��������������������������������������������������������������������������� �����������������������������FURRY ORPHAN OF WAR���������������Allen Ruffin ��������������������������������������������������������������������������� We could not pronounce his name, so we called him Kim. Our houseboy. Actually, Kim was a member of a group who had signed up to work for the GI's to avoid being drafted into his own army. In 1952 Korea, that was as good as a sentence of death. He did pretty well. He slept in a tent with the other Korean helpers who had cots, blankets, sleeping bags, clothing, plenty of food, and no combat duty. They were the kitchen K.P.'s, a task loathed by all GI's, helpers who carried five-gallon cans of coffee to each of our dugouts in the mornings and brought food and coffee to those on duty, carried in the water and fuel cans--well, usually, but not always and sometimes we had to lug these ourselves--and did other useful chores such as washing and ironing, and airing out sleeping bags. Very useful to have around. When any shooting started, they vanished. Utterly. And who could blame them. After all, as we often said kiddingly, "Hey, a guy could get killed around here." Some did. The Korean helpers were paid small sums from the company fund. To have a houseboy, the twelve of us in the dugout chipped in about a dollar a month equivalent in Korean Wan--which was like play money to us--or maybe a little more if Kim got in a snit over working too hard. He made more on the side by crafting personal footlockers from scrap wood. They were beautifully made. He was an artist with the crude, handmade pull-saw, bent nails, some leather and sand. Yep, sand. We didn't have any sandpaper, so he rubbed the wood surface smooth with damp rags and fine sand. Then he rubbed it to a sheen with oil he scrounged from somewhere or other. I paid him five bucks American for mine, which was a fortune compared to the value of Wan, which was changing day by day. He made our dirty, dreary, always-frightened lives more comfortable over the months of summer. In time, I became temporary Sergeant of the Guard, a post which rotated among all the new arrivals who had been there longest without a regular assignment. During night rounds, I often saw a scrawny, snarling Doberman Pinscher stalking our perimeters. This was a trained military guard dog that had become loose when his handler, a member of the division mine replaced, was killed. Coming up this valley, that division was ambushed from the mountains on each side and lost a thousand men for every yard of ground taken. They were withdrawn to Japan and replaced by the division I joined as a replacement, an activated National Guard unit. Very laid back. They left food out for the dog, but never tried to befriend it. They were afraid. In time, I coaxed the dog into coming near. Then to accepting bits of meat from my hand. Then to allowing me to rub its breast and stroke its ears and muzzle. I knew Dobermans. The aunt back home who raised my fiance had three of them. Yessir, I knew Dobermans, but I couldn't make a friend of this one. Ever hear of shell shock? Battle fatigue? This animal had it. Whenever there was an explosion, even of distant artillery fire, the dog was gone in a flash and didn't reappear for days. I always loved dogs, and had a Dalmatian back home that I had trained to hunt. They are the old bird dogs of Dalmatia, you know. Wished I'd had him in Korea, too. There were pheasants and ducks all over the place. One morning, I was astonished to see as the sun rose that the rice paddies were covered bank-to-bank with mallards. At the first break of light, they all started quacking at once. If I hadn't seen them first, it would have scared the shit out of me. The Chinese army we faced made queer noises before an attack. You never knew. In Korea, the sun is up in an instant. You see a little bit of the sun over the mountain with just ever so little light, and it sort of hangs there for a while. Then in the blink of an eye, it is up well above the horizon and everything is bathed in full light. No sort of half-light like mornings at home when I was running my trapline before school. Something to do with refraction over an edge, that edge being the mountain. I looked it up. Shortly after, the ducks would all take flight at once. It was a marvelous sight, thousands and thousands of mallards from all the paddies in the valley zipping up and down, the low sun glistening on their twinkling wings. I could tell mallards from other ducks from a distance ever after that by how fast their wings were beating. And quacking. Duck music. It gets you if you are an outdoors type. I'd give anything to hear that many at once again. The second or third morning after the ducks arrived, I was doing an early turn to check the guards and make sure nobody was asleep