The Korean War-Pusan to Chosin

...Pushed back to a tiny salient at Pusan marking the extent of non-Communist power on the peninsula, they bought time with desperate fighting and terrible losses...

...I fired into his midriff...

...I found one Chinese curled up, lying facedown...

...Why are you fighting...

...Needless to say, not all the brutality was on one side...

...Here the varied yet similarly grim experiences of the soldiers weigh more heavily, the sheer desperation of the earliest battles being most forcefully driven home: Looking for high rates...

...They wanted to give us eggs and produce, not like the South Koreans, who tried to sell them to us...

...We figured we were the losers...

...Who are you fighting for...

...How could we get so caught up in all that Hollywood corn...

...The other kid vomited all over himself...

...yet even President Reagan, in an era when old and honored Regular Army units are deactivated to serve the unfathomable needs of half-souled Pentagon bureaucrats, took due notice of the breakup of that Wayne Michael Sarf is the author of God Bless You, Buffalo Bill: A Layman's Guide to History and the Western Film...

...Wisely, the attempt is rarely made...

...when no GIs volunteered to help carry a wounded North Korean officer ("Of course, no one volunteered...

...But our failure to dictate a peace quite reasonably led to it being considered a no-win war—a test of America's resolve in resisting Red expansion, to be sure, but also a classic case of running to keep in the same place, and a gruesome example of the price which might be demanded by a policy of containment...

...I told the guy, "I'm fighting for one thing—me...

...I will read it carefully before I invest or send money...

...If Knox's choice of material occasionally appears—like his cryptic quoting of the last four lines of "Blenheim"--arbitrary, much of his anecdotal material remains not so much open to questions of overall historical reliability as of necessity in-different to them...

...naval and air units, then ground troops, were thrown into battle to help feeble South Korean forces repel the overwhelming mass of the invading North Korean People's Army...

...It was terribly one-sided, what with our machine guns, mortars, and artillery...

...forces were driven back across the 38th Parallel in defeat, though the U.S...

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...How can the lay reader judge contradictory testimony...

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...Refugees were used as human shields for assaults on U.S...

...Some guys still clutched letters from home...

...positions, and Communist massacres of civilians were not the exception, but seemingly the rule, though Knox presents no "analysis" of their policy save the comments of eyewitnesses: "Someone found out that many of the murdered were professional and business people, educators, artists, politicians, civil servants...

...The methods of Donald Knox are well suited to portraying this seesaw bloodletting...

...Alas, there is always that problem of reliability...

...We've got Chinese walking five abreast...

...I guess five years of Communist rule would do that to a people...

...How, then, to draw from individual accounts a history of mass movements involving, at the least, hundreds of thousands of fighting men...

...One soldier quotes a pilot overheard describing an awesome display over his radio: "You won't believe this...

...most famous unit of all, the fictitious 4077th MASH...

...There are no basic educational requirements and no special career or professional categories...

...So much have we forgotten (or "advanced") that when the populace of Grenada reacted with equal enthusiasm to their rescue by American forces, the New Yorker accused Ronald Reagan of somehow having hypnotized them—for how otherwise could someone actually approve of liberation by brutal Yankee imperialists...

...If South Korean civilians viewed the Yanks as liberating heroes, many North Koreans were even more enthusiastic as the Americans approached the Yalu...

...The "oral" of the existing subtitle is sometimes winked at...

...Who needs a Gibbon or a Macaulay—or even an Ernie Pyle or Michael Herr—when we can have Private Smith tell us the real story as he lived it...

...War, regarded it as a meaningless if bloody joke...

...Does anyone really talk like this...

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...As the Cheyennes had never revealed this tale to anyone else (including their own descendents) the good doctor doubtless felt that he, unlike other whites, had encouraged them with his open mind...

...For a prospectus on this offering call: 889-4935 (local) Toll Free 1-800-392-8774 (Mo...

...Or, as one thorough student of the battle remarked to me, with some heat, "Those Cheyenne sons-of-bitches lied to him...

...who is eligible U.S...

...Even a careful historian may ask the wrongquestions, or believe the wrong answers, perhaps convinced that he alone has been vouchsafed some previously hidden truth—as was the late Dr...

