The Marines of Autumn: A Novel of the Korean War (30 page)

“I’m from Loosiana, General. I never seed snow before.”

“Well, son, I’m from Virginia, myself,” Puller said, “but that’s what being in the Marine Corps does for a young man, shows him the world and the glory of it.”

“Yessir,” the Marine said, not quite sure just how great a consolation this was and nursing sore feet.

“Indeed,” Puller said, warming somewhat to the task, “there are tours of duty so breathtaking a man should turn back his pay. Although,” he added, more thoughtful, “there are also hardship posts. Among which our present assignment might well qualify.”

“I surely think it might, General, by your leave, sir.”

Plenty of them had never seen snow before. From Camp Pendleton you could see snow on the Santa Ana Mountains or, just a bit off, the San Jacintos. But seeing snow in the distance was like picture postcards. This snow was real; this was cold; this chilled and intimidated men who gradually and grudgingly began to realize it could kill them.

Maybe the men of Valley Forge had endured cold. But they weren’t on the march; they were in winter quarters. The Marines were on the march, fighting a dozen times a day and sleeping out nights, when they weren’t attacking or being attacked.

The Chinese were killing them. So was the cold.

Not only the Marines were dying, the cold being an impartial killer, making few distinctions.

The CCF Twenty-sixth Army reported: “The troops were hungry. They ate cold food. They were unable to maintain the physical strength for combat. The wounded could not be evacuated . . .”

The Twentieth Chinese Army: “The troops did not have enough food, they did not have enough houses to live in, they could not stand the bitter cold . . . when the fighters bivouacked in snow-covered ground during combat, their feet, socks and hands were frozen together in one ice ball; they could not unscrew the caps on the hand grenades; the fuses would not ignite; the hands were not supple; the mortar tubes shrank on account of the cold; seventy percent of the shells failed to detonate; skin from the hands was stuck on the shell and mortar tubes . . .”

“To a Chinese soldier,” Oliver Smith remarked, “a wound . . . was a death sentence. He was left to die of exposure.”

The Marines could hear the Chinese around them dying, could hear the cries of the Chinese wounded, cries which died away as they froze to death.

It was only early December, two weeks to go until winter, and Col. Ray Davis’s thermometer reported that nighttime temperatures fell to twenty-four below zero. And the men were living aboveground, most without tents, without fires. . . .

Another bridge had been blown or another ambush sprung, and once again the long double line of men shuffled to a halt. Captain Verity had been walking alongside the jeep, forcing himself to keep his feet moving. Now a captain he knew by sight but whose name he had forgotten came up and sat down next to him on the crusted snow just off the road at the base of the hill.

“Verity?”

“Yes. How you doing?”

“Not good. I lost my company back there three nights ago. Puller relieved me.”

“Hey, I’m sorry.”

“My fault. Puller did what he had to do. It’s just I keep seeing that company, how good it was, how they looked coming over the seawall at Inchon, working house-to-house in Seoul. When was that, Verity?”

“September, I guess. Yeah, September.”

“And now it’s December. Two months and a fine rifle company’s lost and a lot of good men dead.”

“Yeah.” Verity didn’t know what to say except to agree with the man. He tugged a cigar from a pocket and stuck it in his mouth. It was really just half a cigar, smoked down, with the mouth end frozen and with no more taste than an icicle. The other officer saw this and pulled out a pack of cigarettes and a Zippo lighter, but his hands were too numbed to get a cigarette to light.

“Aw, to hell,” he said. Verity could see tears on his cheeks, frozen solid, and he didn’t know if the man was crying now or his tears derived from earlier griefs.

Verity got the man’s cigarette going and, grateful, the captain’s words just came out, like snow thawing, swiftly rushing.

“I told Puller I couldn’t send out another flank patrol up those damned ridges. I lost an eleven-man squad up there six days ago, maybe seven. Then a couple days later I lost nine more men. I sent them up there and they just never came back. We heard firing, but they wouldn’t let me stop and go looking for them. ‘You’re holding up the column,’ they told me.

“So the next day I refused. Just wouldn’t do it. Hell with it, let ’em run me up. I couldn’t send another dozen Marines up there, Tom, just couldn’t. I know I’m wrong, but it’s how I am.”

