Derek Miller - Norwegian by Night

‘Sorry, mate. Could need that. Only got four. Little ship, big guns, bullets flying around. You understand, right?’

So he decided to borrow without permission — he refused to use the word ‘steal’ — a rowboat from his Australian hosts. It wasn’t completely unreasonable, he realised, their wanting to keep the emergency gear during a massive amphibious assault mission, but people have different needs sometimes, and choices need to be made.

Donny Horowitz was twenty-two years old then. He had a clear mind, a steady hand, and a chip on his Jewish shoulder the size and shape of Germany. For the Army, it was only a matter of assigning him to the proper role and then tasking him with the right job. The role was scout-sniper. The task was Inchon.

Inchon was a tactically challenging mission. The North Koreans had weakened themselves against the Pusan Perimeter for almost a month and a half, and Douglas MacArthur decided now was the time to flank them by taking Korea’s western port city of Inchon. But Inchon had poor beaches and shallow approaches, and it restricted invasion options to the rhythm of the moon’s tidal pull.

The naval bombardment had been going on for two days, weakening Inchon’s defences. There wasn’t a man there who wasn’t thinking of D-Day. Nor a man there not thinking about what happened at Omaha Beach when the American bombers missed their targets and the DD tanks sank to the bottom of the sea during their approach, giving the Americans no armour on the ground to provide cover and firepower. No bomb craters to use as foxholes.

Donny would be damned if he wasn’t going to be at the front of that invasion.

That morning, amidst the smoke and the artillery fire, with birds flying wildly amidst the noise, as the Third and Fifth Marine regiments were advancing towards Green Beach on amphibious landing craft, called LST, with M26 Pershing tanks in their bellies. Donny eased the borrowed rowboat down the side of the Bataan , slid down after it with his rifle, and rowed face-forward into the artillery fire directed at the naval craft.

On Red Beach, the North Koreans were defending a high sea wall that the South Korean Marines were scaling on ladders. Across the top of the wall there was a row of sharp shooters trying to pick off Americans, South Koreans, and everyone else fighting under the UN flag. Missiles arced overhead. The Koreans were firing green tracer bullets supplied by their Chinese allies, which crossed with the Allied red ones.

They started firing at Donny directly. The bullets came in slow at first and then sped past him, splaying into the water or puncturing the rowboat.

Sheldon often wondered what the Koreans — a superstitious lot — were thinking when they saw a lone soldier standing face-forward in the water, illuminated by the reds, greens, oranges, and yellows of combat reflecting off the water and clouds of the morning sky. A diminutive, blue-eyed demon impervious to their defences.

One barrage of bullets hit Donny’s boat hard. Four bullets punctured the prow, and then the deck. Water started coming in, and ran around his boots. The Marines had already touched the beach, and were advancing towards the wall. The green tracers were tracking low into his regiment.

Having come this far, and being a bad swimmer — from four hundred yards offshore, and with two feet in his watery grave — Sheldon decided to use his ammunition, goddamn it, rather than drown with it.

He had such soft hands for a boy. Five foot seven inches tall, he’d never known hard labour or heavy lifting. He added up the figures in his father’s cobbler shop, and dreamed of hitting one deep into left field over the Green Monster for the Red Sox. The first time his fingers touched the bottoms of Mabel’s breasts — under the wire of her bra during a Bogart movie with Bacall — she said his fingers were so soft it was like the touch of a girl. This confession had made him more sexually ravenous than any picture show he’d ever seen.

When he’d enlisted, they’d chosen him as a sniper. They could see he was even-tempered. Quiet. Smart. Wiry, but rugged. He had a lot of anger, but a capacity to direct it through reason. A sensitive touch.

We think of guns as brutal things used by heavy men. But the art of the rifle demands the most subtle feel — the touch of a lover or a watchmaker. There is an understanding between the finger and trigger. The breath is kept under disciplined control. Every muscle is used to provide only stillness. The direction of the wind on the cheek finds expression in the rise of the barrel, lifted lightly as from the heat of a warm blueberry pie on a winter afternoon.

And now, his feet in the water, Donny’s eyes were focused on the distant objects above the wall, flickering in the fog and the smoke. The artillery fire did not unnerve him. The water in his socks was just a sensation with no meaning. The bird that flew into his upper thigh, in the confusion of noise and smoke, was only a feeling. He was withdrawn, and to this day, he remembers the moment with music. What he heard, and hears even now in his memories, is the unaccompanied Cello Suite Number 1 in G major by Bach.

At this moment of deepest calm, of the most complete peace, he lost the anger of his youth. The venom against the Nazis was bled from his veins by the music, the smoke, the water.

Now, in this moment of grace, Donny killed.

Through the business end of an unusually straight-shooting .30 calibre M1 Garand, Donny emptied three clips of armour-piercing 168-grain ammunition in under thirty seconds. He killed twelve men, clearing them off a high wall from a distance of four hundred yards, allowing the first US Marines to assault the peak without loss while he bled from a surface bullet-wound to his left leg.

His action was the smallest of gestures, like dropping a pebble into a still pool of water and disturbing the image of the night sky.

He didn’t tell Mabel any of this until much, much later, of course. So late, in fact, that she never came to believe it. They had a son to think about, and heroism was a private matter for Sheldon. He said he’d been a logistics officer, far south and much safer. The wound? The wound was caused by carelessly walking into a toolshed, where he was punctured by a rake. He made it a joke.

Compared to me, it was the sharpest tool in the toolshed.

Sheldon was, as he recalls, awarded the Navy Commendation Medal and the Purple Heart for his part in the invasion. The question is, however, where had he put them? He ran an antique and watch-repair shop. They could be anywhere, in any crevice. He couldn’t find them anywhere. They were the only tangible proof that he still had his marbles. And now the shop is gone, its contents sold off. Everything once so carefully assembled is scattered now. Back in the world, they will be assembled into new collections by new collectors, and then scattered again as the collectors return to the mist.

‘This life.’ What a question! No one really wants to know the answer to this.

In this life, my body has become a withered twig, where once I stood tall. I remember, distantly, the lush earth and beech forests of New England — outside my bedroom window as a child — growing in kingdoms. My parents near me.

In this life, I hobble as an old man, when once I could fly over doubts and contradictions.

In this life, my memories are the smoke I choke on, burning my eyes.

In this life, I remember hungers that will never return. When I was once a lover with the bluest eyes she had ever seen — deeper than Paul Newman’s, darker than Frank Sinatra’s.

This life! This life is coming to an end without any explanation or apology, and where every sense of my soul or ray of light through a cloud promises to be my end.