Excerpts from an oral hisory of

Captain
Wilfred O. Jyrkas

Part II - Police Work Takes A Special Faith

When I was on the job two months an officer was killed. I think I was too young and too dumb to really know that that put me in great jeopardy. That’s kind of a foolish thing to say, but I really don’t think it had the impact. That’s almost the kind of attitude that I think I carried into combat when I went into regular combat in Korea, too. That I’m going to follow my training to the “T”. I’m going to try to do what they tell me to do, to survive this stuff and maybe I will, and the Good Lord watch over me, I’ve always been a Christian, considered myself one, anyway, I don’t know if the Lord does, but some things you’ve got to do on faith. And, I think the police job is one of them.

I never shot anybody, but I pulled my weapon quite a few times. I didn’t point it at people necessarily. I kept it behind my leg. Sometimes it was a club that I had there, sometimes it was my gun. If I found that whoever I was dealing with was completely innocent of whatever I thought happened, usually I said something like this, “We just had a stick-up in the neighborhood or we were just chasing a person we believe to be a felon, you matched the overall description of him, so I stopped you, I’m sorry if I frightened you, but that’s why I drew my weapon. I didn’t draw it to intimidate you.”

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