Brother Fish

by Bryce Courtenay

  Among the men fighting in the United Nations forces, a far greater proportion of Americans were conscripts. They were young, callow, soft and vastly under-trained with no physical and psychological preparation for what they found waiting for them in Korea. Most of the earlier troops in Korea had come from the occupation forces in Japan. Those that hadn’t been conscripts were boys playing at being men, lured to Japan by promises of a good time. They were virgin soldiers in every possible meaning of the term, and should never have been allowed near the business end of a rifle. Now, as prisoners of war, they found themselves living in appalling conditions, lacking even the most basic medical treatment. Depending on the time of the year, they were either bitterly cold or dying of dehydration caused by dysentery and the heat. They were starving, lice-ridden, dirty and sick with beri-beri, roundworm or any of the other little destroyers that come from living in sub-human conditions without antibiotics. They also lacked the maturity and leadership that held the professionally trained soldiers from the other nations more or less together. The thirty-eight per cent death rate amongst the US prisoners was nearly three times higher than for any other nation and the American rate of collaboration with the enemy was later to cause anxiety and a Senate inquiry at home. All this suggested a lack of physical and mental preparation for the exigencies of war.

  The undoing of many of these young American prisoners was something known as the Chinese Lenient Policy. The policy’s underlying promise was that living conditions within the prison camp would be greatly improved in return for cooperation from prisoners with their captors. Coming to accept ‘the truth’ meant more food, warm clothing and some rudimentary medical care. At the time, many prisoners believed cooperating with the enemy would save their lives. In some instances they may have been correct. Declaring that they’d seen the error of their ways and publicly admitting to the shortcomings of the capitalist system was to become yet another survival technique.

  Under these prevailing conditions it wasn’t all that difficult to compromise one’s principles. Especially if, in the first instance, these principles weren’t all that well grounded in past experience. It wasn’t as if collaboration with the Chinese was going to affect the outcome of the war. No lives would be lost as a consequence of non-military information given to the enemy. Nothing you could say would seriously compromise America. Collaboration could be rationalised by a starving soldier as a purely pyrrhic victory for the communists – no more than propaganda and of no real or permanent consequence.

  Every prisoner of war has to decide just how far he will cooperate with his captors. The legal minimum is, of course, to provide number, rank and name, but this was never going to be enough for the Chinese. To refuse to answer all other questions was to invite punishment often so severe it led to death. For instance, one Australian prisoner, Private Madden, captured at the Battle of Kapyong, resisted all attempts to make him collaborate and died of malnutrition and sickness. Madden must have been quite a guy, because he was said to have shared his starvation rations with those of his mates who were, in his opinion, worse off than him. I’m happy to know that he was awarded the George Cross posthumously. While I’d like to think I might have behaved in the same way, a small voice within tells me that I probably would have failed in the extreme bravery stakes.

  In the cave where I had first met Jimmy we’d witnessed the combined effects of malnutrition, bitter cold, mistreatment and sickness, and how it affected the morale of a soldier. In combination these conditions often promoted self-survival and selfish behaviour. But we were not prepared for the extent this had occurred in the POW camp. Here, ‘I’m all right, Jack’ – the Australian euphemism for putting your own needs ahead of the greater good – had gained an entirely new dimension.

  While I was not the only Australian prisoner of war in Korea, I was only one of two in this particular camp, where, incidentally, the Chinese separated the American Negro prisoners from the Caucasians. Jimmy twigged to this soon after we arrived and told a Chinese officer that I was an Aboriginal albino and should therefore stay with him. I confirmed the story and the confused officer consulted his superior. I later learned the request went all the way along the line to the camp commandant, who reasoned my story must be true, otherwise why on earth would I, a white-skinned person, want to live with blacks. Anyway, they swallowed it and this was how I ended up among the Americans instead of the British Commonwealth group.

