Uncategorized

Combat Correspondent Style Guide and Notebook

Monday, December 10, 2018Monday, December 10, 2018 admin

Combat Journalism: CQR

I remember a fellow journalist telling me how her J-school professor once ordered students to write out the entire AP Stylebook by hand as part of a class project. The exercise, I was told, was designed to help the students memorize the Stylebook entries. I still wonder how these students reacted after they became professional journalists and found out that not all newsrooms use AP style.

If they went to work for a magazine, they probably had to learn the Chicago Manual of Style. If they work for an online media company, they may have had to learn the Yahoo Style Guide , which covers the basics of writing for Internet and mobile audiences. In most other cases, they would have had to master the various in-house styles that most media companies have and use to ensure uniformity in their content.

David Minthorn, AP deputy standards editor and AP Stylebook co-editor, said differences in style guides are not generally a problem. He explained that style variations are similar to differences in word spellings and usage found in dictionaries and lexicons. Writer and editor Erin Brenner of Copyediting.

The rest of the correspondents were busy housekeeping. They had taken over the only unoccupied shack, and photogra- phers and newsmen were busy sweeping out the filth and collecting straw on which to lay blankets. But Keyes, Tom, and I all felt too worried to be domestic. Major General William F. He was subsequently taken prisoner by the enemy as he participated in front-line fighting during the summer campaign.

Lieutenant General Walton II. Walker, Eighth Army Commander, in his jeep as it is ferried across the Kumho River a few weeks before his death. I hoped that the invitation meant I was winning an ally from the male correspondents' camp. Strategically located near the conference room, we tried to get information from the officers, Korean and American, who were streaming in and out.

We heard something vague about a convoy of fifty North Korean trucks and tanks that had somehow forded the Han River and were in our vicinity. But no one would tell us any- thing definite. The general in charge of the Tokyo contingent, which was then called the Korean Survey Group and later be- came the American Advance Command in Korea, was seven miles down the road at the repeater station. This station afforded the only means of direct telephonic com- munication with Tokyo. It turned out that during the critical conference, all that the group had to rely on were reports from Korean intelli- gence.

And these reports were as unreliable at that stage as the South Korean Army itself. Suddenly the doors of the conference room scraped open. We heard the thump of running feet and a piercing voice, addressed to the officers within the room: The uncertainty was frightening, maddening. Almost simultaneously we jumped up and raced into the building.

Our questions were met with a flat. He had to slow down because I was practically block- ing his way. Flinging his arms high in the air in an operatic gesture, the colonel answered, "We're surrounded, we're sur- rounded," and pushed past. Keyes and I glanced at each other quickly. If this were true, the beautiful independence of having our own jeep ready didn't mean a thing. Our only chance of survival was to stick by the guys with the guns and communica- tions with Tokyo and the United States Air Force. The panic of the next few minutes jumbled events and emotions so wildly that I can remember only episodic flashes.

I remember a furious sergeant stalking out of the Signal Corps room and saying to Keyes, "Those sons of bitches are trying to save their own hides there are planes coming, but the brass won't talk. They're afraid there won't be room for everybody. From then on every mess sergeant, jeep driver, code clerk, and correspondent had just one idea to get hold 43 PANIC of every and any vehicle around. Any South Korean who owned four wheels and who was unlucky enough to be near that headquarters that night was on foot from that second forward. That was the fastest convoy ever formed, and probably the most disheveled.

They're out of their minds. That was one time when I wished that my rifle experience extended beyond one afternoon on the range. So much had happened it seemed impossible that barely five or six minutes had elapsed since the wild breakup of the conference. Keyes, Tom, and Gordon Walker of the Christian Science Monitor, with carbines in hand, were jammed into the jeep with me.

We had a young sergeant riding shotgun. All I had with me was my typewriter and a toothbrush. In the first retreat in Seoul, where I had had to abandon all my personal things, I'd learned that they were all I really needed. The first jeeps started bouncing toward the airfield without orders or direction. They were filled with infur- iated GIs determined not to be left behind by the brass. At the field Major Greenwood did his best to organize a perimeter defense of the bomb-pocked strip. Mines were laid, machine guns entrenched, small-arms am- munition distributed.

It began to look to me like a fair start toward a Korean Corregidor. Much later I learned more about this projected last- ditch stand at the field. Some planes really were due that evening from Japan, not enough to take everybody, but at least a start in the evacuation. Our small force was sup- posed to hold the field until the planes arrived. Actually they never arrived at all. Rumors started spreading that the brass had decided to take the escape road directly south to Taejon. We had heard that Colonel Wright had gone back to the suddenly abandoned head- quarters to tiy to get word to his advisory officers with the South Korean troops.

He was going to instruct them to leave their charges and head for Taejon, but it appeared certain that there would not be enough time to permit his officers to catch up with our convoy. Their depar- ture, of course, didn't help the precarious morale of the South Korean Army. Then the torrential Korean rains started. Korean nights are cool even in summer, and with this pitiless downpour the temperature was like a foggy winter's day in San Francisco.

None of the men were wearing more than shirts and slacks, and I was still in my blouse and skirt. There had been no time to buy or scrounge a khaki shirt and pants. The rain pounded down without letup during the entire seven miserable hours in our completely open jeep. The blankets we put over us soon were soaked through, and we just sat helplessly, as drenched as if we had gone swimming with our clothes on. The road turned to slithery mud and the rivers became enormously swollen. At one point Keyes, who did much of the driving, swore that we must be lost because the bridge we were crossing appeared to be a long pier lead- ing into the ocean.

We all got out and groped around ahead of the jeep, and finally convinced him that it was merely a terribly wide river. I was sitting scrunched in the front seat between Keyes and Walker, straining to see the road, when suddenly the jeep skidded viciously in the mud. Finally the jeep swerved and the front wheels crashed into the ditch on our left. It wasn't as bad as the one we had missed but it was deep enough. All five of us, struggling in the mud and rain, couldn't get the jeep back onto the road.

