Lt. Piet Visser had a bird’s-eye view of Korea in 1952, arriving from South Africa to a land he remembers as populated mainly by rice paddies and thatched-roof houses.
“I never did any fighting on the ground, I was always in the air on the Mustang aircraft,” Visser said in an Aug. 3 phone interview. “We would be given the ground position of either the tanks or the bridges that the North Koreans and Chinese were using […] and we would be dispatched to destroy them, always in groups of fours, and never less than four at a time.”