The Marines of Autumn: A Novel of the Korean War (14 page)

“You’re right,” the other murmured, deferential in the presence of Oliver Smith.

“Well now,” General Smith said, “they won’t be the last, but these certainly are the first.”

“Yessir,” the murmurs went, rather pleased.

Smith turned to an intelligence officer who had, apparently, already examined the dead.

“Marsh, what can you tell?”

“Well, sir, from the little service record books we’ve been able to examine, one of these men, still a private soldier, has been in the army and fighting much of the time since 1937. He . . .”

Since ’37? Marine officers looked at one another.

“. . . was drafted in ’37 by Chiang Kai-shek, fought the Japanese for eight years until VJ Day in ’45, then started fighting the Communists again in ’47, was still fighting when Chiang bugged out to Formosa—”

“Colonel, we say of our gallant ally Generalissimo Chiang that he and his forces evacuated to Formosa, rather than ‘bugged out.’ ”

“Right you are, General. So when they ‘evacuated,’ this fellow was left behind and after a few weeks was conscripted into the CCF. Same uniform, they just added a red star on his hat. So he’s been in the army thirteen years and he’s still a private and until yesterday he was still fighting. . . .”

Verity stared down at the row of dead. He wondered which of them was the long-suffering private. Hard to tell, even for Verity, who knew the Chinese and had some notion of how the men
aged. Women, well, they aged even faster. Functions of the social structure.

The intelligence officer lectured briefly. The dead men, “the stiffs,” as the Marines had it, wore layers of uniform, all cotton, none of them proof against the cold they’d all already sampled, on both sides of the line, and knew would get worse.

As the dead were picked over for the delectation of Smith’s staff, Verity thought, irrationally he knew, of Elizabeth, dead and cold in the ground. A more dignified death, of course, but no less cold, no less dead. Oh, how he loved her, how he missed her.

“As you can see, gentlemen,” the intelligence man went on, “the outer clothing is dun or khaki on one side, white on the other, the camouflage potential being obvious. We might ourselves one day consider . . .”

General Smith, tall and taciturn, moved his feet impatiently. He didn’t want this turning into a headquarters lecture or a seminar for the Marine Corps Schools at Quantico.

The lecturing officer was not stupid. He caught the gesture.

“. . . and under this padded winter uniform, the usual cotton summer suit, plus any sweaters or extra shirts available. On the feet, sneakers. One or two pairs of cotton socks. We are finding the occasional Chinese soldier dead of wounds. But already suffering, and rather badly, of frostbite.”

Several of the staff officers knelt to look more closely at the bodies, to finger cloth, like bespoke tailors or the operators of a quality funeral parlor.

The mountains slumped down toward the road, in places hanging over it. Even at noon there was shadow. Shadow and shade, a gloom, a darkness, over the snow and the land. That was the doing of the slope, the steep vertical incline, so severe it was difficult to understand how even dwarf trees grew on such gradients and clung. There was the single road, snaking more than a hundred miles through these mountains from the Sea of Japan to the frontier of China—a narrow road of dirt and gravel, not constructed so much as carved into the slopes and clinging there.

It was along this road the two armies would march: the Chinese and the Marines.

In a way, between Peng and Oliver Smith it was what in the Old West they called a walkdown, the rival gunmen walking down the dusty western street toward each other, guns holstered but ready. One night as they sat over a courtesy fire, Verity asked Tate if there was validity in the analogy.

“Well,” said Tate, the student of Captain Quantrill, “there’s no Calamity Jane. But there are two men very handy with guns, competent men, at opposite ends of the MSR. Which ain’t too dusty. But otherwise is available for killing people.”

Izzo threw up his hands.

“With all due respect, Captain, if a couple of guys in South Philly start shooting each other, not only does the police department arrive, but there are calls for the federals and the state police, maybe for committees of vigilantes. Yet when you got a couple of drunken cowboys shooting guys in Texas or Arizona or someplace, they’re frigging Gary Cooper and Duke Wayne.”

