Review: I Hear No Bugles By Robert Winston Mercy.
(Merriam Press, 2008)
By Wesley Britton
Even in the first
days of the silent movie era, film producers knew well the value of celluloid
stories as propaganda. Before World War I, those opposed to America’s involvement overseas
cranked out tragic tales designed to discourage any support for the then feared
“Merchants of Death.†Just as quickly, once war was declared, Hollywood shifted gears and found itself a
major contributor to recruitment drives. Scripts now starred small-town heroes including
little girls exposing saboteurs in Grandpa’s lab and high-flying aviators shooting
down fellow aces, all part of the vital effort to crush the Wiley “Huns†at
home and abroad.
From that point forward, war movies resonated
with the themes of valor, glory, and stoic self-sacrifice in which anyone
anywhere could find themselves elevated morally and spiritually by doing their
patriotic duty. Onscreen, whether battling Southern rebels, Indian tribes in
the Old West, or German U-Boats, a soldier’s life was something to aspire to,
yearn for, and a glorious death on the battlefield was preferable to returning
home to a devoted sweetheart without having come of age in the trenches. The
impact of so many films with these motifs is immeasurable, especially on the
“Greatest Generation†which was moved into action as much by the gallant epics they
saw in theatres as well as the newsreels shown after Pearl
Harbor.
One story from these times is unique. The
opening pages of a new memoir by Robert Winston Mercy, I Hear No Bugles, begins with scenes of a young American drawn into
a soldier’s life due to what he had seen in moviehouses. Then, we learn about
the life of a front-line infantryman in North Korea discovering just how
war was never what was shown in dark auditoriums. Then, bringing his story full
circle, Robert Winston Mercy came home to become first a stunt-man and then a
contract player at MGM playing the very roles he’d grown up watching, only this
time as military commanders in TV series like Combat!, Maverick, and Playhouse 90.
The first paragraph
of I Hear No Bugles makes Mercy’s
thesis clear:
“The effects of propaganda films cannot be
underestimated, particularly in this era of contending political and religious
dogmas that relentlessly threaten to make this century even more unimaginably
bloodier than the last. Indisputably, film is second to literacy in the
intellectual, philosophical and moral development of the human species. The
defunct uniformed `press-gangs’ of history that `Shanghaied’ young men into
military service have been supplanted by the more subtly hypnotic persuasion of
TV and the movies. Every image, symbol and mode of, each delivered word is
meticulously crafted to extract the desired emotional and moral support from
its national audience. Those ships, planes, submarines, helicopters, tanks and
the expended ammunitions of the armies of soldiers we see on the screen are
freely given to the studios for that explicit purpose.â€
For Mercy, the imagery of war was first implanted
in his consciousness when, at the age of four, he saw the Laurel and Hardy 1934
Babes in Toyland. A frightened child
in his seat was elated to see a frightened child on the screen saved from the
bogeyman by the wooden soldiers of “Toyland.†As the years passed, young boys in
his neighborhood witnessed a plethora of war movies onscreen and emulated what
they saw at home with plastic Dick Tracy submarineguns designed to, in
particular, take out the Fu Manchu-like “Yellow Peril†of evil Chinese soldiers
as in the film Mercy said was the most important to his formative years, The General Dies At Dawn. In films like All Quiet on the Western Front, The Moon is Down, The Light That Failed, and Objective,
Burma, the lines between good and evil were not blurred, the superiority of
Western values were unquestioned, the rewards for patriotism evident in every scene.
More than that, for a young man in an unhappy home, military life seemed the
dreamed of escape from poverty and the “Spare the rod, spoil the childâ€
mentality of the times.
Mercy then chronicles how, inevitably, he
became a Marine and describes his years in the states and Japan in the military police where
idealism, if not his military mindset, began to erode. Not until he was called
up for service in North
Korea in 1950 did reality and imagination
come together. “I looked beyond the perimeter's barbed wire fence,†he writes,
“the rice paddies reddened by the sinking sun knowing that the 'movie' I'd
waited a lifetime for had just begun.â€
What
happens from this point forward is the heart of the memoir, and I Hear No Bugles is, in fact, the first
published personal account of a front-line soldier in combat during the
“Forgotten War.†Mercy’s descriptions are laced with what he sees and how the
sites compare—or don’t—to what he saw in all those war movies of his youth. Not
surprisingly, his first moments in battle bring the cinema center-stage in his
mind—“I thought of every cinematic charge I'd ever seen. As the company flaked
across the field, I stopped in mid-splash: Something's missing...what?
