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One For the Boneyard: Book Two of the trilogy 'Depraved'

by Leo Gallagher

350 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #01-0009; ISBN 1-55212-607-2; US$28.00, C$31.95, EUR23.00, £16.00

The story accompanies the author from basic training to parachute school, to occupation duty in Japan, then war in Korea, to military hospital, and finally, to prison.

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about the book      about the author      sample excerpt      catalogue info

About the Book This is the story of a young soldier wounded in battle who later returns to his hometown to find his fiancee pregnant by another man. He goes berserk and winds up in prison while the army alters his clinical file and denies all knowledge of his mental condition prior to convelescent furlough. THEY FORGED THE CLINICAL FILE!

About the Author Leo Gallagher was born in a small Ohio town during the depression. His father was a war veteran who was abusive to his wife and children. The boy hardly knew a father and raised himself. In the army at sixteen to escape a troubled youth, he served in occupied Japan and later went to Korea as an automatic rifleman in the summer of 1950. Wounded by an enemy hand grenade, he was returned to a stateside military hospital and subsequently discharged as a disabled veteran with time on his hands. He has several adventure stories published in magazines. This is his first attempt at a novel, a trilogy with a frankness that leaves nothing to the imagination.

Sample Excerpt

Then several white-garbed figures moved up onto the crest of our hill. I counted five and they were on the same level as the machine gunner and his assistant though quite a distance on his right. Either he did not see them in the gloom and rain and because they were not 'skylined' as they were for us or else for some reason he decided not to fire. But we could see them clearly against the dim skyline because we were thirty feet down the slope below them. I nudged Sheridan and asked him what he thought we should do. We both sensed that they would start on our area next and surely there was no reason to hesitate because we could not give away our location now because the action had already started!

Three more Koreans came up on the crest and now there were eight. A gnawing fear began to eat at me and I couldn't stand the suspense any longer. I trained the muzzle of my B.A.R. toward the first figure in the line and opened fire. I moved down the staggered group quickly, raking them all before they had a chance to react. All eight were down in a few seconds, the contents of one magazine. I quickly removed the empty and replaced it with a full one and sprayed the figures which still quivered, hosing the bodies thoroughly. My fear had turned to murderous rage as I realized how the enemy had killed my buddies. The entire war leaped up before my eyes. The cowardly sneak attack into peaceful South Korea, similar to the way the Japs had hit Pearl Harbor less than a decade before. Then there had been the savage butchery of the first American troops who tried to stem the overwhelming tide. Not one hundred slant-eyed communist bastards was worth the life of an American soldier so kill, kill all of them before they had the chance to kill you!

I tensed and waited for I knew there were more on the other side. They hadn't moved into the area with only eight men. Five minutes later the football whistle again wavered eerily over on my right. The enemy had moved around to attack the hill at our most vulnerable point, the flank nearest the river. As I waited expectantly someone, probably Sergeant Barlow lobbed a white phosphorous grenade at the general area where the whistle had sounded. It burst with a hissing 'plock.' Someone cursed violently in Korean and the outcry turned to screams of agony as the white-hot phosphorous seared and burnt through living flesh.

I felt that we should change our position and move one way or another. At that moment the machine gunner and his companion and three other soldiers who had been on the crest up to our left moved past us in the gloom. At the time I couldn't figure out where they were going. It didn't even cross my mind that any of them would deliberately leave the area where they had been assigned and leave us naked on the slope. But I didn't have much time to dedicate on where they were bound and to this day I can remember that machine gunner's name but I've never told it to a living soul. He can sleep in hell for what he did that night.

The Koreans renewed their attack and began throwing more grenades and one by one they began to explode down the slope to my right. They lobbed them over the lip of the hill systematically as if they were able to see in the dark and about every six feet one would explode with a blossom of dull red flame. I could see the trails of tiny orange sparks before each one burst, perhaps some type of an acid fuse, I figured. Every once in a while someone on our side would yell when they were wounded, simultaneously with a bursting grenade. It was terrible to lie there and not be able to do anything whatsoever to fight back. The explosions moved closer and closer to our position as the enemy moved and worked his way back around the hill to where he had first begun his attack.

