by Pete Hamill
Anyway, back home in Naptown we dint think much about color. Up to the war, the big war, we lived pretty integrated. They was white kids on my street. I played with them, they played with me. Played in the school band with white kids too. Trumpet then. The attitude was, you got red hair, I got black skin, so what? Then it start to change. Dune the war, lots more black people start comin up from the South, to work in the war jobs. They just wasn’t any new housin being built and black folks start doublin up in the black houses and then the whites start to move away. They never did say why, although my daddy said it was simple, that it was all right when they was more of them than they was of us, but when it started bein more of us than they was of them, they decided to move on outta there. And then the shit started. Little shit. Like we got our textbooks all marked up, used textbooks, while the white schools, they got them new. We cuddin get the streets fixed, the sewers, that kind of shit. Without even knowin how it happened, we ended up in a ghetto, except for a few real old white people that cuddin move.
So I start to thinkin about going away. I was the oldest of the kids, seventeen and a senior in high school, but I had a cousin, Charlie Neal his name was. And he was messcookin in the Navy and I liked the way he looked on leave, all sharp and shit, and one night at a party, I toked to him about joinin up. This was just after the war, ’47, ’48, and I was listenin to all the players on the radio and thinkin, Hey, man, I could go to New York and try and play at Minton’s with like, Bird and Dizzy, or I could go in the Navy and get the GI Bill and really learn the instrument, learn harmony and composition, become a great fuckin musician. I had to make up my mind. Just go for it, you know, go try to play with all these monsters in the Apple, which scairt me shitless. Or really prepare myself. Only way I could afford music school was the Bill. But when I thought about the Navy, I just dint like the idea of cookin for white folks for four fuckin years. Dint wanna be no messcook, no domestic in a uniform.
But there was another problem, you know what I’m sayin to you? At this same time, I got myself some trouble. A girl I knew got herself knocked up and her father and her brothers are lookin for me, comin around the block, lookin to shoot me or make me marry her. Either way, I’m dead. You see, I just dint love the girl. I felt sorry for her but I dint think that was too good a reason to marry a woman. So after Charlie Neal left and I had some more time to think (a couple of hours to tell the truth) I went downtown and walked around the block and then toked to the guy, the recruiter, and he says, you know, the Navy is different now, it’s integrated, you dont have to be a messcook, you could be a musician.… So I joined up.
Trouble was when I get through boot camp, they tell me all the music rates are filled up, there’s like a waitin list all the way to 1958, but if I dint want to go messcookin, hell, I could be a corpsman. Workin with doctors … I figure, Hey, why not? At least I’d learn something I could use on the outside, in case the music thing dint work out. And I could practice, keep listenin to the new music, keep readin my Down Beat and Metronome, maybe play with some bands wherever I ended up. Yeah.
So I go to corpsman school. I learn the job is the same as a nurse, but hey, what the hell, it’s a start. I mean, wasn’t Dexter Gordon’s father a doctor? And Miles Davis, his old man was a dentist. Maybe there was some connection.… I work in Jacksonville. A year goes by. I see a little of Gitmo and those fine Cuban women and some great mambo bands, great horn players. And then Korea happens.
Bam.
Like that.
They assign me to the First Marines, cause they’s a shortage of Marine corpsmen, they gettin the shit shot out of them, cause wherever there’s a medic there’s shooting and bleedin and dyin. By November, I’m the only sailor with this Marine company and we’re climbin through the snow and ice in X Corps. Up by the Chosin Reservoir. All of us freezin, strung out over forty fuckin miles. We couldn’t dig foxholes cause the ground was like iron. It was seventeen below zero in a place called Kato. And it got colder as we kept going, heading for the fuckin Yalu, heading for fuckin China for all we knew. I remember we come into a town called Yudan that the artillery wrecked, just blew the piss out of it. They was an old lady sitting there, cryin. Cryin and freezin and singing something in Korean, a gook blues, I reckon. And they was nothin we could do. We cuddin bring her with us, not where we were goin, and she cuddin go back. They was no back. So we just left her to die.
To fuckin die.
Alone in the cold.
