Michael Walsh - Last Stands

Since a writer may now only write about who he or she personally is or what he or she has experienced in an authentic way, and since the political, mutatis mutandis, is now personal, please permit me some personal history.

My parents were married in September 1948, when they were both 22 years old; I was born 13 months later, on the U.S. Marine Corps base in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, the first of five siblings. John J. Walsh and Ann Patricia Finnegan were high school sweethearts in Malden and Medford, Massachusetts, back in the days when it was not at all uncommon for young American men and women to meet and fall in love at an early age, pledge their troth, and head into life and family while still in their teens and early twenties. In fact, this was normal.

Less than two years later, while we were living in Berkeley, California, and awaiting transfer to the American territory of Guam, my father, a newly promoted first lieutenant, was suddenly directed instead to Japan in order to stage for a landing in Korea, where war had broken out on June 25, 1950, between the Communist north and the U.N.-backed south of the peninsula, which had been divided along the 38th parallel after World War II. In a lightning strike, the Soviet-backed north had invaded the south along a wide front, pushing the troops of the Republic of Korea into what became known as the Pusan Perimeter along the southeast coast. It looked for all the world that they would soon be overrun and shoved into the sea.

At the time, there were few if any American forces in Korea. What was left of a rump American military presence in Asia was in Japan, where much of its materiel had been sold to the Japanese, including amphibious landing vehicles (LSTs); they had welded the drop-fronts shut in order to use them as commercial barges. Assigned to a weapons company in the Second Battalion, Fifth Marines (aka the 2/5)the most decorated company in Marine Corps historymy father went ashore at Pusan in the midst of chaos. Whos in command here? he asked the first Marine he saw. You are, sir, came the reply. In one-hundred-degree heat and with artillery incoming, he jumped into a shell crater on the Obong-ni Ridge and found himself sharing the space with a dead North Korean. Welcome to war in Korea.

My father, already a man at the age of 24, immediately took command and has never relinquished itas no real man ever does, at least not willingly, and except by death. So this book is a testament not only to him but to the concept of manliness itself.

The Marines and other allied forces established control over the Pusan Perimeter. Meanwhile, back in Washington, President Truman and his military commander, Douglas MacArthur, decided that the objective was not simply to push the North Koreans out of the south but to liberate the north from Communist influence. Just five years after Soviet troops demolished Berlin, it was the first hot battle of what became the Cold Wara war that would last for 39 years, ending only when the Berlin Wall fell and, two years later, the Soviet Union itself dissolved.

Like many surprise attacks, the landing at Inchon on September 15, 1950, could have gone badly. Coming ashore in the concrete harbor, the Marines had to use wooden ladders to climb over the welded-shut fronts of the LSTs, where they immediately faced withering fire from the entrenched North Korean troops. The casualty rate for Marine infantry officers in such a situation runs between 60 and 75 percent killed or wounded, owing to the Marine tradition of officers hitting the beach first: youre either a casualty and replaced or youre the leader.

My fathers best friend, 1st Lt. Baldomero Baldy Lopez, the son of a Spanish immigrant, was captured in a memorable photograph clambering up a seawall from the LST next to my fathers; the night before, Baldy had said, John, Im going to die tomorrow. He was shot in the arm and the chest as he was hurling a grenade. He smothered the pineapple with his body and was killed instantly, and was later awarded the Medal of Honor. A reporter who witnessed the event later wrote, He died with the courage that makes men great.

And that was just the beginning of my fathers baptism by fire, which went on to include the battle for Seoulfor the Marines, the most harrowing and (to use the current term) traumatic battle of the war, and which he refuses to talk about to this day, even at age 94. Every civilian, even the mama-sans, was a potential enemy combatant, and many was the Marine who died when a peasant woman deployed an AK-47 from beneath her skirts and shot him in the back. The Marines quickly learned to trust no one, and to take no prisoners. Today, this might be called a war crime. Back then, it was called survival.

Still to come was the last stand at the Chosin Reservoir, in which Dads unit, the 2/5, wrote itself into Marine Corps legend. My mother only learned of his safe return to Allied lines in the depths of the 195051 winter, when she saw an AP photograph of him in the local newspaper. He was standing up, in full winter gear, his rifle at the ready at present arms, leaning against an abutment, sound asleep.

In other words, I grew up with heroism, although I didnt know it at the time; after all, I was only 15 months old. And yet, Operation Chromitefor so the landing was termedand its emotional consequences have been with me throughout my life. How does a son, the firstborn, live up to such a father? What does it mean to be a man measured against an example like his? Years later, when I dedicated my novel