in case some gung-ho officer decided to leave his warm bunk and sneak around to find somebody he could chew out and give company punishment. In the first weak light, I thought I saw something funny down by the paddies, and so I hopped into a machine-gun pit with the guard where there was a telephone. I had to hold the bells so to make no sound when I cranked it. I cranked and cranked before the operator woke up and cussed me when I wanted to get through to the duty officer. He wasn't there, and so when the sun popped I could see what was going on and it was just as well I hadn't gotten through and been responsible for a mortar attack. There weren't supposed to be any civilians where we were. Some would show up every once in a while, of course, and usually get shot. Never knew but they might have a basket full of grenades or a machine gun strapped to their backs. It happened. Around the rice paddies there were hundreds of them. As soon as the sun became bright, half of them jumped up and began to run in one direction with paddy-size nets, while the other half ran in the other direction yelling, screaming, and waving their arms. It was over in minutes, and only a couple of hundred ducks were left to fly around quacking their distress. Where all those Koreans and the ducks disappeared to so fast, I never found out. They needed the protein, and were starved for meat. I once saw a tired, thin old horse die in the traces on a street in Seoul, and before you could say Jack Robinson there was a crowd with knives, saws, sharp scrap metal, screaming at each other in that funny way that sounds like clearing your throat, and even eating the meat warm, bloody-raw. The meat was gone in moments and nothing but bones left steaming in the roadway. Minutes more, and only a bloodstain remained. Can't blame them. War is tough. I never saw that poor Doberman again. One morning, after I had finally left the guard unit and gotten my regular assignment, Kim woke me early, shaking me and whispering, "Dog-u, Dog-u." I thought he meant that the Doberman was back. I dressed in a hurry, grabbed my grease gun and made sure I had the double-clips taped together stuck in it, snagged my helmet just in case, and followed him wearing only the floppies he had made me of bits and pieces of leather and chunks of tire tread for soles since he was rushing me too much to put on combat boots and do GI lacing. Kim led me away from the dugouts and up the side of the mountain, and I began to get a little scared. After all, he was a Korean and we were never sure which side any of them were on. I did radio work among other things, and I heard that they knew plenty of us by our nicknames. Kim could have been a Commie leading me into an ambush as easy as not. I wanted to go back, but he kept motioning me on and I couldn't let him see I was scared. Until I heard a puppy cry. Kim led me to a little hole under one of those tiny, scraggy pine trees that grow on the mountains. It looked like someone had started to dig a foxhole or maybe a tunnel there, had hit a rock or big root or something, and given up. Pine boughs had fallen over the top and needles collected on the top of that to make a sheltered spot. Down in the back was a nest made of leaves, bits and pieces of cloth, what looked like white wool. Kim reached in and picked up the bit of wool, which turned out to be a tiny, tiny little puppy. Its eyes were still closed, and its ears sealed to the sides of its head. But, its mouth was open and the lungs worked fine. It was hungry and wanted its mother. There were signs in the hole that she had tried to bury this pup, but maybe had to leave in too much of a hurry. Usually the bitch never abandons a pup without good cause. Maybe she had gone hunting and had gotten killed. I dipped the twisted end of my handkerchief into my canteen, and gave it to the pup to suck which it did again and again. Water helps, but is no substitute for food. I gave Kim another five dollars American--he refused to take Wan--to get some GI canned condensed milk by whatever scheme, and some eggs. Milk was plentiful, but eggs were a little harder. We could only get them if we were allowed to eat apart from the mess hall because of our strange duty hours with the radios, and they were counted carefully. I fed that pup with the rag twist and condensed milk for days and days, and washed its bottom to get it peeing and shitting just like a bitch would do. For a long time, it wouldn't touch eggs even cooked in butter, but it would lick butter off my fingertip. In time the eyes opened, a pale, pale blue. I kept it in a .50 caliber ammunition box in which I'd punched air holes, and lined with socks and pieces of blanket. Wherever I went, so did the box and the pup. I had considered a number of names, but decided on Cal. You see, on the side of the box was