A Loss of Innocence . . . A Flight to Freedom

I remember you.

You were the big guy with “Cornhusker” scrawled on the back of your dungaree jacket, ahead of me in the long, thin line of Marines that trudged up the mountainside.

You grumbled as we bent into the effort, 40 pounds of gear on our backs, as darkness deepened and our anxiety grew. We could hear the unfamiliar boom of artillery from far off and the odd, muted drift of voices from the high ground.

It was a strange and scary time.

We’d been in Korea only two days and already they were leading us up to the main line of resistance, the MLR, and you kept complaining that we weren’t “acclimatated” yet. It was the biggest word you knew, Cornhusker, and it was wrong.

That was in April 1951. I’m in Korea now, near a place called Wonju, standing on a hillside looking for that MLR, an imaginary stretch across the north-central part of the peninsula. We called it the Quantico Line.

I’m here to resurrect memories of a war begun a half-century ago Sunday, because that kind of anniversary just can’t go unnoticed. The fact that the war itself went pretty much unnoticed continues to rest uneasily on the national conscience. It wasn’t a real war back then. It was a conflict. A police action.

Even though it killed 4 million human beings on both sides, military and civilian, it just didn’t seem right calling it a war only five years after the Big One had ended. Euphemisms prevailed in the 1950s as the young men marched away.

And now I’m back in this ancient land at a time when the presidents of North and South Korea are talking peace, shaking hands and laughing as though all that pain never existed and all that blood never flowed.

The fighting ended in 1953, Cornhusker, but the war, that element of hostility that keeps hatreds alive, never has ceased. Even detente won’t erase memories.

You’ll always be a part of the inner me, Cornhusker. You’re one of those guys who continue to haunt my dreams all these years later. I remember you because we were so close for a while, and a sniper killed you with a single bullet just a few weeks after we’d arrived. You died without a word, and I looked at violent death for the first time in my life.

Oh, I remember you.

*

I’m here seeking old battlefields. The driver tells me we’ve covered about 900 kilometers from Seoul to Taegu to the Hwachon Reservoir. We did it in two days. Back then, mountain by mountain, it took us nine bloody months.

I have a diary kept through most of my time in Korea. Much of it is in pencil, watermarked and hard to read. But I can make out sentences here and there. For instance on April 3, a Tuesday, I wrote, I’m beginning to feel detached from myself, as though it is someone else here, doing these things. . . .

The feeling prevailed from the day our troop ship landed at Pusan until the day I left Seoul. I lived in a world reduced to essentials. Happiness was a beer ration. Grief was the sniper’s mark on a guy like Cornhusker.

One minute alive, the next minute dead. Existence snapped in and out of focus that quickly.

We took the days as they came and moved on from one hill to the next, bearing down on our emotions, keeping them in check. Something within perishes in war. An internal dead zone allows a soldier to face terror that might otherwise break him. Fear abates at the cost of involvement. You come home a different person than the one who left.

These thoughts come to mind as I follow the route of the 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines, on a drive called Operation Killer. And the dread that returns from the past still chills me.

*

I remember you.

You were the old man on the porch of a home somewhere in the Yongso Valley, a stretch between high mountains devastated by war. Artillery had left your small house a battered shell, but as we passed I noticed you sweeping.

Slowly, methodically, using a handmade broom, you swept your porch clean as troops and tanks forged north. Operation Killer was the first major offensive after Inchon’s glory and Chosin’s icy ordeal, an assault geared to finding our way back into the war against a massive influx of Chinese soldiers.

But war and peace have passed this way many times before through Korea’s troubled history, and you continued to sweep, despite the destruction of your home and the agony at your doorstep.

The shell-pocked rice paddies around you were thriving once, but in war they are simply annoyances in combat’s path, something we had to slosh through, ankle deep in water and mud, often dodging fire from distant hills.

But still you swept, old man, clinging to that fragile element of the quiet life you once knew.

The rice paddies are still here this spring of the year 2000. The war has long since passed and the fields are green with new life. Another old man works the ground now. His name is Sam Joon Byun and, at 79, he remembers when his village lay in ruins. “There was nothing left,” he says through an interpreter. “Nothing but ashes.”

