The Marines of Autumn: A Novel of the Korean War (24 page)

Boy
, Verity thought,
they’re good, coming in that low and through these hills and hitting the target
.

Sometimes they killed Marines. That was what close air support was. To work, it had to be close. You took the good with the bad. And tried to be philosophical.

Sons of bitches. That, too, was how the Marines thought of the aviation, not only the navy pilots but also the Air Force and even their own Marine flyboys. They were up an hour, maybe two hours a day, and when the mission was over it was back to the carriers or the airfields down south. To warm bunks with actual sheets and pillowcases, to hot showers, to bottles of Coke and hot meals on real plates, to movies and mail and a laundry that delivered clean clothes again the next morning for that day’s flight.

And we’ll still be here in the same filthy clothes, hungry and cold and cramping up, living in shit like animals
.

That was the difference between the Marines coming back from Chosin and the fliers risking their skins to help them out.

Stories came back through the air officers assigned to the rifle battalions to control the close air support, of carrier pilots returning from raids on the Chinese hills whose planes were hit and went down in the sea between here and the ship, sometimes less than a mile away, and the pilots, unhit and unhurt, bailed out.

Sometimes it took the carrier only five or six minutes to get a rescue chopper over to where the pilot fell into the sea and he was already dead, frozen right through his flight suit and boots and thermals. Just as dead and just as board-stiff as the Marines who fell asleep along the road from the reservoir and never woke. The fliers died cleaner, is all, but that made them no less dead.

At least the Marines had the road.

Bad as it was there on the road, the Chinese up in the hills and in the parallel valleys on the Marine flanks were moving through rougher country and deeper snow and lugging everything but what the ponies carried. Sometimes the valleys turned into box canyons and the Chinese had to backtrack and go around, covering twice the ground. Marine patrols cut across their track. Word came in of entire Chinese units down in the snow, some of them already dead, others dying, a few desperately trying to get fires going and fashion shelter.

“We found one platoon, maybe thirty men. Only four or five still alive, and they couldn’t move. Feet frozen, hands, and it’s ten below with a foot of fresh snow.”

The Marines went through the bodies for papers and left the dead and most of the living behind. There was no point trying to bring in a prisoner with frozen feet; you’d have to carry him. A man that badly frozen wasn’t going to live through the night anyway. If they got one who could walk, they brought him in to be questioned, not even bothering to tie his hands.

Verity questioned the prisoners that came in to regiment. Tate monitored the radio and Izzo held a gun on the POWS while Verity talked to them.

Although Captain Verity had no formal training in military intelligence, he’d questioned civilians and the occasional deserter or bandit in North China that winter. He found it an interesting chess game, trying to assess what was truth, what a lie, and what simple confusion or boasting or lack of knowledge.

The Chinese soldiers captured here in Korea, terrified at first or reticent, talked freely once they realized they weren’t going to be handled all that roughly.

“When I don’t bring out the whips and pliers, they get pretty comfortable. Downright chatty.”

Sometimes one of the other officers would suggest maybe the whips and the pliers might make the prisoners even more congenial. Verity laughed these officers off. And if a man, stupidly, pushed it, Verity had an effective out line: “I don’t think that’s such a good idea, but if you want I’ll bring it up to General Smith when I report in.”

“No, no, Verity, just an idea. Just a notion.”

People, Verity knew, were fairly easy to bluff; that was why there were so really few good poker players. And he didn’t bother to impress such officers with details of just how warlords he had known in North China had dealt with the difficult and recalcitrant, to say nothing of deserters and spies: inserting them alive into a working locomotive’s furnace.

Kate Verity knew about Santa Claus. Madame called him Pere Noel. But for Kate’s parents, he was simply Santa. They hadn’t made a fetish out of it.

“But a child should have something to hang onto,” Verity said.

Elizabeth, the natural skeptic, to his surprise agreed. “I wish I’d had Santa. Our house was so fashionably rational.”

Tom, raised in China, where people still believed in ghosts and cow spirits and the year of the dragon and of the snake, was less rational, more willing to suspend critical judgment.

And so, on December 1, at kindergarten, where they began talking about the number of days until Christmas, young Kate spoke up:

“My father is taking me to Paris for Christmas. To see Pere Noel.”

A dozen three- or four-year-olds looked uncomprehending.

“Oh,” Kate said, “that’s the name Santa Claus uses when he’s in France. So the French children will know who he is.”

Most of the kids nodded, solemn and impressed to have a classmate so worldly and knowledgeable.

It was night, a break in the shambling, slogging, awful march from Yudam-ni to Hagaru-ri, and for once they could hear no firefights on the flanks or to the rear; there seemed to be no organized fighting ahead.

“Maybe the Chinks are cold and tired as we are,” Izzo said, his voice enthusiastic with hope. So much so he forgot he was not to call them Chinks; the captain didn’t like it.

How could they not be cold and tired!
Verity thought.

Izzo had contrived to make a small fire, scrounging a few twigs and branches somehow in this barren place, lighting them with a cup of gasoline from the jeep, and now they huddled around it, sheltering from the wind in the chill dark.

“When Lee retreated from Gettysburg,” Tate began, “he had lost twenty-eight thousand men and, more than that, the loyalty of Pickett and Longstreet and others who believed Lee had destroyed the army. The line of wagons, mostly filled with wounded, just like here, stretched seventeen miles. It was raining and they moved slow, the horses and even the mules slipping and sliding. But Lee got them somehow across the Potomac on flatboats and back to Virginia. Meade didn’t pursue. Lincoln, they say, went ape. It was Meade’s chance to end the war right there, by following Lee and running him down in the flat country before the hills. But he didn’t. No one ever explained quite why.”

Verity listened, enjoying hearing a man talk who knew of what he spoke. So many speak without knowing. He knew too many men like that.

