"War Trash" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jin Ha)

3. THREE MONTHS OF GUERRILLA LIFE

After a month of hiding in the daytime and trying in vain to find a rift in the enemy's encirclement, our team was reduced to thirty-four men. Whenever someone was killed or disappeared, I couldn't help but think about my promises to my mother and Julan. It seemed unlikely I would be able to make it home. But in spite of my fear and sadness, I forced myself to appear cheerful, especially in the presence of Commissar Pei, who always insisted that at all costs we must survive. Some of the remaining officers were familiar with guerrilla tactics. Our team leader, Yan Wenjin, the director of the divisional security section, had led dozens of guerrillas in both the war against the Japanese and the civil war. But we were in a foreign country now. Without the knowledge of its language, its terrain, and its people, how could we get the civilians' support that was the basis of guerrilla warfare?

Hunger was our most pressing problem. During the day we picked wild grapes and berries on the mountain, though we dared not move about conspicuously. The wild fruits, tiny and bitter, numbed our tongues and made a greenish saliva dribble out from the corners of our mouths. Commissar Pei couldn't eat what we gathered because of his ulcer, but he encouraged us to search for fruits and herbs for ourselves.

One morning Yan Wenjin ran over and beamed, "There's a dead horse in the woods!"

We all went over to take a look. The horse, a Mongolian sorrel, had been dead for some days. Its hair had begun to fall off, and the gun wound in its chest festered with rings of maggots like a large white chrysanthemum. Flies droned over it madly even though a man wielded a leafy branch to drive them away. Yet we were elated to find the carcass and immediately set about looking for bayonets, wooden shell boxes, and steel helmets. I went up a slope with two men to search the area beyond a patch of dwarf fir trees. As we walked, flocks of crows took off, cawing fitfully. Behind a low rise we came across four dead South Korean soldiers. In the middle of them lay a Chinese soldier, whose head was smashed and whose face was gone, eaten up by birds. Around him were scattered splinters of wooden grenade handles. Clearly he had detonated the grenades and died together with the enemy. We carried his body into a cavity under a juniper and covered him with stones and green branches. After saluting him, we went back with two bayonets and an empty box that had contained mortar shells. We had also found a brass lighter in a Korean man's pocket. The other groups brought back a bayonet, three helmets, and some wooden cartridge boxes too. From God knows where one man returned with a dented field cauldron.

Immediately they started butchering the horse. The air turned putrid as dark sticky blood dripped onto the ground. Soon, large chunks of the meat were being boiled in the cauldron, which had been propped on a horseshoe of rocks. Dr. Wang limped over. Frowning, he had a look at the carcass and then with a pair of tweezers poked the horsemeat in the pot. He said in a thin voice, "The meat is rotten. You'll get poisoned if you eat it."

Disappointed, we walked away to wash our bloody hands in a puddle of rainwater. Some men couldn't stop swearing.

To solve the problem of hunger, Yan Wenjin offered to go down the mountain with five men to search for grain. Commissar Pei let them go. They left after sunset, and we waited for them anxiously. But for five days we heard nothing from them. Later in the prison camp I learned that they had ambushed an American truck transporting a squad of GIs and some supplies. Three of them had been killed by a machine gun, and Yan Wenjin had been hit in the stomach and died on the way to the hospital. After that failed attempt, smaller groups were sent down the mountain to search for food, but none of them ever came back. By chance, I had seen through binoculars how three of our men fell into the enemy's hands. It was overcast that morning, but the air was clear. As our comrades were approaching the foot of the southern hill, suddenly about twenty GIs with two wolf dogs appeared in front of them. Our men swung aside, dashing away in different directions, but the Americans caught up with them and brought them down, some kicking them furiously and some stomping on their chests. For a moment a cloud of dust obscured the human figures. When I could see again, the dogs were springing at our men and tearing at their limbs. Viewed from the distance of one and a half miles, the whole scene was eerily quiet, without a single shot fired. Horrified, I reported the loss to Commissar Pei. His face fell, and for hours he didn't speak a word.

During this period of hiding, several men starved to death. However hard we tried, we simply couldn't get any grain and had to live on wild herbs and fruits, which day by day were becoming scarcer.

