Joyce Orrell helps bring “a touch of home” to wounded soldiers

The soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines in the United States armed forces are some of the toughest, most dedicated, most dependable personnel that make up one the most formidable fighting force on earth.
But when the guns cease fire and the echoes of the artillery fade away, these elite warriors shed their superhero suits and reveal what is so often forgotten underneath: a real person.
To Joyce Orrell and her husband Curtis, it is both obviously simple and profoundly rewarding to take care of those real people who give so much to their country.
The Orrells are involved with the Wounded Warriors program, and Joyce is a part of the San Diego North County Blue Star Mothers, a local chapter of an organization founded in WWII that supports American troops when they ship out and when they return home again.
“We try to bring a touch of home to the barracks,” Joyce says. “A lot of the kids call us mom and dad, and that means so much to us. It’s about building those personal relationships.”
The Orrells came to Valley Center from Ramona 25 years ago on what started as a simple errand.
“We were looking for a Christmas tree,” Joyce recalls. “And when we found this valley, I said, ‘That’s where we’re going to live next!’”
After Joyce retired from her career as a bank operations officer, she remembered what it was like for her husband, a Marine who served in Viet Nam, to return home.
“He knows what it’s like to come home and feel like nobody wants you,” she says. “So when we wanted to do something for our soldiers now, we asked how we could help them feel welcome when they get home.”
It wasn’t long before the Orrells got an e-mail from a nurse at Miramar with an invitation to help welcome returning soldiers home.
“They asked if we would be a part of the homecoming, making cookies and brownies,” Joyce says. “And when they said that they needed official huggers, I said ‘Yes!’”
The more soldiers the Orrells welcomed home, the more wounded veterans they saw that needed something extra special. That led to the Wounded Warriors program and a lot of opportunities to build the personal relationships that are so badly needed.
“We had a mom from Valley Center who lost her son as part of the three/five group that has lost seventy-five men since September,” Joyce says. “So we made up three huge platters to bring up, and one young man just looks at it all for a minute before he says, ‘From the bottom of my heart, I just can’t tell you how much this means to us.’ These kids ask for nothing, but they’re willing to give up so much on our behalf.”
The Orrells are part of a group that visits the Wounded Warrior barracks at Camp Pendleton every Thursday, bringing home-cooked food and an atmosphere of home.
“We started with about twenty to twenty-five meals every week, and now we’re up to a hundred to a hundred and fifty,” Joyce says. “The Wounded Warrior barracks are for the soldiers who don’t need to be constantly monitored in the hospital, but they need to be close by to get fitted for prosthetics or go to physical therapy. It’s a very uplifting place, not depressing at all.”
The work done by the volunteers became much more special for the Orrells last fall, when they welcomed their son, Sgt. Michael Orrell, back from active duty.
“It was a relief to have him home, but we also remembered that we have so many more out there still,” Joyce says. “Michael is our only child, but we think of all of them out there as our kids.”
The Orrells plan to keep volunteering for as long as they can, and Joyce says that you don’t have to have a child in the military to be a part of welcoming our soldiers home again.
“We have a lot of members, but we also have a lot of associates who don’t have anyone in the military,” she says. “We encourage anyone who wants to help to join. We welcome the Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, National Guard—everybody. And every time we leave, we always wonder when we get to come back again.”
To find out more about the Wounded Warrior project, visit the Web site at www.woundedwarriorproject.org/
For more information about the San Diego North County Blue Star Mothers, visit their Web site at www.sdncbluestarmothers.org/

Hank Weldon’s WWII Navy UDT crew helped pave the way for the SEAL teams

Hank Weldon (center, with arms on shipmate's shoulders) with his crew for training on Catalina Island in 1944.

The full crew of UDT teams that trained on Catalina in WWII.


