| LAND OF THE MORNING CALM |
Stevan Orescan
Korea, land of the morning calm, and the first true chapter in my journey to the East at the tender
age of eighteen was a million miles from Washington D.C., where I had grown up in the aftermath
of the Second World War. My parents had moved there in the 40s after the hardships of the
depression, and soon settled in to the dull but secure treadmill as employees of the federal
government.
My father, started as a clerk in the Justice Department, then on to the State Department and
eventually ending his career on the Appropriations Committee in the House of Representatives, My
sister and I never knew exactly what he did there but he went off to work every morning dressed in
a three piece suit and a soft felt hat, driving a Chrysler and later a Lincoln Continental, his
destination being the US Capitol building or, “The Hill,” as it was called by those in the loop. He
would return in the evening, sometimes very late when Congress was in session, have a few
highballs, then dinner after which he would fall asleep in his easy chair next to a fat briefcase of
work that never seemed to get smaller. My mother, through the help of friends in high places,
became a Russian translator for the FBI, helping to unscramble and decode messages that passed
over the airways from the evil empire of Uncle Joe Stalin.
I was a problem kid from the very beginning with no interest at all in eventually becoming a paper
shuffling cog in a bureaucracy that I viewed as a cross between a burlesque show and a thieves
market. By the time I was fourteen I had been expelled from half a dozen schools--incorrigible was
the word they used--including a fancy military school—to instill discipline--several expensive prep
schools and a couple of public ones after the more exclusive options had been exhausted. Usually
the stated reason was lack of interest or motivation but more often than not it was for smoking in
the boy’s room, sleeping in class or calling the teachers stupid.
A number of times I ran away from home, once, at age 10, with two youthful companions to
Roanoke Virginia to work in the coal mines. We sneaked onto a freight car rumbling south just like
in the movies but got caught by the yard cop when we arrived and put in detention until our parents
came to bail us out. Another time the neighborhood idiot boy and I borrowed his brother’s car, and
we headed to Florida to work at the race track. We made it all the way to the Georgia-Florida
state line where a beer bellied cop in a cowboy hat spotted us and took us in to the local
reformatory where we spent ten days with poor white trash juvenile delinquents our age eating grits
and watching bull dyke matrons hitting on the young girls.
As the final coup de grace, the finishing blow that would put everyone out of their pain, I was sent
off to a private reform school, Children’s Village, in up state New York for almost a year. There I
learned about zip guns, street gangs and how to protect my rosy white ass from lustful black ghetto
kids who wanted to fuck me. Many a night I lay in bed listening to the muffled cries of younger
kids, weaker than I who, didn’t have the wherewithal to fight them off. Several times I ran away,
hiding out in the slums and on the rooftops of the Puerto Rican section in Brooklyn where I became
acquainted with marijuana and other substance that the residents used to reduce the pain that life in
America had gifted them with.
My sister was the good one that made straight A’s and played the baby grand piano that was
always graced our living room, Of course she would become the concert pianist everyone thought
she would become. The closest she ever came to fulfilling that ambition was getting married to a
second rate Hollywood jazz musician, shooting dope and playing concerts with virtuoso flourish to
a bizarre group of local musical misfits on a dilapidated honky-tonk piano they had scavenged on
one of their early morning trash runs. She was the queen of her neighborhood though and reveled in
the applause and adulation they bestowed on her.
Barely managing to squeak through high school I joined the marines the day I turned eighteen. If it
had been twenty years later I would have gone off and become a hippie but joining the service was
about the only option a young man had then if he wanted to get away from an intolerable home
scene. After two months of boot camp and ten weeks of what they called combat training I was
put on a boat with fifteen hundred other confused young boys and sent to Korea. Most of the two
weeks it took to cross were spent hanging over the side throwing up.
The war was going full blast at the time, August, 1952, and when we landed at Inchon Harbor we
were given a quick briefing, the gist of it being that if we got captured we were only to give the
enemy our name, rank and serial number no matter what, and then hustled into waiting trucks and
driven to a reserve camp about fifty miles away and five miles in back of the front lines. We could
hear explosions and the rat-tat-tat of machine guns in the back ground. It was very dramatic as the
trucks crawled slowly through the dead of night over shell pocked roads, stopping, starting,
bouncing us up and down as we held tightly onto our weapons and wondering if we were going to
be surrounded at any moment and taken prisoner.