...THE KOREAN WAR—PUSAN TO CHOSIN: AN ORAL HISTORY Donald Knox/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/$24.95 Wayne Michael Sarf American intervention in the Korean war did achieve its initial objective of saving South Korea from the Communists...

...Modern warfare has of late been a popular subject for bestsellers titling themselves "oral histories" and illustrating the problems of the genre...

...A Marine private described an air strike witnessed by the men of his unit...

...Those who think of 1950s Communists chiefly as harmless victims of McCarthyism should recall their required support for the Soviet-sponsored North Koreans who were treating American captives, as well as their own people (if one can ever use this phrase with respect to Communist zealots), with a horrific brutality...

...units providing no testimony...

...Required reading not only for those who want to under-stand the South's past but also for those concerned with its present and future:' -ROBERT FOGEL, University of Chicago "This book emancipates southern history from many traditional bonds and outworn concepts....l take pleasure in recommending it!' -C...

...The minimum initial investment is only $500...

...Should a compiler of oral accounts attempt to resolve these contradictions for him, or use his own wisdom in letting an informant's narrative stand alone...

...The civilians were so happy to see us...

...Although it remained a common practice on both sides, I never again killed another wounded Chinese soldier...

...One is forced to imagine just how their loved ones reacted to the horrors recounted therein, and just what, if any, greater horrors they thought it best to conceal...

...The most revolting anecdote tells of three Yanks who observe American tanks deliberately swerving off a roadto run over several wounded North Koreans: "Emer was a hardy soul and never missed a bite of his cold ham-burger...

...For my life, buddy, for my life...

...But he also uses much written eyewitness material, that closest to Everyman experience being the letters of various GIs...

...However, replacing narrator with editor may merely throw each reader into the democratic plight of being his own historian, to sort out truth for himself—with the added disadvantage that the editor, not the reader, has after all pre-selected the informants and usually asked all the questions...

...Distributions and share price, which are not guaranteed, will fluctuate...

...What are you fighting for, son...

...We dragged along to the next position a few miles farther south...

...Ahead lay other operations, the bloody but indecisive battles establishing a stalemated front, the peace talks where Communist guards threatened American delegates with submachine guns, and a truce which failed to re-establish the precise prewar boundaries of either Korea...

...If such misnamed "oral histories" multiply, it is because their value, and popularity, lie in offering the raw materials of history with an immediacy rarely matched by conventional military narratives...

...You'll receive regular income and always have access to your money...

...Helpless or wounded Americans were doused with gasoline and set ablaze...

...The electronic media generally remind us of the conflict only by re-running Hollywood films about it, most postwar productions being bleakly low-key...

...The more distressingly "sensitive" doctors of the TV series, afflicted with Woodstockian cliches and haircuts, thought nothing of packing a howitzer's breech with cement lest anyone have the bad taste to use it in defending their hospital...

...In James Webb's novel Fields of Fire a returning veteran, asked whether he thinks the U.S...

...Lots of screaming horses and dying Chinese...

...Weren't there any other GIs in this Army...

...forces in Vietnam did no fighting, confining themselves instead to committing atrocities), but even the least biased author may fail to quell suspicions that it is he, not his informants, who deals the cards—precisely the sort of intervention we seek to bypass...

...OLD SOUTH NEW SOUTH Revolutions in the Southern Econoiny Since the Civil War Gavin Wright "If you can read only one book about how history happened to the post-Civil War economy, read this one...

...Americans guilty of brutalities seem unmotivated by ideology (if the average GI can be said to have had one) but frequently possessed of an eye to retaliation...

...Save for the odd Brit or Australian, presumably included for reasons of Anglophonic solidarity, Knox's war is the Americans' war, with even the South Korean KATUSAs attached to U.S...

...It is always disheartening to read that the first American units sent to hold the line were bewildered, unprepared, and poorly equipped, their rocket launchers almost useless against the enemy's T-34 tanks...

...If any American Communist ever tells me when I get home that America was the aggressor in this war I think I'll kill him on the spot...

