Bethany Beach, the FBI and Korea

Recently Donna and I met up with some friends in Bethany Beach, to celebrate a milestone birthday of a close friend of ours, Monica. Monica introduced Donna and me -- she and I grew up in the same neighborhood in Rockville, and we and her brother John, one of my best friends, were on the Hungerford swim team together. She went to college at St. Mary’s College in South Bend, Indiana, where she was a classmate of Donna. After college, she moved back home and invited Donna, who was from New Jersey, down for a weekend, and invited me to join them for some of their shenanigans. That was the beginning of Donna's and my romance. 

In Bethany Beach, along with Monica and her husband Jim were John and Susan, a couple we hadn't seen in years; Larry and Claire, whom we hadn't met before; June, who like Claire had been a high-school classmate of Monica’s, and her husband Rex; and Monica's dad, John Sr. Monica's cousin Pat, who I had also known since childhood, and his wife Margie had rented a nearby house and stopped by Friday evening with their moms. Margie had at one time worked at the Washington Ballet as the assistant to the director; when she left for greener pastures soon after Donna and I were married and living in Montgomery County, she recommended Donna for the job.

 

Donna and I arrived around 10:30 Friday morning. We got settled in, then headed to the beach, just a block away. Because it was after Labor Day, the beach wasn’t terribly crowded. The surf was extremely rough and the water warm. I stayed out, except to wade in up to my calves. We headed up for a late lunch, courtesy of John and Susan, and caught up with everyone. We headed back to the beach for a bit, then went up to the house to shower and start cocktails, appetizers, and dinner. We feasted and imbibed, told stories, and laughed.

 

I’ve known Monica’s dad since I was a teenager. He had a distinguished career with the FBI. I remember one time after college I visited Monica’s and John’s house. Their dad decided to size me up. He handed me a drawing of a street scene and told me to study it for a minute. Then he took it from me and ask a series of questions about it: What time was it? How many cars were on the street? What was next to the bank? I couldn’t answer any of them. “Well, I don’t think you’re FBI material,” he said with a laugh. He was so right.

 He never talked about his career – certainly not to me, and not to his kids either, from what they told me later. Earlier that evening I had asked him if he would share a story with me, but he declined in a self-deprecating way: “I don’t have any stories,” he said.

But later that night he started to loosen up. For whatever reason –to share with us a part of his life he had kept so private for so long, or to simply join in the camaraderie – he started talking. He told of chasing would-be bank robbers down the streets of Washington, guns drawn, of walking past a suspected felon in a dark alley and deciding not to confront him out of concern for his own safety and that of his colleagues, and more.

Then he started talking about his days in Korea during the war – I didn’t even know he had served in that conflict. We learned that, like Donna’s dad, he had been in Inchon. He served as an historian in Korea because, as he said, his superior found out he had graduated college with a history degree, and later, because he had completed a single class of law school, he served as a defense advocate for soldiers accused of wrongdoing.

 

His first war story was about the battle raging in Inchon. He had brought a photographer with him to get some shots from behind the lines. As they were walking along a road toward what they thought was the front, a jeep pulled up from behind.

“What the hell are you guys doing here?” the passenger in the jeep demanded.

“We’re looking for the front,” Monica’s dad responded.

“Christ, son, this is the front! Get out of here before you get yourselves killed!” Monica’s dad and his photographer high-tailed it out of harm’s way.

The second story was about defending a private for some alleged infraction before the Judge Advocate General. Whatever the offense was (he didn’t say), Monica’s dad told the presiding officer that guilty or not, his client lacked the intelligence to know that what he had done was wrong. The private was found not guilty, but he was infuriated with his advocate for calling him stupid. “I told the guy that he was pretty stupid to do what he did, and that he should thank me for getting him off,” John told us.

Our parents are filled with deeply personal stories about their lives. Drawing them out can be difficult, but it’s really important to do so; otherwise, you don’t know of the events that shaped their outlooks and personalities. Sometimes they may try to suppress painful memories, or be duty-bound to not share events, or may feel that nobody cares to hear their stories. Before my dad passed away, he told me some wonderfully insightful stories about his life in the Navy, and about living with his brother and cousins in his aunt and uncle’s house in Clarksburg, West Virginia. And Donna’s dad, shortly before he passed away, opened up about his time in Korea – landing under fire in Inchon, and serving as a guard in a prison camp.

Listening to Monica’s dad open up about his time in the FBI and in Korea was a tremendous gift – and maybe it was good for him to excavate some memories of a time past.