By DAN KIDDER

The United States Navy Sea, Air and Land (SEAL) teams are a fighting force that has seen action in six major conflicts, been the subject of a handful of movies and has even been featured in a line of video games.
From the beginning, the heroes who have served their country in the field of special operations and unconventional warfare have been trained to be an elite force that finds a way to complete the mission and get home, no matter what.
Valley Center resident Hank Weldon knows what those beginnings were like.
Weldon was one of nearly 40 sailors selected to take part in the U.S. Navy’s Underwater Demolition Teams (UDT), which were formed in 1943 under the direction of Rear Admiral Richard K. Turner, and eventually came to be recognized as the beginning of the SEAL teams.
Weldon, who will turn 88 in May, recalls that he didn’t exactly know what he was getting into at the time.
“I was one of a hundred and eighty recruits, and after we had graduated, there was an Army Master Sergeant and General [William Joseph “Wild Bill”] Donovan came through looking for swimmers,” he says. “Well, I had been a lifeguard at a country club back home in Tulsa, and when they said it’s for a swim team, I had to go and open my mouth.”
General Donovan was the head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during WWII, the forerunner of today’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The team Donovan was putting together was to train for reconnaissance, underwater demolition, infiltrating and exfiltrating by sea and intelligence gathering.
“They had us doing things like diving down ten feet and bringing a manhole cover back up, just to show what we could do in the water,” Weldon says. “After I graduated, they picked out four of us and told us, ‘Here’s your orders, get your rig and get moving.’”
The unit did a bit of traveling before settling in to its new home, and Weldon says that they were still in the dark about what, exactly, they were training for.
“At first we trained with an Army Ranger battalion at Camp Pendleton,” he says. “Then we trained with the OSS at a yacht club in San Clemente, then we went back down the coast to Pendleton. Nobody knew what we were doing.”
The training intensified when the unit went to Catalina Island, and Weldon remembers stealth being of the utmost importance
“We got a rubber raft with a car battery and a motor with a small propeller to haul our demolition equipment,” he says. “When we got to White’s Cove [on Catalina Island], we trained with the OSS. There were about thirty or forty of us, in big part there were ex-lifeguards and guys from the Coast Guard. For practice, they gave us a bunch of dummy TNT at high tide, dropped us off about a half-mile offshore and told us to plant it all along the coast while our COs [commanding officers] kept watch. One of the COs said he thought he saw something, but they didn’t see us. When daylight came, the tide went out and all you could see was the dummy TNT all along the shore.”
The Navy UDT squads served in 12 different missions, mostly in the Pacific Theater of WWII. Weldon and his team were nearly deployed to China during the war, but, as he recalls, “MacArthur wouldn’t let Donovan into the Pacific.”
The team did see action in the Battle of Peleliu, a fight for control of a small, Japanese-held island in the South Pacific that had the highest casualty rate of any battle in the Pacific during the war. The UDT squads went in ahead of the Marines to clear the beach of obstacles, and despite the battle’s high death toll, Weldon remembers every one of his shipmates making it through unscathed.
Both of Weldon’s older brothers also served in the war. His oldest brother, Robert, was a B26 bomber pilot in Europe who flew more than 60 missions. His brother William was a Navy pilot who escaped death twice; the first time, he saw a kamikaze pilot hit his landing ship just before he came in, and a few days later, he had just taken off from a different ship when it got hit by a kamikaze.
After the war, Weldon served in the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) for 28 years and was a part of the original metro unit of the force. He was even involved in the police efforts to quell the Watts Riots in 1965.
“I worked with this hotshot lieutenant, and when the riots started, he told me to grab my shotgun and come with him,” he recalls. “We headed to 103rd Street, where it was just getting started, and I noticed these jokers running back and forth from the gas station across the street. So I went over and told the owner to shut the station down. He didn’t want to, so I cranked off a shot in the air, pointed my shotgun at the nearest pump, and told him he had thirty seconds to shut it down. When I went back to the lieutenant, he asked what I was up to. I told him, ‘You don’t want to know.’”
Weldon later worked as a jail supervisor in Los Angeles and had to oversee the incarceration of Charles Manson. He also worked in the records bureau of the LAPD and was a part of the initial electronic transfer of fingerprints.
Weldon originally moved to Valley Center in 1967. Today, Weldon and his wife, Donna, live in Skyline Ranch. Throughout his life, he has been an offensive lineman at Villanova University, an oil rigger, an underwater demolition expert, a police officer, a jail supervisor and an amateur woodcarver.
To this day, Weldon says that one of the most important things he’s learned in his life is to follow the Golden Rule.
“I think it’s important to treat everybody else the way you want to be treated,” he says. “When I was in the Navy, we had a yeoman who we all knew was, you know, a homosexual, and it didn’t bother us. Well, we had shore leave once, and a few other guys were giving this guy a hard time. I went up there and grabbed them and told them, ‘You’re going to start running as soon as I let loose, and you’re going to keep running until I can’t see you anymore, got it? You don’t bother one of our shipmates.’ They took off running. At one of our reunions back awhile, it turns out this yeoman paid for a big part of it because he wanted it to be something special for all of us.”

Weldon (left) with shipmate Leonard Barnhill on shore leave in Hollywood.

Weldon (left) with Wright Travis, who later was the best man at his wedding.

Weldon doing some laundry on Catalina...

...and the caption on the back of the laundry photo.

Another shot of the UDT sailors on Catalina.

Weldon received this special coin from the SEAL Association.

Weldon's green beret.

A motorcycle carved by Weldon.
Some more of Weldon's wood carvings.

97-year-old Ken Hartle recalls his service as a WWII salvage diver for the U.S. Navy

Above: Ken Hartle's Navy photo from 1942.
Below: Ken Hartle today, in his garden with his dog, Duke.