Feeling guilty at my inad- equate strength, I started out to look for a Korean farm- house where we might get help. It was about 5 A. Through the downpour I sighted a Korean thatched hut across the brilliant green rice paddy. It was, for Korea, a well-to-do farm. The Ko- reans were stretched out on the wooden floor of their porch.

When I woke up the family of several men, a woman, and two children, they accepted the situation with true oriental calm. They showed no surprise what- ever at seeing a rain-drenched white woman standing there in the dawn, and two of the men promptly followed me back to the jeep. Their muscle provided enough extra power to wrench it back onto the road.

I had been worrying because we had absolutely nothing to give the Koreans as recompense, but apparently they expected nothing. The two white-clad men walked away even as we started consulting among ourselves as to what we could do for them. That miserable drive ended about an hour later. We rolled into Taejon about 6 A. It looked deserted, but we went up the stairs into the main conference room.

A spare, small-boned man, the general looked very alone. As it turned out, there had been no reason to hurry. The panic was all for nothing. There were no Communist troops within miles of Suwon. In fact, it was more than three days before it fell, and groups of American corre- spondents and officers re-entered the city a number of times before its final seizure. It seemed that General Church had preceded us by only a few hours.

But he had had time to communicate with Tokyo. He looked somewhat quizzically at these four miserable, rain-soaked creatures. I was shaking like a wet puppy, quite unable to control the chattering of my teeth, my gabardine skirt dripping little pools of rain water on the rug. The general said quietly, "You may be interested to know that two companies of American troops were air- lifted into southern Korea this morning. We were so completely cut off from the outside world that we had no way of knowing then, or for several days, that this was a United Nations action.

By now my state of utter physical discomfort, the cold, and the cruel need for sleep left no room for any emotion. Thinking of our retreat and reports of new rout all along the front, I asked the general, "Don't you think it's too late? We'll have people we can rely on. To tell you the truth, weVe been having a pretty rough time with the South Koreans. We can't put backbone into them. What are you going to do with troops that won't stay where they're put? We have no way of knowing whether the South Korean reports are accurate or just wild rumor. It will be better when we have our own organization.

It may take one or two divi- sions. The general added that the first Americans would be deployed directly north of Taejon to safeguard key bridges between this city and Suwon. Troops would ar- rive in Taejon, he said, in a matter of hours. None of us, military or civilian, had the remotest idea of what we were really up against: This meant approximately one hundred and fifty thousand well-armed, hard-fighting RedSj equipped with the only heavy tanks in that part of the world. Actually, Major General Charles A. Wil- loughby, MacArthur's Director of Intelligence in Tokyo, had reported to Washington that the enemy was massing this war potential.

But certainly none of the soldiers in the field seemed to know that his report realistically meas- ured enemy strength. I asked the general, "How long will it be before we can mount an offensive? We walked back into the rain with two tremendous stories: And here we were again with the same old communications prob- lem. How were we to get our stories out? Tom Lambert, who was with the Associated Press, had a twenty-four-hour-a-day deadline.

He suddenly remem- bered a rumor that Ambassador John J. Muccio had a line to Tokyo at his quarters in Taejon. Remembering his hos- tility to the press a few days earlier, we hated to ask for anything. But we were desperate. When the ambassador opened the door of his small gray house in the American-built compound in Taejon's suburb, his face clouded. Beyond him we could see an open, blazing firethe most beautiful sight I've ever seen in my life an open whisky bottle perched on the mantel, and a melee of tired, distraught Americans in the process of thawing out.

Our faces spoke frank longing to be in- vited in, and the ambassador must have been feeling com- passionate, for he let us in. Never has the warmth of a fire or the burning glow of a straight shot of whisky felt so magnificent. But there was no phone. The ambassador did tell us, however, that some correspondents had been using a phone down at the United States Information Service. We had left our own jeep at headquarters. The phone was there all right, in the rickety first-floor room just across from the Taejon rail station.

Tom, by a fluke, got through to his office in about twenty minutes often it took two or three hours. Although we were tre- mendously relieved to have communications at last, we were both disappointed that we had no time to write out our stories. We simply couldn't risk losing this oppor- tunity and so had to dictate our pieces straight off. This was particularly difficult for me, since I was used to daily newspaper techniques rather than news-agency tech- niques. I had never before been faced with the necessity of organizing a story in my head for immediate dictation.

This was to prove the least of my troubles. I was a one- man bureau, and so had no one in Tokyo to whom I could give my story. Tom asked the Associated Press if they would help me. The Associated Press is, of course, a co- operative enterprise in which the New York Herald Trib- une is an owner paper. They would ordinarily try to help out a correspondent of a member newspaper. But after I had dictated only about three paragraphs, Mrs. Was that long, horrible ride, the cold, the fear, all of it, to be for nothing? There was only one thing to do.

The battle of communications which began there at Taejon continued throughout the war. The Army, it seemed to me, consistently managed to make a very diffi- cult situation frightful. Time after time correspondents, who were working in a state of utter exhaustion, found themselves forced into the attitude of "to hell with the quality the miracle is to get the story out at all. Getting the story has been about one fifth of the problem; the principle energies of the re- porters had to be devoted to finding some means of trans- mission.

After dictating my story that morning, I rushed back into the drizzle to try to hitch a ride for Tom and myself. Keyes and Gordon were waiting for us at the ambassa- dor's. I flagged a Korean officer who turned out to be an exceptionally neat, well-dressed fellow who spoke English quite well. Tom climbed in back with the officer, and I sat in front with the driver.

