Free A Captain of the Gate by John Birmingham Page A

The hundreds of communist soldiers running towards his position. And beyond that. He could see the Nakdong River curling its way around the mountains within which the city nestled. The beaches, on which thousands of people had gathered like dumb migrating animals, waiting to step off into the water. The port at which thousands more clawed at each other with hands and teeth for a spot on the handful of barges pulling away to sea. He could see the surviving ships of the US fleet as they poured on speed to escape the ignominious end.
    Branch McKinnon saw all of these things. Or thought he did before he fell back to earth and into darkness.

01
T HE G RAVE
    To watch a city die is a rare and terrible thing. Great capitals rise and fall across the long arc of history, but relatively few men attend their last hours. Fewer still have witnessed the death of more than one, and for the most part such men are found in the service of tyrants and conquerors. Branch McKinnon, firstborn of Elsie and Lester, a humble son of the great state of Georgia, served no such master, but he was well acquainted with their kind. He fought them for most of his fifty-nine years, and saw them consume one city, one country after another.
    Pusan did not kill him. Nor did Saigon, or Jakarta. Having survived the taking of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo in 1946, he would have been entitled to call that his lot and to retire from the field. Millions of others did. In a sense, the whole country shrank away from any more violence after Tokyo. McKinnon was a keen carpenter and sometimes spoke of the quieter life he might have lived building schoolhouses and barns and children’s toys back home. Instead he was drawn to those places where things fall apart and men contend with each other to do their worst. He died, famously, in Singapore, another fallen city, but for once a loss that meant something; one that actually changed the world for the better.
    He rests now in Arlington, probably content, if not quite at peace. Each day brings a new host of mourners to disturb his repose and they come in numbers rivalling those visiting the Kennedy and Eisenhower memorials. A visitor who knew nothing of American history might still understand why two popular Presidents both cut down in their prime would each day attract many hundreds of people wishing to pay their respects. But McKinnon’s simple marble headstone, buried in amound of flowers that often spills over to cover the graves that surround it, could well confuse them. They might imagine that only a great man could command such affection, but surely a great man would not be interred so humbly, not if he were the favored son of such a proud and powerful republic.
    McKinnon, a great man by any measure, flawed as are all men, celebrated and reviled, a creator-destroyer of the first order, lies beneath a simple tombstone because he demanded it be so. He is with his friends, and they lie as they fell: together. It is all too easy, away from the insensate horror of battle, to glorify the deaths of otherwise ordinary men, to forget that death in combat is always squalid and mean, and worse, to view their lives through a prism in which they were only ever brave and wise. McKinnon, like every other man and woman buried at Arlington, had his moments of bravery and wisdom, more so than most. But he was mortal and while it is true that his courage never failed him, at least on the battlefield, his wisdom and his judgment sometimes did.
    When pressed for introspection he invariably described himself as ‘just a free man’, but he chose to fight for his freedom and for others’ in a time when that made him unusual, if not unique. During the long years when America withdrew from the world, flinching away from confrontation, Branch McKinnon sought it out. It made him in turns a pariah and a hero. He was famously denounced on the floor of the Senate as a murderer, a fraud and, most painfully of all, as ‘a