A grenade sparked over the crest and blew up six or seven feet to my right and then they skipped the area in which we were lying and threw two more on our left with resulting explosions and the flutter of isolated bits of shrapnel in the night sky. I let out a quiet sigh of relief as I felt that now they would withdraw after having covered the area thoroughly and hearing the outcries of the wounded and receiving no response to their probe. They must have known that they had done considerable damage. We had nothing to throw back at them, except of course for the one phosphorus grenade that Barlow had thrown. I cursed myself for not obtaining some grenades one way or another that afternoon, but I hadn't been able to obtain what wasn't there to get! I cursed under my breath at the army and the technicality that had returned me to the Far East. I cussed Truman and his fucking year that he had added on to the enlistments of me and a lot of other men who were supposed to have been discharged and whose bodies now littered this bloody hill.

I turned my thoughts to Sheridan and urged him to move with me, either up or down, one way or the other but he was just and undecided as me. I knew the enemy must want me badly after having lost eight of their number, but the gloom of the night and the misting rain prevented them from knowing our exact location.

Then it happened, just when I dared to hope we were safe another grenade sparkled over the lip of the hill straight for us and I realized in that instant that this one had our names written on it. It curved lazily over the hill in a perfect arch. Fortunately for me I was lying on my belly. The grenade exploded in the air, probably just a few inches above the ashes between Bill and me and close by my left hip. We had no armored vests in those days. The concussion knocked me silly and it was all of a minute before I could recover sufficiently to ascertain how much damage the grenade had done. At the split second of the blast it felt as if someone had hit me with a baseball bat and stabbed me in the left side both at the same time. The force of the explosion had blown my helmet off and I shook my head violently from side to side to keep from losing my senses altogether. I reached out to Sheridan and turned and grasped his arm and called to him and then felt his chest but he was not breathing. I felt his neck and called to him, "Wake up Bill," but he was gone and as I spoke the hot blood came gurgling up in my throat, half-choking me and dribbling out of my mouth. With each breath I took I sounded like a wheezing asthmatic for my left lung was riddled with shrapnel and my left pleural cavity was at that moment filling with blood. I knew then that I was grievously and perhaps even mortally wounded. I didn't know how many pieces of steel had struck me in the chest area nor that I had also been wounded several times in the hip. I knew only that I must move from my present position, because I had cried out involuntarily at the moment of the blast and perhaps the Koreans would come over and bayonet any of us who were still alive.

I caught my B.A.R. by the handle and pushed myself five or six yards farther down the slope from Sheridan's body. With my head and torso in a lowered position I figured that I would have a better chance of not passing out from shock and loss of blood. Lying on my back with my feet up the hill was the only thing I could think of at the time. But then I felt myself growing weaker, slipping away into unconsciousness and I felt very ill, as if I had to vomit but couldn't. I was going to die up on this damned hill. But something in me seemed to rebel and I called aloud to God to help me and I didn't care if any mortal heard what I had to say.

"Oh God don't let me die here in Korea. I'm not ready yet and I don't want to go and those Koreans will butcher me if I pass out and they find me. Help me Lord. Don't let me faint. Help me now God don't let me die."

I was never more sincere and had never in my life doubted the existence of some sort of God or supreme being, for my mother had taught me some of the Bible and I did go to Sunday school when I was a youngster, even though I had been ornery and in quite a bit of trouble in my youth. But now I was down for the count and near death and I had to call on God to help me.

Then one of those miracles that you hear about or read about but never think you'll ever experience happened to me. First of all enemy activity ceased and no more grenades fell on the slopes. Everything was quiet and a strange sort of white brilliance gathered in a mantle around me and in the immediate area. My head cleared and I heard a sound like wings beating or air rushing softly and the noise seemed to come from out of the sky and a sense of profound peace and contentment filled my body and mind. I did not see any sort of a figure but I did sense a presence in the space around me which filled my with hope and assured me that I would not die but would return to the United States and home.

Let me hasten to assure any skeptic that I was not imagining anything, and I am not the type of scatter-brained individual that sees visions of the Virgin Mary and all such dribble. What I saw was what I saw and it actually happened for I could feel the rain on my face and see the scattered lumpy shapes of bodies around the area and the white-garbed corpses on the crest of the hill. In truth I was not in shock but was in full possession of my faculties. The strange light filled me with awe but it was in no way frightening, sort of like a soft fluorescent luminescence and that coupled with the sound of the wind rushing or of wings beating was the presence of God. I had been permitted a glimpse into infinity or the afterlife and as Shakespeare so aptly described it, "the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns," or call it what you will.

