hours. When the thirty-plus-foot tides receded, the landing area was a sea of mud.
There was no beach. Men would have to climb a seawall when they left their landing barges.
Army Chief of Staff Collins sent General Matthew B. Ridgway, recognized as one of the brightest officers in the Army, to Tokyo to “confer” with MacArthur about the Inchon plan. Everyone understood that Ridgway’s mission was to talk MacArthur out of his plan.
He failed to do so.
President Truman was faced with the choice of listening to the senior officers in the Pentagon, who wanted him to forbid the operation, or letting MacArthur have his way.
Political considerations certainly influenced Truman to some degree. It was a given that if Truman supported the Pentagon and forbade the invasion, MacArthur would logically conclude that the President had no faith in him, and retire.
If he did so quietly, fine. But that was unlikely. It was more likely that the “firing” of the legendary national hero would see MacArthur as the Republican candidate in the upcoming presidential election.
Whatever the reasons, Truman decided not to interfere with MacArthur’s plan to invade at Inchon on 15 September.
MacArthur gave command of the invasion force—X Corps—to Major General Ned Almond. He did not, however, relieve Almond of his assignment as his chief of staff. While this was perfectly legal, and certainly MacArthur’s prerogative, the Pentagon establishment was outraged.
Some of their rage, MacArthur’s supporters claimed, was because they could not now give MacArthur a chief of staff who could be counted on to provide them a window into MacArthur’s thinking.
Eighth Army Commander Walker bitterly protested the loss of the Marines to X Corps. He said he could not guarantee holding the Pusan Perimeter without them. MacArthur was unmoved. The First Marine Brigade (Provisional) came off the lines in Pusan, boarded the ships of the invasion fleet, and en route to Inchon, reinforced at sea by a third regiment, became the 1st Marine Division.
The invasion was a spectacular success.
At 1200 29 September—two weeks after the landing— MacArthur stood in Seoul’s National Assembly Hall and told South Korean President Syngman Rhee,
“. . . On behalf of the United Nations Command, I am happy to restore to you, Mr. President, the seat of your government. . . .”
MacArthur then led the assembled dignitaries in recitation of the Lord’s Prayer.
The Eighth Army had broken out of the Pusan Perimeter. The North Korean Army was in full retreat.
It was logical to presume that the Korean War was over.
I
[ONE]
NEAR CHONGJU, SOUTH KOREA 0815 28 SEPTEMBER 1950
Major Malcolm S. Pickering, USMCR, whose appearance and physical condition reflected that he had not had a change of clothing—much less the opportunity to bathe with soap or shave—since he had been shot down fifty-eight days before sat between two enormous boulders near the crest of a hill.
He thought—but was by no means sure—that he was about twenty miles north of Taejon and about thirty miles south of Suwon. Where he hoped he was, was in a remote area of South Korea where there were few North Korean soldiers, lessening the chance that he would be spotted until he could attract the attention of an American airplane, and have someone come and pick him up.
Those hopes were of course, after fifty-eight days, fading. Immediately after he had been shot down, there had been a flurry of search activity, but when they hadn’t found him the activity had slowed down, and—logic forced him to acknowledge—finally ceased.
He wasn’t at all sure that anyone had seen any of the signs he left after the first one, the day after he’d been shot down. What he had done was stamp into the mud of a drained rice paddy with his boots the letters PP and an arrow. No one called him “Malcolm.” He was called “Pick” and he knew that all the members of his squadron—and other Marine pilots—would make the connection.
The arrow’s direction was basically meaningless. If the arrow pointed northward, sometimes he went that way. More often than not, he went east, west, or south. He knew that he couldn’t move far enough so that he wouldn’t be able to see an airplane searching low and slow for him in the area of the sign left in the mud.
He had left other markers every other—or every third— day since he’d been on the run. The fact that there had been Corsairs flying low over some of the markers—logic forced him to acknowledge—was not proof that they had seen the markers. The Corsairs, when they