by Cullin Mitch
7
There were pennies in every pocket of Private Bill McCreedy's olive fatigues, five pennies per pocket, treasured like amulets which could ward off bad luck — pressed by durable cloth lining, protecting his skin — as if, hopefully, the copper or steel-covered-in-zinc cents might deflect gook bullets. He liked bragging about the pennies to the other men who served alongside him, smirking while mentioning the importance of his American-minted trinkets and patting his pockets as he spoke: “These babies keep me more rooted than anything. They keep me reminded of why I'm here, what I'm fighting for.” But even if he had never said a word, the significance he attached to the coins would have been hard to miss: before falling asleep at the bivouac spot southwest of P'ohang, the pennies were removed and counted and deposited inside a tin drinking cup; after stirring in that humid countryside — encircled mostly by teenage boys, half awake and scratching at their mosquito bites, lowering their feet to the green plastic groundsheets — the pennies were counted again, divided up into tiny stacks of five, and then, mumbling the Lord's Prayer, McCreedy slipped the stacks, one at a time, inside each pocket. Four of the pennies nearest his heart — he had told Hollis and the others — were engraved with the birth years of those waiting for him back home in the States (his mother, his father, his kid brother, and his young girlfriend), while the fifth penny commemorated the year in which he was born.
How distant the Panhandle of Texas must have felt to McCreedy — the cotton rows surrounding the family farm, the red-stone gashes of the Caprock canyons, the wide-open spaces which comprised the high, dry plains; how remote and dreamlike it all must have seemed when first riding by truck among South Korea's lush, mountainous scenery: the soldiers having caught glimpses of an impoverished countryside — village shacks tilting at the edge of hazy fields which were dotted with half-naked laborers, bone-thin dogs roving in packs on the roadway, sullen Korean faces watching as the military trucks rolled past — while far beyond the mountains, a hundred or so miles away, fellow soldiers were already dying beside the banks of a fast-flowing river, some drowning, too, when crossing the rushing stream to escape an onslaught of North Korean troops. For McCreedy, however, it wasn't yet the grim reality of battle which had immediately repulsed him, nor was it the possibility of a violent end which initially troubled his mind; instead, it was the ceaseless stench rising from the fields which wrinkled his brow, the noxious odor of human excrement combined with ash and used as fertilizer.
“This place is shit,” he ‘d shouted while en route to the bivouac at dusk, waving a hand in front of his face as if he were shooing a fly.
“You got that right,” another soldier responded, answering him from the midst of the identical shapes riding there.
Staring out at the darkening landscape, McCreedy had clamped the hand over his nose, holding it there as the vehicle proceeded — the bodies around him swaying or lifting with the bumps and turns in the road, the pennies sliding inside his pockets as they were all carried into the night. But if Korea was, to him, a foul land where its primitive people appeared unwelcoming — its water often contaminated, its mosquitoes surpassing the enemy troops in staging attacks — he at least found comfort in the little things, like writing letters to send home, counting his pennies, playing poker for match-sticks or cigarettes, and proudly speaking the password which had allowed entry through the bivouac perimeter: “Texas, sir! Texas!”
Hollis, on the other hand, didn't share his outspoken comrade's disdain for where they had been sent. In fact, he was quietly captivated by such a peculiar locale, a territory and culture so different from what had defined his life that he felt somehow transformed within its borders. To his mind, the southern part of Korea was like an imaginary place, a fiction, only to be discovered on the pages of novels, or spotted momentarily in grainy news-reel footage; yet presently the divided country unfolded — vividly, completely, replete with shades of green and blue and gray — and, as well, he was enveloped wholly by its otherness after a South Korean train soon transported the 2nd Battalion from bivouac to the war front (his rucksack destined for a march along winding trails, his darting eyes shadowed beneath a steel helmet and surveying the hillsides, his lungs breathing the heavy summer air when eventually moving deeper and deeper into that exotic, deceptively serene world).
