Part 5 (2/2)

11.

THE THIRTY-EIGHTH PARALLEL.

I've crossed...the Pacific twice, on troops.h.i.+ps....You stand out there, at the rail, at dusk, and the sea is limitless, water in every direction, never-ending, you think water forever, water forever, the movement of the s.h.i.+p seems slow but also seems inexorable, you feel you will be moving this way forever, the Pacific is about seventy million square miles, about one-third of the earth's surface, the s.h.i.+p might be making twenty knots, I'm eating oranges because that's all I can keep down, twelve days of it with young soldiers all around, half of them seasick- the movement of the s.h.i.+p seems slow but also seems inexorable, you feel you will be moving this way forever, the Pacific is about seventy million square miles, about one-third of the earth's surface, the s.h.i.+p might be making twenty knots, I'm eating oranges because that's all I can keep down, twelve days of it with young soldiers all around, half of them seasick-

This pa.s.sage from Paradise Paradise amplifies a scene from ”See the Moon?”: ”[I sailed] over the pearly Pacific in a great vessel decorated with oranges. A trail of orange peel on the plangent surface.” amplifies a scene from ”See the Moon?”: ”[I sailed] over the pearly Pacific in a great vessel decorated with oranges. A trail of orange peel on the plangent surface.”

The woozy troops thought they would dock first in j.a.pan and wait to be a.s.signed, but they were s.h.i.+pped straight to Korea, arriving the day the truce was signed, July 27, 1953. The war's official end left the troops in limbo. Don's outfit was reshuffled to Sasebo, j.a.pan, where the soldiers set up a tent city. They were ordered to paint latrines at Pusan. While on s.h.i.+ft there as perimeter guard, Don got his first sustained look at the ”grimy hills of Korea.”

Finally, on a Sunday in late August, traveling on what he called a ”toy train,” he and his fellows arrived at Second Division headquarters in the Chorwon Valley, just north of the thirty-eighth parallel. ”Walking down the road wearing green clothes,” he writes in ”See the Moon?” ”Korea green and black and silent....I had a carbine to carry....We whitewashedrocks to enhance our area....Mine the whitest rocks.”

For a while, the army considered sending Don to bakers school; this struck him as hilarious, given how hungry and helpless he had been in the kitchen on Leek Street. He insisted to his superiors that his ”weapon was a typewriter”; tenacious and persuasive, he eventually landed a spot in the division's Public Information Office. Only eight men out of twenty thousand were so a.s.signed. Most of the time, he wrote news releases and articles for the division's publication, the Indianhead. Indianhead. Once, while on a.s.signment in Tokyo, he saw the names of Buck Pvt. Harold Ross and Sgt. Alexander Woollcott on the masthead of a 1918 Paris edition of the army's newspaper, Once, while on a.s.signment in Tokyo, he saw the names of Buck Pvt. Harold Ross and Sgt. Alexander Woollcott on the masthead of a 1918 Paris edition of the army's newspaper, Stars and Stripes. Stars and Stripes. Like these Like these New Yorker New Yorker icons, he hoped to get some bylines in the paper, and he almost did, but time ran out on his tour: one more missed opportunity that made icons, he hoped to get some bylines in the paper, and he almost did, but time ran out on his tour: one more missed opportunity that made his his war a pale copy of Papa's-not that he ached to see action, and he certainly didn't want to remain in the service any longer than he had to. But as another Korea veteran, the writer James Brady, suggests, it's a ”sour” feeling to put in your time and then be forced to admit, ”It ain't much but it's the only war we got.” war a pale copy of Papa's-not that he ached to see action, and he certainly didn't want to remain in the service any longer than he had to. But as another Korea veteran, the writer James Brady, suggests, it's a ”sour” feeling to put in your time and then be forced to admit, ”It ain't much but it's the only war we got.”

