| Summary: | (6:49) Mr. Shockley tells about his service in Saudi Arabia while serving in the U.S. Army, including being given the 'eyeball of a goat' to eat at a meal with the Saudi king.Florence-Lauderdale Public Library Digital Archive
Interview with Paul W. Shockley
January 27, 2010
Florence, Alabama
Conducted by Clint Alley and Rhonda Haygood
Clip 9
Paul Shockley: But, I had a, a lieutenant that was a friend of mine, a first lieutenant, he was my best man at our wedding. We got married in September of ’49 and June of ’50 the Korean War broke out. He went over within two or three weeks from the time it broke out, they shipped him out and he went to Korea and two weeks later, his wife, we stayed in touch with his wife, they were friends of ours and he got killed. He’d been in Korea two weeks; he got killed. But, the first bullet will kill you just like the last one will.
Clint Alley: Um-hm. Yeah. So did you stay at Fort Benning throughout most of the Korean War?
PS: Yeah, I did. I stayed at Fort Benning from ’48, I graduated jump school in June of ’48, so I must have went there a month or two ahead of time.
CA: Um-hm.
PS: I went to Saudi Arabia in June of ’53. And I put a year in Saudi Arabia. I was in Ta’if, Saudi Arabia when the old king that took over the country on camelback years before in the ‘20s, he died in Ta’if, Saudi Arabia, that’s in the lower part of, down close to the Yemen country. And he died and they flew him, ah, yeah, Ta’if down close to Mecca and, and Jeddah. [Mr. Shockley refers to the location on a map] See here’s Jekkah, ah, Jeddah it was a port city and this is Mecca here and Ta’if is just right over here close by, I can’t see too good, but it’s, it’s—
CA: It’s in that region down there.
PS: It’s in that region; that might be it right there.
CA: Over there close to the Red Sea, then?
PS: Yeah, it’s close to the Red Sea. It wasn’t over here on the sea; I mean, it was back in, about the same distance from Jeddah to Mecca to—that’s probably, that’s it, T-a-i-f, Ta’if. That’s it right there.
CA: Yeah, yeah. I see it on there.
PS: Yeah, that’s it.
CA: Um-hm.
PS: That’s it. And no outsiders allowed into Mecca, you know.
CA: Yeah. It’s only, ah, Islam. Only Muslims in, allowed in there.
PS: Yeah, only Muslims allowed there. And you won’t find any pictures or anything of the Holy Kaaba or inside of Mecca. But I’ve got some hanging on the wall in my bedroom. You can take a picture of them if you’d like.
CA: Okay. I believe you gave us a copy of that one.
PS: Did I?
CA: Yes, sir.
PS: Yeah.
CA: Yes, sir.
PS: And, ah—
CA: So, why did you go to Saudi Arabia? Did they send you there as an advisor or—?
PS: Yeah, as an advisor. I was with the Military Assistance Advisory Group. That’s a special, elite Army group and we had spe—several secret operatives; I cleared the top secret.
CA: Okay.
PS: And we had other missions, not just this. We worked with Ambassador Wadsworth and course, we worked with our colonels and, and mostly it was officers. General Grover was the commanding officer of the Air Base, of the Air Force. Course at this time the Army and the Air Force had separated completely, you know. They had Air Force Military Assistance Advisory Group and they had Navy Advisory Group and they had the Army Advisory Group. There’s the certificate I got for achievement, in Saudi Arabia, Military Assistance Advisory Group to Saudi Arabia certificate of achievement.
CA: You were telling me that you, you actually, you met the king before he died.
PS: Oh, two, two weeks before he died, I eat with him.
CA: Um-hm.
PS: Yeah. And the eyeball of the goat is a delicacy. It’s an honor to be given the eyeball and they had warned me ahead of time, you know, and I wore two t-shirts and we didn’t have to wear a tie and I unbuttoned the top button of my shirt and I had on my two t-shirts. The old king grabbed my hand, slapped that eyeball on my hand and all the juice and everything dripping from it and I said, “Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you.” And I’m [mimics eating], “Mmmmmmm, oh, delicious, delicious, mmmm, nice goat.” And wiping, “Mmmmm, that’s good, good. That’s delicious!”
CA: So, you slipped it into your shirt?
PS: That, that eyeball went straight down and landed in between them two t-shirts.
CA: Oh, my goodness. What was the king’s name?
PS: Ibn Saud Mohammad, I can’t think of his—. He’s got a name, had a name about like that [indicates a length with his hands]. I don’t know. He’s got every kind of name you can think of; he had them all.
CA: So he gave you the eyeball of a goat, huh?
PS: Yeah. I got the goat. They had that whole goat, had the whole thing laid out there. And we was sitting, they eat on the floor, had tables about six or eight inches high and we was sitting down there with our legs crossed. Course all the Americans’ legs had done gone to sleep and all, from sitting on them. But, you know, it’d be undignified to straighten out or straighten up and of course when it got over and got time to get up there wasn’t no getting up, you know, you had to rub your legs and get them to wake up before you could get up.
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