ST. FREDA

A story...

During the Korean war, I thought it might be better for my career if I worked as a photojournalist at the front. I thought it would be easier than being a combat soldier. I was thinking along these lines—and with no small degree of naiveté on my part, I might add—thinking I could avoid combat completely. The fact that I did this purposely, and with grave intent, I say with a certain degree of shame and regret, feeling as much of a coward today, as I did back then. Some of you who knew me then might say I was motivated by selfishness; the thinking there being that if I took my fate into my own hands, I was certain to find a future position with a reputable newspaper Stateside when I returned. I'd like to think that I went into my new job with my eyes wide open, but I know I didn’t; I still found myself confronting the same personal demons and hidden fears I was hoping to escape, but now witnessing the untold horrors I'm sure everyone else was facing under those more than strange circumstances.

Eventually though, I was hired by a small Ohio newspaper, which allowed me to freelance the articles they refused, while still remaining in their pay—which meant that money was scarce and I was starving more than I was eating. I don't remember how I managed to talk myself into such a job—not when you consider how obviously unqualified I was for it. I like to think it was the blustering self-confidence I exhibited during that first job interview. But now, of course, with the benefit of hindsight, I'm thinking—perhaps with some hint of conceit—that it was the ready self-assuredness of youth rather than the outrageous lies on my resumé. It doesn't matter now, I suppose. I was hired and shipped off to Korea within the month.

Being a recent graduate of the local community college, as I look back at that first year with the benefit of time—and the wisdom of age—I have to ask myself what my editor was thinking of when he hired me. I knew nothing. I was always afraid I'd receive a telegram telling me I was fired for not sending anything back the newspaper could use. As a result of my misgivings and consequent fear, I'd grab my cameras once a week and take pictures of General McArthur and his staff, as well as various other people and sights in the city. Not to be neglected of course, were the local peasants and their constant struggle to live in the outlying districts. All of them seemed to live their lives as if they were untouched by the horrible events surrounding us—General Staff, locals, and peasants, alike.   

I readily admit I went to Korea on a ruse, because I had every intention of completing the great American novel I was working on at the time. It was the same novel every other budding young author in the country was working on. I don't know why I thought writing it in Korea would help me, but I wanted to be the next Norman Mailer, Herman Wouk, or James Michener, (taking my inspiration from the examples they set), which meant I spent more time working on my novel than I did covering the war. Oh, I sent stories and pictures back home once or twice a month, but I only worked on them for two or three days—I think it was evident in the quality of work I sent—because I was using my time to hammer at the novel I was certain would bring me a Pulitzer.

Those were the dreams and enchantments I held onto in my youth; where the impracticable visions I had of war seemed more like reckless idealism—something I think we all hold on to as young boys, carrying them into our adolescence—until the thought of going to war is a Romantic adventure—(picture Lord Byron here going off to fight the Turks and trying to set Greece free from tyranny)—as if there could be glory or honour in this day and age of automatic weaponry.

In Korea during the fifties—or at least, from what I remember about it—I mistrusted everyone. I couldn't look at another man without thinking he’d be waiting to stab me in the back the moment I rounded the next corner. I wondered if every woman I met was a whore wanting to take me for everything I had, or else some civilian willing to open her heart and take me into her home. But I loved Korea and everything about it; I loved the simplicity of the people, the scenery, the distinct countryside where it seemed I could slip back into the nineteenth century, back to a better day, a simpler time for all of us—or maybe it was just my idea of what I thought it should be like: quaint, antiquated, and charming?

I wasn't the first Westerner in the Orient who wanted to lose himself in the midst of a foreign culture, and certainly not the first to let philosophy and enlightenment wash over me and show me there were more important things in life than dealing with deadlines and trying to make ends meet. The simplicity of that time was a reflection of my hectic lifestyle—my need for a place to call home, where I could hide from the world without answering questions—and I suppose that's why I was thinking I could complete a book at twenty-three. I knew I'd have to live a full life before I could write about it, and what better way to understand life than as the silent witness to war? I remember my Dad telling me it was the worst idea I could have possibly come up with; and that was knowing that he’d fought in the First World War, surviving the trenches. In fact, it didn't distract me in the least; that was something he had to do. I was looking for different answers.

That’s why I thought Rudi was the answer I was looking for. I thought he was a man not unlike myself. He first came to the Orient after the Great War—a more innocent time when people like my father actually believed they'd fought "the War to end all Wars"; a time when a generation tried to reconnect with what it had lost—the youth it threw away without a second thought—thinking like the youth of the day always thinks: This will be over before we even get started. I suppose I was just as guilty as my father's generation for thinking I could remain untouched throughout the whole thing—never thinking it could happen to me; but nobody can go through something as horrific as a war and not be touched by it in some way.

I met Rudi in a bar somewhere in Seoul, in one of those small, out-of-the-way places none of my friends went to because it was said to be tied in with the drug trade, mixed up with that mysterious triangle of Hong Kong Triads, New York city mobsters, and Parisian gangsters. I thought, if I want to write an article for a magazine, what better story could I tell than the dark side of army life everyone here was trying to hide from the folks back home? I first noticed Rudi because he was a Westerner like myself, and one tended to hold on to people like that out there; it's as if there's an understanding that goes unsaid, an awareness that's almost shared—as much as it's implied—with something as innocent as a look, or a side-long glance that has the appearance of a distant longing. Rudi had the look of a shell-shocked veteran. His eyes were two pinholes with dark circles underneath, both of them red-rimmed and sunk deep into sockets that stared at me from under half closed lids—like they were staring out vacantly into nothingness most of the time, as if he was playing a movie in his head only he could see.

