By KEVIN J. DONALDSON
Special to Crossville Life
Imagine not being able to tell your family about a significant part of what you did during your military career until a half-century after the fact.

When you roll World War II service, frontline foxhole duty in the Korean War, a stint at the Pentagon, and work with a NATO standardization group into the mix, you have quite a distinguished military career.

That’s just a thumbnail sketch of Keith Gale Comstock’s 22 years in the military.

Comstock, a Colorado native who now resides in Fairfield Glade with wife, Helen, was a part of one of the biggest covert military/CIA operations in the early Cold War years. Despite that fact, he lists something else as the most significant event of his army career.

“The highlight of my military career? Coming home from Korea without any scratches,” Comstock said. “I never got hit, and needless to say, I was just delighted.”

Comstock’s military career, which saw him retire as a full colonel, had something of an unusual beginning. He graduated high school in Pueblo, Colorado (1942), having a distinguished ROTC career as the commander of his unit at Central High School. Following the lead of his mother, a champion big-bore rifle competitor a decade earlier, he had claimed the state ROTC rifle title during that time, with the aid of eyeglasses.

Comstock wanted to serve his country, and with his ROTC training, felt he was a good candidate. His poor eyesight proved to be an initial stumbling block, though.

“I was just devastated”
“When they classified me as 4-F (physically unfit for military service), I was just devastated,” he recalled just a few days short of his 90th birthday last month. “I cried my eyes out, and told my dad I didn’t know what I was going to do.”

After a time, Comstock wound up resorting to other means to follow his heart’s desire to serve his country. “I went back to Pueblo, and got a job driving a truck at the ammunitions depot,” he said. “I ran into an old friend who worked at the local (military) reception center, still determined to get into the service.

“I had to cheat to get in the Army. I memorized the eye chart and got in that way,” he said. “Entry rules were really tough to get into the service in the years after the Depression, but those were gradually eased as WWII went on.

“It was my earnest desire to get in, and that’s the way I did it,” Comstock said. “After that, I was very careful, not volunteering for any training schools, because I was afraid I would fail the physical.”

He took basic training at a base near Little Rock, Arkansas. He went to Michigan State University for training in the Army Specialized Training Program, but was quickly reassigned to the Signal Corp at Camp Crowder, Missouri.

He was part of a group that wound up in the China-Burma-India theater. Comstock said the only real threat there was attempted bombing by the Japanese, as the war drew to an inevitable end. “They told us not to worry – the Japanese never hit anything, anyway,” he said. “We got sent to a little holding camp and waited for our number to come up. We got back in the States in the late spring of 1946.”

Later that year, he started back to school as part of the GI bill. He received a metallurgy degree from the Colorado School of Mines (“they had the best reputation in the world for mining,” he said), as he was able to return to his home state for a while. He later received a masters degree (1958), with a concentration in nuclear metallurgy.

Comstock was involved in ROTC during his time in college, and was eventually offered a regular Army commission. “I thought, ‘if we’re gonna have a war every five years (the Korean War was underway), I may as well get back in and make a career out of it.'”

Action in Korea
He spent roughly 15 months in Korea, seeing the war on an up-close and personal basis.

“I was assigned to support the 7th Regiment in Korea,” he said. “We were going to make a land assault, and two ranking officers were unable to be involved for various health or physical-related reasons. I was a Second Lieutenant, just recently assigned, and didn’t even know all my sergeants. Fortunately, we met with little opposition in that instance.”

Another battle was the exact opposite. “The first night, nothing much happened. But the second night, it all broke loose. Enemy soldiers broke through the perimeter, but they pulled back and we didn’t suffer much as a result of that,” Comstock said.

“Our commander told us we didn’t have enough men to protect the perimeter. He told us to ‘get in the fox hole, stay put and shoot anything that’s above ground.’ A couple of nights later, we killed beaucoup of people who had broken through. We later found out they were Chinese, and we didn’t even know they were involved at that time. We were still surrounded by the Chinese, though. After getting the okay from command, we broke out at daylight the next day, and in a short time were 12 miles down the road.”

Comstock observed some unusual actions from the Chinese on the battlefield. “I think the Chinese must have given their soldiers a stimulant of some kind, the way they often acted on the battlefield.”

He said the weather in North Korea “was just brutal. It got down to 25 below sometimes.”

Comstock and his men found themselves on a ship on Christmas Day of 1950. “We had C-rations for Christmas dinner, because there wasn’t enough Christmas dinner to feed everyone,” he said. He could have eaten Christmas dinner with the ship’s officers, but since the captain said there wasn’t enough food to go around, he ate below in the ship with his men. “I was infuriated (because his soldiers couldn’t be fed), and told them I would just eat with my men.”

During his service in the Korean War, Comstock received two Bronze Stars, awarded for acts of heroism.