Feeling comparatively chipper with the relief of sending his story, Tom clapped the Korean officer heartily on the shoulder. As we left the little gray house at Taejons outskirts around three in the morning, our conversation was as somber as the weather. We were going to Pyontek, where only the day before our forces had been badly strafed by our own planes. This was the first of many incidents which showed how much we needed to improve our ground-air co-ordination. I was assigned now to watch the skies and give warning if I saw a plane. As we neared Pyontek we had to drive around black- ened, still-burning ammo trucks.

The smell of death rose from the ditches and the waterlogged rice paddies on either side of the road. The conversation, in keeping with the glumness of the hour, turned to epitaphs. Aside from the general melancholy of the morning, I had some purely personal reasons for being unhappy.

There has been some publicity about a feud between me and one of my Herald Tribune colleagues. It is quite true that the difficulty existed, and I see no point in being coy about it here. The simple fact was that my colleague didn't want me to stay in Korea at all. I had cabled the office at home that I very much wanted to stay, that I believed there was more than enough news to share and that the war could be covered on a partnership basis. My colleague disagreed with this to the point where he told me flatly that I would General Douglas MacArthur and his political adviser.

He also added the reassuring information that he didn't be- lieve I had a single friend in Tokyo. This was a distressing puzzle to me at the time, but I later learned that he was probably right. The Tokyo agency bureau chiefs were furious about a story I had allegedly filed on American bombings north of the 38th parallel.

The four chiefs had learned of the proposed bombings before the MacArthur visit to the front lines and had agreed among themselves to keep the story a secret until a fixed date. They had received callbacks on some story of mine callbacks apparently indicating that they had been scooped and wrongly believed that I had learned about the bombings from MacArthur and filed the story ahead of their schedule. Since I didn't know anything about their schedule, what they were really doing was accusing me of breaking an agreement to which I was never a party.

It is true that I knew about the bombing plans, but from quite another source. I hon- estly couldn't remember ever filing the bombing story at all, and when I checked the Herald Tribune files on my return I found no record of it. But that, of course, was much later. And in the meantime I was caught squarely in the middle of a lot of unpleasant confusion. I was in such a state of physical exhaustion that I was unusually vulnerable emotionally and really felt baffled and upset. But, whatever the attitude in Tokyo, I found some fine moral support in Korea. I talked it all over with Carl, and he helped me make up my mind with this question, "What is more important to you, Maggie, the experience of covering the Korean war or fears of losing your job?

But there was no denying that I was heavyhearted. I felt that no matter what the cause of my colleague's hos- tility, it would be harder on me because I was a woman. Since I was the only woman here doing a daily news- paper job, I was bound to be the target for lots of talk, and this mix-up would supply fresh material I believed that no matter who was right, I would undoubtedly be blamed. But I was happily wrong. The men correspondents on the scene in Korea could not have been more fair.

They did the only sensible thing, which was to refuse to take sides at all By the end of the summer the entire sit- uation ended up where it belonged, in the joke depart- ment. But at Pyontek that morning there was only gloom in the air and in my mind. We were all cold and tired by the time we found the battalion command post hidden in a tiny thatched hut surrounded by a sea of mud, Colonel Harold "Red" Ayres, commander of the first battalion of the 34th Infantry Regiment, shared his command post with a filthy assortment of chickens, pigs, and ducks.

Earth strode into the hut. We can depend on him to hold on, but if any tanks do get by those batteries they'll head straight for here. It was a big moment, and we four knew that we had been cut in on a critical slice of history. We were about to see the beginning of what we later named the long retreat. I was filled with a very uncomfortable mixture of ap- prehension and excitement as we followed the bazooka teams to the unknown front.

Wrapped in rain-soaked blankets, we traveled swiftly behind the small convoy of trucks and command cars carrying the bazooka and rifle teams. Then, on the crest of a hill, the convoy suddenly halted. We could see soldiers jumping out of the trucks and spreading out on a ridge parallel to the road. The road was clogged with South Korean soldiers in what seemed an endless procession southward.

South Ko- reans, in these early days, simply appropriated the jeeps or command cars assigned to them and took off individu- ally. Tanks can't get off the road, and we can. He had been examining the marks of huge tank treads on the road and told us that the tank had sighted us, turned around, and backed into a near-by village. Even as we were entrenching in a graveyard flanking the main road, the enormous thing rumbled into view about fifteen hun- dred yards to our left.

It was astraddle a railroad, and there was a second tank behind it. We had no idea how many more tanks might be in the little village that lay between us and Colonel Smith's battalion.

;
Burdens of Proof: Faith, Doubt, and Identity in Autobiography (Life Writing).
.
FILOSOFIA (Italian Edition)!

And, to make things even more tense, Colonel Smith's battalion was now urgently messaging us for ammunition. Unless the tanks were smashed, his forward battalion would be cut off. At this point a small ammunition-laden convoy roared up the road. Two lieutenants jumped out and rushed up the hill to Lieutenant Payne. They were tall, fine-looking officers with all the bravado and eagerness of very young, very green soldiers. Well make it all right, but we'd like you to give us a couple of your men.

We'll just wait and make another check with headquar- ters. Then maybe we'll make like Custer. We were becoming in- creasingly impressed with the sure, professional way Payne was handling the situation. I had asked him earlier in the day how he felt about being back at war. A man's only got a certain number of close calls coming to him. But as soon as I heard the guns I got over it. When I saw him again in August, he and Colonel Ayres were the only two survivors of the battal- ion headquarters staff of eleven.

Of the battalion itself, about men at full strength, only were still on the line. The rest were wounded or dead. From our graveyard foxholes we saw the first of these deaths the first American death in Korea. When orders to attack first went out to the fifty-odd youngsters in our bazooka team they gazed at the tanks as if they were watching a newsreel.

