We Were Beautiful Once (42 page)

“I don't know. I didn't know the Hamilton trademark at the time. I came back in '54 after Hamilton bought the company. I thought his family bought it during the Korean War. I don't know...  ”

Nick stopped the witness short. “You do not know what?”

“I, I don't know if Hamilton knew the POWs were clearing minefields.”  

“Was Roger Girardin one of the men assigned to clearing the minefields?”

“He may have been, not sure.”

“Sir, you are evading a responsive answer.  Need I remind you that you are under oath? Is it not true that Private Girardin was one of the POWs ordered to clear the minefields?”

“I only knew what was being rumored!”

“And what was that?”

Harris stood up again. “Objection, the answer calls for hearsay!”

“Your Honor, I am asking whether there had been a commonly understood reason for the disappearance of dozens of POWs, Private Girardin among them. And given that no records exist on this point—or at least the government has not produced any—this witness may have a recollection of what was commonly understood among the troops.”

Lindquist's face was flushed from either the heat or a persistent neck-ache. “I will allow it since I am hearing this case, not a jury. And I can decide whether it is reliable or not. Please answer, Mr. Prado.”

Begrudgingly, Jack answered. “We took it that GIs were being used to clear minefields. Girardin may have been one of them.”

“And can you tell us what else you know about this activity?”

“Don't know much. We were told that the POWs were used to clear the fields, some of them never came back. At least not to our camp.”

“You testified, ‘We were told.'  Who are the ‘we'?  And who told you?”

Harris jumped up. “Ambiguous.”

Nick understood, “Who are the ‘we?'”

“'We' were the guys.”

“And who told you?”

“Don't remember exactly.”

Nick continued to press Jack about ‘who' and ‘what' he knew concerning the mine clearing operation, but Jack was tighter than a drum.

“Is it not true that Private Girardin was one of the POWs ordered to clear the minefields?”

Jack put his hands to his face.

“Sir, do you need some time to compose yourself?” Nick asked.

Jack nodded his head yes.

“Can we make it five, your Honor?” Nick asked.

 

While the court recessed Julie remained in her chair, stunned, repeating Jack's confession: “We took it that GIs were used to clear minefields.  Girardin may have been one of them.”  It was certain that Jack was with Roger and certain that he had kept it from her throughout the years.  It wasn't rage.  Rather, she felt stung by the cruelty of his reticence—his cowardice.  How could she face the man, the only man that she trusted to tell the truth?  She tried to make sense of it, remembering how he went to Korea a wide-eyed, inquisitive boy ready to fight the red menace and had returned a quiet man, impossible to penetrate.

As people made their way out of the courtroom, Jack stayed in the witness chair to avoid facing Julie.  His eyes were shut, and he mumbled, counting backward, remembering something that had long been trapped in a screed of subconscious, the place where his darkest dreams lay dormant. Suddenly, his trembling body felt like it had been transported back in time, back to Camp 13.

 

 

 

WHEN THE CHINESE CAPTURED JACK, THEY FORCE-MARCHED him and a half-dozen men from Usan to Pyoktong.  Fifty miles times seventeen-hundred yards times three feet.  In the odd miles he counted every step forward and reversed the count in the even ones, discounting the pain, forcing his legs like clubs of dead meat to pound a path through deep snow, beneath the cover of trees, beneath smoke filled clouds that hung just above the hilltops, through empty countryside, villages. One guy that kept falling behind finally quit, the men hardly noticing as they forged their way north. Another comrade, bared feet turned blue-black, refused to stand after a short break, and as the men pulled away, they heard the unmistakable shot of his execution. Weeks later, the band reached a town nesting in the security of three side by side hills and the Yalu, and cordoned off by a barbed wire fence, inside of which lay a maze-like collection of muddy village roads and stucco-like dirt shacks, some tiled, unclear where one ended and another began. Jack passed burned out buildings, square foundations and an inner compound surrounded by more wire fence, where he later learned his captors lived and officiated. In the distance, brick smokestacks rose out of larger factory-like buildings like slender, red test tubes, belching smoke, smudging the icy skies.