He pulled at the cigarette, and as it came away from his lips the paper stuck and pulled away skin and a trickle of blood ran down his chin. The captain didn’t seem to notice, and the blood soon froze. His executive officer was dead, killed at Yudam-ni. They’d given his company to one of the rifle platoon leaders.

“Nice kid, boy from the Jersey shore. I hope he does OK. It was a good company I had.”

The captain looked into Verity’s face, trying to make him understand.

“I’m pretty good myself, Tom. Used to be. That’s over now, I guess.”

I guess it is
, Verity thought but did not say.

Izzo maintained sanity. By doing calculations.

“I figured it out, Gunny.”

“What, Izzo?”

“Our rate of speed.”

To the usual ambushes and mechanical breakdowns and skidding accidents were now added small snowslides, hardly real avalanches but sufficient to block the narrow road, and force the sergeants to resume shouting for men to wield entrenching tools and clear the way.

“One quarter-mile an hour, Gunny. Just like Captain Verity calculated himself. What do you think of that? It takes us four hours to go one mile.”

Tate wasn’t paying attention. He was thinking how much faster they could clear the snow if they had real shovels, broad-bladed aluminum snow shovels like they had leaning on porches back home. It would be odd to insist that along with all their other weapons and equipment a Marine division inventory snow shovels. Odd, but it would make sense.

“Gunny?”

“Shut up, Izzo; I’m thinking. About shovels.”

“Jeez. . . . ”

Verity had been listening to Izzo, agreeing with him. A quarter-mile an hour? Why, if a man had the endurance and was sufficiently determined, he could crawl at that pace and keep up. Maybe that’s how it would end for them, crawling out.

He didn’t care. Captain Verity would crawl; he’d squirm on his goddamned belly, pulling himself along on his knuckles if he had to. Anything to get out.

Anything.

Captain Verity was hardly alone in having nightmares.

Sergeant Tate’s were different, is all; didn’t mean they didn’t scare him.

Tate’s derived from his having been in the Fourth Marines at Shanghai. In the clubby intimacy of the Marine Corps, you didn’t have to say much more. Marines all knew what had happened to the men of the Fourth Regiment at Shanghai, understood why, in a very special way, they hated the Japs. Verity didn’t much like the
Japanese, either. But he’d been privileged to fight them, kill them. Tate had been their prisoner.

Ten days before Pearl Harbor the detachment at Shanghai was issued a “war warning” and went over to a combat footing, a thousand of them (804 men more precisely) surrounded by a mil-lion Japs. Most of them were boarded November 27 onto the
S. S. President Harrison
to ship out to the Philippines. One small detachment including Tate and a few Marines manning garrisons upcountry and in Peking were to follow soonest. Except that war broke out first. There was talk of setting up a hedgehog defense in the town, talk of fighting their way upcountry to join up with Chiang, talk of getting away by sea in junks and small boats by night. In the end the Marines stacked arms and marched out in surrender. All those other options were but failed dreams.

In all the horrors of the next four years Tate remembered most shockingly that first terrible moment as they stood in perfect formation to be inspected by their new captors, when the bandy-legged little Jap officer came strutting along and slapped a Marine captain’s face. Later there was worse.

Of all the pain of imprisonment maybe shame was worst.

Sergeant Tate tried hard to keep that in mind when the Japanese starved and beat and worked him near death and laughed at this tall American in his misery.

Bastards!

He’d rather die fighting the Chinese than ever again be taken.

It was odd, even callous, but when Elizabeth died giving birth and the child died, too, Tom had wept and mourned and raged only for her. Not for the child.

After all, in a way, it was the child that had killed her. A boy.

Later, but only later, Tom felt guilt when he looked at Kate and tried to imagine how his son might have looked. The son he ignored in his first grief. And later mourned.

Now, on the march south from the Chosin, he was thinking not only of Kate but of his dead boy whom he had never gotten to know. And had resented.

And now, too late, had grown to love. To think of as, “my son,
our
son.”

