Brother Fish

by Bryce Courtenay

  We’d been told that we could be called into action at any time and, while K Force had essentially taken it pretty easy at Puckapunyal, it began to dawn on some of us that we’d soon be fighting for our lives and that a bit of updated training might just come in handy. Added to this, the regular army blokes were a lot fitter than we were so when we headed off to the Hamamura training centre for Exercise Bolero we realised we would need to pull our fingers out if we didn’t want to be seen as a complete shambles. The two weeks that followed soon sorted us out. The weather wasn’t good. At times the rain came down in bucketsful and we were often up to our eyeballs in mud and slush. If only we’d known, with winter soon to be upon us in Korea, these training conditions were a Sunday-school picnic compared to what lay ahead.

  On the 23rd of September, twelve days after we’d arrived in Japan, the call came to pack our gear for Korea. On the 27th we boarded the American transport ship Aitken Victory at Kure. We’d stowed our kit and the K Force blokes were leaning over the side of the ship watching the friends and families of the permanent army personnel crying and carrying on at the dockside. Then, John Lazarou yelled out from the opposite side of the deck, ‘Crikey! Come take a squiz at this, fellas!’

  By far the more interesting spectacle was on the opposite side of the ship. Across a short strip of water stood the Japanese girlfriends and de factos who’d shacked up with single blokes and had now lost their meal tickets. They were carrying on a treat, crying and clutching each other, some even throwing themselves down, grabbing at the feet of their friends. This was something we’d never seen before, the normally reserved Japanese emotionally overwrought to the point of hysteria. I guess they were not looking forward to returning to the harsh realities of post-war Japan and, I suppose, despite the clash of cultures, some of these relationships may have blossomed into genuine love affairs. Certainly several of the young permanent army coves standing with us seemed pretty miserable.

  As we were watching all this carry-on, there was a sudden commotion among K Force and someone was pointing up to one of the dockside cranes. There, 150 feet into the sky, sat Rick Stackman at the very tip of the extended arm of a crane. How a big clumsy bloke like him ever got up there and then crawled on his hands and knees to the very end of the crane is a complete mystery. He’d gone practically mute on us in the final two days we were at the Hiro barracks and now he was perched like an angry gorilla at the end of the dockside crane.

  Someone must have called the military police, as they soon arrived and tried to persuade Rick to come down. We all did the same, shouting up our pleas and reassurances for him to join us on deck. ‘Bugger off!’ he yelled down at them and then at us, ‘I ain’t goin’, I’ve had a gutful!’

  Johnny Gordon, the Aborigine from Condabri who’d fronted me over my reasons for joining up, eventually climbed onto the ship’s rail and, taking a flying leap, landed spider-like onto the side of the crane and then clambered up to the beginning of its extended arm to try to persuade Rick to come back down. ‘Come down, Rick, we’re your mates, I’ll look after you personal!’ we heard him yelling. By this time Rick was sobbing and shaking his head like a small child who, punished by his parents, has climbed a tree and is too upset to come down.

  The poor bastard had finally broken. He’d survived three and a half years of torture and starvation in the Japanese death camps and now, five years later, he could take no more. I guess his personal agenda for joining K Force must have been to get even with the enemy. But two weeks in Japan had brought all the memories back and cracked him wide open. We were eventually forced to sail without him. Later we heard he’d been flown back to Australia where he was court-martialled and given six months in the Military Corrective Establishment at Holsworthy before receiving a dishonourable discharge from the army.

  In those days the military and the government still hadn’t accepted the idea that war can damage men’s minds and sometimes destroy them more permanently than any physical injury. Big Rick Stackman had a chest full of ribbons gained from honourable service to his country, but his record in Japan showed three arrests for being drunk and disorderly.

  All the army cared to see in him was a troublemaker who’d delayed the ship’s departure by an hour and a half and had effectively deserted his post while on active duty. Today, of course, we know he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and should have been declared TPI (Totally and Permanently Incapacitated) and given an honourable discharge and a disability pension. I’ve often wondered what happened to him, whether the army eventually relented and came good. He was a salt-of-the-earth type of bloke, the sort you come to think of as the backbone of the Australian army.