Tate resumed, “So maybe the Chinese will get tired. And they won’t run us down and we’ll get out.”

“From your mouth to God’s ear, Gunny.” That was as pious as Izzo ever got, and Verity was impressed. With Izzo calling on God sincerely, and not just looking for an edge, things were looking slim.

“Let’s hope so, Gunny,” Verity said. He realized even Tate was no longer talking of winning but of getting out. Verity wondered how deeply that notion had taken the division in its grip. If Gunny
Tate spoke that way, in terms of trying to save the division, then it might be tight indeed. Verity still had cigars and he brought them out now. Who knew when they would have another few hours as placid as this?

“Thank you, Captain,” Tate said, rolling the cigar deftly despite the mitten, but Izzo declined.

“I’m faithful to Lucky Strike, Captain. You come across a carton of Luckies, I’d be much obliged. You know the slogan, LSMFT: Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco.” He looked pleased to have remembered the commercial’s ditty.

Verity had been told by a major who seemed sure of it that up ahead, from Hagaru-ri on south, planes were supplying the column, dropping ammunition and fuel and food. Maybe there would be a carton of Luckies there for Izzo. Verity did not expect Havana cigars, though, and continued to ration himself to one per day except in moments like this, when he treated Tate and offered another to Izzo and was relieved, without saying so, when the Mouse refused.

Here the way was too narrow, too imposed upon by hills, the road running through a ravine too deep, for them to be resupplied by air. Maybe a fighter plane could get in here, flying with a desperate caution, a Corsair or something, but you couldn’t fly transports. And only transports could drop supplies in any meaningful volume.

Hagaru-ri! That was where they were heading; that was where they had an airstrip, or so it was said; that was where they would find fuel and hot food and warming tents and fresh, strong reinforcing battalions. Occasionally here, on the Chosin road from Yudam-ni, men thought they heard transport planes.

“Ours!” they cried, craning necks toward the low gray sky.

But the planes were only a tease, only the cold wind howling, a haunting sound that fired false hope and then cast it down, damp and chill.

Racial integration was still a very new thing, ordered by Truman but not yet fully digested. Older officers, many but not all of them southern, would never fully swallow the idea. Puller wasn’t one of
them, but he had his moments. While he was still in Hungnam before the march north, his accustomed contempt for the army had been stiffened by an incident involving black troops. When reports of an army debacle filtered back into Hungnam, Puller wrote home: “An all-Negro artillery battalion, sent to the front, was delivered by an all-Negro transport battalion to its place in the front lines. On the way back by night the transport men were ambushed by six North Koreans, and the four hundred truckers ran without a fight, leaving the vehicles standing with the lights burning and the motors on. The Reds burned the trucks and hiked up the road into the rear of the artillery battalion, which they sprayed with fire and scattered. The Reds took all the guns. I saw many of the broken men who came back. It was a terrible day for our arms.”

The corpsman leaned close to the wounded man.

“Cigarette, Mac?”

It was what medical care was coming to on the road south from the reservoir, a cigarette, a shot of morphine, being laid out flat on the snow instead of left broken on the road.

“Have a butt, kid?”

Most of the wounded wanted one. Everyone had a Zippo lighter. The Zippo with a windscreen worked even in the snow. The Marines would happily have given endorsements.

“Cigarette, pal?”

“I don’t smoke.”

He was young and the stomach wound had stopped oozing blood, so maybe he had a chance.

“Hey, it’ll take your mind off stuff.”

“OK then.”

The corpsman lighted the Chesterfield, but the boy coughed hard on the first puff. When he’d stopped coughing he said, “My ma made me promise not to smoke till I was twenty-one.”

“Oh?”

The kid died about an hour later. The corpsman had seen a lot of men die along the road, but for this one there was guilt.

“ ’Cause of how he promised his ma and I lit one for him any-ways.”

“Hell,” one of the other corpsmen said, “tough shit.”

“I’ll never pass another frigging faucet without stopping to take a drink.”

That was Izzo. Tate didn’t phrase it as cogently but, tall and lanky, felt the same way.

“It’s funny,” he told Verity. “I was always thirsty in summer, in the heat, at Pendleton and Parris Island and in prison camp during the War. Never thought about it in the winter until now.”

“Sure, we all feel it. We’re dehydrated. Chewing snow just doesn’t get enough liquid into you.”

The canteens, of course, were frozen. So were the jerricans and the water tanks of several hundred gallons towed behind the occasional truck or jeep. There was no way of thawing them without building fires and taking hours, and they lacked the fuel and time. So men scooped up handfuls of snow in gloved and mittened hands and munched on it, freezing their lips and tongues and mouths and tiring their jaws, and ending with a trickle of stale water down parched throats.

“I heard a guy say he laced his canteen with a couple of shots of rye whisky, Gunny,” Izzo offered, “and he claimed it didn’t freeze up.”

“Fine, Izzo, and where’s
your
bottle of Four Roses?”

“Well, jeez, I was just telling you what I heard.” He rolled his eyes toward Verity, as if to demonstrate how sorely put upon he was.

Captain Verity rewarded Izzo with a bleak stare. He, too, wished for a glass of cold, clean tap water. Just one glass. Such implausible dreams kept them going as they trudged south.

On the evening of December 3, the first column of Marines from Yudam-ni reached the outskirts of Hagaru. Relative safety. But only relative.

Verity and his little band were well down the line and wouldn’t get in until the following morning. Izzo scrounged up food and the news: “They said last night they marched in, just like on parade—”

“Of course they marched in,” Tate growled. “They’re Marines, aren’t they?”

Jesus
, Izzo thought,
he never eases up, does he? You’d think I
wasn’t
a Marine, that I was a Canadian Mountie or something
. . . .