This manifestation of the power of someone unseen lasted for several minutes and then slowly faded from view and I was left there with the soft rain on my face and I knew that I had to get some medics up there because God had done his part and even miracles don't last forever. The fact that I was still alive gave me hope and I didn't want to be run over and perhaps bayoneted by the enemy or what could be even worse taken prisoner. Wounded prisoners did not long survive at the hands of the North Koreans. There did not appear to be anyone else alive up on the hill or the one next to me.

"Medics, medics. Come up here and get me. I'm hit and I need the medics."

At that time yelling may or may not have attracted the medics but someone else had heard me well enough. I picked up the muted sound of dislodged gravel and small stones tumbling down toward me. I checked my weapon and made sure there was a full magazine in it. It was difficult to see anything really clear in the misting rain and darkness everything seemed to be growing hazy and fading from my view. Then they came, in twos and threes they slithered down from the crest. I met them with bursts of automatic fire as soon as their vague forms seemed close enough to hit. My B.A.R. proved it's worth many times over the next hour which seemed like ages. The B.A.R. had a steel hinged wedge on the butt plate, shoulder rest and I had this bracing the weapon and was firing as I lay backwards down the slope. Their screams were like music to my ears and I gave no quarter but continued firing at everything that moved there in front of me. I dare not let up for one grenade would finish me. After what seemed an eternity I was alone and I knew that I had been spared and there was no doubt that I was the only one left alive of the sixteen men that had moved into their positions that previous afternoon. The only consolation I felt was that the hill was still in American hands but at what a terrible price.

Finally I heard voices in English and someone calling out cautiously.

"Hey, is there anyone down there?"

The voice came from somewhere up on the crest to my far left, where the enemy had first began the grenade assault.

The voice sounded familiar and was close enough that I decided to really sing out and let them know my location as best I thought. If there were any of the enemy left around we would know soon enough.

"Hey I'm O'Conner and I'm down here to your left about twenty-five yards."

"Yes I can hear you. Just keep talking and we'll get to you."

"Is that you Kelly? Your voice sure sounds familiar."

"Yes, shurn it 'tis your efficient company medic, Patrick Kelly and his hard-working assistant Sherman martin at your service. We tote 'em away with our two man ambulance service, but form the look of things up here these guys don't need medics, they need graves registration! What the hell's been goin' on up here? We could hear the racket for the past couple hours."

"Just a small disagreement about the ownership of this real estate."

"Keep talking, that's it just keep talking."

"I'm sure glad you guys are here, Kelly."

"We have a helluva time getting' up here," he said as they reached my side. "Are you hit bad O'Conner?"

"I guess so buddy, in the chest and I'm hurtin' like hell. The left cheek of my ass feels like a bulldog's been chewin' on me too."

"We'll take care of you in a jiffy."

I felt his movement as he deftly cut a slit at the cuff of my fatigue shirt, then tore in expertly from cuff to shoulder. His next action brought the blessed relief of an ampoule of morphine injected into the fleshy part of my tricep. Simultaneously his assistant was busy at my other sleeve, which was ripped to the shoulder and another needle was inserted into my left arm. I couldn't believe that they'd both given me morphine, so the second shot must have been tetanus.

"Please give me some water Kelly."

"I don't give a damn, I'm burnin' up. Just a little please Kelly."

"Oh all right O'Conner, it's your funeral."

He held a canteen to my lips and I gulped the tepid water greedily. That was the last thing I remembered as they rolled me onto a light stretcher.

The dream-like state lifted and someone above me was speaking. Upon opening my eyes I was momentarily startled to see the thatched roof over my head and it appeared to be revolving, spinning slowly round and round. What the hell am I doing in a Korean house? Have I been captured or what? That was my initial reaction to my strange surroundings, until I noticed a tube leading all the way down from my left shoulder to my knee. The room swam around me. The medics sure had doped me up. They had really been working for my boots, socks and fatigues were gone and I was clad in only my G.I. shorts.

Click here to read about Leo's first book, Depraved

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