We Were Beautiful Once (16 page)

Roger stopped and pulled her close.  “Julie, most things in life are figments of our imagination.  They only exist because we're conscious of them.  Music's that way.  If we disappeared, music would only be noise to the universe.  Love's different.  It is beyond our conscious being, it's that place where beauty, song, the spirit live.  If we accept it, it never vanishes.  Never.”

The light turned red and Roger loosened his grip, but she grabbed and held onto his coat, afraid to let go—aware how close she was to a new order of time, when all things emotionally temporal would suspend until her man returned.  

On the train home that night she wrote:

I know now that I will never have to hurry through life searching to feel what we have at this moment.  If for no other reason than today, I shall always love you.  If for nothing else, I shall always know that whatever I do, wherever I go, it will be not futile or in vain, because all things will be forever cast in this moment
—
be it my music or that unnamed thing which I have yet to meet, or that unknown thing, for which I claim to live.
 
From this moment, it is you.
 

 

The next week Julie and Roger met in Bridgeport for the last time.  Outfitted in navy blue pea coats and rubber boots, the couple spent the day walking arm in arm along the beach at Seaside Park.  Gray and white gulls flew overhead, shrieking open-throated for a scrap of bread.  Except for the gulls and two resolute fishermen casting off the stony breakwaters, they had the foamy lips of the ocean to themselves.  The January tide ebbed and flowed—the long moments of silence marked by the breaking waves that kept time like brushes against the drumhead of a lonely snare.

 “I used to do a lot of fishing when I was a kid, right out there,” Roger said with a longing in his voice.  “My dad and I, we'd get there at dark so we'd see the sun come up.  The ocean and sky would wake up across that span of 180 degrees.  And depending on the way the earth turned, every day was a new brilliance.  Blink and you'd see patterns within patterns in a world that brought us a day that had never before existed.”

Julie loved the poetry in him, and the utter freedom it allowed her own words—words that for most of her life were inside her, tied at the base of her tongue.  “I see that in us, Roger.  It seems love invents a new splendor every morning since the day we met.”  They walked until the new tide came in and the sun found its way to the western sky.  A strong gale roiled the ever-darkening green gray waves and stung their faces.

A weathered old man in a black woolen overcoat walked toward them.  “Sir, would you take a picture of me and my girl?” Roger asked hopefully.

“Sure,” he said, in a gravelly German accent.

Roger pressed the camera into the man's oversized hand.  “Look in here and press this.”

Roger grabbed Julie's bundled waist, and they posed in a mist blowing from an up-tick in wind.  The man stepped back, and Julie imagined how they filled the eyepiece: two faces, hers under her mother's paisley kerchief, Roger's under a black pea cap.  The man's finger located the small silver button.  He steadied the camera. “
Lächeln. Sagen Käse, eh.
”

Feeling Julie shiver beside him, Roger squeezed her.  “I think he means smile.”

The shutter snapped, a frame of silver halide exposed two smiling lovers in the light of a low, winter sun.  As the man handed the camera to Roger, he smiled widely, and Julie heard him say, “Lucky man.”  Roger thanked him.  Julie blushed, then lifted her chin, smiled, staunchly feeling in that moment a woman invincible to her core.

The two lovers moved away from the shore, avoiding the occasional wave that broke free to chart a new high, washing away all earthly footprints.  The gulls vanished one by one.  Roger and Julie walked into a headwind for nearly a mile to the five story, arched entrance to the park where she would take the number 5 bus to the Barnum line and where Roger would take the number 2 to the train station.  Alone at the stop, they held each other, wordless.  It started to rain.  A number 2 came and went.  Then, too soon, a number 5 came into sight.  She boarded, finding a seat adjacent to where Roger stood against the wet wind, promising to be resolute. She focused straight ahead, but then at the last moment turned her head and Roger appeared on the other side of the rain streaked glass, mottled and sparkling.  The bus hissed and lumbered forward, until the lovers, one from the other disappeared.  Slumping beneath the sill, Julie let all the tears she had dammed flow like the rain slipping passed the slippery glass, imagining the lonely winter ahead—the long one, the one where only the nature of things
outside human influence
would decide if she were to ever see Roger again.  And believing with the passion of first love, that of course, she would.

