Korea

By U. Utah Phillips

From The Past That Didn't Go Anywhere

Righteous Brothers Records, 1996

(c) Utah Philips

Part I

I have just left your fighting sons in Korea.
They have met all tests there, and I can report to you
without reservation that they are splendid in every way.
—General Douglas MacArthur

Ever since the kids have been little, they’ve known that I vanish from their lives periodically. And they’ve never really had any idea of what it is that I do. (What do I do, anyway? If I don’t know, why should they?) We never traveled together at all, but one time Brendon, my fourteen year old, he got to travel with me during the summer. And we got a chance to talk to each other as adults, instead of just father and son.

We left from Boston. We were headed up to the Left Bank Café in Blue Hill, Maine. Just above Marblehead, Brendon turned to me and said, “How did you get to be like that?” (It’s a fair question.) I knew what he meant, but he didn’t have all the language to say exactly what he meant. What he meant to say was, “Why is it that you are fundamentally alienated from the entire institutional structure of society?”

I said, “Well, I’ve never been asked that, you know. Now, don’t listen to the radio, and don’t talk to me for half an hour while I think about it.”

We were driving on Highway 1 because it was pretty and close to the water. We got up toward the Maine border and there was a picnic area off to the side. It was a bright clear day, so I pulled into the parking lot. We sat down at the picnic tables, and I said, “Now, sit down. I want to tell you a story. I’ve thought about it.”

I sat down, and said, “You know, I was over in Korea.”

And he said, “Yeah, I’ve always wondered about that. Did you shoot anybody?”

I said, as honestly as I could. “I don’t know.”

But that’s not the story.

Listen to what I was telling him:

I was up at the Kumeree Gap, there, by the Imjin River. There were about 75,000 Chinese soldiers on the other side of the river, and they all wanted me out of there, with every righteous reason you could think of. I had long since figured out that I was the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time for the most specious of reasons.
But there I was.

My clothing was rotting on my body. Every exotic mold in the world was attacking my clothing and my person. My boots had big holes in them from the rot. I wanted to swim in the Imjin River, and get that feeling of death, that feeling of rot, off of me. The Chinese soldiers on the other side, they were swimming and having a wonderful time. But there was a rule, a regulation against swimming in the Imjin River.

I thought that was foolish.

But then a young Korean carpenter named Yung Suk Han, whose family had all been killed off in the war, said to me, in what English he had, “You know, when we get married here, the young married couple moves in with the elders, with the grandparents. But there’s nothing growing, everything’s been destroyed, there’s no food. So when the first baby is born, the oldest, usually the old man, goes out with a jug of water and a blanket, and sits on the banks of the Imjin River, and waits to die. He sits there until he dies, and then his body rolls down into the river, and is carried out to sea. And we don’t want you swimming in the Imjin River because our elders are floating out to sea.”

That’s when it began to crumble for me, you know. That’s when I…well…I ran away. And not just from the Army. I ran away from the blueprint for self-destruction I had been handed as a man. For violence in excess. For sexual excess. For racial excess. We had a commanding officer who said of the babies fathered by GI’s and Korean mothers who the Korean government wouldn’t care for, and so they were in these orphanages, “Well, as sad as that is, someday this will really help the Korean people because it will raise the intelligence level.”

That’s what we were dealing with, you know.

So I ran away.

I ran away down towards Seoul City, down towards ASCOM. Not to the Army. I ran away to a place called the Korea House. It was the Korean civilians way of reaching out to the GI’s to give them some better vision of who they were than what we were getting up at the divisions.

They hid me for three weeks. I couldn’t go out because they didn’t have any clothes that would fit me. Late one night, a stormy night with the rain falling in sheets, I could go out because they figured nobody’d see me. We walked through the mud and the rain. Seoul City was devastated.

They took me to a concert at the AWOL Women’s University. There was a large auditorium with shell holes in the ceiling. The rain was pouring through the holes, and there were clyde lights on the stage hooked up to car batteries—this wasn’t the USO, this was the Korean Students’ Association. I was the only white person there, and the person they had invited to sing was Marianne Anderson, the great black operatic soprano who had been on tour in Japan, you see. There she was, singing “Oh, Freedom” and “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.”