We stayed at the reserve camp for about two weeks in order to be assigned to our respective
units and jobs. Most of the time was spent eating, sleeping, shooting dice and playing cards with
our accumulated pay and doing a bit of guard duty. Every once in a while the Navy corpsman
would come around offering 90 proof alcohol for sale. No marijuana available at the time. The
Bible belt southern soldiers seemed to favor it more than anyone else. It reminded them of their
white lightning home brew, they said.
I was assigned as part of a team to a 75 caliber recoilless rifle in the beginning, a 450 pound
monster that four men carried, and then to a 35 caliber machine gun. I had an M-1 rifle on my
shoulder and a 45 caliber pistol on my hip. Like John Wayne. Very macho. The M-1 rifle I had
spent two weeks with at the Paris Island boot camp, failing miserably to qualify as a marksman.
The other weapons I had no experience with whatsoever but as far as the Marine Corps was
concerned I was ready, along with my other ill trained comrades, to fight and die defending
democracy from communism. It was like little boys playing war and our leaders, not much better
qualified, most fresh out of ROTC or officers training school at Quantico. Ring knockers they were
called, sporting their recent college graduation rings and shiny silver bars on their collars and moving
with embarrassed authority in an attempt to appear like they knew what they were doing. I know
they didn’t know what they were doing because after I returned from Korea and was made an
instructor at the officer’s training school, I still didn’t know what I was doing so how could they?
Our wars are run by idiots.
Then we were shipped up to the MLR, the main line of resistance, which was a long snake of a
trench line that separated us from them, the good guys from the bad guys, the white heroes from the
yellow devils. We were the saviors, they were the gooks and slope heads
The trench, many miles long, was about three to four feet wide and about five to six feet deep
with pockets of sandbag bunkers and gun fortifications off to the sides where we lived, slept, ate,
shat and died. The whole place was crawling with rats, big fat ones that fed off the C-ration
garbage the troops threw out and over, into no man’s land, that area of darkness that separated us
from them. Corned beef hash beef stew, lima beans and hot dogs, stale chocolate, crackers and
jam, standard fare, American style, that everyone soon tired of; take a few bites, keep the
cigarettes and toss the rest over the trench line. The rats were big and ugly and carriers of
hemorrhagic fever, and often just a touch from one was enough to cause fever, vomiting, and
internal bleeding that often ended in death. We were more afraid of the rats than the Chinese or
North Koreans, and cries in the night and the scream of rats! rats! rats! were usually enough to
keep us awake until the morning, and more than once we heard that someone we knew had died
after being kissed by one.
During the day the Chinese would lob mortar and heavy artillery our way, coming close enough to
cause casualties at times. We would do the same but if our aim was a bad as theirs we didn’t get
too many. It was just as well, they were all young kids like us, even younger, thirteen and fourteen
some of them, bundled up in thick cotton padded uniforms with rags wrapped around their feet for
boots. We had down sleeping bags and big insulated “Mickey Mouse” boots for our feet to ward
off frostbite in the winter. It was so cold that when you took a leak it would freeze as soon as it hit
the ground.
At night there would be patrols into no man’s land, ostensibly to scout the territory. These usually
consisted of a squad or two of young marines led by a second lieutenant fresh off the boat. When
we bumped into a patrol of theirs a firefight would ensue and everybody would hit the ground and
start shooting. No one really knew what they were shooting at, and everyone so scared shitless it
didn’t matter. I imagine it was like that on the other side as well. It was a Laurel and Hardy act
played out by children who had no idea of what was going on. I always prayed that the rounds that
came out of my machine gun never killed anyone and I would usually shoot up in the air when I had
to shoot if I could get away with it. I guess if I had been confronted eyeball to eyeball I would have
shot to kill but I am grateful that never happened.
Twenty-four hour guard duty on the MLR was often spent sleeping, reading or shooting the
breeze with a friend. At night we would fire off hundreds of rounds of tracer bullets into the night
sky just to see the beautiful arc they made as they fell into enemy territory. If anyone questioned
why so much shooting you’d just say you thought you saw some gooks approaching.
