Sacrifices of the Few

THE BRIDGES AT TOKO-RI (147 pp.)--James A. Michener--Random House ($2.50).

Lieut. Harry Brubaker, 29, was a naval aviator, and both a brave and fearful man. He was brave enough to be chosen to go in low and attack the enemy bridges at Toko-ri in Korea; he was honestly fearful of the heavy Communist flak, of the icy sea in which a ditched flyer could last only 20 minutes, and, indeed, of landing a jet on a pitching carrier.

But mostly Brubaker was resentful. Why pick on him? He had come back from flying in World War II and married the girl he loved. He was the father of two small daughters who were very dear to him, and he had just got started as a lawyer in his home town. Now here he was in Korea, fighting a war he hardly understood, convinced that the vast majority of his fellow citizens didn't give a hoot.

When Brubaker is first seen in James Michener's short new novel, The Bridges at Toko-ri,* he has ditched his damaged jet and is being rescued, half-frozen, by a helicopter team. To the task-force commander, every flyer's life is precious; but this griping fellow, so like one of his own flyer sons lost in the Pacific, is a special concern. Talking to Brubaker after the rescue, the admiral asks: "Still bitter?" And he gets the answer: "Sometimes I'm so bitter I could bitch up the works on purpose . . . Nobody supports this war . . . Why don't we pull out?" To this and other questions Brubaker gets simple answers: "That's rubbish, son, and you know it. All through history free men have had to fight the wrong war in the wrong place. But that's the one they're stuck with . . . Nobody ever knows why he gets the dirty job. But any society is held together by the efforts . . . yes, and the sacrifices, of only a few."

What makes Toko-ri different as a war novel is its central theme of responsibility, something other U.S. writers have bypassed in an effort to outdo each other in gaminess, self-pity, resentment and use of four-letter words. Author Michener, a Quaker who overcame his religious scruples to enlist in the Navy in World War II, knows his subject. He is not a great novelist, and Toko-ri will not go down as a great novel. But it is an uncompromising story of fear, truth and death.

Lieut. Harry Brubaker dies. He dies trying to make it back to his carrier after helping to knock out the bridges at Toko-ri. But in his last minute of life, "he was no longer afraid nor was he resentful. This was the war he had been handed by his nation, and in the noonday sun he had only one thought: he was desperately in love with his wife and kids and he wanted to see them one more time . . . Harry Brubaker understood in some fragmentary way the purpose of his being in Korea."

*Written especially for LIFE, and given its first publication there earlier this month.

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