Authors: George D. Shuman
“I’m beginning to think we should move up to Stockton. Maybe we could get homes next to each other near the asylum.”
“Oh, you love it, Mr. Brigham. You get to see Betsy every time we go.”
Brigham didn’t respond.
Carla had told Betsy they could come to get the journal; she was ready to give it up. Brigham asked Betsy if Carla had looked at it, and Betsy said she had not. Carla didn’t want to know if there was anything painful inside. She wanted to remember her husband the way he was in her mind.
Betsy was taking Brigham sightseeing in Old Town Kingston on the Hudson this evening. It would be their first official date. Sherry would have the night—and the journal—to herself at a room in Grant’s Tavern.
She didn’t know what to expect. McCullough, according to his wife, was a woodsman through and through. He knew the trees of the forest and the sound of every bird. His friend Dick McKinley used to brag that he could track a snail to Schenectady.
And so she couldn’t know if the pages were going to be filled with wild ramblings of a suicidal man or sketches of life in the Catskill Mountains. Clearly Carla also didn’t know, or she would have opened it. Something scared her about the journal, about Jack’s wanting it to be locked away until they were both long dead.
Betsy met them at Grant’s Tavern once more. They had cocktails at the bar, where she turned over McCullough’s strange book. “Carla said to keep it as long as you need to. Or destroy it if you have to. She said she’d trust your judgment to that. I peeked, of course.” She smiled and stirred her drink with a straw.
“And?” Sherry asked.
Betsy shrugged. “I didn’t know McCullough all that well, I mean, I was still a kid when he died, but I can tell you this. He didn’t write that journal.”
Sherry looked at Betsy questioningly.
“Oh, I didn’t examine it at length, but it goes on about war. A kid in boot camp and then overseas in battle, reasonably intelligent stuff at first, he volunteered for some research and then it digresses into numbers and random words, I guess the kid really did lose it in the end.”
“Monahan?”
“Well, there’s blood all over the pages. Carla said Jack was covered with blood, but she never said anything about Jack being injured.” Betsy shrugged.
Sherry squeezed it to her chest with one arm. “Jesus.”
The bartender gave a thumbs-up. Suddenly Sherry felt weak and the sparkling lights came in and out of focus.
“You okay?” Brigham reached for her arm.
“I’m fine,” she said, taking a breath and patting Betsy on the back. “You guys sit.” After a moment she stood to go to the ladies’ room. “I’ll be right back.”
Sherry went into the ladies’ room and locked the door, wet a handful of paper towels, and sat on the toilet lid, pressing them
to her face. “Please, please, please,” she whispered. “Please don’t take this away, God.”
She thought about Brian just then. What would he think if they were in a restaurant one day and she went to the ladies’ room and returned as blind as the day he met her?
When Sherry returned, Betsy had her forehead against Brigham’s and they were laughing over something private.
Sherry felt a tinge of unexpected jealousy. She had never had to share her best friend with anyone before.
“You okay?” Brigham asked again.
Sherry gave him a nod as she slid onto her stool.
“You two off on an adventure, then?” Sherry asked.
“I have some favorite places on the eastern side of the Hudson. A little town called Rhinebeck, and then we’ll come back to Old Town in Kingston and try a glass or two of port.”
Sherry just sat there and grinned and Brigham turned his profile to her.
“All right, kids,” she said, “I’m going upstairs to listen to a bedtime story. I’ll see you in the morning for breakfast.”
She put money on the bar and asked Mike the bartender how late he was serving in case she got restless.
But Sherry did not come back downstairs that evening, nor was she asleep when Brigham turned the lock in his door across the hall at nearly 3 a.m. A late night with Betsy, she thought smugly.
The optical scanner Sherry possessed was a year more advanced than any model available to the general public. It was able to convert handwritten text more accurately than all previous scanners on the market, because its computer was taught to make decisions based both on probability of character likeness and a nearly infallible formula for predicting—by context—what the author intended to convey. In other words, Sherry was able to listen to an electronic transcription of the journal to within ninety-two percent accuracy.