Most of the day when we were not on guard duty we stayed in our bunkers and played pinochle,
sometimes taking a shortcut by slipping over the trench line to visit friends down the line in distant
bunkers. Often this would bring incoming fire from the Chinese but we were usually so bored we
didn’t care. At night they would shoot flares up to illuminate our position hoping to catch us
unawares. We would do the same. It was like a Hollywood movie set except the bullets were real
and people were getting killed.
Every two weeks they would load us into a truck and take us in back of the line to the shower
tent where we would scrape the dirt off under hot water, drop our dirty clothes in a pile and pick
out clean ones from another pile. Every two months we would go into a reserve camp for two
weeks were we would tank up on unlimited food and beer and watch a movie or two. Every
evening a group of the more courageous warriors would wade across the river to cohabit with the
local village women. With a 45 strapped to their hip or a carbine hanging from their shoulder there
was never any question of payment; they called it the spoils of war.
On the last night of the war I went out on a patrol with a squad of men and a young officer who
had been in Korea for about a week. The armistice was to go into effect at twelve midnight and this
pink faced lieutenant was angry that the war was going to end without him having seen any action. It
was about ten o’clock in the evening and no one wanted to go out on a patrol so close to the end,
but he was insistent. “ I came to Korea to kill gooks and by God I am going to kill some or die
trying.” He led us through a minefield. A bouncing betty bounced up and exploded, killing him
instantly, blowing a large hole in the head of the guy in back of him, blowing a face full of dirt onto
me and wounding the guy directly in back of me. They were the last ones to get killed in the Korean
War. It was about that time that I started thinking about karma.
So the war was now over. 30,000 American soldiers dead, 70,000 South Korean soldiers and
500,000 civilians dead, 4,500 UN soldiers dead and 780,000 North Korean and Chinese soldiers
and civilians dead. And for what? Why for democracy, of course. Fifty years later the burning bush
speaks again and his apostles repeat the same scenario.
A week later I went to Seoul for a day of R & R, rest and recuperation. I drank some Korean
whiskey, weak stuff that tasted like ginger ale. Completely zoned out, I was thrown on the truck
with a few other drunken marines and we bounced back to our reserve camp about fifty miles
away. The next morning when I awoke and tried to lace up my boots my right arm wouldn’t work.
Nerve damage they told me, it will be okay in a few months. That was fine I thought, now I
wouldn’t have to salute. It also got me a ride back to the states in an airplane.
age of eighteen was a million miles from Washington D.C., where I had grown up in the aftermath
of the Second World War. My parents had moved there in the 40s after the hardships of the
depression, and soon settled in to the dull but secure treadmill as employees of the federal
government.
My father, started as a clerk in the Justice Department, then on to the State Department and
eventually ending his career on the Appropriations Committee in the House of Representatives, My
sister and I never knew exactly what he did there but he went off to work every morning dressed in
a three piece suit and a soft felt hat, driving a Chrysler and later a Lincoln Continental, his
destination being the US Capitol building or, “The Hill,” as it was called by those in the loop. He
would return in the evening, sometimes very late when Congress was in session, have a few
highballs, then dinner after which he would fall asleep in his easy chair next to a fat briefcase of
work that never seemed to get smaller. My mother, through the help of friends in high places,
became a Russian translator for the FBI, helping to unscramble and decode messages that passed
over the airways from the evil empire of Uncle Joe Stalin.
I was a problem kid from the very beginning with no interest at all in eventually becoming a paper
shuffling cog in a bureaucracy that I viewed as a cross between a burlesque show and a thieves
market. By the time I was fourteen I had been expelled from half a dozen schools--incorrigible was
the word they used--including a fancy military school—to instill discipline--several expensive prep
schools and a couple of public ones after the more exclusive options had been exhausted. Usually
the stated reason was lack of interest or motivation but more often than not it was for smoking in
the boy’s room, sleeping in class or calling the teachers stupid.
A number of times I ran away from home, once, at age 10, with two youthful companions to
Roanoke Virginia to work in the coal mines. We sneaked onto a freight car rumbling south just like
in the movies but got caught by the yard cop when we arrived and put in detention until our parents
came to bail us out. Another time the neighborhood idiot boy and I borrowed his brother’s car, and
we headed to Florida to work at the race track. We made it all the way to the Georgia-Florida
state line where a beer bellied cop in a cowboy hat spotted us and took us in to the local
reformatory where we spent ten days with poor white trash juvenile delinquents our age eating grits
and watching bull dyke matrons hitting on the young girls.