stencilled Ammunition, cal. .50 M2 Ball. I had considered Ball, since she was a little ball of fur, but Cal seemed better. Yeah, she was a bitch. Once the eyes opened, she started getting curious and wanted to get out and try moving on her legs instead of swimming. Before long, Cal was eating eggs and sugar, and then bacon and Spam, which was about all I could get except C-rations, and though I'd eat them when I had to, I wouldn't have fed them to a pig back home. She started to grow and grow. As soon as her ears perked up, I could see that she was going to be a sturdy animal something like a short, wide-model Husky, all white with some brownish places. She was smart as a whip, and learned from me quickly. I took her everywhere with a leash and a red collar Kim had found somewhere. We were having some pretty busy shooting matches about then, but the noise never bothered Cal. One morning though, early, when she was about four months old, we were awakened by a terrific noise. Scared the pea out of everyone, and we went diving to the ground scrabbling for guns and helmets. During the night, a unit of self-propelled eight-inch howitzers had moved into prepared positions right behind us and began firing over our heads. It wasn't just the concussions, though they blew the roofs of the dugouts around and raised dust a foot above the floor, but the shells sounded like boxcars going overhead. Sideways. And every once in a while, a shell would lose the bearing ring which went anywhere it wanted, tumbling and making a peculiar "whupping" sound. Scary. It lasted an hour. Cal was trembling and wouldn't stand when it was over. She had been mostly under me during the shoot, and now wanted to dig her way under my blouse. But, she was too big and puppy claws are sharp. I put her down with a yell and she ran off. I hunted for her for hours and hours. So did everyone else who knew I was hiding an forbidden pet. I'm not going to say that I cried myself to sleep, but maybe I did and maybe I didn't. I had a couple of bottles of Korean whiskey, Lion Brand or maybe Tiger or somesuch nonsense, that I had left from a case I'd bought from a Yale educated Korean colonel who had come walking up the railroad tracks one day when I was guard sergeant. Later he came back in a jeep with the booze, and was amused to find I was from Connecticut and had been a lunch guest at Yale a number of times. That stuff was vicious, unaged and made from whatever would ferment with some added coloring. The hangover started before you got drunk. And I remember I got as drunk as I could before passing out. I don't recall much after that. I woke up with a terrible thirst, a worse head, and found myself laced into my sleeping bag. This was a prank we'd sometimes play on a replacement, lacing him in and yelling, "Raid" in the middle of the night. I thought the guys were joking me, but this big feller that was my best buddy came and sat on my chest and talked with me until he was convinced I was sane. I drank myself into oblivion while hunting for Cal. Toward dark, Kim came to the dugout rubbing his stomach and said, "Dog-u numbah one chop-chop-u." I snatched the skinning knife I'd brought from home from my belt scabbard and went for Kim. The guys dragged me off. Told me it had taken four of them and a lot more whiskey forced down my throat to subdue me; that I had the strength of ten. Kim was never seen again. Neither was my Kabar knife with the white ivory handle. In fact, we had a hell of a time getting another houseboy and then had to pay double and promise I would be gone when he had to work at the dugout. Just as well. Since then I have learned that Korean men believe that eating dogs at certain times of the year improves their sexual prowess. In one of the litters of German shorthaired pointers I've raised was an almost white male with a familiar personality. So smart. He was learning his commands as soon as he could walk. Had a sense of humor, too. Some dogs do, you know. Don't tell me you've never seen a dog grinning at you? Named him Cal. I told my wife I liked the name Calvin. She doesn't know this story. Don't talk much about the war, except maybe some of the funny things. Shorthair Cal, he was gunshy from birth and I had to sell him cheap. He was purchased by an accented foreigner who called a few days later and told me that Cal had gotten away from his garage and run off, and that he wanted to buy another puppy. I told that man that if I ever saw him again, I'd skin him. Slowly. I might have, too. My wife and I believe in reincarnation. And in heaven. And I figure that if I don't meet up again with all those fine, loving dogs I've owned, heaven is a damned poor place. -end- Copyright (c)1993 Allen Ruffin Allen F. Ruffin, Writer, can be contacted in any P&BNet conference or by snailmail: P.O. Box 241, Middletown, MD 21769