...O The BASIC issue is ESCAPING THE LEGACY OF THE PLANTATION A distinguished economist presents an original and pro-vocative analysis of the economic history of the modern South...

...The destruction of the region's low-wage economy by federal intervention, he argues, laid the foundations of the 'New South," clearing the way for the influx of capital and labor that built an entirely new economy inside the shell of the old...

...When the Chinks get up here they'll think we got giants"), the bizarre communion with "Custer and his 'long knives' " achieved by a Fifth Cavalryman during a mass rendition of "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon" ("It was goofy the way I felt...

...While elements of the Vietnam-protest movement have promoted the notion of the American serviceman as a uniquely racist animal eager to slaughter Asians, the South Koreans—judging from the American informants here—appear to have been more brutal than their Yankee allies...

...Robert Altman's 1970 M*A*S*H, the most popular film ever made about the Korean (or was it the Vietnamese...

...more than chronology will separate most readers from these veterans...

...After MacArthur's audacious amphibious assault on the sea-walled Inchon harbor, our Army's advance from Pusan, and the virtual destruction of the NKPA invasion force, United Nations forces pushed on toward the Yalu to eliminate resistance and reunify the country for elections...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1986 35 Sometimes one would simply like more first-hand information about an incident, such as a briefly described action with Chinese horse cavalry...

...The Vietnam war, writes Webb, "happened only to individuals, and it had ceased happening to him...

...The dead appeared to include entire families...

...You can't think when you're as fatigued as we were...

...Countless writers, of fiction and nonfiction, have emphasized the limited viewpoint of the individual combatant, who may know little of the "big picture" and care less...

...10 East 53rd Street, New York 10022 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1986 37...

...And then what of letting those he chose to sup-press speak for themselves...

...We are just attacking in another direction") with their breakout southward from the Chosin Reservoir—bearing off not only their wounded, but their frozen dead...

...We are also reminded of two philosophies at war...

...Lest we think these revolutionaries hopelessly out-of-date, effective Chinese use of mounted troops was cited as late as 1953 in arguing that our own First Cavalry Division resume using horses...

...Prejudice may be ludicrously blatant (the statements in the People's Almanac oral overview of America might lead the unwary to conclude that U.S...

...Sometimes data may simply be hurled at us...

...but while their story can be magnificently executed by the historian, illuminated with (carefully chosen) anecdotes of courage, elation, and cowardice, the effect may re-main that of a somewhat impersonal drama...

...While it is depressing to think that the most influential vision of the Korean struggle may prove that of Alan Alda, the mere fact that some still think of it, despite its massive bloodletting, as a "small war"—let alone, in Harry Truman's ghastly phrase, a "police action"--suggests a hole in the collective memory...

...White House Fellowships the fellowship program The White House Fellowship program is beginning its twenty-second year and is designed to provide gifted and highly motivated Americans firsthand experience in the process of personal involvement in the leadership of their society...

...Now the notion of an "oral history" of almost anything, but particularly a war, has a curious appeal...

...The GIs knew better, and soldiers entering P'yongyang were disappointed at not capturing any of the North Koreans' advisers: "We really hoped we would nab thetrue Communists, the Russians...

...You can't retreat or withdraw when you are surrounded...

...The uncomprehending world of nonparticipants rarely puts in an appearance...

...The 35th anniversary of the war's opening guns, like previous anniversaries, passed almost without notice, and there is no national monument, controversial or otherwise, to those who fought in Korea, save for a recent (and typically unimpressive) commemorative stamp...

...Studs Terkel's 34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1986 ironically named "The Good War'': An Oral History of World War Two was taken to task on ideological grounds for including too many left-wing witnesses, while in one televised confrontation conservative columnist Dorothy Rabinowitz (apparently unaware of how frequently such tragedies occur) questioned Terkel's motives in including an account of U.S...

...Oddly, none of Knox's informants seems to have been black, and we learn virtually nothing of that still-segregated Old Army unit, the 24th Infantry—perhaps because Knox, successfully blending individual experiences with historical panorama, follows several presumably representative combat units so tenaciously that the book might almost be subtitled "An Oral History with the 5th Cavalry and Fifth Marine Regiments...

