Letter from Korea

The following letter was written by Rafael M. Steinberg '50, a former editor of the CRIMSON, who is now a war correspondent with the international News Service in Korea.

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

Thanks or your letters, welcome here in what used to be called "the land of the morning calm." I'm writing from a sweltering tent at Corps headquarters on what is known as the "west central quarters on what is known as the "west central front." There used to be a central front, an eastern front, and western front. New there is a western front, a west central front, an east central front, and an eastern front. Miraculously, we have abolished the just plain "central front" and the war goes gruesomely on.

Speaking with the fatherly mien of my newly-acquired "experience," but still, after only five weeks here, rather open-mouthed and dewy-eyed, I hereby recommend that everyone become a war correspondent. True, there are occasional discomfitures, sometimes made of lead and steel, but by and large, and I'm serious, it's a remarkable opportunity for good descriptive writing. And as in newspaper work anywhere, you get a helluva lot better picture of what's going on out here than anyone can get from reading the censored reports. Finally, you know, every war correspondent always writes a book when he gets home and makes half a million bucks.

Won't try in this short letter to write all the things I've been putting into my stories. Don't know how many of the features I've sent back are getting printed, but I suppose a lot of the tactical stuff gets play. Most startling to a civilian eye: the total destruction of some towns; the filthy, disease-ridden, starved condition of most off the Koreans; the GI's casual acceptance of battle and death while he bitches about the mud, the dust, the food, the officers, the hills that must be climbed, the months and months away from home; the politicking in the Army; and what seems to be the uselessness of this war as we go back and forth over the same ground, leaving a few lives behind every few hundred yards.

Met bewhiskered, dust-covered 2nd Lieutenant Davis U. Merwin '50 of the Marine Corps about two weeks ago. He's a platoon leader out here and has been on the front almost continuously for a couple of months. Has the most dangerous job there is, I guess. Before I know he was here, I witnessed a Marine assault on hill under fire and wrote a piece on it. Later, I found that he had led that assault.

In ruined Chunchon a couple of weeks age. I was poking around some destroyed buildings getting material for a color piece on what war does to a prosperous city, etc. Came upon an American library, set up during the occupation of South Korea by some U.S. Information Service. Library was full of books on education, agriculture, mechanics, etc., generally practical stuff to help modernize and so forth. The building had been bombed and the books were lying around two rooms, about knee deep on the floor, pages torn, broken glass between them, muddied pages where GI's had stepped through the pile. I bent down to pick up a book. What was it? Obviously, it was "General Education in a Free Society," intact but not looking as if it had been well-read here where society is not free and education is not general. Thought the GE committee or someone might be interested to know how far the Harvard influence extends. I dusted the book off, closed it respectfully, and with fond memory of Hartz's GE course on Democracy and Totalitarianism, replaced it on a shelf.

That's all now--oh yes, an unconfirmed report reaches me that one returned American who had been a prisoner of the Chinese says he was questioned by a Chinese Communist officer who had graduated from dear old Harvard, Unconfirmed. Ray