Clandestine duty
He arrived back in the U.S. the following Christmas Day (1951), and went to the Engineer Center at Ft. Belvoir VA, just down the road from Washington D.C. There, he would receive further training and schooling he had earlier been denied for a variety of reasons.

After receiving the necessary training at the Engineer Center, “they asked me where I wanted to go, and I wanted to go to Colorado if I could,” Comstock said. “They told me there weren’t any spots in Colorado, but we can send you to Albuquerque, which is nearby.”

Col. Barnes was his commanding officer in New Mexico. “He wanted me to go watch an earthen dam being built, and also an airfield. The colonel was adamant that I get as much learning as possible, and I always thought he wanted to be something of a father figure to me, since I had lost my father at an early age.”

“I went there, and after about a year, I got a call from one of my old battalion commanders in Korea, Col. Gross,” Comstock said. “He said he would like to come out and talk to me. I had just made captain, and thought he might want to talk to me about that.”

A couple of days later, his old commander was in Albuquerque. “Col Gross talked a little about Korea, but he was really there for another reason,” he said. “He asked me if I would like to volunteer for a job that’s dangerous, but ‘one I can’t tell you anything about?’ I said, ‘sure, why not?'”

What Comstock didn’t know at the time was that this involved one of the biggest covert operations in the years following WWII. “It involved building an underground tunnel in Berlin that tapped Russian phone lines,” he said. “Thousands of messages were intercepted and decoded as a result of that CIA project.

“We had several people with different skills who were involved in driving the tunnel almost 1,500 feet into the Russian sector of Berlin,” he said. “The clandestine nature was appealing in a way, but we knew that if we got picked up by the Russians, we would be spending a lot of time somewhere in Siberia.

“As it turned out, the British were going to do the actual tapping. None of us knew all the details on the project, or even what the other people’s jobs were on the project,” Comstock said. “The CIA was very compartmentalized about that.”

In later years, Comstock said his children often asked him “what I did that year I was away, and I just told him it was something I couldn’t discuss. Then in 2007, I was watching the History Channel and saw a show about the project. I realized the project had been declassified and I could tell them about it.”

After that, Comstock said, “I got some pretty nice assignments, because the Army figured I was a ‘sharpie.'”

Work at the Pentagon and for NATO
Among those assignments in the mid-1950’s was to monitor all the Army’s materials research programs and to coordinate with other branches of the armed forces. “We met periodically with civilian organizations, so we didn’t duplicate any research programs, in order to save money,” Comstock said. “That was three years well spent, meeting a lot of people in the research field.”

He also later transferred to the ordinance corps, “thinking it would help me find a job after I left the Army,” he said. As it turned out, finding that job after his service to his country was no problem.

Comstock spent the years 1958-1961 working at the Pentagon. “It’s such an enormous facility with so many people and so many things going on,” he said. “We car-pooled to work, with several of us living close together, about 10 or 12 miles away.

“I’m sure the security at the Pentagon is so much tighter today than the time I was there, with the (911) attack on the building several years ago.”

He spent three years in London after his stint at the Pentagon, working with a NATO group, whose job was to standardize equipment between NATO countries.

“It was a good effort,” Comstock said. “One of the committees I was on dealt with ‘grope’ markings (in a sense similar to Braille). If you’re in the middle of the night and had no light, you could tell what you had ahold of just by feel.

“After a couple of years of going to this committee, we had managed to make acceptable ‘grope’ markings, and I recommended we should terminate the committee. The negative reactions from the French, Belgian and other nations was that ‘we need to keep meeting in case something comes up.'”

During his three years in London, Comstock said, he “got to tag along with a lot of big-wigs, which was great.” Following his time there, he was assigned to the tank automotive command, which involved combat vehicle design, along with truck and other wheeled vehicle design. He would later put that expertise to work in a very short stint in Vietnam and in the private sector.

During 1968, he spent a little over a month in Vietnam to help with vehicle mobility in the supply line process. “The army decided they were going to design a wheeled vehicle with the mobility of a tank,” Comstock said. Out of that process came three separate 8-ton GOER vehicles that had tanker, supply and wrecker functions.

“I got appointed as project manager for the GOER vehicle operation,” he said.

On September 30, 1969, Keith Comstock retired as a full colonel after 22 years, despite the Army’s attempt to get him to stay on. He then worked for General Motors for 18 years, 15 at the diesel plant in Detroit, and then three years (appropriately enough) in GM’s military vehicles division. He retired in 1987.

After retirement, Comstock said, “Helen and I were looking for a place to move to. Winters in Michigan weren’t ideal, and Helen had spent her early years in Scotland, with her mother and her mother’s family, until she was 18. Then her mother sent her back to the states to get a job, saying ‘find a home for you, your brother and I.’

“Between us, we’d had our dose of winter weather,” Comstock said.

“A friend who had a timeshare invited us down to Crossville,” he said. “We considered a lot of places, but Crossville won out in the end.”