F. Paul Wilson - Gateways

A thousand yards…three thousand feet…killing someone more than half a mile away. Jack couldn’t imagine that. He tried to keep guns out of his fix-its whenever possible, but when the need arose he had no qualms about using them. Usually it was up close and personal, and never more than twenty-five feet.

A thousand yards…

“What kind of round were you shooting?”

“I got hold of a cache of Match M72s and I hoarded them.”

Jack wasn’t familiar with the round. “How many grains?”

Dad’s eyes narrowed. “You shoot?”

Jack shrugged. “A little. Mostly range stuff.”

“Mostly?”

“Mostly.” He didn’t want to get into that. “Grains?”

“One-seventy-five point five.”

Jack whistled.

“Yeah,” Dad said, nodding. “Penetrated eleven inches of oak. Nice little accuracy radius. I loved that round.”

“Don’t think I’m morbid, but…how many did you kill?”

Dad closed his eyes and shook his head. “I don’t know. I stopped counting at fifty.”

Fifty-plus kills…jeez.

“I thought I was hot stuff,” Dad said, “really making a difference in the fighting, so I kept count at first. But by the time I reached fifty or so it stopped mattering. I just wanted to go home.”

“How long were you there?”

“Not terribly long—most of the latter half of 1950. I was shipped into Pusan in August and what a major screw-up that was, mainly because the Army units didn’t do their job. Mid September I was shipped to Inchon where I landed with the Fifth Regiment. By the end of the month we’d fought through to Seoul, recaptured it, and handed it back to the South Koreans. We thought that was it. We’d freed up the country, kicked those NK commies back above the thirty-eighth parallel. Job done, time to go home. But no.”

Dad drew out that last word in a way that reminded Jack of John Belushi. He rubbed a hand across his face to hide a smile.

“No, MacArthur had the bright idea of pushing into North Korea so we could reunite the country. And there we found ourselves facing the Red Chinese. What a bunch of crazies they were. No respect for life, their own or anyone else’s, just hurling themselves at us in human waves.”

“Maybe what was facing them at the rear if they didn’t do as ordered was worse than charging you guys.”

“Maybe,” Dad said softly. “Maybe.” He seemed to shiver inside his cardigan. “If there’s a colder place on Earth than the mountains of North Korea, I don’t want to know about it. It was chilly in October, but when November rolled around…temperatures in the days would be in the thirties but at night it would drop to minus-ten with a howling thirty-to forty-mile-an-hour wind. You couldn’t get warm. So damn cold the grease that lubricated your gun would freeze up and you couldn’t shoot. Fingers and toes and noses were falling off left and right from frostbite.” He looked up at Jack. “Maybe that’s the deep psychological reason I moved down here: so I’d never be cold again.”

Christ, it sounded like a nightmare. Jack could see this talk was disturbing his father, but he needed answers to a few more questions. He pointed to the medal case restingin the bottom of the box.

“What’s in there?”

Dad looked embarrassed. “Nothing.”

Jack reached in and snatched up the case. “Then you won’t mind if I open it.” He did, and then held up the two medals. “Where’d you get these?”

Dad sighed. “The same time and place: November 28th, 1950, at the Chosin Reservoir, North Korea. The Chinese commies were knocking the crap out of us. There seemed no end to the men they were throwing our way. I had a good position when what looked like a couple of companies of reds made a flanking move on the fifth. I’d brought lots of ammo and I took out every officer I could spot. Anyone who made an arm motion or looked like he was shouting an order went down. Every radio I spotted took a hit. Pretty soon they were in complete disarray, all but bumping into one another. It might have been funny if it had been warmer and if my whole division wasn’t being chopped to pieces. Still, they told me I saved a lot of lives that day.”

“By yourself…you faced down a couple of Chinese companies by yourself?”

“I had a little help at first from my spotter, but Jimmy took one in the head early on and then it was just me.”

Dad didn’t seem to take all that much pride in it, but Jack couldn’t help being impressed. This soft-spoken, slightly built man he’d known all his life, who he’d thought of as the epitome of prosaic middle-classdom, had been a stone-cold military sniper.

“You were a hero.”

“Not really.”

Jack held up the Silver Star. “This medal says different. You had to have been scared.”

“Of course I was. I was ready to wet my pants. I’d been good friends with Jimmy and he was lying dead beside me. I was trapped. They weren’t taking prisoners there, and if I surrendered, God knows what they’d have done to me for killing their officers. So I hungin and figured I’d take as many of them with me as I could.” He shrugged. “And you know, I wasn’t that scared of dying, not if I could go as quickly as Jimmy. I hadn’t met your mother, I had no kids depending on me for support. And at least I wouldn’t be cold anymore. At that moment, dying did not seem like the worst thing in the world.”

Fates worse than death…Jack understood that. But there was still the Purple Heart to be explained. Jack held it up.

“And this one?”

Dad pointed to his lower left abdomen. “Took a piece of shrapnel in the gut.”

“You always told me that scar was from appendicitis!”

“No. I told you that’s where I had my appendix taken out. And that’s what they did. When they went in after the shrapnel they discovered it had nicked my appendix, so they removed it along with the metal fragments. Somehow they got me to Hungnam alive, put me on penicillin for a week, and that was the war for me.”

Jack looked at his father. “Why’d you keep all this hidden? Or am I the only one who doesn’t know?”

“No, you’re the only one whodoes know.”

“Why didn’t you tell me sooner, like when I was eight, or ten?”

As a kid it would have been so cool to know he had a father who’d been a Marine sniper. And even as an adult, he’d have had a whole different perspective on his Dad.

My father, the sniper…my father, the war hero…yow.

Dad shrugged. “I don’t know. When I was finally sent home, I realized how many of my buddies weren’t going with me. Their families would never see them again. And then I got to thinking about all the NKs and Red Chinese I’d killed who wouldn’t be going home totheir families, and it made me a little sick. No, make that alot sick. And the worst of it was, beyond getting a lot of good men killed, we didn’t accomplish a goddamn thing by pushing north of the thirty-eighth. So I just put it all behind me and tried not to think about it.”

“But you kept the medals.”

“You want them? Keep them. Or throw them away. I don’t care. It was the photos I kept—I didn’t want to forget those guys. Somebody should remember them. The rest just happened to come along for the ride.”

Jack dropped the medals into the little case and returned it to the strongbox.

“You keep them. They’re part of who you were.”

“And you might say they’re part of who I still am. That’s why I’ll be backing you up when you go out there to get Carl back.”

“No way.”

“Jack, you can’t go out there alone.”

“I’ll think of something.”

Dad sat silent a moment, then said, “What if I can prove to you that I still have it? Please, Jack. I want to do this with you.”