Air Force Eagles (33 page)

"Perhapszz." When she was excited, a trace of her accent returned. "If you live long enough. I wish you'd get a job where you didn't have to fly."

"No—he'd like that. I just want to avoid him. If he comes here, that's different. I can't believe that he'd hurt me, but he might try to take Ulrich away. I don't know what he'd do to you."

"Profoundly sorry. He was once a good man and I loved him very much. The war changed him; it changed me, too. If I could help him, I would, but no one can."

*

Salinas, California/November 4, 1952

The day had started well. Bandy and Patty went to the polls early, where for the first time in their lives they didn't cancel each other's votes. After McCarthy's violent attack, they'd become straight-ticket Democrats, even though Bandy liked Eisenhower better than Stevenson. But everything turned sour when they returned to their factory. It was hell to see something they'd built up so quickly and so well disintegrate. Half the work force had already been laid off; the rest would go when they finished the work in progress. No more airplanes were waiting on the ramp—now they were being flown straight to McNaughton's Nashville plant.

The Air Force, reacting to pressure from Congress, the public, and Milo Ruddick, had shut off the contractual spigot. There would be no more airplanes coming in for refurbishment.

Hadley had been waiting for them in their tiny conference room.

"First of all, Bandy, how did it go with Varney?"

The general had called Bandfield back to Washington the week before. "I offered to resign my commission, but he wouldn't let me. He's sending me to Boeing, to try and help out on the production problems they're having with the B-47."

"Well, that's a concession, anyway. I'm surprised, I thought sure this was it, that Ruddick had put the squeeze on you to get you out." Roget turned and asked, "How bad is it with the banks, Patty?"

"Well, I never should have tried to buy this place; the banks offered to build it and lease it back, but I figured we were good for four years of war work, anyway. My fault."

Roget shook his head vigorously. "No, it was the right thing to do. What's it mean to us now?"

"Well, we can't keep it up. I'm going to try to go back to the banks and sell it to them, then rent or lease it back. We'll lose our shirt, but we'll be out from under the payments."

Bandfield said, "Maybe we can just rent half of it back; we wouldn't need the whole facility at first."

"Let me talk to them. I'm not sure I want somebody else in here—if we sell as many executive planes as I think we can, we'll need the space. If somebody else comes in and does well, they'll want to run us out."

"Patty's right; if we can hold on to the whole place, let's do it. And if we start making B-17s into water bombers, we'll need all the space we can get."

Roget had already dismissed his anger against McCarthy and

Ruddick. If he could have gotten his hands around their necks, he would have cheerfully strangled them, but they were unassailable, and now the problem was there in Salinas, just like always—how to wring a living out of aviation.

*

Pyoktong, North Korea/November 23, 1952

Demanding to be treated as the other pilots were treated turned out to be a worse idea than pouring the tea on Colonel Kim. John had lost track of time since the rapid-fire events of that morning, but it no longer mattered. He knew he was going to die.

Each day brought him closer to breaking. Time was passing in a blur, just black moments between the beatings and the solitary, yet there were rare moments of great lucidity. A few days before, as he was being walked to a new slit trench, Marshall had turned a corner in the crooked street and had suddenly looked out on a sublime scene, the first element of beauty he'd, ever seen in Korea. The sun had broken through and was gleaming off the fresh snow blanketing the mountains that arced around Pyoktong, their white edge sharply defined by the deep blue of a huge lake. He'd been aware of the mountains but never knew until that moment that the lake was nearby. Startled, he hesitated momentarily and the guard clubbed him to the ground. Reflexively, he curled into a ball as the guard beat consciousness from him with his rifle butt.

Now, an unknown number of days later, still confused from the beating, he was told he would meet Colonel Kim's replacement. After a long wait in a cornstalk-lined mud hut, he was jerked to his feet and the viperous Colonel Choi entered his life, a short, sallow-skinned Korean who tapped a strip of bamboo against his hip like a riding crop.

Through Marshall's throbbing head came the thought: This guy looks like the villain in a Jap war movie.

Choi leaned forward, his brow beetling over thick, Coke-bottle-bottom glasses.

"Captain Marshall, I'm Colonel Choi. I will be interrogating you in the future. You will cooperate." He spoke without an accent.

He sensed his question coming, knew he should not ask it, and plunged on anyway. "Colonel Choi, haven't I seen you in the movies?"

Marshall heard the crack of bamboo before he felt it slice into his cheek. Raising on his toes, Choi rained blows on both sides, quick precise taps that cut flesh but left him conscious.

"Sit down, Captain Marshall. That's just a taste of what you'll get from me if you show any sign of disrespect. You will cooperate."

Marshall sat down carefully.

In the days that followed, Choi's questions were routine, but each carried the implicit threat of quick, sharp punishment. Once he said, "I'll never beat you beyond your endurance, Captain Marshall. I'll just push you to your limit of pain and hold you there until you tell me what I want to hear."

He kept his word, as aware of Marshall's physical limits as a physician, metering punishment out carefully, knowing that fear was as debilitating as the actual punishment.

His blows and threats were coupled with mind-numbing diatribes on the superiority of the Communist system and the certain downfall of capitalism. As Marshall's strength and mental acuity gradually returned, he drew comfort sometimes thinking what his own little capitalist, Saundra, would have had to say to Choi.

Choi differed from Kim in another respect. Someone was funneling him accurate information on racism in America. When he came in each day, he had fresh—and reasonable—statistics on Whites versus Negroes in employment, education, conviction rates, prison sentences, lynchings, percentage of Negro officers—anything that adversely reflected on the system. Choi didn't demand a reaction—he just fed the material, contrasting it sometimes with the harmony of ethnic relations in the Communist system. Marshall was sure that someone had provided Choi with the phrase, but he would conclude each of his race lectures with, "Remember, Captain Marshall, that Communism has no prejudices about color. And remember, too, your Air Force has forgotten you; to your Air Force you are just a nigger."

