Above the Fold

by Peter Yeldham

  “It was a surprise, the invitation to join the Defence Department’s press bureau. I wasn’t sure about working for the army, but then I was promoted to the press office. And now I can hardly believe my luck, to be here in Tokyo as assistant liaison on Macca’s staff.”

  “So tell me about the great man. What’s he like?”

  “At times remote,” said Hannah. “Always a soldier. His father was a general, so he grew up in a military household. Devoted to his memories of the time spent at West Point, as valedictorian and later as the Commander there. His actual title is ‘General of the Army’, and there have only ever been four others in our history.”

  “So he’s the real deal.”

  “Sure is. If he has a fault, he’s not always tolerant of others. He doesn’t have a very high opinion of President Truman, inclined to think he’s a mid-west haberdasher, although I shouldn’t tell you that, and please don’t quote me. People think him a calculating man, a braggart. I can’t agree with that. He spoke of soldiers he commanded in the First World War in a way I find quite moving, and hard to forget. He said ‘they died hard, those savage men — like wounded wolves at bay. They were filthy and they stank. But I loved them.’ A man who speaks like that can’t be all bad.”

  “You’re biased,” Luke said.

  “I work with him, so I try to be loyal. I know they make fun of him and accuse him of behaving like a Mikado. But there’s a lot of people in America who want him to stand for election as the next president.”

  “So hang onto your job,” Luke suggested, “and you might end up in the White House.”

  “I don’t think he has the temperament for it,” she replied. “And nor have I. At heart I’m still a journalist, like you. Would you want to be press attaché to the Prime Minister in Canberra?”

  “Please God! No, thank you!”

  She laughed again, and he saw others around them smile. Harry had done him a rare favour, suggesting he share noodles with Hannah Thompson.

  Luke had begun to write special features, and Harry Morton encouraged him. After those on Kaito, Yuri Nakamura and the television pioneer Logie Baird, he went to Nagasaki to write about what he called ‘The Almost Forgotten City’. When people discussed the atom bomb it was invariably Hiroshima, but the city of Nagasaki had suffered equally. Luke had a strong belief this second demonstration of nuclear power was the fault of Emperor Hirohito, who could not face his people and admit defeat. But he also criticised the impatience of President Truman and his advisers who refused to wait for the inevitable surrender. A great many people had died unnecessarily because of these two men.

  In Nagasaki he met survivors and encountered terrible stories of thousands of bodies that could never be claimed, because entire families had been instantly wiped out, and there was no-one left to identify the dead. In some cases there were not even bodies to bury. It became another feature that was widely published, and aroused controversy in America because of the blame attached to the Truman administration.

  Rupert read the article when it was published in the Melbourne Age, and the following week when taking Helen to a concert he showed it to her.

  “I wonder if we could send this to Claudia?” Helen suggested.

  “I’m not sure,” he said. “Does she want to be reminded of his success? Our mate is starting to get a lot of material published with his byline attached. He’s going places, as she always predicted he would.”

  “I’m spending the long weekend with them at Easter,” Helen said. “Why don’t I take it with me, and see how she feels? Even better, why don’t you come with me?”

  Between his feature articles Luke worked as a reporter covering events in Tokyo, in particular the growing unrest between occupation troops and the group of ex-soldiers known as the IPRU. Ever since the grenade attack on the train over a year ago, their assaults had escalated. Interpreters for the occupation force became nervous, for they were being singled out as prime targets. Two girls who worked in General MacArthur’s office were intercepted on their way home and murdered. It was only one of a series of brutal acts that Luke covered for the newspaper.

  “They were stripped naked,” the American Major in charge of the police unit at the Dai-ichi building told him, “and their clothes and handbags with US identity passes were dumped on the doorstep of each girl’s home for their parents to find. Which indicates they were well known to their killers.” He shook his head despondently. “One was just seventeen, working to help the family because her father couldn’t get a job. Cheerful, sweet kid. If I could catch the bastards, we wouldn’t need the hangman. I’d fuckin’ kill the creeps before they got to court.”