Still, Hollis could agree with McCreedy that Korea was nothing like Japan, a nation which, by comparison, was more developed, more complacent in defeat, and, without question, cleaner. In parts of Tokyo, there was at least something resembling the leisure many of the soldiers had enjoyed back in the States; there were Japanese big bands playing American music at Ginza nightspots, and taxi dancers wearing evening dresses, and cheap beer. The Japanese, it seemed, were also more refined by nature than the dirt-poor Koreans, and because they had never suffered decades of subjugation and violent occupation, they lacked the hard, untrusting collective traits of a long-ago broken, scarred people. That being the case, Hollis fostered a greater feeling of sympathy for the Koreans than he did for the Japanese (the Koreans were, after all, really warring with themselves and not directly against the United States of America), while McCreedy — shaking his head beside Hollis during the twenty-hour train trip, scowling on his wooden seat at the shirtless women toiling in fields beyond the cramped passenger car — did little to conceal the contempt he felt for those he regarded as subhuman by default: “Like a bunch of pigs wallowing about in their own filth.” And, he believed, their impossible language was coarse, distraught in tone, sounding like a wounded heifer echoing its pain. Furthermore, they lacked the fundamental and essential understanding of a Christian God, of the Lord's sacrifice.
“Honestly, Creed wouldn't fuck a single one of them, even if I wanted to — unless Christ himself ordered me to.”
“I wouldn't either,” Hollis had replied, sketching in his notepad and not paying much attention to his comrade's grumbling, pondering instead the warning their captain had recently made clear to each carload of soldiers: the enemy might be hiding among Korean refugees from the north, blending in without uniform, disguised as civilians.
McCreedy glanced down at Hollis's drawing. “There you go,” he said, nodding resolutely at what he saw. A shaggy gorilla was taking shape on the notepad, standing at the center of a bean field, holding a banana in one fist and a hand grenade in the other; the caption above it read: what kind of guerrilla are you? “You see, we're on the same page. We're like two sides of the same coin.”
“Maybe.”
Later on — once the steam engine had climbed the Autumn Wind Pass, chugging for Yongdong County and the front line — McCreedy stood in the aisle of the passenger car, his body rocking with the train's movements, and said, “Hey, you all give me your ears for a sec, will you?” At that moment conversations ceased, every set of eyes fixed on him, and, relishing the sudden attention with a grin, he held out his tin drinking cup, pivoting so all could see it. “Let Creed show you a little something about these folks we're fighting against and these folks we're helping out here. Let me give you a little insight about just how their kind of mentality operates.” He produced three of his pennies, explaining that the Koreans named their newborns by dropping spare change into an empty can, the resulting clanking noises determining a child's lifelong moniker. “Goes like this, right? Listen closely, if you can.” He shook the pennies from his hand, sprinkling them into the cup. “Park-Clink-Kim,” he announced, bringing a few hoots and a smattering of laughter which were subdued beneath the train's continual rumbling. He sprinkled the pennies again: one after another after another. “That'd be a Clink-Kim-Park.” Again. “And that's Park-Park-Clink.”
Almost everyone, it seemed, was delighted by McCreedy's joke — everyone, that is, except Hollis, who, shifting his gaze to the window, ignored McCreedy's gleaming stare and recurring wink (“Now who's got a smoke or two for ol’ Creed?”) and beheld a rice paddy shimmering under the sun, then thatch huts, then a swift blur of oxcarts on a dirt road nea
r the railroad tracks, belonging to what he suspected was a weary group of battle-fleeing refugees. Before long the voices of McCreedy and the other soldiers grew fainter to him, and the sound of the train became all embracing. In the distance, where sunlight reflected off more rice paddies, he saw the silhouette of a girl leaning against a parked bicycle and supporting herself on crutches.
When the 2nd Battalion began disembarking a few miles behind the Yong-dong front — filing onto the station platform, bringing C rations and full canteens, slouching under the weight of rucksacks, sporting eight-round M1 ammunition clips on cartridge belts — the soldiers they had come to replace stood waiting there, greeting the new arrivals without as much as a smile, posed haphazardly like a living tableau which depicted the aftermath of battle. It was as if they were being met by future visions of themselves, an opaque mirror image casting a grim reflection of what lay ahead. Stepping from the train in relatively clean uniforms, bright eyed and green, the young men of the 2nd Battalion were taken aback by their counterparts from the 24th Infantry Division: boys like themselves yet somehow made older than their years and now worse for wear — some bandaged about the head and arms, some on stretchers, most in grubby fatigues — each stubbled face looking beaten; but once the passenger cars were emptied, those tired expressions quickly betrayed varying degrees of relief as the men slowly ambled forward and started boarding the train.
