Our Tarnished Brass

Our Tarnished BrassTwenty-Six Years Ago, I was a lowly private on the western front in Korea. I lived with a few other privates in a sand castle made of sandbags, a so-called hootch (from uchi, the word in Japanese for maison) on the mountaintop on the safer side of Old Baldy. In our man-made cave, the only light was a pale gray shaft of sunlight from the one embrasure (or, after dark, from a candle in a C-ration can) and the dim furniture was in the fashion of early ammunition crate--it said Ex...