Branch: Army
Duty: Administrative personnel officer
By Delaney Brown
Harold “Bill” Heller looks back at his decision to enlist with the Army during the onset of the Korean War and regrets nothing.
Heller traces his many jobs – teacher, psychiatric hospital administrator, regional chancellor of USF St. Petersburg, representative in the Florida House – back to his decision to join the Army. He credits his military experience for turning him from a goofy kid clapping erasers on his high school sweetheart to a man filled with discipline and purpose.
Heller, now 86, was 17 when the U.S. went to war with Korea in 1950. Still a high school senior and too young for deployment, Heller asked his father, who was on the draft committee, to move his name further up the list to ensure he would be called.
For Heller, military service was part opportunity, part patriotic duty. The son of a sharecropper from Georgia, Heller knew the GI Bill would be the only way for him to get a college education. Though he played football and baseball in high school, Heller knew he wouldn’t get the athletic scholarship necessary to attend a four-year university.
As a kid, Heller had grown up playing soldier. He dressed up in Army uniforms. Donning the fatigues felt natural. When it came time to head off to basic training, Heller felt ready.
Because of how young he was when he enlisted, Heller wasn’t eligible for active duty. The Army sent him to school for a year, thinking that when he turned 18 he’d be ready for deployment. By the time Heller was old enough to deploy, his year in school and his aptitude for teaching made him valuable to the Army in a different way.
Instead of becoming a pair of boots on the ground, Heller was assigned to education. Many of the draftees in the Korean War had little opportunity for education. Many were functionally illiterate. Heller taught them how to read and write.
Though he was disappointed he couldn’t serve his county in a combat role, Heller quickly discovered the importance of his job and his passion for teaching.
“I wish some of the students (at USF St. Petersburg) could see how much the enlisted men appreciated their education,” said Heller.
Heller’s office is filled with photographs. On the top of his bookshelf stands a portrait taken as a member of the Florida House of Representatives. Another shows Heller posing next to a 1926 Dodge, his prized possession as a teenager. Nestled among all those stands a picture of Heller at 18, standing tall in his Army fatigues. It makes him proud to spot the paratrooper pin stuck to the bill of his cap.
His paratrooper uniform hasn’t been worn in years. His wife wishes he would just get rid of it already, maybe donate it to a local high school. After all, they’re always in need of new costumes. But still, it hangs in their shared closet. He’s long past the days of dress-up, but he isn’t ready to let go quite yet.
Photo courtesy of Stacy Pearsall (resized for web)
