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Finally, It Can Be Told or What I Really Did In Korea

Posted by djingodjango on Friday, March 25, 2011

 

Of course you have heard the story about my time as a combat journalist and photographer while in the Army.

Uncle Sam paid for my journalism schooling at a beautiful elm shaded campus in New Rochelle, New York and a brief three week tutorial on the proper use of a twin-lens reflex camera and a 70mm combat camera. Plus an undergraduate degree on print development, hosted by the Signal Corps..

I always like to link the word “combat” in defining my time in the military. It adds a certain edge to what was really a time of peace.

 I never saw any actual combat. Unless you count the time I fell over in the “Pussy Cat Bar” in downtown Paju-ri. 

Or the unfortunate incident that occurred on a street corner in Seoul that left a fried rice stand in flames and yours truly fleeing from a large angry man wielding what appeared to be a machete.  

But I digress.

When I stepped off the plane in the “Land of the Morning Calm”; one very cold January morning, I had assumed the sobriquet for this bucolic peninsula was right and proper.  

I was wrong.

I discovered this fact several months later at three o’clock in the morning when the Chinese 3rd Army decided to move a few tanks over the DMZ, just to see if the “First Team” was paying attention to their mission statement.

I was assigned to the 7th Cavalry Regiment (Armored Cav.), 1st Cavalry Division.  and this early morning party hosted by Mao's finest found me somewhat indisposed; having spent a jolly time with my comrades earlier that evening at a local tavern. The NCO Club.

 Somebody in the center of the compound was pounding furiously on an empty 105 mm shell casing hanging by a chain on a pole.  Somehow, there was a direct link to the inside of my head which swelled and deflated in time to the clanging.

I was upset at this turn of events and the fact that the Chinese 3rd Army did not keep me informed as to their actions. I was, after all, a journalist.

I arrived at the 7th Cavalry regiment through a little misunderstanding with the editor of a newspaper.  

By the way, the 7th Cavalry is General Custer’s old regiment. You recall that dust-up at the “Little Big Horn”?

Yes.

Everyone remembers.

Headquarters made sure we remembered by issuing enameled regimental pins with a raised sword and the words “Garry Owen”, a famous drinking song made famous by John Wayne in the movies “She Wore A Yellow Ribbon.”, “Rio Grande” and “Fort Apache”, in which Henry Fonda led his troops into an ambush from which very few returned.

We also got brass-plated cavalry insignias for our “soft caps” with the number seven displayed under crossed swords.

As I write this, I am reminded of a scene in a truly wonderful movie entitled “We Were Soldiers” when the major, played by Mel Gibson, is sitting in his study at home before deploying with his troops to Vietnam.

In front of him is a book on the “Indian Wars” of the nineteenth century, which is opened to a painting depicting General George Armstrong Custer and his men being slain and mutilated by the enemy.

He knew who he was and where he was going.

I, however, didn’t have a clue.

Headquarters also had a recording of the song and every morning at 6:30 just after reveille, the strains of this old Irish bar tune sprayed out of the speakers scattered throughout the compound.

M.A.S.H. got it right. There really were loud speakers.

Originally, I was assigned as a correspondent for the “Cavalier”; a weekly divisional newspaper that was printed in Tokyo at the same facility in which “The Stars And Stripes (Pacific Edition)” was also published.

My editor, a young fellow named Chamberlain with a thick Harvard accent and a large set of teeth, mentioned that I was also a “stringer” for the SAS. A “stringer” is the term used for a reporter who, while filing a story for his publication, may also find his byline in another paper if the story is considered newsworthy. And if they need to fill some space.

There were no restraints or parameters for our job description. My MOS (a term once used for a three number designation and meaning “military occupation specialty”) was 701. “Public Information Specialist”. I also had a secondary MOS of 703, broadcast specialist, and everyone in the army had a basic MOS of 111. Infantryman.

We left every Monday morning after a quick briefing by our editor and a word or two from his boss, Major Avon.

Major Avon was an affable guy who probably could have easily slipped off his uniform and into a gray flannel suit and worked in advertising someplace.

His affability was about to be tested.

There were five “beat” reporters  (men who were assigned a specific locale in which to report news) in our office and one broadcast specialist, a fellow named Joel who had a deep, velvet voice and had to lug about fifty pounds of recording equipment around from compound to compound and record greetings from the troopers to the folks back home. His job was very narrowly defined and required little advance work and no running down or research.

On the other hand, beat reporters were hard pressed to follow leads and come up with interesting stories week after week. In my case, I was presented with many distractions and no restraints, plus the fact that I was only eighteen years old, and had lived a relatively sheltered life in New Hampshire.

There were several other young reporters with similar backgrounds and it wasn’t long before we began to wander aimlessly during the day from post to post; with a camera, a typewriter (one each, mechanical processing unit, OD.) and the entire southern half of a third world country to explore. What was a boy to do?

Well, we did most everything a boy could do, and something’s a boy should never do, and as a result, the weekly stories were becoming fewer and shorter. 

The paper went to bed (printed as written) at noon on Friday, and many weeks I stumbled in around eleven AM just in time to hand my dwindling handful of stories and pictures to the editor. As the months went by, I noticed he did not smile at me as often.

