It had been just over three years since the old Army
Air Forces had been transformed into a new and separate branch of the U.S.
Armed Forces when Buck arrived in Texas for his training. Also, by that time,
the Korean War had already been raging for six months; and a whole lot of water
had already flowed under the proverbial bridge in Truman’s ongoing “police
action” in Korea.
2 The previous June, thousands of troops from the
communist northern portion of the Korean Peninsula had poured across the 38th
parallel into the pro-Western Republic of Korea (ROK) to the south. Under the
guise of a United Nations resolution, President Truman had ordered American
troops into the conflict early the following month in support of the ROK.
3 By August, what was left of the ROK’s army (along
with their American allies) had been confined to an area around Pusan in the
extreme southeastern portion of the peninsula. The following month, General
Douglas MacArthur launched a counter offensive against the communist forces at
Inchon. In November, the Chinese entered the conflict and quickly erased the
gains that MacArthur had achieved during the offensive.
4 For Buck, however, Korea was still more than a year
away. He would have to complete his training first. He was slated to be a
radio/radar technician, but his training had barely begun when he received word
of his mother’s death. He was granted emergency leave to return to Huntsville
for the funeral.
5 By the time he got back to Texas, however, there was
no way for him to catch up with the training he had missed. Instead, he was
sent to Boston University for four months of training to work on aircraft
engines. “This is the most boring shit I’ve ever dealt with,” he told one of
his classmates.
6 In fact, about the only interesting thing that
happened to him while he was there was a letter he received from Doodle.
“Leslie married that nice Maynard girl named Dorothy,” she informed him.
7 Technically, Leslie was his nephew, but he had
always been more like a brother or best buddy to Buck. “Well, at least he’s
having some fun,” he thought.
8 From there, Buck was sent to San Marcos Air Force
Base in Texas and then on to Perrin Air Force Base. At Perrin, he was tasked
with working on some twin-engine B-26 planes that the Air Force was using for
reconnaissance. Buck, however, was more interested in drinking and women at
that point in his life.
9 At the end of July, he turned twenty-one years old;
and he was ready to celebrate. He and some of his buddies headed into Sherman
(about seven miles from the base) and invaded the first saloon that they came
to there.
10 After several drinks, Buck’s attention focused on a
buxom blonde seated at the other end of the bar. For a moment, he caught her
eye. She smiled and winked at him. He raised his glass to her, and then left
his bar stool to stagger over to where she was seated.
11 As he got nearer, he noticed that she was
surrounded by several other men who were actively competing for her attention.
Buck pushed through several of them and got close enough to speak. “Hello,
darlin,” he began.
12 “That’s not the way it works, darlin!” the woman
laughed. “I’ll need your dog tags if you’re goin to be talkin to me.” Buck
quickly took them from around his neck and handed them to the platinum vision
seated before him.
13 “Hey, buddy, can’t you see that I was here first,”
he heard someone say behind him. “Yeah, you gotta get in line,” another man
protested.
14 Someone gave him a shove, and Buck started
swinging. His fist landed first in the man’s face who had told him to “get in
line.” Then Buck felt someone’s fist hit his face, and he was suddenly
careening toward the floor. Someone kicked him before he could get back up, and
he could see that others were now fighting above him.
15 He pulled out his pocket knife and stabbed the man
who had kicked him. The man let out a howl and quickly crawled away through the
melee. Buck’s hand felt warm and wet. He looked down at his hand. It and the
knife were covered in blood.
16 His head was swimming, and he was suddenly very
nauseous. “I’ve got to get outta here,” he thought. Then he somehow managed to
make it to the door and ran outside. He looked both ways and kept on running.
He squatted down in a nearby ravine and hid there until morning.
17 Unaware that the beautiful blonde had given his dog
tags to an MP after the fight, Buck thumbed a ride back to the base. The police
arrested him at the gate.
18 “This is very serious,” the lawyer told him. “Don’t
say anything to anybody!”
19 Dick wired him fifty dollars to help with his
fines, and the lawyer managed to get him out of it with a slap on the wrist.
Even so, Buck’s days in Texas were now numbered.
20 “If you don’t volunteer for Korea, I can guarantee
that you will get every shit detail that comes down the pike,” his CO told him.
Buck was on a plane to Japan two days later.
21 From there, he rode in a mail carrier to Kimpo Air
Base which was a few miles to the northwest of Seoul, Korea. In other words, he
was close enough to the fighting that he would never really feel safe and
secure while he was there.
22 Like the other airmen on the base, Buck lived in a
tent with a wooden floor and an oil stove for when the nights turned cold. He
slept in a sleeping bag on top of an army cot. As there wasn’t any warm water,
showers there were rare (even in the summertime). Like his buddies, he also
drank a lot of coffee and ate a good many C-Rations while he was in Korea.
