Photo by Lance Anderson
The times I remember us throwing Smiley out the hatch on that plane always come two different ways.
In the first, we all heave to with all of our gear—he braces his arms and combat boots in the corners of the hatch like a cat that’s trying to avoid getting a bath or being shoved into a box. Eventually we push him out and he goes with a scream that keeps going, slowly getting harder to hear until he becomes a tiny dot too far in the past to even see any more.
And in the second way, Smiley hangs on the edge of the hatch with those soft little delicate hands of his, but we all push together again, and he hangs on with one last hand. Someone pries that off and then Smiley tumbles forward so silent in the roar of the wind and engines and disappears behind the plane like a forgotten dream. And though all of us troopers are at first in silent awe at the sight, we then let out a great yelling cheer as he leaves our field of vision.
::
Smiley was our South Korean interpreter. I think a lot of the guys hated him just because he was a gook. Things were confusing—we were here to kill some gooks, but also here to help others. They all looked the same to us. But damn it if Smiley didn’t have heart. He said he couldn’t get into his military because of his eyesight, and the guy did wear some thick dame-repellant army issue glasses. He loved eating in the American mess hall and sitting at the table with us G.I.s. Especially the paratroopers he was assigned to be interpreter for. I sometimes thought he was funny and at others, I kind of felt sorry for him. He didn’t know what a pack of cutthroats he was dealing with. He was an earnest guy, and though he was about the same age as most of us, we were worlds apart. He would get very excited in the mess hall eating G.I. lima beans and ham and telling us excitedly that he couldn’t wait until we attacked the North Koreans and the chinks (he had picked up the word from us).
He would start going on about how this was all the chinks at work, they were the ones behind this. First kicked around by Japan, now China. Pask said the japs were way worse than the chinks. He’d been at Sugamo and had seen a lot of those jap criminals interrogated. Said he’d seen Tojo interrogated. I don’t even want to go into what he said those japs did to some of the G.I.s that they caught. Pask had some pretty bad stories. He didn’t like telling them too much, either.
Smiley had a huge head. Big ears. The crew cut wasn’t doing him any favors either. He was in good shape and the olive drab uniform fit him well, maybe a little baggy in places. He had the glasses and the giant mouth with big teeth; his whole face was kind of wide. Most of the time people hardly talked to him at chow; he just sat and watched us with enthusiasm as we talked about baseball and broads and how many gooks we were going to kill and such things.
Eventually we said he was going to have to jump with us—he was very interested in this. He had to do at least one jump if he wanted to wear wings before we went to war.
Old Smiley got real excited about this—he said he knew about paratroopers in World War II. He wanted to jump. Just then Harford walked up holding a plate with a piece of cake on it. He was a big-headed G.I. with giant teeth and lazy eyes. He said, “You guys talking about jumping?” We all said we were and Smiley wanted to jump too. “So old Smiley wants to jump, eh?” he looked around at us with those sleepy eyes. “No 34-foot tower, no 250-foot tower? No T-7s crushing the nuts outta you? You know I was the best at the 250-foot in my class? No shit, just like Coney Island—I was there once too. Smiley’ll just have to jump with us, out of the C119, I reckon. Pretty risky without the training and prep. You think you can handle that, boy?”
He looked at Smiley, who looked down at his lima beans. He slowly raised his head and faced Harford as best as he could. “I can jump,” was all he said with a glint in his glasses. He looked serious in an almost funny way.
“Well I guess we need someone with us who understands all that hing ding these chinks are running around babbling. And I guess it has to be a gook. Couldn’t they have found us a gook trooper?” Harford smiled his hayseed smile, took a bite of his cake, and said, “Remember Jenke? Our first casualty? He was all hot to jump too.”
::
Lieutenant Jenke lived the paratrooper life to the core. His physical training scores were at the top of the 187th ARCT. He led us on battalion runs. He stood at the front of the line in the chow hall and egged us on while we got food and ate. “Get some of those potatoes, trooper!” or ”Don’t turn down my gravy, trooper!”
He had sort of dark eyes and his boots and uniform were A-1. If we were doing anything, he was always in the middle of it. He looked like a tall thin Rudolph Valentino wearing jump wings. He could assemble and disassemble his M1 and his .45 in the dark. He took great quiet pride in these skills.
A trooper who helped Jenke move into his room at Kimpo (he was an officer, so he got a private room) said he got a view into his footlocker, and it was all issue. Nothing personal at all. No letter writing stuff, no civvies, no pictures of friends, family, or dames—and everything was crisp, square and angular. Not a speck of dust.