Betsy had been right about the text lapsing into seemingly random words and numbers, but what she didn’t understand was what made those words and numbers significant.
All evening, Sherry had been listening to Monahan describing a dreary two months in boot camp.
Now he was deployed and about to land in Korea.
She laid in her bed looking up at the old tin ceiling, put the headphones back on and pressed her thumb against the track wheel on the scanner’s remote.
August 26th, 1950
We arrived last week, rough seas under a full moon and puke all over the landing craft. None of us had slept the night before, anticipating what we’d heard about the fighting at Old Baldy and knowing we’d be there by the end of the week. Most of the battalion we were joining had only been in country six months before us, but they sure acted salty as hell. Our captain, Jim Merritts—he was in World War II in the Philippines—said it wouldn’t take long to get our battle scars here and that the way commissioned officers were falling, battle promotions either. We thought he was being dramatic and laughed at the way they said he slept with a gun in his hand. Someone said he’d seen too many Tex Ritter movies. Then last night one of the guys went out to use the latrine and didn’t come back. They found him barbwired to a tree along the perimeter the next morning, his tongue had been cut out. He kept shaking his head and making noises as they began to untangle him. When they were finally able to pull him from the tree a grenade blew two of them to pieces. His back had been holding the spoon down.
That was how it started for us.
We heard that the Koreans liked to sneak into the camps at night and use their knives on our soldiers. We never saw any thank God, but one night they bombed us from a glider
and all these guys were set on fire. You didn’t sleep much at first, you marched and you bedded down. That was it. And in between you waited for the enemy to come over the next rise and overrun you. After a few days the exhaustion set in. You didn’t jump at the sound of a rifle shot anymore. You learned to put your head on your knees and go unconscious. We were already salty by the time we got to the 38th Parallel.
September 22nd, 1950
We are at the base of a prominence they call Hill 105, near railroad tracks that run into Seoul. I know the Marines have tried to get on top of it and they were pushed back down, but we’re going back up there with them in thirty-six hours to do it all again.
I promised myself I would never say goodbye to you in any of my letters. I don’t plan to break that promise, but I have to tell you all that I love you, Mom, Papa, Sophie and Sam. Never forget that.
Captain Merritts says we aren’t to worry, that if anybody should be afraid it’s them gooks in the 25th Infantry who are about to meet the Fighting 32nd. I’m wearing my cross, Mom, I know that makes you happy and tell Papa there is a Gunny Sergeant somewhere here in Seoul whose name is Theodore Roosevelt Monahan just like Grandpa. I haven’t met him yet, but if I do, I’ll tell him Grandpa was in the battle of Somme. I know that will impress him.
Well, I’ve got to go, Captain Merritts says we have to listen to some Washington armchair commando who’s just arrived at the front. Probably bringing us news the Chinese have joined the war, as if we didn’t already know. The Captain says the 7th Division has been seeing them for a year and if they ever do come in force we’ll have hell to pay. They say you kill a hundred they’ll send a thousand more. You kill a thousand they send ten thousand.
I’ll write tomorrow if I get a chance. If not it may be a while till we get dug in again. Hopefully on top of that hill.
September 29th, 1950
We made it! It’s hard to believe, but we really made it. We are here. Back in the good old US of A. You can’t know this of course, not for another three months and I won’t be able to tell you everything, but it will be around Christmas by then and I’ll be home for good this time. Papa won’t need to worry about his leg any longer. I’ll be there for planting when spring comes around.
I am so glad now that I wasn’t able to get mail out to you in Korea. I know now my last letter would have worried you terribly. You might have read something about the battle on Hill 105 and thought I was there.
I was last telling you about an officer from Washington coming to the front line. Well he came all right and he was a bird colonel at that. He was looking for volunteers for a special but dangerous assignment he told us, and there we are in our field jackets loaded down with ammo and grenades wondering what in the heck could be worse than going up that hill in the morning. Next thing I know Captain Merritts grabs Tim Pollock by the shoulder and pulls him out in front of us. Then he looks at me and grabs my web belt and pulls me out of line. “Talk to them two,” he told the colonel and then growled, “Dismissed!” to the others. Last I saw was his sandy colored crew cut as he knelt by the phosphorous fire we’d built to keep warm.
