Brother Fish (3 page)

‘Hey! Mel-borne, da young lady on the aeroplane she tol' me it got lots o' green trees like Central Park an' a big brown river run clear through da middle.'

‘You don't want to know, mate,' I replied. ‘Bloody good place for a funeral.'

Jimmy laughed. ‘You da boss here, Brother Fish, ain't no big deal, I's seen Central Park and da Brooklyn River. Dis yo' country, man. What you pro-pose suits me fine – I been hurt bad from dat war and dis nigger in need of nourishin' and yo' mama's cray stew just da medicine I needs.' He pronounced it ‘med-des-seen' in a way he had of separating and often stretching the syllables in a long word.

Of course, today, in the context of hip-hop music and in current African-American street talk the word ‘nigger' is used in a prideful way, much as the derogatory word ‘wog' in our culture has become a badge of honour when used by the children of Italian and Greek migrants. But in 1953 it was a very different America for an African-American cove like Jimmy Oldcorn. In the South they were still lynching Negroes and elsewhere they still openly used the pejorative ‘nigger'.

Moreover, in the Korean War, Negro recruits were initially segregated as they had been in World War II. This was done with the patronising excuse that they preferred to be ‘with their own kind'. While there were coloured combat units, in the eyes of the senior staff officers coloured men made poor soldiers. They were thought to be cowardly, unintelligent, afraid of the dark and only fit for labour battalions, though there was no evidence to substantiate this point of view and the coloured combat units fought as valiantly and intelligently or, on occasion, as poorly as the white. Despite a Presidential decree in 1948 promising equal opportunity in the armed forces, this perverse view persisted. The senior army brass in some instances came from the Southern states and they feared desegregation in the army would make the nigger too big for his boots when he returned home to the South and it would lead to demands for desegregation in institutions and facilities in civilian life.

In fact, in mid-1950 when things started going wrong for the Americans in Korea, Jimmy's unit was thrown into battle where on the 10th of July 1950 it recaptured an important road junction at Yechon. But that was to be a one-off victory. Like the rest of the American units committed from the occupational forces in Japan, they were under-trained, under-strength, under-equipped and most certainly under-motivated.

Some time after coming home I recall reading an account of the early days of the war, and came across this paragraph concerning Jimmy's unit:

Defeat and constant retreat lowered their morale and men withdrew
in confusion and haste, often abandoning their dead, their weapons
and their equipment as they struggled in disorder to the rear.

Although all the regiments committed in those first months were found wanting, the failure of Jimmy's 24th Infantry Regiment against the North Koreans was put down to it being a Negro unit. The equal failure of the other units was not ascribed to them being Caucasian, but instead was blamed on the fact that they were ill-prepared and poorly equipped.

As it happened, Jimmy did not take part in the debacle that followed the US Army's entry into the war or in the ignominious retreat known as the ‘big bug out'. He only arrived in Korea in early 1951 where, shortly after, he took part in a successful skirmish against the enemy rescuing a white unit under difficult circumstances. Nevertheless, he felt the need to defend his regiment. ‘What you expect, Brother Fish, when dem honky units did a bug out to save dey asses, dey say it 'cos da enemy is overwhelming! When we outta der like a jack rabbit wid a pitchfork up his ass, dey say dat because we is cowardly niggers!'

There is another interesting aspect to the 24th Infantry Regiment and, it is true, it was not a happy outfit and had problems other than poor training. The unit contained both black and white officers but the American army would not allow a black officer to command a white officer. For example, if a white lieutenant was posted to a company with a black captain as 2IC, the black captain had to be posted out and a white captain replace him. As a result, each time this happened it sent a clear message to the Negro troops that they were seen as inferior. It is not difficult to see how this would have affected their fighting morale. In October 1951 the US Army was finally desegregated and the 24th Infantry Regiment was absorbed into racially mixed units and ceased to exist. But by this time Jimmy was in the hands of the Chinese.