He was sixty, he said, but I thought he looked closer to seventy, and when he spoke, I realized I was probably nearer to the truth than he was. His head was covered with a thick mat of coarse white hair, the same sort of hair my mother had at that age; his skin hung loose on his arms, and his face was a criss-crossed patchwork of wrinkles burned to a nut brown through years of exposure to the tropical sun. The grey hairs on his chest were poking out through the missing buttons of his torn white shirt—a long sleeved shirt that was sweat-stained and looked as if the only time it had been washed was the last time he was caught out in the monsoon season. The left sleeve was partially rolled up on his forearm, and he had a battered package of cigarettes hanging—almost balancing—in a torn breast pocket along with a pen, which seemed to hold the cigarettes in place. His moustache was thin, greying, and well trimmed; he kept it neat, but it was stained yellow from years of cigarettes dangling out of his mouth. His teeth were black and broken, which made the skin that hung around his face look loose, giving him the sunken, drawn in look of an emaciated peasant.

His parents died on the Titanic when he was fifteen. They left a sizeable inheritance behind, but it was nothing extravagant. He and his brothers would continue with their educations, but not in the private schools of Berlin where they'd been for as long as he could remember; they'd have to go back to Vienna. They would live under the guardianship of a cousin, an Englishman named George, an international banker who helped turned their modest inheritance into something more substantial. Rudi spoke of the man with a devotion that was little short of reverence, and I could see there was a deep respect for the man, as much as there was love—as much as a man like Rudi can express such sentiments.

When the Great War broke out, Rudi was already in his first year at medical school. He liked University life he said, but two years later, he enlisted. Because of his medical training, he went to a field hospital as an ambulance driver. He was tossed into a maelstrom, he said; it was like living in a world gone mad. He was there—at the front—for almost two years, he added; two years of Hell, sleeping three or four hours a night for days at a time, and then going for weeks at a time when nothing happened, so that a man could feel lulled into thinking the world was at peace. Things went differently on the Italian Front he said, reaching into his breast pocket with shaking hands to pull out a cigarette. When he said he saw things a man shouldn't see, I agreed, remembering my own short encounter with the war here, and how I hadn't been to the front since. A man can lose touch with himself as easily as he can with God, and I wondered if that was what happened to him.

Still, he was an interesting man, and I saw a story in him I thought I might be able to sell to the magazine, and told him as much. I wondered how a man who lived in Vienna, was educated in the best schools in Berlin, could lose himself to such a degree that he ended up here, in this little bar in Korea? He said the war had destroyed a lot more than the old Empires of Europe by allowing the likes of Hitler, Mussolini, Lenin and Stalin onto the world stage; his brothers had died because of it. His youngest brother died of the Spanish Flu, and his other brother somewhere in the Alps. George died on the border, shot as a British spy. There was nothing to go back to, he said with a shrug that was almost an apology. It was easy letting himself get lost, he added; that was the easiest thing he'd ever done in his life. He boarded the first available steamer to the South Pacific, and never looked back. He'd come across a dead German soldier and took the man's papers, giving up his past, his name, and his life for a life less ordinary; an uncertain future hopping among South Pacific islands picking up languages and dialects. He told me he speaks four languages fluently, and a dozen different dialects with some smattering of success. He said it to me evenly, not like a man bragging about his accomplishments and hoping to inspire some sort of praise from someone else, but a man telling you he did what he did in order to survive; simply, honestly, humbly. He made his way out to the Philippines he said, and from there, on to Hong Kong; it was only inevitable, he said, that he ended up in China.

"But how did you end up here? In Korea?" I asked.

He looked at me through his half closed eyes and smiled, scratching at his cheek slowly, lazily—which, if I was an older man and knew something more about life than I knew then, would have told me what sort of a man he was. "I'd need a drink to tell you that story," he said with a smile. He looked at me wistfully through the bottom of his beer glass as he stubbed out the remains of his cigarette. I quickly ordered him another drink.

"There are times when a man has to have a drink before he can talk," he said with another smile.

It was a weak smile—almost limpid—and I saw a mournful look pass across his face behind his broken, blackened teeth—a fleeting look that was gone almost as soon as it was there—and then he crossed his arms as he leaned on the dirty table and looked at me seriously, pushing his sleeves back.

"You'd have to go back to Manchuria, in 1937," he said when the beer was placed unceremoniously on the table in front of us. I looked up at the waiter—a man in a stained apron who affected a smile and left as quickly as he could, bowing and apologizing to me, making a mockery of his own ill manners. I told myself it wasn't worth the effort to argue with the man.

"I saw a lot of things traveling through the islands and living among the people there—things that would have shocked me in my previous life. I left Hong Kong for the Chinese mainland sometime in 1932. I spent a year chasing the Dragon in and around Kowloon--you know what that means when I say chasing the Dragon?" he asked, nodding and smiling when he saw that I did.