The Marines of Autumn: A Novel of the Korean War (17 page)

Verity, hardly as comfortable as he looked, was wondering the same thing, wondering if they were, just how he would handle it.

While Tate, who had been a prisoner before in Asia, angrily rejected the idea of ever being one again.

Maybe the wind was worse than the snow or the cold.

“It comes out of Siberia,” Tate said. “Not a hundred fifty miles from here to Siberia.”

“That’s Russia, ain’t it?” Izzo said.

“That’s Russia,” Tate agreed.

Izzo laughed. “Hell, we finish off these Chinamen, we go a hundred fifty miles north and start up with the Russkis.”

“Sure, Izzo, sure.”

Verity didn’t really think they need go looking for further difficulties.

When the wind came it scoured the road clear of loose, dry new snow and left it a glistening, ribbed, shining, rutted ribbon of ice off which the sun, when it shone, bounced, blinding the men and reflecting off Izzo’s mirrored glasses like theatrical spotlights. The ice was steel-hard, even in the sun, at those temperatures, and the deeply cut rubber tread of snow tires spun helplessly on the up-inclines and ran madly out of control on the way down, so that men were drafted into service as draft animals might have been, pushing the skidding trucks uphill and hanging onto them, feet planted and skidding on the way down.

“You men, get on that there truck; grab hold; pull!”

The sergeants drove them. But who drove the sergeants? Men with frozen feet shuffled obediently to push or heave against a fender, a bumper, the tailgate of a laboring, careening truck.

Even tracked vehicles skidded wildly.

The sergeants shouted at them, too, and the tank drivers, perched a dozen feet above in the open turrets, shouted and cursed back.

Nothing was accomplished, the tanks and motorized guns too heavy for even a dozen men to make much difference pushing up or braking down, not on the ice, not on the inclines, and every so often they lost a truck or a howitzer, memorably once a tank, or a jeep, and watched it slide and bounce away down the side of a mountain toward the ravine and frozen stream below, men leaping off at a great rate, rolling or sliding downhill on the snow until they came up against a rock or a tree and stopped with a sudden whack. Incredibly, except for a few men they lost in this way, most of the Marines crawled or climbed their way back up the slope to the road to continue the journey as pedestrians, sore and limping and cursing long and steadily against their fate.

“Does the men good to curse,” Tate remarked. “Healthy to let off a little steam.”

“It does,” Verity agreed, and concluded that if he thought it would help him even one bit, he would let off a power of oaths.

Izzo made up for him.

It was an empty country.

There were few farms or anything that resembled grazing land, no orchards laid out. Once you got away from the coastal littoral and the land climbed, there wasn’t much of anything, roads, villages, power lines or telephone poles, bridges, conduits. Only a few huts here and there between the towns, and the towns were nothing much, eight or ten miles apart. No central market town as you might expect. The hills were formally called the T’aebaeksan Range, and there were traces here of hunters and little else.

Was it climate denuded the place, the cold and wind out of Siberia and Manchuria, or that the soil was barren? There was no lack of water, and plentiful water usually meant people. Or had the Japanese in their forty years of occupation shifted population elsewhere? Or just killed them?

Tom Verity was accustomed to another Asia, a-teem with people, so many there was never sufficient land or water or timber or food. Or anything. In the Asia he knew, China, they killed off girl children to hold down the size of families and blunt famine. They weren’t supposed to, but they did. Japan, too, was overcrowded. He knew that from books. And don’t even talk of India or Burma or Siam or French Indochina or the East Indies.

In all the vast continent only Tibet and Mongolia were as empty as North Korea. Only here and in such places was the country left over to the wind and the snow and the cold. And to men who used these places as killing grounds.

Yudam-ni sat in a bowl ringed by seven-thousand-foot mountains.

Verity reported to Colonel Fleet, who had the point battalion of the regiment.