I remember when we first got to Kimpo, and we were all kind of nervous when we got to the warehouse where we would stay a couple of nights and we heard his voice. We all got around him and there in the lightbulb light and dust, he gave a speech about how we were going to complete our mission and complete it well. We were Americans and professionals, and we had the right men, leaders, and training for this mission, he said. He was a real natural officer, and none of us would forget his solid stance that night. He was a rock of strength for us that night. We knew things were going to be okay when he was done talking. We all went to our bunks feeling pretty good even though we were in a strange place.
Then something happened that really shocked us all. It was one of the last warm nights of September. It was a warm night when every noise seems magnified by the heat, and the footsteps of even the quietest walking guard going by seem to tap and click too much. Nights like that aren’t easy to sleep on even when a person’s tired.
The shot broke the night like a thunderbolt. We all knew it was a gunshot though. We’d heard enough of them by then. Some may have first thought we were being attacked or something, but it was only one shot and a lot of loud footrunning and then yelling. Troopers jumped out of their bunks in their underwear and ran to where the noise came from. Dust floated in the air, just like when Jenke gave his speech that night. We got to the doorway where the noise came from—it was Jenke’s room. He had his own since he was an officer. The looks on troopers’ faces were of shock and surprise and something like plain fear and stupefication. Someone was yelling—the watch I think. “Get the medic, it’s Jenke—oh Lord he’s shot. He’s a bloody mess! GET THE FUCKIN’ MEDIC!”
There was more rushing around and the medic came up in his underwear, carrying a canvas field satchel. He worked his way into the room, and it got a little quieter. Then right away, “What the hell happened? He’s dead! Is this his .45?” The night just seemed to freeze and go quiet, and that’s how it always comes back, frozen, us standing around outside his door in a crowd on the hot September night.
They said he was cleaning his .45, and it went off and shot him in the head. The chaplain had a small service for him and then they shipped his body back to the States. Our first casualty.
::
Smiley’s problem wasn’t that he wanted to be a paratrooper or jump with paratroopers; he wanted to belong. He wanted to belong to a bunch of guys who didn’t like him, or his people, or his country, or his food. It was the opposite with him. He loved Americans, and particularly G.I.s. He loved our food, our ideals (as he understood them), our power, and the comradery he envied in particular. He wanted to be American and Korean.
::
And Smiley goes out the hatch—he’s wearing paratrooper boots with the slanted heel under the arch so they don’t get caught on the rim of the hatch when a jumper goes. His line goes out and snaps and we see the T-10 jerk him like a doll—his legs and arms fly out in front of him and his helmeted head snaps forward and then he’s gone.
***
The plane was noisy inside as usual. The engines and the wind combined in one loud, dull, and steady droning roar. Smiley was just a few guys back from the open hatch. His big mouth was open kind of in a sad sort of way. He panted nervously with his large mouth moving. He looked kind of pitiful. Some of us actually felt kind of sorry for him. It was at times like that for a second you almost thought about if he had a gook family at home who was worried about him, or maybe told him he was worthless or something else, like he was going to be a somebody. Some had been saying that he’d lost his family in the war. Either they were dead or he couldn’t find them. He had a pretty good deal going with us though. His own room with his own bunk, and good American grub and stuff too. Anyway, he looked kind of sad as he sat there, but I know there was still a lot of resentment for him in that cabin. We were all shoved together pretty close, and we all knew we were going out that hatch to fall thousands of feet to the ground below where we might even be shot at.
We all knew Smiley was pretty scared—no, he was absolutely terrified of jumping, but his determination to join us was stronger than his terror and fear. Still, it was plain to see that the poor guy was a wreck and we were worried that he wouldn’t be able to think straight when he went out the hatch, so someone had the bright idea to bring a canteen full of whiskey to calm him down. We passed the canteen down the row to him like a fire brigade. I’m sure a few joes in that line would have liked to take a swig, but we all knew it was for Smiley. When he got the booze he looked at it, nodded, and opened it with shaking hands. He held the olive drab container to his lips. He must have thought it was water, because he got a major look of surprise on his face which quickly spread into his namesake smile. For a second he forgot about the jump and the plane, and that he was about to fall out into the open sky thousands of feet above the Earth and maybe die.
He took a drink.
First it was a tilting sip then a full slug. His face grimaced as he swallowed the larger gulp. We knew there was probably only 20 minutes or so to the jump site, so he had to get working to kill a quart of whiskey. We were all laughing now, and he started to liven up, changing from his earlier scared and serious look. He nodded hard and fast and rapidly like he was ready to do this thing. He talked to the guys around him and they all laughed together. He took another slug.
