Life of a military man

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Although soft spoken, Elva Einsel continues to spread the word on the efforts her late husband, Maj. Gen. David Einsel, made to the country he loved in two wars and peacetime.

She's been promoting three books chronicling his life and service, and has made a number of speaking engagements to share her husband's story. The tales of valor at places such as Heartbreak Ridge are intermingled with anecdotes of their lives as a career army family.

"Dave graduated from Ohio State University, and had orders to go to Korea the same day," she recalled. "He had to leave and go to Camp Atterbury, check in and go to Korea."

She recalled his story of what became known as the battle of Heartbreak Ridge.

"They had orders to go up the mountain to a hill with a 155, hill 940, to protect the troops that would be coming up. The trouble was that the roads in Korea were only four feet wide, and the gun was six feet wide. They had to dig an extra two feet to get the thing up the mountain."

They went up at night, and set up the radio station, so they could call planes in if needed, Elva said.

"But the enemy must have been watching, because the next morning, all of them had been fired upon immediately, and they were all killed. He called for the planes, but they couldn't get there fast enough to help."

"Two of his buddies were hurt badly, one was hit by shrapnel in the foot and the leg, the other one didn't make it, he was hit so badly. Dave was hurt trying to get the wounded to a place for help, and he was hit with shrapnel."

"It was later known as Heartbreak Ridge, but he didn't know it," Elva said. "Until his mother got a letter and read it in the newspaper was it known as Heartbreak Ridge."

"I can remember he said it was terrible, that there were pieces of bodies and trees everyplace," Einsel said.

After serving in Korea, he had numerous statewide assignments where he put studies in chemistry and physics to good use.

"We were lucky to get back and assigned to Edgewood Arsenal, where he worked in the medical labs to decide which chemicals were best in making antibodies against nerve gas," she said. "Also in the making of a protective mask in case of a chemical attack."

The family was then sent to the University of Virginia, where David was to get his masters degree in physics.

"It was there that he built the ultracentrifuge for Dr. Jesse Beans, the head of the physics department at UVA," she said. "It was similar to the one he built at OSU before he left. It set the world record for speed of rotation, it had to be housed where it could be watched day and night."

From the university, he was sent back to Edgewood Arsenal, where he received orders to go to Las Vegas.

"That was where they were going to detonate the last atomic bomb above ground," Einsel said. "He asked me to come out to see the last one detonated."

She was also asked to photograph it, with directions.

"It was 4:20 a.m., and I was to watch for a green light," she said. "When it went off, it was so absolutely startling. And I felt the heat from it, even though I was 70 miles away from it."

Moving yet again, the Einsel's next stop was Alabama, where Dave was to take an advanced course for chemical corps. This was the time of the Selma civil rights march, and she heard marchers were coming through Anniston.

"I pulled the old Edsel underneath a hedgerow in the back," she said. "They were marching, yelling and singing, they turned over a trash can, and one guy spotted the Edsel. He saw the old license plate, and he started yelling, 'Yankee go home.'''

They moved to Washington, where Dave taught chemistry and physics at West Point.

When Dave was called to duty again in the Vietnam War, Elva and the children were escounced in an apartment in Virginia.

He asked to stay on to teach, yet received orders to report to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

"A general could never fully reveal, publicly, where they were moving troops, but their orders were to go to Vietnam," she said. Her husband was part of the advance team, in charge of the Chemical Corps, defoliating trees before they could build a base.

She said at one point, Dave was at DaNang, and enemy troops were crossing the border into Cambodia, and he would call President Lyndon Johnson to ask him what to do.

"There was a 24 hour time difference, but they didn't want to get into a war in Cambodia," Elva said. "One night, one of the tents was destroyed. He asked permission to get tear gas from Fort Benning, knowing that the enemy troops would not have any tear gas, and would not be able to see to shoot their guns."

The next night, Einsel said, a lot of the enemy troops dropped their guns and ran across the border.

"That saved our boys, and they didn't come back that way anymore," she said.

He worked for a while as an officer in the Strategic Defense Initiative, or Star Wars.

Dave retired from the Army in 1985, and was preparing to fulfill a lifelong dream to return to Tiffin. Elva recalled one incident that derailed his plans, temporarily.

"We had come up to the farm to do some work on the house," Elva said. "He and his brothers agreed that whoever was out of the Army first would build a house next to the farm.

No one knew where they were, or so they thought. Dave received a phone call that morning, from Marc Casey of the CIA, saying he needed to talk to him, and he was expected at a meeting in D.C. at 9 a.m.

When the agent was asked by Dave how he got a hold of him, the agent's reply was, "I keep track of you." The couple drove back to make the morning meeting the next day.

Dave was to be asked to go around the world about four times a year, and keep track of the nuclear, chemical and biological weapons stored.

He did that for four years, when a bout of double pneumonia, which landed him in the intensive care unit helped him decide to refocus, and retire.

Dave Einsel's uniform, medals and memorabilia are now housed at the Seneca County Museum. Copies of each of his three books, "Boyhood to Heartbreak Ridge," "West Point and Vietnam," and "Duty, Honor, Country," are available by calling Elva Einsel at (419) 447-9048 or at Paper & Ink, 98 S. Washington St.