“We’re the meat on the end of the stick, Captain,” Fleet said. “They’ve got us out here poking at the Chinese just to see who bites. We might just get eaten.”

“I was told to join the lead battalion, Colonel. The closer I can get, the better radio reception.”

Fleet was a lieutenant colonel, a regular, a dry, slender man nearing forty who had few illusions.

“That’s fine. Just don’t get too far out. I can’t spare people to bring you back if you hit trouble.”

“Colonel, I’m staying right here with battalion headquarters if it’s OK with you. I have absolutely no heroic tendencies.”

Fleet permitted himself a small smile. The two men understood each other.

It was snowing again and they sat on camp stools inside Fleet’s tent. A stinking oil stove made the interior smoky but relatively warm. Verity was glad for a chance to thaw.

“If you can give me the general situation, Colonel, it’ll help me make more sense of what I’m hearing of the Chinese traffic.”

“Sure. This regiment is just west and farthest north of anyone in the First Marine Division. And my battalion is the point. My job is to probe north looking for Chinese, just patrols. They’ve got orders to scram back home the minute they encounter Chinese. Grab a prisoner if they can, but come home. I’ve got other patrols out sidling west. They’re supposed to contact elements of Eighth Army, if and when. Trouble is there’s a spine of mountains running between us and Eighth Army. A dozen men moving light can get across those mountains. But you’re not going to move trucks and artillery and such over those mountains. Not in this snow. So the whole business of maintaining contact with Eighth Army is just slightly surreal. In case of trouble X Corps can’t do a damned thing for the Eighth Army and Eighth Army can’t do a damned thing for X Corps, which means the Marines. Clear?”

“Yes.” Verity liked plain speaking, and except for that “surreal” line, Fleet spoke plain. He also permitted himself a jab at MacArthur.

“For the life of me, and it may literally come down to that, I can’t understand what the hell General MacArthur was thinking about when he divided this army in high mountains where the two elements of the army can’t possibly support each other.”

“I don’t understand it, either. But my orders deal only with developing intelligence on how many Chinese may be out there and just what they’re going to do.”

“You got a cigarette, Captain?”

“You’re welcome to a cigar.” Verity pulled one out and the colonel was really grinning now.

“I keep trying to stop smoking to please my wife. She thinks it’s bad for me. Up where we are right now I say the hell with that. Up here everything’s bad for me.” An enlisted man came in and asked if the two officers wanted coffee. As they sat drinking it, steaming hot and bitter black, Fleet said, “Funny, but coffee always smells better to me than it tastes.”

“Yeah.”

“And speaking of that,” Fleet went on, “the first time you smell Chinese food, Captain, pull back.”

General Smith had told Verity the same thing. He wondered who wrote their lines. Maybe Bob Hope, back at Wonsan, one hundred miles and a century ago.

This was a good group of officers. You could tell that right away. A bad one stood out, not so much in what he did or who he was but in how the others sort of edged away from him, not wanting to catch whatever it was.

Up in North China it had been like that, too, Verity remembered. A good group. And there was Schiftler, the bad apple. No one could really put a finger on why except he was pious and smarmy and somehow slick. But Verity remembered how drunk everyone got that first night after Schiftler was sent home. Happy drunk. They didn’t even mind that they were marooned up in North China in winter fighting bandits while that bastard Schiftler was heading back to the States.

“Hell,” someone remarked, “we got lucky. Feel sorry for America.”

Here in Korea so far, they all seemed to be OK, and Verity had not yet smelled a bad one among them.

Izzo was a master at scrounging and Tate carried the gravitas of a gunnery sergeant, and between them they confiscated a small house.

“Only a few bugs, Captain,” Izzo said enthusiastically, “and they’re all dead, froze. I’ve seen lots worse.”

They parked the jeep out front and installed the radio inside. The house had one room and no running water or toilet, but there was a sort of combination fireplace and oven and they got a fire going. Except for the dead bugs, it was pretty cushy. There were majors, even colonels, sleeping under canvas, and Captain Verity had this house. And with a fire.