  “I won’t quote you,” Luke said.

  “I wish you could,” was the other’s reply. “It’s plain scare tactics these guys are using, making it a lot harder for us to get anyone to work with us.”

  “What did MacArthur say?” Luke asked him.

  “He’s suggesting guards escort interpreters from their homes, but it’s bullshit. We don’t have enough troops to babysit every civilian we employ. And if we did see them home, the IPRU would bomb their houses instead.”

  He sounded disconsolate, and no wonder. It was an increasingly difficult time, with the simultaneous staging of war crime trials. Some of these had dragged on for years since the end of hostilities, with the IPRU ferociously opposed to them. It was a difficult task for a journalist to report them without bias. The worst of the war criminals had been convicted long ago, and these lesser trials spawned protest on all sides. Pacifist groups were upset that politicians were being convicted, while the Emperor who’d signed orders for the use of poison gas in China was granted immunity.

  Luke, in one of his letters to Helen, said he should’ve studied law, as covering courtroom dramas was a job for a jurist. When she wrote back, he noticed how often she mentioned Rupert in her letters.

  Luke and Hannah had become close friends, but until now not lovers. He had attempted to keep it that way. Wary of any new relationship, he worked hard during the day, and at night tried his best not to think of Claudia. And he was still an occupant of the penthouse above the cinema where Miki took care of his needs without emotional complicity.

  But that came to an abrupt end when his life took a different turn. He had been with the newspaper almost two years when shots were fired across the 38th parallel that signalled the start of another war. Just as shots had been fired in Sarajevo to trigger World War One, and shells across the Polish Corridor sparked World War Two, the tinderbox this time was the divided country of Korea.

  When the North Korean army crossed the 38th parallel, America began to send troops to support South Korea, and called on its allies to contribute their forces. Australia, ever responsive to demands from overseas, promptly agreed, and an Australian regiment arrived in Pusan. When the fighting began Luke knew there’d be war correspondents to follow. What he didn’t realise at the time was that he’d be one of them.

  “How do you feel about it, Luke?” Harry Morton asked.

  He was being invited to cover a war, to go where guns were firing and bombs exploding. To go to what he’d escaped when they incinerated the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was a shock. A moment of disbelief. The pacifist asked to go to war.

  “We’re only sending the best,” Harry told him, but there was no compulsion. So how did he feel?

  “Great,” he said, through gritted teeth.

  “Terrific,” was the response from Harry.

  They shook hands, and Luke hoped his weren’t trembling. Life had been too easy; a few years covering stories in Tokyo and writing articles that were republished in other newspapers, sharing the luxurious apartment above Alfie Metcalfe’s cinema, with all the comfort and erotic extras it entailed. Now he was pitchforked onto the 38th parallel, a contour drawn across the Korean Peninsula that he’d never expected to see. And all his fears about war came back to haunt him.

  “You’re a bloody idiot,” said Alfie.


  “I know that, mate. No need for you to remind me.”

  “It won’t last long,” a journalist from California boasted when they met. “The North can’t win against the might of the USA. We’ve got a strong army from other countries including yours, and General MacArthur is in command. He’s issued a battle slogan: ‘Home by Christmas!’”

  Big Noise from Little Rock was not a name to inspire confidence. Years ago, when Luke was a kid on the Northern Beaches and MacArthur was US commander in the Philippines, he’d pronounced the islands impregnable. A few months later he escaped with his family, hell-bent for Brisbane with the victorious Japanese in pursuit and since the end of the war he’d lived the soft life of a Mikado in Tokyo, doing little more than taking the salute at ceremonial parades. If he was President Truman’s choice as Supremo, Luke secretly doubted if any of them should make plans for a peaceful Christmas.