  The Americans had been in the camp longest and many had endured two winters in captivity. Even worse, they’d initially been under the control of the North Koreans, whose brutality far exceeded the Chinese and who were totally indifferent to human suffering. In that first fiercely cold winter the prisoners had even been denied wood for heating. They were in terrible shape, and those confined to the so-called hospital hut were pitiful in the extreme. They lay in their own excrement, unwashed, uncared for, with maggots crawling over their suppurating sores and open wounds.

  ‘Holy shit, Brother Fish, what we got here?’ Jimmy said, rubbing his beard.

  ‘A bloody sight more than we can handle between us, mate,’ I answered.

  ‘We gotta try – dese men, dey got no more respect. Dey gonna die ’cos dey cain’t find no reason to live.’ He turned and looked at me. ‘We gotta find dat reason an’ give it back to dem cats.’

  ‘Mate, these blokes are past it. We’d be wasting our time,’ I protested.

  ‘Ain’t got nothin’ better to do wid our time, Brother Fish.’

  Here we bloody go again. ‘Jimmy, you can’t save the whole fucking world!’ I protested.

  Jimmy turned and looked down at me. ‘Brother Fish, if we don’t try we gonna die in dis place. Trying, dat what gonna keep you an’ me a-live.’

  The morale of the Americans had long since hit rock bottom. Discipline had broken down completely, and compassion for the sick and wounded was non-existent. Officer and sergeant prisoners had been segregated in their own compounds and there didn’t seem to be any organised attempts to help each other within their group. Everyone was living in a cocoon known as ‘selfish survival behaviour’ – a contradictory condition, because it invariably shortens the survival factor and eventually leads to death or complete mental collapse.

  ‘We gotta find “da man”, Brother Fish,’ Jimmy said.

  ‘The man? What man?’

  ‘Der always one, maybe two. Dey rule, dey bad – dey “da man”.’

  ‘Mate, how do you know there’s one?’ I asked him.

  ‘Dis a prison, ain’t it? In prison dere always “da man”. You’ll see, it da same here.’

  It didn’t take us long. His name was Corporal Steve O’Rourke, a white American from Little Rock, Arkansas – the standover man and resident psychopath. We learned that during the previous winter he’d tossed two men, both gravely weakened by dysentery, out of the barracks, where they’d frozen to death. The stink caused by their condition apparently offended him. Such was the impoverished moral condition in the camp that there had been no recrimination, no protest – O’Rourke had literally been allowed to get away with murder. Now, together with a bunch of fellow thugs, he ruled the American camp by means of fear and intimidation, and frustrated any attempts to restore order. His power lay in anarchy.

  ‘How are you going to get at him, mate?’ I asked Jimmy. ‘He’s got a dozen enforcers with him, and there’s only the two of us.’

  ‘We wait – he come to us. Den maybe da rumble happen,’ Jimmy replied, then added the single word ‘Ogoya’.

  I had absolutely no idea what he meant by this – why would Operation Get Off Your Arse be a reason for Corporal Steve O’Rourke to confront us? I had forgotten the example of the hospital cave where the creation of a collective had frustrated the selfish aspirations of the individual and brought about the challenge of the big southerner, Ward Brady Buckworth Junior.

  It had been less than a week since our plaster had been removed and we were still on crutches – me with my standard Chinese ba
mboo pair and Jimmy on his Captain Hook. We were certainly in no condition to fight anyone, even supposing I was a handy man to have at your side in a fight – which I wasn’t. I hadn’t inherited my old man Alf’s ability with his fists. In my poor condition I wasn’t much looking forward to the confrontation with O’Rourke that Jimmy seemed to think was inevitable.