Three years before Don arrived in-country, W. H. Lawrence of The New York Times The New York Times wrote of the enthusiastic greeting U.S. troops received at Pusan Harbor, with schoolchildren ”waving Korean, American, and United Nations flags, lined up...singing the Korean national anthem.” GIs snapped pictures and gave the kids candy. Pusan itself, Lawrence said, consisted of ”thatched shack after shack amid dirt and squalor which would make any pineboard shack in the Hoovervilles of 1932 look like the Waldorf-Astoria.” But by the summer of 1953, even the shacks were gone. Don's outfit saw very few civilians; they'd been routed from their land and evacuated to the south, out of the battle zone. Only the grimy hills remained, punctured with sh.e.l.l craters. wrote of the enthusiastic greeting U.S. troops received at Pusan Harbor, with schoolchildren ”waving Korean, American, and United Nations flags, lined up...singing the Korean national anthem.” GIs snapped pictures and gave the kids candy. Pusan itself, Lawrence said, consisted of ”thatched shack after shack amid dirt and squalor which would make any pineboard shack in the Hoovervilles of 1932 look like the Waldorf-Astoria.” But by the summer of 1953, even the shacks were gone. Don's outfit saw very few civilians; they'd been routed from their land and evacuated to the south, out of the battle zone. Only the grimy hills remained, punctured with sh.e.l.l craters.

The historian Callum A. MacDonald wrote: At 10:00 p.m. on 27 July [1953] a sullen silence fell over the front. The opposing armies disengaged and fell back on their main defense lines behind the DMZ. The outposts in No Man's Land were left ”deserted and quiet except for the rats.” There was little rejoicing. For the first time in its modern history, the U.S. had failed to win. [Things] had ended in a draw...[the] ”sour little war” was finally over.

Nevertheless, dangers remained in this once-fertile wasteland. Don and his fellow newcomers were warned to watch for land mines. On the narrow road that twisted out of the harbor to Pusan, heavy American vehicles hauling weapons and equipment kicked up dust and caused traffic snarls; daredevil drivers swerved swiftly around one another on the edges of twelvefoot embankments, provoking accidents. The weather was harsh, diseases easy to catch. The soldiers heard rumors that Korean dust was full of parasites that fed infections. And of course no one knew if the truce would continue to hold.

Second Division headquarters sat in a bare valley, near the bombed-out town of Chorwon, bounded by distant red-soil hills. Soldiers named the area's American outposts ”T-Bone,” ”Alligator Jaw,” ”Spud,” ”Little Gibraltar,” ”Norti,” ”Old Baldy,” and ”Pork Chop.”

Don and his coworkers in the Public Information Office pulled light duty. They worked from seven to five, making reveille in ”an offhand way.” They suffered no inspections, no guard duty. Their showers spit hot water, and they kept cases of warm Asahi beer in the office. A Korean houseboy washed their clothes, cleaned their rifles, and heated water so they could shave in the mornings. The army employed several young Koreans-the kids called themselves ”Number One Boys”-to carry and organize equipment. The soldiers referred to them, collectively, as the ”gook train.”

For all the comparative ease of the a.s.signment, Don was ”not, of course, deliriously happy,” he wrote Joe Maranto. ”[F]eel that everything is going to pot, can't write worth a d.a.m.n (tho well enough to show these people).” He said, ”we run into a lot of stories...that we can't write [for the Indianhead Indianhead]-had half-a-dozen of EM [enlisted men] attempting to blow off their officers' heads in the last month. Despite sunny pictures being painted in Stateside publications, morale is lousy. In indoctrination cla.s.ses they're asking us to report anybody who b.i.t.c.hes about the army or expresses a desire to go home....Remember [Orwell's] 1984.”

Don's fellows in the PIO included a ”Master from Columbia and a Master from Wisconsin, the latter with a degree in drama,” he said. ”[A]lso a Southern Cal type and a Kansas U. type, and one from Minnesota and one from Pitt. We're getting a new one from CCNY this morning; he's a lawyer and looks to be pretty much of a bomb.” For the first time in his life, outside his father's house, Don wasn't the best-educated person in his group. He felt this deficiency keenly, and wrote his family for books, books, and more books: Dylan Thomas, Ezra Pound, Saul Bellow. He asked his wife to send, along with The New Yorker, The New Yorker, the the Partisan Review Partisan Review and and Theatre Arts. Theatre Arts.

In October, he wrote to Maranto that a television crew from Seoul ”comes up here to the front and films things if we do the scripts. Needless to say, this is marvelous experience.” He was looking forward to a Thanksgiving party at a nearby Dutch compound: ”[A] whole gang of bigwigs are flying in from the Netherlands and there is a promise of much liquor.”

Francis Cardinal Spellman ”choppered in on Christmas day to say ma.s.s,” Don wrote. Later, someone pa.s.sed around a couple bottles of ”vin terrible from somewhere, and the Thais chipped in with a bottle of Mekhong, a whiskey that is peculiarly their own and tastes remotely like anti-freeze. Not that antifreeze of whatever kind isn't welcome at the moment-it's been snowing (I had a WHITE CHRISTMAS!).” In fact, the temperature hovered around nine degrees.

