The Marines of Autumn: A Novel of the Korean War (18 page)

Oliver Smith sank his head deep into the collar of his parka against the chill as the jeep sped north, a driver, a general, and two bodyguards with automatic weapons celebrating the Pilgrims’ first harvest in Massachusetts Colony.

Thanksgiving Day was cold and clear at Yudam-ni, and Verity and Tate took turns sitting in the jeep tuning the radio and watching Marines play touch football on a patch of flat ground. Where they got a football wasn’t quite clear, but they played with vigor and much shouting, and the occasional cry of foul for leaving your feet to throw a block.

“In 1916 on the Somme,” Tate said, “when the English went over the top, someone tossed out a soccer ball and they kicked it toward the German trenches.”

“They get there?”

“No, sir. They attacked at dawn walking into the sun and lost sixty thousand men killed and wounded that first morning.”

“Well,” Verity said, “there’ll never be another war like that. Men won’t allow it to happen; men just won’t do it, not like that. Not ever again.”

He’d read that somewhere. Now where the hell . . . ? Then, he remembered.

“Scott Fitzgerald wrote that,” Verity said. “Or something close. When Dick Diver took them on a guided tour of the old battlefields in
Tender is the Night. . . .”

“Yes, sir,” Tate said, not entirely sure just who “Dick Diver” might have been. It was Tate’s experience that men would always do stupid things. In wars or not. It was their nature.

When the football game was over, a padre drove up and said mass with an altar cloth spread over the hood of his jeep. Maybe a hundred men attended. The priest wore incongrous red earmuffs throughout and his vestments flapped loudly in the wind, but Verity wished, not for the first time, that he had a religion he believed in and practiced. It seemed a comfort to men who did.

“You pray, Gunny?”

“Yessir, I surely do. Always have. Don’t get much to church, but I’m a great one for praying. Helped get me through the prison camp, I believe. Men stronger and healthier than me died who had no belief in anything bigger than themselves. Makes you think.”

By Captain Verity’s reckoning from radio traffic and the unit numbers and commanders’ names he fed into G-2, the First Marine Division now received back from Almond’s corps headquarters this estimate: “There are eleven Chinese Communist Forces divisions in your area.”

That was November 24. Two days later the Marines got this updated message: “There are now fourteen CCF divisions in your area.” General Willoughby over Thanksgiving dinner had told Smith he faced only a Chinese “screen.”

Oliver Smith looked around at his staff, at the stunned look on even hardened faces.

“For what we are about to receive,” he said quietly, “let us be duly grateful.”

The following day the count of CCF divisions surrounding the Marines had risen to sixteen. Nothing Verity heard suggested this was exaggeration.

They had fashioned a campfire somehow, which was a feat, considering the scarcity of trees, and Colonel Fleet, who was in a mood to chat, and Verity sat warming by it while other men hunkered deep in sleeping bags laid directly on the snow or, the fortunate ones, on pneumatic mattresses inflated by mouth and providing a luxurious insulation.

Colonel Fleet was talking. About the Corps, which surly enlisted men sometimes called the Crotch, but for which Fleet manifested a fierce love. Verity had heard words like these before, much of it grandiose crap. But when Colonel Fleet said them, there was a difference.

“We’re a ferocious little confraternity, we Marines. A violent priesthood. You aren’t simply enrolled but ordained. If I ever become commandant, which is hardly likely, along with those first gleaming gold bars every new second lieutenant will be anointed with holy oils and prayed over, while superior officers wash his feet, symbolic of Jesus with his apostles just before he died. Incense rising and choirs chanting.”

“Yes, well . . . ,” Verity said, a bit ashamed to know so little of religion. He agreed the Corps was a magnificent body of fighting men, but a lot of bullshit went along with it. Though not, he hastened to correct himself, that Fleet was talking bullshit. The colonel took Captain Verity’s silence for encouragement. This was at Yudam-ni, with Verity temporarily on Fleet’s staff.

“Read the New Testament, Verity, especially the Gospels. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. You could be reading the
Guidebook for Marines.

He was a southerner, a VMI man like Puller, like so many of them in the Corps, and had an easy grace. “We could have done worse than hooking up with this outfit,” Verity told Tate in the morning, and the gunny agreed.

“They have a good feel to them, Captain, and it ought to be cushy once we get to know them.”

They never got to know some of them.

The first Marines off the hill had a couple of Chinese prisoners, small, glum-looking men in their padded cotton suits. One of them had no left arm, and the side of his uniform was rusty with dried blood. “Sumbitch won’t die,” one of the Marines accompanying him said in wonder. “Must of been the cold stopped the bleeding.”

I
t was November 26 that Eighth Army, as military historian Joseph Goulden would later write, began falling apart. There was one startling victory in a sea of defeats, routs, flights, and panic. The five-thousand-man Turkish Brigade, in Korea only a few days and without orientation or acclimation, with no South Korean interpreters or American advisers and guides, was rushed into action by a desperate Gen. Walton “Johnny” Walker. ROK regiments were throwing down their weapons and running, entire regiments, not just a few men here and a platoon there, leaving adjacent. American units with their flanks in the air and the Chinese coming on. The American Second Division seemed especially imperiled, and it was to its flank that they hurriedly ordered the Turks, with their reputation for ferocity and martial ardor.

