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WARSAW — Earl Rouse never wanted to leave home.
“I enlisted running away from the draft,” he said with a laugh. Born and raised in Warsaw, Rouse graduated from James Kenan High School and enlisted in the Coast Guard in July 1965. He chose the Coast Guard because the recruiter promised him that he would stay close to home and be able to visit his parents every weekend, but he was sent straight into the Vietnam War instead. Rouse and about six of his friends from Duplin County signed up and served together in many of the same stations. During basic training at Cape May, NJ, they were given a choice: Hawaii or Alaska.
“I signed up for Hawaii. When we got there, we had to race to the boat (Cutter Bering Strait) where we were stationed,” Rouse told Duplin Journal.
Instead of a sunny tour on the beaches of Sand Island, Hawaii, Rouse was immediately shipped off to Japan (Cutter Ocean Station Victor) and into the Pacific theater.
He would spend the majority of his active-duty career in the Guam and Saigon areas. Pulled into service in the Vietnam War, Rouse was a yeoman on the boat. Part of his duties in Guam included ferrying 82 boats from Subic Bay, Philippines, to Da Nang, Vietnam. Patrolling borders and facilitating medical checks on fishing boats were a large part of the job in that area. Rouse was responsible for a lot of clerical activities, including transmitting target coordinates to bomber planes. Rouse recalled being stationed at the Loran Station in Yap.
“That was a year of paradise,” he said. In this rural island, natives went around half-dressed and participated in ceremonial dances sporadically throughout the day. Rouse shared how he took pictures and Kodak refused to develop the film because they thought the people were being exploited.
“I told them this was how the people lived and dressed normally, and they developed the film and sent rolls with it. We never had to pay for the film again,” he said, “it was like we were National Geographic.”
Some of those pictures are on display now in an exhibit honoring Rouse’s service at the Duplin County Veterans Museum.
Now in his 70s, Rouse serves as the museum’s curator. For 12 years, he has told the stories of Duplin County soldiers from the Revolutionary War through the more recent wars in Afghanistan. The stories were passed along with the uniforms and artifacts or researched by Rouse himself. Rouse remembers and retells them all as if the soldiers were all his high school buddies.
Two floors of stories are housed in the historic Victorian Best home, originally donated to the Warsaw Presbyterian Church. Near the entrance to the museum stands a book over 400 pages long, listing all the veterans from Duplin County. When you ask Rouse if he knows any other veterans in the area, he proudly answers, “Yeah, I know about 2000 of them.”
Rouse eventually returned to North Carolina during his active duty service. His last station in July 1971 was at the Aircraft Repair and Supply Center in Elizabeth City. From there, he was able to make trips home to visit his family, as he had been promised from the beginning.
During some of these visits, he met and fell in love with a girl from Warsaw. Because she didn’t want to leave the area, Rouse left active duty and became a part of the Coast Guard Reserves. He took a job at General Electric, settled down, and started a family. Rouse credited his boss at GE for helping him make the rank of petty officer first class.
“He pushed me on to every opportunity (to better myself),” he recalled. Rouse served in the Coast Guard Reserves from August 1972 to December 1988. He was stationed in Oak Island, Southport and Buxton as well as Yorktown, VA, before finishing his service at Wrightsville Beach. As a retiree now, all the stations “treat (him) like a king” when he visits. At Wrightsville Beach, his last station of duty, they still allow him to come and fish off their dock with them. Overall, Rouse loved his time in the service.
“I’d go back now, if they let me,” he told Duplin Journal.
