It is Late It is late. I have just opened another beer, and thrown another log on the fire. I am thinking about my buddy Al, who is as old as my father, and who has told me many stories about his days as a Marine in the Korean War. A lot of guys will tell you war stories, but not many have the snapshots to back them up. Al does. In the pictures, Al is young again, wiry and muscular from too many pushups, too many hours of rifle PT, too many nights without sleep and days without food. Al doesn’t know I am writing this article. He would not want me to, I think. As a Marine in Korea, he got used to answering “certainly, sir” to any order, no matter how ludicrous it may have been. He was a machine-gunner there. The machine guns back then were water-cooled, like the one Snoopy mounted on his doghouse when he was reliving the World War I aerial battles with the Red Baron in his imaginary Sopwith Camel. But water, Al told me, was too difficult to transport in Korea. The Marines just supplied them with crates full of extra barrels, to replace the ones that melted from being fired for too long. In terms of sheer tonnage, more ammunition was spent in the two and a half years of the Korean War than in all of World War II, including the two A-bombs dropped on Japan. Over 33,000 American soldiers died there, and over 103,000 were wounded. Many of the wounded were sent back out into the field to be wounded again. The war got very personal; Al has pictures of Marines going through the killing fields, recovering the items that the North Koreans and Chinese soldiers had lifted from the bodies of dead Americans, items like watches, medals, pens, and pictures of sweethearts left behind. Al recounts these tales as if he had seen them in the movies, those old serial flicks where the ending is always left in question. The grainy black-and-white photos are grisly. One shows a Communist soldier who had climbed out onto an American tank barrel, in hopes of stuffing a satchel-bomb down the muzzle. Al’s company radioed to the tank to fire at the right moment, blowing the enemy troop to smithereens. Others show the masses of slaughtered Chinese, in the light of day, after a night of “freewheeling”, when Al would never take his finger off the trigger of his Browning, one comrade feeding belts and links of bullets into the side of the machine gun, the other calling out “left”, “right”, or “up”, depending on which direction the enemy came from. When he was discharged, Al stepped off the boat onto the shores of San Diego. He went into a bar to get a much-deserved beer, in his Class-A’s. A beatnik civilian, he said, was at the bar, and chastised him for being the killer the government had taught him to be. The beatnik said that he loved everyone, including Communists. “So do I,” said Al, and knocked the idiot off his barstool with a hard punch. Al’s best days are long behind him now, but some memories won’t ever escape his mind. His worries of the present seem trivial to him, compared to the ordeals of his youth, when he was only worried about following orders. He was lucky, to see as much combat as he saw and to come out unharmed. He even maintains a certain sense of humor about the whole thing, as horrible as it was. He accentuates his stories with a hearty laugh, not what one would expect. His lungs have since been blackened by years of work as an Allied Signal engineer, working with asbestos as part of his job testing jet engines. He lives a comfortable life in the heart of central Phoenix; his hobbies include long walks in the sunshine in the daytime, and sighting his telescope on the heavens at night. If you didn’t know the stories, if you hadn’t seen the photos, you wouldn’t believe the horrors he endured when he was young. Now, North Korea admits to having nuclear capabilities. Our president has listed that country, the last true bastion of Communism, as being part of an “axis of evil”. But George W. Bush knows nothing of combat. He was being coy in a speech when he made the remarks, and now they have come home to haunt him. With his “new tone” of pre-emptive strikes on those who would harm people who love freedom, he has practically doomed another generation of young men to die on that frozen ground, with those harsh mountains looming like alien gods in the background. Al did not sacrifice his innocence, his youth, to have a silver-spoon dumbass like Bush send more Americans out into those bloody fields to die. But here we are, looking down the barrel of North Korea once again, and all because nobody in our government ever cared to finish off the war they started. They left this, as they left Iraq, undone, because they know there will always be a few hundred thousand more men like Al, willing to follow orders, willing to get the job done, willing to take a few more chances, and a few more snapshots. Our soldiers will always do this out of love for this country, for love of their fellow Americans, even those privileged enough never to have to commit to this awful deed themselves. I raise my beer to Al tonight, and to those who fought and died alongside him. I stoke the fire before I head to bed myself. I pray that the sacrifices of the past have not been made in vain, and likewise for the sacrifices of tomorrow’s young men. But I just don’t know anymore. I’ll have to look Al up again, and ask him. At least I know I can trust his judgment, even if he punctuates it with a veteran’s grim chuckle that somehow seems both out of place, and in place, at the same time. Paul Heller 10/18/02 << back to the archives
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