Leaving for Korea (February/March 1997 | Volume: 48, Issue: 1)

Leaving for Korea

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Authors: James Brady

Historic Era: Era 9: Postwar United States (1945 to early 1970s)

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February/March 1997 | Volume 48, Issue 1

We sat over beer on rough-hewn cedar benches at a big old table in the shade of trees that only California grows, young men talking away the hot November afternoon, a November such as we rarely had in the East, all of us in proper uniform, the forest green, and we were pared lean and very fit by the hills and the forced marches and the heat, burned cordovan by the California sun.

It was my birthday, November 15, and tomorrow we were going to the war.

A dozen Marine officers, lieutenants like me, and about ninety master sergeants and gunnery sergeants and other NCOs, men of enormous dignity who made me uneasy when they saluted, had flown north at dawn from Camp Pendleton to the Navy airfield outside San Francisco to take a plane across the Pacific. We were replacements for men dead or wounded in Korea.

“Fresh meat,” one of the sergeants remarked pleasantly.

The division was short of sergeants and platoon leaders—young lieutenants—after the September and October fighting on the ridges. They were in a hurry to get us, and that’s why we were being flown over. The rest of the replacement draft, maybe two thousand officers and men, including most of our friends, would cross the Pacific in troopships. In the plane flying north to San Francisco, I wrote to Sheila Collins, who was going to marry somebody else, wishing her well and telling her what a great girl she was and what fun we’d had. And meaning it. That letter accomplished, I mentioned to the man sitting alongside that today was my birthday, that I was twenty-three. He wished me well.

“You know,” he said then, “George Custer was a major general at twenty-three.”

That rather put me in my place. The other man sensed it and tried to make it up.

“Well, brevet general. Not permanent rank. He was really only a colonel, and after Appomattox they reduced him back.”

“I’d take colonel,” I said. “I’d take major.”

“Different kind of war. Promotion came quick.”

“He had another advantage over me, Custer,” I said.

“Our last day,” Mack Allen said abruptly, which was odd because Mack talked less than any of us. But it was what we all were thinking.

“Oh?”

“Yeah, I can’t ride a horse.”

At Moffett Field outside San Francisco, they discovered something wrong with the plane that was to take us to Korea, and they were going to have to find another. That would take until tomorrow morning, so we were free until then. 6:00 A.M. That was luck: a day to kill in San Francisco. And on my birthday. Bob Phelps said we ought to drive down to PaIo Alto, where he’d played football the year before at Stanford.

“You’ve never seen such a place,” Phelps said.

Bob Doran and Lou Faust had friends to visit or errands to run, but Mack Allen and a few of us piled