Do You Have Half A Minute?

If someone you love disappears and you never find out what happened to him there is no peace about it. Losing someone to death is hard enough, but missing is not dead. It is just missing.

For decades more than 8,000 men have been missing from the Korean War. My father is one of them. Amidst sightings and intelligence reports and a whole host of other evidence that many of these men were taken to the Soviet Union and never returned, the United States Government did nothing for a very long time. Over the past twenty years there has been an effort in place to gain an accounting. Progress has waxed and waned. Politics get in the way. So do budgets. So does apathy, I’m sorry to say.

People not touched by such a loss likely wonder how and why families would continue to suffer so many years later. My best analogy is a wound that runs deep—one that has been covered over by nothing more than time. Without something to heal the injury, it festers from within.

The Coalition of Families of Korean & Cold War POW/MIAs has drafted an electronic petition asking President Obama to make good on his promise to find out what happened to the men who disappeared while fighting in Korea on behalf of the rest of us. Each time someone signs the petition an email is sent to the White House. I have included a link to the petition below. It takes about thirty seconds to sign and send. Thirty seconds. The missing men and their families have been waiting for sixty years.

Every day this country sends its servicemen and women into battle, asking them to be ready to make the ultimate sacrifice. Behind their willingness to go forward is the expectation that, if they are captured or if they fall or if they simply disappear, their country will do everything in its power to bring them home, or at least find out what happened to them.

I hope you will join me in asking our government to do what it should have done a long time ago for men who had that same expectation. Men who were let down. 

http://www.change.org/petitions/president-barack-obama-resolve-the-mysteries-surrounding-the-forgotten-men-of-the-forgotten-war?share_id=sbSEzHSpgj&utm_campaign=signature_receipt&utm_medium=email&utm_source=share_petition

The Man in the Photograph

           Today is the anniversary of the day my father was lost over North Korea. I have many people in my life for whom I am thankful. This is not to take away from the riches they have brought me. But today I pay homage to the layer that lies beneath everything else. It has come forward through the years and become a part of who I am. A while ago I wrote an essay about my father’s loss. In tribute to him today, I am posting it.

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            It came in a telegram. In the ‘50s that’s how they did it. “I regret to inform you…”

            It’s the message that brings a military wife to her knees. An envelope delivered to the front door. She takes it into her trembling hands and stares at it, already knowing.  

            My mother was seven months pregnant with me when she got her telegram. The message was not of death. Hers delivered a different kind of blow. My father was Missing in Action. He’d gone out on a night mission over North Korea and hadn’t come back to base. No word. No witnesses. He’d simply disappeared.

            He’d probably been captured and was being held as a POW. Mom tried to stifle the terrible images of torture and starvation that crept in at night when she was supposed to be sleeping. She clung to her thoughts of the day he would come home. Two months later, I was born. My older brother and I were good distractions. 

            The days and months passed. It got harder to picture his face and to hear his voice. But still she clung to the glimmer that had insinuated itself into our lives. Dad would be home as soon as the war was over.

            When the war ended a year and a half later, they televised POWs crossing the bridge during repatriation in Panmunjom. As the men hobbled across, one by one, expectant and frightened families watched from far away. When they saw their Johnny cross over, they would cry out. Some jumped to their feet. Mom stood silently, clenched fists at her breast, searching the faces. 

            The last man crossed over. His family must have been so relieved. My mother crumbled to the floor. This was not the grief of a woman who’d been told her husband had been killed. Mom was caught somewhere between his death and something worse. Where was he? 

            The government promised to do everything it could to get answers but that turned out to be more talk than action. Later, the 944 List came out. My father’s name was on it. The list was of men who remained missing for whom the government felt there should be an accounting based on circumstances surrounding their loss. In my father’s case, two of his crew members had come back. They’d been captured and held for the rest of the war. That meant the North Koreans and the Chinese who fought with them had found the air craft wreckage. They either had my father or knew where he was buried.

            There should have been information but there wasn’t, and there was no coordinated effort to get any. Eventually, the government changed my father’s status from MIA to Presumed Dead and that was the end of it—for them, but not for us. When you love someone, it’s hard to just presume he's dead. He is your husband. He is your children’s father. He is your life. You don’t just write him off and go about your business.

            You wait and wonder and agonize every day over what might have happened to him. Years pass and details of the life you shared with him begin to fade. But the anguish never does. It lives alongside of you in his stead. My mother carried on, but the loss came with her. Where was her husband?

            My brother eventually stopped standing at the front door crying “I want my daddy,” but he never stopped missing the man who had carried him on his shoulders. I grew up without ever having known my father, but my mother managed to bring him to life for me. His picture was on my bed stand. His hockey skates and other artifacts sat about the room. There were countless stories of him; there were countless tears for him. And always, always there was the hope that one day he would be standing at the door. 

