The Savage Innocent 2015

So no, it was left to me to pick up the discarded wrapping paper and carry it down three flights to the curbside bins. Rand and Madeleine sat on the terrace that looked out over San Francisco Bay; and there they sat, hand in hand, on the threshold of a dream -- as the setting sun slipped behind the Golden Gate. There was a Moody Blues album playing in the living room, setting the mood that defined the coming days. One song, Watching and Waiting, seemed to sum up the feelings I had as I watched them. Whenever I hear that song I think of them sitting in silhouette, framed by an amber-purple sky, watching them as they looked after greater truths waiting for them out there on the far side of the sky.

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Winters in Indiana aren't for the faint of heart. The word bleak comes to mind, but singularly fails to convey the utter desolation and ruin one feels. Unless, of course, you have to stand at parade rest for an hour each and every morning on warped sheets of ice waiting for your room to be inspected, waiting before you march off to breakfast, counting cadence all the way. Not to say the experience doesn't have its fine points -- I'm sure there are and were many -- but let me say in all politeness that if there were, it was all lost on me.

Christmas had come and gone, the return flight to Chicago a memory, and in the frozen aftermath I witnessed a strange metamorphosis: a peculiar sense of responsibility had come calling for Dalton Rand -- and found him ready and waiting to shoulder the burden. He'd given Madeleine not a ring, but THE ring. All of a sudden, life was taking on a whole new complexion, and I could tell his new world had been textured in none too subtle shades of 'serious' and 'purpose'. He went from being a sort of care-free fifteen-year old version of the Nietzschean übermench to acting just like any other stressed out, fingernail biting American teenager. I guess the biggest thing to hit him about this whole situation? Madeleine was two thousand miles away, he missed her terribly -- in the painful way teenagers miss their 'one true loves' -- and it suddenly became apparent he'd lost his edge. He was growing dull, distracted, and wholly dissatisfied with his lot in life.

Having grown up in Europe, America came up on him hard and fast, like a freight train roaring through the night. I think anyone in his situation would have found the experience overwhelming, maybe even a little disorienting, but Rand wasn't just anyone. He was an observer, true enough, but he was more than anything else a man of action -- even at fifteen. The rebelliousness that seized America's youth when Richard Nixon turned his attention on Laos and Cambodia seemed pointless to Rand; he had bigger fish to fry. When we read about student protests in Time and Newsweek, he said they were little more than the runny-nosed bleatings of just so many spoiled sheep. As a matter of fact, I think he longed to strap on an airplane and bomb North Vietnam, because, if I'm right, after so many years in Europe he longed more than anything else to simply be an American.

But perhaps, and just for a while, I don't think Rand really understood the hidden depths of America, of what being an American truly means. The very inclusiveness of the word implies an infinite variety of shades of grey, yet such a vast profusion of ideology was lost in the absolute blacks and whites of the Cold War. The academic Weltanschauung we found ourselves in, trapped in, you might say, precluded dissent, but some of us were bound to break our way out of this cocoon sooner than others, and therein lies our tale.

I hope you'll pardon me now, as another long digression is in order. I need to tell you a little more about Tom Shipman and his world, about a frozen lake in Korea, about orange-robed monks and a Japanese lady, because without understanding Shipman's story, I'm not sure what happens next will make a whole lot of sense.

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The Korean Conflict remains a footnote in America's long Cold-War policy of containment, and a small footnote at that. Sandwiched between WWII and Vietnam, the Korean War was a relatively modest affair, by Cold War standards, anyway. Soviet expansion, first in Eastern Europe, then in the Middle East and SouthEast Asia was the great concern of the day, and for many who fought in WWII it seemed as if the United States had entered a protracted period of never ending war. Still, Korea was a Big Deal. Russia, China and the United States squared off for the first time in Korea. The 'duck and cover' nuclear drills that shaped so many lives in the 60s can be traced back to Korea. Even so, few people today care about, and many more don't even know there was a war during the first three years of the 1950s.

And fewer still know anything about the two week battle around Chosin Reservoir.