The time came when many of us, callow youth with skills in journalism and no skills in self-restraint, were given a specific number of stories to write each week. I believe seven was the number. As I reflect on it, that number was very ironic.

Panic struck, we huddled together. What to do? There was hardly anything going on and you can only write so many ‘human interest’ stories on some guy who was an executive pastry chef at the “Fontainebleau Hotel” in Miami and is now greasing wheels in a motor pool.

Or a man who once sold camels in Syria and now was driving a deuce and a half through rice paddies in “The Hermit Kingdom.” (A rather baroque name for Korea, and part of a story I wrote on the “History of the Land Named Korea”. We were getting desperate!)

Then, a brilliant idea.

Nobody ever checked on the veracity of our weekly word plums did they? What if we obfuscated a bit. Embellished. Garnished. Lied.

Who would know?

And so it began.

Faux Hemingways and Ernie Pyles. We made up some classic tales.

I wrote a story on a “Rifle Breakdown Team”, claiming the Army had inter-squad contests world wide involving soldiers who would disassemble and reassemble various weapons and be timed whilst doing so.

I made up places where they would compete. Men’s names. Men who were legends at taking apart M1's in total darkness. Or under water. I wrote about records about to be broken as thousands of spectators roared and cheered on their favorite “Rifle Breakdown Team.”

Of course the truth of the matter was that I just happened to wandered into the barracks of A Company, 5th Cavalry Regiment one afternoon as the men were preparing to “chogie” for a little twenty mile hike with full packs. I took pictures of guys checking their rifles. I turned it into a Broadway hit!

Next on the bill; a saluting dog. Yes ladies and gentlemen, complete with a photograph to verify said pet trick, a company mascot named “Rusty” (a name I would later use as my on-air radio persona) who would, on command, raise his paw to his eyes and “salute”!

Of course the fact that someone threw sand in his eyes just before we took the picture sort of helped the trick along.

Oh, it was sad. We wrote real stories and we wrote surreal stories and we wrote no-real stories. You know it had to catch up with us.

It did.

One early autumn day the 5th Cavalry Regimental commander, a Lieutenant Colonel somebody, set down the latest copy of the "Cavalier" and went to congratulate his men on winning the Eighth Army All Far-East Rifle Breakdown Championship (SSgt. John Walters, A Company, 5th Cavalry Regiment, First Cavalry Division with an M1 Garand rifle, calibre 30.06, Springfield Armory , 1955, in a record time of 13.27 seconds) the proverbial poop hit the fan.

We were all called in from the field that Tuesday afternoon in September. And we all fessed up. We were restricted to the compound until further action could be taken.

A day later I was before a group of high ranking military personnel who asked, “What the %^@*&%% were you thinking?”  “You stupid %#@!&.” And, my favorite from the aforementioned Major Avon… “You will never write another story for the US Army again.”

We were all going to be deployed back to our basic MOS (infantryman, you will recall) to outfits we had “shamed by our lies and deceit.” 

I snuck out of camp that afternoon and hitched a ride to the 7th Cav, a place I had been told I where I would end up, and visited my good friend Rick, the regimental clerk. I told him my dilemma, and he laughed.

But then, he said there was an opening in the motor pool as a clerk. I took it.

And that is where I was during one of the times we had to bug out because the North Koreans and Chinese did not play nice.

It is a fact that the incident of false reporting became a story in the Pacific Edition of "Newsweek" magazine. I believe it was revealed in a mid-October issue, 1961, complete with a little cartoon of a saluting dog.

Three months later, the PIO specialist who wrote and published the regimental newspaper found himself on the colonel’s short list of people who needed to go.

I got a call from the clerk again. And in a manner of a few hours, I was back writing.  It wasn’t quite as glamorous and I had a smaller readership. But it sure beat the heck out of pulling wheel bearings out of jeeps.

And so, after a year or so, plus a little extra tacked on because the East Germans decided a wall down the center of Berlin would enhance the charm of this old European city, I bid farewell to Korea.

As I stepped aboard the troop ship in Pusan harbor, I spotted the regimental clerk who had helped me. He has a list of shipboard personnel to fill.  The reporters’ jobs were all taken, he said. But they needed a ships cartoonist. I reached in my pocket and clicked open my pen.

“Where do I sign?”

I got the job and spent 16 days on a ship where I was required to draw one cartoon a day, and I spent the rest of the time wandering around, above and below deck with a clip board and a pencil behind my ear. Looking like I knew what I was doing.

I didn't, but nobody noticed.

Until I stepped off the ship in Oakland, but that's a story for another day.

© 2011 George Locke

 

 

 

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3 comments on “Finally, It Can Be Told or What I Really Did In Korea”

beetlegeist Says:
Friday, March 25, 2011 @9:55:14 AM

You are a brilliant writer and I look forward to reading more.

Lady Bird Says:
Friday, March 25, 2011 @7:16:49 PM

George you sure haven't lost the ability to write a good story.
What page did that come from in your book.
Jill

tinkersdam Says:
Monday, March 28, 2011 @8:12:40 AM

Great story, George...would love to hear more.

Denise

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