KOREA

1951

Zeno

Polish this, swab that, carry this, grin when they call you a pussy, sleep the sleep of the dead. For the first time in his memory Zeno is not the darkest-skinned person in the group. Halfway across the South Pacific someone nicknames him Z, and he likes being Z, the skinny Idaho kid slipping through the clanging darkness of the lower decks, male bodies everywhere he looks, young and crew-cut, torsos flowering up out of narrow belts, veins twining round forearms, men with trunks like inverted triangles, men with chins like cowcatchers at the fronts of trains. With each mile he puts between himself and Lakeport, his sense of possibility builds.

In Pyongyang, ice glazes the river. The quartermaster issues him a quilted field jacket, a knit cap, and a lightweight pair of cushion-sole cotton-blend socks; Zeno wears two pairs of Utah Woolen Mills socks instead. A motor transport officer assigns him and a freckled private from New Jersey named Blewitt to drive a Dodge M37 supply truck from the air base in the city to forward outposts. Most of the roads are unpaved, single-lane, and snow-packed, hardly roads at all, and in early March of 1951, eleven days after his arrival in Korea, Zeno and Blewitt are driving a load of rations and fresh produce around a hairpin turn, following a jeep up a steep grade, Blewitt behind the wheel, both of them singing

I’m forever blowing bubbles,

Pretty bubbles in the air,

They fly so high,

nearly reach the sky

when the jeep in front of them tears in half. Pieces of it cartwheel off the side of the road to their left, gun barrels flash to their right, and a figure materializes in front of them waving what looks like an old potato-masher grenade. Blewitt cuts the wheel. There’s a blaze of light, followed by a strange booming, like a steel drum being pounded underwater. Then Zeno feels as though the delicate parts of his inner ears are yanked out of his head all at once.

The Dodge rolls twice and comes to rest on its side on an open slope half-covered with snow. He sprawls against the windshield, something hot trickling out of his forearm, a high whine clogging both ears.

Blewitt is no longer in the driver’s seat. Through the shattered side window Zeno can see soldiers wearing the woolen green uniforms of the Chinese seething down the scree toward him. Multiple sacks of dehydrated eggs, ejected from the back of the truck, have been punctured, and clouds of egg powder hang in the air, and one soldier after another passes through, their bodies and faces streaked yellow.

He thinks: I knew it. All the way to the other side of the globe and I still couldn’t outrun it. They’ll come now, all my deficiencies promenading past: Athena dragging me off the ice, The Mermen of Atlantis shriveling to black. Once, Mr. McCormack, the Ansley machine shop manager, told him his fly was open, and when Zeno, blushing, went to button it, Mr. McCormack said, don’t, he liked it like that.

Fruit, the older men called Mr. McCormack. Sissy. Swish.

Zeno tells himself to locate his M1, climb out of the truck, fight, do what his father would have done, but before he can convince his legs to move, a middle-aged Chinese soldier with small beige teeth drags him out of the passenger’s door and into the snow. In another breath there are twenty men around him. Their mouths move but his hearing registers nothing. Some carry Russian burp guns; some have rifles that look four decades old; some wear only rice bags for shoes. Most are tearing open C rations they’ve taken out of the back of the Dodge. One holds a can printed PINEAPPLE UPSIDE-DOWN CAKE while another tries to saw it open with a bayonet; another stuffs his mouth with crackers; a fourth bites into a head of cabbage as though it were a giant apple.

Where is the rest of the convoy, where is Blewitt, where is their cover? Strangely, as he is prodded back up the slope, Zeno feels no panic, only a remoteness. The piece of metal sticking out of his forearm, and through the sleeve of his parka, is shaped like a willow leaf, but it does not hurt, not yet, and mostly he is conscious of the striking of his heart and the buzz of nothingness in his ears, as though a pillow is clamped around his head, as though he were back in the little brass bed at Mrs. Boydstun’s house, and all this was an unpleasant dream.

He is directed across the road and through the icebound terraces of what might be a vegetable farm and pushed into an animal pen that already contains Blewitt, who is bleeding from the nose and ear, and who keeps miming that he needs a cigarette.

* * *

They huddle next to each other on frozen ground. All night they wait to be shot. At some point Zeno pulls the metal leaf out of his forearm and ties his sleeve over the injury and puts his field jacket back on.

At dawn they are marched across a jagged landscape, joining a few other rivulets of prisoners heading north: French, Turks, two Brits. Every day fewer aircraft come overhead. One man coughs incessantly, another has two broken arms, another cradles an eyeball still hanging from its socket. Gradually the hearing in Zeno’s left ear returns. Blewitt suffers such intense tobacco withdrawal that, more than once, when a guard throws away a butt, he dives into the snow after it, though he never manages to recover one while it’s still lit.

The water they are given smells of excrement. Once a day the Chinese set a pot of boiled whole-kernel corn down in the snow. A few shy away from eating the carbonized crust burned to the bottom of the pot but Zeno remembers the Armour & Company cans Papa used to heat on the wood stove in the cabin beside the lake and chokes it down.

Every time they stop, he unlaces his boots, peels off one pair of Utah Woolen Mills socks, tucks them inside his coat, up against his armpits, and puts on the warmer, drier pair, and this more than anything is what saves him.

* * *

In April they reach a permanent camp on the south bank of a river the color of creamed coffee. The prisoners are sorted into two companies, and Blewitt and Zeno are put with the healthier group. Past a series of wooden peasant huts stands a galley kitchen and storeroom; beyond that lies a ravine, the river, Manchuria. Spindly, wind-wracked conifers stoop here and there, their branches all sculpted by wind in the same direction. No guard dogs, no alarms, no barbed wire, no watchtowers. “The whole country’s a damn ice-cold prison,” whispers Blewitt, “where are we going to run?”

Their quarters are thatched huts that accommodate twenty lice-tortured men arrayed on the floor on straw mats. No officers, all enlisted men, all older than Zeno. In the dark they whisper about wives, girlfriends, the Yankees, a trip to New Orleans, Christmas dinners; the ones who have been here the longest report that during winter they lost multiple men every day, that their lot has improved since the Chinese took over the camps from the North Koreans, and he comes to learn that anyone who fixates—who talks nonstop about ham sandwiches, or a girl, or a certain memory of home—is usually the next to die.

Because he can walk without trouble, Zeno is assigned duty as a fireman: he spends most of every day gathering wood to heat black pots hung over the fireplaces in the prisoners’ kitchen. Those first weeks they eat soybeans or dry field corn boiled to a paste. For dinner there might be wormy fish or potatoes, none larger than an acorn. Some days, with his wounded forearm, it’s all Zeno can do to gather a single load of wood, bundle it, drag it into the galley, and lie down in the corner.

Panic attacks come on late at night: slow, constricting things in which Zeno cannot breathe for terrifying intervals and from which he worries he will never recover. In the mornings intelligence officers give speeches in broken English about the perils of fighting on behalf of warmongering capitalists. You are imperialist pawns, they say, your system is a failure, don’t you know that half the people in New York are starving?