but math, a school that specialized in helping West Pointers. It would take three months and $375. Bud, I said, you're a lot like me. If you quit now when you're licked, you'll never get over it. You go take that course, and get back in, and then, if you want to resign, you go ahead and resign.
I had to borrow the money, of course. But Bud tutored at Professor Silverman's, living in his house, for his three months, and then he took his tests and passed them. That summer he went to work to make the $375. The following spring I had to ask him, Bud, do you want to resign Now? "Mother," he said, "you knew me better than I knew myself." And when he got his diploma, do you know what he did? He gave it to me. "Here, you earned it," he said.
I remember when he was in Japan with the occupation. He liked Japan, but then he always liked any place he happened to be. But two years is a long time and he wanted to come home, and he wanted the feel of home. He wrote me that there were three things he wanted: a really beautiful set of golf clubs, a red convertible, and a dog.
Well, I knew I'd better let him get the golf clubs, but I put in for a car. They were hard to get then so I went right down when he wrote that. I even told the man it had to be red, but I didn't care what make it was.
That was about a year before he got home. A month before, I called up. No, he was still way down the list. I told them they just had to get me that car or him. I thought I wasn't going to be able to make it. It was 1948 by then, but they were still hard to get. Just a week before, though, the dealer called and he had a car. Said that it was really for someone else but they could wait. Only thing, it was a gray convertible.
He trusted me for the money and I got the car. Joan and I -- That's our youngest, she's only nineteen -- we went down to the station to meet him. I drove so carefully. When Bud saw the car, he acted like a kid. I'll never forget that ride home. He drove it as if it were a tank, and on the wrong side of the road too the way they do in Japan. The next day we got the dog -- a German shepherd, like one he had when he was a boy.
When he went back west, he drove out in that car, with the dog beside him. It was the last time I ever saw him. He wanted to get back home again, he planned it time and time again, but then there was Hawaii, and Alaska, and then just as he was starting his leave, Korea.
That's why I'm bringing his body home. He did so want to come back again. A West Point friend wanted him buried at the Academy, but I asked David and I asked Gayle -- that's Bud's wife . . . or bride, I Guess -- and they both said, "No, Bud wanted to come home."
Gayle will come with him when he comes. They got married just before he shipped out. I've never met her, but it was she who broke the news to me, not the Army. Someone at the post in Fort Lewis -- that's in Washington -- told her. She called me right away. She tried to tell me gently, but you can't tell something like that any way but straight out.
I thought it was David's wife calling -- they live in Yakima, near Tacoma, where Bud was. It was midnight here and I'd been asleep. But when she said Bud's name, I knew. Joan was just coming in the door and I was standing there, I couldn't say a word, and then I fainted. Joan picked up the phone, and I guess I came to for I went into dad's room. I shouldn't have -- it doesn't do with heart trouble to break news like that suddenly, but I wasn't thinking. I just put my head down on his bed and cried. Poor dad, he had to take care of me that night.
I don't know what went on that next week. It was like I was in a daze. I got somebody in, or they came in, and ran the nursery school -- I put the school in the house six years ago when I had to get some work, but I couldn't leave home. I remember, though, one morning I realized I had to go on living -- that Bud would have wanted me to. Something he said once came back to me suddenly. It was when my sister died. It sounded almost hardhearted to me at the time. He told me not to worry: "A thing that's over with is in the past," he said, "don't look back. Go on."
I took over the nursery that morning, but I didn't last the morning. There's a little prayer we say, and I got as far as the line "God is good" and it stuck in my throat. I couldn't say it. You can't help but think at a time like that that God has let you down. I pulled myself together that night, though, and thought about things.
There's a prayer the cadets say at West Point that helped me back. It always made my heart turn over when I heard them say it. It wasn't just their country they were trained to fight for, but God too. "Encourage us in our endeavor to live above the common level of life," they said. "Make us to choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong and never be content with a half truth when the whole can be won."
Bud chose the harder right. He didn't want to go. He didn't want to leave Gayle. He didn't want to ship out -- he wanted to drive east, and home. But he went, and he went willingly and ready to do his best. He said it when he was on the ship.
He called it a fast scribble. They were going to land at Pusan the next day and he wanted me to know where he was. Wait. I'll read it to you.
"I will miss Gayle, " he wrote, "But now we are on our way, I am glad. That sounds like an Army man, doesn't it? But knowing me, you can see why I feel that way -- I like to get things done rather than wait for them to happen."
All his letters were like that. It was only twenty-two days after he left that he was killed. The last letter I got was just before he crossed the Naktong River and went into action at Yongsan. He wrote so clearly about what went on. I could see it all. I followed him on a map. He thought a lot of the men with him, and told me how brave they were. He especially admired the marines there -- "Braver than ordinary people," he said they were.
His last letter made me so happy -- for, of course, I didn't know it was his last. He was still two miles behind the front and it looked like he might be held there awhile, though he was itching to move up. He was very optimistic: "When we get across the river, we'll really roll -- and push these jokers right back to the 38th parallel." He talked about how it would be over soon, how he would come home, where he would be assigned next after the war, and he wound up, just as always, saying, "Don't worry about me."
I wish I knew what happened then. People say I'm wrong to want to know how he died, that I shouldn't think about it. Bud would have told me, though. He'd know I couldn't sleep nights, imagining trying to live it to the end with him.
People ask me if I am bitter or resentful. No, I am neither. I am resigned. It is the part of mothers always to be giving. Sometimes it is a little; other times it is much. Occasionally we are called on to give our most. My consolation for Bud's loss lies in my faith that he is now "home" -- in "the house of many mansions." I feel we shall meet him again there.
We had a flag ceremony in the school. I don't think the youngsters get enough these days about their flag and what it stands for. I was playing The Star-Spangled Banner for them to march to and they were singing it, as best they could, the way children do, when I suddenly thought, "This is for Bud," and my hands started trembling. "He died for his country, and for these children, and millions of other children."
"One of my friends, who knew Bud from the time he was little, wrote me something I'll never forget. It made me feel proud and humble, both.
"Comfort yourself," she said, "with the knowledge that with all his fine abilities and his good record, he was ours."
Yes, God was good to me, I thought, I had a fine son.
He was buried in 1951 in Green Hill Cemetery, Amsterdam, Montgomery Co., NY.