Finally Home From the War

Night was the worst of all times in Korea, its absolute darkness embracing the potential of a dozen ways to die.

Twilight was almost as bad, because anticipation entered the equation and heightened our awareness of every shape that blurred into ebony and every sound that rustled in the wind.

I knew with certainty that the snap of a twig could be the last sound I would ever hear, the final, single tap of a drumbeat before a bullet.

It was Joe Citera’s last sound and Pete Mammaril’s too, and a hundred others whose names I once knew in the tight camaraderie of war.

The memory of night’s menace has lasted 45 years, emerging at unexpected moments like a bird startled into flight, causing an almost physical reaction to keep low and seek cover.

And so it was proper that I should visit the newly dedicated Korean War Memorial as dusk fell over the Washington Mall.

I looked all the terrible memories in the face, held to the scene by a fascination that would not allow me to glance away, staring into the eyes of a warrior-statue whose horror is eternized in stainless steel.

I stared until twilight merged into darkness and the sunset that splashed rainbows on the underside of thunderclouds vanished, and the terrible, drenching heat of an unbearable day became an unbearable night.

The 19 soldiers that compose the memorial seemed to move with the shadows that shifted with the transition from day to evening. Pale green spotlights cast their faces into ever-deepening expressions of tension and anxiety.

The images were haunting. I saw myself there, and heard a twig snapping. . . .

*

Monuments are often larger and grander than realities, assuming heroic proportions in the aftermath of the events they commemorate.

In the case of the Korean War, a hole in history three years wide, that may not be so. It was a confrontation beyond the statistics that were endlessly quoted over the dedication weekend.

Speakers and booklets, needlessly seeking justification for the memorial, never failed to mention that 54,000 Americans had died in a war once dismissed as a police action, as though a euphemism, however often repeated, would erase the flow of blood that traced red ribbons on the snow of an Asian winter.

What I never heard on that weekend was that a total of 5 million human beings from all sides, military and civilians, young and old, lost their lives in the battles that raged up and down the Korean peninsula.

There isn’t a monument big enough to recognize that kind of loss, except wherein it dwells on the world’s conscience.

I thought about those things as I finally pulled free from the hypnotic state I found myself in, troubled by both the memories of war’s endless nights and the murder of those who were its innocent victims.

Even as night deepened, crowds swirled around me at the memorial, creating a surreality of movement over my own memory of being totally alone in the shadows that fell over the front lines almost five decades earlier.

Armies of graying and potbellied men were my company as we walked around the memorial’s sculptured squad of soldiers, each 7 feet tall, that seemed to move through time and remembrance up a slight incline toward the Washington Monument that glowed in the distance.

Helmeted, draped in ponchos, their M-1s and Browning Automatic Rifles at the ready, they are frozen in postures of vigilance, looking this way and that, alert to movement, listening to sounds.

One seems to have just turned, swinging to the right, listening. Was that a twig he heard snapping?

*

Jets from Washington National Airport added to the mystique of twilight, silhouettes against the setting sun, reminiscent of the terrible sunsets created by flashes of fiery napalm once dropped from the skies in bursts of color on seashores, ridgelines and valleys terraced by rice paddies.

They were the sunsets of Inchon and Pusan and the Punchbowl and Chosin Reservoir and Heartbreak Ridge and Hamburger Hill and of a dozen sweeping offensives with names such as Operation Killer and Ripper and Mousetrap.

The napalm sunsets left behind figures charred in the posture of flight or crouched in fear, the odor of their burning flesh lingering on the breezes of memory that drift occasionally into my sleep.

If I talk too often of memory it is because so many of them were evoked during the two days I spent at the Korean War Memorial.

I was reminded a dozen times over of the war and those who fought it with me, especially on the sweltering night of my arrival with the presence of a small piece of cardboard left at the head of the memorial.

It said simply, “F-2-7, 1st Mar. Div.”

There were many such notes left in the area of the monument, either around the marching soldiers or at the foot of a 164-foot-long granite wall, on whose face was etched the ghostly images of war’s participants.

But the one that caught my attention was the handwritten F-2-7 notation, because it meant Fox Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Regiment, First Marine Division. Seeing it was an affirmation of my past. It was my company, my battalion, my regiment, my division.

I had been there. I had honest to God been there.

*

I never discovered who made the F-2-7 sign or found anyone from Fox Company, but it really didn’t matter. We were all warriors in the same battles, confined to a peninsula about half the size of California, oddly companionable in the mutuality of our war.

We looked for faces, we looked for names, we looked for combat insignia at the memorial, and we talked endlessly to each other, the way old soldiers do, about how close friendships were and how quickly they ended in sprays of fire and lead, or in the single drum-tap of a sniper’s bullet.

There was a completion to all this, a closing of the circle, final recognition that, yes, there had been a war and we had been in it and now everyone knows that.

There were no parades and bugles when we came home. No crowds cheered, no storms of confetti and streamers fell from tall buildings.

The troopship William Wiegel that returned me to San Diego docked, prophetically, as night was falling. But if we expected family to meet us, none was there, because there had been confusion about where the ship would land and when.

A small detachment of Marines waited as we docked and led us to buses at the end of the pier. There wasn’t even a band.

The buses took us to the Marine Recruit Depot where I had entered the Corps two years earlier. I was told as we were mustered out the next day that I couldn’t leave the base because records showed I had never returned a pillow issued when I was in boot camp.

But then they looked in my eyes, where visions of blood and hell still dwelt, and knew that no goddamn pillow would ever stop me from leaving that base. The Marine Corps in its wisdom wrote off the pillow and sent me to my Cinelli, my wife, who waited.

*

There was no such silence or insensitivity on the long weekend of the memorial.

The President spoke, bands played, flags fluttered, fireworks lit the cloudy night and everyone marched on parade. There was even a thunderstorm.

You couldn’t ask for a better acknowledgment of an effort at arms. If it seemed a little excessive, that’s OK too.

It was for Joe Citera and Pete Mammaril, who heard the drum taps 44 years ago, and Adolph Brunn and Don Weiland, who made it home, and for all of us who felt so alone when our ships docked at piers notable for their emptiness.

The Korean War never really ended. Tensions continue to bristle along the border of a divided country. I saw it firsthand during a visit a year ago. Nothing has changed.

As a result, we have been unable to feel that anything was over or that we were truly home. We have been suspended in history and vilified by our own memories, leaving a war neither won nor lost, and 5 million people dead.

But now, if nothing else, the monument tells us our pain is acknowledged and the brutality of our war is recognized. To that extent, we can slip out of the uniforms of our memories and rest easily with our terrible encounter.

Finally there has been a tribute. Finally, a parade. Finally, a band. I can say with a satisfaction I never anticipated that, after decades adrift in nights I can never forget, I’m home at last.