Korea

[Intro] I have just left your fighting sons in Korea They have met all tests there, and I can report to you without reservation They are splendid in every way [Verse] Ever since the kids have been little they've always known that I vanish from their lives periodically And, um, they never really had any idea what it is that I do What do I do anyway? If I don't know why should they? We never traveled together at all (Since the kids have been little they've always known that I vanish from their lives periodically And, um, they never really had any idea what it is that I do) Brandon, the fourteen year old, he got to travel with me during the summer But we got a chance to talk to each other as adults You know, as adults instead of just father and son We left Boston, we were heading up to the Left Bank Cafe in Blue Hill, Maine And Brandon, just above Marblehead, turned to me and he said "How did you get to be like that?" It's a fair question I knew what he meant, but he didn't have all the language to say exactly what he meant What he meant to say was "Why is it that you are fundamentally alienated from the entire institutional structure of society?" And I said, "Well I've never been asked that, you know? Now don't listen to the radio and don't talk to me for half an hour while I think about it." So we drove and talked We were on Highway One because it was pretty and close to the water Got up to the Maine border and there was a picnic area off to the side, with some picnic tables It was a bright, clear day So I pulled into their parking lot and sat down at the picnic tables And I said, "Now sit down, I want to tell you a story, cause I've thought about it." We sat down, and I said, "You know, I was over in Korea." And he said, "Yeah, I've always wondered about that Did you shoot anybody?" And I said, as honestly as I could, "Well I don't know But that's not the story" I said, "Listen to what I'm telling you I was up at Kutamari Gap there by the Imjin River There were about 75,000 Chinese soldiers on the other side And they all wanted me out of there With every righteous reason that you could think of I had long since figured out that I was the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time for the most specious of reasons But there I was My clothing was rotting on my body Every exotic mold in the world was attacking my clothing and my person My boots had big holes in them from the rot I wanted to swim in the Imjin River and get that feeling of death, that feeling of rot off of me The Chinese soldiers were on the other side They were swimming, they were having a wonderful time But there was a rule, a regulation against swimming in the Imjin River I thought that was foolish But then a young Korean, worked for us as a carpenter by the name of Young-sik Han All of his family had been killed off in the war But he said to me, in what English he had 'You know, when we get married here The young married couple moves in with the elders They move in with the grandparents But there's nothing growing, everything's been destroyed so there's no food So the first baby that's born, the oldest, the old man goes out with a jug of water and a blanket And sits on the bank of the Imjin River and waits to die Sits there until he dies And then he'll roll down the bank into the river And his body will be carried out to the sea And we don't want you to swim in the Imjin River because our elders are floating out to sea.' [Verse] That's when it began to crumble for me, y'know That's when I... well, I ran away Not just from that, I ran away from the blueprint for self-destruction I had been handed as a man for excess For violence in excess For sexual excess For racial excess We had a commanding officer who said of the GI babies Fathered by GIs and Korean mothers That the Korean government wouldn't care for so they were in these orphanages And he said, 'Well as sad as that is Someday this will really help the Korean people because it'll raise the intelligence level.' That's what we were dealing with, you know? So I ran away I ran down to Seoul City down towards Ascom Not to the army, I ran away to the place called the Korea House It was Korean civilians reaching out to GIs to give them some better vision of who they were than we were getting up at the divisions And they hid me for three weeks Late one night, cause they didn't have any clothes that would fit me Late one night, it was a stormy, stormy night Rain falling in sheets I could go out, cause they figured nobody would see me We walked through the mud and the rain Seoul City was devastated And they took me to a concert at the Ewha Womans University Large auditorium with shell holes in the ceiling and the rain pouring through the holes And Klieg lights on the stage hooked up to car batteries This wasn't the USO, this was the Korean Students Association The person they had invited to sing—I was the only white person there The person they invited to sing was Marian Anderson The great Black operatic soprano who'd been on tour in Japan, you see There she was, singing "O Freedom" and "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen" And I watched her through the rain coming through the ceiling And thought back to Salt Lake and my father, Syd Who ran the Capital Theater, which was a movie house But it had been an old vaudeville house And he wanted to bring live performances back to the capital In 1948 he invited Marian Anderson to come and sing there I remembered, we went to the train station to pick her up And took her to the biggest hotel in town, the Hotel Utah But they wouldn't let her stay there, because she was Black And I remembered my father's humiliation and her humiliation As I saw her singing there through the rain And I realized right then I said, Brandon, right then I knew that it was all wrong That it all had to change And that that change had to start with me