Devotion

by Adam Makos

  In civilian life, Koenig remained close with the Brown family. In 2005, he took Jesse’s granddaughter, Jessica, on a special trip to Oceana Naval Air Station so she could see why her grandfather had loved carrier aviation. Together, they visited Navy Fighter Squadron 32. The squadron’s pilots suited up Jessica in flight gear and showed her how to preflight an F-14 jet.

  Today, Jessica calls Koenig “Uncle Bill.”

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  Richard “Dad” Fowler commanded the carrier Ticonderoga during the Vietnam War and retired as a rear admiral, the equivalent of a two-star general.

  Anyone who knew him wasn’t a bit surprised.

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  Bill “Wilkie” Wilkinson foresaw a career full of separations from his wife, Mary, so he transitioned to the Naval Reserves in 1952. While continuing to fly fighters on weekends, he took a weekday job with American Airlines and became a commercial airline captain when he was only twenty-four years old. Thirty-five years later, he made his final flight for American as a 747 pilot.

  Today, Wilkie and Mary enjoy sailing a twenty-foot sailboat from their home in Maine. During quiet times at sea, Wilkie reflects on his life, and his thoughts sometimes roam back to the Yalu bridge strike and the North Korean children he flew over.

  He hopes their lives turned out okay.

  —

  During a layover at Norfolk Naval Base in 1954, Wilkie reported for dinner in the officers’ club and was seated two tables away from the skipper—Dug Neill. To Wilkie’s surprise, the skipper invited him to his table, and afterward the two went out for beers, like old friends. The following year, Marty Goode bumped into the skipper at Naval Air Station Key West and enjoyed the same hospitality.

  Both Wilkie and Marty would later come to the same conclusion: The pressures of leading a squadron had altered the skipper’s personality, making him stern for a reason—out of concern for his young pilots.

  The skipper would later become a university professor.

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  John “Red” Parkinson had trouble readjusting to civilian life. He drifted by day and at night he couldn’t sleep under blankets for fear he’d be caught unprepared.

  Then in 1952, everything changed. While driving to his uncle Anton’s farm, Red was crossing a four-way intersection when another driver’s brakes failed. The other driver broadsided Red’s car and rolled it. Red emerged with scrapes but was otherwise okay. He noticed that the other driver was a pretty twenty-one-year-old girl with hazel eyes and curly blond hair. Her name was Virginia.

  In the hospital, the two struck up a friendship. Red borrowed a friend’s car to drive Virginia home. Two years later they married and settled down on a dairy farm.

  Every November 27, on the anniversary of the Chosin Reservoir battle, Red climbs a hill near his farm at night. In the cold, he sits and remembers.

  —

  Red hadn’t seen Charlie Kline since Yudam-ni but never forgot how Charlie had steered him to his faith. In tribute, Red began volunteering with the Gideons International, the organization that had given him his pocket Bible during his Marine days.

  In 1985, Red attended a Gideons convention in Philadelphia as a delegate. As Red was introduced to the audience, a man stood abruptly at the rear of the hall, nearly flipping his chair. “We finally got ya!” the man shouted. Red looked closely and saw the thick chin and wide grin of fifty-six-year-old Charlie Kline.

  Charlie hadn’t died at Yudam-ni after all. He had been searching for his bazooka when the Chinese came, so he took shelter in a culvert.

  After three days in hiding, he escaped but with both lungs damaged by the cold. The Marines transported Charlie in the column to Hagaru, then airlifted him to Japan and hospitals from there.

  In the middle of the Philadelphia convention hall, Red and Charlie embraced to thunderous applause. Until Charlie’s death in 1999, the two were inseparable.

  —

  On a brisk October day in 1955, Sergeant Bob Devans’s remains were returned from North Korea to his hometown of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, during one of the few postwar exchanges of remains. As his coffin was lowered into the earth, his brother, sister, father, and mother were present.

  And so was his high school crush, Audrey Johns.

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  During his fourteen months in naval hospitals, all ten of Ed Coderre’s frostbitten toes were amputated. Due to his war wounds, Coderre was never able to play for the Red Sox; he became an accountant instead. In 1977, he and his wife, Wanda, took a cruise to Cozumel, Mexico. On the beach, Coderre was hesitant to remove his shoes and reveal his toeless feet, so he went for a walk.

  At a nearby baseball field, he took a seat in the stands as players were arriving for a pickup game. He and the players discussed their mutual love of baseball. When one of the teams found itself short a player, they asked Coderre to join them. He did, and on his first at bat, he hit a line drive. Coderre rounded the bases safely to third, running on just his heels. The Mexican players were too busy cheering to notice.

  Today, Coderre still loves the Red Sox.