  He flew from Tokyo with a bunch of journalists to join the Australian 3rd Brigade at Pusan, and the news on landing was that the North Korean army was in full retreat. It was too good to last; the Chinese government moved in eighteen armoured divisions to support their ally. By November, amid the start of a harsh winter, they had overwhelmed US troops and forced them back across the border. General MacArthur prepared a counterattack, and his ‘Home by Christmas’ call was flagged to all units. The word went out that his massive strike across the Yalu River would defeat the North Korean and Chinese forces, and put an early end to the war.

  Instead the Chinese defeated the marines at Chosin, and a month later they captured Seoul, the South Korean capital. The clarion call ‘Home by Christmas’ would not apply for the next few years, and it would not happen under this Generalissimo.

  When Luke’s reports of the war began to be republished in Australian newspapers, Helen had already given Claudia the feature article on Nagasaki to read. It prompted Claudia to contact a press-cutting agency, so she and Steven would receive Luke’s front-line dispatches. In their small flat on the beach at Noosa, the weekly mail from the press agency brought the distant war to them, and Claudia, remembering his expressed fears when they were lovers, could hardly believe the war correspondent in the thick of battle was the same person.

  Sometimes, when Steven was asleep, she sat up reading them over again, torn between fear and a deep pride.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  There was ice everywhere and the river was frozen. Forty degrees below freezing, and the platoon was seeing sights they’d never believed possible. Bottles of frozen beer bursting like grenades, eggs that could not be cooked because nothing, not bayonet points nor rifle butts, could crack them open. In their hutchies, the local equivalent of a foxhole, built out of rafters and sandbags, soldiers with beards or moustaches were trying to remove the icicles that clung to their facial hair, in order to eat the meagre rations that were available. The sky was leaden grey, and so close overhead it induced a sense of claustrophobia.

  Luke was crouched with the survivors of the platoon, all of them packed into one of these cramped holes in the ground. There were six of yesterday’s dead somewhere out there in the valley, who could not be retrieved for burial; the Chinese machine gunners were waiting with itchy fingers. It was a bastard of a country, they all agreed, a stupid bastard of a war, and they were all stupid bastards for being here.

  The tough terrain did not help. It was mostly mountainous and covered with frozen ice in winter, but difficult to find clean drinking water in summer, for the landscape was full of stagnant pools that were lethal. The summer was hot, and Australians who said that no flies could be worse than those in their own outback soon learned otherwise; they attacked in vicious swarms supported by mites. In the evening came mosquitoes with a high-pitched whine like the sound of dive bombers. Summer was even more unpleasant because of bodies unable to be collected that became swollen and decomposed. The Australians hated summer and the smell of the dead, but that was before they’d experienced their first winter. November was bad, December worse, January and now February both beyond belief. Tasmanians, those who lived nearest the South Pole, said they had never known cold like it. Fingers froze, feet lost sensation, the platoon slept with guns against their bodies to prevent weapons from freezing up. Noses clogged, eyes stung, their chilled minds began to lack perception.

  Luke had been with this forward platoon for almost a month now. It was becoming hard to calculate the time, far easier to count their losses. Thirty men had been reduced to eighteen; a total of nine dead and three injured — walking wounded who’d been told to make their way back to the field hospital, if they could find it. The platoon was a remnant of what had been a whole battalion before they were cut off by the first Chinese attack. All contact had been lost and for the last week they’d been entirely on their own, trying to make the enemy believe they were threefold. In their boots and same clothes, unable to wash, they stank and were exhausted. But Luke, to his own surprise, was not the least bit afraid.

  Angry, yes. And cold. Hungry, of course, and thirsty because the water was almost gone — just a small ration each, in the morning and at night. But not frightened, even when they were under attack. He’d always assumed he would be. Growing up with the weekly newsreels, and sometimes beset by over-imaginative dreams, he had dreaded embarkation to New Guinea. So what caused the difference during the past four months in Korea?