One afternoon a band of bareheaded soldiers emerged in the southeast, moving toward us. They looked like a platoon. After observing them through binoculars, Commissar Pei decided they were our men. Indeed as they were coming closer, we recognized their leader, Wan Shumin, who had been the deputy commander of an engineering company. Before we withdrew from Jiader Hill, he had led two squads to demolish a bridge on a roadway. They carried out the mission but were cut off from us and trapped in that area. Since then, they had roamed around to elude the enemy and look for a way to return north, to no avail. Two days before, near Maping Village, they had picked up a large sack of sorghum that smelled of gasoline. They hated to use up all the grain themselves, so now they offered some to us. We were all delighted, not just about the food, but more importantly, that these men were unwounded and less combat-fatigued. Their arrival increased our fighting capacity and made us feel like a functional unit again.

Commissar Pei 's mood often affected us. He was our mainstay, as though he had always known what to do and where to go. In fact he was just ten years older than most of us. When he was happy, we tended to be in good spirits too. Unfortunately, thanks to his ulcer, he was gloomy and miserable most of the time. But he could eat sorghum porridge now, so we saved half a bag of the grain for him, about thirty pounds. Luckily Tiger found a bottle of multiple vitamins and a pack of Fortress cigarettes in a secret pocket of the leather bag he had carried for the commissar. Pei offered a cigarette to everyone who was present. I didn't smoke at that time, so I declined.

From that day on Pei took three vitamin pills a day, which helped him a good deal. In addition, the cook boiled sorghum porridge so well for him that it looked almost like paste, and soon Pei stopped regurgitating food. Miraculously his ulcer began to heal.

Once again we attempted to find our way out of the hostile territory. A group of three men, all officers, was sent out to probe the enemy's positions, but they didn't come back. They were all Party members, unlikely to have deserted. Actually desertion made no sense if they wanted to go back to China alive, because they couldn't mix with Korean civilians and would be easily identified. Logically speaking, the only way to survive was to surrender to the enemy. But most of us, terrified by the propaganda that described in grisly detail how the Americans had tortured Chinese POWs, dared not think of capitulation. We had been told that the enemy would turn most captives into guinea pigs for testing biochemical weapons. As a result, many of us thought we would prefer death to captivity.

Having waited four days without hearing from the three men, we decided to seek a way out by ourselves. It was dangerous to remain in the same area for too long. We set off north, without any specific goal in mind. After about three miles we spotted the enemy on a hilltop. They saw us too and opened fire; we scrambled into the larch woods nearby. As we ran away, bullets swished past, clipping branches and twigs. It was clear now that the three officers must have fallen into the enemy's hands.

We climbed a foothill and went down into a small valley. From there we saw a puff of wood smoke rising from a hill slope. Some civilians must have been over there, so we headed stealthily toward the fire. Coming closer, I smelled something like cooked rice and my heart leaped. Then a clearing emerged, in which a middle-aged Korean woman in a long white dress was chopping brushwood with a hatchet to feed the fire under a dark pot. At the sight of us, she yelled and dropped the ax and ran back into a shed built of wattles and bundles of cornstalks.

We loudly ordered her to come out, but she didn't stir. We waited a few minutes, then entered the doorless shed. Inside crouched four women. One of them was quite young, under twenty, her middle finger wearing an aluminum thimble. They looked clean and all wore the same kind of shoes that resembled miniature boats, made completely of gray rubber. The folded blankets and the indented straw on the ground indicated that they lived here, hiding from soldiers. They cowered together, shivering, and one broke out sobbing. We couldn't understand their language, so it was impossible to get anything from them. We brought them out of the shed; they were still trembling in the sun. When I removed the lid from the pot, a wave of steam rushed up with a sizzle. The rice looked glutinous and smelled overwhelmingly fragrant. I was amazed that under such circumstances they still had fresh rice. I had seen Korean families eat watery soup with only a few rice grains in it. Now all eyes turned my way, fixed on the cast-iron pot. I was sure that if the commissar had not been around, we would have wolfed down the food without hesitation. Pei took out his notebook and wrote "Chinese men," then stepped closer to the women and showed them the characters. He told them we wouldn't harm civilians and they mustn't be afraid. The oldest of them raised her thumb to acknowledge that we were a good army, though apparently they couldn't make out what Pei was saying. Then he wrote "Rice" on the paper and flashed it at them again.

