Steve Martini - Double Tap

UN forces scattered over hundreds of square miles were suddenly confronted by Chinese regulars in numbers that overwhelmed them. That anyone survived was a miracle.

The Chinese stormed into rear areas, overrunning supply and headquarter units, killing clerks and officers by the score, shooting cooks and GIs on kitchen patrol in mess tents, cutting down anyone wearing an olive-drab uniform.

The Chinese tore up motor pools, shooting mechanics and drivers. They stormed through a tented field hospital, shooting and bayoneting the wounded in their beds, and killed every doctor and nurse on duty. Thousands of American soldiers died in the remote frozen wastes of North Korea that winter, many of them with expressions of shock etched into what would soon become frozen, ice-covered faces.

According to what I was told later by my father, my uncle saw only small slivers of this horror, but it was enough.

In the forward areas, in the chaos and darkness, a few here and there survived. Some made it out of the killing zone before the enemy could close its grip. Others lay wounded or unconscious and were left for dead. They crawled behind snowbanks, scurried into the shadows, and waited for the opportunity to escape when the enemy was busy elsewhere. Some made it. Others were killed or captured in the attempt. Many wandered aimlessly in the mountains, leaderless and alone, where they froze or stumbled into Chinese units and were killed or captured, sometimes within sight or hearing of other American soldiers on the lam.

From everything I have heard or read, it was horror on the scale of the surreal. There are accounts of dazed American soldiers wandering among rampaging Chinese whose bloodlust was momentarily chilled as they scavenged for food, weapons, watches, or clothing. Some of these GIs actually walked within a few feet of scores of armed Chinese soldiers who didn’t lift their rifles. The Chinese seemed not to notice as the GIs wandered off into the snow, some of them actually finding their way back to American lines. Others lying on the ground wounded were shot or bayoneted when they groaned in pain. From the written reports, neither logic nor the conventions of humanity seemed to have played any part in this. Years later, historians would conclude that many of the Chinese troops were themselves starving to death.

A few GIs, navigating by the stars at night, hunkering down by day, gradually moved south, found buddies along the way, and formed small groups. These survivors stumbled, crawled, and ran for days without rations or water over barren, rock-strewn mountain passes covered by snow, across frozen valleys, and through rivers of icy slush. Largely unarmed, always just ahead of the Chinese, dragging frostbitten limbs through the snow, these half-dead soldiers stumbled toward the first pickets outside the defense perimeter of the Marine compound at Chosin. On their fixed faces was the thousand-yard stare that in later years I would come to know as my uncle’s undeviating expression, the haunted look that for decades was Evo’s deathlike gaze.

I spend the morning in the office going over some ancient history. Janice, my secretary, has been culling old news articles from Nexis as well as material off of the Internet, items providing detailed background on General Gerald Satz. She has downloaded them onto the office network and this morning I go over them on the computer in my office.

Like Haldeman and Erlichman, hot dogs and mustard, Gerald Satz and the word scandal go together, etched on my mind by the salty tang of southern politicians digging through the national trash on live prime-time television on hot summer evenings a decade ago.

General Gerald Satz’s picture had been plastered on every front page in America for more than a month. The old newsprint photographs, digitized and coming alive on the screen of my computer, revive all the memories of what I had watched on television.

It was the kind of fame you might reserve for your most despised enemy. Satz’s name had been mentioned by a legion of witnesses, all under oath at the bar of politics, a Senate investigative hearing. By the time Satz got to the green felt table and raised his right hand, the spit was already sharpened, hot and ready for the roasting.

It was one of those scandals, the details of which no one is able to remember a week after they’re over, but that invariably enter history with — gate attached as their defining suffix.

As a soldier, Satz had seen combat. Cast by the press in the role of an idiot, burdened by a zealot’s wealth of initiative and a fanatic’s dearth of judgment, he won that year’s Tony as the administration’s military court jester in the timeless Washington melodrama Plausible Deniability . He became a political bullet magnet, absorbing every shot aimed at his prince, devouring the scenery and stepping out even to grab a few ricochets lest they wing some minor functionary or a janitor in the White House. When it was over, the only group still scribbling notes was the White House Secret Service detail, all taking pointers on how to provide executive body protection.

Of course, all of this left the multiheaded senatorial hydra seated at the committee dais writhing in anger, furious that none of their needle-like teeth had passed through the general’s body to nail the President. As a measure of satisfaction they took Satz down for perjury.

Most people of sound judgment have long since concluded that any time mouths move among the members of Congress, they are either eating or lying, sometimes both simultaneously. Uttering lies from the floor of the Senate is one of those functions processed by the autonomous part of the brain, like breathing. Even when caught in a falsehood, it is thought to be a social lapse no worse than passing gas during a dramatic pause at the opera. But for outsiders who are testifying under oath before a Senate investigating committee to slip up, to say “Yes” when they meant “No,” or “Maybe” when they should have said “I don’t remember,” is viewed as an unforgivable and deadly sin. The fossilized serpents of the Senate went after Satz tooth and tong.

He was convicted on two counts of lying under oath to a committee of practiced and confirmed liars who knew the product well when they saw and heard it. He was sentenced to six years in a federal penitentiary.

When his trial ended, committee staff collared Satz before he was hardly out of the courtroom and tried to roll him to turn state’s evidence against his political handlers. Satz refused. Like a soldier tied to the stake and refusing a blindfold, Satz told them to go screw themselves, and he did it on live TV, replete with images of Senate staffers skulking away from the camera lights into the dim shadows of the courthouse. By then most of the members of the committee who had brought the hammer and nails to this particular crucifixion were disclaiming any responsibility. They had read the tea leaves in the polls, and voters back home weren’t particularly happy.

In the end, Satz never served a day. Like most of everything that comes out of a Congress laden with partisan poison, Satz’s conviction was flawed, overturned by the court of appeals on what critics called a technicality, the fact that members of the committee couldn’t stop talking and fawning for the cameras long enough for their attorney to establish the predicate.

In order to convict for perjury, it is necessary to establish with precision the questions posed to the accused and in response to which he was supposed to have lied. This would seem straightforward to the average person.

The problem with Satz came about as a result of one of the more august members of the committee, an octogenarian who couldn’t move without being carried, and whose mental as well as other bodily functions had last operated in a normal fashion several decades earlier. The man had been propped up at the committee table by staff who took turns kicking the back of his chair with their foot every so often in order to jar him back to reality. This presented some difficulty for a committee in which the live microphone moved around the table. Sooner or later this doyen of the Senate would be expected to produce something beyond a muted snore. As it turned out, he produced a reversal on appeal.