The Korean War Hero You Never Heard Of

The longer I read and write history, the more convinced I become that the unexpected is a crucial ategory of the historical experience. Seldom do events unfold the way presidents and prime ministers and politburo chairman assume they will. Nor, when the upheavals are investigated by historians, do they turn out to be as simple as they seem in the headlines. This prevalence of the unexpected is amply demonstrated by my experience with the story of Lieutenant Eugene Clark's role in the 1950 invasion of Inchon.

I came across the story of Clark's covert mission many years ago and tucked it into my files because I thought it could be the basis for an exciting novel. I never got around to writing that book but I also never forgot the story. There was something uniquely fascinating about this man, who began his Navy career as a yeoman, and discovered he had little interest in commanding what he wryly called an"LMD"--a Large Mahogany Desk.

By the end of World War II, Clark was a lieutenant, fluent in Japanese, participating in the invasion of Okinawa. After the war he captained an LCT on murky CIA missions along the China coast, trying to help the Nationalist Chinese in their losing war with the Communists. There he acquired a reputation for having"the nerves of a burglar and the flair of a Barbary Coast pirate."

I finally decided to give Gene Clark's story a public airing in MHQ, the Quarterly Journal of Military History, where I wear a contributing editor's hat. In the course of my research, I was disappointed to learn Clark had died in 1998. But there were ample sources for an article-length treatment which was published in the summer of 2000.

Soon after, I received a letter from Clark's daughter, Genine, telling me that the family had a rather lengthy account of Gene's mission, which he had written not long after he returned from Korea in 1951. I told her I would be glad to read it. Candidly, I did not expect to find much more than I had found in my research.

The day the manuscript arrived, I started reading it from that smug viewpoint. Soon my jaw began to drop and, by the time I reached the last chapter, it was down to my waist. Gene Clark was not only a daring covert ops man, he was a superb writer--and his story was much bigger and more significant than I thought.

I sent the manuscript to my literary agent, Ted Chichak, and he too read it one sitting--and rushed it to G. P. Putnam's. The rest, as they say, is history--unexpectedly vivid history--and unexpectedly revealing about Gene Clark, the invasion of Inchon and the relationship of Americans to Koreans in the tragic conflict we too often tend to downplay as a painful somewhat meaningless interlude between World War II and Vietnam.

Clark's mission testifies, not only to his own heroism, but also to the amazing resilience and dynamism with which America fights wars. It also testifies to a national trait--the readiness to take big risks to win great victories. Here was Douglas MacArthur, a general without an army in June of 1950, when the Communists invaded South Korea, marshalling an amphibious host three months later--and choosing as his target a port city about which his intelligence people knew next to nothing--not even the height of the formidable sea walls that the Marines would have to scale.

Two weeks before the invasion, MacArthur's staff pulled Gene Clark from their Tokyo deck and played him as their best hope of winning this tremendous gamble. They sent him on what his boss, Navy Captain Edward Pearce, called"a little rumble you're going to like." For fourteen days, Clark and two Korean lieutenants survived on Yonghung-do, an island within a dozen miles of Inchon, while they gathered the information the invasion planners so desperately needed. Operating on as little as two hours' sleep a day, they armed the islanders of Yonghung-do, who hated the Communists, and fought off North Korean assaults by land and sea, captured enemy harbor craft and interrogated captives who confirmed MacArthur's intuition that the Communist high command did not suspect Inchon would be targeted.

The Clark team even obtained exact information on the size of Inchon's garrison. Under cover of darkness they ventured into the heart of the city's harbor to measure the height of the seawalls, determine whether troops and vehicles could advance across the ubiquitous mudflats at low tide and pinpoint the dozens of machine gun nests and artillery emplacements on the fortress island of Wolmi-do, at the mouth of the harbor.

Without this crucial information, thousands of Marines might have died storming that heavily fortified bastion. Finally, on the climactic night of the invasion, Clark turned on the lamp in the lighthouse on the nearby island of Palmi-do to guide the United Nations armada up the narrow channel to Inchon.

What makes the story so compelling is not only the resolution, resilience and leadership Clark displayed for two weeks within heartstopping reach of one of the most murderous Communist regimes of the 20th Century. He is more than a magnificent man of action; his narrative reveals him as a thinker who understood what was at stake in this clash between freedom and totalitarianism. He is also profoundly human, shaken more than once by doubts about his adequacy for the awesome task confronting him.

Finally, Gene Clark's story is a deeply moving account of an American discovering a sense of brotherhood with brave men and women of a different race and culture who were also ready to fight and if necessary die for freedom. I am proud to play a part in bringing this extraordinary narrative to the wide audience it deserves.