More than a million Americans, many still in their teens, fought, and survived, the Korean War. The G.I. never quite understood what this particularly bewildering war was all about. But he fought well, and reached his own understanding of Korea by personal, painful, ugly experience.
For one thing, he understood death. There was the first mound of corpses by the roadside, caked with dried blood, open mouths frozen in a scream. His sergeant said: ''Don't get shook up. They're just Koreans." Or there were muddy U.S. Army boots protruding awkwardly from under a blanket as a litter jeep bounced down the road from the front. Or in the rain, as he climbed his first Korean hill, there was the glistening poncho stretched over the two men sleeping near the trail—and then he realized that they were asleep forever.
Death reached closer. He had to tell the captain: "He was lying in his hole, all curled up. I guess the round just dropped in on top of him." Afterwards, he and the rest of the squad had to decide what to do with the last letter the man had written before the round dropped in on him. "Send it home." said the chaplain, "his Mom will want to know what he was thinking before he died."
The Why. The G.I., like any other soldier, was afraid of death, which came suddenly, and always at the wrong time. A man in his company was blown up just after he got a telegram that told him he had a new son, his first. "The American soldier has only one fault," said a platoon leader. "He has too much to live for." Many men said: "I don't want to be a hero, I just want to be alive." Nevertheless, there were plenty of heroes before it was over. Not wanting to die, the G.I. newly on the line took a while to discover what made a man risk death.
But eventually, he understood why a medic threw himself between a patient and a grenade. He understood the private who could have abandoned his hole, but stood up throwing back Chinese hand grenades before they exploded—until he misjudged one. And the corporal, with four bullets in his chest, who was told: "Take a stretcher; you'll die if you walk down." "Yeah," he replied, "send four guys back to carry me and they'll all get clobbered. I'll make it." And he did. Those were the cool heroes, sacrificing themselves, not to "halt aggression" or "fight Communism," but out of elemental loyalty to the outfit, and to the other men around them.
There was another kind of hero forged by the heat and pressure of battle. There was the private, foot all but blown off, chest punctured with machine-gun bullets, face mangled by a mortar chunk, who kept going until he got nearly to the top of the ridge. There, he died, and only then fell down. There were the two Kentuckians who rushed up a hill screaming hillbilly songs and dived into a North Korean bunker with their hand grenades, blowing it up. There were also men who went to pieces in the strain of battle, and dashed forward, screaming and crying, to be cut down by the enemy. Other panic-stricken men "bugged out," or groveled in their foxholes, clawing at the earth. He turned away and hoped that would not happen to him.