The plane droned away as he dropped—tumbling full of whisky—a child of the air at that point. He fell gently though he must have been screaming. His glasses stayed on because of the brain bands strapping them to his head. His arms were out wide, and his legs flailed violently in the windy skies.
The drop was always like a dream—scary as waiting to die—watching the world in the sky and down on the earth below like it was a movie. It seemed the boots would never touch the ground again. Sometimes in my memories it’s all silent and nothing—just a fast floating down toward the ground. Other times it’s all noise—plane engines, howling wind, people yelling, gunfire and explosions. I wondered how Smiley remembered it on that trip floating down. He must have been scared out of his skin. None of us knew if he even worked the risers going down, or if he just got lucky somehow and made it. In Korea, it seemed like it was always dark when our boots finally touched the ground; again, I’m not sure if that was real, or just another memory trick. I guess I could always look it up somehow.
::
The landscape was covered with troopers and their parachutes—it looked like giant dead flowers all over the place and there was all kinds of noise too. Yelling, ruffling, gunfire, and general craziness. I think we must have all been wondering if Smiley made it. His chute had to have opened. The landscape was a lot like the base back in Monterey, California. I got out of my chute, using the issue switchblade to cut out of the last cords, and ran across the dry yellow grassy hills with my M1 at the ready. I heard someone yelling for a medic and I saw a bunch of troopers running toward a group that was mobbing toward an open field. The blood pounded in my body—I felt like I could run a hundred miles even in all my gear—I also felt like I could collapse at any minute, but I kept running; I was alive and on the ground.
When I got to the crowd, I sort of shoved my way in to find out what was going on in there. Something laid on the ground in the center. What had been a trooper, but no chute around anywhere. Someone was screaming.
“It’s Harford! He’s dead! He’s fucking dead!”
“Oh Shit! Oh Shit!”
I got a look at him through the crowd. It looked like a lump or a tossed duffle bag that wasn’t packed well. It was twisted, mangled. It looked like some bones, kind of shiny and maybe red, were sticking up through the olive drab uniform. The helmet looked like it had been run over by a truck, and there was goopy stuff in blotches on the ground around the mess. I think I saw a boot and a hand in the flashes of light and dark.
“It’s Harford—Oh shit! It’s Harford!” Soldiers pushed to get a look. We had all temporarily forgotten about the mission.
“Where’s the fuckin’ medic!?”
“He doesn’t need a fucking medic; can’t you see that?”
“No! No! No!”
Someone was losing it up there.
“I thought it was Smiley! I thought it was fucking Smiley! It’s fucking Harford! He’s dead!”
An officer pushed through the thick group with Sergeant Flannery. I didn’t recognize the big officer. He went after the hysterical trooper.
“Get yourself together, soldier! Get the fuck out of here!” The officer spoke through his teeth. The broken trooper pushed out of the group—it seemed like he was starting to cry. “Moretti!”
“Yes sir?”
“Go with him!”
“Yes, sir!”
Pask had jumped with the big radio—he came loping up with it and the BAR—the skinny guy was amazing.
“I just got a call—they found Smiley a ways back down the road—he’s drunker than a fiddler’s bitch, but he made it. He’s alive! He made the jump!”
I turned to Pask, his incredulous Brooklyn face thin under the shadow of his helmet. I looked in his sparkling eyes as well as I could in the shadows and dark.
“Yeah, well, Harford’s dead. I think his fucking chute didn’t open.“
“Son of a bitch…”
“Son of a bitch, and fucking Smiley the . . . well, he makes it.” I stared as Pask’s face faded into darkness and shadows—the loud sounds of war around us seemed far away.
That was our second unit casualty in Korea.
Author’s Note: My father, John Joseph Patchell (1930-2017), served as a paratrooper in the Korean War in 1950-51 and was awarded the Purple Heart among other commendations. Stories came from him infrequently and usually only in fragments. In his last few years of his life, the stories were more forthcoming, and in more whole forms. I interviewed him a couple of times in the early 20teens, once taking notes and once on video. I had been working to fictionalize his stories since the mid- to late-1990s, but it was an almost chance meeting with Maxine Hong Kingston (The Woman Warrior) at the L.A. Public Library in 2003 when I began trying to write them in earnest. The first story, “Fragments of Bacon,” was published in her collection Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace in 2006. After my father passed away in 2017, the notes from the lengthy interview and partial manuscripts burned in a fire during COVID. The video interview is still on the camera somewhere. Aside from “Bacon,” only two other stories and an epic poem survived the ravages of time. “The Banks of Noon” is one of those two stories. Here’s to the memory of a father.