It took prodding from their officers to make them realize that this was it that it was up to them to attack. The first swoosh from a bazooka flared out when they were nearly five hundred yards away from the tanks. But the aim was good and it looked like a direct hit. But apparently it didn't look good to Lieutenant Payne. We could see enemy soldiers jump from the tank, and machine guns began to chatter at the approaching bazooka teams.

Through my field glasses I could see a blond American head poke up out of the grass the young soldier was trying to adjust his aim. Flashes from the tank flicked the ground horribly close, and I thought I saw him fall. But in a few minutes I heard a soldier shout, "They got Shad- rickright in the chest He's dead, I guess. I thought then how much more matter-of-fact the actuality of war is than any of its projections in literature. The wounded seldom cry there's no one with time and emotion to listen.

Bazookas were still sounding off. We felt certain that the tanks, which were like sitting ducks astride the tracks, would be demolished within a matter of minutes. But time passed, and suddenly, after an hour, we saw the bazooka boys coming back toward us across the fields. Besides, these damn bazooks don't do any good against those heavy tanks they bounce right off.

But even so it seemed incredible that we were going to pull back with enemy tanks still within our lines. I was gripped with a sense of unreality that followed me through most of the war. Reality, I guess, is just what we are accustomed to and in Korea there was never time to become accus- tomed to anything. Incredible or not, it was clear enough as we returned to the command post that we Americans had not only been soundly defeated in our first skirmish but that a major re- treat of our battalion would be forced.

We simply had nothing with which to halt the tanks, and we were far too few to prevent the North Korean infantry from coming around our flanks. We hated to think what was happening to Colonel Smith's forward battalion. But you soon learn, at a war front, to place events firmly in separate emotional compartments. There was abso- lutely nothing to be gained by thinking about Colonel Smith's situation.

When we got back to battalion head- quarters I think most of us tried to lock the door of the worry compartment and concentrate on immediate, ma- terial problems. My first act, on getting out of the jeep at head- quarters, was to slip and sprawl flat on my belly in a muddy rice paddy. Soaked and mud-caked, my consum- ing, immediate interest was the getting-dry department. Lieutenant Payne came to my rescue. He found me some dry green fatigues and gallantly escorted me to an empty thatched hut where I changed. Next on the list of compelling interests was flea powder. I had been in agony all day, completely defenseless against as vicious an as- sault as fleadom ever made.

A thick network of bites pocked my waist, thighs, and ankles. I hurried down to the medic's hut to beg for the little gray box of insecticide powder which was to be my most precious personal pos- session of the Korean war. I was talking to a Medical Corps sergeant when they brought in the body of Private Shadrick. His face was un- covered. As they carefully laid his body down on the bare boards of the shack I noticed that his face still bore an ex- pression of slight surprise. It was an expression I was to see often among the soldier dead.

The prospect of death had probably seemed as unreal to Private Shadrick as the entire war still seemed to me. He was very young indeed his fair hair and frail build made him look far less than his nineteen years. Someone went to look for a dry blanket for him, and just then the medic came back with the flea powder. He glanced at the body as he was handing me the gray box.

The story unfolded shortly after midnight. I had been trying to sleep on a blanket-covered bit o floor where other correspondents and most of the battalion officers were also stretched out. Despite bone-aching weariness, the memory of our bazooka skirmish and the thought of tanks within our lines filled my brief sleep with uneasi- ness. Suddenly through the darkness a voice whispered to me, "Better get into the war room fast. We may have to pull out suddenly. As lie looked at me ques- tioningly, I added, "It s exactly the same time that we had to leave Seoul and Suwon. In the center sat General Earth and "Red" Ayres.

Deep concern had replaced the confidence that had marked both these men only twelve hours earlier. A kerosene light flaring on the table in front of them highlighted their serious faces. The table was covered with a map and surrounded by field telephones. Separat- ing the officers from the relentless downpour outside were grotesque rain-soaked blankets that flapped over the win- dows. The handful of correspondents stood in the dark- ness at the opposite end of the room. Near us various officers were frantically grinding their field telephones, which cast strange shadows in the melo- dramatic light.

Just as we entered, I saw three tattered, shaken GIs heading for the door. They looked as if they had been on a prolonged Dunkerque. They say most of the battalion is lost. We've just contacted an officer Colonel Perry. He had difficulty walking. Shrapnel had got him in the leg. He walked slowly up to General Earth. His voice reflected a mixture of exhaustion and deep unhappi- ness. They came at us from all sides.

We fired until we ran out of ammo. Then, with visible effort to take emotion out of his voice, he said, "I know that you and Colonel Smith did everything that could be done. How bad is it? We had some recoilless 75s, some mortars and other artillery. About eight-thirty in the morning those heavy tanks started rolling in on us.

We took them under fire at about fifteen hundred yards and hit four or five. But we couldn't stop them they rolled right by our positions. Pretty soon the tanks got around to our rear and were shooting at our positions from behind. Some were dressed like farmers, in whites, and the rest had on mustard-colored uniforms.

They came like flies, all around us. We didn't have enough men to deploy. Then we got caught in the cross fire of the tanks and infantry. We were out of rations and out of ammo by three in the afternoon. We had to leave all our heavy guns, though we took out the breeches. The last I saw of Colonel Smith, he was leading a group of men over the hill. And the Chinese, when they came in, followed exactly the same battle procedures.

When not successfully spearheaded by tanks, enemy infantry would take advantage of our numerical weakness to infiltrate and encircle. I remember describing it in a story as a "circular front. We started the war with three under-strength battalions. They were perfect targets for the enemy battle plan. As the war developed, the Communists perfected some new tricks, of course. As they captured more and more of our equipment, they began to disguise themselves in American uniforms and try to fool the troops by calling to them in English and pretending to be South Korean allies.

