by Adam Makos
The gate bobbed in Red’s vision. He swore he would collapse in joy when he crossed that line in the dirt. Then the gunny’s Kentucky twang rang out: “Hold it up!” The men passed the word forward and Red’s face sank. Everyone stopped and jeeps squealed to a halt. The men stood, wobbly.
Gunny Sawyer paced back and forth along the line. “Double column!” he shouted. “And look like Marines! Cinch them straps. Tuck in them loose ends. Stand like you’ve got a spine.”
Red plodded into a line and fastened his icy chinstrap. Others straightened the bedrolls sagging on their buddies’ packs. Wounded men hobbled from jeeps on frostbitten feet, using their rifle butts for balance. The wounded fell in and the two columns came to number roughly fifteen men in each. As the gunny passed to inspect them, Red and the others stood taller.
“Forward march!” the gunny called.
Sixty boots began thumping the snowy gravel. Red’s eyes fixed on the ragged helmet cover of the man ahead. His eyes perked up and he raised his chin higher. In step beside the columns, the gunny started singing: “From the halls of Montezuma…” A chorus of voices picked up the tune: “…to the shores of Tripoli. We will fight our country’s battles, in the air, on land, and sea….”
The men sang as they marched through the gate. Young voices blended with older ones, northern voices with southern. From the corner of his eye, Red saw others watching—the SPs, the interpreters, refugee mothers with babies, squatting old men, bundled little boys and girls.
Inside the tent city, the song ended and the gunny called a halt. Red and the others lowered their last boot heavily. The wounded swayed, desperate to keep balance, and everyone fought to keep their backs straight. They once had been Boy Scouts and soda jerks and baseball players in sandlots. But now beneath the stubble and grime, they were veterans.*
Even the enemy was impressed.
Off to the side of the compound, hundreds of Chinese prisoners watched from the fence of a wire pen. Blankets were wrapped around their shoulders. They were loosely guarded and their casual posture suggested they had accepted their fate. They were due to be evacuated, too.
They had to be.
During the “Big Bug-Out,” some Chinese prisoners had escaped from the Marine column and were “liberated” by their fellow Chinese. Marine patrols later found the escaped POWs machine-gunned in the snow. The communists had executed their own troops, believing them to have been “ideologically contaminated” during their captivity under the Americans.
Runners approached the gunny to deliver the unit’s assembly orders. Red’s eyes focused ahead and narrowed. Between the men and the ships lay a street, on both sides of which sat trailers. Their wooden side boards had been flapped up and turned into awnings. Marines were lining up beneath the awnings and someone was serving something—food or drink, Red couldn’t tell.
The gunny returned. He pointed to a ship that was currently taking aboard tanks and told the men that they’d be boarding soon. The ship would carry them to Pusan, on the southeastern tip of South Korea. The gunny showed them where to assemble on the beach, two hundred yards away. “Y’all got ten minutes to grab a snack,” the gunny said, raising a thumb to the trailers behind him. “Ten minutes, no more! Lotta Marines are coming in behind you.”
Red and the others grinned.
Stretcher bearers approached and the gunny told the wounded to fall out to the side. “Everyone else stay on your feet!” the gunny added. “No plopping down—I ain’t gonna drag your asses the last mile—it’s un-damn-dignified!”
The men roared with laughter.
—
Red, Jack, and a few of their buddies hobbled toward a white trailer with a red awning. The line was short and a sign read: HOT COFFEE, FRESH BREWED. Inside, women wore green parkas and served coffee from stainless dispensers with spigots. A sailor walked up and placed his canteen around the spigot. The woman turned a handle and the coffee flowed. Steam rose from the canteen.
Am I dreaming? Red wondered. He was accustomed to melting snow in his mouth when he needed a drink. He and the others pried their canteens free and edged forward. Red unscrewed his canteen cap. A gritty, grinding noise sounded. Frozen saliva, dirt, and particles of food were caked around the canteen’s rim. The others’ canteens were just as filthy.
