HOW LIKE A GOD
79
going to defy the laws of nature. He was not mad, but that, un–
fortunately, didn't make much difference.
In the weeks that followed I recalled all the stories I had
heard about him since I had come into the regiment. Although his
home of record was Tampa he had certainly not been raised there:
his
speech was indigenous to the North and to the City. He was un–
married and claimed no dependents. His Emergency Data Card
indicated that the Salvation Army of Tampa should be notified
in
case of his death, and he had made Boys' Town the sole beneficiary
of his ten thousand dollars free insurance. In World War II-which
waS as far back as I could trace his records-he had served in Patton's
Third Army, being a part of that right arm which swung through
Brittany, where he was attached to a Quartermaster outfit in Brest.
Subsequently he had been assigned to the occupation forces in Japan,
where he returned to the work that he had given as
his
principal
ci–
vilian occupation-longshoreman. He was rotated to the States in
1947 and eighteen months later was shipped back to Japan where
he was stationed at the outbreak of the Korean war.
At this point his history burgeoned into a mythology, for he
had been captured by the Chinese shortly after they crossed the
Yalu River and came barreling down the peninsula, rolling up our
dispersed forces before them.
It
was told that he had gathered
his
team of loaders at Inchon, stolen the weapons from a rifle platoon,
and, followed by a mob of dockers, set off at a dead run for the
interior and the Chinese. Another redaction had it-and I was sur–
prised to discover how generally this fable had been circulated-that
he and his men had been secretly transported to the Yalu to super–
vise the loading and unloading of the vessels that were to cross that
river when we invaded Manchuria. I finally learned what seemed
to be the truth of the matter from someone who had been
in
the
same prison camp with him: Niederweg had been captured by the
Chinese while driving a truck parallel to the front. Because of the
shortage of personnel immediately following the Chinese attack, he
and his longshoremen had occasionally been detailed to transport the
material they had just unshipped. On one of these missions he had
run into an enemy patrol behind our lines. They had shot out the
tires on his truck, and he had surrendered.
He had not escaped from prison camp and was exchanged in