...I was thrilled for them...

...MICHAEL P JOHNSON, New York Review of Books "Crowded with valuable and novel insights...the text radiates a unique wisdom in assessing the many-sided debates....A joy" -WILLIAM PARKER, Yale University "Political economy in the best sense of the term...

...More credibly, we can blame our own desire to get what we hope are the facts "straight from the source," in the unaffected speech of everyday life, without the distorting intervention of historian or journalist...

...At times prisoners were killed simply because they were too inconvenient: Word was passed to kill all enemy wounded...

...The deaths of comrades or even enemies strike home as they.could scarcely do in a third-person narrative, reminding us of war's horrible waste even better than Knox's citation of appalling casualty figures...

...Major credit cards accepted...

...Where was it going to end...

...Pfc...

...thus is the "self-told" ideal suspect...

...A veteran discourages thoughts of ideological motivation: Some little guy came around . . . asking questions...

...But of course, along with battles and atrocities, Knox also gives play to the incongruities and absurdities of war and military life, whether a Marine's unintended psychological-warfare effort in stupendously answering nature's call ("Leave it, Killeen...

...But as time passed, the entertainment media began telling us more about con-temporary bugaboos than the realities of a past war...

...We're 36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1986 throwing everything we got in the cockpit at them and they won't break...

...Didn't seem real, he says...

...For the Chinese leadership, of course, the "odds," and losses, seemed not to matter as they threw forth their expendable legions, including teenage boys armed only with wooden rifles tipped by real bayonets...

...I don't know what the official Army history says about us at this time, but I'm sure those who later recorded these events weren't around to witness the mess...

...The Americans' view of their Communist enemies comes through in a fashion so ill-remembered in our own day that one feels peculiarly jolted into another time...

...One pilot for an estimated enemy company...

...Can even the most conscientious writer really produce a true "oral history" of any modern war...

...We sat on the ground and enjoyed the show...

...A bemused General Smith remarks, "I've tried to explain many times to people that 'Retreat, hell' business...

...They were not...

...Almost out of fuel, but we'll be back...

...it didn't seem real...

...Fortunately Knox provides another account by a lieutenant who witnessed the same (or a similar) incident: otherwise we might not believe it...

...and all other states) *Computed by annualizing most recent quarterly distribution of $0.475 ($0.10 income and $0.375 short-term gains) and dividing by the maximum offering price of $12.85 on May 28,1986 Results for this period are not necessarily indicative of future performance...

...yet while this is undoubtedly first-hand material, does not the very professionalism of a Marguerite Higgins—an eyewitness by trade, rather than by chance interview—subvert the point...

...Guys, sweat soaked, shitting in their pants, not even dropping them, moved like zombies...

...Thomas Marquis in crediting those wizened Cheyenne Indian veterans of the Little Bighorn fight who told him that Custer's men had actually achieved self-annihilation by shooting themselves or each other...

...Mark Baker's Nam offered conveniently anonymous ac-counts and provoked suspicions of outright fabrication voiced by Soldier of Fortune magazine...

...They will not break ranks...

...Gavin Wright traces key reasons for the region's century-long status as a second class country-within-a-country, stressing the isolation of its labor markets from national and international development...

...He had a head wound shaped like a perfect pie-cut that exposed his brain...

...citizens are eligible to apply during the early and formative years of their careers...

...Newsweek's Peter S. Prescott accused Peter Manso of simply publishing the research for his "oral biography" of Norman Mailer, dismissing Manso's excuse for reproducing, sans analysis, contradictory accounts ("One can assume there is more truth in a montage than in a monolith") as "the worst sort of baloney, an abdication of responsibility...

...this is not surprising...

...Name Address City/State/Zip Phone - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - On the road in July, pulling back again from another blocking position, it was exactly like the day before, except now I was more tired and miserable than I'd been twenty-four hours earlier...

...Even journalistic war coverage is quoted at length...

...He also noted—as men will sometimes note such odd details in the midst of war—the excellent condition of the Chinese corpses' teeth...

