The Garner Files: A Memoir (5 page)

I
was an introvert, but in a group of people, I was a show-off. I pretended never to take things seriously. I was probably trying to hide my insecurity. (What the hell, it worked for me. I’m glad nobody tried to fix it.)

One day a bunch of us were hanging out in front of Woolworth’s in Norman and there were some gumball machines next to the door. I said to no one in particular, “I could steal one of those, easy.”

“Well, bull
shit,
” they said.

That was all I needed. I sauntered over to a machine, swept it up with one hand, and kept on walking with it right down Main Street. None of the gang thought I could—or would—do it. They were so impressed at how smooth I was that one of the girls in the group nicknamed me “Slick.”

The girl was Betty Jane Smith and she was my first love.

She was gorgeous, vibrant, full of life. I would have married her in a heartbeat. But there was a problem: Betty Jane was an older woman, by two years. While I was playing football and doing my best to flunk out of Norman High, she was attending OU and dating a college man.

Though I grew up fast in some ways, I was immature in others. I was a real wallflower. Women frightened the hell out of me. (Still do.) I didn’t have a clue how to talk to them. Because I lacked the courage to tell her myself, a girlfriend told Betty Jane I was absolutely balmy about her. Unfortunately, the girlfriend told
me
Betty Jane wasn’t interested. Not in a million years.

Broke. My. Heart.

I must have been out of my mind: Here
she
was, a beautiful former Football Queen and Pep Club president, and there
I
was, a ne’er-do-well with no prospects and no ambition, two years her junior.

Betty Jane eventually married the college man. He ended up a mogul in the record business, and they lived out in the Valley, a few miles from my house. As far as I know, they still do.

It took a long time to get over Betty Jane. I was sure I’d never fall in love again. A big cloud of gloom and doom settled over me, and I didn’t want to do anything or talk to anyone. I just sat there brooding. I couldn’t make a decision whether to take a bath or a shower, so I didn’t do either. I just sat there. For days. At one point, I even contemplated suicide. But eventually I started to come out of it. Little by little, I began to feel like my old self again, until one day I realized that the cloud had finally lifted. I decided to go on living.

I
was the first Oklahoman drafted for the Korean War.

When I got the letter from Uncle Sam in late December 1950, I figured that if they needed
me
, they were in trouble: I’d already been in the National Guard. I tore up a knee during maneuvers, and they gave me a medical discharge. I had the knee operated on because I wanted to play football again.

When I reported for induction, I asked the doctor, “Hey, Doc, what about my knee?”

“What about it?”

“They operated on it, you know?”

“Well, they must have fixed it. Next!”

I went through basic training at Fort Sheridan, Illinois. One day they put up a list of a hundred guys who were being shipped out, and to my relief I wasn’t on it. That’s when I learned that nobody was supposed to go overseas unless they had boots. One of the guys on the list had feet the size of aircraft carriers and the army couldn’t find boots to fit them, so they took
him
off the list and put
me
on it.

I was sent to Schofield Barracks in Honolulu and assigned to the
5th Regimental Combat Team of the 24th Division. It was a “bastard outfit,” an independent unit with no permanent higher divisional headquarters. At one time or another, the 5th RCT had fought under the 1st Cavalry, the 45th Infantry Division, and even a Marine brigade, earning itself a distinguished combat record. In the parlance of the time, it was a “colored” regiment, because it had a large percentage of Hawaiians and Asian Americans. When the fighting heated up, the 5th was rushed to Korea. They needed fodder to stuff up the gap, and we were in the first group of replacements.

On my second day in Korea, as a rifleman in Able Company, I was bringing up the rear of a patrol when I was hit with mortar shrapnel. Most of it glanced off my helmet, but a few fragments caught me in the hand and face and one cut my watchband.

They sent me back to an aid station, but instead of going in, I started picking out the little bits of metal while looking in the mirror of a jeep. An officer came up and said, “Don’t do that! Go inside and we’ll get you a Purple Heart.” So I went in, they bandaged my “wounds,” and I went back to my unit.

A couple weeks later, on April 21, 1951, in what’s now called the First Spring Offensive, 250,000 Chinese Communist troops swarmed across the 38th Parallel. The first thing they ran into was the 5th RCT.

Able Company was dug in on a ridgeline on the RCT’s right flank, with elements of the Republic of Korea 6th Division protecting
our
right. On the night of April 24, the Red Chinese attacked us in force, bugles blaring. (They used bugles and whistles to signal infantry maneuvers, and it got so the sound of them was more unnerving than the roar of their artillery.)

As soon as machine-gun tracers and mortar rounds started coming in, the ROKs turned tail and ran, leaving our right flank wide open. We were overwhelmed by the sheer volume of incoming fire as wave after wave of infantry slammed our position. I took cover on the lee side of the hill and saw three enemy soldiers running along
the ridgeline. Without thinking, I shouldered my rifle and started ripping away. I’m pretty sure I hit one of them because I saw the head snap and the helmet fly off.

The Red Chinese shot us to pieces. Before we knew it, we had only thirty men left out of one hundred thirty, and we were surrounded. Our company commander, Captain Horace W. West, assembled the survivors and told us we were going to execute a “retrograde” maneuver. Which is a nice way of saying we were checking out. Despite bleeding profusely from nine bullet wounds, Captain West led us off the ridge and we
retrograded
all night long, fighting as we went. None of us would have survived without his bravery and leadership, for which he ultimately received the Distinguished Service Cross.

At dawn the next morning we picked up some ROK stragglers just as our fighter planes began pounding the enemy positions. We were all sitting on a hilltop cheering them on, shouting, “Go get ’em, boys, blow the
shit
out of ’em!” when one of our own AT-6 spotter planes flew over. Because we’d lost our orange air panels that would have identified us as friendlies, the AT-6 radioed back about a concentration of “enemy” troops. The next thing we knew we were being strafed by US Navy Panther jets firing 20-millimeter white phosphorus rockets.

