Research Notes

by Gordon Haber

Snapshot taken in Korea of an unidentified Korean city. A small airplane can be seen in the background flying above the city. From: Brenda Thompson. Truman Library.

How does it feel to kill? I don’t remember. But I do remember how it felt to be alive after a successful assault. There would be an initial sense of jubilation until we were reminded of our losses. Then would come the disappointment erson weariness.
— Curtis Morrow, What’s a Commie Ever Done to Black People?

The strongest memories of all these years remains the same: the weather (monsoon and freezing winters), the desolation (burning forests and scarring of the countryside), the refugees (dead men, women, children, and their bones), and fear (the unknown, pain and death).
—Rolando Hinojosa, “Notes from a Forgotten War, So-Called,” Callaloo Journal

One reason the novel took so long to write (ten years!): I was in fact reluctant to write yet another unpublished manuscript, and so I convinced myself I was simply writing short stories. I’d write a Korean War story, then I’d write a book review or a story about 17th century New Amsterdam or something autobiographical, and then I’d write another Korean War story. Eventually the idea of a novel was inescapable.

The second reason it took so long: research. Research is fun. I love chasing down details and learning new things and getting lost in other people’s lives. Also it’s a great way to procrastinate. The result is a research document—dutifully organized by topics like “weapons” and “music” and “K-rations”—that is literally longer than the novel itself.

Looking back over all this stuff, I’m stricken by how open I was to it all. Sometimes I was looking to chase down very specific things—about specific weapons and the like. Other times, I was looking for (as the kids say) a vibe. I definitely overdid, but I think in the end I was teaching myself about research and historical fiction. The next novel (if there is one) will be a little more of an efficient process.

I want to be transparent and note that my sources were almost all American. My book is, largely, an American novel about an American soldier—more specifically, a working-class Jewish kid from a certain place and time. This is not to diminish the enormous suffering of Korean civilians or the heroic efforts of South Korean soldiers. It’s because I was writing about a specific character transported from his home to a war zone, and as a literary or artistic challenge, that seemed hard enough.

What follows is a partial list of my research and how it played into the creative process. It’s not-very-well-organized arranged by broad topic and then by each section of the novel.

Oral histories

Unlike Vietnam, there isn’t a lot of film or audio from the Korean War. But there are so many wonderful oral histories from the Library of Congress or state libraries or veteran’s groups. Their testimony was invaluable. I used a lot of it for building the scenes on the troopship, especially the seasickness passage, and also for the stuff about the gauntlet after the dttle of the Chongchon River.

Army publications

I don’t think many realize just how much documentation about the Korean War comes from the Army itself. There was a real effort to record what happened and to learn from it.

  • Combat Actions in Korea
  • Korean War After Action reports
  • Policy and Direction: the First Year, James F. Schnabel
  • United States Army Infantry Training Program Effectiveness During the Korean War, Maj. Christian K. Jaques
  • The Medic’s War: United States Army in the Korean War, Albert E. Cowdrey

More Army stuff

I had to learn a lot of about military of 1950; here are some of the sources that helped.

The Black Experience

The integration of the Armed Forces is a little-known aspect of a little-known war. In some ways it’s a familiar story—their soldierly qualities were diminished or even dismissed, when every objective account shows an incredible contribution. I didn’t use this specifically, but for those who are interested, I’d point you to the story of young Thurgood Marshall, than an NAACP lawyer, and his efforts to overturn dozens of blatantly racist courts martial.

  • Col. Charles Bussey (1921-2003) was a Tuskegee Airman(!) who went on to lead a company of engineers in Korea. Here’s an interview with Col. Bussey on the Warriors in Their Own Words podcast, and he wrote his own book, Firefight at Yechon: Courage and Racism in the Korean War.
  • Curtis Morrow’s vivid memoir, What’s a Commie Ever Done to Black People?: A Korean War Memoir of Fighting in the U.S. Army’s Last All Negro Unit.
  • Black Soldier White Army: The 24th Infantry Regiment in Korea, a US Army publication on the all-Black 24th Infantry.
  • Twice Forgotten: African Americans and the Korean War, an Oral History. Interviews with Black veterans by David P. Cline.
  • An American Dream: The Life of an African American Soldier and POW Who Spent Twelve Years in Communist China, Clarence Adams.