Irritated by the term nigger, knowing that it was true for some, like Coleman, Bones had declared a private war against the interrogator. The rules were weighted so that Choi must inevitably win—but he knew also that he would never surrender, never break. Choi could kill him—and he had given some thought to killing himself—but he would not give him any of the limited military information he had, nor would he ever admit to the unspecified war crimes he was supposed to have committed.

His biggest challenge was to remember the lies he'd told before, for Choi was obviously working from the papers Kim had prepared. Once Kim had asked him to describe the F-86; Marshall had spun out a long line of technical misinformation, most of it taken from material he'd read about the MiG, liberally laced with "secrets" from the Avia he'd flown—a millennium before?—in Israel. Kim had been ecstatic, and he forwarded the material with relish. When Choi repeated the question, with Kim's report in front of him, Marshall's weakened state made it difficult to recall exactly what he'd said.

Bones had discovered immediately after Kim's departure how very special his rations had been. Now all he got, twice a day, were wooden bowls of cold water and
chook,
a watered, gummy rice that every fourth or fifth day might also contain a fishhead or some garlic buds. Either was very welcome. Before, he felt as if he were starving; now he really was and knew that his nickname had never been more appropriate.

The first serving came before dawn. There was not much time to eat, yet he always saved the bowl of water to rinse the chook bowl, a spoonful at a time, to make sure he got every dreg. The second came at the midpoint of the evening, when the interrogators broke for their own supper. Then he had a little more time and would carefully space his bites, chewing each one until every trace of it, even the barely perceptible flavor, had entirely disappeared. When he was finished he would scrape the bowl with the spoon, as if he could express nourishment from the wood.

There was no way to tell the time, but judging by the appearance of his interrogators as they tired, he was being questioned from about six in the morning until one or two the next morning. The interrogators grew progressively more exhausted and ill-tempered, even though they took turns and often absented themselves, one or two at a time.

The prayers his dad had taught him were sustaining him mentally, but there was nothing he could do about his physical deterioration. There were no mirrors, but he could see his spindly limbs and feel his bony ribs. Sleeping on the hard-packed dirt floor was an agony. After eighteen or twenty hours in the interrogation cell, he'd collapse on the frigid floor and fall into a dreamless sleep for an hour or two until the insistent pain from his arms and bony hips would awaken him. He'd massage himself for a few minutes, then drop back into exhausted slumber like a stone falling into a well, repeating the process until the guard kicked him awake.

Marshall had already decided that the kicks, like most of the Korean brutality, were not aimed at him specifically; they treated each other the same way, and it was only natural that he would be low man on the kicking pole. The nine guards lived in the same hut with him, all in a room not much larger than his own four-by-eight-foot space. He watched their crude domestic arrangements—patching each other's socks, the tattered rags still on their feet; studiously picking lice out of seams; interminably reading, or pretending to, from Communist textbooks. They shared their frugal rations, and they stole from each other and everyone else without remorse. The lowest man in the guard's pecking order, evidenced by the fact that everyone kicked him and he kicked no one but Marshall, was U Eun Chur. U didn't kick him as often as the others did, and he had once given him a small frozen potato to eat, a gift from God. When the other guards were out of the room, U Eun Chur would come over and point to his skin and to Marshall's, then make a kicking motion with his foot. Marshall assumed he meant that they were both dark, that they were both maltreated.

Yet everyone in Korea was maltreated—and didn't seem to know it. Even field-grade officers lived animal-like lives, five or six dossed down in a room with only a rough canvas tarpaulin as a blanket, eating coarse, ill-prepared food, and entertaining themselves by studying Marxist doctrine. Women had achieved true equality—they lived under the same primitive conditions, sleeping under the same tarpaulin. There were no signs of any sexual relationships.

On one of his trips to the slit-trench, he saw a little Korean boy, no more than three, run outside into the subzero weather totally nude, relieve himself, spend a few moments casually examining some refuse in the snow, then scamper back into his mud hut. They were hardy people—no wonder they were so tough to fight.

In some mysterious way, Choi's merciless pounding was strengthening him like a blacksmith tempers steel. In recent days Marshall had undergone a miraculous transformation for which he was supremely grateful. He was no longer afraid; the quivering jelly feel in his belly was gone, even when, like yesterday, Choi was raging, "I'll kill you, but that's not all. I'll go to the United States; I'll kill your wife and your family!"

The week before, the threat would have terrified him. Now he snarled back, "You blind gook bastard, you couldn't find the United States if it was tattooed on your ass. Shut up and let me alone."

Marshall wasn't sure what had given him this new courage. It still hurt just as much to perch on the interrogation stool for hours, or to lay bent up on the frozen floor, or to take the casual blows and kicks, but the fear was gone. Analyzing it, he realized that lack of sleep and agonizing hunger drove fear away by making death seem attractive.

In the end, he became almost grateful for Choi and his continual threats of punishment and death because they gave him strength to hate so much. And he even learned a lesson, when Choi began to talk with obvious relish of tortures to come.

"Captain Marshall, things have been easy for you so far. If you do not confess to your criminal actions, I will have a hose inserted in your rectum, and force water into you until your stomach is flushed out of your mouth."

"Go ahead! I haven't committed any criminal acts. I hope you do flush me out, it will kill me. And when the war is over, you will be a war criminal, and you will be hung like Tojo. And I will meet you in hell and kick your fat Korean face in!"