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