            Years passed. The silent wondering pressed to the back of our hearts and made room for life unfolding. Then, in 1991, Boris Yeltsin came to the U.S. and told of how American POWs had secretly been taken out of Korea to the Soviet Union and never returned. 

            Families of the 8,000 men missing from the Korean War were outraged. The men’s children were now of an age to get involved and we did. We organized and demanded that the government do something to finally get the answers we had all yearned for but never received. The reluctant assumption we had made that our fathers must have died passed quickly from our lives and, in its place, came an anger that we had been made to live with the not knowing for forty years. 

            Each of us was set to wondering anew. Was my father one of the men who had been taken? Had he been thrown into a gulag and forced to live in Siberia, alone and waiting to be rescued? New anguish piled on top of the old. We were now guilty of inaction. We had abandoned our fathers.

            There were Congressional hearings. An office was formed in the Department of Defense. Its mission: to find out what had happened to the men who never came back. I quit working and became a full-time advocate on behalf of POW/MIAs. Along with thousands of other family members, I badgered Congress and the State Department and the White House. I traveled to former Soviet Bloc countries and to China and even to North Korea is search of answers. There were marches and newsletters and too many speeches to remember. I combed the National Archives, filing one Freedom of Information request after another. Twice I testified at Congressional hearings. Most powerful of all, for me, I found my father’s crew members. They told me everything they could remember about that night. All of it placed my father’s loss in context, but none of it told me where he was. He had simply vanished.  

            More than twenty years into our search, we still have no answers. My father is 87 now, if he’s still alive. Every year, on January 13^th, just at the hour his plane went down, I hike into the woods, his picture and his hockey glove in hand. I sit alone and find him in my heart and get into that plane with him. I picture a bail-out. Then I picture going down in flames, in case it happened that way. I feel his emotions as they must have been in those terrible moments when life and death flashed by him and chased him to the ground.  

            I lost my father to war. The fact that he was MIA instead of KIA has tormented me my entire life. We’ve pressed for resolution to the uncertainty. Find the answers, however bad they might be, we’ve always said. We just want to know.

            Sometimes I wonder if I really do. After all these years, I have grown accustomed to having him somewhere out there. Missing in Action; not dead. The uncertainty has kept him alive. He is the man in the photograph—my father—all things a child might want him to be.

In A Land Far Away

My father was lost, but never found, in the Korean War. Missing is quite different than killed. I could write a whole piece on that alone. For now, let me just say I have a shadow that follows me. It is the question never answered, it is the heartache born of what might have been and of what might have happened.

Last week was Father’s Day. My brother sent an innocent message: Happy Father’s Day, Dad. I cried, again, and wrote back “Why does it break my heart every time?” His answer was direct. “At some point, we will need to accept that he's gone.”

It was logical. It was the truth. It is something I will never be able to do.

I have, from the first day I remember, needed to know what happened to my father. I have spent the last two decades trying to find out. This process is a sad one. You learn enough to know there is more that must be told. You learn men were taken and never returned, and that your father might have been among them. You learn enough to never, ever, be able to let go.

About ten years ago, I was invited to participate in a Department of Defense delegation to North Korea. It would be a humanitarian mission, in search of cooperation in the effort to account for the 8,000 men who remain missing from the Korean War. For me it would be much more than that. North Korea has always been the frozen tundra that, in the dark of night, took my father without explanation. It is the place in which the truth lies, waiting.

I packed my bags to travel thousands of miles, a world away, and decades in time. I knew it would be a trip back to January 13, 1952, months before I was born, the night a part of me died.

As we prepared for landing in Pyongyang, I wondered if my arrival would be anything like that of my friend, Gerri, who had come on a similar mission a couple years before. When her plane hit the runway, men came running with hoses to put out fires that erupted here and there in the tires or engines or elsewhere on the plane. As she made her way into the terminal, there were no lights. When she fumbled her way into the ladies’ restroom, she found herself sloshing ankle deep in overflow from the hole in the ground that served as the toilet.

Now as we hit the runway, I readied myself to leap from flames and then to swim in waste. None of it would matter. After a lifetime of imagining the place, I was in North Korea. It might as well have been Oz.

Our landing was, actually, quite uneventful. Inside the building – I hesitate to call it a terminal – there was no public presence. There were no airlines coming and going, no commercial anything. The only sign of life came from a few men walking around, all of them wearing simple brown pants and a matching brown jacket. None of them acknowledged us. If I tried to make eye contact, they quickly looked away.