  —

  In 1952, the Marine Corps awarded Lieutenant Robert Reem a posthumous Medal of Honor. His widow, Donna, accepted her late husband’s award from the secretary of the navy. Later, in an interview with Coronet Magazine, she explained that she had begun teaching Sunday school as a way of moving forward after her husband’s death. “If you didn’t have something to cling to you’d be lost,” she said. “I believe I’ll see Bob again.”

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  Charlie Ward received the Silver Star for rescuing Tom from the mountaintop. After a long Marine career that had begun before Pearl Harbor, Ward retired in 1964 as a major. He settled in Pensacola and lived there for ten years. After a career fraught with danger, Ward was killed in a jeep accident at age fifty-six.

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  Fletcher Brown became a mechanic in the air force during the Korean War, and Lura Brown served in the 82nd Airborne, a unit held stateside in anticipation of a Soviet attack on Europe. Both men later followed their mother’s wishes and sought higher education. Fletcher earned an MBA from Pepperdine and Lura studied horticulture at UCLA.

  In 2000, the brothers and Daisy represented Jesse at a Korean War commemoration in Sacramento. A tall, black Marine in his seventies approached them. Five decades earlier, he had been the square-faced Marine who had watched Jesse fly at the Chosin.

  “I can still see him overhead,” the Marine said, as his eyes filled with tears. “If it hadn’t been for him and the others, none of us would have gotten out alive.”

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  In 1966, Tom Hudner attended a Christmas party in Miramar, California. He was a captain then in rank, and navigator of the carrier Kitty Hawk.

  Across a crowded room he saw a striking brunette, a tall, Jackie Kennedy look-alike. Tom’s friend told him that the brunette’s name was Georgea Smith. She was a widow whose husband, a pilot, had been killed three years earlier.

  Tom’s friend tried to steer him toward any other woman. Georgea had three children—and she was taller than Tom, too. But Tom had already made up his mind. As Georgea was slipping on her jacket to leave, he stopped her at the door.

  Two years later, they married and had a son together, Thomas Jerome Hudner III.

  After thirty years of service, in February 1973, Tom delivered a speech just days before his retirement from the navy. At the Boston Navy Yard, with Daisy Brown in the audience, he dedicated a new frigate—the USS Jesse L. Brown.

  In civilian life, Tom served as a state commissioner for veterans’ affairs, as president of the regional USO, and as treasurer of the Medal of Honor Society. During his many speeches to military officers, veterans, and schoolchildren, he always remembered his last words to Jesse: “We’ll be back for you!”

  For more than sixty years, Tom’s promise went unfulfilled. Ever since the war, relations hadn’t thawed between America and the North Korean regime, and the U.S. military had been unable to search for the remains of its
nearly eight thousand MIAs, Jesse Brown included.

  Then, in summer 2013, at the age of eighty-eight, Tom decided to take matters into his own hands.

  His family tried to dissuade him. His fellow veterans urged him to reconsider. The U.S. State Department advised Tom that they’d be powerless to protect him. But Tom had learned a lesson in wartime: Sometimes you have to break the rules.

  In July 2013, in a drizzling rain, Tom stepped off a plane in North Korea. Officers of the North Korean army were waiting for him and his traveling party.* Two days later, in the capital of Pyongyang, Tom clipped his Medal of Honor around his neck. Soldiers led him into a conference room, to a seat across from a North Korean colonel and his staff. For sixty-three years, Tom had waited for this moment.

  With cameras of the world media rolling, Tom asked the North Koreans to begin a search for Jesse Brown’s remains.

  At first, the North Korean colonel remained silent. He glanced at his notes where his reply had been prewritten. News of Tom’s arrival had already coursed through the ranks of the North Korean military, the government, and into the ear of the nation’s new, thirty-year-old Supreme Leader—Kim Jong Un.

  The colonel began to read a message from the Supreme Leader to Tom.

  Kim Jong Un was impressed that Tom had come so far, after so long, to keep a promise to a friend. In tribute to Tom, the North Korean leader granted approval to his army to resume the search for the remains of MIA American servicemen—beginning with Jesse Brown.

  —

  Back in Hattiesburg, eighty-six-year-old Daisy Brown was following Tom’s journey to North Korea and the tremendous outpouring of national support. A news network sent a camera crew to Daisy’s home to gauge her reaction. “I never dreamed that this would happen,” Daisy said in an interview, “and yet if it’s successful, I’m sure that it’ll bring some closure to us and they can bring him back and give him a final resting place.”

  With renewed hope, Daisy waited. Sixty-three years had passed since Jesse’s death and she knew it could take longer, even decades, for anyone to locate two burnt Corsairs in a range of desolate mountains. Most of all, Daisy was thankful to Tom for trying.

