The Marines of Autumn: A Novel of the Korean War (37 page)

Harry Truman, over bourbons with Clark Clifford and his cronies, gave reluctant tribute. He’d assailed the Marines as possessing a public relations apparatus superior to that of the Soviet Union. Now the Marines might just have saved his ass. And he acknowledged as much.

Had they also salvaged MacArthur? Mr. Truman, with bourbon or without, was determined they would not. He’d had enough of the general.

While Izzo cajoled, Tate was watching the speed with which trucks hit the ramp, the distance between MPs, and how closely they checked off vehicle numbers on their clipboards, how closely they scrutinized driver and passengers, if any.

Izzo started to wheedle again but saw something in Tate’s face and shut up. After a moment the gunnery sergeant turned to him.

“OK, Izzo, we go.”

A few moments later, they were rolling, very slowly, sliding in between a two-and-a-half-ton truck and a battered armored personnel carrier that had seen brighter days.

“Stay at their speed until I tell you, Izzo.”

“Aye-aye, Gunny.”

Up and down the beach, Marines waded into the Sea of Japan to board ships small and large that would carry them away from Korea. Next month, next spring, perhaps, they would be back, fighting
again. But for this moment they were men who had lived through the terrible autumn, fought the cold and the Chinese, and not died.

Miracle enough.

Tate watched them queue up and stamp their feet in the sand and then, when the infantry craft were ready, shuffle ahead, heavy-laden, to board ship and leave. People had to understand their slowness: their feet were frozen.

The LSTs only took vehicles. Tanks and trucks and tracked guns and personnel carriers and ambulances.

And jeeps, caked with mud and pierced by shell fragments and driven by surly little men who were sure something was being put over on them.

“What the fug y’mean, what am I doing?” Izzo cried at the first dubious MP. His legitimate outrage was more than impressive. And he kept the jeep moving.

“ ’Zackly what I mean, buddy.”

“Yeah, sure.” That was the extent of Izzo’s response. Tate looked into the MP’s eyes balefully. Captain Verity, up front, stared straight ahead, stern and cold behind his silvered glasses.

The entire division; twenty thousand men less the dead and missing, was being taken out. To fight again. No one looked too closely at heroes.

Except this one MP.

“Something wrong with this officer?” he asked Tate. “He sick or something?” He leaned toward the jeep.

Tate gave him his best gunnery sergeant glare, and then, crisp and sure, he said, “Captain Verity, back from the reservoir, with dispatches for the general!”

The MP hesitated, still looking into Verity’s face, and then, after a moment that to Izzo seemed an hour, stepped back to snap off a salute.

“Yes sir, Captain.”

“Hit it, Izzo,” Tate said, jaw set and eyes glacial.

The jeep leaped forward in the sand, wheels spinning, sending up spumes of grit and beach, racing down to the water’s edge, where it cut deftly in front of a huge Pershing tank and hit the steel ramp hard and loud.

“Hey, you!” the tanker shouted from his perch a dozen feet above them, to which Izzo responded with a loud, discordant squawk of the horn and an echo of Tate: “Captain Verity with dis-patches for the General!”

The jeep bounced buoyantly up the ramp, its tires burning rubber on the metal grating, before vanishing into the darkness of the ship’s hold, followed by the big Pershing, the final vehicle this LST could hold.

“Move it! Move it!” the MPs shouted as they waved off the next vehicles and directed them down the beach to another LST, as the heavy ramp creaked and groaned upward on its cables, sealing in the Pershing tank and the little jeep carrying Izzo and Tate and Captain Verity out of Korea.

“You see that jeep cut in there ahead of the tank? Three Marines?”

“Ferget it,” the MP sergeant growled.

“But, Sarge . . . ”

“They’re crazy, them guys who was up there.”

“Crazy?”

“Sure, all them from the reservoir. Crazy or froze or dead. Or all three. Be grateful they didn’t take a shot at you.”

The MP, disappointed, like a traffic cop without a ticket to write, started to argue. The sergeant cut him off.

“Let it go. You’d be crazy, too, you was up there.”

Within minutes, its powerful engines in reverse, churning up sand and mud and silt, the ship bearing the body of Captain Verity slid laboriously off the beach at Hungnam and out into deeper waters, where it would turn and set course to sail south on the evening tide.

“Glorioso, Mouse,” Tate muttered. “That was glorioso . . . .”

“Why, thanks, Gunny. Nice of you to—”

“Now, just shut up.”

Jesus, this was some gunny.

“Jean,” the General said, hearty and bluff, “I wouldn’t be surprised if we were going home at last.”

