On the Boys of Autumn

They were a potbellied army of men in their 60s, balding for the most part and slow of step. One was in a wheelchair, one used a cane and several had hearing aids.

They had returned to a country as tourists where once they had fought as warriors, and were trying to remember what it was like four decades ago when artillery roared like thunder and shrapnel fell like rain.

We were in Korea. This isn’t exactly an L.A. column, I guess, but if you’ll indulge me for a day, I’ll tell you what it’s like to go back to a war zone whose images continue to haunt dreams long after the battles have ended.

There were 80 of us, mostly from Los Angeles, on a reduced-rate trip sponsored by the U.S. Navy League, Korean Air Lines and others. It was handled by Olympus Travel in L.A.

The idea was to thank those of us who had fought in that strange and distant encounter that is recalled, if at all, as a footnote to the larger war that preceded it.

We were, as President Harry Truman put it, a police action. Some still regard it as a conflict, not a war, as though by gentler definition its memories are less harsh, and its dead less gone.

But while time may have blurred details of combat we once thought we’d never forget, the impact of the war is still with those of us who made the trip back in time to Seoul and Inchon and Panmunjom and Yangu and Chunchon.

I saw a man cry who had never cried before. I saw a widow search for the exact place where her husband had died. I saw a son trying to reconstruct the last days of a father he had never seen.

*

It was an odd assortment of veterans who made the nine-day trip, reflecting on the caprice by which war thrusts men together. There was a Los Angeles cop and a Presbyterian minister, a restaurateur and a medical doctor, a milk truck driver and a college professor.

Some were retired, some weren’t; some were in good health, others in pain. A few brought grown children with them to see beyond words what Daddy was talking about all those years a long time ago.

Emotions ran the gamut among the veterans from bombast to grief, but, always, there was an underlying frustration with the notion that their time of fear and pain amounted to nothing. Korea was still divided. The North was still an enemy.

I heard one tattooed old soldier rage against the obscure forces that make one war important and dismiss the other; that line the streets with flags and flowers for those who fought in one war, and turn their backs on those who fought in another. Who chooses? Who decides?

But, at least the Republic of Korea--South Korea--endures, and we may have had something to do with that. The major cities bustle with commerce. The villages once torn by battles are thriving towns. Only the old remember the war. Only the old should.

“I came to look,” Catherine Giles said to me, “to see where he died. It was too long ago, but I’ve always wanted to know.”

She was talking about her husband. It was said without tears, but it was apparent that the sadness had never gone away. Their life together had ended too soon. She felt incomplete.

“There was a mine explosion,” she said, looking toward the distant mountains. “One piece of shrapnel hit him. One piece of shrapnel . . . “

*

The colors of autumn lay over the high ground that edged Hwachon Reservoir. Bright reds and pale yellows gleamed in the muted sunlight of an overcast day. This was the place of my memories.

I had been here as a young Marine in battles that had almost destroyed a regiment of men I had come to know as brothers. It has been calling me back ever since.

The reservoir lies now in the demilitarized zone north of the 38th Parallel. We were there with special permission granted through the Korea Times and its publisher, J.M. Chang.

I stood on a mountaintop 3,000 feet high and looked over a vista of almost surreal beauty, of ridgelines cascading back into the distance in muted tones of blue and gray; of autumn colors so bright they hurt the eye.

I tried to remember how it had been back then, trudging past the stepped rice paddies to reach the foot of the mountains, and then charging up their steep slopes in the face of gunfire.

They were days of drums and bugles, of victories so sweet they can never be achieved again; of fear so deep and elemental, it can never be repeated.

But I couldn’t re-create them that day on the mountaintop, and it’s just as well. The war is over and the dead long buried. I sensed an acceptance of that among those who made the trip back in time. Perhaps now they will rest easier in their dreams.

The drums are silent, the buglers gone.