Two guards shoved Jack through the door of a one room hut—thatched roof, hardpan floor resembling something he'd seen in pictures of Native American adobes. Inside, packed like canned fish, were 15 men, weeks unwashed, greasy lice colonies roaming freely through overgrown beards, multiplying and sapping blood. When Jack stumbled in, the wheezing and coughing men hardly noticed.  It smelled like a crapper. He found a tiny vacancy. Every now and again diarrhea-stricken men bolted for the latrine; the weaker ones would curl up and shit their pants.

His comrades told him he would be fed a bowl of millet and sorghum and sometimes a ball of soybean, twice a day. Over time, many would contract beriberi, rickets and dysentery and eventually die.  A week after he arrived, the guards kicked open the door and dumped a kid, delirious, foul smelling pus oozing from a gangrenous leg wound. He stayed in a coma, death's rattle disquieting the darkened quarters for several nights until he became silent.
Jack helped stack his body behind the shanty, where it would stay until the spring thaw. The man on Jack's left had the pasty orange and yellow look of jaundice. The following week Jack dragged him to the stack outside too.  
 

In late spring, hushed lilies grew in the woods, on the hills and near the shore. The place could be mistaken for a rustic vacation spot, except for the death and dying still rampant inside the huts. Men exhausted by famine could not lift their arms to keep the flies from feasting on their faces. Beriberi and rickets kept them from using the latrines. And then the shouting started. Chinese held indoctrination sessions outdoors, every morning for hours until noon. They would scream and rant until the POWs recited slogans or chorused that particular day's message:
the Americans were capitalists engaging in war crimes
.  

Jack reverted to counting numbers, adding, dividing, multiplying and occasionally mumbling odd results. One night he turned to Arsenalt, the guy next to him, and said that he had a recurring dream where, like a character in “Alice in Wonderland,” he dropped into a rabbit hole to feel no pain, a comfortable fairy-like world where he blinked his eyes backward, counting the seconds contained in a year to the cheers of faceless bystanders. Eventually a fellow inmate, tired of his nonsensical ramblings, told him to shut up or they would throw him outside. From that point on Jack kept his dreams and newly emerging visions to himself, although it could not stop the numerological mutterings over which he had no control.

In May, the men were allowed to walk to a shallow inlet to bathe, wash clothes and cut their beards if they had something mildly sharp. Jack kept to himself—or perhaps more accurately, the men stayed away from him because he lived in another world where he held imaginary conversations. He kneeled next to a pool of water and stared at himself. His face was thin, although a good likeness of his civilian self, something that could not be said for most of the men. Then he heard, “Jack, Jack O'Conner!”

Jack stood up and shot back. “Yeah, who're you?”

“I'm Roger, from back home.”

Jack's mouth fell open, his eyes blinked uncontrollably. “Holy Christ.”

Roger grinned from ear to ear and Jack embraced him in a bear hug. “When'd you get to this retreat?” Roger asked.

“They caught me 'round end of November, the Ch'ongch'on River valley. You?” “Yeah, me too, Ch'ongch'on River. November. How you doing? What's the matter with your eyes?”

“Nervous twitch, got worse when I got here.”

“When was the last time you heard from Julie?”

“Not sure, maybe October. You?”

“Last letter I got, was...  early November.”

“How'd she sound?  Say anything about my mother?”

The men's excitement gradually subsided, the conversation turning to small talk, until Roger said, “Say, you know your friend there, Hamilton, I could swear that I'd seen him back in Suwon...   yeah, saw this guy standing next to a car, next to this mass fucking grave, weird...  really sickening.”

“What?”

“Well, at the time the guy only looked familiar, I wasn't sure it was him, and it all looked pretty threatening, so I went on my way...  it was some time later it sank in—it hadta be him. Just thought it was too much of a happenstance.”

“Where're you now?”

“Up behind the day room. You got any room?”

“Yeah, we had fifteen, then four passed this winter, dysentery,” Jack replied, eager to have Roger join him, and then added, “Why?”

“We're shoulder to shoulder.”

It was the better part of an hour later, when they went separate ways. As Jack walked back to the hut, Montoya asked, “Who were ya talking to?” Jack did not answer, walking dead ahead, in another world.

The summer passed into fall, and it was snowing for the first time when Jack saw Roger walk into the hut, a big grin on his face.  Jack startled himself out of a gloomy daze. “Roger, where the hell'd you go?”