We were wearin so much shit—long johns, hoods, parkas—that we’d sweat like hell, and when we stopped walkin the sweat froze. A few guys took they socks off and tore the skin away with them. In that cold, feet froze to boots. In that cold, if you touched the M-1 with your bare hands, the skin come off. Even the BARs froze. Some guys pissed on their guns to make them work and other guys started greasin them with Wildroot Cream Oil. Or Kreml. That fuckin Kreml was the best, all white and pearly and thick.
The night of the Big Cold, we’re in the dark on Hill 403 when we start hearin the voices, short quick voices, know what I mean? Not Korean voices, we knew them by now. Chinese voices. And somebody says, they can’t be Chinese, the Chinese ain’t in this thing and we ain’t in fuckin China. But a little after ten, they come at us. The Chinese. They lay down a mortar barrage and start blowing their fuckin bugles, all flat and out of tune, just blowing like crazy, and they was waves of them, all lumpy like, in their white clothes, comin through the fuckin snow. Comin over the ice. Comin at us.
The Marines shot them and shot them and shot them and they still kept comin. They was blood all over the snow and they still kept coming. One crazy fuckin Marine, his bolt froze and he stands up and throws the rifle at them and they shot him through the belly. And then they were on us, only nine of us left on that fuckin hill, and they wasn’t time to help the wounded, all you could do was try to live. So we fight them with everything. Trenchin tools. Spades. Knives. Bayonets. Them frozen fuckin unshootable fuckin guns.
Then one of their bugles blows and they all start to leave. Like that. Whoever that fuckin horn player was, I loved his ass. They was wounded guys everywhere and I did what I cud. The morphine Syrettes was frozen. The fuckin plasma froze and then the plasma bottles started explodin from the cold. We had fifty-four guys wounded, and a bunch of other guys dead. We went to scavenge among the dead Chinese for weapons. I almost shit when I saw what they had. They were fightin us with 1903 Springfields. We had the latest guns and they froze in that cold. They were fightin us with the equal of a bow and arrow. And kickin ass. Right then and there, I wanted to run. We all did. Just get off that goddamned hill and go somewhere. But we cuddin go anywhere. The orders were to hold the hill to keep the road open, down below us in the valley. That was it. Wait for reinforcements.
So we drag the Chinese bodies over and make a wall out of them and we fill sleeping bags with snow and lay them out on the slopes. The wind was blowing hard and it was colder. And that night they came again with their bugles and we just kept shootin and shootin. We shot them while they were bayonetin the sleepin bags. And we shot them when they came close to overrunnin us again. We just kept shootin. I think I shot nineteen of them. I never did see one of their faces. And then, just like that, they went away again. And an hour later here comes some more Marines, fifty, a hundred of them, another outfit cut off and fightin its way out. They were as fucked up as we were. It gets lighter, day coming, the sky gray as steel. An air-drop comes over at dawn and drops ammo and food and drugs, all we need, and I shoot up the worst wounded with morphine and bandage the others.
The Chinese stayed away a whole day and I began to think: maybe I’m gonna live. Cause for three fuckin days, I knew I was gonna die up there. Just knew it. And then I did die. Just let myself die. Knowing there was nothing to do about it. But now I got to thinking I was gonna live, and for the first time I got scared. Before I was just doin. Now I was thinkin. And I was afraid, I didn’t want to die, didn’t want to feel it, wanted to live and go home and play
music and get laid. I didn’t want to freeze in my own piss, or wait for the fuckin Chinese to come and kill me. I heard later that’s what they did in their army. Fight two days, rest one. But we didn’t know that up on that goddamned hill. We shivered. We ate crackers. We ate snow. We waited to hear the Chinese bugles.
Then we hear we are leavin. A strategic withdrawal, they called it. Advancin in another direction, some Marine said later. But everyone knew it was a retreat. All up and down the line, the Chinese had beat the shit out of us and we were pullin out. We wunt going to the Yalu, we wunt going to fuckin China, no matter what MacArthur said. We were gettin the fuck out of there. And they was only one road, one way out, and we knew it and so did the Chinese. Somehow we buried the dead. Eighty-five of them. Still up there at Yudam. The men from Fox Company of the second Battalion of the Seventh Regiment. Still in Korea. Forever.
