Brother Fish (41 page)

While Jimmy would ever after insist that my learning the folksong from Kim Sun and its subsequent performance in front of Ho Ling, the Chinese officer who transferred us to the farm hospital, was what saved the lives of the men in the North Korean cave, this was probably untrue. But, just as I like to believe that Kim Sun had cadged a lift on the bullock cart so that he could take care of me, so Jimmy is entitled to his fish story. And anyway, true or false, it made no difference – I was landed with the Brother Fish nickname for the duration.

Much more likely to be the reason we were given medical treatment was that cease-fire talks had recommenced at around this time and the question of prisoner exchange had been placed on the agenda. Prisoners of war were now a valuable commodity, a bargaining tool, where the more you had the more persuasive you were likely to be. It suddenly became imperative to keep as many prisoners of war alive as possible, and the plaster casts Jimmy and I had received were strictly for cosmetic purposes and had nothing to do with duty of care, compassion or even folksongs.

A week after I'd arrived at the farmhouse hospital, and only a day after I managed to get around on my Chinese crutches, we were declared fit to leave. As far as the Chinese farmhouse hospital system was concerned, provided you weren't flat on your back you were ready to move. Convalescence wasn't built into their system, which was true for their own men as well as for us.

Late the following day, with darkness already settling over the landscape, a five-ton truck arrived and we were hastily loaded aboard to join a truckful of Chinese soldiers who shuffled to make sufficient room for us to sit. We hadn't gone more than a couple of miles before we joined a convoy of about fifty trucks, tucking in close to the front. Upon our departure we'd been issued with a blanket, which did very little to keep out the biting cold, and I can remember grumbling to Jimmy that it wasn't our wounds we needed to worry about because we'd eventually perish from the bloody cold. In fact, I should have been grateful – later we would learn that the previous winter several columns of UN Command prisoners had marched this same route for hundreds of miles with those unable to keep up shot on the spot. With our broken legs we'd have been shot before they lifted the starting gate.

It was slow going over bad roads and there was little chance of sleep. Hours passed, and sometime in the early morning we heard warning shots from Chinese lookouts situated high on the surrounding hills. Shortly afterwards came the sound of aeroplane engines. The convoy stopped and we could hear whistles blowing as the soldiers in the remainder of the convoy and those in our truck hastily evacuated to take cover and we were left, sitting ducks, not sufficiently mobile to leave the truck on our own.

‘How 'bout dat?' Jimmy sighed grimly. ‘We gonna get our ass kicked by da fuckin' US Air Force.'

Next thing the surrounding landscape was illuminated by parachute flares and the attack began. My mind went back to Bluey Walsh and the Chinese soldier who'd been burned by napalm and I'm still surprised I didn't shit the kapok-quilted cotton trousers they'd given me in the hospital. I had been frightened, very frightened, before this, but now I was absolutely terrified. The vision of Bluey Walsh taking his last breath and the Chinese soldier sitting with his arms welded around his knees, his entire body crisped by napalm, filled my panicked mind. I prayed that whatever hit me was for keeps and that it wasn't napalm. We could hear each plane as it came in low, its roar drowning everything out, the truck rattling on its chassis. They started at the back of the convoy, working methodically as a team. It was rockets, not napalm, destroying one vehicle after the other. It was precision work and in military terms good shooting and no doubt the pilots were experiencing a buzz, not aware that the only kill they would make in this early-morning raid was on their side. Then just three trucks from where we stood in the convoy they stopped and left, presumably because they'd run out of rockets.

My body was filled with an overwhelming joy such as I'd never before experienced, and complete calm replaced the terror of a few moments before. ‘Well, I'll be fucked!' I remember saying, smiling at Jimmy, knowing we'd emerged unscathed.

Jimmy hadn't seen my reaction of a few moments before – the truck was still in half-darkness and I guess he had been pretty preoccupied with his own final thoughts. Hearing my calm voice and the familiar Australian expletive for surprise and wonder, he reached out and shook my hand. ‘Brother Fish, yoh da coolest cat dat I ever did know. Yoh still da man.'

