The Coldest Night (10 page)

When they punched onto Blue Beach and Henry stepped off, it was only to stumble and fall to his knees on the mudded and cobbled shore. They’d not been on land for almost three weeks and their legs were no longer quick enough to meet the hard rising earth. He strained under the heavy load that weighed his body. He carried a haversack, knapsack, cartridge belt, bayonet with scabbard, meat can with cover, knife-fork-spoon, canteen with cup and cover, first-aid packet and pouch, poncho, shelter half, steel helmet with liner, helmet cover, gas mask, entrenching tool, and grenade pouch.

He carried the BAR and two harnesses of .30-caliber magazines. He wore the .45 in a shoulder holster that belonged to his old uncle and the sheath knife that was also his uncle’s. The BAR alone weighed twenty pounds and had a range of fifty-five hundred yards, more than three miles. Men debated whether or not you could kill a man at that distance or if he just disappeared over the curvature of the earth.

Gunny was running with them and then was down among them as they groaned and scrambled to their feet bearing the heavy weight of their armamentary. Gunny was tall and square built and born in 1905. He had been a marine since the age of sixteen and he was now forty-five years old and wore a long handlebar mustache he waxed every morning. He was now ferocious and screaming and cursing and kicking them in the ass.

“Get up, god dammit. Get up,” he screamed.

“I’m trying,” the man said.

“Quit your bitchin’,” he barked. “You volunteered for this lash-up.”

Gunny had told them that in battle one saw better and heard better and the body acted more quickly. The mind concentrated in battle. Old ailments and nagging injuries cleared up and in this way battle was very good for one’s health. Henry collected himself and stood erect and stumbled and fell again, but he was not afraid. The possibility of being afraid was only an idea to him and had not yet entered into his mind. Though he agonized for the immense weight he felt entering his legs and hips, his heart beat like strong machinery and he plodded forward on feet and knees and feet.

“Good Lord,” Lew kept saying, his words sawing the noise stricken air. “Good Lord,” he cried as they staggered on their wobbly legs.

They scaled the fifteen-foot seawall on ladders to find a city disappeared in a pall of smoke and a veil of fog and dust eerily lit by fires burning on the distant landscape. The beacons jambed into the blown mess and stirred it like a wind. Overhead, the gull-winged dark blue Corsairs ripped the air, their .50-caliber guns silent as the amtracs dropped their tailgates and more men and machines and weapons entered the chaos and the equipment of war began to mass: jeeps, trucks, artillery, tanks, tractors, men. Hundreds of men in front of him and thousands behind him, and every fourth one of them screaming to be heard above the roar of the diesels belching black smoke, the clank of steel treads, the thousands of cogs, belts, cleats, tracks, pistons, and shivering cylinders exploding fuel, the yelling; the yelling slowly gave and inside all that noise he could hear a military band strike up to play.

“We are the most fortunate men,” Henry said as he got his shoulder inside Lew’s to help him over the wall. That was what the colonel had told them. They were the most fortunate men, because most times professional soldiers have to wait twenty-five years for another god damn war, but here they were with only five years wait for this one. He told them they would all be home by Christmas.

“It’s a shitty deal. That’s all I’m saying,” Lew said.

“Quit your bitching or I am going to slap your jaw,” Gunny said as he pushed by, a .45 clasped in his hand.

“He’s a big operator, that one,” Lew said.

“Fortunate, I say.”

Henry looked at the black ocean behind him. Between his shoulder blades chafed a new tattoo, a blue and gray compass.

Three months ago he signed up and they immediately put him in the hospital. When his head wound had healed, they taught him commando, sniper, tommy gun, and BAR. They taught him stream, swamp, river, desert, and mountain. They taught him compass and first aid. They gave him three meals a day and a roof over his head, and he fired his rifle and screamed and bayoneted straw dummies. They told him he would be one of them forever.

He took one last look homeward the thousands of miles away, a ragged and empty wind, the verdigris light like burning copper in the quivering air. He knew he’d finally entered the enormity of existence, the sphere of the incredible.

Chapter 14

I
T WAS THE
K
OREAN
autumn when the division marched north through the dusty barren countryside, marched up through the rice fields and apple orchards. It was the shineless autumn sky in the season of mortality and turning into winter as they marched north along the east coast highway through the tiny villages. The fruit trees were leafless and stripped bare of their fruit and some were split and shivved and splintered with bullets and their upturned roots exploded from below the ground in broken claws.

They left the port that very day and they followed the colors north, the blue diamond, the scarlet and gold guidon, the stars and stripes. They crossed the hot plains, passing by fire-gutted warehouses and exploded factories, the nature of their industry made indecipherable for the work of the Corsairs and the distant naval guns. So complete was their work, Henry thought, perhaps it wasn’t that at all. Perhaps they were factories in the production of smashed brick, tangled wire cable, contorted and twisted steel machinery. Perhaps this strange land manufactured bent and fire-scarred lathes; perhaps it peeled barrels, shredded motors, and violently dismantled substations.

They passed a little girl in a red plaid skirt and white blouse. She was wearing gray knee socks and white saddle shoes. She stood among burned timbers, crumbled bricks, and ruptured antitank mounts. She wore her school bag hiked over her thin shoulder and her black hair tied in a ponytail. She picked a stem of dry grass and offered it to him, and when he accepted it she smiled and plucked another for herself and placed the end in her white teeth.

They passed an old woman begging for food, her outstretched hands purple and arthritic, an old man beside her wearing a black top hat and flowing white robe. He was leaning on a staff and his beard was so long he wore it tucked under his belt. The old man had only one foot and in the calmness of his face was the news that they were not the first foreign army he’d seen march in his life.