Jimmy Oldcorn's reason for being with me in Melbourne began in a North Korean field hospital situated in a cave somewhere deep in the mountains that form the inhospitable spine of the Korean peninsula. We'd been chatting together, me talking of home and the island in an attempt to forget our miserable surroundings, when suddenly the idea struck me. ‘Hey, Jimmy, when this is all over why don't you come home with me, mate?' I'd repeated the offer on several occasions and did so again when our release looked like being a real possibility, though on that occasion I was quick to add, ‘Mind you, you'll probably go a bit stir-crazy, there's bugger-all to do except lie in the sun, fish, surf, dive for crayfish or go duck or roo shooting. But my mum cooks real good cray stew.' Sounds funny today, but at the time the qualification wasn't intended to paint a picture of halcyon days spent on an idyllic island. I honestly felt the need to warn him in advance that things were pretty slow-moving back home.

But, of course, he took it to mean an invitation to paradise. He'd tut-tut and shake his head. ‘I don't know, Brother Fish, that I can endure such hardship. It ain't easy when you're accustomed as I is to da cos-mo-pol-itan life of Noo York city, man!'

We were both badly wounded and slowly rotting in the freezing, stinking, dark, wet, dirty, overcrowded cave that passed for a North Korean field hospital. While he always agreed to come, adding some amusing protest such as the one above, we knew it was just talk, a way of bolstering our despairing spirits. We both had badly broken left legs that hadn't set well and our wounds in several other places were infected and suppurating under the now filthy bandages we'd applied ourselves, mine being a couple of field dressings every Australian soldier carries and Jimmy's from the first-aid pouch the Yanks carried. We fully expected to be shot, as the Korean soldiers, used by the Japanese as POW guards during World War II, had a well-documented reputation for senseless brutality. In the chaotic early stage of the war, they were known to shoot their captured wounded. I guess we were lucky – they certainly weren't the friendliest mob, and why they hadn't put a bullet through our heads and put us out of our misery was a complete mystery. Nevertheless, they seemed determined to let the consequences of neglect do the job for them. We were clearly not intended to come out of the cave alive.

Later, prisoners became a valuable negotiating tool in the cease-fire talks. We were half dead and by now happy to receive a merciful bullet to the head when the North Koreans handed us into the care of a Chinese field hospital. Although their conditions proved just as primitive as those of the North Koreans, as our captors they were somewhat more benign. Moreover, they attempted to set our broken legs, though the doctor who did mine injected too little anaesthetic, leaving me in agony for the last part of the process. In any event, both Jimmy's leg and mine were badly set and encased in a carelessly made plaster cast that would cause us both a great deal of grief in the months that followed.

Time, more or less, heals most things, including badly knitted bones, and if you don't die you get better. The pain in my leg eventually got to be tolerable, though it never progressed much past that stage, and the filthy plaster cast remained on. Thankfully our mobility increased. Though we were still on crutches, we began to entertain the idea of an escape. It was all pie in the sky, of course, just another fantasy like Jimmy's coming to Queen Island. For a start we had no idea where we were, and while we may have been able to head south by reading the night sky we had no idea where the front lay. Furthermore, while I may have managed some small distance on my bamboo crutches, Jimmy's barely reached his waist and made movement for him very difficult. He'd utilise the crude crutches as if they were twin walking sticks. It was a slow, jarring and painful form of locomotion and he couldn't sustain it for more than a short period. Eventually I managed to steal a length of field telephone cable and, fisherman style, lashed his crutches together to form a single support that allowed him to move about more efficiently in the manner of a pirate with a peg leg in a kid's pantomime.

We were in the depths of a North Korean winter with night temperatures down to minus thirteen degrees Fahrenheit. Escaping under such conditions would have been a forbidding task for the fit and healthy, never mind two coves more than half-starved with only one pair of sound legs between them.