As the final coup de grace, the finishing blow that would put everyone out of their pain, I was sent
off to a private reform school, Children’s Village, in up state New York for almost a year. There I
learned about zip guns, street gangs and how to protect my rosy white ass from lustful black ghetto
kids who wanted to fuck me. Many a night I lay in bed listening to the muffled cries of younger
kids, weaker than I who, didn’t have the wherewithal to fight them off. Several times I ran away,
hiding out in the slums and on the rooftops of the Puerto Rican section in Brooklyn where I became
acquainted with marijuana and other substance that the residents used to reduce the pain that life in
America had gifted them with.
My sister was the good one that made straight A’s and played the baby grand piano that was
always graced our living room, Of course she would become the concert pianist everyone thought
she would become. The closest she ever came to fulfilling that ambition was getting married to a
second rate Hollywood jazz musician, shooting dope and playing concerts with virtuoso flourish to
a bizarre group of local musical misfits on a dilapidated honky-tonk piano they had scavenged on
one of their early morning trash runs. She was the queen of her neighborhood though and reveled in
the applause and adulation they bestowed on her.
Barely managing to squeak through high school I joined the marines the day I turned eighteen. If it
had been twenty years later I would have gone off and become a hippie but joining the service was
about the only option a young man had then if he wanted to get away from an intolerable home
scene. After two months of boot camp and ten weeks of what they called combat training I was
put on a boat with fifteen hundred other confused young boys and sent to Korea. Most of the two
weeks it took to cross were spent hanging over the side throwing up.
The war was going full blast at the time, August, 1952, and when we landed at Inchon Harbor we
were given a quick briefing, the gist of it being that if we got captured we were only to give the
enemy our name, rank and serial number no matter what, and then hustled into waiting trucks and
driven to a reserve camp about fifty miles away and five miles in back of the front lines. We could
hear explosions and the rat-tat-tat of machine guns in the back ground. It was very dramatic as the
trucks crawled slowly through the dead of night over shell pocked roads, stopping, starting,
bouncing us up and down as we held tightly onto our weapons and wondering if we were going to
be surrounded at any moment and taken prisoner.
We stayed at the reserve camp for about two weeks in order to be assigned to our respective
units and jobs. Most of the time was spent eating, sleeping, shooting dice and playing cards with
our accumulated pay and doing a bit of guard duty. Every once in a while the Navy corpsman
would come around offering 90 proof alcohol for sale. No marijuana available at the time. The
Bible belt southern soldiers seemed to favor it more than anyone else. It reminded them of their
white lightning home brew, they said.
I was assigned as part of a team to a 75 caliber recoilless rifle in the beginning, a 450 pound
monster that four men carried, and then to a 35 caliber machine gun. I had an M-1 rifle on my
shoulder and a 45 caliber pistol on my hip. Like John Wayne. Very macho. The M-1 rifle I had
spent two weeks with at the Paris Island boot camp, failing miserably to qualify as a marksman.
The other weapons I had no experience with whatsoever but as far as the Marine Corps was
concerned I was ready, along with my other ill trained comrades, to fight and die defending
democracy from communism. It was like little boys playing war and our leaders, not much better
qualified, most fresh out of ROTC or officers training school at Quantico. Ring knockers they were
called, sporting their recent college graduation rings and shiny silver bars on their collars and moving
with embarrassed authority in an attempt to appear like they knew what they were doing. I know
they didn’t know what they were doing because after I returned from Korea and was made an
instructor at the officer’s training school, I still didn’t know what I was doing so how could they?
Our wars are run by idiots.
Then we were shipped up to the MLR, the main line of resistance, which was a long snake of a
trench line that separated us from them, the good guys from the bad guys, the white heroes from the
yellow devils. We were the saviors, they were the gooks and slope heads
The trench, many miles long, was about three to four feet wide and about five to six feet deep
with pockets of sandbag bunkers and gun fortifications off to the sides where we lived, slept, ate,
shat and died. The whole place was crawling with rats, big fat ones that fed off the C-ration
garbage the troops threw out and over, into no man’s land, that area of darkness that separated us
from them. Corned beef hash beef stew, lima beans and hot dogs, stale chocolate, crackers and
jam, standard fare, American style, that everyone soon tired of; take a few bites, keep the
cigarettes and toss the rest over the trench line. The rats were big and ugly and carriers of
hemorrhagic fever, and often just a touch from one was enough to cause fever, vomiting, and
internal bleeding that often ended in death. We were more afraid of the rats than the Chinese or
North Koreans, and cries in the night and the scream of rats! rats! rats! were usually enough to
keep us awake until the morning, and more than once we heard that someone we knew had died
after being kissed by one.