The Jewish experience

Memoirs and other primary sources

It’s interesting to read journalist’s accounts because so much of them involved scooping their competitors and the difficulty of getting their stories out. At the same time, you can get a real sense of what it was like—combat and the aftermath, the wrecked cities and refugees.

History

  • Korea, 1950, Orlando Ward
  • The Korean War: A History, Bruce Cumings
  • The Korean War, Max Hastings
  • The Korean War: An Exhaustive Chronology, Bud Hannings
  • This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness, T.R. Fehrenbach
  • Understanding the Korean War: The Participants, the Tactics, and the Course of Conflict, Arthur H. Mitchell

Fiction

  • Hold Back the Night, Pat Frank. A page-turner from 1951 about a Marine company in retreat after the Chinese attack.
  • The Useless Servants, Rolando Hinojosa. The autobiographical diary of an artillery man fighting in the early stages of the Korean War, first published in 1993. Hinojosa was a wonderful writer. He who wrote poetry as well as prose, and moved easily between Spanish and English.
  • An American Soldier, Michael Lynch. A novel from 1969 about racial tensions in the latter stages of the war.

Visual Art

Photography

Sound

Life in 1950

Music

Other nonfiction

  • The Last Full Measure: How Soldiers Die in Battle, Michael Stephenson
  • Tastes Like War, Grace Cho
  • Voices from the Korean War, Richard Peters and Xiaobing Li
  • Cheongcheon 1950, which I didn’t read, because it’s in German.
  • Emergency War Surgery, US Army Medical Center
  • Korean phrase book (1944)

Research Websites

Maps

July, 1950

This section started out as a short story called “Troopship.” I believe I chose the General Darby as the model for the ship itself because I found it in the 2ID Command Report of July-August 1950, but I’d have to back and check. Either way I spent a lot of writing hours—more time than I should have—getting my head around the geography of a troopship, and these various links were helpful. As was the book Troopship, by Kate Holliday, one of the very few women who reported on the conflict.

But the bit about taking the top bunk—“they call it throwing up, but it goes down”—came from a story my dad told me when he was shipped out to serve in Germany in the mid-50s.

August-September, 1950

Links on the Naktong River fighting, a.k.a the Battle of the Pusan Perimeter:

An informative yet condescending article on KATUSAs, or Korean Auxiliary to United States Army:

October, 1950

November, 1950

The famous retreat from the Chosin Reservoir happened at the same time as the massive 8th Army retreat from the Chongchon River, but Chosin is more storied. I wanted to write about the Chongchon, because the stories of the gauntlet—a valley road the US and Turkish forces retreated through to evade the Chinese—are as little-known as they are harrowing.

  • North Korea isn’t very forthcoming with geographical information, so I created this Google Map to get a sense of the gauntlet Hesh has to make it through after the Chinese attack in the “November 1950 section.”
  • Robert B Bruce’s Master’s thesis was really helpful—apparently his own father survived the battle and he interviewed many other survivors: In the Jaws of the Dragon: The United States Second Infantry Division in the battle of the Chongchon River, Korea, November 24-December 1, 1950.
  • Another fascinating tidbit of history is that Charles Rangel, a long-serving Manhattan congressman, survived the battle and wrote about it in his memoir, And I Haven’t Had a Bad Day Since: From the Streets of Harlem to the Halls of Congress.
  • 1950 Press Photo American gunner covers withdrawal of UN forces, Chongchon River
  • Footage of US Army at the Chongchon River.
  • More footage of US Army at the Chongchon River.
  • The River and the Gauntlet, SLA Marshall
  • Korean War winter footage
  • Korean War footage 1950/51
  • 抗美援朝纪念馆: Memorial of the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea  

If there had been time…

I’d have visited the NC State University Library Archive to look at Max Desfor’s photographs. (Here’s his AP obit.)