1913 was a long time ago.
Woodrow Wilson was elected president. Henry Ford’s famous Model T was only in its fifth year of production. A postage stamp cost only two cents. And Veterans Day hadn’t even been thought of yet.
But 97 years ago, one of our country’s last remaining heroes from WWII was born on a farm in Bakersfield.
Ambert Kenneth Hartle of Valley Center, who goes by Ken, served as a salvage diver for the U.S. Navy from 1942 through December of 1945.
“I was working as a shipfitter on a Navy yard when the war started,” he recalls. “And I wanted to get into the war. I tried to quit, but I was so valuable as a shipfitter that they didn’t want to release me to join up. So I started taking extended vacations, for a week or two, so they would have to find replacements. Eventually, they got the message and they let me go.”
His experience working on ships got him started as a shipwright, but Hartle says that he wanted to pursue a different path.
“I wanted to go into the Seabees [construction battalion],” he says. “So I went to Camp Perry in Virginia and had to go through all the boot camp stuff. Then I got sent to Gulf Port, Mississippi, where I was a part of the 105th specialists’ battalion. They took me and another guy, and they sent him off to Puerto Rico, and they sent me to Mare Island [Naval Shipyard, located off the coast of Vallejo, CA] to build destroyer escorts.”
But once more, Hartle had a desire to do something more.
“They put the word out through all the service that they needed divers, especially those with any experience,” he says. “Well, I had been scuba diving [with friends] a couple of times, up near the Golden Gate Bridge. So I volunteered.”
Hartle was one of 50 divers in his diving school class and, after completing his training in New York, was a part of the salvage efforts going on in Pearl Harbor.
“I got in on the tail end of the diving at Pearl Harbor,” he says. “It was tricky because a lot of the Japanese bombs and torpedoes didn’t go off, so we had to be really careful down there.”
The focus of Hartle’s battalion was to salvage destroyed ships and downed planes for potential repair. But the job also had a somber side.
“We’d bring up ships and planes to get them back into commission to help out the war effort,” he says. “But a lot of times, we were going in to bring back the bodies of our boys.”
As a diver first-class, Hartle was cleared to go underwater up to a depth of 190 feet, but he says, “I went deeper than that all the time. I even got in up to 288 feet once.”
His mind still as sharp as ever, Hartle recalls every detail about his service, from the names of his classmates in diving school (“Johnny Grimes was the best diver I ever worked with,” he remembers) to the name of his ship (Artillery Tug Rescue 11):
...to the exact weight of his diving suit (216 and a quarter pounds, compared to his own body weight at the time of 174 pounds):
...to the antics of the ship’s mascot, a dog the crew named Dusendorfff, who was with the ship from New Hampshire all the way to Hawaii:
Hartle is full of stories from his formative years, from surviving a kick to the face from a mule at age three, to dealing with the loss of his mother at age nine, to the subsequent move at age 13 to live with an aunt and uncle when his father was placed in a sanitarium with tuberculosis.
Always a hard worker, Hartle left home not long after moving in with his aunt and uncle to work a series of jobs up and down the California coast. He remembers working at a number of ranches, including a prune ranch in Santa Rosa that he describes as “the best job I ever had.”
At age 14, he bought a Model T for the tidy sum of $15, then later abandoned it on the side of the road when it broke down on the way to another job.
He went back to high school on his own and graduated from Alhambra High School in Martinez, CA in 1931. He went back to work at various jobs, on the west coast, and survived two more close encounters with dangerous animals while working as a cook for a mining camp.
“I was only on the job for about a month when I was bitten [on the leg] by a rattlesnake,” he remembers. “Everybody else was gone into town, so I was thinking, ‘What do I do?’ So I split [the bite] open with my knife and sucked out as much as I could. It got a little swollen, but it wasn’t as bad as when I got stung by a scorpion a few weeks later. It got me in the arm, and my whole arm ached for a long time after that. It was much worse than the snakebite.”
During the war, he had another close call when he was responsible for watching the anchor chains as they were hoisted or lowered from the ship:
The crew had a new captain, and, in his inexperience, he ordered both the anchors to be raised simultaneously. Hartle, who normally stood right next to the chains as they were in operation, had this time moved behind a small steel barrier to look at something else. The stress of hauling up both anchors, which weigh in at four tons each, caused the cast iron chain to crack, sending shards of metal in every direction.
“I had stepped over to the side, so I only got a little piece near my eye,” Hartle says. “But a big piece hit into the steel wall and stuck there because of the force from the crack.”
When his service was up, Hartle remarried (“I went into the Navy married, and when I came out, I was divorced,” he says of receiving an infamous “Dear John” letter from his first wife) after he bumped into his family’s former babysitter.
“Jeanne had been the babysitter for my wife and our kids,” he says. “After the divorce, I bumped into her when I was out shopping for a suit. We got to talking, and I asked her out. We were married for sixty years.”
Jeanne Hartle died two years ago after serving as a secretary in the Valley Center school district for a number of years.
The Hartles had three children together: Karen Dahl, who lives in Victorville, CA; Kenny Hartle, who lives in Montana; and Kathy Mayotte, who lives in Texas. The family moved to Valley Center in 1962 to open a chicken ranch, and Ken was a member of the Valley Center water board for four years, a charter member of the Rotary Club, and has worked odd jobs as a local handyman.
He still tends his own garden at his home off of Hilldale Road, and he remains an avid sports fan, especially when it comes to reading about the Valley Center Jaguars football games.
To commemorate Veterans Day this year, Hartle will be the special guest speaker for an assembly at Valley Center Middle School on Wednesday.


Hartle and his shipmates enjoying a little time off:
Hartle says that the crew would go swimming for recreation, sometimes in shark-infested waters, necessitating an armed guard on deck to keep an eye on the swimmers:
And sometimes, they ended up with a trophy:
Photos courtesy of Ken Hartle