"Opsumnida!" said the same woman, shaking her face, which was as furrowed as a walnut. Perhaps she meant "We don't have any."

I asked the youngest of them in English, "Where is your home?" She couldn't understand me and kept shaking her head. If only one of us had been able to speak Korean. Or if only we'd had a few bottles of penicillin powder or atabrine pills, which I was sure we could exchange with them for food. Korean women were very fond of medicines and cosmetics, even soap and toothpaste. We kept glancing at their pot, but dared not touch the rice.

The encounter with the civilians convinced us that there must be grain hidden somewhere. We stayed up on the opposite hill and kept a close watch on the women, but they never came out of the clearing in the daytime. They seemed aware they were under surveillance. We figured they must have lived in the village at the southern end of the valley. So at night we went there to dig around among the razed houses in hope of finding some edibles. We found nothing.

Then one day we happened on another burned village, which we watched from a distance but dared not approach while it was still light. Though there seemed to be nothing left there, a wisp of smoke rose from the ruins. As we wondered if someone was cooking over there, a stocky woman came out of the village, heading toward the hill slope in the east. We followed her through binoculars and saw her enter the bushes. Five or six minutes later she reappeared with a bulging sack that must have held grain. So after dark, we went over to dig in the bushes and found a sack of rice too, about fifty pounds. Regulations said that we must never take anything from civilians, but we were hungry and some of us were dying. Commissar Pei took out his notebook and wrote an IOU, saying that we had borrowed the grain and would compensate its owner when our army came again to liberate South Korea. He placed the piece of paper into the empty pit and held it down with a cobblestone. The words were in a running script; I suspected that the owner would never figure out the meaning and would curse us like mad.

If only we'd had money to pay them. In contrast to us, the North Korean army was loaded with cash; every man had bales of it, because they had seized the South Korean government's currency plates in Seoul. Their soldiers always paid for everything they took from civilians, who were pleased but didn't know the banknotes were losing value. I often wondered why the North Koreans wouldn't share some of the money with us. I guessed our top generals must have been too proud to ask them such a favor.

To avoid being pursued by the enemy, we moved farther south, deeper into hostile territory. Since most fields had not been sown, we didn't expect to have ripe crops to eat in the fall, but there were orchards and groves of chestnut trees on some hills. We all hoped that our army would launch the sixth-phase offensive soon so that we could rejoin them. We didn't know that from now on there would be no offensives anymore – the war had reached a stalemate.

We settled in a wooded valley where a brook flowed. In the evening frogs croaked in the water. The next day we began to catch frogs, which were a delicacy to us. We would skewer about a dozen of them on a whittled branch and roast them over a fire. But within three days all the frogs had been eaten up, and no croaking rose up at night anymore. Once in a while we heard a wild animal howling, a wolf or a leopard, but we couldn't go hunting them because we dared not fire our guns.

Time and again we sent out men to search for grain. With few exceptions they would run into the enemy, and some of them would get killed. On average every twenty pounds of rice cost one man, so we mainly ate herbs, grass, and mushrooms, waiting for the fall when the wild chestnuts would ripen. Once about two dozen men were poisoned by a whitish fungus, which looked like tree ears and was juicy and crunchy, quite tasty. Half of us ate some, myself included. Afterward we collapsed, and a few men began groaning and rolling around with cramps in their stomachs. Fortunately Dr. Wang didn't eat any. He boiled several cauldrons of water and made us drink our fill so that we could excrete the poison. I was sweating so much that my vision was blurred. It took two days for us to mend, though nobody died this time.

To shelter ourselves from the elements, we fetched crates left by the Americans along the road and used them to prop up sheets of corrugated iron we had dislodged from a dilapidated shack abandoned by charcoal burners. We also spread pieces of cardboard on the ground so that we could sleep on them. I hated to go to the road north of the mountain, because it smelled awful there, the air rife with decomposing bodies, Chinese and Koreans and Americans, all left behind, unburied. Back in China, at the Huangpu Military Academy, we had been instructed that in a battle the dead must be buried quietly, as soon as possible, so that the troops couldn't see them; otherwise the sight of the corpses would weaken their morale. But here, in a real war, nobody cared.