Our escort was military. They took us to a state-owned facility for official guests. It was sort of like a hotel, but it was definitely not open to the public. The building was situated on acreage down a long deserted road, which was guarded at its mouth by armed military personnel. Though simply outfitted, the residence was lovely. We were free to walk its grounds, which I did frequently. There was a body of water on the property that appeared to be a habitat for beautiful white cranes. The cranes were large and stately birds. One of our hosts told me that North Koreans believe the crane is the symbol of eternal life.

Our main purpose in North Korea was to visit the sight of ongoing remains recovery operations. U.S. teams were in-country searching for Americans who had been buried and left behind during the war. Two teams had been deployed, one to work burial sites in Unsan County and one to work near the Chosin Reservoir. Both locations had seen large battles between American and Chinese forces in the fall of 1950.

We flew by helicopter to the Chosin Reservoir. A flight attendant served us beverages and gave a speech about The Imperialist Americans and all that was wrong with our society. She offered many statistics, including the fact that 250,000 American women were sold into sex slavery each year. It was an odd kind of welcoming address.

The Chosin team was camped in the middle of nowhere. Armed guards encircled the place. We were told the guards were for our own protection because the local population hated Americans so much, but the guards and their guns were at all times facing inward.  

When we got to the recovery site, we walked to the edge of a grave. The top surface of a set of remains had been exposed. A farmer had found them while working his field. Apparently, a small group of Americans had come down the road from the reservoir to this farm and were ambushed by Chinese soldiers. The fallen man’s position in his grave told a harsh story. You could tell he had not been buried by friends or anyone who cared about him. He was not laid out. He’d obviously been tossed into a hole and covered over. He’d been cut down and disposed of without kindness, with no reverence. It was a sight no loved one should ever see.

We traveled the next day by vehicle to Unsan. The ride there took us through the western region, the area in which my father’s plane went down. Rice paddies and flowers lay amongst low rising hills. Scattered farmhouses with thatched roofs dotted the landscape. There were no vehicles anywhere and, what machinery we could see was handmade and primitive. It looked as though the country had stood still in time; the iron curtain drawn tight around it had kept out the trappings of progress.

Our vehicles stopped at the side of the road. One of the soldiers invited me to get out. He pointed off in the distance with a sweeping gesture. "Your father…here. His plane crashed somewhere here.”

My legs felt wooden as I walked into a field through tall waving flowers that whispered against each other in the breeze. There was nothing around. My mind traveled back, as if in a time machine. It went to that night, when their engines stopped and the plane fell. I closed my eyes and saw the flames. I saw my father, maybe jumping into the darkness, maybe riding the plane into the ground. Either way, he’d been here. I could feel him around me. I hoped, wherever he was, that he could feel me around him. It was the most spiritual moment I’ve ever experienced.

When we returned to Pyongyang later that afternoon, we attended a dinner hosted on our behalf. I sat next to a military man about my same age. He spoke some broken English and told me he’d lost his father in the war, too. He didn’t know what happened to his dad, either. I’d never stopped to think of losses suffered by the North Korean people. They’d always been the bad guys to me, as if that somehow made the families impervious to heartache. The soldier and I spoke of our fathers. We each tried, but failed, to contain our emotions. From distant parts of the world we had grown up hating everything about each other. That night, we became friends.

On the heels of that emotional experience, we were taken the next day to the national war museum in Pyongyang. Our guide took us into the Atrocities Room and turned our attention to their main exhibit. There, from floor to vaulted ceiling, was the story of my father’s loss mission. Ken Enoch and John Quinn, two of his crew mates, had been captured and taken as POWs. They were forced to sign germ warfare confessions and had become poster boys for North Korean anti-American propaganda.

Giant photographs of Enoch and Quinn, along with drawings of bombs that showed bugs crawling out of them, and blow-ups of the signed confessions, covered the full length of the room. We stood before the wall for thirty minutes listening to a presentation about the Imperialist Americans, the demons who had bombed their lands and infected their people. The guide gestured angrily toward the photographs. I felt a sweat creep up under my hair. Did they know my father had been on the same mission? Would they find a way to hold me back when the rest of my delegation departed?

By the time the trip was coming to an end, I felt almost schizophrenic. One minute I’d be confronted with deep rooted hatred and shameless repression that stirred dark and angry responses. Then, almost from nowhere, beauty or kindness or compassion or some powerful connection to my father would come upon me. It was a place for which I had no use, and it was a place that meant more to me than anywhere else.

It came time to leave. Our plane taxied, then gathered its speed down the runway. I was sad. It felt like I was leaving my father behind. I turned to take one last look at this country that had swallowed him up. The sky was blue that day and the hills were green, but my eyes saw nothing past the white crane that flew just beyond the wing, keeping pace at my window. His large wings moved as though to music. The bird could have gone anywhere, but he went with us. Just before we lifted off, the crane turned his head to me and our eyes met. In that fleeting instant, I found my father and knew then I would never let him go. Like the crane, he would have eternal life.