  He had somehow lost his fear. He thought it had to be because of the job, some sort of adrenalin rush from being a war correspondent at his early age, sending back regular copy and even a couple of scoops that brought messages of approbation from Harry Morton in Tokyo, Harry passing on word that some of his dispatches from the front had been sent to newspapers in other countries. In particular The Daily Mail in England and The Guardian. Most importantly, one story about accompanying a bunch of American marines on a night patrol that had been published by The Washington Post. It instantly made him think of Hannah, how much he missed her, and when, or if, he’d ever see her again. He wondered if she was still in Korea, and did she ever think of him lying cold and dirty in this bloody awful shit hole.

  There was a stir among the platoon as they heard the Chinese mortars open fire, and a cluster of shells exploded around the hutchie. But it was scraps of ice, not dust or chunks of dirt, that filled the air, lethal enough if a piece hit you, he supposed, but the earth was far too frozen to be moved. Memo to Ernest Hemingway, he thought. You never had a shag in a landscape like this, Ernie, or if you did you wouldn’t have been able to boast you felt the earth move. But to hell with Hemingway; he only wanted to think of Hannah, whether she was still here, and still able to cope with MacArthur’s moods. The lovely Hannah Thompson from Poughkeepsie in New York, who’d now become the General’s principal press liaison officer.

  They’d met again on his second night in Pusan, when MacArthur was holding another of his incessant press conferences to explain he had no policy differences with the Truman administration. The more often he said this, the more obvious it became the differences were divisive and extreme.

  “You were at the back almost hidden by war correspondents, and I didn’t even know you were in Korea,” she told him later that night, the first time they were in bed together. “I thought of all the meals and coffee we’d had in Tokyo and how we somehow didn’t go to bed, and there and then made a mental note about it.”

  “A mental note with what in mind?” asked Luke.

  “Well, with something like this in mind,” said Hannah, running her hands down his naked chest and between his legs. “And to ask you why it didn’t happen sooner.”

  “My life was complicated. I was trying not to complicate yours.” He’d felt a familiar stir at the touch of her soft hands. There had been no woman who could arouse him like this, not since Claudia. Hannah with her dazzling smile and green eyes, her long chestnut hair spread across the pillow. Why didn’t it happen sooner, indeed, he’d thought, and responded as she climbed on top of him. They’d spent every night of his week’s leave in
Pusan locked in her private hotel suite, the pair of them captivated in the kind of ecstasy he thought he’d never experience again.

  “You can complicate my life all you wish,” she’d whispered, as she woke him in the middle of the night and they made love again.

  A week later, on Valentine’s Day, an Australian counterattack freed the troops along the 38th parallel, near to the place they called the Valley of Death. Hundreds of frozen bodies preserved by the winter were able to be buried in military graves before the summer heat decomposed them. Luke was the only war correspondent there, and he wrote of the ferocious winter month they’d survived while running out of food and water, and sometimes being within earshot of the Chinese and North Koreans, so close they were able to hear conversations, without having the remotest idea what the enemy was saying. What he brought back from the Valley of Death was raw and vivid reporting, graphic enough to be syndicated around the world. Harry Morton saw to that, but it was Hannah Thompson who made sure it went to The Post. By then she’d fallen completely in love with him, for she’d spent that bleak month in a state of despair, assuming he’d been killed.

  She no longer cared if they were the object of gossip at the Pusan Headquarters, and ignored the sly looks or innuendoes from staff officers, some of whom, she knew, had been secretly hoping they might take Luke’s place. Hannah was aware he did not feel quite the same intensity that she did. She began to realise there’d been someone else. Once, by accident, she’d seen a tiny photo of a lovely girl in his wallet, and one night when they’d had too much rice wine to drink, he’d spoken in a brief maudlin moment of ‘Claudia’ and his best friend Steven. Hannah didn’t ask or want to know the details. At the age of twenty-six she’d had other men in her life, but not one like this.