During the day the Chinese would lob mortar and heavy artillery our way, coming close enough to
cause casualties at times. We would do the same but if our aim was a bad as theirs we didn’t get
too many. It was just as well, they were all young kids like us, even younger, thirteen and fourteen
some of them, bundled up in thick cotton padded uniforms with rags wrapped around their feet for
boots. We had down sleeping bags and big insulated “Mickey Mouse” boots for our feet to ward
off frostbite in the winter. It was so cold that when you took a leak it would freeze as soon as it hit
the ground.
At night there would be patrols into no man’s land, ostensibly to scout the territory. These usually
consisted of a squad or two of young marines led by a second lieutenant fresh off the boat. When
we bumped into a patrol of theirs a firefight would ensue and everybody would hit the ground and
start shooting. No one really knew what they were shooting at, and everyone so scared shitless it
didn’t matter. I imagine it was like that on the other side as well. It was a Laurel and Hardy act
played out by children who had no idea of what was going on. I always prayed that the rounds that
came out of my machine gun never killed anyone and I would usually shoot up in the air when I had
to shoot if I could get away with it. I guess if I had been confronted eyeball to eyeball I would have
shot to kill but I am grateful that never happened.
Twenty-four hour guard duty on the MLR was often spent sleeping, reading or shooting the
breeze with a friend. At night we would fire off hundreds of rounds of tracer bullets into the night
sky just to see the beautiful arc they made as they fell into enemy territory. If anyone questioned
why so much shooting you’d just say you thought you saw some gooks approaching.
Most of the day when we were not on guard duty we stayed in our bunkers and played pinochle,
sometimes taking a shortcut by slipping over the trench line to visit friends down the line in distant
bunkers. Often this would bring incoming fire from the Chinese but we were usually so bored we
didn’t care. At night they would shoot flares up to illuminate our position hoping to catch us
unawares. We would do the same. It was like a Hollywood movie set except the bullets were real
and people were getting killed.
Every two weeks they would load us into a truck and take us in back of the line to the shower
tent where we would scrape the dirt off under hot water, drop our dirty clothes in a pile and pick
out clean ones from another pile. Every two months we would go into a reserve camp for two
weeks were we would tank up on unlimited food and beer and watch a movie or two. Every
evening a group of the more courageous warriors would wade across the river to cohabit with the
local village women. With a 45 strapped to their hip or a carbine hanging from their shoulder there
was never any question of payment; they called it the spoils of war.
On the last night of the war I went out on a patrol with a squad of men and a young officer who
had been in Korea for about a week. The armistice was to go into effect at twelve midnight and this
pink faced lieutenant was angry that the war was going to end without him having seen any action. It
was about ten o’clock in the evening and no one wanted to go out on a patrol so close to the end,
but he was insistent. “ I came to Korea to kill gooks and by God I am going to kill some or die
trying.” He led us through a minefield. A bouncing betty bounced up and exploded, killing him
instantly, blowing a large hole in the head of the guy in back of him, blowing a face full of dirt onto
me and wounding the guy directly in back of me. They were the last ones to get killed in the Korean
War. It was about that time that I started thinking about karma.
So the war was now over. 30,000 American soldiers dead, 70,000 South Korean soldiers and
500,000 civilians dead, 4,500 UN soldiers dead and 780,000 North Korean and Chinese soldiers
and civilians dead. And for what? Why for democracy, of course. Fifty years later the burning bush
speaks again and his apostles repeat the same scenario.
A week later I went to Seoul for a day of R & R, rest and recuperation. I drank some Korean
whiskey, weak stuff that tasted like ginger ale. Completely zoned out, I was thrown on the truck
with a few other drunken marines and we bounced back to our reserve camp about fifty miles
away. The next morning when I awoke and tried to lace up my boots my right arm wouldn’t work.
Nerve damage they told me, it will be okay in a few months. That was fine I thought, now I
wouldn’t have to salute. It also got me a ride back to the states in an airplane.
 | |  |