The enemy simply avoided frontal assault and depended on infiltration and a series of enveloping movements. Both the North Koreans and the Chinese keyed their tactics around their one big advantagevast quantities of man power. And they were extravagant with it, as we learned that night from Colonel Perry. His phrase, "They came at us like flies," became a commonplace one in the next few months. As the colonel finished his unhappy account, General Earth's first words were, "My God, to think I personally pulled away the dynamite from those bridges. Now there was absolutely nothing to stop them.

Our weak half -strength battalion was inevitably due for the next blow. We could not understand why the enemy had not struck already. We didn't know it then, but there were six well-armed North Korean divisions bearing down on us. Why they did not push their tanks straight through to Pusan then and there is one of the war's mysteries. A hard push would have crumbled our defenses, as everyone from General MacArthur on down now concedes. Facing the enemy were only a thousand Americans at the most and the dis- organized remnants of the South Koreans.

They overestimated us as much as we underestimated them. Knowing that our battalion was due for a showdown, I elected to stay on and watch the fight. The command post, as usual, was located in a school- house. Regimental officers were bending over maps, grind- ing telephones, and frantically trying to piece together what was happening up front.

As so often happened in this lightning-fast war, correspondents had to function as liai- son officers. Carl and I were cross-examined at length about the bazooka skirmish, and we reported the situation in as much detail as we could remember. It was now 3 A. With the waning of excitement, weariness closed in again. Until this period in the Korean war I had not realized that the bodily mechanism could be pushed so hard and so long without sleep.

Later, watch- ing soldiers and marines march miles and then fight all night and day without sleep, I realized what a compara- tively small dosage of exhaustion we correspondents had to endure. But on that particular night the long, rough jeep ride in the cold, the innumerable hikes up and down hills, and the many previous nights with only an hour or two of sleep combined to put both Carl and myself in a state of stupor.

Despite the hubbub around us, we each War-weary GI limps back to his base near Wonju after a fifteen-mile patrol. When I woke at about 5: I think the silence and a new crop of fleabites must have done it there was not a single American soldier left in the room. Maps, guns, and the big square cases of C rations that had been strewn around the floor were gone. Carl, his head propped on his elbow and his eyes still blurred with sleep, was blinking about the room with dis- belief. I am continually astonished when, with the benefit of hindsight, I remember the atmosphere of confidence at division headquarters on that day.

For we were terribly unprepared in the Far East. General Doug- las MacArthur had repeatedly and urgently warned Washington that he had insufficient forces in the event of an emergency. So much had happened it seemed impossible that barely five or six minutes had elapsed since the wild breakup of the conference. Keyes, Tom, and Gordon Walker of the Christian Science Monitor, with carbines in hand, were jammed into the jeep with me.

At the field Major Greenwood did his best to organize a perimeter defense of the bomb-pocked strip. Mines were laid, machine guns entrenched, small-arms am- munition distributed. It began to look to me like a fair start toward a Korean Corregidor. Much later I learned more about this projected last- ditch stand at the field. Some planes really were due that evening from Japan, not enough to take everybody, but at least a start in the evacuation. Our small force was sup- posed to hold the field until the planes arrived.

Actually they never arrived at all. Rumors started spreading that the brass had decided to take the escape road directly south to Taejon. We had heard that Colonel Wright had gone back to the suddenly abandoned head- quarters to tiy to get word to his advisory officers with the South Korean troops. He was going to instruct them to leave their charges and head for Taejon, but it appeared certain that there would not be enough time to permit his officers to catch up with our convoy. Their depar- ture, of course, didn't help the precarious morale of the South Korean Army.

Then the torrential Korean rains started. Korean nights are cool even in summer, and with this pitiless downpour the temperature was like a foggy winter's day in San Francisco. None of the men were wearing more than shirts and slacks, and I was still in my blouse and skirt. There had been no time to buy or scrounge a khaki shirt and pants. The rain pounded down without letup during the entire seven miserable hours in our completely open jeep. The blankets we put over us soon were soaked through, and we just sat helplessly, as drenched as if we had gone swimming with our clothes on.

The road turned to slithery mud and the rivers became enormously swollen. At one point Keyes, who did much of the driving, swore that we must be lost because the bridge we were crossing appeared to be a long pier lead- ing into the ocean. We all got out and groped around ahead of the jeep, and finally convinced him that it was merely a terribly wide river. I was sitting scrunched in the front seat between Keyes and Walker, straining to see the road, when suddenly the jeep skidded viciously in the mud.

Finally the jeep swerved and the front wheels crashed into the ditch on our left. It wasn't as bad as the one we had missed but it was deep enough. All five of us, struggling in the mud and rain, couldn't get the jeep back onto the road. Feeling guilty at my inad- equate strength, I started out to look for a Korean farm- house where we might get help.

It was about 5 A. Through the downpour I sighted a Korean thatched hut across the brilliant green rice paddy. It was, for Korea, a well-to-do farm. The Ko- reans were stretched out on the wooden floor of their porch. When I woke up the family of several men, a woman, and two children, they accepted the situation with true oriental calm.

They showed no surprise what- ever at seeing a rain-drenched white woman standing there in the dawn, and two of the men promptly followed me back to the jeep. Their muscle provided enough extra power to wrench it back onto the road. I had been worrying because we had absolutely nothing to give the Koreans as recompense, but apparently they expected nothing. The two white-clad men walked away even as we started consulting among ourselves as to what we could do for them.

That miserable drive ended about an hour later. We rolled into Taejon about 6 A. It looked deserted, but we went up the stairs into the main conference room. A spare, small-boned man, the general looked very alone. As it turned out, there had been no reason to hurry. The panic was all for nothing. There were no Communist troops within miles of Suwon. In fact, it was more than three days before it fell, and groups of American corre- spondents and officers re-entered the city a number of times before its final seizure.

