Last Notes from Home

by Frederick Exley

  In 1943 our minister’s son accepts his first prominent political position as foreign policy advisor to New York State Republican Governor Thomas E. Dewey, who is preparing to run for the presidency against Roosevelt in 1944. In that campaign Dewey (almost as if our minister’s son were holding him on his knee, a la Charlie McCarthy) puts forward the idea of a postwar world with a “lasting peace” that would of course exclude our ally Russia, an idea that could only further stimulate the paranoia of Stalin and drive him further and further into his demented self. Such an idea also infuriated the Roosevelt administration, whose wartime policy was that any lasting peace must include not merely Mr. Dulles’s Anglo-American Big Two but all the allies, including Russia, which had after all, marshal, endured the siege of Stalingrad and was just as committed—if not more so—to the defeat of the Axis as we.

  By 1946 our minister’s son has moved from the shameful isolationism of his 1939 hope that we wouldn’t intervene against Hitler to become a flagrant, verbal, nearly hysterical internationalist and in his public utterances is given over to phrases like “the menace of Sovietism,” to calling Russia “atheistic and materialistic” (this, Matt, coming from a citizen of the most materialistic nation in the history of mankind and a nation whose very constitution guarantees one’s right to atheism), to saying the Soviet regime “rejects the concept of moral law,” and it has become apparent that our minister’s son who, as late as 1943, was advocating a “Christian” postwar peace with H Duce and Hitler’s thugs is now advocating a “Christian” war with Russia. It becomes apparent, too, that his isolationism of 1939 had not so much to do with his legally representing New York banks holding German bonds as with his “Christian” loathing of the possibility of any accommodation whatever with “the godless Bolsheviks.” By 1947 he has become the most feared and despised man in Russia, the object of searingly vitriolic attacks by Vishinsky. Our minister’s son has almost single-handedly become the architect of the Cold War. From 1947 on, in his capacity as delegate to the World Council of Churches, to the United Nations, as Republican party advisor to Truman’s secretaries of state, and finally as Ike’s secretary of state, our minister’s son is everywhere—but everywhere, Big Jim—spreading the Cold War gospel of the Soviet menace. It was a dormant Cold War destined to volcanically erupt in both Korea and Vietnam.

  Do you know, for example, old pardner, where our minister’s son was on June 19, 1950, a week before the North Koreans crossed—on June 25—the thirty-eighth parallel into South Korea and the Korean War began? As “nonpartisan” Republican Party advisor to Democratic Secretary of State Dean Acheson, Foster Dulles was in Seoul, South Korea, huddled with that runt Syngman Rhee, whose Republic of Korea was hardly a republic. President Rhee’s little paradise was rife with rumors that it was a police state that would have warmed Himmler’s heart. Rhee’s republic was further beset by the known fact that the majority of its citizens favored reunification with the Communist north, a possibility which, had it become actuality, would have left Mr. Rhee sucking hind tit and Mr. Dulles’s godless heathen occupying more earthly space.

  How this must have galled our minister’s son, not to mention our old-soldiers-never-die guy sitting like an emperor in his Dai Ichi headquarters in Tokyo. Emanating from South Korea at least since May there had been intelligence reports, even published newspaper reports, of massive buildups of North Korean troops along the thirty-eighth parallel; and though on June 25 General Douglas Mac-Arthur would express shock at their crossing the parallel into South Korea, later, before a congressional committee, the head of MacArthur’s own G-2, Maj. Gen. Charles Willoughby, a Kraut with a pronounced Teutonic accent born to an American mother and a German aristocrat named Tscheppe-Weidenbach, would in a circumspect way seem to contradict his commander’s prerogative to shock.

  From my reading of history, marshal, whatever machinations were conceived between our minister’s son and President Rhee in that week before the war will never be known, but it is certain that Mr. Dulles flew directly from those conferences to Toyko, huddled with MacArthur at Dai Ichi, and then, amusingly, instead of flying home he went holidaying in Kyoto, where for three days he lolled about as if waiting for something, as indeed he unquestionably was. On the North Koreans’ moving across the parallel (some intelligence reports indicated that rather than assuming a defensive posture Rhee’s Republic of Korea troops had crossed into North Korea first, provoking the attack), our minister’s son flew immediately back to Tokyo, again conferred with General MacArthur, and what might be justifiably called the Dulles-MacArthur-Rhee War was under way.