He is thin and bearded, with skin the texture of parchment. “We lived in holes in the hills,” he says, pointing toward a ridgeline. “The Communists found some of us. Many were killed, others taken to the North and never seen again. We were afraid and hungry.”

In my diary for April 21 I wrote: The civilians we passed huddled together around fires near their burned-out houses. A man stood with his hands behind him, straight up, almost proudly, wearing rags. And I heard myself saying bitterly, “Behold, the glories of war. . . .”

A morning fog lifts as we talk, the old man and me. It is a gray and unsettling mist and I’m glad when it’s gone. It reminds me of the shrouded dawns when the cry “Saddle up!” roused us from our foxholes to move through valleys like this toward objectives that rose abruptly from the shallow floor.

There was peril at every step. Mortars from the ridges, mines in the lowlands. As I walk along the roadside today, a scene flashes into memory: There’s a Marine not 20 feet in front of me. He glances back. I see his face. An explosion. A cloud of smoke. Silence.

There were no screams. There was no time to scream as he stepped on a mine and was shredded by the blast. I still see his face. There and gone. We move on.

*

I remember you.

Your name was Pete Mamaril. You were small for a Marine, barely 5 feet 5, a 20-year-old born in the Philippines who had come to America in search of a future.

For a little guy, you had a laugh that could fill a barracks and a smile that faced any situation. It’s the smile I remember most about you, Pete. You loved the Corps, and nothing they did to us could change that.

We went through boot camp and advanced training together, and ended up in the same fire team in combat, comrades in arms. I remember you as we fought for the high ground east of Hongchon, the most mountainous section of Korea. Here the peaks tower over the low valleys, disappearing back into fading shades of blue as far as the eye can see.

Today, the high ground is thick with pine and fir trees, and with maples whose leaves turn to glory when autumn comes. Back then it had been bombed and scorched with such ferocity that the trees were almost nonexistent. Those that remained were torn and leafless, their branches reaching like claws to the lowering skies.

Napalm blackens everything, including human beings. I remember us, Pete, going up one of those nameless hills after the Corsairs had brought thunder down onto it. We saw humans that were charred figures, their bodies still smoking, caught by napalm in the posture of their flight. One died as he reached forward, seeking a haven beyond his grasp.

And that night when we dug in, sickened by the sights and smells of what we’d seen, we heard a woman wildly crying, her sounds carried up from the valley to our hillside foxholes, intensified by the evening’s silence.

It was a wail that lasted for hours, and we wondered, Pete, why she was crying. For a dead husband? A lost child? “Maybe,” you said, “she’s just crying for all of us.” I remember the look on your face, and it wasn’t a smile.

We moved out the next day, assigned to different units to fill spaces left by the dead and wounded. I was halfway down the hillside when enemy mortars flew in, hissing out of nowhere, few but deadly, a quick wharumph! and then silence.

I didn’t look back, Pete. We were a company in assault, and hesitation could mean the destruction of our drive to something called Objective Able. We leaned into our fears.

In my diary I wrote: Once I was a small child and I was afraid of things, so I ran from them. Now I’m a man in war and the things I fear could mean my death, but I don’t run. Oh, foolish travesty of intelligence, where is your reason?

It was only later, after we had secured our objective, that someone said to me, “You know your friend? The little Filipino guy? He’s dead.”

Yes. I remember.

*

The villages are towns now and the towns are cities. South Korea is a prosperous nation, and that is reflected in the countryside. Chunchon, Yanggu and Inje bustle with commerce. The streets are full and traffic heavy on superhighways that were once dirt roads packed down by the tread of tanks.

This part of Korea is a tourist mecca today that covers almost 17,000 square kilometers and includes a population of 1.5 million. Children pedal brightly colored paddle boats on lakes so clear that you can almost see the bottom. Families camp on mountains we took at the point of a bayonet.

One brochure offers tours of an old battlefield above Chorwon called the Iron Triangle, another of that region around Yanggu we knew as the Punchbowl.