It seemed that General Church had preceded us by only a few hours. But he had had time to communicate with Tokyo. He looked somewhat quizzically at these four miserable, rain-soaked creatures. I was shaking like a wet puppy, quite unable to control the chattering of my teeth, my gabardine skirt dripping little pools of rain water on the rug. The general said quietly, "You may be interested to know that two companies of American troops were air- lifted into southern Korea this morning.

We were so completely cut off from the outside world that we had no way of knowing then, or for several days, that this was a United Nations action. By now my state of utter physical discomfort, the cold, and the cruel need for sleep left no room for any emotion. Thinking of our retreat and reports of new rout all along the front, I asked the general, "Don't you think it's too late? We'll have people we can rely on. To tell you the truth, weVe been having a pretty rough time with the South Koreans. We can't put backbone into them.

What are you going to do with troops that won't stay where they're put? We have no way of knowing whether the South Korean reports are accurate or just wild rumor. It will be better when we have our own organization. It may take one or two divi- sions. The general added that the first Americans would be deployed directly north of Taejon to safeguard key bridges between this city and Suwon.

Troops would ar- rive in Taejon, he said, in a matter of hours. None of us, military or civilian, had the remotest idea of what we were really up against: This meant approximately one hundred and fifty thousand well-armed, hard-fighting RedSj equipped with the only heavy tanks in that part of the world. Actually, Major General Charles A. Wil- loughby, MacArthur's Director of Intelligence in Tokyo, had reported to Washington that the enemy was massing this war potential.

How many style guides do journalists really need? - Poynter?
Apologetic Motivation: Its Influences on Biblical Interpretation (IBRI Occasional Papers Book 32)?
?
Developmental Origins of Health and Disease;
Full text of "War In Korea The Report Of A Woman Combat Correspondent".
How many style guides do journalists really need? - Poynter?
Yo-yo Cupcake (Bean Bag Designs Book 3).

Muccio had a line to Tokyo at his quarters in Taejon. Remembering his hos- tility to the press a few days earlier, we hated to ask for anything. But we were desperate. When the ambassador opened the door of his small gray house in the American-built compound in Taejon's suburb, his face clouded. Beyond him we could see an open, blazing firethe most beautiful sight I've ever seen in my life an open whisky bottle perched on the mantel, and a melee of tired, distraught Americans in the process of thawing out.

We had left our own jeep at headquarters. The phone was there all right, in the rickety first-floor room just across from the Taejon rail station. Tom, by a fluke, got through to his office in about twenty minutes often it took two or three hours. Although we were tre- mendously relieved to have communications at last, we were both disappointed that we had no time to write out our stories.

We simply couldn't risk losing this oppor- tunity and so had to dictate our pieces straight off. This was particularly difficult for me, since I was used to daily newspaper techniques rather than news-agency tech- niques. I had never before been faced with the necessity of organizing a story in my head for immediate dictation.

I thought immediately of Joe Fromm of the C7. Joe agreed at once to take the story. But by this time the USIS room had filled with correspondents pressing hard for the use of the phone. Under these psychological pressures I slashed the Su- won episode to about two paragraphs and compressed the rest of the really important events into five or six paragraphs. I felt miserable and frustrated. The battle of communications which began there at Taejon continued throughout the war. The Army, it seemed to me, consistently managed to make a very diffi- cult situation frightful.

Time after time correspondents, who were working in a state of utter exhaustion, found themselves forced into the attitude of "to hell with the quality the miracle is to get the story out at all. Getting the story has been about one fifth of the problem; the principle energies of the re- porters had to be devoted to finding some means of trans- mission.

Tom climbed in back with the officer, and I sat in front with the driver. Feeling comparatively chipper with the relief of sending his story, Tom clapped the Korean officer heartily on the shoulder. As we left the little gray house at Taejons outskirts around three in the morning, our conversation was as somber as the weather. We were going to Pyontek, where only the day before our forces had been badly strafed by our own planes. This was the first of many incidents which showed how much we needed to improve our ground-air co-ordination. I was assigned now to watch the skies and give warning if I saw a plane.

As we neared Pyontek we had to drive around black- ened, still-burning ammo trucks. The smell of death rose from the ditches and the waterlogged rice paddies on either side of the road. The conversation, in keeping with the glumness of the hour, turned to epitaphs. Aside from the general melancholy of the morning, I had some purely personal reasons for being unhappy.

Brigittas Wardrobe - Score.
Media directory.
Rendez- vous sur la Côte dAmour (Girly Comedy t. 12) (French Edition)!
Letterpress Strategy Guide - Tips, Advice and Strategy to Win Honestly!?
Apocalipsis. 3ª Entrega (Spanish Edition)?
Media directory.

I had cabled the office at home that I very much wanted to stay, that I believed there was more than enough news to share and that the war could be covered on a partnership basis. My colleague disagreed with this to the point where he told me flatly that I would General Douglas MacArthur and his political adviser. He also added the reassuring information that he didn't be- lieve I had a single friend in Tokyo. This was a distressing puzzle to me at the time, but I later learned that he was probably right. The Tokyo agency bureau chiefs were furious about a story I had allegedly filed on American bombings north of the 38th parallel.

Since I didn't know anything about their schedule, what they were really doing was accusing me of breaking an agreement to which I was never a party. It is true that I knew about the bombing plans, but from quite another source. I hon- estly couldn't remember ever filing the bombing story at all, and when I checked the Herald Tribune files on my return I found no record of it. But that, of course, was much later. And in the meantime I was caught squarely in the middle of a lot of unpleasant confusion.

I was in such a state of physical exhaustion that I was unusually vulnerable emotionally and really felt baffled and upset. But, whatever the attitude in Tokyo, I found some fine moral support in Korea. I talked it all over with Carl, and he helped me make up my mind with this question, "What is more important to you, Maggie, the experience of covering the Korean war or fears of losing your job?