Tate told Izzo he didn’t understand history, but Verity thought there was an argument to be made.

In the words of Mouse Izzo, “This place looks like frigging Switzerland.”

Izzo had never seen Switzerland. But he was about right.

From Hungnam on the coast of the Sea of Japan to the southern tip of the Chosin Reservoir was nearly seventy miles. Soon after you left Hungnam, the port, and its twin inland city, Hamhung, you could see the real mountains ahead and yet still, at the hairpin turns, you could look back at the sea in the distance.

“Glorioso, Captain,” Izzo said, very impressed, “even better than the Poconos.”

“Praise indeed, for I have seen the Poconos,” Verity replied, enjoying the moment.

Smith released him from headquarters with instructions to drive
north and catch up to Litzenberg, monitoring the radio all the way. Where were the Chinese? Where had they gone after the fight at Sudong?

“If you as much as
smell
Chinese cooking, Verity, get back here and tell me. I want to know what your chum Peng is up to.”

“Yessir.”

As Izzo drove north, the sun dimmed, a sort of yellow veil coming between it and the earth. And it got colder with the wind up. By two in the afternoon they could no longer see either the sea behind or the distant mountains ahead. Then the snow began to fall, heavy snow, heavy and wet, coating everything.

“Oh, shit,” Izzo said, no longer admiring the landscape.

It was the first half of November.

Gen. Oliver Smith was not happy. His First Marine Division had reached Hagaru-ri, at the southern end of the reservoir. To the northwest, two of his three rifle regiments, the Fifth and Seventh, would soon be based on Yudam-ni, north of Hagaru. The other infantry regiment, General Puller’s First Marines, was still far to the south, having been sent off on the equivalent of a wild-goose chase, waiting to be relieved by the Third Army Division so it could rejoin Smith and the other Marine regiments to re-form the division as a whole. Smith did not like the way X Corps had broken up his division or what Generals MacArthur and Almond were telling him to do.

More fundamentally, Smith didn’t like MacArthur and didn’t much like Ned Almond, who more and more took on his master’s (MacArthur’s) posturing and protective coloration. There were army generals who felt the same as Smith did, but their careers depended on MacArthur’s favor. The Marines had never liked MacArthur (calling him Dugout Doug), and as a Marine general Smith could get away with a lot more backtalk. Sass, his grandmother used to call it.

Oliver Smith, wreathed in pipe smoke, sat at a table in the old Jesuit schoolhouse at Hungnam that served as divisional HQ with his ops officer, his intelligence chief, and four or five other members of the division staff.

“Captain Verity, sir,” a duty officer announced.

“Send him in.”

When Verity came in, blinking in the gloom after the bright sunlight of the long jeep trip south, Smith welcomed him, told him to pull up a chair, get out of his coat, and light up if he wished. Verity always worried when encountering such high-level urbanity, and he was instinctively on guard.

“Yessir, thank you, General.”

Smith made the brief introductions. “Now, tell us what you’ve got.”

“Yessir.” Verity looked down at his sheaf of notes. Began to read.

“Gentlemen, I’ve identified by number the Forty-second, the Twentieth, the Twenty-seventh, and the Twenty-sixth CCF Armies. The Forty-second seems to have three infantry divisions, I’ve got the numbers when you wish, and the other three armies have four divisions each. By my count there are at least six of these divisions already in the general area or a day’s march from the Chosin Reservoir. The other nine divisions seem to be a farther north. How far, I don’t know.”

One of the staff officers said, “Four entire armies? Surely that can’t be.”

The G-2, Smith’s intelligence officer, a gloomy man, explained, “Their armies are more like our corps. What we call an army the Chinese call a field army.”

“But still,” Smith said, “elements of four armies, with six divisions identified?”