The colonel took us to the CO’s tent where no one could hear and asked us if we would be interested in returning to the States. He said that the army was conducting secret tests that might help us win the war and I know it sounds crazy, but we would get honorable discharges after just three months if we volunteered to act as guinea pigs.
I don’t have to tell you with Hill 105 looming overhead what we said to him.
And here we are. Just like he said.
We’ve all been encouraged to write on pads they gave us, or in my case my diary, to help pass the time, even though we probably won’t be allowed to keep them after we are discharged. Everything here is top secret they told us. They have civilians walking around and I’ve never seen so many medals on uniforms like these officers have.
There isn’t much to do with our days, we read and play checkers and there is a ping-pong table in the mess. The tan I had from basic training is all but gone, Korea was cold as a Chesapeake shad, but here we live underground and it’s a constant 66 degrees because of how deep it is, somewhere in the Northeast or by the Great Lakes from what we can put together from our collective experiences.
It may seem odd, all this work to write down our thoughts and then not be allowed to share them, but I find it helps get things out of my system. Things I’d rather not bring home when I’m discharged in December.
I admit that I sometimes feel guilty about leaving friends behind in Korea. I know the 32nd was going into battle while I was being driven back to the harbor at Inchon. After that we were launched to the carrier Valley Forge and were hustled into a Douglas Skyraider bound for Tokyo.
Maybe, as Mom says, the Lord decides our fate. I can only hope to do my country proud, as I would have tried to do in Korea.
Well it’s suppertime and I best go. The meals are pretty good, we have a cook who is Italian and speaks no English. We pretty much have to make sign language to tell him we like his food. The table might be light again tonight. Two of the guys taking radiation shots got the flu. Now we’re all worried ’cause some of us had been in the Orient, but the doctor here
said he’s sure it’s not the Asian flu. Whew. That’s a relief. Tomorrow I’m going to try to hear radio waves in the R-lab. They say they are like radar pulses only stronger.
Sherry laid the journal open across her stomach, closed her eyes, and felt the tickle of cool air from the ceiling fan. A horn honked outside the window, then a door opened and she heard a car radio and loud, drunken voices before the door slammed and the car drove away. Boys—maybe eighteen, maybe twenty, not much younger than Thomas J. Monahan had been when he penned these words.
She tried to appreciate the mind-set of the Cold War era. Especially the early years, as Brigham had explained. She tried to imagine the threat of a weapon capable of destroying the United States in one blow. It was real to them, Brigham had said. They knew that a hydrogen bomb had been tested in the Philippines in 1947—one thousand times more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Brigham said that not long afterward, the Soviets detonated a bomb that eclipsed all bombs dropped in World War II.
He had reminded her that the youth of 1950 had not grown up in a nuclear world. They remembered Roy Rogers and gangsters and tommy guns, not missiles, Al-Qaeda, and dirty briefcases.
What could one make of it? Under the circumstances, how many citizens would have cried out for a ban on testing weapons of any kind? How many would have insisted on months, years, even a decade of trials before new drugs were introduced in order to save a soldier’s life? Few, she thought. Few would quarrel with the research and development of new weapons and the age-old solution of using volunteers.
What, she wondered, had been done to that boy’s brain to silence him for half a century? She thought about the device on the far side of that table she had seen…. “Can’t…on, can’t…
on,” she whispered. Had she actually felt her temperature rising when she was holding his hand, or was it only a memory? And what was
can’t…on?
Had Monahan been brainwashed, controlled by some remote means, and could that neurological aberration have triggered a response in her own brain fifty-eight years later? Sherry had no idea how memories were conveyed to her mind, only that somehow they were, and that they must travel through a conduit between the deceased person’s central nervous system and her own.