  Within hours after the June 25 outbreak of hostilities MacArthur received permission from Commander in Chief President Truman to use American air power, within days permission to use American land forces. Be that as it may, with his war against the godless red menace heatedly and furiously under way, our minister’s son flew happily (at least one imagines him happy) back home, stopping off in Honolulu long enough to tell assembled reporters that though he knew the situation in Korea had been critical, that attack had come “sooner than expected.” Brother!

  You tell me, Big Jim, that out yonder there in Dodge City the folks ain’t all that unsubtle and yet you cannot grasp wherein my irony lies and that you further challenge everything I’ve said about Dulles. Okay. Peace. We had another man from Watertown, who even now lies before us in his bier, and boys from all their various Watertowns (didn’t even you, old pardner, have your own Watertown up there in that cold Swede country of Minnesota?) who for the past twenty-five years have been the well-disciplined instruments of our minister’s son’s zealous missionary dedication to ridding the world of the heathen. There is, however, a world of difference between sitting in the very highest seats of power formulating policy and becoming a pawnlike tool in the execution of that policy.

  Whereas I’m certain, Big Matt, that our minister’s son died smugly (let me not be that unkind and instead say “self-righteously”) in Maryland’s Walter Reed Hospital—not comfortably as he, too, had the cancer and for any pain he suffered I’m genuinely and truly sorry—in the knowledge he’d done what he must to bring the wrath of God down upon the godless, the Brigadier, on the other hand, and as a finely honed utensil of our minister’s son, somewhere along the line became not only somewhat brutalized by our minister’s son’s Christian wars but became a rather more dedicated advocate of clearing the world of our enemies than even Watertown’s patron saint, Mr. Dulles, was. I think, Big Jim, I can even isolate the moment this change began occurring.

  On November 21, 1950, the Brigadier’s (he was a first lieutenant then) regiment, the Seventh Division’s Seventeenth Regimental Combat Team, commanded by Col. Herbie Powell, was standing at Hyasenjin on the Yalu River, looking over the mostly frozen gorge of the river into the frigid barren mountains of Manchuria and spitting contemptuously into the narrow and unfrozen stream which trickled and twisted serpentinelike through the Yarn’s icy banks. Despite what you may have heard from bullshitters in bars, Big Matt, the Brigadier’s regiment was the first to reach that river and stare haughtily into the nearly mythological and mysterious depths of Manchuria.

  Speaking of guys, marshal, from all our various Water-towns fighting in tie wars of our minister’s son, do you know who the first three guys to reach the Yalu were? I have their pictures at home and the men’s names and ranks are stamped as indelibly into my mind as the frozen mountains of Manchuria in the background. They were Sgt. Peter Rupelnas of South Boston, Massachusetts; Cpl. Mayford Gardner of Royal Oak, Michigan; and Pfc. Tommie Robinson of Las Cruces, New Mexico. I kid you not, Big Jim! As much as the names and hometowns sound like the creation of some hack screenwriter who wrote those fairy-tale B war movies in which you, and most of the other stars, doubtless began your careers, these were the first three guys to reach the Yalu. Sergeant Rupelnas is kneeling in the crusty snow taking a picture of Mayford Gardner and Tommie Robinson, parkaed and field helmeted, M-is at the ready, the partially froz
en Yalu behind them, and over the way beyond the river the craggy snow-covered mountains of Manchuria. Yes, marshal, Mayford Gardner and Tommie Robinson standing at the very top of the Korean Peninsula—there is great gravity in their faces—announcing to the world that the Seventeenth Regimental Combat Team has secured and battened down North Korea for our minister’s son.

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  By then, MacArthur, the smell of blood in his nostrils and heady with victory, is crustily urging his commanders to take the Seventeenth Regimental Combat Team as example and push on to the Yalu. Once there, he assures his commanders, he will relieve them with South Korean troops. In one of those bursts of trashy sentimentality of which the general was capable, he tells his commanders he has promised “wives and mothers the boys will be home for Christmas.” In a visit to his field commanders on November 24, three days after the Brigadier’s regiment arrived at the Yalu, he told Maj. Gen. John Church, commander of the Twenty-fifth Division, “Don’t make a liar out of me”—presumably with the wives and mothers—”Get to the Yalu and I will relieve you.” The general then boarded his private plane, the SCAP (Supreme Commander for Allied Powers) for his three-hour flight back to Tokyo and his headquarters. On his way he decided to fly over Hyasenjin and salute the Seventeenth Regimental Combat Team for its audacious run to the Yarn. As he passed low over Hyasenjin, he ordered his pilot to tip the plane’s wings in recognition of that regiment’s courage. For this the Air Force awarded Gen. Douglas MacArthur the honorary wings of the combat pilot and the Distinguished Flying Cross. Would I kid you, marshal?

