The Marines of Autumn: A Novel of the Korean War (25 page)

It had taken four days to cover the fourteen miles from Yudam to Hagaru. Colonel Litzenberg’s Seventh Regiment had only one tank left. There was a new Chinese general in the area, Sung Shinlun, a veteran of the famous Long March of 1934-35, and his command now consisted of twelve divisions of Chinese regulars. They fought for every one of those fourteen miles, for every hill, for every ridgeline, for every narrow place in the road. After the firefights the regimental surgeon, a naval officer, said of the Marine wounded, “It was very strange to see blood freeze before it could coagulate. Coagulated blood is dark brown, but this stuff was pinkish.” And the doctors concluded that while some men froze to death, some of the wounded survived rather than bled to death untended because their blood congealed.

Verity and Tate walked beside the jeep while Izzo drove. At one point they had four wounded Marines and one dead man stowed aboard.

“I could do without the stiff, Gunny,” Izzo complained.

“Just shut up, Izzo; you don’t know how cushy you have it.”

And it
was
cushy. Verity agreed with Tate. For all the cold and the exposure and thirst and stomach problems, at least they weren’t humping up and down the hillsides to attack Chinese positions and clean them out so the column could move forward. When Col. Ray Davis’s battalion fell out to assault Fox Hill and resecure the Toktong Pass with a night march through mountains and then a dawn fight, Davis reckoned his men were carrying one hundred and twenty pounds apiece, and this was on a climb through deep snow in the dark. Now, at Hagaru, a good-sized town, there were houses, barns, stores, places with walls and roofs against wind, against the falling, drifting snow. Tate didn’t even bother to scout anymore for lice.

“Doesn’t matter anymore if it’s lousy,” Verity told him, “just so long as we can get warmed.”

“Aye-aye, sir.”

Theirs was just a hut, nothing more, but with four walls and a door and even a broken window. It was fine. Snug. Only a little snow filtered through the chinks, and the roof was sound.

“And there’s an alley right out back,” Izzo enthused, “where you can shit out of the wind.”

That night, exhausted but despite fatigue unable to sleep, Verity lay awake on the earthen floor in the stinking sleeping bag for a long time. Perhaps twenty minutes. Thirty. What time was it now for Kate? he wondered.

In Georgetown it was morning and people woke in warm beds to shake themselves alert before going downstairs to the door, snatching the
Washington Post
or the
Times Herald
from the doorstep, retreating discreetly then, to kitchen or bath, for steaming coffee and fresh juice or back upstairs for a leisurely bowel movement and steamy shower. Such people wore leather slippers and Brooks Brothers PJs and flannel robes of Black Watch plaid.

And not foul trousers smelling of piss and shit and wool undershirts damp with sweat, thawing now in the blessed lee of walls and roof, steam rising from their bodies, crawling into a sleeping bag stiff with filth and body fluids and, here and there, a little blood.

When Verity pulled off his socks they, too, were bloody where the soles of his feet had frozen to the wool and the skin pulled away in tatters and patches. But you had to get wet socks off your feet and pull on dry ones. Otherwise it wasn’t a little skin you lost; it was your feet.

Nor in Georgetown, he realized, were people lousy. Or frostbitten. Or likely to die that day.

“We ought to write a letter to your papa, Kate.”

“Yes, Madame, Poppy would like that. We must tell him that here at home it is sunny and warm. So nice.”

Kate thought.

“And are there French soldiers there, too, with Poppy?”

Madame beamed.

“But of course, and gallant.”

The general was wearing both a shoulder holster and an automatic shoved into the waist of his trousers. . . . That wasn’t Georgie Patton bullshit with ivory-handled revolvers; this was because Oliver Smith knew Chinese soldiers might be coming through here later that night, that the general himself might be not only commanding a division of twenty thousand men but also fighting for his own life. It sobered you
.

