I guess most people don’t identify it with my Hippy self, but I served with Able Company, First Battalion, Fifth Marine Regiment, First Marine Division, in Korea in 1953 as a rifleman, a BAR man and a Fire-Team Leader. I drew combat pay and was fired on and returned fire and carried dead and wounded friends back from no-man’s-land.
All this talk about gays in the military took me back 47 years to those times. We had several Combat Corpsmen, the Marine Corps name for a Medic, in our company but the most memorable was Mother Heaps.
Mother was about six feet four and handsome with close-cut, black, curly hair, a fine-looking young man who wanted nothing more than to resume his homosexual life back in San Francisco. Our Platoon thought it was pretty slick to have a gay Corpsman. We thought we got good treatment; Mother Heaps was kind and compassionate and we felt we were covered. Mother loved us, and we loved him back by accepting his care. His gentleness was much appreciated in those hard combat situations. To my knowledge, he never “hit on” any of us.
Mother was good on patrols. One time we went out not long after full dark. We entered no-man’s-land through the Panmunjom “Peace Corridor” with its red and white candy-striped guard shack with the guard in his spiffy white gloves, white spats, white duty-belt and chrome helmet. We were quite a contrast in our camouflage and blackened faces. After a few hundred yards we left the peace corridor and turned towards Three Fingers and Horseshoe, Chinese-held hills. We managed to penetrate fairly deeply into Chinese territory without alerting any sentries and, having completed our reconnaissance mission, turned back towards our own lines, looking for the sally gate where we could re-enter U.N. territory.
There was a trench all the way across Korea, roughly at the 38th parallel. First there was a row of trench with fighting holes and machine gun bunkers every few yards, then a thirty-foot-wide strip of tanglefoot barbed wire five feet deep, mined with occasional trip flares. Outside the barbed wire was our mine field. Some of the mines would blow a man up. Some would blow up a tank.
The mine field, for the safety of the U.N. forces, had one strand of barbed wire running down our side of the field with a small red triangle hanging every few feet. On the posts, facing our line, were signs: WARNING, MINE FIELD!
As we hunted the sally gate, we ran up against the one-strand fence, saw the triangles and read the sign, upside down from the wrong side. We had been led across the minefield and were standing in it.
We, of course, wanted to be on the other side of that fence and started to step over when the Sergeant, who had led us into the minefield, said,
“No. We made it this far. We’re going to turn around and retrace our steps through the field, go back and re-enter through the Peace Corridor.”
Opinions flared, whether to cross out of the mine field or go back through it, when suddenly Mother Heaps drew his .45, jacked back the slide and pointed it at the Sergeant.
“Sergeant,” he said, “this appears to me to be a health question. I’m in charge of health and it looks unhealthy to the men to go back through that mine field after we were lucky enough to make it the first time. We’re going to step over the fence and go in through the sally port. You can run me up on charges when we get back to our own company area, but that’s what we are going to do now!”
The Sergeant looked down the barrel of the .45 and reluctantly agreed.
In the morning we all waited on tenterhooks for the Sergeant and Mother Heaps to tell their stories to the Captain. We feared for Mother’s safety. There were dark rumors that people who misbehaved in combat could be stood up against the wall and shot.
When Mother came back down the hill, we were all over him.
“Well, what happened?”
Mother smiled. “Nothing, to me.”
“What happened to the Sergeant?
Mother smiled more broadly. “He was relieved of duty as a squad leader and sent to the rear to be a cook.”
That was one of the best good-sense decisions I ever saw come down through the official channels of the Marine Corps. We all thought,
“Mother takes good care of us!”