“I could frigging get used to this, Gunny,” Izzo admitted, “if we could pick up the Eagles game on the radio Sunday.”

Instead, they picked up more Chinese.

“What do you make of it, Verity?” General Smith asked. He’d flown in to Yudam-ni by chopper from Hagaru for an officers’ meeting. Verity gave his report, drew certain conclusions, tried as best he could to answer Smith’s questions.

“It’s all very strange,” the general said.

It was that. It was the quiet that worried them; an army as big as the Chinese ought to make noise. They certainly had for a time there:

In late October the Chinese entered the war in large numbers and with extraordinary ferocity. Forty miles from the Chinese border, a ROK battalion of the Sixth Division encountered a large detachment of Chinese and was routed. The next morning the Chinese fell upon a regiment of ROKs, which promptly abandoned all its vehicles and three artillery batteries. On the twenty-eighth, in the same area, another ROK regiment was committed. U. S. air cover supported the regiment during an all-day fight. Once night screened the Chinese from air attack, they smashed the ROKs. Of 3,500 officers and men in the regiment, 875 escaped. By the next day an entire ROK Corps had been driven back forty miles. And it wasn’t just the ROKs. The American First Cavalry Division, near Unsan, was to have its turn. To the din of brass bugles and whistles and truck-mounted rocket fire, the Chinese attacked. All day long on November 1 the lines bent and swayed and held. But by November 5 one entire American battalion had ceased to exist. All along the line the Chinese attacked. By the end of the first week of November the UN drive to the Yalu had been halted or driven back almost everywhere.

Then, and this was the strange thing, the Chinese just melted into the hills.

“Any new theories on that, Verity?” Oliver Smith asked.

“No, sir. Not one.”

“MacArthur continues to think they came in to make a political point, to sound a warning, and having done so, they’ve gone back home.”

There was some discussion of that. On November 2 the Chinese announced over their own radio that the men in Korea were “volunteers.”

“You don’t buy that, Verity,” Smith said.

“No, sir. The division and regimental and corps numbers we’ve gotten so far are all regular army. Organized as divisions and corps. So if these are ‘volunteers,’ they ‘volunteered’ unanimously and in volume.”

“Maybe they just ran short of ammo and food and pulled back to regroup.”

It was agreed that was possible.

The division’s intelligence officer read from a report. It was considered odd that while North Korean troops routinely shot wounded POWs through the head rather than burden themselves with enemy casualties, the Chinese were reported to have provided medical attention to ROK and American wounded. It was clinically primitive, but it was as good as the treatment their own wounded were getting.

“That sounds like regular Chinese army stuff, General,” Verity offered, “not ad hoc, not what you’d expect of a bunch of volunteers.”

“I agree on that.”

Smith wasn’t windy, whatever else he was.

Ned Almond entertained his generals, hosting a Thanksgiving dinner at Hungnam. Linen tablecloths and napkins, silverware, good china, saltshakers, and pepper mills. Every appointment but finger bowls.

MacArthur flew over and presided. The Mikado. Maggie Higgins was there and some of the other media pets. MacArthur said grace and piously asked the blessing. His intelligence chief, Willoughby, was very smooth, urbane.

Almond spoke ripely of a last, triumphant drive north to the Yalu. And to China.

Gen. Oliver Smith, of the Marines, whose division was extended over thirty miles of snow-covered mountains and who had six CCF divisions in his neighborhood, lacked appetite and left early, pleading an early dusk and a long drive.

“Of course, General,” Almond said, “and my compliments to your command.”

In the jeep heading back north from Hungnam, Smith thought how he despised Willoughby, who continued to insist the main Chinese weight was to be found in the west, opposing Eighth Army. Over dinner he had said, “There’s nothing opposite you, Smith, but a screen. You’ll brush them aside. A skirmish line will do it.”