‘I was shitting myself, Jimmy,' I replied truthfully. But I could see he didn't believe me.

It was fast getting light when we moved off again. The bulk of the Chinese soldiers, now without trucks, marched behind us, and we soon turned onto a narrow track mostly hidden by snow to reach a complex of caves where we disembarked. I guess this wasn't our intended destination and more like a transit station. The attack had delayed us nearly two hours as the soldiers had had to push the wrecks off the road before we finally got away. It was now daylight, and the Chinese did not run their convoys during the day lest they be even more exposed to being spotted and attacked from the air. The remaining trucks were driven into several of the bigger caves and we were taken into a smaller one occupied by fifteen wounded Chinese and North Korean soldiers. A Chinese officer spoke to the wounded men, presumably telling them not to harm us, because they moved over, leaving two straw pallets in the far corner for Jimmy and me to occupy. This surprised us, as the back of the cave, furthermost from the opening, was always the least cold. The officer had obviously elevated us in the pecking order.

The men in the cave ignored our presence except for one little cove, who appeared to be suffering shell shock and seemed to be trying to tell us his name, jabbering away thirteen to the dozen and gesticulating madly, to the amusement of his wounded comrades. His name sounded like Hok, or something similar, but he spoke it so fast it could have been anything – Og, Sok, Nok, Tok – so we finally settled for Hok and left it at that. This seemed to please him and Hok became our mate. Then Jimmy, obviously impressed by my expletive immediately following the air attack, taught him to say, ‘Well, I'll be fucked', and once he'd mastered the expression Hok would rattle off something in Chinese and then end whatever it was he was saying with, ‘Well, I'll be fucked!'

Those of the Chinese and Korean wounded who could walk were permitted to leave the cave whereas we were not, and Hok would disappear and later return and go and sit on our pallet and pull a blanket over his knees pretending to be cold. We soon learned that he was concealing food, in the form of hard, almost-tasteless biscuits, and an occasional cigarette under our blankets. We presumed he must have stolen these from somewhere by the care he took to conceal them. We'd touch him on the shoulder and thank him and he'd always reply, ‘Well, I'll be fucked!' Which, I'm ashamed to say given our miserable circumstances, was good for a bit of a laugh. Hok, mad as a March hare, was proving to be a good friend when we most needed one.

We'd been in the cave for three days when, late in the afternoon of the third day, two North Korean officers entered and walked over to where we were sitting on our pallets. One of them pulled a Luger pistol from his holster and held it against Jimmy's temple.

‘Whoa, man!' Jimmy said, not moving.

‘He's just trying to scare you, mate,' I said unconvincingly.

‘He done succeeded, man,' Jimmy said, his eyes grown wide and fearful.

The next moment the second officer drew his pistol and I felt the end of its cold metal barrel on the centre of my forehead. All I could think was,
What a bloody stupid way to die
. Then they must have glanced at each other, because they pulled the triggers simultaneously. I don't suppose you can have such a thing as a thunderous click but that's what it sounded like to me. Despite the cold, I'd broken into a sweat.

The two Koreans chortled, highly amused, slapping each other on the back, immensely pleased at this neat trick. Then the one with the Luger cleared his throat and, with the laughter gone from his eyes, reached into his quilted jacket pocket and took out a fully loaded magazine and slipped it into the pistol. Then he turned to look menacingly at us.
Jesus! The first time was to put the wind up us. This time it's for real!
I thought. At that moment Hok arrived and launched himself at the two officers, his hands flapping every which way while he shouted furious abuse at them. The North Koreans turned and retreated hastily with Hok shooing them out of the cave as though they were a couple of trespassing chickens. With the two officers gone he turned to face us, his hands on his hips. ‘Well, I'll be fucked!' he said, with exactly the right intonation.

