Seize the Day. A M (Jack) Harris
and soldiers, all were still. Many of the men who had survived the night had probably not yet taken hold of this new day in which they would fight, cut, destroy and be destroyed. But the business of war was, for the moment, at a standstill.
Our jeep was stopped at the bridge spanning the deep, fast-flowing Imjin River where our identity passes were checked. The drive continued until I swerved the vehicle off the main highway and onto a small track. Along this rutted lane way I was halted at a barrier by Korean youngster dressed in the uniform of South Korea’s National Police. He saluted smartly when he saw I was driving, then, with a big grin, he pressed on the weighted end of the barrier, raising it. I moved the jeep onto the top of a rise and drew it to a sliding halt in front of a group of old Korean homes, formerly a farming homestead. Doors and windows all about swung outwards and soon the courtyard was filled with a mob of yelling Koreans; this was the headquarters of my agent detachment, with its recruits and trained agents, some awaiting missions, some undergoing instruction.
I knew them all. Getting out from the jeep I spoke to some, talked with others, shook hands with two who had just returned from instruction in Seoul. Before going into my hut I sat on the front step, lit a cigarette and let my thoughts go in shadow and sunlight with the smoke, while allowing my eyes to follow the contours of the land about my place. It was a hard country creeping inward to envelop the paddy fields once won by the toil of the uprooted Korean farmers who had been forced by war to quit their villages. The fields tumbled down in an abandoned fashion from the hills, and with them, water which had been channelled to grow wheat and rice was spilling aimlessly over a narrow channel.
At the bottom of one of the abandoned paddy fields one of the agents, doubtless to pass the time away and probably to recall a life from which he had been rudely divorced by the coming of war, had erected a miniature water wheel. The water fell gently on to it and turned a spindle to which the builder had attached two small hammers. Under the impulse of the water the spindle clicked around to move the hammers and they rose and fell, beating with an easy rhythm as they did so on two tiny brass bells. The ring of the bells was crystal clear and peaceful, filling the valley with quiet, and beauty and peace.
But I knew that there was no quiet, no beauty and certainly no peace or comfort for Pak and Chet over the Northern mountains to my front where lay a thin haze. How were they doing? I wondered. They were somewhere behind that haze, while I lay in peaceful security, smoking. But why not? I asked myself. This whole stupid bloody business, this war, was drawing to a close. Both sides were sick of this conflict. I had been in it from the beginning in 1950, and I would like to get out of it, all in one piece, damaged though I was, by my first wounding. But right now, another mission was under way and this was the worst time for me, the waiting. I would wonder perhaps if the men on this or any other mission would be able to penetrate all the way through the enemy lines undetected. But if caught and questioned would they reveal this place, my headquarters, and also tell of the route we were using to get to our safe houses? Were some of my agents working for the enemy and taking to them valuable front-line information about the forward elements they were passing through? I could never be completely sure, even though I could communicate with them in Japanese, something their conquerors had imposed during their fifty-odd years of Korean occupation. Because I could never be completely sure of all of them and could only fully trust Lim and Pak, I only went out with those two men on top assignments. It was a tough job, rugged and demanding of the body, cruel and exacting on the nerves. I accepted that the reward for some was revenge, and that those who hated most bitterly might be most fully trusted. The reward for others was the fulfilment of an ideal, but that in extreme danger or capture the coward mind might elect to live against the dictates of an idealistic heart.
Pak and Chet in their village headquarters near the Imjin River
I believed I knew them all, the hater, the patriot, the idealist, and the mercenary, the lover of money; and most of all, I knew that the mercenary must be treated with the utmost caution, since if a man can gain from both sides, he is doubly happy. I knew them all, as well as a man might ever get to know another; in darkness and in light, in danger and in safety, with blood on their hands and hate in their hearts, but I could only trust two of them fully. And because my body was flesh, and my mind was tired with yearning, I knew I might not even fully trust myself. It was the price I paid for dealing in deceit.
*
Sitting there, thinking about my present life and the circumstances which had placed me in this spot, I involuntarily flexed my left hand which had been badly shattered and was bereft of all the knuckle bones, the metacarpus, was still in place but it had led to my medical re-classification out of infantry service. Of course there are battle risks for an infantryman, and I remembered how my commanding officer Lieutenant Colonel Green had come to me when I was stretched out, badly wounded, and he had placed his hand on my shoulder, to say he was sorry to be losing me. He had returned to his part in the battle and later that day, he was mortally wounded. But here I was now, an intelligence operator, often sent to cross a dangerous river and patrol the land far beyond in more danger than any I had encountered as a fighting soldier.
Chapter Three
I was born in Mildura in 1925. I never knew my father but I was told many years after our one and only meeting that, when my mother was pregnant with me, he had visited a brothel and picked up what was then referred to as the pox. My mother had left him and with my sister Bonnie, she moved in with her parents, Martin and Mary Roach. I was born in their small home in Mildura. I did come face to face with my father one memorable day, however, when I was leaving school and walking down the road with some school friends. I noticed a beautiful old draught horse, the sort used for pulling heavy loads of what was quaintly called night-soil but which I knew was shit, plodding down the road towards us. When it got close, a big man striding alongside the horse halted it, rudely picking me up dumped me on the broad back of the animal. To my astonishment he declared, “I’m your dad, son!”
I sat hunched up and ashamed on the huge horse, said not a word, and when the man, someone I could never refer to as my dad, had dragged me angrily from the horse and dumped me on the footpath, I knew I would have to give a bloody nose to the biggest boy in the group of school mates, all giggling and whispering that Harris was the son of the local shit-carter. I got the bloody nose, however, but it did lead to my grandmother getting Rocky Daniels, an old ex-champion fighter and the local milk carter, to teach me how to box. Many years later I was to fight, and successfully, in the West Melbourne Stadium.
I never knew the circumstance but my grandparents, apparently without any money, set up home on the Buronga Ridge, located across the Murray River, in 1932 when I was eight years old. I loved the area, the name Buronga was Aboriginal and I believed it meant ‘many stars reflecting in the water’. Centuries before, the Aborigines had roamed all along the water way, hemmed in all along its banks with huge eucalyptus trees which were ancient long before the white man ever saw them. On some, scars can be seen where the natives had cut bark from which they fashioned their canoes, made by removing a long oval of tough covering and then binding and shaping the ends together to make a bow and a stern. The craft were unstable and crude but they suited the lifestyle of the earliest people, for they were easy to carry and simple to replace. Many canoes must have been built over the centuries when black men squatted over long strips of bark, a piece of flint in their hands, while their women worked in the shade, watching them, as their piccaninnies splashed and yelled in the shallows. Then, the river and its many billabongs teemed with fish and shrimps, along with platypus and millions of water birds.
That is all gone now, but the river is broad and tranquil, with the sky often an imperial blue. The river in many parts is a turbulent stretch of water, fed from the far off Snowy Mountains but with lock gates at Mildura, the river slows and widens, providing the entire region and the irrigation fields with water sufficient to grow anything planted. The land is so lush that it goes a long way to redeem the harsh, shanty outline of the shacks on the ridge at Buronga, lying above the river like the rippled spine of a sleeping lizard. The ridge is at the far end of a desert and its only street is a wavering ribbon of sand drawn between the glistening boles of tall trees. But it is a good place if your needs are simple.