Everywhere there were small rectangular American and Korean flags on strawlike stems and there were swallows disappearing into a riverbank; and houses, their roofs thatched and the walls made of mud plastered to bundles of cornstalks and sorghum; an ox raised on scant feed pulling a wooden plow. There was a man with his dead strapped to his back, his head bowed with grief and a little boy walking beside him, his back crooked and his body bent to a crutch.

For a while there were children among them and nobody knew where they came from and then they disappeared.

It was a land of wood, hay, and stubble, a land as if he’d dreamt it, and he could not yet tell that these were the witnessings a man never forgets. He would remember it all in random unbidden moments and they would spring on him, and these would be among his occupying memories for the rest of his natural life.

They pushed north in parallel columns along both sides of the road toward Hamhung forty miles distant from the landing. Korean laborers bearing packed A-frames walked an interior line of march. They bore food and ammunition, batteries and medical supplies, wire and needles. After three weeks aboard the LSTs everyone’s legs were weak and their bodies racked with flu. The sun was hot on the plains and many of the men passed out under their heavy loads and were picked up by shuttling jeeps and taken to the aid stations.

Lew was marching in front of Henry when suddenly he turned around and was marching backward. His body was squat and thickly muscled, but he had a high-fluting voice and sounded more like a girl than a man when he spoke. His hair was red and flat, and more out of habit than vanity he combed it every chance he could. He smiled; his gold tooth flashed.

He told Henry he was from Charleston and wanted to know where Henry was from.

“Charleston,” Henry told him.

“Charleston, West Virginia,” Lew clarified.

“The same,” Henry said.

“Someone tol’ me that,” Lew said, and snapped about.

Another mile and he turned backward again. He told Henry he’d been in the Pacific and joined up again because he wanted to buy a persimmon yellow Jaguar automobile and have it shipped from England to America. His mother was a widow, and if he died instead of lived, she would have the money he was saving for his Jaguar automobile and she would also be the beneficiary of his National Service Life Insurance Policy.

“Ten grand worth of Uncle Sam’s money,” he said. “She could use it. Not bad for a few months’ work, either way you look at it. Of course, I’d have to be dead for her to make out. What about you?”

Henry smiled. “Before he died, my grandfather encouraged me to travel.”

“The hell you say,” Lew said, and looked at him queerly and then gave Henry a second look that he took to mean they would be friends.

“Maybe we’ll be fortunate,” Henry said.

“Quit your fucking around,” Gunny said as he came back down the line.

“I hear that,” Lew said, and gave a wink of his eye.

Lew turned about, and then he turned again after Gunny disappeared.

“Him and me were in the Pacific together. He’s a real pussycat.”

For a time they rode under canvas in trucks over the dusty and bumpy road, their tailbones bouncing on the hard wooden slats of the seats, their spines jarring against the rake of the sideboards. While some took pleasure in the truck rides, their grinding transmissions, roaring engines, and stinking exhausts, the trucks fatigued Henry and he wanted to be marching again. After being at sea for so long, he wanted to be moving on his own two feet.

Their progress slowed as they encountered clusters of Korean families moving south. A marine reached out from the back of the truck with his lit cigarette and set slow fire to a mattress bundled atop an A-frame a Korean was carrying. The men in the truck laughed and then a second marine, imitating the first, did the same, lighting fire to a family’s bedding perched on an A-frame. Henry wanted to say something for how wrong that was, but he didn’t. He looked to Lew who didn’t say anything either. He knew the violence that seemed to be always within them, convulsive and necessary. Daily, there were fistfights on the transports for slights real or perceived.

“You shouldn’t ought to do that,” Henry said, and the men quieted.

“What the fuck does it matter to you?” the first marine said, turning his attention, rising up over him.

Henry covered his eyes with his hands, paused, and then stood up to confront the man.

“Leave him alone,” Lew said. “He’s just a kid.”

“There’s no need to go sticking your oar in,” the marine said, but clearly he did not want to get into it with Lew. Henry sat back down.

“You missed a great opportunity to keep your mouth shut,” Lew said.

Lew’s words stung, but they were enough to save him a beating and the soldier backed away as the drivers let out the clutches one after another and their engines revved, the trucks lurching forward. They were on the move again and then their truck jumped and stalled out and the driver was roundly mocked.

The truck was moving ahead, but not long before it stopped and let them out for no reason they could see. They were in another nowhere place just a few miles beyond the nowhere place they’d recently left behind.

“Right about now I wish I was anywhere but here,” Lew said.

“Where would you go?” Henry asked.

“Anywhere is good enough.”

“Mount up!” Gunny bawled out.

“He’s a corker, that one,” Lew said, and they stepped off and they were marching again on both sides of the road humping north to where they did not know. There was a deep ditch that ran alongside the road, and as Henry walked he scrutinized it for cover on a moment’s notice and then conceded each found place to the next man in the marching line and found another. He kept walking that he might inherit the next sanctuary of deadfall or boulder, a copse of scrub pine.

The confrontation in the truck, he let it pass from his mind. However right he’d been, he felt a boy and a foolish boy for having spoken up, but what else could he have done?

He came to a place beneath hackled trees where Lew was looking at something. Three men and a woman lay in the ditch. Theirs were heads without backs to them, their hands bound with wire. They were his first dead. Their faces were blown and contorted and he thought what hard painful work to be killed.

“Don’t think about it,” Lew said.

“When do the hunters go up?”

“When they need us.”

“When will that be?” Henry said.

“Not ever, I hope.”

He passed from beneath the hackled trees and the high wind of autumn was roaring overhead. He remembered seeing the compass rose on his back, the image traveling from the mirror held up behind to the mirror he held in his hands. He touched at his pocket where letters were collected and then he walked on, a hitch in his step on the side where lay the heavy weight of his weapon.