How Korea Was Bombed in My Mother's Name

The author shares how a simple request for a dog by his daughter leads to the discovery of a disturbing photo from the Korean war.  And in the end the daughter gets her dog.

Transcript

Our daughter Amber wanted a dog. She begged for one. She wheedled, and cornered me for one. She used all the advantages a ten-year-old child has, like a good memory and a cherubic face.

 “You had a dog,” she complained with her arms calmly placed behind her back, “when you where a kid.” 

She maintained a composed demeanor, eyeing me. I like composed. I said nothing.

            “I’m an only child,” she continued, not in a whining tone, but matter-of-factly. “I’ll never have brothers or sisters. I’m just lonely sometimes.”

            I continued to say nothing, but I thought. You are right; you will not have brothers or sisters. Your mother and I are too old. We have many regrets and your sharpened dart has struck one of them, bull’s-eye!

             “Don’t you have pictures of your dog?” she asked, with a sigh and a bit of hope, “Could you show them to me?”

             A well laid trap, if ever I heard one. And I put my foot into it like a bear beneath a bee’s hive dripping with amber-laced honey.

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              For whatever reason, my mother bequeathed me a box of photos when I was ten. Ancient, decrepit, mostly out-of-focus, black-and-white images, long forgotten until I was pestered about the need for a dog. Buried in the attic, entombed in a footlocker, they were easy to find as I had kept them in the same pink and blue Johnson and Johnson cardboard box I had received them in. 

             I pawed and perused photo after photo, not bothering to leave the attic. I found a picture or two of Biff, my Cocker Spaniel. She had been a good dog, and as black in color as fate. The family mug shots twanged primordial chords and I found myself sighing much like my daughter had a few hours ago. I dug deeper, to the bottom of the box. I hadn’t seen these photos in forty years or more. 

             I pulled out five two-by-two inch, glossy black and whites. I knew what they were straightaway. Back when I was ten, they meant nothing. Now these same photos almost made me cry. They had been so exotic I had kept them, but now they were the stuff of the blood in my daughter’s veins.

               Irony by the bomb load.

             I absorbed the photos, rapt in details that I now understood. Unbelievable. All five photos were circa the now mostly forgotten Korean War. My mother had dated a U.S. soldier before I was born; I think his name was Jack. That surprised me that I could even recall his name. In one photo, he stood in front of a six-foot high stack of sandbags. Canvas tents stretched behind him. Even as a ten-year-old I had known what he clutched in his hands – a sinister looking Chinese-made barrel-clip machine gun. He pretended to strum it like a guitar. A big smile accompanied the playful gesture.

            In another photo three young gaudily made up Korean women posed. They too smiled, but now years later I could see their smiles were required. Maybe even paid for. I remember thinking they were beautiful when I was a kid. Now, I knew they were tough-as-nails camp follower - survivors. Yet, the photo that humbled and disturbed me the most was one showing rows of bombs, stacked three deep. The rows piled on and on into the distance. They’d be considered primitive by today’s high-tech weapons standards. These were merely run-of-the-mill three or four-hundred-pound contact gravity bombs with cheap fins attached to the end. The bombs had words written on them in chalk, “Serprise package from Skippy.” Serprise spelled incorrectly is on the first bomb on the top row. Package from on the first bomb in the second row and Skippy sits on the last bomb in the bottom row. They wait, heaped, conveyor belt style, ready to kill in this Skippy’s name.

            A sadness tugged at me. I wanted to cry. Amber’s mom is 100 percent Korean. 

 In far-off, alien Korea from 1950 to1953, the villagers and city-dwellers of the Korean peninsula were bombed; bombed to smithereens with all kinds of weapons. Some weapons had names chalked on them. General estimates were that one million people died in the Korean War. Maybe members of my wife’s family died from these very bombs autographed, “Serprise package from Skippy.” 

And a horrible epiphany followed by a blood rush to my head gave me clarity that I didn’t want. Only a few years ago I learned something from an aunt. My mother’s teenage nickname was Skippy. She didn’t like the nickname and changed it after marrying my father.

            The photo was a present to her from her Army boyfriend Jack and the bombs with her name chalked on them, a present to the Koreans below. In the end, they had become a present to me a ten year-old boy, who in his fifties became horrified at the connections.

            Full circle - Serprise package from Skippy.

            And I thought of the rough, yet eye-opening three years I spent in Korea on Cheju Island. A half-million Koreans lived there. Seventeen of us were foreigners. Eight were Irish nuns sequestered so well I never saw even a hint of their existence. As for me, time and time again buses stopped full of people, their faces pressed to the windows staring at me. Verbal abuse was thrown my way regularly. Mira my wife suffered too. Not all interactions or even most by any means were negative. But I thought we needed to fill in some history for our Asian American daughter.  

            By the way our ten-year-old daughter got the dog.