  However, while Rick Stackman not coming with us had troubled us somewhat, we had another immediate anxiety to occupy our minds. On the 15th of September, a week before our date of departure for Korea had been announced, General MacArthur, the commander-in-chief of the UN forces, launched an amphibious landing at Inchon, halfway up the Korean peninsula where the 1st Marine Division immediately struck out for Seoul. By the 21st of September, while we were still training in the mud and slush, his troops were threatening the North Korean Army’s lines of communication. The communists were caught between a rock and a hard place, and they didn’t know whether to continue to attack the UN forces desperately defending the southern tip of the Korean peninsula, or to turn and fight the marines. In any event they left the decision to turn and fight too late and scores of thousands of the communist troops were trapped. Our greatest fear now was that by the time we arrived the war would be all over bar the shouting.

  The Aitken Victory set sail for Korea at about eight at night, and during the crossing we heard a news broadcast by General MacArthur announcing the North Korean Army had been routed. The communists had retreated across the 38th parallel with the South Korean Army in hot pursuit, and the Americans were champing at the bit on the border waiting for the word from the UN to go after the Reds to finish them off.

  However, it seems they need not have worried, for the communist army by now was a spent force, thirteen of their divisions having disintegrated in the panic that followed the American landing and many thousands having been taken prisoner. MacArthur, in an effort aimed to influence a hesitant United Nations General Assembly, announced to the world that, given the opportunity, his army would make short work of the demoralised North Koreans and quickly unify the country.

  Which was all very well, except for the fact that we were in this war as well. It looked to me as if, for the second time, I would be going home without having fired a shot in anger. I still wouldn’t qualify as a returned serviceman and I’d go home still wearing my meaningless medal. Of course, by now I’d quite forgotten my secretly professed sympathy for communism. MacArthur was jumping the gun and we didn’t find this at all amusing, him hogging all the glory for the goddamn marines.

  After all, we’d gone to a lot of trouble to volunteer and now this Yankee blow-hard was going it alone, soaking up the glory. This time he wouldn’t have to say ‘I shall return’, as he did when the Japs kicked him out of the Philippines. Korea was turning out to be an anticlimax. It was all very well for MacArthur to be the surrogate Emperor of Japan, but, fair go, that didn’t mean, with the help of the marines, he would again emerge as the all-conquering hero while we were still in Japan training, splashing around in the mud and the rain.

  This wasn’t entirely fair, of course. Throughout July, while coming to the aid of the South Korean forces, the Yanks had taken a fair old belting, notably at a town named Taejon on the mountainous Korean peninsula. It seems the North Koreans hadn’t yet understood that they ought to be afraid of America’s might. Unfamiliar with the communist method of maintaining a strong frontal attack while, at the same time, by means of infiltration, initiating surprise attacks from the side and rear, the Americans had come off second best on their first encounters with the enemy.

  The Australian papers at the time were full of the hiding the Ame
rican occupation forces, rushed into battle with little preparation, were taking trying to expel the communist invaders. Even before the special K Force recruitment was announced, my interest in the new war must have been obvious to Gloria. She handed me a clipping from the newspaper, dated 22nd of July 1950. ‘Before you go getting any ideas, Jacko, take a look what the communists are doing to the Americans.’ It was the first of many clippings she was to cut out and paste into her ‘war journal’, which I’ve kept all these years.

  Young Americans, tired, shocked, straggle to safety

  Advanced us headquarters in korea, Fri. – Filthy young Americans with muscles crying for rest, and fear deep in their eyes and bellies, are straggling into this rear area today for what the Army calls ‘regrouping’, says the United Press correspondent, Gen. Symonds.

  They haven’t eaten for hours. The only possessions they have are their powder-grimed rifles and carbines, clutched tight in their hands.

  Hungry as they are, many of them don’t have time to eat the rations waiting for them, but flop down in the dirt with a steel helmet for a pillow and fall into an uneasy sleep punctured by dreams of the ‘nightmare alley’ they had to travel to get here.

  At first there was only a small group. Then, one by one, truck by truck, they began to come in. Unit sergeants try to make lists of their men, but for some the list is small. The sergeants look at the pitifully few names and mutter: ‘Maybe they’ll come in later.’