I was diving into a foxhole when I got hit. In the butt. (How could they miss?) The jets kept firing and there was white phosphorus streaming in all directions, so I figured I’d better get out of there. I jumped out of the foxhole and ran . . . right off the side of a cliff.

I rolled end-over-end about a hundred yards down the hill, dislocating my shoulder and tearing up my knees. Meanwhile, rockets were still raining down, with fragments ricocheting all over the place. I thought of the old line, “It ain’t the one with your name on it you have to worry about, it’s the one addressed, ‘To whom it may concern.’”

A ROK soldier had rolled down the hill, too, and he was worse
off than me: he had white phosphorus burns all down his back and I knew it was smarting, because that stuff
burns
. I could barely move because of my knees, but we slowly dragged ourselves back up the side of the hill. When we reached the summit, it was deserted.

There we were, alone on top of the hill. The ROK didn’t speak English and I didn’t speak Korean, but we could communicate with gestures. It didn’t seem like a good idea to stick around, so we headed south, hoping to catch up with our retreating column.

As we made our way down the hill into another valley, I looked to my right and spotted a group of about one hundred fifty soldiers . . .
and they weren’t ours
. It was what must have been a whole company of North Koreans. They saw us, too. My rifle had been blown to bits by a rocket, but the South Korean still had his, though it wouldn’t have helped much if the North Koreans had decided to open up on us. I don’t think I’ve ever been more scared in my life than I was at that moment. I didn’t wet my britches or anything, but it wouldn’t have taken much more.

We just kept walking, right past the North Koreans. To this day, I don’t know how we got away with it. The only thing I could ever figure is that because the South Korean had a rifle and I didn’t, the North Koreans must have thought he was one of them and I was his prisoner.

We walked for maybe six more hours, until we heard the sweet sound of American tanks. As we approached our own lines, I took the rifle from the South Korean so our guys wouldn’t mistake him for an enemy soldier who had the drop on me. They sent me to an aid station right away. I don’t know what they did with the South Korean. I’ve often wondered what happened to him.

The next day they airlifted me to a hospital in Japan. By the time I got there, my shoulder and the phosphorus wounds on my backside weren’t too bad, but my knees had swollen up like balloons. I spent about two weeks in the hospital. Most of the guys there were a lot worse off than I was.

In his history of the 5th RCT,
Hills of Sacrifice,
Colonel Michael Slater writes that my unit fought one of the biggest and most pivotal battles of the Korean War. Of the 3,200 5th RCT troops deployed from Hawaii, more than a third were killed, wounded, or missing in action within six weeks of entering combat. Slater calls the battle “the most bitter close-combat struggle Americans have participated in since the Civil War.” In terms of the big picture, our side had withstood a human wave offensive in which the Red Chinese lost 200,000 men and gained nothing. After that, it settled into a stalemate that finally led both sides to negotiate. The result half a century later is two Koreas tensely divided by the 38th Parallel.

Y
ou automatically get a Purple Heart if you’re wounded or killed in action against an enemy of the United States. “Wounded” is broadly defined. The little shrapnel scratches I got were the same as my more serious knee injuries for the purpose. For that matter, a piece of shrapnel gets you the same medal for losing an arm. So I was awarded two Purple Hearts on my service record. But I never got a medal.

Years later, I wrote the army about it because I wanted to have something tangible to give Grandma Meek before she died. Didn’t get an answer. I wrote again, and they finally dug through the old records and found my paperwork.

In 1983, in a ceremony that coincided with the two hundredth anniversary of the Purple Heart, a general pinned the medal on my chest, one Purple Heart decorated with an oak leaf cluster to indicate two awards. He said the army was remedying an error. It was sure better to get it thirty years late than posthumously. Sorry to say, it was too late for Grandma Meek, who had died in 1969.

I felt lucky to be recognized. Many other Korean War vets never have been. It was an unpopular war, coming less than five years after World War II. Nobody was ready for another war so soon. When we
came home, there were no parades. The nation lost almost as many men in Korea as we did in Vietnam, but they didn’t even call it a war—it was a “police action” or the “Korean conflict.”

Korean War vets are ignored because Korea is a forgotten war. I hope that’s changing. There’s finally a Korean War Veterans memorial in Washington, and I’ve joined with Buzz Aldrin and others to help raise money to build a Korean War museum. (Many people don’t know that before he was an astronaut or walked on the moon, Buzz flew sixty missions as a combat pilot in Korea.) Korean vets deserve the same recognition as vets of other wars.

Then again, Charlie Madison, my character in
The Americanization of Emily,
may have had it right: we’ll end wars only when we stop glorifying those who take part in them. In any case, I want to be very clear about one thing: I was not a hero. If there were any heroes, they were the guys who never came back from Korea, or the ones who were wounded, captured, or risked their lives to save their buddies. I didn’t save anybody but myself. I wasn’t a hero; I just got in the way a lot.

A
fter being discharged from the hospital, I was assigned to a base post office outfit stationed in a bombed-out shoe factory. That’s when I started enjoying the war, because I became a “dog robber” like Charlie Madison and Bob Hendley, the character I played in
The Great
Escape
. A dog robber is a soldier who knows how to work the system, a facilitator who can get just about anything done.

I decided to turn our area into a first-class recreation center. To do that I had to scrounge materials and supplies from other units on the base. They weren’t always inclined to cooperate, so I had to give them an incentive: if they didn’t come up with what I wanted, they didn’t get their mail. Soldiers become unhappy when they don’t get their mail, so they usually gave me what I asked for, including what
we needed to build a bar and keep it stocked with whiskey. Graves Registration provided the ice.