Politics

Art imitating life

by Seth Gitell

This weekend, which marked the 50th anniversary of the start of the Korean War, provided a chance to take a second look at the career of a New England hero, Senator John Chafee.

When Chafee died last October at age 78, much was made of his Rhode Island patrician heritage and his distinctive brand of moderate Republicanism. But one aspect of Chafee's life was glossed over: his service in the Korean War's Chosin campaign, where American forces faced destruction at the hands of 100,000 Chinese soldiers and 20-degrees-below-zero weather.

That's no surprise. The Korean War -- or "police action," as President Harry Truman called it -- became known as the "Forgotten War," falling as it did between World War II and Vietnam. Even I -- weaned as a boy on my grandfather's tales of fighting in North Africa and Italy and my father's stories of battling in the jungles of Vietnam -- knew remarkably little about Korea besides what I learned from the sit-com M*A*S*H (which was really more about Vietnam). Author James Brady faced this same problem when he tried to publish a novel about the Korean War, The Marines of Autumn. Finally, though, St. Martin's Press agreed to publish the book, releasing it this year. For New Englanders, one attraction of Brady's book is that the novel's protagonist, Thomas Verity -- a 30-year-old World War II veteran called away from his cushy university life for service in Korea -- is based on Chafee.

Readers of Brady's gripping novel, which tells of the Marines' harrowing retreat from the Chosin Reservoir, will find this afterword: "My portrait of Verity draws on Chafee's education at Yale and Harvard, his combat experiences on Guadalcanal and Okinawa and service in North China, and on his gallantry, his gentleness, his love of family and of country and of the Marine Corps."

How Chafee served as the basis for a novel written by Brady, a journalist more famous as publisher of Women's Wear Daily, editor of New York magazine, and, more recently, columnist for Parade magazine, makes for an interesting story. As a 23-year-old lieutenant, Brady was assigned to Chafee's rifle company in the Taeback Mountains. Little did the green soldier know that his cool commander -- a captain -- came from one of Rhode Island's most prestigious families.

"We were living in bunkers dug into the ridge line," Brady recalls. "It was a lot like the war in Flanders in 1917. I knew he was a New Englander because he had that accent. I only learned years later that he was a Yalie, that he was Skull and Bones, and that his great-grandfather and great-granduncle had been governors of the state."

What made Chafee so memorable to Brady was his incredible calm under pressure. "He didn't fluster easily," Brady remembers. "At one point a Marine machine gunner killed two Marines by accident. When the laborers came to pick up their bodies, the Marine was very shook up. He said, 'Nobody's going to touch these guys.' A Marine with a gun in his hands can be an explosive thing, but Chafee calmly just talked him out of it. Chafee said, 'I know you're upset. We're all upset. You know the right thing is to let these guys go home.' "

Brady had dinner with Chafee the week before the senator's death. "Over dinner, I told him I'd written a new Korean War book," he says. "I told him, 'I've stolen your persona as the main character.' " Chafee asked Brady if he could read the book, and the author assured him he would have galleys sent out by the beginning of the year. "He never got to read it," Brady says. "He died the next weekend."