  Had the general been able to land SCAP at Hyasenjin, he might, according to what the Brigadier later told me, have awarded every member of the Seventeenth his own honorary wings and Distinguished Flying Cross, though how a rifleman would explain such paradoxical awards to the boys in the neighborhood bars back home—assuming he got back home, and many wouldn’t, Big Jim, many would not—is another question. A week before the Brigadier’s regiment walked warily—M-is and Thompsons at the ready—into this tin-hutted mud-floored village, planes from carriers in the Sea of Japan had bombed and burned 85 percent of it and Hyasenjin lay, for all practical purposes, devastated as though on Judgment Day.

  Although the day before—on Thanksgiving, November 23—the general had so suavely (Old Mac had style, marshal, you got to give him that) tipped his wings in homage to the Seventeenth, the troops had been air-dropped shrimp cocktail, roast young torn turkey, cranberry sauce, candied sweet potatoes, stuffed olives, fruit salad, fruit cake, hot coffee, and minced pie—I know I sound like some wise-ass, Mistuh Dillon, but it’s true, true—even this reminder of wives and moms back home in South Boston, Royal Oak, and Las Cruces—no, even this heat-generating orgy of calories could not compensate for what the general would have discovered had he been able to land SCAP at Hyasenjin.

  On the night the Seventeenth walked into Hyasenjin the temperature dropped to thirty-two degrees below zero. As we would begin discovering in our hometown newspapers some weeks later, the Seventeenth Regimental Combat Team, like so many troops in Korea, was in no way equipped for this near-arctic fighting. Many troops were without gloves. Although they all had combat boots, they were not the insulated kind suitable for winter fighting. Most had parkas, but many were unlined and not the arctic kind the army used for winter fighting. A week before, in the valiant and furious drive to reach the Yalu, troops of the Seventeenth’s Third Battalion entered the Unzi River and began to ford it in what they believed was ankle-deep water, only to find themselves waist deep in heartstoppingly icy waters. Eighteen of them suffered such severe frostbite that their uniforms had to be cut from them. Water-soluble medicines froze. Blood plasma had to be heated an hour and a half before it could be administered to the wounded.

  Nor were the cold and the poor planning for winter combat the least of it, old pardner. On the same day General MacArthur was tipping his wings in salute to the Seventeenth and adding ribbons to his chest, the CIA was telling President Truman that the Chinese would indeed cross the Yalu, subject our forces to a “prolonged attrition,” and maintain North Korea as a political entity, and told the president further that the Chinese possessed sufficient troops to do so, an incredible six hundred thousand troops amassed around the bridges leading into North Korea. Nor could this possibility have ever been far from the general’s mind, suggesting that at age seventy he may have been walking about in fairyland talking only to the noble multiwinged seraphs.

  But the rest is history, old pardner. On November 26, two days after the general had flown over the victorious Seventeenth at Hyasenjin, the Chinese came storming across the Yalu by the thousands, by the tens of thousands, by the hundreds of thousands, and this same Seventeenth which only days earlier had stood so arrogantly and proudly, spitting so disdainfully into the freezing waters of the Yalu and staring so contemptuously across the way at the snow-blanketed mountains of Manchuria, after being bivouacked for a few days of cold uncomfortable rest right at the very Chinese border, now found themselves fighting desperately back—with the First Marines covering their retreat at the Chosin Reservoir—to the ports of Hamhung-Hungnam, where in that now historic evacuation they would be taken by ship to the southern tip of Korea, and, after regrouping, have to begin the long arduous fight back to the thirty-eighth parallel.

  Even then the Seventeenth Regimental Combat Team was luckier than most. As is well known by now, Big Jim, Chou En-Lai’s main thrust was directed against Johnnie Walker’s Eighth Army in the west and entire battalions under Walker’s command not only ceased to exist as fighting units but simply ceased to exist. By January 22, a mere two months from the day the Brigadier’s regiment had stood so haughtily on the banks of the Yalu, the Chinese had driven the United Nations forces seventy miles below the thirty-eighth parallel.