  It was difficult enough coping with the conditions in the camp – particularly for me in a hut comprised entirely of Negro soldiers. I found myself the single white guy, and also the smallest amongst us. If it hadn’t been for Jimmy’s large, facially scarred presence, I don’t think I would have lasted very long. The prisoners in our barracks were completely demoralised and for the first two days very few words were spoken to us. Men with blank eyes would stare through us as if we weren’t there. They’d ignore our questions or answer with a mumbled monosyllable. Moreover, I was to discover that while my ear had become attuned to Jimmy’s ‘dis and dat’ dialect, his mode of expression was by no means universal among his kind. Coloured Americans, even in the 1950s, didn’t all sound the same. There were several regional and ghetto dialects and expressions among the prisoners in our barracks, and most of them were initially incomprehensible to me until I began to understand the different argot. There were also one or two who spoke what Jimmy referred to as ‘turkey talk’, though even the way the white blokes spoke often showed vast syntactical and cultural differences. In Australia, while the odd expression may differ, we all sound pretty much the same. It hadn’t occurred to me that America’s population was so large that the different states could be likened to different countries and cultures.

  The day we arrived, those of us who’d travelled together in the truck were lined up on parade in front of a dais where the camp commandant began by delivering what might be described as a ‘spit-flecked’ address, shouting at us angrily, though in surprisingly good English. ‘You are war criminals!’ he accused, pointing his finger down at us. ‘You have fought in an illegal and unjust war of aggression against the peace-loving people of Korea! Under the precedents set by the Nuremberg war crimes trials, we have the right to execute every one of you!’

  ‘Here come da judge,’ Jimmy said, out of the corner of his mouth. ‘First come da bad news, den come da good news.’

  I had become accustomed to Jimmy’s perspicacity, and sure enough, after a bit more invective, the commandant’s demeanour suddenly changed and his verbal outrage screamed to a sudden and quite unexpected halt, like a truck forced to stop suddenly on a dirt road. He shifted down two gears into what might be described as the ‘benevolent uncle’ tone of voice.

  ‘But we are not like you,’ he continued, slowly and calmly. ‘We regard you as misguided. You do not know you are criminals! You have been duped by your capitalist masters, but do not know this. It is not your fault.’ He smiled sadly as if sympathising with us. ‘So the Chinese People’s Volunteers extend to you their Lenient Policy.’ He paused and then smiled down at us benignly. ‘The Lenient Policy means that we will not extract our rightful blood debt. It also means something else just as important.’ He smiled again and spread his hands. ‘We are going to give you the opportunity to learn the truth.’

  ‘And da truth shall set yoh free . . . dat from da bible,’ Jimmy whispered to me.

  The commandant changed gear once again and assumed a semi-menacing manner. ‘But the Lenient Policy has its limits! Those who refuse to learn the truth will put themselves outside its mercy and benefits.’

  Eventually, with a bit more hot’n’cold rhetoric, he completed his address, and we were commanded to salute before being marched away.

  This was quite unlike any prison camp I’d imagined or seen in newsreels or movies. There were no towers, searchlights or high barbed-wire fences. In every direction were thatched mud-and-wattle houses and an occasional slightly bigger building with a corrugated-iron roof. They were the kind of structures you’d expect to find in any large Korean village, which the camp may well have once been. This, of course, made it difficult to distinguish it as a prison camp from the air. But this need for camouflage opened the way for prisoners to escape as there couldn’t possibly be sufficient guards to watch the whole perimeter of this vast camp, and the few we saw didn’t look too concerned. Perhaps they correctly surmised that we were in the middle of the boondocks and that there wasn’t an easy and safe destination to escape to.

  The mud houses that were referred to as barracks were for the prisoners, and the tin-roofed buildings housed the Chinese soldiers and staff. The guard escorting us to our accommodation rather proudly ran a commentary for us in broken English, and pointed to a set of distant buildings somewhat separated from the rest of the camp. ‘No want go that place,’ he said. ‘Velly bad.’

  Our group was divided between two mud houses while Jimmy and I were told to stand aside. After all the others had been allocated their quarters we were taken a few rows further down where the Negro compound stood. ‘You not black foreign devil. Why I ordered you stay here?’ the guard said, obviously surprised that I was to be placed among the American Negroes and apologising for what he thought must be an administrative bungle he was nevertheless forced to obey.

