The Marines of Autumn: A Novel of the Korean War (15 page)

There had been, early in the month, a freakish spell, a thaw following the early snows and hard frosts. On November 3 a Major Lupton reported having permitted the men of his command, marching south of Sudong, to fall out and bathe in a mountain stream. Temperatures were in the fifties, and the sun shone and men stripped to their skivvies, cavorting loudly.

“Considerable grabass,” the major noted amiably.

Two nights later the glass fell below zero for the first time. And kept right on falling. Ten below. Twenty. Twenty-two below Fahrenheit.

“Those thermometers don’t go that low.”

Some did; some didn’t. After a point it became academic. Machinery froze; weapons jammed; rations were inedible; men slowed.

There still remained five weeks of calendar autumn, but already the long, hard winter had taken the Taebaek Mountains and the high tableland and the winding, narrow road into its frozen grasp, not to relinquish it until April or later.

“Be dead by then. Or, better, home.”

That was the conventional wisdom in these first days of the really terrible cold, when men were still capable of humor. And of prodigies of invention.

“Wild Root Crème Oil! That’s the stuff. Gets the bolt action working no matter how cold. Hell of a lot better than gun oil.”

Twenty-five below now. For the first time, the division was counting more casualties from the cold and frostbite than from wounds.

It wasn’t only the Marines who were short of winter clothing or equipment designed to work in this weather. In the west, the Army’s IX Corps attacked north, its objective the Yalu River. Ninth Corps was not considered, even by its own officers, to be a very good outfit, but it went anyway.

As they moved out, it was reported, in one line company all but 12 of 129 men discarded their steel helmets in favor of pile caps. Only 2 men of the 129 had bayonets. Half the men carried entrenching tools; they averaged only one hand grenade per man and sixteen to thirty rounds of ammunition per rifle and carbine.

In a brisk firefight you might fire off sixteen or even thirty rounds in the first minute and a half.

And these were American soldiers about to attack in bad weather in hostile country over mountains and to drive everything before them to the borders of China. Those were MacArthur’s orders.

She loved singing “Sur le Pont” and hearing Poppy sing it to her.

But Kate was, for her age, intellectually curious.

“Do you know other songs?” she inquired of her father.

“Why, yes, I do. Though I’m not much of a singer.”

“Oh,” she protested, and meant it, “but you sing so nice and loud.”

Tom Verity thanked his daughter, rather gravely, and, encouraged by her compliment, did actually sing a few songs he knew and liked and which did not demand much of a voice: “Dixie” . . . “The Music Goes Down and Round” . . . and “Waltzing Matilda.”

“I learned that one in Australia, a long time ago,” and he explained to her what a “swagman” was, and a “billabong.”

Naturally, being a Yale man, though never a Whiffenpoof, he tried her out on their song, “poor little lambs who have lost their way” and all that. But only the repetitive “baa . . . baa . . .
baa . . . ” caught at her attention. Whether she liked a song or not, Kate heard him out, patient and desirous of learning.

Then, she would say, “You know, Poppy, I think ‘Sur le Pont’ is still best.”

He laughed at that and she laughed and then they sang “Sur le Pont” all over again. Loudly, and in French.

The railroad that paralleled the mountain road would soon pinch out. Then they would have only the road, dirt and gravel, a cliff towering above them on one side, a chasm falling off sharply on the other.

“Don’t drive on the shoulder,” Izzo muttered to himself from behind the wheel.

On the higher passes through the mountains, engineer battalions were already at work with ’dozers, grading and trying, where there was elbow room, to widen the road. The big tanks, the Pershings, were too wide to negotiate the tighter bends, and only a handful of the smaller Shermans had as yet gone north toward Hagaru and the reservoir. The remaining North Koreans might still have some of those big T-3 Russian tanks up there, and you didn’t want to fight those with old Shermans. No one knew what armor the Chinese might have.

When the three men rolled into the railhead of Chinhung-ni with its small frame houses dusted with snow, smoke rising from tin chimneys, the big, sagging dun tents, the piles and stacks and scatter of crates and sacks and rolls of wire and other freight just dumped there on the frozen ground, with a background of steep, snowy hills and sparse forest, men moving and lugging stuff, bundled and earmuffed, it reminded Verity of grainy old sepia photos of the Klondike in the time of the gold rush. He asked Tate if it didn’t.

