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K Force, 3rd Battalion, the Royal Australian Regiment (3RAR), five-feet five-inches in his size-six army boots. In appearance all sinew and bone, wearing a blaze of copper-coloured hair, deeply freckled and, at twenty-five, already irreparably sun-damaged. Fighting weight, 125 pounds when fully fit.
    In the blue corner, Jimmy Pentecost Oldcorn, 24th Infantry Regiment, 25th Infantry Division, American Negro, six-feet six-inches in his khaki army-issue socks, weighing in at 260 pounds of solid muscle with fists the size of soup plates.
    This was not how we looked when we departed from the hell of the North Korean hospital cave and were handed over to the Chinese. Despite losing a mountain of weight Jimmy remained a big man, around 180 pounds. While I, reduced to sixty-five pounds in total, could have been knocked off my feet by a healthy sneeze.
    Jimmy was the colour of bloodwood honey, which at the time was disparagingly known in America as ‘high yella’, while I came from a long line of redheads who seem to have been born minus a layer of skin. His hair, grown long in prison camp, would at a later time become fashionable and be referred to as the ‘Afro’, while his dark beard sat naturally and evenly attached to his jowl and chin as if carefully worked up by a clever make-up artist. By contrast, I carried several months of uncut, filthy, matted red hair and a ragged beard, both crawling with vermin. I must have looked like one of those long-limbed Indonesian ginger-coloured apes. What are they called – orang-utans!
    Even when we’d been liberated and cleaned up, the disparities between us remained. We were both emaciated, heads shaved, eyes over-bright and set into deep dark sockets, the difference being that he still looked like a Nubian prince while my hollow, bruised-eyed appearance and pale, almost translucent skin speckled with a firmament of ginger freckles suggested that I’d been subjected to several bouts of chemotherapy long after I should have been mercifully left to die.
    I’m not sure what it takes for two blokes to become the sort of mates who will willingly die for each other. It can’t simply have been gratitude. Jimmy had little reason to feel grateful to me and while he had undoubtedly saved me on more than one occasion from throwing in the towel, he’d done the same for the American prisoners. Yet, apparently they didn’t feel the same way about him. I asked him on one occasion whether they’d come to see him in the Tokyo hospital to which they’d all been taken. Jimmy just laughed. ‘Ain’t like dat, Brother Fish, in Uncle Sam’s mil-it-tary. Coloured soldier do a white soldier a goodly deed, pick him up when he fall down, dat white guy he gonna hope his friends ain’t lookin’ on, man.’ It seemed that not one of the Americans he’d helped pull through had come to thank him.
    On the contrary, they’d appeared without Jimmy on a movie newsreel they’d shown us in the hospital, where they’d all been transformed into individual heroes. They were now men of enormous internal fortitude who had survived the worst the Chinese could throw at them and, in the true spirit of the American fighting man, triumphed over adversity. I have no doubt whatsoever that these mostly whimpering, frightened little boys with conveniently short memories will wear their Purple Hearts and campaign ribbons with pride for the remainder of their lives.
    Perhaps, unlike me, they didn’t feel the obligation to be grateful. It is my observation that when men are dying they hate in a more specific way and haven’t the energy required for gratuitous racial hatred that only seems to reassert itself when an ethnic type finds itself in the majority or back in firm control, as they may have felt once we’d been liberated.
    If the other Yanks weren’t exactly salt-of-the-earth types, then nor was I. On the racist issue, when a law such