When Edward Greer talks about his time in combat, his description of battle is straightforward.

“In wartime, you didn’t have much to think about except get the stuff out there, get the ammunition on the target. You didn’t have much time to consider hardly anything else. And taking care of your troops,” Greer said.

But Greer’s life is testimony that military service is far more complex, with lives shaped or even saved by decisions of individual leaders. That’s illustrated in his 1950 citation for the Silver Star, the Army’s third-highest honor for valor in combat.

The Korean War was in its opening weeks. Second Lt. Edward Greer of Gary, West Virginia, and his fellow soldiers from the all-Black 159th Field Artillery Battalion were among the first U.S. troops rushed to South Korea after North Korea invaded in June 1950.

“On 26 July 1950, near Changiong-ni, Korea, Lieutenant Greer was forward observer for Battery B, which was supporting an infantry company. During the ensuing action when the company was cut off from the enemy, Lieutenant Greer called for artillery fire on his own position to enable the infantry company to withdraw,” the citation read. “When the company had completed withdrawal, Lieutenant Greer returned to his former position and assisted in evacuation of the wounded under heavy mortar and small arms fire.”

The battle was fought on the second anniversary of Executive Order 9981, President Harry Truman’s 1948 directive to integrate the armed forces. Greer and most of the Black soldiers fighting in Korea in the war’s early days were still in segregated units. 

Greer, who eventually became one the first Black general officers in the Army, will celebrate his 100th birthday on March 8 in El Paso, where he and his wife settled in 1976. 

He is one of the dwindling number of living veterans who fought in three defining U.S. wars of the 20th century – World War II, Korea and Vietnam. And he is one of the last remaining Black veterans who joined the U.S. armed forces when they were segregated, fighting for a country that viewed them as second-class citizens at best.

Greer said there was no time to think about issues like segregation and integration while fighting.

“You’re fighting because you’re trying to protect you and your troops. You’ve got to think about that, because the big thing is you don’t want to lose anybody,” he said. 

Dana Pittard, 64, who grew up in El Paso and became among the hundreds of Black generals to follow in Greer’s footsteps, knew the Greer family all his life. He called them Uncle Ed and Aunt Jewell. Pittard said Greer talked with him frequently about fighting for an imperfect country.

“It was the ideal of America — that America, by our Constitution, by our Declaration of Independence, it was the ideal. In practice, it wasn’t what it should have been, but it was still worth fighting for and making a difference by example,” Pittard said. 

From West Virginia to combat in Europe

Greer was born in Gary, a coal-mining company town for U.S. Steel in the southern part of the West Virginia. His parents had moved there from North Carolina. His father, Walter, worked as a coal miner – one of the few jobs where Blacks and whites received equal pay – and later as a school truant officer. 

Edward Greer enrolled at West Virginia State College, then an all-Black school, in 1942, but his education was disrupted by World War II.

“He was in college and the war broke out and they took all the men out of the college and made them go into the Army,” said his son, Michael, a retired physician who now serves as his father’s caregiver.

Greer, then a private, was assigned in 1943 to the 777th Field Artillery Battalion, an all-Black unit in the segregated Army. By the end of the war in 1945, he had been promoted to master sergeant, the Army’s highest enlisted rank at the time. 

“I had 130 know-it-alls,” he said of the men he helped lead through France and Germany.

When Germany surrendered in May 1945, the 777th Field Artillery was ordered to the Pacific, where the war with Japan still raged. While their ship was en route in August 1945, Japan surrendered.

“The ship changed direction from going wherever it was headed for and headed straight for New Jersey and out processing,” Greer said.

Back to college, then back to combat

By January 1946, Greer was back at West Virginia State College. While there, he met a fellow student named Jewell Means. They graduated on May 30, 1948, and were married the next day. 

Greer had planned to become a dentist, but his dreams fell victim to the realities of mid-century America. 

“I took all the necessary courses to try to pursue a career in dentistry. Of course, at that time, you still had the business of segregation, and there were only a few places that a poor Black kid could even think about going” to dental school, he said.

Instead, Greer received a commission as a second lieutenant in the Regular Army, which offered a sense of stability for a 24-year-old Black man.

After almost two years of schooling and training, Greer joined the 159th Field Artillery Battalion in Japan in March 1950. Jewell, pregnant with their first child, stayed in the United States.

Three months into his tour of duty in Japan, communist North Korea launched a surprise attack on South Korea, a U.S. ally, on June 25, 1950. The closest U.S. forces were in Japan, including Greer’s unit, and were moved to South Korea in July. They quickly saw combat, including the battle where Greer earned the Silver Star.

In September 1950, recently promoted to first lieutenant, Greer got word of another milestone. Jewell had given birth to their first son, Michael. 

“I was going up one of those hills in Korea. And of course, the guys that I worked with knew we were expecting a baby, so I got a radio message, you got a young cannoneer. Being a boy. I don’t know what the message would have been if it had been a girl,” he said with a laugh.