“Well, I guess, Captain,” Tate said, considering the proposition.

Izzo was more enthusiastic. “Jeez, suppose there was gold here, Skipper.” He looked ready to grab a pan and seek out the nearest pebbled stream, staking claims as he went.

Tate regarded Izzo with a certain degree of admiration. “Izzo, no wonder you’re good at selling cars.”

“The best, Gunny. You see a sales opportunity, you grab it.”

“Carpe diem.” Verity felt he should toss in.

“Yessir,” Izzo said. “And you, too, Gunny; whatever the captain said goes double for me.”

Tate just cleared his throat. Izzo took the broad hint.

“Anything you want done now, Gunny? Just say the word.”

“Yes, Izzo, find us a house with a roof and at least three walls and without too many lice or other bugs.”

Izzo was eager to please. In dealing with gunnery sergeants, this was good practice. Neither could he resist the huckster’s snappy retort.

“Wall-to-wall carpeting?”

“Izzz-zohhh!”

It took the Mouse less than an hour.

“A light colonel had his eye on it, Captain, but I hinted strongly it was for General Smith himself. Sort of.”

He’d even found a few chunks of wood and some straw and gotten a fire started. Verity once might have felt guilty about having a roof and a fire while other men huddled out of the wind in open fields, squatting or lying on frozen ground with only a bit of canvas for shelter. Not now. Cold did that to men, reducing them to clever, self-absorbed animals ready to do anything for warmth, almost anything to survive.

Elizabeth had always liked November.

“It’s your birthday and Election Day, which is fun of a different sort, and then there’s Thanksgiving and big football games and the country is lovely with foliage on the turn and maybe the first snow flurries and that’s wonderful as well.”

She wouldn’t like November here quite that much, Verity thought.

“And I can wear the new fall clothes . . . ,” she had added, occasionally the practical woman. Fall. Autumn.

This is fall
, he realized. Winter was still a month ahead. December 21 or 22, something like that. North Korea was still in November, two-thirds of the way through autumn, and they were already losing men to frostbite.

And Elizabeth was a year dead.

The snow fell, whipped by the wind, and Verity shrugged deeper into his old down parka, shoulders hunched against the cold, shivering, wondering if calendars had gone mad or if he were simply a man confused by war.

The snow fell and in the narrow valleys where streams rushed through the bottoms the swift water slowed, grew mushy, and froze hard.

There were things Verity didn’t like about the Marine Corps, never had, but he enjoyed seeing good troops march. Before battles. After a bad fight, troops didn’t walk the same.

K
oto-ri didn’t mean anything to any of them.

“Just another little half-assed Korean town.”

Now they were coming up on Koto-ri and the mountains were higher, and the road steeper and narrower, the weather colder. Far behind them was Hungnam. That was the sea, naval ships standing offshore, an airstrip, port facilities and warehouses and buildings almost Western in their cunning sophistication, some with indoor plumbing. And an ocean view. It was comforting to be able to see blue water when you were a Marine heading off into high mountains with winter coming to fight a campaign against the largest army in Asia. Hungnam was safety; Hungnam was home.

Tom Verity had always liked mountains. He was a skier, not the skier Elizabeth was, lacking her grace and style, but he could get down the hill. He liked the silence of the chairlift going up through the woods and then, briefly, swaying over the rocks at timberline, looking down at rabbit and deer hoofmarks and imagining there might still be a black bear down there in sleep or a bobcat prowling.

Now?

Izzo, for his part, had become excited.

“Look at them Alps!”

Tate prudently snuggled deeper into his parka but otherwise did not seem intimidated.

There was still one pass to get over before Koto-ri, the Funchilin, on some maps thirty-two hundred feet high. By alpine standards, despite Izzo’s enthusiasm, this was nothing. But here in North Korea with the wind coming out of Manchuria and from the vast ice box of Siberia beyond, the November snow was already piled deep and drifting in the pass.

Verity thought,
I wonder what it’s like in true winter.

Thinking that way, he shuddered, involuntarily, his shoulders contracting and jerking upward, his neck vanishing into the parka. Tate, seated behind him with the radio, noticed. And Verity knew he had.