“Here, pal, take this,” a limping infantryman said, pausing long enough to fix a brown-eyed gaze on Hollis while pressing a fresh pack of Chesterfields against his palm. “I'm finished,” he explained, moving on toward the train, his uniform dusty and frayed at the collar, his black hair matted and unwashed. “I've quit,” he said, without glancing back. “I'm done.” Tightening his grip on the pack, Hollis watched the infantryman recede, gradually losing sight of him amid the crowd readying for the return journey.
In hindsight, Hollis couldn't remember exactly when it was he began smoking (definitely not while stationed in Japan, undoubtedly after arriving in Korea), but he would never forget the morning he quit — just a couple of weeks later while dug in at the Naktong River, on his last day at the front. Nevertheless, he always associated that encounter with the infantryman as the beginning of an earnest, short-lived nicotine habit, soon hoarding his C-ration cigarettes at the bivouac near P'ohang, treasuring the packs where previously he had given them away. Moreover, there was smoke hanging in his memory, plenty of it — gray-white smoke sucked deep into his chest, regurgitated through his mouth and nose — as prevalent to his recollections as the grit which swirled about the cavalrymen, irritating their eyes, sneaking down the muzzles of their M1s.
Mixing with the summer heat, dust and cigarette smoke reigned behind the Yongdong lines, saturating the regimental command post, drifting above the 2nd Battalion while they took positions and established security posts; it wafted, too, beneath the moonlight when a patrol flank spotted the figures of northern refugees approaching, the white-clad shapes emerging like ghosts on a darkened road: the rumors of enemy infiltrators hiding among the civilians was enough to prompt fire from the jittery patrol flank, the rounds missing the refugees but successful in stopping the advance — the panicked villagers about-facing with heavy loads on their backs, reversing with their children or babies, scrambling backward into the night. And, in turn, it was to be the lighting of a cigarette which brought the regiment's first casualty, the fatal shots ringing through blackness and hitting a lieutenant when he struck a match before dawn, discharged from the semiautomatics of his own men (nervous Easy Company soldiers, inexperienced riflemen who jumped quickly at every sound).
Sometimes in the smoke-laden mornings, McCreedy's pennies were shown again to the jittery men who had returned from night patrol, those disquieted soldiers who sat tiredly beside one another, thoughtlessly nursing their cigarettes, saying very little while McCreedy tried bolstering their spirits by grinning his usual grin, smiling as if he possessed the answers to every problem: the pennies were stacked on his right elbow, balancing there until — with a deft movement of his arm — they fell away from his skin, floating for a millisecond, only to be caught by the swift-grabbing fingers of his right hand. Hollis had seen the coin tricks at least two dozen times; he had seen McCreedy's pennies rolled along gyrating knuckles, disappearing in fists, materializing soon thereafter like two round holes on someone else's forehead. Hollis had also heard more than once the usual spiel which marked the conclusion of McCreedy's display, memorizing the harangue in spite of wanting to forget it.
“I think some of you could use a dose of perspective,” McCreedy always began, holding out a bulging prophylactic, the condom stuffed with pennies and dangling beneath his grip like a half-full water balloon. “Do yourself a favor and have a look at this here. This baby is pretty special, let me tell you. What I keep in here is my Indian Head cents, five percent zinc, ninety-five percent copper, minted by our own U.S. Treasury. This whole bunch was collected together by my grandpa. Seems kind of worthless, I guess, except they don't do these no more. Now, what sets this particular batch apart is every last one hails from the exact same year — that'd be 1876, and that'd also be the same year General Custer took that unfortunate tumble at Little Bighorn.” He pulled a single cent from the condom, pinching it between a thumb and forefinger, turning the coin in the sunlight so that the front engraving, a Native American in a feathered headdress, and the reverse side, a circular wreath bound by three arrows, could be glimpsed. “So take a good look at it,” he said, handing the penny to whoever was closest to him. “Have at it, go ahead, pass it on around, would you?”