  In July 2014, after a long illness, Daisy died in her home. But before she passed, she told her daughter, Pamela Brown, that she had decided where Jesse should be buried if his remains ever returned to his native soil. At first Daisy had thought Jesse should rest in Mississippi, in a quiet cemetery under a shady tree. But then the schoolteacher in her had a better idea.

  Daisy decided that Jesse should one day rest in Arlington National Cemetery so people of all ages and races could visit his grave and be inspired by his story. Because, to Daisy, her husband isn’t done serving his fellow man.

  In her last days, when she looked around her, Daisy came to one final conclusion:

  The world needs Jesse Brown and Tom Hudner, now more than ever.

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  Jesse’s last letter home to Daisy

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  * Author’s note: My staff and I accompanied Tom Hudner on his ten-day journey to North Korea and have posted our photos and video on my website: www.AdamMakos.com.

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  Teenage Tom Hudner (seated) with his siblings.

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  Nineteen-year-old Tom during a visit home from the Naval Academy in 1944.

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  Daisy holds Pam during a 1949 visit to Hattiesburg.

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  Jesse as an ensign, September 1949.

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  Jesse and Daisy with Pam at their Rhode Island cottage, summer 1949.

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  Marty Goode aboard the Leyte.

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  In February 1950, Jesse rehearses his reading in the Quonset Point chapel. His reading was Romans 12, “A Living Sacrifice.”

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  A Leyte LSO signals “Hold steady!”

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  While training in spring 1950, Marty catches the last cable before the crash barrier.

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  Fighting 32 during the Mediterranean cruise. Front row, left to right: Key, Hudner, Ferris, Cronin, Cevoli, Neill, Fowler, Jester, Whalen, Koenig, Lane. Back row, left to right: Brown, Sargent, Byron, Stevens, Cotchen, Mohring, Goode, Sheffield, Nelson, Miller, Gelonek.

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  Leyte deckhands prepare a Corsair for takeoff.

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  The beach at Cannes during the Leyte’s visit.

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  Elizabeth Taylor, Nicky Hilton, and friends tour the Leyte in Cannes.

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  Elizabeth Taylor dines with the Leyte’s officers.

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  6th Fleet Marines practice an amphibious landing in the Mediterranean.

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  Red Parkinson (far right) and his antitank platoon on Crete.

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  During maneuvers, a Marine aims an M20 Super Bazooka.

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  Ed Coderre during a visit home to Rhode Island in 1949.

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  Enjoying watermelons on Crete. Foreground, left to right: Charlie Kline, Red Parkinson, Bob Devans.

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  Marines assemble aboard the Leyte during the Mediterranean cruise.

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  Red Parkinson naps as his LST ship passes through the Suez Canal, bound for Korea.

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  Before Jesse’s deployment, he and Daisy drove home through Tennessee, where Daisy snapped this photo.

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  Days before deploying, Jesse plays with Pam outside Daisy’s mother’s apartment.

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  Bill “Wilkie” Wilkinson during flight training.

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  Wilkie snapped this photo during a practice flight before Korea.

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  In their cabin aboard the Leyte, Jesse pens a letter home while Bill Koenig reads.

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  On the Leyte’s first day at war, her crew watches one of ’32’s planes launch.

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  Squadron 32 at the front of the pack, waiting for the takeoff signal.

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  Tom in the cockpit during the Korean cruise.

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  In the hangar deck, sailors muscle a Corsair onto an elevator.

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  “Dad” Fowler as a twenty-year-old Hellcat pilot in 1944.

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  Dad Fowler launches down the center line. “I always tried to fly like he did,” Wilkie would write.

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  On the Leyte’s second day at war, Marty (far left) and others review maps in the ready room before a strike.

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  Captain Sisson (left) and the skipper display captured enemy flags that the skipper brought back after his emergency landing at Wonsan.

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  After missing his landing on the first try, Jesse had to pay the customary fine to the squadron coffee fund. Left to right: Lee Nelson, Jesse, Marty Goode, and Bill Koenig.

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  The Leyte and Valley Forge at anchor in Sasebo harbor. In the distance lies the British carrier Unicorn, on reprieve from operations off Korea’s western coast.

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  Sailors and locals mix in Sasebo’s Black Market Alley, also affectionately known as Robber’s Row.

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  En route to the Chosin, the Marine column waits as its artillery pounds Hill 891.

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  These Chinese soldiers were captured near Hill 891. Here, they wear their reversible uniforms with the brown facing outward.

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  A Leyte Skyraider returns from a mission at
the time of the bridge strikes.

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  Jesse as seen through a Corsair’s windscreen in late November 1950.

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  The Leyte’s “special mission” Skyraiders and Corsairs on a mission in early November.

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  The bridges of the Yalu. After the Leyte Skyraiders’ strike, smoke embraces the Korean end of the highway bridge. Planes of the Valley Forge will pummel the railway bridge next.