My guess is that few people know that the Japanese Army 'liberated' the Korean peninsula from China, in 1895, mind you. Japan then annexed Korea -- and the Korean people were subject to a most brutal existence, for decades. When Japanese imperial ambitions spread to mainland China (and to her vast natural resources) during the Great Depression, Korea was stripped bare by Japan, her men enslaved, her women forced to provide "comfort" to the men of the Emperor's armies. Of course everyone knows all Asia was torn asunder by WWII, and that the British and Dutch, who had defined Asia's entry into the Industrial Age, lost their empires in the aftermath. By the time World War II ended, contours of a vast new conflict were taking shape, and let's simplify matters by defining this conflict as a struggle between two competing economic philosophies. Let's further simplify things with a football analogy: the United States and her NATO allies represented the Capitalist Team, while Russia, China and a whole bunch of professors at Brown and the University of California at Berkeley represented the Communist Team. After WWII, there were many smaller countries around the world that toyed with the idea of converting from capitalism to communism, and the Capitalist Team simply didn't want this to happen. Russia seemed to be behind many of these countries' nascent ambitions, too, and so the game was afoot. During the immediate post-war period, the Korean peninsula -- like Germany and Vietnam and Greenwich Village in New York City -- was partitioned; communists took control of the north while capitalists took control of those lands south of the 38th parallel. All these partitioned countries, bastard creations at best, seemed doomed to fail from the start, and Vietnam collapsed into civil war soon after partition, the two Germanys became a battleground of competing ideas until the Wall came down in '89, leading to reunification. The war over the partitioning of Korea ended, however, in a stalemate, and a cult of personality remains in charge of the north to this day. About Greenwich Village? Hell, all I can say is the last time I ventured in that embattled, war torn country, most of the chicks I saw there had dicks, and no one spoke English. Enough said.

Anyway, lets keep in mind that the major communist entities of that era, Russia and China, seemed intent on exporting their economic revolution to Western Europe and the Americas. A group of patrician Ivy Leaguers, known collectively as The Wise Men, counseled haberdasher-turned-president Harry Truman that the best way to confront communist expansion was to push back wherever and whenever they tried to expand into new territory; this policy was known as Containment and became, after a document called NSC-68 was enshrined in the pantheon of America's own imperial ambition, official U.S. policy.

Containment was resisted by conservatives in Washington; many wanted to exploit America's strategic superiority and bomb the Soviet Union off the map. These conservatives wrested control of vast segments of America's industrial capacity and dedicated these tremendous resources to expanding America's capacity to wage war all around the world. The nascent spiritual leader of these uber-Capitalists, by the way, was a slight Soviet emigre, a woman by the name of Ayn Rand; their Bible a ponderous tome mirthfully titled 'Atlas Shrugged'. It's well worth a read, by the way, if only because it should be considered a founding document of the conservative movement in America, and indeed, elsewhere. I will not dwell further on Ayn Rand's relationship to this story. It's simply not relevant, because not all Rands, it seems, are created equal.

In mid-summer of 1950, North Korea's communist forces, backed with weapons from Russia and China, pushed, and pushed hard into South Korea; the first armed test of the Policy of Containment was underway. American and United Nations forces pushed back against the North Koreans. North Korean troops were initially repulsed, pushed back all the way to the Yalu River and the Chinese border, then winter's first snows fell. This first communist advance appeared contained, and indeed it was, at least until the full weight of a Chinese Army counter-attack hit American and U.N. forces. This first thunderous, world altering collision between two massive ideologies occurred around a frozen lake in North Korea. The Japanese had, decades before, named this lake 'Chosin'.

There's little need to dwell on the obvious, but wars change the people who fight in them. We've seen in own our lifetimes how very unpredictable these changes can be, often violently so. The fact of the matter is this: I could never have come to terms with what happened to Rand and I in the spring of 1970 without coming to terms with the changes war brought to Tom Shipman's life. And, well, you might never come to understand the nature of the beast that was Tom Shipman, and that would be a shame.

