In Manchuria (40 page)

Uncle Fu was then sixteen and away home for the first time, sent to Beijing to train in air force logistics.

“Near the end of
1950
, we made it to the border, to the city of Dandong on the Yalu River. They gave us guns and whatever uniform was available. Mine was too big.”

It still was, but Uncle Fu's gaunt frame made all of his clothes seem big.

In North Korea, he remembered camping in caves by day and marching through the night. “Once over the border, I could see American planes filling the sky. Frankly, I had no idea where I was; in war, you do as you're told and just think about surviving. We had Koreans in our unit; they had fought against the Japanese in the Northeast, then volunteered with the Communists in the Chinese civil war. We didn't know that Russia wanted China to fight the Americans for them: Stalin was afraid of America! It wasn't until after the war that I learned that of the ninety-six boys who enlisted from my village, only six of us survived. I was lucky, that's all.”

At war's end, Uncle Fu was assigned to Shenyang in
1953
. “I knew your Auntie Yi's boss, and he introduced me to her, and then we got married.”

I asked if it was love at first sight.

“
En'e,
” he replied—dialect for “Sure”—surprising me with his candor. “Isn't it always that way for a man, when he meets the woman he wants to marry? I don't think that's true for women, though.”

Auntie Yi's family was living in Wasteland, so Uncle Fu was transferred to work at the airfield in
1957
. “Land reform had finished, so the land had been carved up and distributed to the peasants, but like I said, there wasn't much out here then. When the Cultural Revolution started, the Red Guards didn't have anything to destroy. But our family—my wife, San Jiu—they had a tough time because their ancestors had been labeled ‘rich peasants.' I was a soldier, so the Red Guards left me alone, and I could stand in front of anyone they wanted to yell at. But they were ferocious. We didn't know who they were; they came from the city, and it was like an invasion. You can't even imagine it, seeing these strangers in the village, yelling at people. Really, I didn't understand what they were doing; to a soldier, it was completely without discipline.”

I asked if there was ever talk of the army subduing the Red Guards—if, after surviving Korea, his unit didn't want to knock the teenagers playing at revolution into the paddies. Uncle Fu smiled. “It's logical to ask that now, but back then everyone was used to following orders—the military but also the farmers, since they had been commanded in the co-ops, then the communes. It was as if we were employees, waiting for the boss to tell us what to do.”

Chairman Mao died at three o'clock on September
9
,
1976
. “A store in Lonely Outpost had a television, so the whole village gathered there. Can you imagine that, all of us standing there, trying to get a look? We all cried, and then someone would get tired and have to step away, so the crowd would move up a spot. You waited until someone got tired from crying, and then you could see the screen better,” he said. “But I was genuinely sad. It was three days of silent mourning, and people really were silent. The next year Zhou Enlai died, and Zhu De died after that, but by then I couldn't cry anymore, even if he was the founder of the People's Liberation Army.”

Uncle Fu didn't have a single photograph of any of this: his home village south of the Yangtze, his parents, his classmates, his fellow soldiers, his camps in Korea, his airport hut, or the construction of this house. “No one took photographs then,” he said, shrugging. “They didn't start recording statistics or taking a census here until
1956
, when Wasteland became a village and the administrative office opened. Before then this place had no records. Officially, our history begins in
1956
. That's how I understand it. I arrived the following year.”

Tunk
went the cork thermos stopper, and he carefully poured hot water into my bowl. I wondered if Uncle Fu had ever seen an American up close in the war. His mouth fell. “I forgot to tell you! I was there when the American bombers took out the bridge in Dandong.”

The city's name meant “Eastern Peony”; my wife had been named Peony in Chinese because her uncle returned from a trip to the Yalu River town the night she was born. I found this as ignominious as being named Fargo, but Uncle Fu said it linked her arrival to a journey, just like life itself: “When you have a child, put a character from this place in its name.”

“
Waste
or
land
?”

He chuckled. “You don't have to ask me that.”        

Uncle Fu said the fight for the bridge in Dandong was the time he was most scared in the war. “The commanders said we were going to cross that bridge into North Korea,” he recalled. “But during that battle, I couldn't imagine it.”

You can stand on its remains; the bridge has become a patriotic education base, but one more muted than the museum perched on Dandong's hill, whose entrance greets visitors with that catchy ditty “Defeat Wolf-Hearted America.” Its exhibits tell visitors that Chinese soldiers “took good care of every mountain, river, grass, and tree owned by the Korean people” as they repelled the “attack of U.S. imperialists and its running dogs.” The War to Resist America and Aid Korea Museum is not for our friendship.

But neither is the minor industry in Chinese gloating that thrummed on Dandong's shore. Every half hour, from dawn to dusk, ferries motored halfway across the Yalu so tourists crowding the railings could snap photos of the North Korean town of Sinuiju. It showed rusting ships, fishermen in threadbare tank tops, and a man pedaling an old bicycle. Chinese passengers said:

“Look at how backward they are! So poor!”

“This is what China looked like during the Cultural Revolution.”

“I hear they still use ration coupons to buy food.”

“They must think we betrayed communism. But they must admire our development.”

Only a generation ago, many Chinese cities looked nearly as moribund. The ferry made a wide turn, and we saw what the North Koreans face all day: cranes building high-rises, billboards advertising banking services, and roads filled with private cars. The War to Resist America and Aid Korea Museum. Along the bustling promenade: a row of telescopes, where people pay to stare at an empty shore.

They also see the black steel bridge that stops mid-river. Built in
1911
, the former railroad bridge once linked Japanese-controlled Korea with Manchuria.