So we start out, with some trucks below us now on the road and more trucks comin and more and more fucked-up Marines staggerin outta the hills. We strap some of the worst wounded across the radiators of the trucks to keep them from freezin to death. Sometimes we cuddin tell who was dead and who was alive. You cuddin get a pulse, it was so fuckin cold. We cuddin change their dressins either. So right off, I learn that if the guy’s eyes move, he’s alive. If the eyes don’t move, fuck him, leave him.
The guys who were walking had diarrhea and they eyes was crazy but they kept movin. They wanted to live. To fuckin live. To get off the ice, to get to the warm, to go home. I cuddin feel my own feet. I just kept movin them. Tokin to them, sayin move, mothafucker, like Stepin fuckin Fetchit. Keep goin, feet, get me to the promised land, keep me alive.… We had some of the wounded on trucks on top of parachutes, tied on with primer cord. And we come to a bridge and start over and then the fuckin bridge collapsed. We all back up, but one truck went into the river. A half-frozen river, full of ice. And two of these crazy mothafuckin Marines dive into the river and rescued those guys. Cut em loose from the primer cord. Drug em up on the bank. Let them live. That’s why nobody can tell me no shit about Marines, man. I mean, I don’t take no crap from them, specially some rearguard asshole pullin guard duty in Florida. But I don’t give them no shit either. They dive into frozen rivers, man.
We got close to Hagaru on December third. That was a pretty good-size town. It was snowing like a bitch and we stop on a hill just outside the town. Then, through the snow, we see planes on a runway and an American flag and tents and trucks and so we know, shit, we fuckin made it, we might actually fuckin live. And then those crazy mothafuckin Marines got in drill formation. All shot up and hurt and frozen. And they march into that town, countin fuckin cadence. One captain had most of his fuckin jaw shot off. He had so many bandages around his head he looked like a mummy. But he walked, man. Marching. In step. Proud. The crazy mothafuckin Marines.
I dint even know I was shot till then. Frostbite, dehydration, shot in the left thigh, the hip. I don’t remember nothin about how that happened. I for shitsure wunt trying to be no hero. I was just trying to live, even that real bad coldass night I was sure I died. Yeah, I killed some guys. I must of. I don’t know how many. I dint take no names. I was just shooting, like every other poor mothafucka on the hill.
You think that changed me? Bet your sweet ofay ass it did. I come home knowin I wunt ever gonna take shit again. Never gonna be the white man’s nigger. Even if that meant everybody makes me to be a troublemaker. I went to Korea. I did my so-called fuckin duty to America. Nobody gonna tell me how to live anymore. No cracker. No bowin an scrapin Uncle Tom black man. Nobody. Whether they like it or not, whether you like it or not, I’m an American and I’m gonna start livin like one. I got six months to go in the Navy. In September I go to school somewhere, on the GI Bill, a free man. Music school.
Somewhere warm.
Somewhere hot.
Chapter
34
The rain was over when I went out into the night to find my way to the barracks. I felt gorged: with food and with Eden; with this newer, raunchier, dirtier, music; with the intimate opening into the lives of what I still called Negroes. I was full of images of the frozen dead in Korea too. And with the rich loamy smell of the wet earth.
I walked along the footpaths and as the clouds moved on, I could see the stars. Men my age had died because plasma froze in bottles, but I was alive. Men slept here in these barracks, wifeless and womanless, but I had found Eden Santana. I felt as if I could reach out and gather the stars in my hand, pack them loosely like some cosmic snowball and release them again into the universe.
“Come over here, sailor,” a voice said.
A figure in officer’s suntans was squatting down at the side of the gedunk. His back was to me, but I knew it was Captain Pritchett. He looked up.
“Give me a hand, here,” he said.
“Yes, sir,” I said, and wondered if I should salute and decided not to. He was digging in the earth around a bush. There was a large empty earthenware pot beside him. He handed me a small digging tool.