But at Pyontek that morning there was only gloom in the air and in my mind. We were all cold and tired by the time we found the battalion command post hidden in a tiny thatched hut surrounded by a sea of mud, Colonel Harold "Red" Ayres, commander of the first battalion of the 34th Infantry Regiment, shared his command post with a filthy assortment of chickens, pigs, and ducks. Earth strode into the hut. We can depend on him to hold on, but if any tanks do get by those batteries they'll head straight for here.

It was a big moment, and we four knew that we had been cut in on a critical slice of history. We were about to see the beginning of what we later named the long retreat. I was filled with a very uncomfortable mixture of ap- prehension and excitement as we followed the bazooka teams to the unknown front. Wrapped in rain-soaked blankets, we traveled swiftly behind the small convoy of trucks and command cars carrying the bazooka and rifle teams.

Then, on the crest of a hill, the convoy suddenly halted.

We could see soldiers jumping out of the trucks and spreading out on a ridge parallel to the road. The road was clogged with South Korean soldiers in what seemed an endless procession southward. South Ko- reans, in these early days, simply appropriated the jeeps or command cars assigned to them and took off individu- ally. Tanks can't get off the road, and we can. He had been examining the marks of huge tank treads on the road and told us that the tank had sighted us, turned around, and backed into a near-by village.

Even as we were entrenching in a graveyard flanking the main road, the enormous thing rumbled into view about fifteen hun- dred yards to our left. It was astraddle a railroad, and there was a second tank behind it. We had no idea how many more tanks might be in the little village that lay between us and Colonel Smith's battalion. And, to make things even more tense, Colonel Smith's battalion was now urgently messaging us for ammunition. Unless the tanks were smashed, his forward battalion would be cut off.

At this point a small ammunition-laden convoy roared up the road. Two lieutenants jumped out and rushed up the hill to Lieutenant Payne. They were tall, fine-looking officers with all the bravado and eagerness of very young, very green soldiers. Well make it all right, but we'd like you to give us a couple of your men. We'll just wait and make another check with headquar- ters. Then maybe we'll make like Custer. We were becoming in- creasingly impressed with the sure, professional way Payne was handling the situation. I had asked him earlier in the day how he felt about being back at war.

A man's only got a certain number of close calls coming to him. But as soon as I heard the guns I got over it. When I saw him again in August, he and Colonel Ayres were the only two survivors of the battal- ion headquarters staff of eleven. Of the battalion itself, about men at full strength, only were still on the line. The rest were wounded or dead. From our graveyard foxholes we saw the first of these deaths the first American death in Korea. When orders to attack first went out to the fifty-odd youngsters in our bazooka team they gazed at the tanks as if they were watching a newsreel.

I thought then how much more matter-of-fact the actuality of war is than any of its projections in literature. The wounded seldom cry there's no one with time and emotion to listen. Bazookas were still sounding off. We felt certain that the tanks, which were like sitting ducks astride the tracks, would be demolished within a matter of minutes.

But time passed, and suddenly, after an hour, we saw the bazooka boys coming back toward us across the fields. Besides, these damn bazooks don't do any good against those heavy tanks they bounce right off. But even so it seemed incredible that we were going to pull back with enemy tanks still within our lines. I was gripped with a sense of unreality that followed me through most of the war. Reality, I guess, is just what we are accustomed to and in Korea there was never time to become accus- tomed to anything.

Holiday Style Guide: How To Pack For Thanksgiving Weekend

Incredible or not, it was clear enough as we returned to the command post that we Americans had not only been soundly defeated in our first skirmish but that a major re- treat of our battalion would be forced. We simply had nothing with which to halt the tanks, and we were far too few to prevent the North Korean infantry from coming around our flanks. We hated to think what was happening to Colonel Smith's forward battalion.

But you soon learn, at a war front, to place events firmly in separate emotional compartments. There was abso- lutely nothing to be gained by thinking about Colonel Smith's situation. When we got back to battalion head- quarters I think most of us tried to lock the door of the worry compartment and concentrate on immediate, ma- terial problems.

My first act, on getting out of the jeep at head- quarters, was to slip and sprawl flat on my belly in a muddy rice paddy. Soaked and mud-caked, my consum- ing, immediate interest was the getting-dry department. Lieutenant Payne came to my rescue. He found me some dry green fatigues and gallantly escorted me to an empty thatched hut where I changed. Next on the list of compelling interests was flea powder.

I had been in agony all day, completely defenseless against as vicious an as- sault as fleadom ever made. A thick network of bites pocked my waist, thighs, and ankles. I hurried down to the medic's hut to beg for the little gray box of insecticide powder which was to be my most precious personal pos- session of the Korean war. I was talking to a Medical Corps sergeant when they brought in the body of Private Shadrick.

His face was un- covered. As they carefully laid his body down on the bare boards of the shack I noticed that his face still bore an ex- pression of slight surprise. It was an expression I was to see often among the soldier dead. The prospect of death had probably seemed as unreal to Private Shadrick as the entire war still seemed to me. He was very young indeed his fair hair and frail build made him look far less than his nineteen years.

Someone went to look for a dry blanket for him, and just then the medic came back with the flea powder. He glanced at the body as he was handing me the gray box. The story unfolded shortly after midnight. I had been trying to sleep on a blanket-covered bit o floor where other correspondents and most of the battalion officers were also stretched out. Despite bone-aching weariness, the memory of our bazooka skirmish and the thought of tanks within our lines filled my brief sleep with uneasi- ness. Suddenly through the darkness a voice whispered to me, "Better get into the war room fast.

We may have to pull out suddenly. As lie looked at me ques- tioningly, I added, "It s exactly the same time that we had to leave Seoul and Suwon. In the center sat General Earth and "Red" Ayres. Deep concern had replaced the confidence that had marked both these men only twelve hours earlier. A kerosene light flaring on the table in front of them highlighted their serious faces.