The snow crunched underfoot, loud as saltine crackers. Verity walked as often as he could, alongside Izzo’s jeep. His feet were frozen and he had an irrational dread of losing them. A strange country. There was plenty of snow on the flanking hills, and it lay deep and packed here on the road. But there weren’t that many snowstorms. It was as if the snow had fallen and then slacked off, leaving itself to the terrible cold to congeal and conserve until spring. Walking on the crunching snow was better than sitting on the slow-creeping jeep, even absent Puller’s orders. It kept the blood moving, almost raised a small sweat, and forcibly drove blood into the extremities of fingers and toes, earlobes and nose.

Gunnery Sergeant Tate felt the cold as much as Verity did. But he was handling it better.

“Gunny, keep an eye on me. Don’t let me start to shake. If I ever start shaking, I may never stop.”

Tom meant that, literally.

Occasionally, as they trudged slowly along the mountain road, a man fell out, not from fatigue or illness but from sniper fire. A single shot.

“We ought to have people up there, Captain,” Tate said disapprovingly, looking toward the ridgelines, standing out white and stark against the sky. Until today, or maybe yesterday, Marines still worked the ridgelines. No more.

Verity knew Tate was right. The ridgelines paralleled the road a thousand feet higher. What a marvelous bit of high ground. The Marines preached that: “Take the high ground.” But exhaustion and ambush and just plain inertia discouraged officers from sending flanking patrols to the ridgelines. In this weather, in deep snow, it might take a handful of men hours to climb six or eight hundred feet, and by the time they got to the ridgelines there might be a hundred or five hundred Chinese infantrymen waiting. The few patrols that reached the ridges were either exhausted or swiftly killed. Right or wrong, Marine officers on the right-of-way had
largely stopped sending men into the high ridges unless ordered by Higher Echelon.

I know it’s wrong
, Verity thought,
but would I have the strength to drive them up there, to insist that they go, order them up, and then live with myself when they never came back? Five years ago, on Okinawa, I would have driven them up. With a pistol if need be. It’s this damned cold that dulls the mind and congeals spirit and freezes men’s hearts, as well as toes and fingers
.

“Sloppy,” he said aloud, critical of himself, “half-assed.”

Chesty Puller would still have officers brought up before a court for not throwing out flank patrols, especially on higher ground. But they weren’t all “Chesty.”

“Captain!” Izzo shouted from behind the wheel, more aggravated than alarmed.

“Yes?”

“Something going on up ahead.”

Tate climbed up on the hood of the jeep, tallest of the three. Up there where the road narrowed between hills there seemed to be something.

“Can’t tell what. Lot of milling around, Captain.”

Verity had a map out, trying to unfold it in the wind and hold it steady in the cold.

“The map shows a bridge. Maybe that’s it.”

“Oh, shit,” Izzo groaned. “Maybe they blew the frigging bridge.”

Captain Verity no longer wrote letters to his daughter. He wanted to; there was so much he had to say. But his fingers could not hold the pen. The earliest unmailed letters had been neatly folded and secreted in inside pockets deep in layers of stinking wool close to his chest. Later letters, folded more crudely, the writing not nearly as crisp, were shoved into outer pockets easier to reach, the pages wadded and balled up. And although Verity did not know it, the ink had begun to smudge and run, courtesy of the sweat of exertion and the melting snow filtering through cloth or driven by the wind.

He still planned to mail Kate her letters. If they ever reached a
place with such civilized conceits as a Fleet Post Office. And if he did not die on the road from the reservoir.

“Cut off! We’re cut off! They blew the damned bridge!”

So blazed the word up and down the line of march in minutes. When it came to gossip, Marines were worse than hairdressers.

They all knew the bridge that the rumor said was blown. They’d marched across it going north, a one-lane structure less than fifty feet across, spanning a steep ravine. Now it was blown. Oh, shit.

Infantry troops might scramble down the slope of the ravine and wade the stream at the bottom and climb up the other side. With the ice it would be tricky, but they could do it, carrying packs and weapons. There was no way trucks or tanks could do it, no way they could get the wounded across. You couldn’t carry wounded men down and then up frozen slopes like that. There weren’t enough choppers in the Pacific to lift them across. And the Chinese up there on the high ground would shoot down the choppers.

Maybe the story of the bridge was all bullshit. Just a rumor. That possibility now sped up and down the line. The brass knew better.