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He lived on campus, in one of the modest bungalows that lined the perimeter of a tree-lined drill field. Shipman lived in this bungalow with his wife. She was, I think I mentioned once before, a Japanese woman, and I first saw her when I had dinner with my mother at the inn. Her name was Tetsuko, which translates, roughly, to Lady of Steel. Students rarely saw her on campus, which, in hindsight, was a probably a very good thing. She was a stunning, utterly exotic looking woman, and young men lost in floods of testosterone are best left to wander in the comfort of less tangible dreams. Willowy and fragile looking from a distance, I believe now she had been named with no small amount of prescience. Though she wasn't yet fifty years old the night I first saw her, she looked half that age. At least you might have thought so -- but for the blinding purity of her white hair. She was always dressed in deepest black, too, which only served to accentuate the striking contrast of her hair. And I say black clothing, but never a penitential black, never a shiny, reflective black; no, she always wore the black of limitless space. When I first saw her face, it felt as if I was looking at an island of stark serenity -- framed by infinite space. As a result of her startling appearance, she seemed as distant and remote as a faraway planet in the most remote arms of our galaxy.

And I was given to understand that at one time she had been a Buddhist nun.

Shipman met her during a brief interlude when he was stationed in southern Japan after World War II. At twenty years of age, Shipman arrived in the Pacific theatre just in time for the initial invasion of Okinawa, on 1 April 1945; he was there for 49 days, assigned as a combat corpsman with the 1^st Marine Division. War changes people, and I think those assigned to medical duties bear the brunt of that change. Of importance here, Iwo Jima, then Okinawa, witnessed the first large scale deployment of napalm for close air support, with the seasoned pilots from the original VMSB-235 carrying out the majority of these missions. While Marine aviation is generally focused on providing close air support to ground troops, in April, 1945, nobody really understood the temperamental nature of napalm.

The first sorties using napalm were directed at Japanese troops who were using deep caves in the sides of steep mountains to keep out of sight. Pilots and troops alike found that conventional bombs were proving inadequate, the Japanese simply retreated to the depths of their caves until the Dauntlesses and Corsairs disappeared, then they'd reappear, man their guns, and repulse the next wave of Marines. Napalm changed that equation. The pilots dropped napalm near the entrances to these caves, and when the napalm blossomed -- all the oxygen was sucked out of the caves. No one inside, of course, survived. Unfortunately for those outside the caves, most notably Marines positioned nearby waiting to assault the Japanese, when napalm detonated it tended to spray over a very large area, and often this spray landed within Marine positions, injuring hundreds of men at a time. Tom Shipman spent almost all his time on Okinawa tending to men severely burned by napalm.

By June, 1945 Shipman went to Korea, where his unit fought scattered remnants of Japanese forces still holding out in the mountains, and more napalm was used, more Marines burned. He remained in Korea until mid-August 1945. Until just after Hiroshima and Nagasaki entered the global lexicon of horror. After the surrender, elements of the 1^st Marine Division were garrisoned in Japan, as part of the primary occupation force. Shipman was among those tasked to help render medical assistance at a Japanese Naval hospital near what remained of Hiroshima, and it was in Hiroshima that Shipman met a US Navy Captain by the name of John Crossfield.

Crossfield was preparing the initial BDA, or Bomb Damage Assessment, for the War Department. He and his team were measuring radiation levels in and around the city, and one day ran across a convent in the mountains north of the city. The convent had been turned into a sort of hospital, but the nuns he found had neither the expertise nor the supplies to take care of so many seriously ill people. Crossfield decided to gather a team of Corpsmen to help the nuns, and with supplies to treat burns and malnutrition, he took a large convoy back to the convent.

When Crossfield asked around the base, looking for personnel who might have experience treating burns, Shipman's name came up time and time again. Crossfield found Shipman working at a field hospital in the center of the city, told him about the convent and his plans to help the nuns. Shipman was in that first convoy, and stayed with the nuns for months.

Forgive me if I keep repeating this, but War Changes People, yet sometimes it is the people met in war that changes us the most.

