THE FIGHTING, WAITING EIGHTH ARMY

From Korea, TIME'S Senior Editor John Osborne cabled:

AMERICANS ought to be aware that their army in Korea today, a truly fine outfit, is not the best army the U.S. can put in the field. It is the best army that can be put in the field in the circumstances.

The soldiers who man it and the officers who command it see no purpose and no good in the kind of war they are fighting. Americans fighting abroad always want to be done with war and go home, but there is a special quality in our soldiers: disgust with the war they are waging now. It is the quality born of their knowledge that they are not expected to win. They are expected only to stand and hold, and perhaps to be killed or maimed in the process. They are expected to leave their line on occasion and walk through the night silence toward the enemy line, and on rare occasion even to attack and harass the enemy line--but almost never to take the enemy line.

They say in total truth: "We aren't going anywhere," and ask why, then, they must patrol and probe and await the sniper's bullet or the shell that may find them on their hills, and why they must be there at all. They do not yearn to leap from their lines and drive across the snow-whitened enemy hills. Far from it. But they do yearn for an end of this war and they would rather fight to end it than await an ending that never comes.

The individual end is death for some, wounds or capture for many more, and rotation home for most of them. Rotation is a human necessity, but its effect on the army as a fighting force is nonetheless corrosive. A division commander figured recently that the majority of his combat soldiers had been in Korea for only five months. Platoon and company leaders seldom keep their units for longer than four months. For some reason, very few captains and first lieutenants experienced in company command are coming out on replacement, and there is a shortage of company leaders. Noncommissioned squad leaders are also hard to come by, and many squads are being led by privates first class with six months or less of Army service.

"Results Unknown." Every morning at 8 o'clock, at every U.S. command post in Korea, commanders gather with their staffs for their daily briefing on the infantry war. Before a lighted map of the corps, divisional or regimental sector in question, a G-2 officer reduces the cold, the tensions and the tragedy of the night just gone to dry brevities which, more often than not, end in the phrase "with results unknown."

Our artillery has fired so many rounds into and over the whitened hills--"with results unknown." Our patrols have crept forward from our lines, through our barbed wire and minefields, a little way toward the enemy lines, and perhaps have sighted and fired at figures seen or imagined in the vibrant stillness--"with results unknown." Our corps and division commanders and staffs just don't have enough to do. Not that they are idle; far from it. But it's tough when there's so little active war to manage or follow. Minor patrol actions are followed by rear headquarters with a meticulous concern that would be reserved for sizable battles in an active war.

As always, the generals find ways to lighten their lot when they are confined to the rear. Apart from its invaluable uses as a cargo carrier, ambulance and general communication vehicle, the helicopter is a great personal blessing to some of them. A corps commander has the door at his right removed and shoots foxes from his "chopper" with a shotgun.

All the same, it's still a war for the men in it. A night patrol can be as dangerous and deadly for the men doing the job as the biggest of battles. The wounded, hand-carried for hours over the cold hills to the nearest jeep point--it may take three hours to do 1,000 yards up some of these hills--suffer as they would at the Yalu. And, on the quietest of nights on a "quiet" sector, the regimental commanders always have a little stack of personal letters to sign, supplementing the Defense Department telegrams and beginning, "It is with the deepest regret . . ."

Bunker Lights. Supply is superb--probably the best in any war in our history. An old regular who recently visited the front said, with only slight exaggeration: "This is the first war I ever heard of in which the men at the front live better than the men at the rear." It could be, at times, that things are just a little too good for an Army that, after all, may have to do some extensive fighting. One division commander recently blew his top when he heard that the men of one of his line companies had improvised a generator system and were stringing electric lights in their bunkers.

There is no all-American army in Korea today. Quite apart from the units of other nations, the Eighth U.S. Army in Korea is a three-language study in the American century. People at home who think only of boys from The Bronx and Topeka and Dallas when they read of "an American division" in action make the same mistake a U.S. corps commander made not long ago. He watched a U.S. infantry squad in a training exercise and afterward delivered a little speech, remarking on the splendid

American faces he saw before him. The general noted that a junior officer was about to bust with suppressed laughter and, in some irritation, asked him why. The junior officer replied that only four of the 14 men could understand what the general had said. The splendid American faces were variously from the continental U.S., Puerto Rico, Guam and Korea.

It might have been almost any infantry squad in the Eighth Army. Every U.S. infantry division in Korea has the equivalent of several companies of KATOUSA (Korean Augmentation Troops, U.S. Army) and a sprinkling of Spanish-speaking draftees from Puerto Rico. Many of the Koreans in the line today have been with their U.S. divisions for two years or more; they are the old hands of this war. Thousands more have followed them into service with the Americans, and at one time or another most American infantrymen have to "buddy up" with a Korean soldier.

Army policy requires that Puerto Ricans and KATOUSA be dispersed through squads and platoons alongside continental Americans, rather than placed in separate units. The results in enforced understanding and companionship are often good and warming. But the language difficulty is serious. The result at the front is that squad and platoon leaders must communicate with their men in an awkward mishmash of straight American, pidgin talk and sign language, with occasional help from the few interpreters at hand. All this forwards the brotherhood of man. But it can be tough on night patrol in the cold wastelands between the lines, where each man's life may depend on perfect understanding and precision.

Sick of Stalemate. The soldiers talk of their war just about as their generals do, and just about as well. There is one natural difference: the G.I. at the front takes a personal and more reluctant view of trying to end it with a ground offensive. But, to the depths of their beings, the men in the lines believe that it ought to be ended. Many of them are genuinely puzzled by the failure to end it by negotiation, and they say over & over that there must be some way to get the enemy to quit.

Much of the frustration begins at home. No soldier is long in Korea before he comes to share the general conviction that Americans at home are sick of the war and don't care how it ends or what happens to the men waging it. A visitor recently hazarded a guess that the American public was not so much sick of the war itself as sick of stalemate. A regimental chaplain who heard this remark said in answer: "If I could believe that, and could say it to these men with real conviction, it would do wonders."

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