“Yessir,” Verity stated. “The divisions I’ve listened to are the One-twenty-fourth, the Fifty-eighth, the Sixtieth, the Eighty-ninth, the Eightieth.” That made only five, but no one protested.

The ops officer spoke up now.

“We’ve known about the One-twenty-fourth. The Seventh
Marines came up against them at Sudong November second. Then the One-twenty-fourth broke off and went back up into the hills November sixth or seventh.”

So at least one of my identifications proved out
, Verity thought, exhaling relief. He was glad he didn’t do this sort of thing for a living.

“Their infantry divisions,” the G-2 told them, “average about ten-thousand men. So if the captain’s correct, they’ve got at least sixty-thousand men close to the Chosin. We’ve got a division of twenty-thousand Marines and there’s probably another twenty-thousand Army and ROKs in the neighborhood.”

“So it’s our forty to their sixty,” someone put in.

“Unless those other nine divisions show up,” Smith remarked, sounding oddly cheerful at the possibility.

There was some detailed questioning of Verity, and he tried to respond accurately and, at the end, turned over all his notes.

General Smith nodded at him. “Thank you, Captain. You can rejoin your attached unit now. Or drive back in the morning, which might be a better idea, considering the road and the hour. I’ll expect immediate reports from you regarding any change in the enemy order of battle. Especially if those nine other divisions come onstage. You understand?”

“Yessir.”

He and Izzo and Tate were billeted in tents for the night, fed a hot meal, and asked, “What’s it like up north?”

“Glorioso,” Izzo told the headquarters enlisted men. “We live like frigging kings.”

The next day, after receiving yet another communication from Ned Almond urging him to prepare his entire division for a “sprint” north, Oliver Smith sat down to write his November 15 personal letter to the commandant of the Marine Corps, General Cates, at Henderson Hall, Arlington, Virginia.

It was a letter no army general could or would have written:

So far our MSR north of Hamhung has not been molested, but there is evidence this situation will not continue. . . .

Someone in high authority will have to make up his mind as to what is our goal. My mission is still to advance to the border (with China). The Eighth Army, eighty miles to the southwest, will not attack until the twentieth. Manifestly, we should not push on without regard to the Eighth Army. We should simply get further out on a limb. If the Eighth Army push does not go, the decision will have to be made as to what to do next. I believe a winter campaign in the mountains of North Korea is too much to ask of the American soldier or Marine, and I doubt the feasibility of supplying troops in this area during winter or providing for the evacuation of sick and wounded . . .

Smith told Cates in detail what he was doing, using engineers to improve the road for tanks and heavy vehicles, ordering airstrips built and the like, a steady, measured advance securing its MSR as it went along, rather than the headlong dash Almond was ordering. He was not pessimistic, Smith assured Cates, but he admitted concern over “the prospect of stringing out a Marine division along a single mountain road for one hundred twenty air miles from Hamhung to the border.”

On that same day, the Seventh Marines entered Hagaru-ri, the sizable town at the southernmost shore of the Chosin Reservoir. That was where Verity and Tate and Izzo were heading, driving in a jeep with the top down. The temperature November 15 was four below zero, Fahrenheit.

It was also on November 15 Captain Verity turned thirty years old.

“My birthday, Gunny.”

“By God, sir, that’s fine,” Tate said, who was a year older.

There were no celebrations or observances of Verity’s birthday, none at all, and the war went on.

Izzo, too, was notified. “Yessir,” he said vaguely, “and the best of many returns.”

Izzo was twenty-eight and his good wishes had not come out
precisely as intended, but Verity appreciated them nonetheless, and when Izzo and Tate told him their ages Verity thought,
We are all getting old
, then said so aloud.

“And I hope we get frigging older, sir,” Izzo observed with considerable fervor.

Now the cold closed down, seizing the land, the mountains, and the men in its metallic grip—a category and dimension of cold few of these men had ever felt bar those of the northern plains states, the Dakotas, Alaska, or men from interior Maine and Vermont north of Burlington.