Don informed Maranto that he had begun ”pedagogging two nights a week” at an army education center: ”English (on a very elementary level), about 15 students, $1.25 an hour. One of my students is an aged Negro M/Sgt. who hasn't been inside a cla.s.sroom since 1930 and 5.” This was Don's first teaching experience.

The army had not prepared or properly equipped its troops to face the killing cold of Korea's valley winters. By January, temperatures shot to sixty below zero. The sh.e.l.l holes filled with ice. A hard, frozen coat encased the area's remaining spruce and pine trees and the untidy concertina-wire fences on the headquarters' perimeter. Don slept in his uniform, keeping handy his web belt and canteen. Beside his bunk, an oil stove reeked poisonously, but it kept him relatively warm at night. During the day, soldiers sat on logs or sooty sandbags, s.h.i.+vering inside wet ponchos, crumbling cocoa cakes into boiling water. Sometimes they peed on their rifles to unfreeze them. Otherwise, they used ammo tubes as urinals in the snow. Deep fog drifted off the Sea of j.a.pan and seeped into the folds of their clothes.

Stilled by the punis.h.i.+ng weather, and with no imminent threat of combat, the men grew bored, lazy, careless. It was easy to make a mistake with the equipment, to trip over something-a jerrican full of water, a sleeping bag-and sustain a serious injury. The men shaved several times a day, just to have something to do.

The sun began to sink around 2:30 every afternoon, and a fierce Siberian wind tumbled over the hills. The soldiers waited for the gook train to bring them their mail, then retreated to their tents to clean their rifles, count their grenades, and hunch over lukewarm suppers of lima beans and chewy ham. Food arrived from the army's rear flanks by way of jeep trailers; it came in insulated thermal containers, but nearly always, the last men served found their meals frozen solid.

By 4:30, the light was gone. In the dark, the lonely tinkling of the tin cans with which the men had decorated the concertina wire made everyone feel a few degrees colder. Heading out to the latrine, you had to make sure your toilet paper wasn't a block of ice.

Sometime in December or January, Don wrote his father that he had taken R and R in Seoul. There, he had seen From Here to Eternity. From Here to Eternity. Though the filmmakers ”emasculated half the characters,” the movie ”nevertheless had some wonderful moments.” Don went on to describe a ”multi-million luxury hotel S. Rhee is building in Seoul with American gold.” Don had met one of the architects. He ”is not really an architect at all but an artist who used to design sets for the 'Kukla, Fran and Ollie' TV show and is a PFC belonging to our 9th Regiment.” The ”main architect is equally not a real architect but some kind of a b.a.s.t.a.r.d designer who went to MIT and parades around in Seoul looking weirdly out of place in Ivy League uniform.” Together, these men were building a ”14-story Babel in which the interiors are all very chi-chi in...what they fondly believe to be the modern manner. They are being very arty about the whole thing and that's quite a trick because it's almost impossible to be arty in Seoul since the city is all bombedout ruins and poverty.” Though the filmmakers ”emasculated half the characters,” the movie ”nevertheless had some wonderful moments.” Don went on to describe a ”multi-million luxury hotel S. Rhee is building in Seoul with American gold.” Don had met one of the architects. He ”is not really an architect at all but an artist who used to design sets for the 'Kukla, Fran and Ollie' TV show and is a PFC belonging to our 9th Regiment.” The ”main architect is equally not a real architect but some kind of a b.a.s.t.a.r.d designer who went to MIT and parades around in Seoul looking weirdly out of place in Ivy League uniform.” Together, these men were building a ”14-story Babel in which the interiors are all very chi-chi in...what they fondly believe to be the modern manner. They are being very arty about the whole thing and that's quite a trick because it's almost impossible to be arty in Seoul since the city is all bombedout ruins and poverty.”

The letter shows an attempt to connect with his father, and reveals Don's aesthetic development. He saw that it didn't make sense for an architect, standing among ruins, to insist on the ”modern manner.” It was a case of ego over need, of forcing the wrong design. wrong design.

In March 1954, Don described for Joe Maranto Marilyn Monroe's trip to entertain the troops: ”Just before the show I was backstage and the door to her dressing room was open...we watched her warming up for the show, complete with b.u.mps & grinds and wiggles in tune to the music being played on the stage, and she was winking & blinking at us and smiling a more or less girlish smile and in fine giving the d.a.m.nedest pre-show show you've ever seen.”