  ‘Ho!’ Jimmy said later. ‘Da Chinese too – dey got dis-crim-in-nation, Brother Fish.’ In the years to come we would learn that the Chinese people were possibly the most racist people on earth and that, to them, to be black-skinned placed a person on the very bottom rung of the human evolutionary ladder. Although, I must say, the Chinese guards in the POW camp, while separating black from white, did not appear to discriminate and the black soldiers fared no worse than the white.

  Jimmy and I were ushered into a room about eight feet square and a Negro prisoner pointed to a spot against the wall. ‘Y’all take Ed and Charlie’s place,’ he said.

  We placed our gear down where he’d indicated. ‘What happened to them?’ I asked.

  The soldier looked at me and then at Jimmy, and then asked, ‘Who dis punk?’

  Jimmy looked suddenly angry. ‘Don’t call him no punk, yoh hear? He mah friend, dude. Now answer da man’s question. What happen to dem two?’

  ‘One, he got beri-beri, he in hospital. D’other he jus’ back from Kennel Club – he also in hospital.’

  ‘Kennel Club?’ Jimmy asked.

  ‘Punishment box, five feet long, four feet high.’ The soldier separated his hands about two feet. ‘This wide, an’ yoh lie on your back. They don’t let yoh outta der – only for latrine or so they can beat you, and yoh got no blanket at night.’

  The effort it took to give this explanation seemed to have been too much for him and he suddenly sat down against the wall hugging his knees, head thrown back, eyes closed. I remembered my own stay in the cage with Dave McCombe and shuddered. I noticed the cracks around his mouth, indicating he was malnourished. We all had these cracks, but somehow I’d hoped the grub at the POW camp might be a little better than the various field hospitals we’d been in. Fat hope.

  ‘What happen when dem cats get back?’ Jimmy asked.

  ‘Ain’t comin’ back,’ the man said, then closed down again, this time resting his chin on his chest, his knees obscuring his mouth as if to indicate that he’d terminated the conversation. We were to learn that going to hospital was an almost certain death sentence.

  On the way to our compound I’d seen a hand-printed sign that read ‘Royal Ulster Rifles’. As most Australians have more than a dash of Irish in them, I made my way over to make their acquaintance. I confess I’d been with Americans too long and looked forward to a slightly different viewpoint. In my experience, the Irish and Australians have a good deal in common. Approaching on crutches, I observed a scrawny, red-headed bloke sitting outside a mud house sewing a button onto his tunic.

  ‘G’day,’ I said.

  He looked up and smiled. ‘You’d be Australian, then?’ he said right off.

  I nodded. ‘Know if there are any others around?’ I was hoping I might find Dave McCombe.
/>   ‘Was one, if I remember rightly. Moved on.’

  ‘Moved on? What, died?’

  ‘No, I’d be thinking they moved him on to another camp.’

  ‘You wouldn’t remember his name?’

  ‘Now, I’d by lying if I said I did. To be honest, I didn’t know him meself,’ he replied.

  ‘By the way, I’m Jacko McKenzie,’ I offered.

  ‘Doug Waterman.’ He extended his hand. ‘Pleased t’meetcha, Jacko. Just come in, have you?’

  ‘Yeah, early this morning.’

  ‘I see. When and where were you captured?’

  ‘November. Wounded on patrol north of the Imjin River practically on the border.’

  ‘We’ve been hearin’ you fellas gave the boogers a bit of a belting at Kapyong.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know about that, mate. We certainly brought a good few of ’em to a screaming, if temporary, halt.’

  He looked at his watch and bit the end off the cotton, the button on his tunic once again secure. ‘Well, we’d better be down to the company kitchen for a feed – for what it’s worth.’ Then he corrected himself. ‘The food’s pretty bloody awful – it smells and tastes like shit, and it might well be exactly that and all, but you’ll be taking my advice, Jacko; eat it and eat it all – there’s that many dying of malnutrition, it’s no joke.’