"A Mean & Cruel Heart"

One was a punch-press operator, another was a truck driver; the rest were Regular soldiers, a warehouseman, a baker, a gas worker, a mechanic, three unemployed civilians and a student. They wore sports shirts mostly, open at the neck with the sleeves rolled up, and they had come to Governors Island in New York Harbor from distant places--Denver and Detroit, Cottonwood, Ala., and Hanging Rock, Ohio --for a long-awaited Army reunion. Center of the reunion: a clean-looking young Regular Army sergeant who smiled winningly beneath a mop of golden hair.

The occasion for the reunion was a general court-martial, and the accused was the lad with the golden hair. Sergeant James C. Gallagher of Brooklyn was charged in ten specifications with consorting with the Chinese Communists and murdering three of his fellow American prisoners of war in Korea. The witnesses were sharp-tongued and bitter; one testified that he had buried one of the three dead G.I.s beside the Yalu River, and he swore: "I made a promise to that kid . . . that if God permitted me to get back home alive . . . the man who murdered him would be brought to justice." The witness pointed across the courtroom to the trim and carefully uniformed Sergeant Gallagher: "That is the man, sir!"

The Progressive. One by one on quiet Governors Island the witnesses unfolded a forlorn panorama of windswept P.W. camps by the Yalu, with their squalid mud huts and icy compounds, and their Chinese Communist officers--"Wong" and "Ragmop" and numberless others--who were constantly seeking to brainwash the G.I.s and undermine their allegiance. Aiding the Communists, the witnesses testified, were the G.I. "progressives," and one of their leaders was Sergeant Gallagher. Opposing them in the psychological struggle were G.I. "reactionaries," led by Sergeant Lloyd W. Pate of Augusta, Ga., also a Regular, who used both oral argument and force to keep wavering Americans loyal. "What do you mean by force?" demanded the trial counsel of Sergeant Pate. "Why, sir," the leader of the reactionaries replied, "you just beat the hell out of 'em."

This strange cold war, the former P.W. witnesses testified, was a desperate affair of survival. About 1,400 of 3,000 inmates of Camp 5, for example, were dying from disease, malnutrition and maltreatment, and those who heeded progressives got favor and food from the Reds. Gallagher helped run the "Red Star" study group on Communism; he lectured P.W.s on "Wall Streeters and capitalistic imperialists" and wrote leaflets urging U.S. troops in the line to surrender. Gallagher, said witnesses, advised one of the Chinese officers to shoot Sergeant Pate and the reactionaries. One of the witnesses remarked that Gallagher once sold him a plate of beans and corn to add to his daily half cup of grain for $5; the heart of Sgt. Gallagher, said this witness, was "mean and cruel."

The Reactionaries. Leader of the reactionaries. Sergeant Pate developed the indictment. One wintry day when the temperature was 30DEG below zero. Sergeant Pate and five or six of his friends heard blows, body blows they thought, coming from one of the huts. "I saw Gallagher lifting a man off the floor roughly," said Pate. "He carried him to the wall near the corner. As far as I could see, he hung him in some way to a peg in the wall. His feet were about six inches off the floor. Then Gallagher stepped back and laughed. He reached up and snapped the limp head back and said. 'Dammit, that'll learn you. When I say move, you'll know what I mean.' I could see that man was dead." Sergeant Pate, too late to help, found the dead man humped outside in the snow. "He looked like he was an old man . . . a rack of bones." said Pate, "but he was only 18 or 19."

Next, five more witnesses testified that Gallagher caused the death of two other sick, emaciated U.S. P.W.s. Gallagher, said one of the witnesses, thought the two inmates were "smelling up the room," so he threw them outside into the 40-below cold "like a bartender bouncing a drunk." Most of the witnesses themselves helped recreate the odor of P.W. Camp 5 on placid Governors Island. Did you not protest, or try to stop it? they were asked. "No, sir,'' came hesitant replies, "I was afraid to get thrown out myself ... I couldn't help myself ... I didn't want to freeze to death." Next day, outside the hut, the two men were found "stiff, blue and dead." The mother of one of them sat in the hearing room, following the testimony closely, just "to see who the boy is . . ."

Pleadings. What could be said for Sergeant Gallagher, brought up in a decent home in Brooklyn, an Army recruit at 17, and a holder of the Purple Heart? Some of the witnesses thought Gallagher believed in the Communist doctrines; others thought that Gallagher was one who enjoyed lording it over his fellows, seeming important and influential, and that he was soft and pliable, receptive to the meager comforts the Communists could accord him. "I know I'm a sorry son of a bitch," Gallagher told one of the reactionaries one day, "but after all, I know I can't quit ..." The reactionaries were not sympathetic: "I told him if I lived and he lived," said Sergeant Pate, "I would personally see that he was hung."

Facing not hanging, but a top sentence of life at hard labor, Sergeant Gallagher still looked well-fed and well-groomed at week's end; he showed himself deferential and eager to help those in authority, this time his lawyers, in little ways like quickly passing the Scotch tape and paper clips along the courtroom table when they were required. "Once I get back to the States I'm not worried," Gallagher once told a reactionary. "All I have to do is to plead that I did those things under mental duress." Gallagher did not believe that the U.S. Government could do anything or would bother him. But Sergeant Gallagher could be wrong.

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