There was no time to celebrate. “I was trying to protect my rear end and stay alive at that time.”

By the end of 1951, Greer – now a captain – returned to the United States. The Army was moving quickly toward integration of its forces, mostly out of wartime necessity.

“It really started on the tail end of my tour there in Korea, because we had a shifting of soldiers back and forth between units,” he said.

Over the next two decades, Greer’s Army career would take him to Germany, Oklahoma, Kansas, and multiple tours of duty at the Pentagon. He was promoted to major in 1958, lieutenant colonel in 1963, and colonel in 1968. 

The Greer family grew to three children with the addition of son Kenneth and daughter Gail. 

Becoming a general

In 1970, then-Col. Greer was sent to his third war, in Vietnam. He first served as deputy commander of the XXIV Corps Artillery, then as commander of the 108th Artillery Group. 

“I had four battalions in Vietnam,” he said, giving him command of hundreds of soldiers as the United States was winding down its involvement in the war. 

Greer served a year in Vietnam before being sent to the Pentagon in 1971. In June 1972, the Army announced that 62 colonels had been selected for promotion to brigadier general, including Greer and four other Black officers.  

Before this wave of promotions, only four Black men had risen to the Army’s general officer ranks, the New York Times reported at the time. 

With his promotion, Greer became deputy commander of Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri, one of the Army’s premier training posts.

“That was a most pleasant time. And the thing that made it so nice were the people. Not only the people that were on the post there, but also the civilian population around the base. Those were good, solid citizens there in Missouri,” Greer said.

In 1975, Greer received his second star in a promotion to major general, and was named deputy commanding general of the U.S. Military Personnel Center in Washington. At MilPerCen, as the organization was known, he played a major role in determining assignments for members of the armed forces.

“At MilPerCen, he had friends, family, and soldiers call him up to ask for compassionate assignments,” his son, Michael Greer, recalled. “And also he would make sure that interracial couples did not get assigned to bases in segregated or racist communities to protect the couple and their children.”

Greer also had served in the military’s personnel office for three years from 1961 to 1964, where he shaped the future of countless Army families, including Dana Pittard’s. His father, Bob, was an Army air defense officer.

“My parents, they did not want to be assigned to the South, and El Paso wasn’t considered the South, even though Texas is. And that’s why so many contemporaries of my parents ended up settling and retiring in El Paso, because it was one of the few places they’d ever been in the Army where they didn’t experience as much racism as they experienced in other places,” Pittard said.

Greer retired from the Army in 1976, bringing an end to a historic military career that covered 33 years.

Life in El Paso

The Greers got to know El Paso during brief assignments and visits to Fort Bliss.  

“When we would come down here, we always had a lot of fun. And of course, at that time, coming here was always, when do we go to Juárez ? And I must say, in my early years here, we were scouting around for the big eating places in Juárez ,” Greer said.

While visiting in 1976 to see their son Kenneth, who was in the Army at Fort Bliss, Jewell Greer found a home in the Mountain Park subdivision of Northeast El Paso with expansive views of the city. She called Edward to let him know that she had found her home, and he was free to join her.

Jewell and Edward built their post-Army life at that Mountain Park home. Both were involved in real estate sales, and were active members of several civic boards. Jewell Greer died in February 2021. They were married for more than 72 years.  

When asked why they chose El Paso, Greer gestured to his yard.

“You see this weather out here today?” he said on a 58-degree day in early February. “When you lived in Washington, D.C., and survived that weather that you get there, it didn’t take much. I guess if the weather had been decent, I’d be living in D.C. right now.”

Celebrating history

Greer’s family, the Army, city and county officials and others have 10 days of events lined up in March to celebrate his life.

Pittard, now vice president of defense programs for Allison Transmission in Indiana, will return to El Paso for some of the festivities celebrating Greer, the man who pinned his second lieutenant bars when he graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., in 1981.

“I love the man and he’s family. But it’s an important milestone, not only in his life, but for all of our parents who fought so hard for not just our country, but for us all just to be good citizens. And he represents that entire generation,” Pittard said.

“He’s so humble, but so good to people,” Pittard said. “And he has this style, I call it the Greer style, that you just wanted some of that. It’s not apparent now because he’s 100 years old, but he had this style that was cosmopolitan, it was serious. I’d stand at attention as a kid with him because of this style, this respect. And he’s loved.”

As he approaches 100, Greer has outlived his wife, two of his three children, and most of his friends and comrades in arms. 

“I’m real fortunate to be able to be around this long because, see, my address book has gotten to be a number of cross-offs. There’s a hell of a lot of people ain’t around that I started out with, and there’s damn few of us still around.”

When asked what he was most proud of in his life, Greer said: “I think coming up in the Army and being involved with people, managing people, getting along with people. And I guess I’m just a people person. I like people, and I want them to like me.”