Red raised his canteen toward the spigot.
“Stop!” A woman reached from behind the counter and shielded the spigot with her hand, her face cringing with revulsion. Her coworkers leaned in to look at Red’s canteen and reeled in disgust. “That’s not sanitary,” the woman snapped. “You’re going to need to find a clean canteen.”
Red turned to see if Jack and the others were putting him on. The others were muttering under their breaths—it was not a joke. Red glanced up at the woman and she glared down with disdain.
One of Red’s buddies pointed to another trailer that was serving coffee a few spots down the row. “We’re taking our business elsewhere,” the Marine told the woman. She shrugged with indifference.
Red and his buddies walked to the Salvation Army trailer, where a perky young girl worked behind the counter, bundled against the cold. Jack held out his canteen. “Miss, will you still serve us with these?” He gestured to his canteen.
“You betcha,” the girl said. “And we’ve got Oreos too!” She fanned her hand to a platter of cookies.
Red waited his turn and held his canteen up. His eyes followed the steam as the girl filled his canteen.
“Creamer?” the girl asked.
“Yes, ma’am,” Red said.
The girl poured powder from a box. “Sugar?”
He nodded happily and she poured him sugar too.
Red capped his canteen and returned it to its case. He pulled off a mitten, reached for a few Oreos, and put them in his pocket. His fingernails were long and dirt filled the wrinkles on his hand, but the girl seemed not to notice.
Red and his buddies thanked her and hurried to their assembly point.
—
On a stretch of beach beside their ship, Red and his buddies dropped their packs and relaxed. They’d arrived early, even before the gunny.
Up and down the line of ships, Marines from other units climbed gangplanks to board. Trucks and tanks drove up the ramps and into the vessels’ cargo holds. Cranes hoisted jeeps aboard. One hundred and eighty ships were already waiting or en route to Hungnam. Over nearly two weeks, the ships would take aboard 100,000 fighting men, 17,000 vehicles, and 91,000 civilians—most but not all of the refugees who had flocked to the harbor.
Red opened his canteen and took a sip of coffee. It was perfectly hot and bittersweet. He fished an Oreo from his pocket and crunched down on the cookie. His jaw had nearly forgotten how to chew soft food. The black crumbs clung to his stubble.
Jack and the others ate cookies and drank their coffee in silence.
They made no victory toast, nor would they. But there had been a victory of sorts at the Chosin Reservoir. The Marines, the army, the forces of democracy—roughly nineteen thousand men—had bested more than a hundred thousand enemy troops, nearly destroying the Chinese 20th and 27th armies.
“We shouldn’t be leaving,” a Marine commented. His eyes scanned across vast piles of supplies. “We should just regroup here.”
Red shrugged. “Here or down the coast,” he said. “What’s the difference?” The others nodded. In a month, they’d get their wish. In January 1951, the 1st Marine Division would be returning to battle.
“Heya, look at that,” Jack said. He pointed to a nearby ship and Red’s eyes focused on the anchor chain. Halfway up the chain, two North Korean peasant boys were climbing to sneak aboard.
Their small faces were clenched. Their hands clutched the iron chains and their diminutive bodies dangled over the frigid blue water.
They might have been brothers. They were probably orphans. Whoever they were, they were desperate to escape the communists. Red glanced at the boys and knew exactly why the Korean War mattered. There
, on the anchor chain, he saw why he had come to this miserable, frozen land and why Devans had given his twenty-one-year-old life.
“That about says it all,” Red muttered.
At his side, Jack nodded.
* * *
* Red’s Weapons Company marched to the Chosin with 188 men and reached Hungnam with 109. Ed Coderre’s How Company began with 185 men and ended with 50. Among How Company’s survivors were Wick and Tex, both frostbitten but alive.