The woods were deep here, providing good cover. During the day we would move about as little as possible; most of the time I just lay in the shade resting. Some calmness settled over me. I had with me a paperback of Uncle Tom's Cabin in the English original, which I often read with the help of the dictionary. Commissar Pei regretted not having brought along a full-length book; in his bag he had only a few booklets that were mere propaganda material. He mixed well with the soldiers, who could endure anything but the silence in the mountains.

Yet they knew how to enjoy themselves. They made playing cards with paperboard and chess pieces with wood chips. During the day they often played for hours on end. I knew the chess moves well but preferred to remain a kibitzer. In addition to the games, every day Pei would tell them a story. A high school graduate, he was quite knowledgeable about ancient legends, and the stories he told fascinated the men. Hao Chaolin, a small sharp-witted man, also offered them stories, mainly those from revolutionary novels. I shared with them some episodes from Uncle Tom's Cabin. Some of the men were touched by the character Cassy, who poisons her baby son with laudanum to prevent him from being sold as a slave. They said that the American slave owners must have been crueler than most of the landowners in the old China, but they were amazed that even the slaves could eat pork belly, beans, biscuits, chicken. I translated the passages in which Aunt Chloe serves the slave Sam a big meal after he tells her the good news that Eliza and her son Harry have fled to the other side of the Ohio River so that the slave trader can't catch them anymore. In the scene Sam eats so many toothsome things – chicken wings and drumsticks, ham, corn cake, turkey legs. Granted that they were leftovers from the masters table, they seemed sumptuous to these starving men.

"What does turkey taste like?" Tiger asked me with his large eyes batting.

"I don't know," I confessed.

"It must be real good," another man put in.

I told them, " Turkeys are very big, almost like a small ostrich."

"My, a lot of meat the bird must have," Tiger said.

"It seems to me that the American slaves ate better than most of the rich families in my home village, tut-tut-tut," said a short fellow with a wide face.

Actually a similar notion had crossed my mind too when I read those pages for the first time. I had thought America must be a bountiful land where nutritious food was available for everybody, even slaves.

The soldiers chatted a great deal among themselves, bragging about their hometowns and their deeds in the battles they had fought in China. They also talked at length about the dishes they had tasted or heard of: Nanking cured duck, Jinhua ham, stewed lamb sold at street food stands in the Northwest, whole fried carp and roast pigs served at dinner parties in the Northeast. A man from the South even boasted how delicious fried rats were. I said he was disgusting and no matter how hungry I was, I wouldn't touch such a thing, though I knew the dish was a delicacy in some coastal areas.

Some of us had picked up American cans left at their deserted campsites, and we couldn't help but wonder what kind of food GIs ate. We were impressed by their abundant resources. Tiger often said he wished that when the war was over, he could bring home just one pile of the shell casings the Americans had discarded, so he could sell the brass – which would be enough for him to live on for the rest of his life.

Gradually I developed a kind of attachment to the commissar, who seemed more and more amiable to me. One day when we two were alone, he confessed that he'd once had his doubts about intellectuals in the army, but that I had made him think differently. To the servicemen, most of whom were illiterate, every college graduate was an intellectual. Apart from my loyalty to our comrades, Pei must have been amazed to see that I could read alone for hours without respite and immerse myself in a novel written in English, of which he had read an ornate translation long ago. He was especially pleased that at night I would do guard duty for an hour, just like the enlisted men among us. He told me that if he got killed, I should help Chaolin lead them. I said I couldn't accept such a responsibility; I wasn't a Party member and was unsuitable for leadership. Besides, Chaolin was very capable and might not need my help at all. But the commissar insisted, "Your deeds are your qualification. You should lead our men if worst comes to worst."

What he implied was that I should succeed Hao Chaolin if they were both lost. In truth, although I was calm in appearance, I was apprehensive at heart. What would happen to my mother if I perished in this foreign land? I missed my fiancee terribly. At night I often dreamed of her and my mother and woke up tearful. I wondered if my comrades had heard me babble in my sleep. Could Julan and I communicate through dreams, telepathically? Or were the dreams nothing but the vagaries of my mind? One night I saw her face shine with a mysterious smile, as if she had some secret but meant to keep me in suspense. As I stretched my hand to touch her tilted eyebrows, she faded away and I woke up with a numbing ache in my chest.