“Now dig on that side, see? But don’t hit the roots. I’m gonna save this baby.”
I started digging carefully in the dim light, feeling with my hand for the roots of the bush.
“This is oleander. The goddamned snowstorm practically killed her.”
Then he started talking to the bush. “But I’m gonna save you, ain’t I, honey? You been such a good girl. You been so put upon.” His voice was crooning, as if directed at a baby. “We gonna get you up and into a pot and up to the control tower, where there’s lots of sun. Give you lots of water to drink and keep your ass warm. You gonna live, honey. You ain’t gonna die next to no brick wall.”
We finished clearing the roots. He picked up a small paper bag and poured pebbles into the bottom of the pot.
“Now throw some of that dirt in there,” he said, the voice abruptly full of authority. He went back to the bush.
“Yes, sir.”
“And bring it over here, close to me. Yeah. That’s it. Okay … Now, while I hold her up straight, pack some dirt in there. Not too hard now. Easy. The dirt from the top, the real black stuff, not that sandy clay crap at the bottom. Yeah. Okay, that’s it. Good!”
He stepped back and gazed at the plant, looking happy. Then he was suddenly aware of me again, and fixed on my face.
“What’s your name, sailor?” he said curtly.
I told him.
“Well, thank you, Devlin. What are you doing out anyway? After the base has been secured?”
“I was visiting with the messcooks, sir.”
“Visiting with the messcooks? You’re white, sailor!”
“I know, sir.”
“Well, what the hell you doin up there with that crazy bunch of galley slaves?”
“Listening to music, sir.”
He looked suddenly interested. “No kidding? What are they playing these days? I bet it’s not Glenn Miller or Bing Crosby anymore.”
“No, sir.”
“So what do they listen to?”
I smiled. “Well, there’s a group called Professor Longhair and the Shuffling Hungarians, and a guy named—”
He guffawed. “Professor Longhair and the Shuffling Armenians?!”
“Hungarians, sir.”
“Jesus Christ. What else?”
I told him the names of the other singers and groups, while he asked me to grab one side of the pot and help carry it to his office. He repeated every name I gave him, as if memorizing them for a test. I told him about Bobby Bolden and how he should be given a band to play at the EM Club. He grunted, and repeated Bolden’s name, as we carried the pot together up the three steps of the Administration Building, grunting and straining. A Marine private snapped to attention at the door.
“Open all those doors to my office, Private,” Captain Pritchett said. The private led the way down a corridor to a corner office. He flicked on the lights, saluted again, and backed away as we entered the office with the plant. The room was
very clean and sparsely furnished, except for the plants. They were everywhere. And I thought of all the flowers at Eden Santana’s trailer.
“Over here in the corner, Devlin. We’ll leave her until the morning and then I’ll have her moved to the tower.” We laid the plant down next to a window. He started crooning to it again. “Now you get a good night’s sleep, you hear me? And tomorrow you’re gonna live in the sunshine. Tomorrow, and for the rest of your life on this planet. You hear me, honey? You can bet on it.”
I gazed around the office. There was a bookshelf with framed photographs of the captain on the deck of a ship, the captain with a woman, the woman alone, the captain and the woman coming under an arch of swords held by midshipmen. There were a couple of books: The Ops Officers Manual, The Bluejackets’ Manual, various books of rules and regs from Bupers, How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie. He glanced at the woman’s picture.
“That’s my wife,” he said in a flat voice. “She died.”
“Sorry to hear that, sir.”
“I was in love with her from high school and we got married during the war and after all that, all that damned worrying and me being torpedoed and all the rest of it, she went and died on me.”
He shook his head and turned to look again at the plant.
“She got me started on this stuff, the gardening,” he said. “When I came home from the war, she had the goddamnedest garden waiting for me. So I guess maybe, in some way, if I keep these things living, then she’s alive too. See that plant over there?” He pointed at a large green plant with leathery leaves. “That’s from our garden in Sausalito. After I sold the house, I took it with me. I know she’s alive in that one.”
He looked at me as if suddenly aware that he had revealed himself to me, that he was vulnerable. He saluted smartly. I returned the salute.