I remember the Punchbowl.

We were on a ridgeline that bordered its singular shape, moving deliberately toward an enemy hill, our energy sapped by a numbing heat wave. It was at the start of July. Soon the rain would come, as it always did in July and August, but this day seemed years away from any kind of cooling comfort.

Often, because we moved so fast, our supply trains couldn’t keep up. We scrounged for water where we could, once drinking from a pond which, we discovered to our horror, contained a human leg at the bottom. We dropped extra purification tablets into our canteens, closed our eyes and drank it anyhow.

This day shadows my memory. As we trudged along the ridgeline, enemy fire blasted through our ranks. It was a flat-trajectory, 76-millimeter artillery piece firing down on us from high ground across the valley.

We scattered and sought shelter on the reverse slope, listening to the boom of ignition, the evil hiss of the shell and the almost instantaneous explosion as it hit. They fired many. One was meant for me.

I lay with my head down on the steep reverse slope, feet propped against a dead tree. I heard the 76 fire . . . and the tree that I leaned against shattered into wild fragments, its trunk and branches strewn over the ridgeline.

And then I realized. The missile had hit the tree but hadn’t exploded. It was a dud. I lay there long after our own artillery had silenced the enemy weapon.

I should’ve died that day. I should have been one of the 37,000 Americans to perish in that strange and awful war. Why am I still alive? “Let’s go,” a platoon sergeant said softly, knowing what had happened, knowing what I was thinking. “Let’s just go,” he said.

And I moved on, leaving a part of me by that tree, and the rest of me still wondering what it all meant.

*

I remember you.

Your name was Joe Citera. You were a rangy kid with big ears from Greenpoint, Brooklyn, whose raspy imitation of Jimmy Durante somehow kept us going through the worst of times.

I remember us lying flat in a rice paddy, half buried in mud, incoming mortars exploding around us . . . and you rising and asking, in that Durante rasp, “I wonder what the poor people are doing?”

We called you the luck of Fox Company because with you around we often managed to be where the danger wasn’t and, well, because you made us laugh.

But there was a serious side to you too, Joe. You confided once that at 19 you’d never had a girlfriend because of your protruding ears. “Look at them,” you said, pushing them out even farther. “They’re like elephant ears. When I get out, I’m having them cut down and pinned back. They can do that now. And then wait’ll you see me.” The Durante rasp: “Step aside, Errol Flynn, and let this beautiful guy through.”

You were a beautiful guy, Joe. Gentle, generous and without a hostile bone in your gangly body. You gave your chocolate rations to kids and your food to refugees along the road. The villagers I’ve talked to on this trip, and there were many, remember guys like you for those simple, humanitarian gestures. They remember you as bright moments on very dark days. I heard “Thank you” many times in the week I was here. So many of those thanks were meant for you.

Destiny should never have led you to Hill 749.

September. The rainy season had passed and the chill of autumn was setting in. The leaves of the maple trees normally turn brilliant at that time of year, but there were no trees around us on 749.

We were just grateful that it was dry, having survived sleeping in holes filled with water, drenched to the bone, and crossing rivers turned swollen and murderous by storms that rolled in one after another.

Hill 749 was waiting for us on the far side of one of those rivers. It was the first U.N. night attack of the war. We’d climbed in silence to surprise the enemy, but he knew we were coming. As we neared the knoll, he opened up from both flanks.

Machine gun tracers streaked the night, mortars blew around us. And then they came at us. Somehow, firing wildly into the gathering darkness at shapes that slipped in and out of the shadows, we managed to build a perimeter around the knoll.

I heard someone shout, “Citera’s been hit!” and a coldness beyond the exterior chill filled me. But he hadn’t abandoned us. As waves of North Koreans stormed up the hill, screaming threats and shouts in English, one enemy voice seemed to rise above the others. It said with deadly intent, “All Marines from California go home tonight!”

It would not go unanswered. Another voice, the Durante rasp of Joe Citera, filled the night when it asked, “What about Brooklyn?”