...Instead the cold, the frostbite, the overwhelming numbers of Chinese enemies are pressed upon us again and again, the big picture disappearing, as it sometimes should, into the crucible of individual experience...

...Knox, employing his own interviews and others from Navy and Marine Corps history collections, skillfully unifies the narrative with his own bridgework and quotes official reports that produce a striking contrast through their very lack of color...

...military's airtight "shoepac" into a sweat-freezing frostbite machine...

...But we did"), or even the garlic odor preceding Communist night attacks—a detail previously told to me by my Uncle Mickey, an Eighth Cavalry veteran...

...MANN WOODWARD, Yale University $19.95 at bookstores, or direct from the publisher...

...Crushing such hopes were countless Chinese "volunteers" who launched human-wave assaults to the sound of whistle and bugle, threatening to destroy the Americans through sheer numbers in battles fought at temperatures that destroyed flesh and jammed weapons, shattered the plastic caps of canteens, and transformed the U.S...

...Knox's book ends abruptly with the Americans rallying from their defeats on the Yalu...

...If such incidents were unfamiliar to newspaper readers—Samuel Fuller later boasted that his 1951 The Steel Helmet, the first film made about the war, was also criticized as the first to depict a GI gunning down an unarmed prisoner—they should help remind us that, police action or not, this was the last censored American war...

...Rather than capsule biographies (undoubtedly the most practical approach for Santoli or Terkel) Knox offers us short—sometimes very short—bursts of individual memory, with some recurring informants dropping out only after being wounded or captured...

...is winning, claims that the civilian asking him probably has a better idea: "I don't know anything about it...

...Additionally, Fellows participate in an extensive education program including seminars with top government officials, leading scholars, journalists and private sector leaders...

...It was a uniquely dramatic eyewitness account—unique in part because other eyewitnesses swore that MacArthur had done no such thing...

...Toll-free (800) 638-3030...

...Here we were in Korea fighting and dying and our president says that...

...Just a bit farther down the line lay the forget-fulness of republics...

...Employees of the Federal Government are not eligible, with the exception of career military personnel of the Armed Services...

...One Australian soldier found in the Soviet embassy stationery boxes containing American embassy letterheads and, perhaps afflicted with a Whittaker Chambers-like pessimism, set them ablaze...

...the futility of any unified narrative is underscored by the common technique of presenting collections of personal narratives, with a minimum of linking narration...

...When asked why I did this, I replied, 'I think the bastards will be back.' " Covering only our POWs' early experiences, Knox cannot treat of Chinese "brainwashing," deprivations, psychological (and sometimes physical) torture, and forced "confessions" to absurd germ-warfare charges which still lay ahead for some...

...If a certain Lieutenant Greer is denounced by a former subordinate, we have only the subordinate's view to consider: was Greer still alive at the time of the interview...

...Romantics may attribute the appeal to the origins of mankind's earliest epics, or to some "Amazing Stories"-like vision of our Cro-Magnon ancestors huddled awestruck as a sage, features dim in the firelight, tells of the mammoth-slaying heroes of the race...

...While such lapses can be shrugged off, more damaging to the book's underlying "point"—the sense of getting raw, hell-I-was-there accounts—are some edited narratives which seem all too well smoothed regarding grammar, syntax, profanity, and eloquence: "He was from a small Illinois farm town and as American as apple pie...

...He turned slowly and looked at me as if saying, "Why must you make me suffer more...

...In-stead he seems a victim of men whose trust he thought he had earned...

...He called Korea a police action...

...how to apply Application forms and additional information can be obtained from: President's Commission on White House Fellowships, 712 Jackson Place N.W., Washington, D.C...

...They lined the road in their villages, looking like they'd been relieved of a heavy burden—silent, happy, meek as Iambs...

...a Navy chaplain even tells of civilians, some of them children, being rescued by a Marine officer as they were about to be executed as Communist "collaborators...

...Al Santoli's Everything We Had: An Oral History of the Vietnam War featured one informant who later recanted his story of being taken prisoner by the North Vietnamese...

...casualties inflicted by "friendly fire...

...The author even occasionally switches back and forth between informants so as to cover phases in the same brief action or incident—the shooting of an individual soldier, perhaps...