It worked. Meeting the onrushing Chinese face-to-face, the Turks not only held their ground and turned back the enemy with bayonets; they also captured hundreds of Chinese prisoners. The Second Division rushed its interpreter, a South Korean lieutenant, to question the Chinese POWs. The “Chinese” turned out to be South Koreans, survivors of a ROK regiment attempting to flee
south, survivors then mowed down by the ferocious Turks. All the dead and captured “Chinese” were South Korean allies of the Turkish Brigade.

There was a sort of retribution the very next day when the Turks encountered authentic Chinese and were themselves nearly wiped out. It took only a day for the proud Turk Brigade to be smashed. That’s how fast the Chinese were moving and how good they were.

“No one ever accused Almond of being lazy. Or lacking guts.”

No
, thought Oliver Smith,
or of having good sense.

It was morning at Hagaru, November 27, and Almond had ridden a jeep sixty miles north from Hungnam to see Smith as his Marines jumped off from Yudam-ni toward the west to link up with Johnny Walker’s hotly involved Eighth Army. It was the second day of the renewed CCF attack, and Eighth Army was already in travail. That’s why the Marine offensive was crucial, so it might relieve Eighth Army by drawing off major Chinese units.

Fourteen or fifteen miles to the north, as Smith and Almond conferred, the Fifth Marines under Murray moved out on the attack. It was zero degrees Fahrenheit, with heavily falling and wind-whipped snow that blinded the advancing infantrymen as well as grounding the planes and masking the artillery forward observers. One rifle company commander reported: “Canteens burst; plasma and rations freeze solid; mortar base plates crack in the cold; carbines and most BARs are inoperable. Only the machine guns and rifles are working.”

In sixteen hours of tough fighting the regiment had gained only fifteen hundred yards and suffered heavy casualties. And they were still within the town limits of Yudam-ni, where they had started.

Not even Smith realized it, but they were fortunate not to have advanced farther. That night the CCF attacked in overwhelming force on both shores of the reservoir, against the Fifth and Seventh Marines in the west and MacLean’s regimental task force on the other bank in the east.

The night attack surprised Smith, surprised them all. He expected the Chinese to break off and take a breath after fighting all day. They didn’t.

Verity had not fired a shot in anger at another man in five years. Okinawa, the summer of ’45. Despite what he told Elizabeth, he had shot plenty then and always in anger. Then a few times, less angry, up in North China, sometimes to frighten off or impress and not always to kill. That was the winter of ’45-’46. So for almost five years no shooting, nothing. Not unless you counted that one time a man he knew on the Eastern Shore had several of them come up for the goose shooting on Chesapeake Bay. Verity could handle a shotgun, but he lacked bird-shooting experience and kept missing the goose, shooting fore or aft of the bird as it flew in and then over them as they shot from the blind. He didn’t know how fast a goose really flew so could not lead properly with the shotgun.

But he knew how to lead a man. He knew how fast a man moved and precisely how far out front of him to aim.

Nor had he been shot at in anger (is there any other way?) for five years. Be fair about it: everything was a trade-off. Yet you never forgot the sound, the whine of the ricochet, the delayed, distant crack of a weapon, the sound that reaches you after the bullet is past, the extremely odd realization that someone you don’t know and have never met just attempted to end your life, and the blissful knowledge that you have, and literally, dodged the bullet.

Now, in late November of 1950, he again was exchanging shots.

There were ranging shots first, from the 61mm mortars, and overhead fire by machine guns, long-range and ineffective. Then there were rifle shots, scattered and then steadier, more intense. The sound came mostly from the east, from the shores of the big lake. Was that it? Were the Chinese coming across the lake? Trouble was, it was snowing, hard, dry, wind-driven snow, cutting visibility almost to nothing.

“Let’s get ready, Gunny!” Verity shouted. “We could be in the middle of this!”

“Aye-aye, sir.”

How do you fight as an infantryman in snow so heavy you can’t see fifty yards ahead? They didn’t teach you that at the Marine Corps Schools, Quantico, Virginia, where all Marine officers are trained before they are sent out to command.

Verity wished there had been such lessons.

In snow this heavy the attacking Chinese could be among you before you knew it. That’s when their burp guns worked to good effect, in close. The Marines, with their superior rifles, had the advantage at a distance, two or three hundred yards, even more.

In the snow of the Chosin in November, you might not be able to see thirty yards.

Not now when during a blizzard the Chinese army launched its attack on the village of Yudam-ni. Now, having fought all day, without backing off for food or rest or rearming, they were counterattacking, challenging the Marines on their own ground.

These are good troops
, Gunny Tate thought.
This is not the minor leagues we are playing in.

In Washington, as elsewhere, the Christmas decorations had gone up at commercial enterprises at Thanksgiving. Kate, seeing the coverage on television, asked to be taken downtown to observe the wonders.

Madame was unsure. What would Mr. Verity have done? The mother, as she understood it, was a Jew. Just how was the child being raised?

In the end, acting
in loco parentis
(and wanting to see the stores herself), she took Kate to Garfinckel’s and to Woodward & Lothrop and to any number of lesser stores and shops where they enjoyed the holiday windows and the Christmas displays and encountered, dizzyingly, any number of Santa Clauses, even a few who actually looked the part.

Kate wondered if they also decorated stores in
Koree
, using the French pronunciation.

“Korea,” Madame corrected her, giving the pronunciation in English. She assumed they did.

“And are there many Santas there as well?”

“I think so.”

“Why were there so many Santas?” Kate wondered, and wished Poppy were here so she could ask him.