When the other men laughed heartily listening to Pei, I often remained pensive. One day the commissar said to me, "Why don't you teach us some English?"

"What for?"

"It will be useful. We'll fight the enemy again. Teach us some words we can use on the battlefield."

So I began to teach them English, just some phrases and short sentences, such as "Hands up!," "Drop your weapon, we spare you!," "We don't kill prisoners," "Don't move!," "Surrender, you are safe!," "Don't die for American imperialism!"

There was no paper to write on, so I used a stick to inscribe on the ground the written characters representing the English sounds so that the literate ones among them could have some phonetic guidance. I couldn't possibly make them pronounce the words accurately, since half of them didn't even speak Mandarin well. But they were eager to learn, even if they did complain about the pain inflicted by the English pronunciation on their tongues and jaws. A few claimed they had sore throats. I was amazed that in just a few days they could rap out to one another what they had learned. Most of them were smart men who would have gone far in their lives had they had the opportunity and the education. I wondered why they would concentrate so much on learning a few foreign words that they might never use at all. Heaven knew what would happen to us tomorrow; we might get captured or killed anytime. The enemy was just two miles to the north.

I suspected that to them the act of learning must represent some kind of hope. At least this meant there was still a future, on which they could fix their minds. Their limited awareness of the larger world and their inert response to the menace of death endowed them with the strength needed for survival. I was moved by the tenacity of life shown in their desire to learn.

One afternoon, as we sat near a cliff learning how to sing a folk song, a man rushed back from the bushes where we would go and relieve ourselves. He shouted at us between gasps, "Enemy! They're coming from both sides!"

Immediately Tiger began pushing Commissar Pei toward the edge of the cliff, which wasn't very steep, overhung with tussocky grass and jujube shrubs. "You must go down now, sir!" he urged. As Pei was hesitating, Tiger shoved his shoulder forcefully. The commissar tumbled down and disappeared; then four or five men jumped down too. Tiger raised his pistol to fire at the enemy coming out of the woods. As he was about to retreat, a bullet hit his arm. "Oh!" he yelled. Then another bullet struck his neck and he died instantly, his blood flowing down the granite rock he fell on. The rest of us were pinned down by machine guns and couldn't move. While I was wondering what to do, a grenade landed near us. Our cook picked it up, but before he could throw it away, it went off. A burst of light opened in front of me and a wave of heat swept me up. Then everything turned black.

When I came to, I realized I was in a vehicle, probably a jeep. The cool air was brushing my face, which must have been swollen. The sky seemed quite low, with the tattered clouds jittering violently. Someone said in English, "Damn, we let some of the gooks get away."

A breezy voice answered, "Relax, man. We got eight of them, not bad."

"Are they Koreans or Chinese?"

"Must be Chinks."

"How can you tell?"

"They don't wear no uniform."

The jeep horn tooted, then some passing vehicle beeped back. The man in the passenger seat called out, "Hey, how's it going?"

"Swell," someone cried back from a distance.

They caught me! This realization shot a sharp pang to my heart, which seemed to jump up and block my throat. Two other Chinese men, whose faces I couldn't see, were also lying in the jeep. I couldn't tell if they were dead or alive. I could still move both arms, but my legs were numb. I tried to wriggle my toes to make sure they were still there; to my horror, I couldn't feel anything in my left foot. I touched my left thigh, which felt wooden. Hard as I tried, I couldn't move the leg; it must have been fractured. I touched my crotch – we had been told that some Americans would castrate Chinese POWs – but everything was all right there except that my thigh was bandaged. It seemed my captors meant to keep me alive. Why didn't they kill me? It would've been better that way. At least people back home would treat Mother as a Revolutionary Martyr's parent and the government would take care of her.

Where were they taking me? To a prison? To a hospital? I was overwhelmed by fear and shame. What should I do? We had never been instructed how to act honorably if we were taken prisoner, except to kill ourselves. Only Commissar Pei had once said that if we fell into the enemy's hands, we must never tell them the truth: always lie to them. That was all the preparation I had received for this situation. I was confused. Why hadn't the Americans finished me off? That would have made their job much simpler.