...One also shares in the Marines' exultation as they sweep victoriously into the North Korean capital—sacking the Soviet embassy and cooking the swans of the Pyongyang zoo in Russian wine A conventional account of the retreat from Chosin might present Marine valor, sacrifice, and discipline in conventional, perhaps inadvertently "glamorous" terms...

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...Marines declined to concede it ("Retreat, hell," growled Major General Oliver P. Smith...

...But at times the enemy's behavior seemed less valiant or even suicidal than simply baffling...

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...One is strangely grateful, in these illiterate days, to come across someone using a double negative, though this I noticed but once...

...For this reason an informant's mention of the Chinese letting walking wounded prisoners return to their own lines—one of several incidents in which they released Americans for political reasons—might convey the impression that they were fundamentally more humane than their North Korean allies...

...Truman really slapped us in the face...

...I just sensed we were going to find another hill and be attacked, then find another hill and so forth, endlessly, forever...

...Lean, sandyhaired, he looked like where he came from—the corn belt...

...If, however, an ambitious writer is even to attempt an "oral equivalent of war," or rather of an orthodox war narrative, the chosen conflict should ideally involve the same informants throughout the length of the book, unfold over a relatively brief period of time in a relatively small area, and have few controversial points to be cleared up by the possibly fading memories of the informants...

...The odds didn't mount up...

...what fellows do During their one year assignments in Washington, Fellows serve as special assistants to Cabinet secretaries, or senior members of the White House staff...

...The raid had a murderous effect, but a Corsair was destroyed and its pilot killed...

...we had all heard about atrocities the North Koreans had participated in"), their platoon leader finally shot him with his pistol...

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...He excels in taking vigorous bites out of war's experience and, with his mass of details, conjuring up the feeling of these Korean campaigns as powerfully as any work could do, the more so because groups of informants share common tribulations...

...One can also abdicate by failing to do supplemental research and/or letting an informant's fantasies take over...

...But Knox's book exhibits the virtues as well as the vices of the form...

...James Cardinal wrote home that "You can believe everything you read in American papers about how miserable the Communist leaders treat the people behind the Iron Curtain...

...Neither a "good war" nor by any normal standards a small war, it has failed to attain either the righteous mythology of World War II or the romantic heart-of-darkness pessimism that is one currently popular approach to our Vietnamese involvement...

...For once a blurb writer does not exaggerate as the dustjacket for Donald Knox's The Korean War proclaims that it "may well have been this country's most quickly forgotten full-scale war...

...Dee Brown even claimed his ludicrous Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee as such, despite its reliance on standard Indian Wars sources...

...Applications are accepted from June 1-November 15...

...This "oral history" proves a suitable shock treatment for historical amnesia, opening with American mobilization for the first uphill battles against the North Koreans and ending six months later after a seesaw of rousing success and shattering rout...

...The first six months of conventional fighting in Korea seem far better suited to such treatment than either the sprawling Second World War or the complex quagmire of Indochina...

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...And its virtues are considerable...

...In one such incident cited by Fehrenbach, the Chinese signally failed to impress the released American with their humanity, having first shot several South Korean prisoners before his eyes...

...The commission seeks candidates of demonstrated excellence in their professional roles as well as significant breadth of interests and community involvement...

...Well, anytime I'm dropped off in a strange country and asked to fight the Chinese, my answer is simple...

...All the more reason to let us know more about it...

...Merle Miller's Plain Speaking let Harry Truman tell of how the great captain MacArthur had kept the President waiting prior to their historic confrontation on Wake Island...

...Some thanks...

...I watched...

...More seriously, we find no Army rebuttal, official or unofficial, to Marines' charges of Army units failing to hold positions and even abandoning their wounded during retreats: did Knox ask none of his Army veterans about such charges...

...Like T. R. Fehrenbach's history This Kind of War, which called for non-conscript "legions" to fight dirty but necessary wars of containment on behalf of a flabby-minded America, some films brooded over our will to withstand a Communist enemy—a concern encouraged by reports of GI prisoners collaborating with that enemy and, very rarely, being converted to Marxism...