CHAPTER 42
THE GIFT
Five days later, December 16
Hattiesburg, Mississippi
THE MORNING SUNSHINE STREAMED through the windows and into the apartment’s living room. From outside on the porch, Daisy’s voice trickled through the glass, as did the soft, somber voices of strangers.
Local folks, blacks and whites, men and women, dotted the sidewalk in front of Daisy’s mother’s apartment. Some were coming to see Daisy, while others were leaving. Ever since the local paper had announced Jesse’s death on the front page, a constant stream of visitors had come to the projects to express their condolences. For many white visitors, it was their first visit to Hattiesburg’s all-black neighborhood.
During a lull between visitors, Daisy entered the apartment with a covered bowl in hand. She set it on the kitchen counter with the others. Almost every visitor had brought banana bread or a casserole or their mother’s recipe for this or that.
Daisy sank down onto the couch. She had never expected to become a twenty-three-year-old war widow. She wasn’t angry at Jesse for leaving her, nor at God for taking him. When a writer for Ebony magazine asked how she was coping, Daisy said, “I guess it was the will of the Lord to take him. I’m glad, proud that he died fighting as a navy flyer. He would have wanted it that way more than anything in the world.”
Still, Daisy’s heart felt hollow.
The house was silent. Her mother was out and Pam was napping. Daisy was glad that Pam was asleep. She had never cried more over her daughter than she had that week. Anytime Pam had heard an airplane fly over, she ran for the windows shouting, “Daddy! Daddy!”
—
Daisy’s mother entered through the back door and set a small sack on the kitchen table. She emptied the contents and a pile of mail poured forth. Citizens across the nation were writing to Daisy to express their sympathies. Even Tom Hudner had written from the Leyte to tell Daisy of her husband’s bravery, but the letter went missing in the deluge of mail.
Daisy’s mother leafed through the pile surreptitiously. Whenever she found a newspaper, she tore it in two and threw it in the trash. She couldn’t bear to let Daisy see what the papers were saying—it was too terrible.
The story of Jesse and Tom had become front-page news across America. The papers were all quoting a navy press release that had been wired from the Leyte immediately after the crash, before Tom had returned to the ship. The press release got the story wrong, and so did the papers.
In Tom’s hometown, the Fall River Herald News wrote, “The 26-year-old Hudner landed in the same field and ran to Brown’s help knowing, the Navy said, that his own chances of escape were slim. But Brown was dead when Hudner reached him. Hudner radioed for a helicopter to take Brown’s body back to friendly territory.”
In Hattiesburg, many black folks read the Afro-American newspaper’s account: “Navy rescue planes rushed to the scene of the crash, but Brown’s plane became enveloped in flames before he could be removed from the cockpit….the Marine helicopter arrived and Ensign Brown was removed from the plane. He was dead.”
Daisy’s mother thumbed through the envelopes to see who had written. She didn’t realize that her efforts to protect her daughter were in vain. Daisy had already gathered clues from her visitors, who openly lamented the senseless, gruesome way that Jesse had died. She had heard how her husband had died alone, before anyone could reach him. And she surmised what no one would tell her—that Jesse had burned to death.
—
“It’s for you,” Daisy’s mother said as she set an envelope on the coffee table in front of her daughter and then hurried away. Daisy sat up, curious. “I’m going for a walk,” her mother announced from the kitchen. The back door opened and closed.
Daisy picked up the envelope. Her eyes went wide. She recognized the handwriting and the return address: “Fleet Post Office San Francisco, USS Leyte, VF-32—Ensign Jesse L. Brown.”
The tears began streaming. Daisy slowly opened the envelope and unfolded four handwritten pages.*1
At Sea, Sunday Nite
3 December 1950
Daisy held her mouth and shook her head. Jesse had written this on the night before his death:
My own dear sweet Angel, I’m so lonesome I could just boo-hoo. But I try to restrain myself and think of the fun we’re going to have when we do get together, so only a few tears escape now and then. I love you so very much, my darling.