“Sorry, Gunny. Stupid of me.”

“Nosir, it’s cold. It surely is.”

Izzo, intent on the winding road and its slick surface, didn’t know what the two men were talking about.

Tate, shrugging off Captain Verity’s shudder, did not forget it. Sure it was cold. He felt it; they all did. Verity’s behavior was nothing more than a matter of temperatures. Tate hoped that’s what it was.

They rolled into Koto-ri by early afternoon, the radio chattering Chinese, some of it clear, some staticky and distant. Tate wished he knew the dialect and what the hell they were talking about. Verity, who took notes, didn’t say all that much.

Ahead of them, north of Koto-ri, were more mountains, higher still, massive, and looming.

“Reservoir’s up there, Captain,” Izzo said, consulting his map, “another ten miles, I’d say. Over them mountains.”

“Right, Izzo,” Verity replied, trying to reestablish authority and to communicate calm.

In the War, Tom Verity never considered himself a hero. But he’d been cool and efficient under fire, under stress, and in some
fairly dicey situations. He was often afraid; most sensible men were. But they had functioned, done the job, killed the Japanese, and won the War. Even while being scared.

This was a situation of another dimension entirely.

And he knew why. In World War II he was in his twenties and had no child. If he had been killed back then, it would have been sad for him, worse for his parents. If he was killed in Korea, who would care for Kate?

It was that which made the difference. And which frightened him in an entirely other way. Husbands and fathers he concluded, had no business going to war. Combat was for the young and unencumbered. Not for responsible people on whom children they loved relied.

Well, that was stupid. Verity was hardly the only man in the Marine Corps who had a kid.

Which didn’t make things any better or relieve his anxieties. He’d been shaken badly and he knew it.

They drove slowly past working parties of Marines erecting tents and trying, without apparent success, to dig latrines in the frigid earth, and could already see frozen turds here and there on the ground. But that was OK; they would soon be covered by snow.

Verity was relieved that his pen was still working. Maybe ink did freeze; it hadn’t frozen yet.

“Dear Kate,” he wrote.

Madame would read the letter to his daughter. It really didn’t matter so much the words as the spirit of the thing. He assumed sensitivity on the part of Madame.

“There are wonderful mountains and snow, Kate. Quite cold, but we have big warm coats and boots. There are many strange people here and I will tell you all about them one day soon. Someone saw a brown bear that bumped into a tent in the night. You never heard such shouting. The poor bear was scared away. Do you and Madame do your French every day?
I hope so. For when I come home we will have to plan our trip to Paris. I love you, my darling.”

He really did think about their Paris trip. Surely the small bar of the Ritz on the rue Cambon side could arrange a chicken sandwich and a glass of milk.

“I’ll have a martini and you some milk and perhaps Dali in his flowing cape and hat will come in. Or Hemingway.”

He would explain to her then who Hemingway and Dali were. And about martinis. And other inside information about Paris all three-year-old Americans should know. It was healthier thinking about Paris and the Ritz bar and Hemingway than brooding about the reality of where he was and the great hills and this cold that had begun to frighten him.

They weren’t at Koto-ri long; it made no impression. Later, it would.

“Move it; move it; move it.”

Litzenberg was still ahead of them, by now having passed through Hagaru heading northwest for Yudam-ni around the shores of the big lake. Hagaru was a good-sized town with warehouses and two-story buildings and an actual grid of paved streets in a decent-sized valley.

This is the place
, Izzo told himself.
We can do business here.

The Marines were already building an airstrip. Hagaru was the one place north of Sudong and Chinhung-ni flat enough for a real airstrip that could take big cargo planes. Smith was counting on Hagaru. Without telling anyone, he was already planning to fall back on Hagaru if things got sticky up there at Yudam-ni or beyond. Hagaru could be defended, supplied. He was less sanguine about Yudam-ni.

Verity and his two men drew hot rations from the engineer battalion hacking out the airstrip and ate sitting on the warm hood of the jeep, watching the engineers work. It was interesting to see, especially if you didn’t have to do it. The ground was so hard frozen
the pans of the bulldozers could only scrape an inch or two deep at every pass, and then pneumatic drills had to be brought up to crack the frozen earth from the pans so the ’dozers could go back and scrape again.