YOU'RE WRONG SERGEANT... I'M NO COWARD

Korea 1953 A True Story
Excerpt from Boney TeenHobo
Autobiography of Lloyd E. Lawrence Sr

Being an Airman Second Class meant little money each payday. He went back to his Sarah Street gang Barrio roots to become a survivor. He had learned how to work the black-market in Japan, Korea was no different. It started out as a nickel and dime survival project, but became very nefarious and lucrative later on. He was very uncomfortable with the adopted "Fast Eddie" persona he had developed. Boney also built and rented the only hot shower concession at K16. He fashioned two showers out of mess hall heaters and Old F80 wing-tip tanks using boiled water pressure in heated fifty-five gallon drums to force the water up into the two suspended wing tanks on an elevated overhead platform made from shipping crates. He got the idea from watching old coffee pots pressure lift water up to the waiting coffee grounds in a vessel above the pot. At twenty-five cents a head he made about five bucks a day. The Air Force rationed a fifth of whiskey a day per man at one dollar eighty cents. The Marines on the frontline were allowed one 3.2% alcohol content beer each day. He'd save rations for a few weeks and take them to a rear area of the frontline and sell them for thirty dollars each; encouraged and abetted by a childhood friend from the Pack Rat gang who was assigned to the 1st Marines on the Kansas Main Line of Resistance (MLR).

This continued until one night as he was returning; near the Kansas Line, the Route One checkpoint guard was longer there. The MLR had moved and he was in enemy territory. In stark fear, his foot went pedal-to-the-metal to get out of there as fast as the weapons carrier could go. The 6127th had old WWII weapons carriers as recreation vehicles when the new 1950s models arrived in theater. The old inventory was also turned over to the ROK forces.

He could hear his heart racing synchronously with the exploding rounds to the north of him. The rounds were going over his head to the enemy coming south in sake-drunken, horn-blowing hordes. With powerful adrenalin surges and a sudden increase in blood pressure, a pulsating swishing sound like the Doppler Effect from the overhead shells, seemed to imitate that sound as the blood swished in his ears. He thought, "Maybe the Sergeant was right; I must be a coward."

A few hundred meters down the road; as he raced south on Route One toward Seoul, a dirt road, he saw an American jeep on its side in a rice paddy. It was about ten meters out to the left of a right-hand curve. There was hissing white steam emanating from the radiator, in what appeared to be bullet holes. The headlights were on and bright, they formed an eerie show of two vertically stacked beams with the rising steam pointing toward the road. He thought at first to ignore it and continue on the run for safer ground. It occurred to him that some Marines might be wounded and need help. Then paranoia set in and he thought it might be an enemy trap. He was searching for a justifiable reason to leave. His conscience would not let him respond to the overwhelming urge to get out of there.

His Carbine was loaded with a thirty round banana-clip on which he kept another thirty round clip taped back-to-back for quick reloading by rotation, should the need ever arise. He pushed the automatic lever to the on position, turned the lights of his weapons carrier off and crawled on his belly through human excrement; commonly used in rice paddies for fertilizer. Circling the jeep, he saw that it was empty and no one seemed to be close around. Reluctant to call out, because the enemy might be near, and hearing the sounds of battle a short distance to the north, he again thought to get on to safer ground. The situation reminded him of the sacrifices he'd make during hide-and-seek games as a child. He was Closter phobic then and would force himself to hide in scary places lest his friends thought him to be a coward. Again, with mustered-up courage, he yelled in a whisper, "Anybody here?" After a short listening pause and hearing no answer, Boney crawled back to his vehicle and went pedal-to-the-metal until he was stopped at the new Main Line of Resistance (MLR) Checkpoint about thirty miles north of Seoul. The 1st Battalion of The 1st Marine Division manned it. It was the same outfit he had nefariously been selling whiskey to. In oblivion to the questions or presence of the Corporal in the makeshift 1st Division guard shelter he couldn't focus.

Transfixed, he glanced back toward the Imjin River and north to the Kansas Line. Howitzer rounds were flashing like lightening strikes on the distant hills. The moon's shimmer with its golden hue silhouetted the hills; belying a MLR war zone. The beauty of it seemed so unsuitable. In all that shimmering beauty, another flight line of planes loaded with the wounded and dead was being spawned to deal with later. It envisaged the familiar cry of another gung-ho Marine moaning, "Mama . Mama" and the irrevocable fate of the disastrous ones destined for body bags, stacked in rows on tiers ten high. He further imagined shallow graves in rows waiting their turn, just another typewritten line on a space-available cargo manifest for return home. Boney always wanted to enter their names on a passenger manifest instead of being listed as an item of cargo. They would all join the continual line of flag-draped coffins at Travis Air Force Base, Oakland Army Depot or some other port of entry. A line developed behind him at the Check Point. The military had lines for every thing.

He thought back to the planeloads of fresh replacements in lines, coming to combat with an often-declared attitude of, "Where are they? I'm going to kill some Gooks!" And he saw lines of liters in the other direction with a sober quietness and an occasional plea for a Nurse or Mama.

Then there were lines of cannon fodder formed by the court system back home where the choice was jail or war. The Judges would reduce a felony to a misdemeanor. The lines of friends at Edison and Clovis High Schools left behind in the storm of life. They would be at their commencement exercises marching in line to the sound of "Pomp and Circumstance." Some would be in line at the Induction Processing Center of drafted inductees and the few volunteers. The makeshift football team giving each other courage with a gung-ho grunt before contact on a line of scrimmage at Tachikawa, across from the transient barracks.

Then the saddest of all lines. funeral cars slowly in route to a cemetery bringing Eagle-Hearts to their final resting place where the mothers moan: "Oh my son . my son; only to be shocked with the loud volley of gunfire from a line of rifles in military salutation; which gives way to yet another line formed to console the widow and her children with: "On behalf of The President of The United States and a grateful nation, may I present this flag of the United States with our deepest condolences?"

The sacred ground he was upon was near the 38th parallel where lines of battle had shifted back and forth for three years, generating the horrible lines of statistics eventuated by the madness of a mismanaged war.

Boney said to himself: "Oh, you're wrong Sergeant! I'm no coward for I am now part of the line of proud men spoken of by the Savior:" "No greater love hath any man than this, that he lay down his life for a friend."

Boney was humbled, knowing that he had passed the test of grit that no man should ever have to face. At eighteen years of age, and at that very instant, the boy became a man. Lloyd the man was humbled by the trauma of war. For the rest of his life, just as in combat, civilian life would be a constant and endless struggle. He later realized that it is far better to be humble by choice rather than humbled by circumstance, but either path opens the way to learning and maturing.

In one of his many sonnets, Lloyd later wrote of being humbled at the altar of war's remembrance:

"One question haunts me every Veteran season;
Did fate shoot craps in death or have a reason
To spare this ordinary boney sparrow.
While skewering soaring eagles on its arrow?"

God Bless The Vet.