H
agaru-ri itself had not been spared during the fighting at Yudam-ni and the first leg of the march south. Once the Chinese cut the MSR south of Hagaru, cutting it in a half-dozen different places, it was obvious to both contending generals, Smith and Peng, that only Hagaru’s airstrip could keep the Marines supplied and fighting until attacks were mounted to smash the Chinese roadblocks and reopen the mountain road. That was when Peng threw in his men against the perimeter hill defenses of the town and against the town itself and its airstrip.

“You can’t frigging believe it!” a Marine marveled as scores of Chinese soldiers rolled dizzily downhill in the snow toward his machine gun, rolling over and over until they reached the Marine lines and instantly sprang up, firing their burp guns and hurling grenades. There was a moon and even this unorthodox tactic failed, as Chinese bodies piled up in the snow in front of the machine guns. Inside the town a large Chinese unit broke through, very close to divisional HQ, only to evaporate in an orgy of looting, ransacking warehouses in search of boots and blankets and warm clothing. Artillerymen and engineers and army troops back
from the north were all thrown into the fight along with the single Marine rifle battalion holding the town. And by the time the Seventh Marines and elements of the Fifth marched in from the north, the Chinese had melted away, leaving only crimson trails in the snow and their dead.

With the airstrip again secure, the big C-47 cargo planes resumed their flights, carrying out the wounded and sick, carrying in ammo and rations and even five hundred fresh Marine reinforcements, a short battalion, and welcome. And along with them came reporters, David Douglas Duncan of
Life
and Maggie Hig-gins among them. Duncan would stay with the Marines the rest of the way. Miss Higgins would not.

Verity was at the airstrip, seizing the opportunity to send out letters to Kate and try to find out what was going on. Then he saw Maggie Higgins.

“Everyone’s trying to get out and you fly in,” he told her.

“Oh, it’s you.”

They were in a big warming tent erected on the margin of the airstrip. The tent was warm enough but sagged, buffeted over and over by the prop wash of the transport planes, and was lighted by Coleman lamps.

She liked his eyes and the intelligence. You encountered many things in a war but not always intelligence. She pulled out a cigarette and he patted his pockets for matches but had none, and she lit it herself, deftly, using a big, battered Zippo.

“I was vague on purpose back there at Hungnam,” Verity said, not apologizing but explaining. “I’m supposed to be a Chinese language expert. It’s something I teach at college. And a good reporter might interpret that as somehow significant. Now, of course, it doesn’t matter. The Chinese seem to have made their intentions clear.”

“A Chinese expert?” she said, sloughing off evasions. “How did that come about?”

“Born there. Lived in China until I was fifteen. My father had a business.”

He smiled at her and she smiled back, as if this were the start of something and not two strangers caught up in chaos.

“And now you’re an officer.”

“Only a captain. A civilian, really. Two months ago I was at Georgetown lecturing on the Ming dynasty. I’m not at all important, Miss Higgins.”

“And I specialize in ‘important’ people?” She knew the gossip about herself.

“You don’t have to be defensive, Miss Higgins,” Verity said mildly. “I meant nothing by it.”

“OK then,” she forgave him.

“How’d you get here? We’re supposed to be trapped.”

“Hitched a ride. I knew a pilot.”

I’ll bet you did
, Verity thought, and disliked himself for it.

She took a few notes and chatted with other men, officers and enlisted both, and then, warmed, she went out to see what else was happening, to count the planes or the stretchers or do whatever it was newspaper reporters were supposed to do in wars. Verity shook her hand and watched her go. Her scent, whatever it was, lingered in the big tent.

Jesus, if
I
can smell her
, Verity thought, she
must have smelled me
.

Marguerite Higgins had been out on the tarmac less than an hour when Chesty Puller came along.

“Is that a woman?” he demanded, knowing it was, and furious.

Puller hadn’t been told of her arrival, and when he first caught sight of her she was doing interviews just off the airstrip, talking with wounded Marines on stretchers or laid out on the snow, waiting for the next plane.