  Hobart M ercury, 22 July 1950

  Taejon and the other skirmishes and battles the Americans had fought on behalf of the South were a case of too few men, mostly inexperienced, attempting to hold too large an area, with nobody to watch the flanks. This was to be an oft-repeated tale in Korea. Now, with the whole of the 1st Marine Division brought into the war, General MacArthur had every right to be pleased with the American recovery.

  If only we’d cared to listen, there was a warning in all this that we might not be entirely ready for combat. While the present assault had been led by the crack 1st Marine Division, the initial tactic in Korea, driven by the urgency of the situation, consisted of dribbling weak detachments of American troops drawn from three divisions of the four doing duty as occupation forces in Japan. These were not battle-hardened fighting men but troops recruited since World War II, most without military experience except for the cushy conditions that prevailed in occupied post-war Japan.

  Of course we saw it quite differently. We were, we argued, at least the equivalent of the highly trained, combat-fit American marines. We realised that while our soldiering skills were a bit rusty, they were still there – a skirmish or two would soon see them oiled and polished to their former brightness. Most of the blokes had been under fire at some time or another; we even had some ‘thirty-niners’ who’d been with the 2nd AIF from the start of World War II to the very end. You couldn’t say they didn’t know their stuff now, could you? Some, in fact most of us, had joined the war late but, with a few exceptions, me being one, had seen action in the Islands. Quite a few had held rank, which they’d relinquished in order to sign on for Korea, and there were some among our lot who’d been decorated. Rusty or not, we knew when the time came we would rise to the occasion.

  As it turned out this wasn’t exactly an accurate summation. For a start, some of the K Force blokes were getting on a bit and we’d all been corrupted by civilian life – you could see this in several of the blokes who hadn’t yet managed to get rid of their beer gut and some still huffed and puffed a bit, stopping to hold their knees during a training run. It was a bit presumptuous at this stage to compare ourselves with the crack, super- fit up-to-the-minute marines. On the other hand, as older individuals and as soldiers with a fair bit of past experience, we were well ahead of your ordinary Yank grunt fighting on the peninsula at the time.

  In our defence, we’d had next-to-bugger-all training as a battalion and later on when we’d been in a stoush or two and had got our shit together we were happy to compare ourselves with the marines and, for that matter, the crackerjack British permanent army units. Nevertheless, initially going in, it would be fair to say we were just a tad undercooked and overconfident.

  Still, we were straining at the leash to have a go at the communist enemy and now the ref had gone and blown what seemed like the final whistle and we were going nowhere but home without having fired a shot at the enemy. I remember someone, I forget who, remarking that if only Rick Stackman hadn’t got himself in the mess he was in, he’d be the only cove among us who’d be happy with MacArthur’s victory.

  We cheered ourselves up with the fact that we were on board the Aitken Victory on our way to Korea and we hadn’t been ordered to turn back. At least we’d reach our intended destination and be able to claim we’d set foot on Korean soil.

  We arrived at the port of Pusan the next morning and, somewhat to our surprise, were met by an American Army band playing ‘If I Knew You Were Coming, I’d Have Baked a Cake’ and a Korean Army band playing ‘Waltzing Matilda’ with a distinctly Asian flavour. Not to be outdone and pleased to have arrived, a group of blokes from our battalion returned the favour with a rendition of what had become a ditty much favoured by our company, D Company.

  ‘We’re a pack of bastards, bastards are we,

  We’re from Aus-tra-lee-a,

  The arsehole of the world and all the Universe.

  We’re a pack of bastards, bastards are we,

  We’d rather fuck than fight for lib-er-tee!’

  At least the Yanks would know we’d arrived. It was fortunate that at the time of this patriotic choral rendition our commanding officer, Charlie Green, was out of earshot, being smothered in garlands of orchids by an official welcoming party of beautiful South Korean women. We assured ourselves, however, that he was a good bloke and would have privately enjoyed the joke.