A convoy with new trucks arrived at the caves around midnight on the fourth day and loaded up the Chinese soldiers and the two of us, and we left leaving a plainly distressed Hok behind. After the second day in the cave cracks had appeared in my plaster cast, and now as the truck bumped along the road, flickers of pain shot down my leg. My only hope was that it wasn't the start of another infection and simply the effects of slow healing.

Towards dawn we halted in what appeared to be a village, in the centre of which was a large shed about thirty foot long and ten foot wide. It had possibly once been a communal shed but was now converted into another farmhouse hospital, with the usual thatched roof and dirt floor. At the end furthermost from the door a small charcoal stove struggled unsuccessfully to heat the hut against the deepening winter. Against the wall on either side of it were the usual raised platforms running all the way along two-thirds of the hut and containing thirteen UN Command wounded and sick. This was a hospital not as big as the other, with no modern equipment and few, if any, drugs beyond the barest necessities, but with its own doctor.

The wounded and sick, all of them American Caucasians, were in a pretty bad way. One had a leg missing, another's kneecap had been sheared off by shrapnel, several, like us, wore plaster casts and two had arms missing. But it was the general condition they were in that was horrendous – wounds openly oozed pus, the plaster casts festered from within and gas gangrene was quietly rotting the stump of the soldier with the amputated leg. All of this emitting an odour that only those inured to living with it could endure. The Chinese doctor and the orderlies wore masks, but even they couldn't tolerate staying in our presence too long. Both Jimmy and I vomited the first time we entered the hut, and a voice from one of the wounded men rang out, ‘Welcome to the stink pit, comrades!'

Like the previous hospital, the hut was regarded as a human zoo, an irresistible attraction for the soldiers who occupied the village. They'd congregate outside until apparently someone gave them permission to enter, when they'd barge in, shouldering each other out of the way in their anxiety to be the first to gawk at us. Despite the condition of the wounded men it was deeply humiliating and unwelcome, but there was nothing we could do about it. Shouting at them didn't work and was simply regarded as part of the performance. The intrusions would occur a dozen times a day and they made our lives even more miserable than they already were.

After the second day Jimmy had had enough. ‘It Ogoya time, Brother Fish. Da gooks – dey gettin' on mah nerves, man.'

Jimmy's counterattack was simple enough. As the Chinese soldiers barged through the door we would all lift and flap our blankets and the odour would greatly intensify, wafting directly into the faces of the oncoming soldiers. We had learned that Chinese foot soldiers have pretty strong stomachs, but this odoriferous welcome was to prove their nemesis. Expectant faces would suddenly contort into grimaces as their hands shot up to cover their noses and mouths. Those in the front would turn in an effort to get away, often knocking down the others coming in. The hut soon emptied and we'd hear our unwelcome visitors retching and vomiting outside. Even in these most miserable of circumstances this got a laugh from the men in the hut and Jimmy, in an attempt to emulate my accent, would exclaim, ‘Well, I'll be fucked.' He was once again in control.

As with the previous situation in the North Korean cave, these were men who'd basically lost the plot – they were disillusioned and reduced to the status of animals, and most had given up hope of staying alive. Somehow Jimmy got them going again with the help of the harmonica. Don't let anyone ever tell you that music isn't a powerful medium – it's perhaps the most powerful. When the human voice can no longer reach a man, a ballad or a tune from when his life was good can touch him and make him respond. If Jimmy was wrong about ‘The Fish Song', he was dead right about the mouth organ and its latent power to change men's attitudes.

Staying clean was, of course, impossible, though an orderly would deliver a medium-sized enamel basin containing hot water to the hut every morning. It was first come, first served, with the fittest men always getting to use it and the sick almost never. After the first three people had used it the water was dirty and possibly even dangerous to use, as their infected parts had been cleansed in it. By the time it got to the last patient the bowl was almost empty, the remaining water black and foul. Jimmy organised that a different bloke got first go every morning so that each of us got to get a proper wash every two weeks or so. It may not sound like a big thing, but it was everything. Just knowing that your turn would eventually come around kept a man going. You'd feel the hot water splashing on your face and arms and know it was about as close to heaven as you could get under the circumstances.