I watched her through the rain coming through the ceiling and thought back to Salt Lake, to my father Sid, who ran the Capitol Theater. It was a movie house, but it had been an old vaudeville house, and he wanted to bring live performances back to the Capitol. In 1948, he had invited Marianne Anderson to come and sing there. I remembered we went to the train station to pick her up, and took her to the biggest hotel in town, the Hotel Utah, but they wouldn’t let her stay there because she was black. I remembered my father’s humiliation, and her humiliation, as I saw her singing there through the rain.
And I realized, right then, I said, “Brendon, right then I knew that it was all wrong, and it all had to change, and that the change had to start with me…”

Part II

When I got back from Korea, I was so mad at what I’d seen and done, I wasn’t sure I could ever live in the country again. I got on the freight trains up in Everett, north of Seattle, and kind of cruised the country for two years. I was making up songs, but I was drunk most of the time, and forgot most of those.

I had heard that there was a house in Salt Lake City by the railroad rotary yards where there was a clothing barrel and free food. So I got off the train there (I was headed for Salt Lake anyway). And I found that house— right where they said it was!—but most of all I found this wiry old man, 69 years old, tougher than nails, heart of gold. A fella by the name of Amund Hennessey.

Anybody know that name? Amund Hennessey?

You know, one of Dorothy Day’s people, the Catholic Workers. During the ‘30’s they started houses of hospitality all over the country. There are about eighty of them now.
Amund Hennessey was one of those. He’d come west to start this house I’d found called the Joe Hill House of Hospitality. Amund Hennessey was a Catholic-anarchist-pacifist-draft dodger of two world wars-tax refuser-vegetarian-one man revolution in America. I think that about covers it…

He was pure hell.

First thing he did, after he got to know me, he said, “You know you love the country. You love it. You come in and out of town on these trains, singing songs about different places and beautiful people. You know you love the country; you just can’t stand the government. Get it straight.”

He quoted Mark Twain to me: “Loyalty to the country always; loyalty to the government when it deserves it.”

It was an essential distinction I had been neglecting.

And then he had to reach out and grapple with the violence, but he did that with all the people around him, these second world war vets, you know, on medical disabilities and all drunked up. The house was filled with violence, which Amund, as a pacifist, dealt with every moment, every day of his life.

He said, “You’ve got to be a pacifist.”

I said, “Why?”

He said, “ Because it’ll save your life.”

My behavior was very violent then.

And I said, “What is it?”

He said, “Well, I can’t give you a book by Gandhi because you wouldn’t understand it. I can’t give you a list of rules that if you sign it you’re a pacifist. You look at it like booze. You know, alcoholism will kill somebody until they finally get the courage to sit in a circle of people like that, and put their hand up in the air, and say, ‘Hi, my name’s Utah. I’m an alcoholic.’ Then you can begin to deal with the behavior, see, and have the people whose lives have been destroyed define it for you. It’s the same with violence, you know. An alcoholic can be dry for 20 years, but they’re never gonna sit in that circle and say, ‘Well, I’m not an alcoholic anymore.’ It’s the same with violence. You’ve got to be able to put your hand in the air and acknowledge your capacity for violence, and then deal with the behavior. And it’s not going to go away. You’re going to be dealing with it every moment in every situation for the rest of your life.”

I said, “Okay, I’ll try that.”

And Amund said, “It’s not enough.”

And I said, “Oh…”

He said, “You were born a white man in mid-20th century industrial America. You came into the world armed to the teeth with an arsenal of weapons, the weapons of privilege. Racial privilege. Sexual privilege. Economic privilege. You want to be a pacifist, it’s not just giving up guns and knives and clubs and fists and angry words, but giving up the weapons of privilege and going into the world completely disarmed.”

“Try that.”

That old man has been gone now twenty years, and I’m still at it. But I figure if there’s a worthwhile struggle in my own life, that’s probably the one…
 

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