"Counting on Nothing"

As cease-fire hopes at Panmunjom sag or soar, what is happening to the morale of the G.I. in the line? Last week TIME Correspondent Bud Hutton cabled this answer from the Korean front:

TOWARD morning a runner came up from the battalion and said he had heard something over the radio at C.P. about the U.N. making some sort of offer the Chinese might take. "Could amount to ceasefire, if the Chinks go for it," said the runner. "If the Chinks go for it," he repeated.

The Joes standing around George Company's C.P. bunker went on watching U.N. artillery shells burst against Communist bunkers on a mountainside 3,000 yards up the valley and said nothing for a while. Finally, a 23-year-old rifleman from Honolulu, whose black hair had grown streaked with grey since he came into the line last July, spat on a splintered railroad tie. "So what?" he asked. "I'm going to start holding my breath? I ain't counting on nothing except that old big R in rotation to get me outa here." The BAR (Browning automatic rifle) man scuffed a stone and said: "So what're we supposed to do? When we can stop fighting, the man will tell us, and until then we'll fight when we gotta, and that's the way it is."

As it was at George Company, so it was all up & down the U.N. line last week, and so it has been for most of the 4 1/2 months since truce talks started. The people to whom cease-fire negotiations mean most --the Joes now in the mud of the early winter line--simply aren't counting on anything to get them out intact, except rest-and-recuperation leave in Japan, or the big R of rotation. As for cease-fire talks, as one company commander said, "Look, Jack, that stuff's in another world from us. Sure, maybe it's in the back of our minds a little bit, but no more than a faint hope, if that much."

In the infantryman's own grimly terse definition, morale in combat is whether you fight good or not, when the man (i.e., the C.O.) tells you to. All along the front the U.N.'s Joes were pushing ahead of a hypothetical line, afoot and in tanks and aircraft, to fight the enemy because the man had told them to. The chaplain of one U.S. outfit in the west central sector snorted at a question about morale.

"Yesterday," he said, "our Baker Company tried to take a hill. They were driven back and their C.O. was wounded. At the aid station, a couple of riflemen from Point Platoon came back to see how the C.O. was. They asked, 'You want us to take that hill, captain? You just lay still a bit.' Forty minutes later the hill was ours. That's how morale is."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.