I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to adequately explain what that did to the company. I know this: We held off five vicious charges that were complete with bullhorns and bugles. We dug into a hill that was almost granite and held our ground throughout the hellish ordeal. And as long as he was able, Citera’s voice urged us on.

Joe died just before sunrise from shock and loss of blood, his legs shredded by machine gun bullets. We were consumed with a sadness too deep to measure. But at least we could acknowledge his gift. We wrote a message on the side of a cardboard C-ration box and affixed it to a tree trunk. It said, “To Joe Citera, Hill 749. You held our luck as long as we needed it.”

I remember you, Joe. We all do. We always will.

*

I stand by the Hwachon Reservoir looking toward the northeast, at a jumble of hills where 749 sits. We lost half a battalion here and won a Presidential Unit Citation “for extraordinary heroism, superb professional performance in battle and outstanding devotion to duty.”

One man killed today from a booby trap, I wrote less heroically in my diary for Oct. 10. One wounded from our own artillery. There are a million ways to die around here. Pick a way, any way. . . .

“You saved Korea,” a retired college professor said to me in Seoul last week. Horace Underwood is from a third-generation American missionary family in Korea. His grandfather founded Yonsei University, where Underwood is now a member of the board of directors. During the war, he was a Marine translator.

“You could feel the turnaround from the first day of the war to the day the Americans came,” he said. “You saved Korea in every sense. . . .”

The price we paid was heavy. From a June 4 diary entry as we prepared to leave a rest area to return to battle: I knew all this couldn’t last forever, but in war, the impossible is what a man clings to; the inevitable is what he scorns. Even now as I write, the men are out in the warm evening playing baseball, football or cards. And tomorrow night, the guy who’s dealing out the blackjacks may be spread all over the front lines by a 120 mortar. The one who’s pitching the curves may be sucking in blood from a bullet hole. And the one who’s writing this diary may be cannon fodder too.

It was a possibility none of us ever ignored. We asked for just one more day as we crouched alone at night in foxholes dug along forward mountain slopes, entrenchments long since filled in by time’s relentless mechanisms. Just one more day of life.

The constant presence of death created a terrible loneliness. There were empty places in our soul. I had a wife waiting for me and a daughter born two months after I’d been sent off to war. I knew her only from pictures. It was an ache beyond any physical pain I have ever experienced.

I remember realizing that the 38th parallel we crossed twice in combat was the same line in its reach around the globe that passed just north of San Francisco, my home at the time. It was a strange awareness, and it filled me with a desperation to live, to survive, to exist.

Just one more day.

*

I remember you.

You were the thin young man aged by war, too old too soon, that they came for in the night, saying you’d been transferred to the rear. They had checked your records and discovered your interests and talents and wanted you as a regimental combat correspondent.

You stared dumbly from your foxhole at the messengers who brought the news. “On your way,” your platoon leader said, a first lieutenant just out of college. “Your war is over.”

But how could you leave? How could you abandon those with whom you had shared such peril, those to whom you owed your life? Friendships are forged in combat that are closer than brothers, built around a mantra that says no Marine is ever abandoned; we bring out our dead, our wounded, our shattered lives.

“This isn’t an invitation,” the lieutenant said. “You’ve been ordered. Pack your gear and get the hell out of here.”

So you left the front lines in the night, riding a jeep through the darkness to a place of tents and cots and hot food, far beyond the range of artillery.

But one never really leaves a war.

It stays with you down the years, hovering just beyond trills of laughter and times of happiness. Its sounds and images appear at unexpected moments: while holding a small child, or caught in a traffic jam, or alone in a garden.

But physically, at least, you spent the last few months of your war in relative safety and you left Korea aboard a troop ship looking back at the land that lay in a mist of dreams and moments long since past.

I thought about those moments as I boarded a 747 last week that would bring me home. I thought about you, the boy you had been and the man you had become, wounded by war but moving on.

I remember you, Al Martinez. You were so young then, and so old.

*

COMING SUNDAY

The story of Army troops who fought at Chosin Reservoir is a tale of anguish and redemption.