***

During the first five months of Roger's Army life, the couple exchanged dozens of letters.  On June 2, 1950, Roger read orders posted on the bulletin board:
Private Roger Girardin, San Diego, California, Naval Station, port of embarkation.  Assignment: 1st Battalion, 21st Regiment, 24th Infantry Division, Japan.  Arrival estimated June 21, 1950. Report to Command H.
 

Julie had written to him often about her loneliness, and he felt answerable for her sadness, but just before he embarked on his new assignment, he wrote:

Yes, yes we do have better days ahead.  Days when we can pick morning like a wild flower again, when we can love life again (when I know you are there, I truly love life), when we can spend our days with each other and grow old. Right now I cannot see you, your smile, your nakedness.  It's empty here because I can't hear you whisper, laugh, or moan, or even hear your beautiful complaints.  These things are what fill me up.

The barrack's lights went out promptly at nine.  Roger placed the letter in the outgoing mail.  Twenty days later, he received her reply:

Roger, you speak of our love so wonderfully.  See, this is why I love you so much & why it's so hard to ever move on—each day is a struggle.  Last night I played the violin from three till dawn.  The workers leaving to make the six o'clock whistle must have heard me all the way to the bus stop.
 

After he read Julie's letter he noticed a small crepe paper with something hidden inside still in the envelope.  He unfolded the paper and found three blue-button wild flowers neatly pressed and pasted to a tiny card that read:
From My Secret Garden
.

That evening, Roger, Julie and millions of Americans picked up their newspapers.  The headlines all read:
NORTH KOREA INVADES THE SOUTH.
 

 

 

 

ON JUNE 25, 1950, IT RAINED HARD ALONG the invisible line separating the two Koreas.  Sometime in the early morning, rumors flooded Seoul that the North Korean People's Army (NKPA), had crossed the 38
th
parallel.  Three days later, the NKPA stormed into the capital killing, wounding and capturing thousands.  Taken by surprise, the Republic of Korea's (ROK) government based in Seoul set up operations twenty miles south, in Suwon.  President Truman ordered troops flown into the country, in what he described as a police action—giving the impression he was sending forces in for crowd control.  Less concerned with how it played at home, General Douglas MacArthur ordered the 1st Battalion, 21st Regiment, 24th Infantry Division to Suwon, to hold the line of advancing NKPA.  Under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Brad Babcock, a contingent of four hundred and six men departed from Itazuke Air Base, Japan on the morning of July 1.  Included among the troops were a few war horses, like WWII veteran Sergeant Joe Johns, a burly thirty-year-old with one ear, and a large contingent of green privates—like Roger Girardin, the lanky twenty-three-year-old.

Accounts of well-orchestrated troop movements going awry litter military history, and Korea was no exception. Instead of flying to Suwon, the Air Force dropped the men on a landing strip outside of Pusan, hundreds of miles south of the intended destination.  Babcock quickly organized a caravan and moved seventeen miles to board a train that would take the troops partway to Suwon.  Since the train wasn't ready for boarding, Babcock ordered the mess sergeant to break out a chow line, but when his adjutant informed him that, except for the sergeant, the rest of the cooks were left in Japan, he revised his order—C-Rations. The troops were off to a shaky start.

Roger and his fellow neophytes deploying to the front for the first time did not dwell much on food but on the abstract anticipation of combat.  They feared the unidentified, saw a boding evil in everything—from the orderliness of lines to the simplest staccato commands—that seemed loud and exaggerated.  On the platform, waiting to board an old steam train, Roger watched the officers, hushed and heads lowered, sluggishly moving toward the rickety, wooden second-class cabins.

Sergeant Johns stood at the front of the formation.

“This fucking place smells like shit,” he grumbled.

“Smells like rotten cabbage, Sarge,” blurted the man next to Roger.

“No one asked you, soldier.”

A local high school band played a Sousa march near the locomotive, as commands were shouted over horns, calling for the men to climb aboard.  In the brown boxcars coupled behind the officer's second-class cabins, the stench of cabbage gave way to the smell of hay, piss and animal crap.  Each man found a spot suited to his level of anxiety: edgy talkers and listeners, readers (comics, novels, bibles) letter writers, poker players.  Most men were sweat-soaked to the bone.  Roger chose a corner strewn with hardened nuggets of dog shit, pushed them aside, and flopped down onto floorboards suspiciously stained with dried blood.  

