Brother Fish by Bryce Courtenay Read Free Book Online

five days. But in the sub-zero weather his feet became frozen and he was forced to give himself up to a Chinese patrol. The Chinese then forced him to walk the thirty miles to our medical hut on his frozen feet. I still recall the day he came to our hospital shed. Long before he arrived we could hear his cries and screams of pain echoing across the icy landscape. Dr Wong, a truly decent man, even if he was a gook, did his best to save the airman’s feet, but, in the end, was forced to amputate.
    So, if I appear to be slagging the Yanks, then I’m giving the wrong impression. Men simply don’t come any braver than Chuck Ward. But the other prisoners were just kids – some were conscripts who didn’t want to be there in the first place, young lads just out of high school, though many, like me, hadn’t completed their education. The odd bruise or a broken collarbone from a football game was probably the worst pain they’d experienced. Some looked as if they hadn’t yet had their first shave and, generally speaking, had very little understanding of the reasons for the war.
    The prisoners who were volunteers looked even younger. Many of them had joined the army lured by large colour posters along the major roads promising ‘Have Fun in Japan’. It wasn’t entirely a lie, not like the First World War poster with General Kitchener pointing a finger at Australia’s youth and instead of the English version that said, ‘Your Country Needs You!’ our version read, ‘Join the Grand Picnic in Europe’. The American poster kept its promise and young American armed-forces personnel had a ball in Japan, where most of the work they did was ceremonial. One young bloke from Louisiana confessed to me, ‘I was the best in my company at rifle drill, I did all the ceremonial duty, only one problem: I couldn’t shoot!’ Another admitted to me that they were soft and when the South Korean army crumbled much sooner than expected, and with the marines on the other side of the Pacific, the regiments stationed in Japan as occupying forces were thrown into the battle entirely unprepared and with no time to even reach full strength.
    As the war turned nasty for the Americans, so desperate did the situation become that reinforcements were thrown into battle with only six weeks’ basic training, ten weeks short of the usual requirement to turn a civilian into a fighting man. Passing through Japan on their way to Korea, these reinforcements were issued with rifles and carbines. But so urgently were the troops required at the front that there was no time to fire their weapons so that they might be correctly calibrated. These were mostly city and small-town kids who knew little or nothing about weapons, and they went into battle as indifferent shots armed with rifles and carbines that couldn’t be relied on to fire accurately at any distance.
    A lot of shit has been shovelled onto the Yanks in Korea and if I seem to be making excuses on their behalf, it’s because the real circumstances are never explained. There was another thing – members of the Australian ground forces were all volunteers and if we were a bit rusty we’d initially been very well trained, while so many of the Yanks were ill-trained conscripts who deeply resented being forced into a war they neither understood nor wanted. This happened again in Vietnam. Anyway, this wasn’t the sort of military mix you would expect to become a bunch of Hogan’s Heroes in captivity. Nor, for that matter, could you expect them to have the experience or motivation to stand up to North Korean brutality or Chinese interrogation.
    However, Jimmy Oldcorn, the only member of a coloured battalion among the Yank prisoners in those field hospitals, was different. He wasn’t much older than any of them, but he never kowtowed to the enemy. He didn’t bait or defy them but he was obdurate and persistent when it