  The battalion was marched to the local station where we boarded an ancient train bound for Taegu where we were to be a part of the 27th Commonwealth Infantry Brigade. At Taegu we were joined by 1st Battalion, the Argyll and Southerland Highlanders and the 1st Battalion, the Middlesex Regiment.

  Our first assignment was a behind-the-lines mopping-up operation in an area known as Plum Pudding Hills, which pretty well summed up our despair. A man would never be able to admit that he’d gone to Korea to fight the communists and had ended up doing what essentially amounted to military housework at, ferchrissake, an area named Plum Pudding Hills!

  MacArthur, with his rapid victory, had done the dirty on us and we were far from happy little Vegemites.

  CHAPTER THREE

  A Member of the Club

  Plum Pudding Hills was well named, being plumb in the middle of nothing much happening. Our job was supposed to be rounding up North Korean stragglers, which involved traipsing around aimlessly in the late-autumn sunshine – not bad if you like walking uphill all day carrying your haversack, rifle and full ammo. Maybe some of the other units caught one or two stragglers, but all we came across was a dead enemy soldier already pretty flyblown and high on the nose. We buried him and stuck a stick on his grave and placed one of his canvas boots on the stick. It was the best we could do – noggies aren’t Christians so a cross wouldn’t have made any sense, and at least the boot would tell anyone interested that a North Korean soldier lay under the little pile of windblown rock.

  I guess we were pretty disillusioned – the morning radio was squawking the latest MacArthur pronouncement, and it was obvious that game, set and match wasn’t far off. His 1st Cavalry Division was waiting on the border for UN permission to cross, where, if the broadcasts were to be believed, it would be all over in a matter of hours – well days, anyway. The bulletins told how the US Air Force was bombarding the hills on the far side of the 38th parallel where the enemy was in complete disarray.

  We were sitting outside our tent attending to our blisters and generally feeling sorry for ourselves when Johnny Gordon suddenly up and said, ‘This is bullshit, why don’t we go AWL?’
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br />   We all looked up in amazement. ‘What? Where? You got the urge to go walkabout, Johnny?’ Ernie Stone joked.

  ‘Go to the front, see some action. No good here,’ Johnny replied.

  ‘What, join the Yanks? Go missing, just like that? Yer mad?’ I said.

  Then Rex Wilson chimes in, ‘Why not!’ He turns to Johnny, ‘Count me in, mate, bloody sight better than hangin’ around this shithole.’

  ‘Hey, whoa, wait on! That’s desertion – we’d be court-martialled!’ Lance Corporal John Lazarou says, trying to exert his ever-so-trivial rank.

  ‘Yeah, that’s if we were doin’ a bunk like, you know, cowardice. But that ain’t it now, is it? We’d be doin’ the exact opposite. Who’s ever heard of going AWL to get into a stoush with the enemy?’ Ernie argued.

  At the time Ernie’s logic seemed totally compelling. We agreed we’d probably be docked a bit of pay and spend a few days in the guardhouse, but that was a small price to pay for being the first in the battalion – even the first diggers – to get a crack at the enemy.

  ‘Let’s do it for Rick Stackman,’ Johnny Gordon now volunteered. This was nothing less than a stroke of genius and clinched the matter once and for all. There seemed to be little purpose in pointing out that Rick’s problem was with the Japs and we would be fighting North Koreans. I guess, in our minds, we lumped all noggies together and, anyway, it was common knowledge that the Japanese had used Koreans as guards in the POW camps of World War II and that they’d been the cruellest bastards of all. We now had a purpose, you could say, in fact almost a duty to desert to the front. If the army was going to lock Rick up like a common criminal his mates were going to see to it that justice was done and that he was suitably avenged for what the Japs had done to him on the Burma Railway.

  That night ten of us got our gear together, grabbed our rifles and slipped out of camp some time after midnight. It didn’t take long to hit the main supply route from the port of Pusan to the front. I don’t know about the others, but finding myself out on the road knowing I was AWL was a bit scary, but I kept telling myself that I was buggered if I was going to end up fighting in two wars in which I had never seen the enemy or fired a shot in anger. The army owed it to me to give me a chance to go into combat. If they weren’t going to do the right thing then I had no option but to take the law into my own hands.