“Home? Douglas, what a glorious thought.”

She was southern, with a soft voice full of charm but also very genuine enthusiasm for her man.

“Yes, Truman will recall me. I sense it coming.”

“But you saved the army, Douglas. No one else could have.”

“And might have won,” he agreed, “had the president and the Joint Chiefs possessed vision. And the will.”

She was too excited by the thought of home to be pensive. Their lives had taken on the curious rigidity and internal logic of the Druid Circle. And now, to break out, to see America again . . .

“Just think of it, home.” She was thinking, too, of their son. When her General remained silent, she said, hoping to arouse him, “And think of how the country will celebrate your return. How the people will call for you. Oh, what a dazzling moment it will be.”

“Yes, Jean, home is of all destinations sweetest.”

But in his heart the General knew America did not elect as president men who evacuated armies and retreated.

At Hungnam they dug a hasty cemetery and buried there the men from the reservoir who’d died on the road south and been carried in by truck or on the tanks or the narrow-gauge railroad. When the ceremony ended, Chesty Puller broke away from the formation of senior offices and went up to the line of Marines who’d fired the rifle salute over the bodies, thanking them for volunteering for this small, last service.

Then he wrote his wife: “Darling: With the help of the Almighty and no other unit or person, my regiment is on the beach at Hungnam and will be aboard ship before the day is over.”

This was December 13. Puller himself boarded the transport
General Collins
on the next day and would play poker all night with officers and enlisted men both.

Kate Verity, in a velvet-collared coat, white knee socks, and Mary Janes, stood quietly to one side with her nanny outside the church while all these tall people consoled one another
.

T
hey buried Tom Verity next to his wife in a Maryland churchyard of no particular religious denomination but of great beauty, and snowless in the mild winter.

A few days later, in Christmas week, with wreaths still hung and the creche decorated, the Jesuits held a memorial service at Holy Trinity, a church in Georgetown just off university property and, like the college, a Jesuit institution.

From Henderson Hall came two Marine officers in dress blues, with all the medals, properly grim and concerned and attentive, saying the right things and standing erect at appropriate moments. Neither of them had ever met Captain Verity; they knew little of him or how he’d died and had come to mourn on official orders to do so.

Georgetown’s students were home on Christmas break and the church was largely empty, but some faculty and Elizabeth’s sister from Philadelphia, attended, and Mr. and Mrs. Verity, the parents, older and grayer, very much so, had flown in from Grosse Pointe. A Jesuit spoke, the tone and the words well chosen, and then one
of the officers, and there were several hymns from the organ, tunes Verity would not have recognized.

It was a fine service (the Jesuits did such things well), and Izzo and Gunny Tate in likelihood would have enjoyed it, seeing what the captain meant to them and Izzo being Catholic and Tate, a career noncommissioned officer, partial to ritual and rite, but they hadn’t been notified or invited. In the muddle of evacuation and later in the refit and reinforcement of the division both men had been reassigned, and nothing was ever put down in writing of their services to Captain Verity. So commissioned officers who didn’t know Tom Verity attended in their place.

When the ceremony was ended and they all filed out into the bright winter sun, blinking after the proper gloom of the church, Elizabeth’s sister and the elder Veritys stopped to thank the priest. They weren’t Catholic, but they had manners. As they spoke, Kate Verity, in a velvet-collared coat, white knee socks, and Mary Janes, stood quietly to one side with her nanny outside the church while all these tall people consoled one another. The child thought carefully about what she had seen and heard inside and remembered how the lighted candles danced, trying to understand some of what these strange men had said about her father, and why none of them was the “Mouse” of her daddy’s letters, and who drove their “poor little jeep” and wore sunglasses, even at night, and she also wondered why they played such odd songs, instead of one of those her father sang. Like “Sur le pont d’Avignon.”

Then she tugged at the nanny’s hand and inquired, politely but wanting very much to know, “Madame?”

“Yes, Kate?”

“And who will take me now to France to see the bridges?”

I
’ve been asked by several people who read this novel in pre-publication if the fictional Thomas Verity was inspired by my rifle company commander in the Taebaek Mountains of North Korea, Captain John H. Chafee of Rhode Island, who would later become governor of his state, Secretary of the Navy, and a United States senator. Yes, he was. My portrait of Verity draws on Chafee’s education at Yale and Harvard, his combat experiences on Guadalcanal and Okinawa and service in North China, and on his gallantry, his gentleness, his love of family and of country and of the Marine Corps. In those matters, and in none of Verity’s flaws, the story owes much to Captain Chafee, who also died in the autumn, on October 24, 1999.