The significance wasn't lost on any of the cavalrymen, nor did anyone appear dismayed while McCreedy went on to remind them that they were now the military descendants of a singular legacy: they belonged, after all, to the 7th Cavalry; they were also soldiers of the Garryowen regiment, named so after the Gaelic drinking song chosen by the 7th Cavalry's infamous lieutenant colonel — George Armstrong Custer — and still whistled or played on occasion by cavalrymen. As fresh recruits back in the States, they had each been given a pamphlet which glorified the 7th Cavalry's history as formidable Indian fighters, the cover adorned with a horseshoe-and-saber shield; their orientation had also included screenings of They Died with Their Boots On, in which Errol Flynn portrayed the fated commander, the film depicting the Battle of Little Bighorn and the massacre of Custer and his troops by Sioux Indians.
“Just don't ever lose sight of that,” McCreedy said, his voice taking on a serious, melodramatic tone. “When you're feeling low or unsure of what's going on in this godforsaken country, you just remember you belong to the great Seventh Cavalry, and your role, like them what served ahead of us, is to clean the land of ignorant hostiles and pave the way to a better world. It's a true calling, I believe. It's our chance to settle an old score on behalf of those two hundred brave brothers that lost their lives to the savages at Little Bighorn.”
However, it was apparent very few of the men, aside from Schubert Tang, actually had much regard for McCreedy (how they rolled their eyes or shook their heads behind his back, making fun of his pennies and loud, annoying big talk whenever he wasn't around), although he was tolerated out of necessity and, to a greater degree, because he was the single most intimidating, unpredictable one among them. Even so, it amazed Hollis that soft-spoken, introverted Schubert had — since coming off the transport ship onto Korean soil — followed McCreedy like a devoted puppy, and, as a result, was offered a fair amount of kindness and respect, in spite of Schubert belonging to what McCreedy called the Mud Races.
The unlikely bond formed by the two happened early on at the bivouac near P'ohang, when four soldiers from another company gathered around Schubert as he walked alone to the mess tent, taunting him for being a gook, asking him what the hell gave him the nerve to join a white man's army. It was the sudden arrival of McCreedy — putting himself between Schubert and the soldiers, towering over all of them — who shut
the foursome up with an extended, jabbing index finger, explaining he would thrash anyone who dared suggest that someone born and raised in the United States of America was a gook, especially if that someone was of Chink descent and was still willing to risk his life against the communist threat perpetuated by his own genetic background. The soldiers found themselves lacking the collective or individual wherewithal to respond, and thinking better of further provoking the wild-eyed Texan by uttering another word, they slinked sheepishly away like bullied children. From then on, Schubert and McCreedy were almost inseparable, eating together, playing cards together, swapping stories, loaning each other cigarettes or matches: the outspoken bigot and the only Asian in the group had become the best of friends. So however Hollis wanted to feel about McCreedy, there now appeared in his inward sight the image of a man at once brave and impossible to gauge.
While Bill McCreedy might have deliberately gone out of his way to be a kind of parody of himself, a one-dimensional hick archetype which had already become a common caricature in any number of B movies or war magazines, he would remain, to Hollis, a tangible person who had actually existed at one time. With that Mohawk which drew the scorn of their platoon sergeant, the expressive sunburned face shining beneath the dimmest of lights, he wasn't unsociable or withdrawn like Hollis, and so, by nature, he relished the lowbrow chatter which probably tempered his own fears — talk of women, tall tales from childhood, the mindless jests, general bull-shitting — the rite of strengthening ties with the brotherhood of soldiers. Yet for all his contempt and swagger and annoying bluster, McCreedy wasn't compassionless or incapable of conveying a genuine Christian demeanor, although, upon reflection, Hollis could only recall one other incident in which he saw McCreedy behave as the Lord would have done.