  It was about this time, old pardner, that I began to detect a change of tone in the Brigadier’s letters. At the time I was a sophomore at the University of Southern California, books containing the wisdom of the ages in hand, strolling about wide close-cropped green lawns shaded by swaying palm trees and surrounded by gaggles of some of the loveliest, most golden coeds imaginable, hardly the place to react to the bitterness and brutality seeping into the Brigadier’s letters. Much has been written about the near-hysterical abandon with which the Chinese fought in Korea.

  ‘The Chinese,” said Gen. Matthew Ridgway, who replaced Johnnie Walker after his jeep-accident death, “was a tough and vicious fighter who often attacked without regard for casualties.”

  Most of the American troops believed, in fact, Big Jim, that such recklessness as the Chinese displayed was spurred by marijuana smoking at the very least, more probably by opium smoking, and into the Brigadier’s letters there now came this new and biting hatred. By then his regiment, along with the rest of the United Nations forces, was slowly and agonizingly fighting its way back to the thirty-eighth parallel, and I one day received a letter—and I remember the Brigadier’s precise words—in which de-humanization entered into the Brigadier’s service in behalf of our minister’s son. Writing in not nearly the restrained tone of General Ridgway’s saying the Chinese “attacked without regard for casualties,” the Brigadier said that “the fucking gooks came at you in such a way it was like picking off fucking ducks in a shooting gallery.” Although the Brigadier admitted it was shameful of him, he wrote that he “laughed like a fucking hyena when he saw the fucking gooks piled up like cordwood, like mountains, baby brother, like fucking mountains!”

  Don’t get me wrong, marshal. The Brigadier was my brother, and even in the very groves of academe and walled in by all those stunning and proper golden girls from Beverly Hills and Bel Air, I laughed like a fucking hyena too and prayed, yes, prayed, Big Jim, that the Brigadier would kill a few thousand fucking gooks for me. So in the service of our minister’s son the process of brutalization is passed from brother to brother, from brother to friend, from friend to friend, and goes on forever, world without end.

/>   Alas, marshal, the Brigadier would never make it back to the thirty-eighth parallel, where the war ended at the very place it had begun. The second time the Brigadier was wounded, his hip and his pelvis were crushed. He was flown from a M.A.S.H. field hospital in the line to the Tokyo Army Hospital, thence to Tripler Army Hospital (where some twenty-odd years later he would die), thence to a military hospital in Waltham, Massachusetts. After many months the surgeons succeeded in putting him back together again. Whether the good doctors ever succeeded in putting the Brigadier back together mentally is another question.

  What is my point, old pardner? It is simply the age-old and proverbial one of power awesomely corrupting its beholders, as it most certainly did with Dulles and Mac-Arthur. Let me be more specific, Big Jim, and say I believe the much-revered MacArthur was a fraud and a fucking liar into the bargain, that despite his protestations of shock at the Chinese entering the war en masse the general never for a moment doubted they would do so and that he stood prepared to sacrifice, like pawns in a chess game, his most forward elements, including the Brigadier’s Seventeenth Regimental Combat Team, to the Chinese in order to get Congress’s permission to wage nothing less than an atomic war of attrition against the godless Chinese, a war our minister’s son doubtless would have endorsed. It is a very harsh accusation, I agree, old pardner. For all that, and though the Brigadier would give the army another twenty-two years of his life after finally leaving the hospital in Waltham, I have reason to know he was forever haunted by the possibility that MacArthur had been rendered so blasé in the execution of what one calls Command that he had become a moral monster. You wince with distaste, Mistuh Dillon?

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  If I say that I’d long owed Wiley an apology for the hard abruptness with which I’d cut him from my life, I mean that at fourteen I entered the haughty world of the jock and in those days in Watertown jocks had no time for anyone else but other jocks. Of course I did not know that day at the bier that I had become so smitten with Robin mat over the next year I’d make an incredible five round trips to Hawaii to see her, staying on the Cirrhosis of the River at the Coco Marina in Hawaii Kai—she’d rented Wiley’s house—for as long as up to two months, when her Maui boyfriend would call her and announce he’d be over in a couple days. I’d then move on to Wiley’s in Lanai.