A steam whistle blew.  The cars jerked forward as the locomotive chuffed from the station, spitting and spewing a silver-white vaporous exhaust, its sound swallowing the oompah-pah of the golden tubas.  A steady acceleration, a repetition of articulating connecting rods, the mechanical growls as the wheels bore down on the tracks—muffling the bass drums that had earlier drowned the shouts of the officers bringing the men to order.  In due course the train relaxed under a steady quickening, its cadence eventually calming Roger's unease.  He pulled Julie's last letter from his knapsack, and his eyes closed before he finished reading the last line.

At 0800, July 2, the train pulled into Taejon, its whistle startling Roger out of a restless sleep.  Some diehards were still playing poker.  The men jumped from the cars and assembled in rows ten feet from the tracks.  On command, they broke formation, found a dusty space alongside the dirty, gray, clapboard station, opened rations for a second time and shot the breeze—reminding Roger of the Boy Scouts he once saw headed for summer camp.

While the men bivouacked, Colonel Babcock and a band of soldiers, including Roger, drove jeeps north to Osan to survey and choose a location they would defend if the NK headed toward Pusan as predicted.  A few miles south of the village of Suwon the colonel found what he was looking for: a group of small hills that crossed a road—a pinch point for troops moving through.  He designated one—a three-hundred foot elevation, Hill 116—to serve as his “vantage point.”  That night the troops boarded another train to Pyongtaek, leaving them with a ten-mile march that began at midnight.  Three hours later, in a light rain, they reached a muddy flat one-half mile south of Hill 116, where men from the 52nd Field Artillery Battalion were setting up artillery armed with high explosive anti-tank shells.

Roger woke at dawn to the sound of radio chatter. “T-34 tank from the interior.  Look to the north, sir.”  Two lookouts about twenty feet away heard the report, too.  One of them poked his head out of the brush, scanning the horizon through field glasses blurred by a steady downpour.  Handing the glasses to the man next to him, he snarled, “It's crawling like a motherfuckin' bug.”  Thirty minutes later, other tanks were visible.  The radioman reported, “I think there are eight, maybe more, sir.”

 “Recoilless! Recoilless rifles!” Babcock hollered. Johns repeated the order, and men on the forward slope fired the first American rounds of the war—sending a shudder through the troops huddled behind boulders dotting the hill.

“A splash of mud, sir, the mark's short.  Tank's advancing,” reported a veteran.

Babcock radioed the bazooka men lodged in a drainage ditch alongside the road, “Hold your fire until they're on top of you!”  When the lead tank came within twenty yards, an explosive fire and thunder shot out from the turreted gun.  A second later, a concussive vibration rattled the hill, followed by a sharp cracking sound from several toppling hardwoods.  The radio chattered.  “Tank's still coming.”  From another direction, “Medic, medic.”  Roger saw three men covered in branches sprawled in a clearing next to the felled trees.

The men of the 24th crouched or leaned behind the trees and large boulders.  A short while later the point man spotted twenty-five more tanks moving from the north, outside the range of small artillery.  A howitzer from the south encampment blasted off two rounds in succession targeting one of the six forerunners.

“Bug's on fire!” shouted the point man.  The five remaining tanks turned to outflank Babcock's howitzer 105s.  Within two hours, the first of the group of twenty-five T-34 tanks had completely bypassed Hill 116. Roger heard chatter again.

“Sir, one o'clock.” Roger lifted his head from behind his rock and through the rain saw a column of trucks and troops that stretched out as far as his eye could see, reminding him of the panic he felt the first time he saw a five-foot water snake slithering along the ground at his uncle's farm.  He felt like shitting his pants.

Another hour passed before he heard the rattled pulse of sprocket driven tracks; fifteen minutes later the metallic cadence stopped. Enemy infantry emerged like green ghosts out of the downpour.  Three hundred yards north of Hill 116 an NK tank faced the troops.  It raised its turret and fired. Following a thud, screams of “Corpsman, corpsman.” Babcock's bazookas returned fire, but the shells bounced as they fell short.  Roger saw the colonel, a few lieutenants, a dozen noncoms and as many grunts zigzagging toward the top of the hill.  He followed, bolting up a narrow path and tripping over a man gurgling in his own blood.  “Corpsman,” someone yelled.  Roger kept running until he saw a three-boulder fortress, and he fell safely into a cranny, shaking as much from fear as from the cold rain coming down in sheets.