This is Jocco podcast number eight with Echo Charles and me. Jocco Willink. Good

evening Echo. Good evening. In 1952 a young marine Robert A. Ganon arrived on

shore at Incheon Korea where he was going to be shipped north to fight. As they

gathered to head north he saw stacks of sea bags which is like a military

duffle bag. He saw him sitting in the rain. No one had to explain what they were

doing there or why. They belonged to Marines that had been killed on the front. He

wrote this poem years later about seeing those sandbags, seeing those sea

bags piled high. When clouds are gray and lowering and fog obscures the plane I

sometimes think I catch a sight of sea bags in the rain. I know it is a vision

to a theory to last but it brings a wisp of sadness and a haunting of the past.

We had come ashore at Incheon in 1952 and administrative landing just a unit

passing through. We mustered at the railhead lining up to board a train. When

through the stormy darkness I saw sea bags in the rain. There was no need to

question why they were lying there looking lonely and abandoned in the damp

Korean air. Their owners had gone northward and would not return again from

where hell's of bitter battle took the lives of fighting men. Now in fog and

darkness gather I rarely can restrain my saddened thoughts of Incheon and sea

bags in the rain. So imagine that you're a young marine who has joined the

Marine Corps and you're fired up and you have the visions of glory and that

romantic vision in your mind of what war is going to be like and you get to

Korea and it's an administrative landing so there's no shooting going on and

you're now you're on the ground and you're in Korea and then you muster to

...