Now visitors can walk five hundred yards, halfway across the Yalu, where the bridge ends at an observation deck. Four concrete pilings draw a dotted line to the far shore. Tourists pose next to a disarmed bomb, and a plaque that says the United States bombed the bridge from November
8
to November
14
,
1950
. The story ends there.

But Uncle Fu had said he was most scared then.

 

In late
1950
, the war had seemed all but over. North Korean troops had been pushed out of Seoul and back across the Thirty-eighth Parallel; United Nations soldiers occupied Pyongyang, and the North's air force had been destroyed. From his Tokyo headquarters, General MacArthur, commander of the UN forces, declared that his troops would be home by Christmas.

Despite OSS reports of Chinese movements toward the Yalu River, MacArthur repeatedly asserted that China would not cross into North Korea. The Communists had just won China's civil war and inherited a crippled economy. Its army could not even invade Taiwan, let alone take on the United States.

Chairman Mao, in turn, saw that America's post-world-war commitments stretched from Berlin to Tokyo, and now into Korea. China could put four times as many men on the ground as the UN forces, which it did, nearly surreptitiously, in October
1950
by having them march at night and hide in caves during daytime. A sixteen-year-old Uncle Fu was among the
120
,
000
troops that flanked the American Eighth Army. An additional ninety thousand soldiers were en route.

Meanwhile, MacArthur had cabled Washington, D.C.: “The defeat of the North Koreans and of their armies was thereby decisive.” In fact, the war was about to be extended another twenty months.

Until November
1950
, UN forces had been fighting “under wraps,” ordered to “stay clear of Manchurian and Soviet boundaries.” American naval pilots, taking off from carriers in the Yellow Sea, could not pursue Chinese pilots in Soviet-supplied MiG jets or attack antiaircraft guns stationed across the border. This mandate created “MiG Alley,” a zone of airspace along the Yalu River where American pilots played a deadly game of cat and mouse. Chinese fighters took off from Dandong's airfield, climbed to thirty thousand feet, dove with guns blazing on American planes, then darted back across the Yalu and safety. Among their targets was a young ensign named Neil Armstrong. Before he took one giant leap for mankind on the moon, Armstrong was shot down over Korea, evading capture and flying a total of seventy-eight combat missions before leaving the Navy at age twenty-two to become a test pilot.        

MacArthur pressed President Truman to allow pilots to engage in “hot pursuit” over the Yalu. Truman, fearing China's entry into the war, instead prohibited any air strike within five miles of the border.

In his memoir, MacArthur wrote that these restrictions made him feel “astonishment” and “inexpressible shock.” He told his chief of staff: “For the first time in military history, a commander has been denied the use of his military power to safeguard the lives of his soldiers and safety of his army.”

MacArthur threatened to resign, but Truman—facing down McCarthyism, criticism that he had “lost China to the Reds,” and a predicted Democratic defeat in congressional elections—relented on the five-mile exclusion zone. MacArthur could bomb the Yalu River town of Sinuiju, the seat of Kim Il-sung's fugitive government. In reply to his request to destroy its bridge, severing it from China, he was ordered: Only take out the span's “Korean end.”

It is easy to imagine MacArthur's jaw clenching as he read the cable. Had the joint chiefs—including General Omar Bradley, commander of Allied forces in western Europe during World War II—forgotten how difficult it was to level a bridge from the air? The flooring itself was easy to drop, but also easy to replace. Even when poorly defended, taking out a bridge by plane required multiple low, pinpointed bombs at key supports. Furthermore, because the United States “did not want to be in the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the wrong enemy,” General Bradley and the Joint Chiefs authorized the Yalu River bridge mission only on the condition that American airmen attacked the structure on the perpendicular, not by the more effective approach of lining up their planes along the bridge's axis and releasing their bombs.

The pilots would have to fly into a hail of antiaircraft flak and Chinese fighters, and try to hit the bridge on a pass. At a preflight briefing, an admiral told his men: “Our naval pilots have been given a most difficult task. Our government has decided that we cannot violate the air space over Manchuria or attack on Manchurian territory regardless of the provocation. If such attacks were made, the world might be thrown into the holocaust of a third world war.”

On November
8
, American B-
29
s used napalm and incendiary bombs to level
60
percent of Sinuiju. Sixteen other cities were hit as well. “All of North Korea would be cleared in ten days,” MacArthur promised. “Unfortunately, this area will be left a desert.”

In history's first all-jet air battle, Chinese planes intercepted Americans targeting the Yalu bridge. Remarkably, no pilots on either side were downed. Neither was the span.

The next day Navy pilots tried again, with Panther jets hitting the bridge under the cover of propeller-driven Corsairs, which fired at the antiaircraft guns. From twenty-seven thousand feet, through unrelenting flak, “we came down in a high-angle attack, probably around in a
70
-degree dive,” a pilot recalled. “I remember I went down on my target with my wheels down. You did that in a Corsair for high angle dives in order to keep your speed down. Otherwise you'd get up to too much speed and you couldn't use your flaps as the speeds were so fast you'd just blow them right off. The landing gear was designed to take the high speeds encountered in steep dives.”

The bridge remained standing.

Back in the United States, Harry S. Truman followed the results of the
1950
congressional elections aboard the presidential yacht. Truman was “drunker” (on bourbon) and “more dejected,” his official biographer wrote, “than anyone had ever seen him.” Earlier that week he had been the target of a botched assassination attempt by Puerto Rican separatists, and now the election brought further woe: Republicans had gained five seats in the Senate and twenty-eight in the House.