“No place.  They changed our routine, so I never saw you by the river again.”

“What brings you here?” Jack asked.

“Overcrowding. Few of us had to move. Figured a good time to jump over.”

“Well, have a piece of floor. Right here,” Jack said, patting the ground beside him. “Montoya, no problem, right?” Montoya looked at Jack, but said nothing.

In '52, snow fell from mid-October on and confined the men to their huts. Jack had run out of things to talk about, and fell into long periods when he slept or sat quietly. In early December, it snowed every day. Under his breath, Jack continued to repeat things that did not make sense. His twitching got worse. One day, Jack recited the same thing for fifteen minutes. “My eyes blink goodbyes to flies who despise our lies, and spies on what's in our cries.”

“Jack, knock it off! What the fuck are you saying anyway?” Montoya asked.

“It's a gospel, for my ministry,” he answered contritely, not wanting to offend.

“What ministry, for Christ's Sake?”

“I'm doing what God wants, to carry His word into the backwater of no-man's land among the men, our tribe,” Jack explained, trying to rationalize.

 “Jack, my amigo, get some sleep.”

It was close to Christmas when he started telling his cellmates that he was visited by an angel who told him to gather the “Believers” and hold mass. And Jack noticed that Roger, who had of late chosen to have absolutely nothing to do with him, decided to join his enterprise. “Roger, how about me making me an altar?  It'd keep you busy.”

There was a ban against holding religious ceremonies, but over the next few weeks, Jack watched the hut cadre steal pieces of wood and string and assemble a small altar—not more than a wooden board on two short stools and a small cross placed on its bare surface. Meanwhile, Jack's ramblings continued. “Shall slew the snake in his track, bury his body in tamarack.” But no one asked Jack what he was saying, long since accepting that he had crossed over.  

When the men finished building the altar, Jack called his “congregation” together and despite the men's collective opinion that Jack was a little crazy, all eleven of them kneeled— except Roger, who Jack saw watching from the far corner. They recited the Our Father. The wind howled, and snow blew through the clapboard cracks. For a while they had forgotten the hell they were in and raised their voices singing a few familiar carols. During “
God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
” the door burst open. A cold blast of air blew the floor mats against the far wall. Three billy-stick-carrying guards ordered everyone face down. A guard swept his hand over the makeshift altar, leaving it in a pile of rubble. Two men grabbed Jack by the scruff of the neck and threw him into the snowy night. “Out, Out,” they ordered. Jack screamed, “
Kyrie eleison, Kyrie eleison
!” Once outside, the guards pummeled him into unconsciousness.

For the next few days, in a four-by-four cell off the day room, Jack slept and ate, pissing and shitting in a milk pail.  And there were two brief appearances in the dayroom, sitting across from a Chinese interrogator demanding he renounce the war. It was during the grilling that he had first seen those little hexagonal diagrams on a sheet of paper lying next to the soldier. On the third day, he overheard Colonel Cho, the CCF commandant of the camp speaking Chinese to a man with a familiar voice. In a swift rush of excitement, Jack realized it was Trent Hamilton. Jack waited. When it sounded as if Cho had left the dayroom, Jack called in a soft voice, “Trent, Trent.”

Jack thought he had heard something, but nothing happened. “Trent, can you hear me...  ?  I'm here...   next room,” he called in a loud undertone.

In the next instant, Cho and Trent walked in. Trent was in an officer's combat uniform —crew cut, day old stubble, but otherwise in good shape.

“Jack!” he clamored, hardly able to get the words out. “You're the last guy I thought I'd see.” Beneath Jack's eyes, Trent saw two blood-dried, hollow black shadows. His face had a deep scratch that went up and over a purple lump on the side of his head. His left eye was swollen like a jawbreaker. His cheeks were sculpted around two bones, making them appear jarringly transparent.  Long matted hair stuck to his head under the glue of dried blood. His khaki wool pants were pinched at the waist by a black electrical cord, a white pullover shirt made from flour sacks hung on an undernourished frame beneath his opened field jacket. It wasn't the guy Trent remembered from a rainy night when a dead woman was about to take the wheel in a car impaled on a telephone pole.