Farm kid enlists in Army and serves country for decades

SAVANNA, Ill. — As a high school student, Richard Siedenburg did not plan to join his dad farming, but that changed after spending time in other countries in the U.S. Army and Army Reserves.

“I worked for a little while for Chrysler, building cars by Belvidere, and I knew really fast that I wasn’t going to live for 30 years doing that job,” Siedenburg said. “So, I got a job at the Army Depot in Savanna shipping ammo to Vietnam.”

In 1967, at 19 years old, Siedenburg enlisted in the Army.

“They were pretty good salesmen — you could either be drafted for two years, or enlist for three years and then you had a choice of what you wanted to do,” he said.

After completing his training in Alabama, Siedenburg had orders for Vietnam and came home on leave.

“When I got back to base, I had orders to go to Korea instead, so I was within days of going to Vietnam,” he said.

Siedenburg was stationed in Korea for a year.

“Being a farm kid, I hit it off with most of the Koreans,” he said. “To see what they could do with nothing really impressed me, and if you were kind to them, they were more than kind to you.”

The United States had stockpiles of ammo in Korea in 1968, even though the Korean War had ended years before.

“I was an ammo warehouseman and there was ammo that needed maintenance, repackaging or it had deteriorated enough that we would blow it up,” Siedenburg said.

“I saw barefoot people planting rice, plowing with water buffalo and living in grass-roof shacks,” he said. “That made this little corner of the world look a lot better and I started looking at things from a whole different direction.”

When Siedenburg returned to the United States, he had a year and a half to serve.

“They couldn’t send me overseas again for so many months, so I got stationed at the Army Depot in Savanna as a military policeman,” he said.

After completing his active duty in October 1970, Siedenburg joined the Army Reserves and worked second shift at the Army Depot and attended Highland Community College three days a week.

“There was a sale barn in Pearl City and I would stop there and on my way by and buy dairy-beef cross heifer calves,” he said. “My wife would start bottle feeding them and that was the beginning our cowherd.”

Purchasing the calves at $40 a piece was a lot cheaper than buying cows, Siedenburg noted.

“I built the herd up to 120 cows,” he said.

Siedenburg and his wife, Cathy, live on the 130 acres that Cathy’s dad once owned.

“We bought the adjoining 140 acres and we have the 200-acre farm that my dad bought in 1949,” the farmer said.

“Most of my corn and soybean ground is rented to the neighbor and I still make hay,” he said. “Now we have about 50 cows in our crossbred herd that is mostly Angus and we have about 100 acres in timber that the hunters like.”

When the Savanna Army Depot closed in 2000, Siedenburg transferred to a unit in Madison in south-central Wisconsin.

“That was an ammunition unit and we would travel every other year for training overseas for three weeks,” he said. “So, I spent time in Italy, Turkey, Germany and Korea.”

A lot had changed in Korea from when Siedenburg was there in the ‘60s.

“They had built super highways, they were driving SUVs and talking on cell phones,” he said. “When I was there before, rush hour was three ox carts in a row.”

Siedenburg served in the Army Reserves until he was 60 years old.

“The fun part is when I was 58 years old I went to Iraq for a year,” he recalled.

“I had a couple hundred acres of corn and beans, pastures to mow, hay to be made and calves that needed to be taken care of,” he said.

“So, I handed the fella up the road my checkbook and said make it work and he did a fantastic job, which is why he still works some of my ground.”

While in Iraq, the American soldiers lived in one of Saddam Hussein’s palace complexes.

“They looked really beautiful from a mile away, but they were so shoddily built,” Siedenburg said. “It doesn’t freeze over there, so their water lines were just barely underground and after driving across them two or three times you’d get a water leak.”

Working the nightshift in Iraq, Siedenburg manned the computers, radios and phones.

“If someone was out on patrol and they needed assistance, they would call into me and I would send out reinforcements,” he said. “Everybody was supposed to be in by sundown, so normally there wasn’t a lot going on.”

Siedenburg’s older brother served in the Army for four years.

“He learned Russian and became an interceptor and now he knows five languages — Russian, Chinese, French, Spanish and Swedish,” Siedenburg said.

“They wore civilian clothes, drove civilian vehicles and they’d be along the border with East Germany and listen for the Russians who weren’t supposed to be there, but they were,” he said. “They would be talking in their tanks and my brother would bring the information back to headquarters once a week.”

Siedenburg would joke with his brother since he was unable to pass the French class while he was in college.

“But the Army had a great incentive program,” he explained. “There was a test every Friday, and if you didn’t pass the test, you were in Vietnam the next Monday, so if someone was having trouble, the guys would get together and study all night long to help them pass the test.”

Siedenburg goes to the Seniors Center in Mount Carroll once a month to meet fellow veterans.

“Different ladies groups make treats for us and furnish the coffee,” he said. “We talk about things that maybe we wouldn’t talk about otherwise.”

The group includes about 20 men.

“It’s everyone from people who were in the reserves or the National Guard who were never deployed to combat soldiers that were in Vietnam,” Siedenburg said.