23 His first time on guard duty was miserable. It was
pouring rain, and the only thing he had to protect him from getting drenched
was a thin poncho. As a consequence, he spent most of his time in the guard
shack.
24 When the CO checked on him that night, he startled
Buck so bad that his teeth started chattering. He shined a flashlight in his
face and asked him if he was awake. “Yes, sir!” Buck replied. “See that you
stay that way!” the CO barked in reply.
25 The nights were always difficult at Kimpo. They
were close enough to the 38th parallel that the North Koreans would
sometimes slip into the base and kill some unsuspecting airman while he was
sleeping.
26 Each night, they were also subject to a flyover by
the communists. They would drop fragmentation bombs out of their planes and try
to hit the tents of the sleeping airmen below them. “Did Bed Check Charlie get
anyone last night?” was usually one of the first questions asked each morning.
27 And, if the nights weren’t enough to torment the
Americans, there was the fact that the people from the North looked just like
the people from the South. Hence, unless the person was wearing a uniform,
there simply wasn’t anyway to distinguish friend from foe. Hence, Buck and the
other airmen stationed there were always suspicious of the natives streaming in
and out of the base. “Is that Gook carrying scraps of food or explosives in
that pail of his?” Buck wondered on more than one occasion.
28 His next time on guard duty was even more
frightening than his first had been. He heard something moving in the tree
line, but it was so dark that he couldn’t see anything.
29 “Halt! Who goes there?” he shouted into the
blackness before him. There was silence. “Advance and be recognized,” he
demanded. He thought he heard a stick or twig snap. “Jong-gee!” he screamed in
the best Korean he could muster with his Southern accent.
30 His heart was beating fast now, and a cold sweat
had broken out across his forehead. Another stick snapped in the darkness. He
pointed his rifle at the darkness before him and opened fire. A spray of
bullets hit the trees in front of him.
31 Within minutes, he was surrounded by other airmen
and his CO. “Miller, what in the hell are you doing?” the CO demanded. “Sir, I
thought I heard something out there,” Buck replied. “You think you heard
something!” the CO repeated.
32 His shift on guard duty for that evening was over.
Nevertheless, he spent most of the rest of that night answering questions about
exactly what had happened and why he had decided to fire his weapon.
33 Then, one night, the base alarms sounded. They were
on red alert. It was the middle of winter, and the temperature was hovering
around zero. It was two o’clock in the morning, and it was pitch black outside.
34 Buck and his comrades had to position themselves on
the cold, snow-covered ground with their weapons pointed at the perimeter of
the base. They could hear the Chinese soldiers shouting and screaming in the
distance. Buck’s teeth were chattering again, but it wasn’t from the cold.
35 Fortunately, the Chinese and their North Korean
allies never overran their position. Although the airmen of Kimpo felt the
constant pressure of the not too distant front, they never had to retreat or
surrender their base to the enemy.
36 In the meantime, Leslie had been inducted into the
U.S. Army and was on his way to Italy. He was to be stationed in Trieste and
would work in the motorpool there.
37 “At least he’s not in Korea,” Doodle told Clayton.
“This way I’ve only got one of them to worry about!” “He’s still pretty damn
close to the commies,” Clayton reminded her.
38 In the meantime at Kimpo, the wing of one of the
Australian Meteor’s stationed at the base tipped the runway and crashed. The
plane had burst into flames, and everyone was loading into emergency vehicles
to rush out to the crash site. “Miller, ride in that ambulance,” Corporal White
pointed. Buck jumped in the vehicle just as it pulled away from the hangar.
39 As they approached the wreckage, Buck could see
that the plane was fully engulfed in flames. “Can you smell that?” someone
asked. “Yeah, there’s no mistaking that smell,” another answered. Unlike his
comrades, however, the boy from Alabama had never smelled burning human flesh
before. He was horrified.
40 When the fire was extinguished, Buck had to help
them pull the boy’s charred body from the twisted metal of the plane. He
learned later that he was only nineteen years old. “He was from Sydney,”
another man volunteered. “We all bleed red,” Buck thought to himself.
41 Finally, early in 1953, word came that the United
States and its allies had concluded an armistice with the North Koreans and
their allies. The war was finally over. “Maybe we can get the hell out of this
God forsaken place!” one of the airmen shouted. “I could go for that,” Buck
agreed.
42 He was released from the service on December 17,
1954 at the “convenience of the government.” He touched back down on the soil
of the United States at Seattle, and he kissed the ground when he got off the
plane.
43 There were, however, no cheering crowds or ticker
tape parades to welcome him and his comrades back home. Like the men who had
fought in the war, the American public wanted to put Korea behind them as
quickly as possible.
44 Buck got started on forgetting right away. He
immediately proceeded to get drunk, and he stayed that way for the next three
days.
No comments:
Post a Comment