The table was covered with a map and surrounded by field telephones. Separat- ing the officers from the relentless downpour outside were grotesque rain-soaked blankets that flapped over the win- dows. The handful of correspondents stood in the dark- ness at the opposite end of the room. Near us various officers were frantically grinding their field telephones, which cast strange shadows in the melo- dramatic light.

Just as we entered, I saw three tattered, shaken GIs heading for the door.

List of style guides

They looked as if they had been on a prolonged Dunkerque. They say most of the battalion is lost. We've just contacted an officer Colonel Perry. He had difficulty walking. Shrapnel had got him in the leg. He walked slowly up to General Earth. His voice reflected a mixture of exhaustion and deep unhappi- ness.

They came at us from all sides. We fired until we ran out of ammo. Then, with visible effort to take emotion out of his voice, he said, "I know that you and Colonel Smith did everything that could be done. How bad is it? We had some recoilless 75s, some mortars and other artillery. About eight-thirty in the morning those heavy tanks started rolling in on us.

As they captured more and more of our equipment, they began to disguise themselves in American uniforms and try to fool the troops by calling to them in English and pretending to be South Korean allies. The enemy simply avoided frontal assault and depended on infiltration and a series of enveloping movements. Both the North Koreans and the Chinese keyed their tactics around their one big advantagevast quantities of man power.

And they were extravagant with it, as we learned that night from Colonel Perry. His phrase, "They came at us like flies," became a commonplace one in the next few months. As the colonel finished his unhappy account, General Earth's first words were, "My God, to think I personally pulled away the dynamite from those bridges. Now there was absolutely nothing to stop them. Our weak half -strength battalion was inevitably due for the next blow. We could not understand why the enemy had not struck already. We didn't know it then, but there were six well-armed North Korean divisions bearing down on us.

Why they did not push their tanks straight through to Pusan then and there is one of the war's mysteries. A hard push would have crumbled our defenses, as everyone from General MacArthur on down now concedes. Facing the enemy were only a thousand Americans at the most and the dis- organized remnants of the South Koreans. They overestimated us as much as we underestimated them.

Knowing that our battalion was due for a showdown, I elected to stay on and watch the fight. The command post, as usual, was located in a school- house. Regimental officers were bending over maps, grind- ing telephones, and frantically trying to piece together what was happening up front. As so often happened in this lightning-fast war, correspondents had to function as liai- son officers. Carl and I were cross-examined at length about the bazooka skirmish, and we reported the situation in as much detail as we could remember.

It was now 3 A. With the waning of excitement, weariness closed in again. Until this period in the Korean war I had not realized that the bodily mechanism could be pushed so hard and so long without sleep. Later, watch- ing soldiers and marines march miles and then fight all night and day without sleep, I realized what a compara- tively small dosage of exhaustion we correspondents had to endure. But on that particular night the long, rough jeep ride in the cold, the innumerable hikes up and down hills, and the many previous nights with only an hour or two of sleep combined to put both Carl and myself in a state of stupor.

It was July fifth. The war was ten days and four retreats old. Major General William Dean, one of the kindliest and finest of soldiers, was just taking over the division command. In spite of what had happened, the myth persisted that just a few more soldiers and a few more guns could turn the tide. But still this was not enough. For we were terribly unprepared in the Far East. General Doug- las MacArthur had repeatedly and urgently warned Washington that he had insufficient forces in the event of an emergency.

Here was sad proof of his wisdom. Even at home America itself had fantastically few trained men on. In Korea regular army officers who knew the paucity of our numbers wondered if enough men could possibly be mustered. Then the United States, fighting under the banner of the United Nations, made the fateful decision to send virtually every mobilized American soldier to Korea, stripping our homeland of all but the most meager defenses.

General Omar Bradley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, later told America the "bruising truth" of how deeply the Korean war bit into our supply of trained soldiers. America paid heavily for its unpreparedness. It bought time with the lives of a few who were sacrificed against hopeless odds to hold till reinforcements should arrive. It cannot make up for the men who are dead and who might at least have had a fighting chance to live had we been prepared.

Delaying action is the military term for the licking we took in those strange, faraway places: At Chonan the first of these holding actions the enemy caught us in a deadly trap. We walked into it in the effort to regain the ground that headquarters believed had been needlessly relinquished in the last swift retreat.

Our jeepload of correspondents accompanied the rein- forced American patrol on its excursion into no man's land. The patrol was led by Major Boone Seegars, a tall, smooth-looking officer of an almost Arrow-shirt-advertise- ment quality of handsomeness. I had met him briefly in Germany, my previous post. McNarney, onetime commander-in-chief in Germany. Two infantry pla- toons inarched in ditches by the sides of the road and heavy guns were all set to roll forward if we needed them.

After several miles we spotted the enemy dug in ahead of us. To our surprise, the enemy soldiers hurriedly with- drew over the brow of the hill at our approach. An eager first lieutenant said, "Let's hurry them up with some fire. We rode through Chonan without drawing a shot, its rickety wooden houses deserted and silent. Suddenly our caravan stopped. Rifle fire struck at us from the hill ahead and a few mortars lobbed in. But re- sistance was slight and soon ebbed. However, Major See- gars decided to pause and call up the artillery.

At this pointfour o'clock in the afternoon Keyes urged that it was time to go back and file our stories. Copy was log-jammed back at Taejon and there was as much as twenty hours' delay. I was in a spot. I hated to leave the situation at this critical juncture. But if I pressed the time too close, I might miss my deadline altogether. There was the transportation problem, too, and Keyes was the boss of that jeep. So I decided to head back to Taejon, about a two-and-a-half-hour ride.

Pausing at the 34th Infantry Regimental Command, I found new cause for worry. Then communications had broken down.

Combat Journalism: CQR

Navigation menu

List of style guides