It's...the musical soundtrack! I whispered, "I HEAR NO BUGLES,"
and then the tempo of fire grew.â€
According
to Mercy, there were few Gary Cooper’s facing down enemy fire in Korea—instead,
Mercy witnessed cowardice, greed, stupidity, “bug outs,†death from friendly
fire, savagery and, within himself, a blood-lust sometimes difficult to
control. Where other autobiographies might include flashbacks to childhood
events to connect the adult with their past, Mercy’s memories of home come from
lines by heroes portrayed by the likes of Errol Flynn, Robert Taylor, and
Ronald Coleman and what they might have said in the circumstances Mercy
describes. But as Mercy’s battlefield experiences continue, references to
actors and famous movie lines become fewer and fewer—certainly, a literary
means to demonstrate that piles of corpses, the stench of war, icy blizzards,
and devastated civilians caught in the cross-fire have more than replaced the
sights and sounds of silver screen fiction in his mind. Still, fantasy
intrudes. When two POWs are brought to him for interrogation, “My mind reeled
through half a dozen films and found the one it needed.†Drawing from an idea
from some unknown script-writer, Mercy took one Chinese soldier behind a boulder
and faked his execution. The other talked—and then was shown his still-alive
comrade. In one skirmish, Mercy finds a dead couple with a toddler sitting
beside them. “Suddenly, a shot rang out. I swept the baby up and dashed for the
cover of a crumbled wall and returned the sniper's fire. The baby mutely smiled
and gurgled throughout the explosive exchange and my flesh tingled in
recognition of the blinding quirk of fate that made me the wooden soldier of Babes in Toyland!â€
Ultimately, Mercy
is wounded in combat and visions of Hollywood
return. In a M*A*S*H hospital, a nurse attempts to steal his wallet and sews
adhesive tape inside his wound when she is caught. Not exactly a divine
counter-part to the Veronica Lake-angels of mercy of both A and B movies. In
the end, after eight years of service, Mercy was mustered out—to become a
player in a number of B movies himself
including Blood Thirst, The Starfighters, Paradise of Terror, The Eternal Mask,
and The Picture of Dorien Gray.
But readers will learn little of Mercy’s life
after Korea—these
are stories for a different venue. It’s also important to note Bugles is far from the first book to
provide a vivid portrait of the horrors of war—but few previous memoirs have
gone inside multi-cultural units from an insider’s perspective. (Bearing a
Samurai sword, Mercy lead a mixed group of American GIs with South Korean and
Japanese privates with mixed motives and often conflicting mindsets.) While
Mercy—serving with his twin brother Richard—was often at odds with superiors
and line soldiers alike, being at the front was the life he preferred to the
point he felt adrift when no longer part of the dangers of combat. His is a
story of life-and-death choices on a daily basis, a man often wondering why he
didn’t pull an easy trigger knowing that if he were in any other army, the
decision would have often been far more brutal.
Perhaps the primary audience for I Hear No Bugles will be those
interested in military history in general and the Korean conflict in particular;
yet the psychological connections Mercy makes between battlefield action and
the deeply implanted motivations that shaped him give the book a wider reach.
The graphic evolution of this veteran should remind readers that history does
repeat itself, and even viewers who believe they’re watching movies and TV
dramas with objective, or even cynical eyes, should know they cannot be immune
to the overt and subtle messages that become part of our cultural DNA. With one
eye looking to the past, we can read Bugles
as a reminder of neglected history; with the other, we can use it as a
mirror into ourselves, a window into an awareness of our own mental fusions of
what we absorb, all those influences both with and without soundtracks.
Click here to order this book from Amazon
Dr. Wesley Britton
is the author of three books on espionage in the media, his fourth, The Encyclopedia of TV Spies will be
issued from Bear Manor Media. Many of his articles—including an interview with
Robert Winston Mercy about his work on television and film—are posted at
WWW.Spywise.net