Tetsuko Shibata had always been a serious student. She was a serious student in a land, and in a time, where studious women were still considered something of an oddity. But war changes societies, just as it changes people, and war changed social constructs and expectations in Japan, just as war changed America. Tetsuko wanted to study medicine when she finished university, but found herself, in June,1945, working as a nurse at a naval hospital in Hiroshima; she was in fact a well regarded surgical scrub nurse. One day in August she was going to visit her grandmother, who lived in a monastery in the mountains north of the city, when she saw a lone silver aircraft flying over the city. The explosion she observed, even from ten miles away, knocked her off her feet; she witnessed the deaths of sixty thousand people and turned inward on herself. I never learned the how or the why of these things, but she was soon working at her grandmother's convent in the mountains north of the city, taking care of the sick and the dying.

And a strange thing happened. Her jet black hair turned purest white within days of the bomb's detonation over Hiroshima. No one fully understood the effects of radiation in those days, but people seemed to be affected proportionately to their distance from Ground Zero. Some people very close to Ground Zero saw their hair fall out, these people were also seriously burned and were soon bleeding from their mouths and rectums. These people died quickly, and Tetsuko found herself, more often than not, working with these victims. She worked tirelessly, without rest or supplies, until the helplessness of her situation became overwhelming.

But there was no end to the sickness and death. There was no turning away. No quitting.

One day American soldiers appeared, and she hated them. She wanted to find a sword and hack their heads off, she wanted to hold their severed heads high and spit in their callous faces, yet she saw her true self in that moment, fell into a poverty she found hard to shake. Then she fell back to the Shinto teachings that had defined her childhood. She turned to the seven million spirits that define life, turned to sacred spirits in the rocks and the trees, turned to an acceptance of the world and her place in it. Days later she saw a column of American trucks coming up the battered road toward the monastery, and she met John Crossfield and Tom Shipman later that day. They were among those bringing supplies to the convent, then she learned that Shipman was one of a handful of corpsmen assigned to help the nuns. He was the enemy, she told herself as she struggled to accept the man and his talents, yet he came to care for the living and the dying in the weeks ahead. He did not see the world in terms victors and vanquished. He saw sickness and death as his enemy, and he had come to the mountain prepared to fight.

I don't know the details. Shipman never got a chance to tell us the whole story, but I can guess what happened. Somehow they fell in love, and they married a few years later. They didn't have children, and I thought perhaps that was a result of all the radiation they worked around. Maybe that's why they chose to live at a school; that Tetsuko married a U.S. Marine and came to live on the campus of an American military school is an irony I'll leave you to ponder.

When I think of Tetsuko even now, think of all she lost in this life, my feelings still get in the way. But life goes on, in the most unexpected ways.

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I always believed Shipman would have made a great physician, apparently John Crossfield did too. Instead, Shipman chose to remain in the Marines, to carry a carbine with his medical supplies. Again, this was just part of the undercurrent of irony running through Shipman's life, and something I feel inadequate to discuss. Anyway, sometime in late 1950, Shipman found himself temporarily attached to the 7th RCT31, a 3,000 man composite Regimental Combat Team, and one of several American divisions in the area around Chosin. He arrived at the lake just before heavy snow and ice cut off all lines of supply to the south, and more importantly, just as hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops crossed into North Korea.

Command elements from Chosin to Washington, D.C. saw the vast new threat emerging, ordered the various Marine and Army groups to dig-in along the hills that flanked the eastern shore of the reservoir. Battle was joined, with the American force vastly outnumbered. Sometime during the second day of the initial Chinese attack, the 7^th RTC31 was cut-off from the main body of American forces; they had in fact been cut-off by an entire division of Chinese regulars. Unbeknownst to Shipman and his comrades, still another Chinese division was gathering in the twilight to help mount an all out effort to destroy the splintered 7^th. In effect, there were now 36,000 Chinese regulars moving in to take out 3,000 American Marines. Sometime during the long night that followed, when the snow was so deep it was impossible to walk without falling into deep drifts, Shipman stopped being a corpsman and became an infantryman. He was among a handful of survivors rescued three days later, and the record shows Tom Shipman killed over three hundred men during just one assault that first night. He told our class the number was probably twice that, and he looked at us for a long while, letting the enormity of the number sink in.