 I'm from the Cody First Nation and my name is Tony Cody. I'm 72 years old and a Korea War veteran. Can you tell me a battalion or regiment? I was with the 81st Field Regiment Royal Canadian Artillery. How were you enlisted in the Army for? I was in the Army for six years. I was 17 years old. Were you involved in active duty or peacekeeping? I was in both. I went into active duty in Korea in 1953. Seeing action there, participated in action in Korea from 1953-54. I was 14 months in Korea. And as for peacekeeping, I went to Germany in 1955-57. That was a peacekeeping role there. Do you join the Army? I think I admired when the Second World War veterans first came home, or when they went to war in the early 40s and then they came home in 45. I used to admire them coming home and hearing some of their stories and whatnot. I always thought, well, I should give it a try. If I ever get a chance to join the Canadian Armed Forces, I said I'll join the Canadian Army. I did in 1952. It was very challenging. It was an experience. And I learned how to be independent. I had learned how to be on my own, look after myself, and be able to integrate into the white system. I came out of a residential school where we were all segregated and we were kind of timid and wasn't very, very forceful in trying to explain yourself and whatnot. But you learned leadership discipline and everything like that in the Canadian Army. On reserve prior to or at the time of signing up? I just come right off the reserve. Just a young kid coming off the reserve. What was that like? I came off the reserve when the reserve life was quite hard at that time from the time that I was going to school. I was in the residential school and then I got out of the residential school and tried to make a living on the reserve. And employment was very, very scarce on reserves at that time. You got seasonal work. You worked for farmers. You worked at harvest time. If you got lucky, you got a job in town, but they were very scarce. So somebody had to do something and I didn't have that much of an education. I had a sub-centered level of education from the residential school. So I thought I'd give the armed forces a try and I succeeded in being accepted to go into the Canadian Army. What was the experience like for you to go from a reserve setting to another environment like to a foreign country? It's really something different. Even when you first get into your first, where you take your boot camp or basic training in Camp Shiloh was where I took my basic training in April of 1952. And it was all together different. The way of life was different. You had to act like a soldier and start training to be a soldier in uniform and in a strict discipline. But it was not as tough as it used to be at the residential school. Residential school was tougher, so there's nothing for me to be in the Army to take all that crap of discipline and regimentation and getting direction from the NCOs, the sergeants and corpos and the lieutenant. It was easy in Canada when I first started. It was just nothing, but it was kind of funny really. When I went to Korea, it was all together different lifestyle there. The people were poor. I thought we came from a very poor background, but when we got to Korea, I realized those people were very poor. There were children running on the streets along the troop train begging for food and everything like that and hardly any clothes on them. Five, six-year-old kids there begging for food and they were starving. What their country was at war and their houses were being demolished, had been demolished by bombs or tiller shells and everything else like that. I used to wonder, I wonder where those poor kids sleep at night. But as soon as the troop train would come along, they'd all appear. They would all appear with their hands sticking out and begging for food, water, whatever that. The troops used to carry sea rations. We had sea rations in our packs and whatnot, and we would send or throw the food that we had in our sea rations to them and they would all make a mad dash. The city of Seoul, which is the capital city of South Korea, that was totally demolished by bombs from the Americans and the Russians, Chinese airplanes and whatnot. And you see people going around, starving, hardly any clothes on and really looking for food and begging here and there. It's really tough to see people in that kind of, in that stage where they have absolutely nothing to eat and hardly any clothes at all. It made me think, it made me really think. I used to think it was poor from where I came from. Then I realized that here in Canada we are very lucky. We are very fortunate, even though the Indians at that time were also considered to be very, very poor. But after seeing the situation in Korea when I arrived there, in March of 1953, then I realized that we are much better off than the Canadian Indian people are much better off than the South Koreans in Korea. Have you applied for veterans' benefits or services from Veterans Affairs? Yeah, I did. When I got my release I did apply, but I was one of the veterans that didn't really get anything. Other veterans got all kinds of benefits, post-war benefits, what we call post-war benefits. Same situation as our First World War and Second World War veterans from the Reserves. I don't know why they treated us different, and I'll say that we went and fought with our white brothers side by side. We did the same thing as they did. We were assigned to the same kind of dangerous duties. We did everything that they did. We dug trenches, we shared trenches with them, and some of us got taken prisoners of war, some of us got wounded, some of us got taken prisoners of war, and then when most of the Indian veterans got their discharge, they were treated altogether different. Even though they said that there would be post-war benefits and payments after you donned the uniform off, it didn't turn out that way. A lot of the veterans and I was one of them that didn't get anything. All I got from my first stint in the Army was $110, and it was called the Re-establishment Grant of $110, and that's all I ever got. I wanted to pursue a higher level of education. The New Veterans Affairs had monies funding for white veterans where a lot of them went back to university, went back to college.