Spring saw our legs liberated from their plaster casts. The cutting away of the plaster is a memory that will be with me for the remainder of my life. For months I'd endured not only pain but an incessant itching under the cast that very nearly drove me crazy. Nothing I did seemed to help. I would poke a thin piece of bamboo down into the cast and cease the itching for a few moments before it would resume. Sometimes I would use the bamboo stick so frantically that eventually blood would trickle out of the bottom end of the plaster cast. When eventually the cast came off it liberated a vast colony of lice that swarmed in their tens of thousands over my emaciated left leg and thigh. It was such a bizarre sight that the orderly yelled happily to anyone standing close to come over. The tiny, disgusting grey creatures swarmed over the wooden pallet I was lying on and dropped to the earthen floor where the onlookers gleefully stamped on them. It was the best joke all day and the noggies marvelled at my leg, which the lice had picked to raw meat – in some places to the bone. Thankfully, in return for this unexpected sideshow, the orderly powdered it with a sulphur compound and bandaged it up. Two days later they reclaimed the bandage. I hope they washed it for the next cove, but things were that primitive it would have been unusual if they had.

With the removal of our casts we were officially cured, even though we continued to die slowly of malnutrition and the pain in our legs was seldom absent. From the last of the many field hospitals we'd been in we were sent to a POW camp on the China border. What followed was a further twelve months on legs that never quite healed and our wounds, while finally closing, remained tender to the touch. We were also introduced to Chinese methods of interrogation and their attempts at brainwashing, which were often funny though sometimes decidedly not.

So, you can imagine our joy when a cease-fire was called between the United Nations Command and the North Korean/Chinese Alliance and a prisoner-of-war exchange was arranged. We lined up with a bunch of Yanks, Brits, Turks, Canadians, South Africans and, of course, Australians, as well as nations I don't rightly recall. It was August the 9th, 1953 – a day I shall never forget. We waited on the 38th parallel at the exchange point at Panmunjon and I remember turning to Jimmy and saying, ‘We made it, mate, and I have you to thank. I don't reckon I could have done it on me own.' I tried to smile, to make the remark sound a tad flippant, but it didn't work – my lower jaw became unhinged and I found my mouth wobbling and I started to weep.

‘Nosirree! Brother Fish, we done made it together, man! Da one brother without da udder ain't worth a pinch o' sheet.' He gripped me by the shoulder, his large hand still strong. ‘Dat what it mean to be brothers in arms.'

We were then taken to US 121 Medical Evacuation Hospital in Seoul for an assessment of our injuries. We were safely tucked up between clean sheets, our heads and beards and the other hairy parts of our bodies shaved clean, where I noticed for the first time that my pubic hair had turned grey. We were then de-loused, showered, had our open sores dressed and commenced the tricky business of holding down small amounts of meat and milk. I was troubled at the thought of leaving Jimmy Oldcorn for our respective hospitals in Japan. I decided not to mention Queen Island before we parted in case it embarrassed him now that we were free again. I wondered if I'd ever see him again, and this thought really played on my mind. The thought that I was about to lose the best mate I'd ever had kept me awake all night and I became profoundly depressed.

When we'd taken our departure from each other I'd tried to sound cheerful and I could see he was trying to do the same. Men are such silly buggers, they joke when they want to cry, and finally all I could think to say to prevent myself breaking down again was, ‘Go on, piss off you silly bugger!'

Jimmy laughed. ‘I always knew you had no good manners, Brother Fish. I's gonna miss you playing da fish tune.' We shook hands when we should have embraced, but those were different times and men didn't show their feelings as easily as they do today. There was no mention from him about coming to the island.

To my surprise and delight, three weeks later, my leg re-broken and in a decent cast, and while sitting rugged up in a wheelchair in the compound of the British Commonwealth Hospital in Kure, a nurse arrived. ‘You've got a call from Tokyo,' she said, breathlessly, obviously having run from the phone to find me. She took hold of my wheelchair, laughing.

‘What's the joke?' I asked, as she began to wheel me away.

‘Oh, nothing, just your caller. At first I didn't know who he wanted. This deep American voice kept saying, “Put me through to Brother Fish, ma'am!” It wasn't until he described you that I realised who he meant.'