Daisy could hear Jesse’s voice in her mind. She held the letter closer.
The last few days we’ve been doing quite a bit of flying, trying to slow down the Chinese communists and to give support to some Marines who were surrounded….Knowing that he’s helping those poor guys on the ground, I think every pilot on here would fly until he dropped in his tracks.
Daisy’s eyes raced left to right.
Don’t be discouraged, Angel, believe in God and believe in Him with all your might and I know that things will work out all right. We need Him now like never before. Have faith with me, darling, and He’ll see us thru and we’ll be together again before long too.
Daisy flipped through the pages. Jesse spoke of the past they shared and of the future he longed for with her. It was as if he had a premonition that they might part.
I want you to keep that pretty little chin up, Angel, come on now, way up. I want you also to be confident in this and that is: Your husband loves his wife with all his heart and soul—no man ever loved a woman more.
Daisy turned to the final page. The end was coming.
Darling, I’m going to close now and climb in the rack. I honestly dread going to bed, but I usually dream of you, so I’ll manage to make it until we’ll share our bed together again—darling, pray it’ll be soon.
Daisy’s eyes savored each word.
I have to fly tomorrow. But so far as that goes my heart hasn’t been down to earth since the first time you kissed me, and when you love me you “send” it clear out-of-this-world.
Daisy gripped the letter tightly.
I’ll write again as soon as I can. I’ll love you forever.
Your devoted husband
lovingly and completely yours
forever
Jesse
Daisy clutched the letter to her chest. She leaned back against the couch and closed her eyes. New tears slipped down her cheeks as a look of calm settled across her face. She knew that this letter was a blessing, a means to hear Jesse’s voice again and again for the rest of her life.
Through her tears, Daisy thanked God.
Soon after
Each morning before their shifts, they came up to the corridor in the Leyte’s tower.
They were white sailors, black sailors, men in T-shirts from the boiler room. This was officer country, a place where the average sailor never ventured. Stewards in white high-collared coats, deckhands in colored shirts, each came with an envelope in hand.
At a steel door, each man knocked. The door opened and each handed over his envelope.
Officers came up too, holding envelopes. Tom knocked on the steel door. So did Koenig, Marty, and Wilkie. Some didn’t have as far to walk. Captain Sisson came from the bridge and handed over his envelope.
—
Every morning, Commander Wally Madden approached the steel door and stepped inside without knocking. This was his office, and every morning he shook his head in awe.
His staff had placed the morning’s collection on his desk, and each day the pile of envelopes cascaded like a landslide across t
he desktop.
The envelopes contained cash. Everyone in Squadron 32 had heard Jesse say, at one time or another, that his dream was to provide his daughter with an education, so the Leyte’s crew had taken up a collection to create a scholarship for baby Pam. As the air group CAG, Madden had been chosen as custodian of the funds.
The ship’s crew didn’t normally take up collections. They couldn’t possibly do it for every casualty. But, as Madden explained in a Leyte press release, “We felt this way about the loss of Jesse. He was a hell of a swell guy. We figured that his little girl was going to have a rough row to hoe without any daddy, so we wanted to do something for her in his memory.”
Some sailors gave one dollar, some a couple of quarters. Someone leaked that Captain Sisson had contributed forty dollars—equivalent to nearly four hundred dollars in present-day money.
In the end, nearly every man on the Leyte knocked on that steel door with an envelope in his hand.
Six weeks later, February 3, 1951
A crowd of civilians cheered as the line of pilots descended the gangway of the Leyte and stepped onto the pier of North Island Naval Air Station in San Diego. The sun shone brightly, the temperature was in the low sixties. After three months at war, the Leyte had returned.*2
Dignitaries waved from a grandstand. A navy band belted out marching music as drum majorettes high-stepped to the beat. Behind the crowd, sailors opened a telephone trailer for the pilots to call home.