His letters mention few friends.h.i.+ps with other soldiers, but he did become close to a young man name Sutchai Thangpew, from the Royal Thai Battalion, a group of around one thousand elite soldiers attached to the American division. The battalion was famous for its bayonet skills. Thangpew, a lieutenant, was engaged to a woman in Bangkok. Like Don, he was a talented writer; he had been a.s.signed to record his battalion's history. Someday he hoped to become prime minister of Thailand, and Don believed he would succeed. Thangpew was tall and handsome, gentle and intelligent, with a kindly smile. Don once traveled with him to Tokyo, where they visited the national theater, and saw a ballet and a Kabuki show. Later, when Thangpew married, Don sent him a wedding gift. For years afterward, Don scanned the newspapers for word of his friend's rise in politics, but he never saw anything about him.

Increasingly, Don felt left out of the lives of his Houston friends. Maranto sent Don some of the book reviews he had written. Don replied, ”To pay your...reviews the highest compliment of which I am capable, they remind me of me. There is a certain intensity, plus a reaching for the word that is not merely the mot juste but also has a cl.u.s.ter of overtones; in fine, they are very, very good. As is my custom, I say not that they seem seem good to me, but flatly that they are good.” Despite his confident tone, he must have felt that Maranto was pa.s.sing him by. Now and then he admitted in his letters that he wasn't pleased with his own writing. good to me, but flatly that they are good.” Despite his confident tone, he must have felt that Maranto was pa.s.sing him by. Now and then he admitted in his letters that he wasn't pleased with his own writing.

He grumbled about the paucity of ”good music” in Korea, though ”strangely enough the most consistent source of good serious music our Zenith can pick up is Radio Moscow, which sometimes gives us Tschaikowsky [sic], sometimes propaganda in English.” In another letter to Maranto, he mentioned that he had heard from Pat Goeters. ”Goeters is still writing the obscurantist prose he was writing when I left. I am pervertedly happy that such things remain constant.” Maybe he wouldn't be entirely entirely at sea when he got back home. at sea when he got back home.

Like dust in the hills around the Chorwon Valley, Korea sprinkles Don's fiction, in stories such as ”See the Moon?” and ”Visitors” and ”Overnight to Many Distant Cities.” The most extended mention of his tour appears in ”Thailand,” collected in Sixty Stories Sixty Stories in 1981. Here, Don splits himself into two personalities, one a droning old veteran recounting his service in the ”Krian war,” the other an impatient young man ready to ”consign” the vet ”to history.” It's as though, in his late forties (when he wrote the piece) Don had accepted the fall from Papa's perch: There are no Hemingway hero tales, just a boring old man and his cliched reminiscences. His memories are of no use to a new generation-or so the story's in 1981. Here, Don splits himself into two personalities, one a droning old veteran recounting his service in the ”Krian war,” the other an impatient young man ready to ”consign” the vet ”to history.” It's as though, in his late forties (when he wrote the piece) Don had accepted the fall from Papa's perch: There are no Hemingway hero tales, just a boring old man and his cliched reminiscences. His memories are of no use to a new generation-or so the story's form form suggests. In fact, the vet's recollections are anything suggests. In fact, the vet's recollections are anything but but dull, and come, nearly whole cloth, from Don's prowls along the thirty-eighth parallel: dull, and come, nearly whole cloth, from Don's prowls along the thirty-eighth parallel: ... there was this Thai second john who was a personal friend of mine, named Sutchai. Tall fellow, thin, he was an exception to the rule. We were right tight, even went on R & R together, you're too young to know what that is, it's Rest and Recreation where you zip off to Tokyo and sample the delights of that city for a week....This time I'm talking about...we were on the side of a hill, they held this hill which sort of anch.o.r.ed the MLR-that's Main Line of Resistance-at that point, pretty good-sized hill I forget what the designation was, and it was a feast day, some Thai feast, a big holiday, and the skies were sunny, sunny. They had set out thirty-seven washtubs full of curry I never saw anything like it. Thirty-seven washtubs full of curry and a different curry in every one. They even had eel curry....It was a golden revel....Beef curry, chicken curry, the delicate Thai worm curry, all your various fish curries and vegetable curries...toward evening they were firing off tracer bursts from the quad-fifities to make fireworks and it was just festive, very festive. They had fighting with wooden swords at which the Thais excel, it's like a ballet dance, and the whole battalion was putting away the Mekhong and beer pretty good....

