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The prospect of death he learned to ac cept, and he seldom talked about it. But he could gripe about the hardships. Each echelon claimed that the men to the rear were "fat" with luxuries. The man on the line envied the man at battalion because he usually slept on a cot and lived in a tent and had three hot meals a day. Battalion thought regiment "had it made" because there the men rode around in jeeps. The soldier assigned to regiment wished he was farther back at division, where it was safer, where there were showers, Korean houseboys to do the laundry, and movies almost every night. The man at division figured the corps headquarters soldier "had it knocked" with his PX, his girls, and "tak-san" (much) beer. At corps, they envied Army's warm buildings, big PX, recreation programs, coffee and doughnut canteens, and "Stateside" Red Cross girls. The G.I.s at Army headquarters would rather have been in Japan, or else close to the front collecting four rotation points a month. But everybody wanted to go home.
R & R. The G.I. was homesick the minute he hit Korea. Around the sputtering Coleman lanterns in the bunker, on the long, dusty truck rides that bruised his bones, he talked of "The Big R" (rotation) and "The Little R" (rest and rehabilitation leave in Japan). He knew to the day when he could expect to go home —"if too much stuff doesn't hit the fan and use up all the replacements," or if the brass didn't "push the panic button" and freeze rotation for a while.
He served his time and left Korea. His outfit stayed on. There was no "duration" to limit or extend his stay. The veterans of World War II went home by the hundreds of thousands in the ranks of their outfits, with a sense of accomplishment and the prospect of a big welcome—maybe a parade. They had suffered and won. The veterans of Korea trickled back individually, with a sense of relief at being alive. They have merely suffered.
The returning veteran of 1945 was a man of hope; his enemy was beaten, his target—Tokyo or Berlin—was reached. He was ready for a brave new world of peace and plenty. His younger brothers, resigned to the ugly old world of war and greed, shout no message. They argue about whether the war should have been started, whether it should have been carried into China or stopped at the 38th parallel, whether Van Fleet or MacArthur or the White House had the right solution—and they don't pretend to know all the answers. All that binds them is their common understanding of the steep ridges and the stinking paddies and the swift night attacks from the north.
In gathering places across the U.S. they recognize each other when they hear such terms as "bahli-bahli" ("hurry up"), or "no sweat." Their password is a mangled version of Arirang, the Korean folksong taught them on a quiet night by ROK soldiers in the bunkers. The badge of their fraternity is the fatalism by which they say, when things go wrong: "That's the way the ball bounces."