As the veteran talks, his bored young listener tells himself, ”I cannot believe I am sitting here listening to this demento carry on about eel curry.” Finally, the young man thinks, ” I am sitting here listening to this demento carry on about eel curry.” Finally, the young man thinks, ”Requiescat in pace” (a play on Montresor's words at the end of Edgar Allan Poe's ”The Cask of Amontillado”). ”I close, forever, the book [on you].”

”Thailand” shows that Don never closed the book on his past. Still, he refused to address his experiences directly directly-after all, his father had taught him that if you reveal too much of yourself, you'll be open to ridicule. In ”Thailand,” Don preempted any censure he might get for writing a straightforward narrative (what could be more familiar than a war story war story?). Nevertheless, the young man's impatience with old-fas.h.i.+oned stories makes him appear shallow, and the narrator, a veteran of a much more varied world than his companion has known, enjoys the last laugh: ”They don't really have worm curry....I just made that up to fool you.”

When spring came, with its rains, the roads in the Chorwon Valley became deep red swamps; on hikes, the men sank to their ankles in mud. The Number One Boys stayed busy sc.r.a.ping and s.h.i.+ning the GIs' boots. The soldiers would fill their rucksacks with peaches, sugar, coffee, pork and beans, and toilet paper, then walk into the hills, amazed at how much light the stars cast. As the weather warmed, fat flies gathered around mess kits and p.i.s.s tubes. As the men sat reading-letters, manuals, Mickey Spillane novels-they swatted at their ears.

For his twenty-third birthday, Don asked Marilyn to send him Erich Auerbach's Mimesis. Mimesis Mimesis. Mimesis examines several major works-the authors ranging from Homer to Proust-and argues that a writer's grammar, syntax, and diction can't help but absorb the ”style of the age.” Auerbach claimed that Dante's vernacular, a combination of lyricism, historicism, science, and philosophy, led to the realism of Balzac and Flaubert. examines several major works-the authors ranging from Homer to Proust-and argues that a writer's grammar, syntax, and diction can't help but absorb the ”style of the age.” Auerbach claimed that Dante's vernacular, a combination of lyricism, historicism, science, and philosophy, led to the realism of Balzac and Flaubert.

Don also requested Suzanne Langer's Philosophy in a New Key, Philosophy in a New Key, a study of semantics and symbols. He was particularly keen on Langer's notion that words loosed from their familiar contexts or meanings (as in the poetry of Mallarme) retain their roots. A whiff of past a.s.sociations clings to language, even when it is put to odd new uses. a study of semantics and symbols. He was particularly keen on Langer's notion that words loosed from their familiar contexts or meanings (as in the poetry of Mallarme) retain their roots. A whiff of past a.s.sociations clings to language, even when it is put to odd new uses.

Marilyn's enthusiasm for her French cla.s.ses encouraged Don to read French poetry and to try to pick up some idioms, while stationed in Korea.

He read novels by Gide and Stendhal, Faulkner, Huxley, and Moravia. He read Shakespeare and a study of Socrates. He wrote his mother that he had found Truman Capote's The Gra.s.s Harp The Gra.s.s Harp ”wanting Capote's earlier magic.” He devoured Eisenstein on film and Lionel Trilling on the liberal imagination, Max Beerbohm on the theater and Edmund Wilson on the novel. He admitted in a letter to Joe Maranto that he felt a ”mammoth inferiority thing” from having a poor education. ”wanting Capote's earlier magic.” He devoured Eisenstein on film and Lionel Trilling on the liberal imagination, Max Beerbohm on the theater and Edmund Wilson on the novel. He admitted in a letter to Joe Maranto that he felt a ”mammoth inferiority thing” from having a poor education.

A pair of photos taken by fellow soldiers-one in the Second Division camp, the other in a Tokyo garden-shows Don to be comfortable with himself in spite of his unhappiness. He is tall and rangy, relaxed in his uniform, grinning in front of the ”grimy hills” or deadpanning next to a fake stork in a fountain. His letters make it clear, though, that he was impatient, biding his time until he could get back home. ”Perhaps the army has given me something,” he wrote to Maranto, ”but if it has I don't know what it is, except that it has kept me earthy and close to the soil all right...

”But...is that a virtue?”

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