“There’s an active eight-holer over there!” Puller exploded.

Old-school Virginian that he was, Chesty Puller could not accept a woman in close proximity to six or eight Marines sitting on old ammo crates, trousers down around their ankles, smoking and chatting and enjoying a good bowel movement.

“I want her out of here!” General Puller ordered.

Miss Higgins, objecting vigorously, would be aboard the next plane going out. The next day her airstrip interviews with the wounded and the dying ran on page one of the
Herald Tribune
. There was no mention of the eight-holer.

Mouse Izzo, in a philosophical mode, inquired about Chesty. “Does he frigging think women don’t shit?”

Verity had watched her climb into the battered C-47, moving well, her rear end surprisingly shapely considering the cold weather gear she wore.

Twenty thousand Marines were trying to get the hell out and would do just about anything for a ride, and here was this New York newspaperwoman flying in and arguing her right to stay.

Elizabeth. Elizabeth would have argued, too.

Tom Verity wondered, if his wife possessed Miss Higgins’s professional skills, would she, too, have gone off alone to write about wars?

And concluded, yes, had Elizabeth been a journalist, she very well might. And would have looked good, too, in whatever she wore.

Men had different attitudes toward the war correspondents. Some gave them grudging admiration. They, after all, didn’t have to be there. Others hated them. Vultures, circling over the roadside and picking at the dead, earning big money and fame by auditing the casualty rolls.

Verity had his opinion of the correspondents. They saw the war, sworn witnesses to its horror; they took notes, reported as truthfully as they could, chronicling the war. They did everything but fight it.

And why hadn’t Tom Verity sent back via Miss Higgins his letters to Kate?

There were the wounded, the dead, and the missing. And then again, some men just vanished.

The sergeants were forever taking roll call, checking lists, keeping after the squad leaders and fire team corporals.

“. . . Keep an accurate muster. Only way.”

“Yes, S’arnt,” the corporals agreed.

That’s how it went down the line of command from General Smith to the last sore-assed private in the division. Someone was always supposed to know where you were. That was the standard procedure, the Marine routine, the only way you could keep the division from falling apart, becoming a mob like the army.

Still, men disappeared into the night and the snow and the cold, falling out of the line of march to take a crap and never catching up, or turning the wrong way on patrol to end up tired and cold in a box canyon where you might sit down for a few minutes in the snow to work things out in your head and rest a bit, and then . . .

Or being taken by a long shot, freakishlike, from a sniper. Those Marines, too, might never be found if they were out on the flank.

In the spring, maybe the war would be over, with Red Cross people allowed in, and somewhere up in these hills they’d find bones and teeth and know they were Marines from the belt buckles and the weapons, the metal grommets on the canvas leggings, the web gear and canteens, the tin hats and dog tags and Zippo lighters and leather wallets with photos of the kids or old Mom, the Barlow knives and eyeglass frames and religious medals, the things that didn’t rot or rust away under the snow when the men died.

Things that wild animals wouldn’t bother eating.

Izzo was cursing steadily, hopping around, first on one foot, then the other, next to the idling jeep.

“What the hell are you . . .?“

“I was trying to take a leak, Captain.”

“Well, go ahead.”

“With all these clothes and three pairs of pants and skivvies besides, by the time I get my cock out, Captain, begging the captain’s pardon, I forget what the hell I’m going to do with it.”

Tate was the philosopher among them: “You know, Captain, it could be worse.” Tate was heating a canteen cup of cocoa over a meager fire in the lee of the Jeep, and snow was falling. The cocoa was for drinking and the dregs for his every-other-day shave.

Verity didn’t bother to answer, but Izzo, furious, spoke up for him. “Worse, Gunny? It could be worse? You shook or somethin’? Here’s the captain with frozen feet, you’re shaving in cocoa, and I just pissed down my pants leg because it’s too cold to pull out my dick and with you things is just great? Jeeezus.”

Tate ignored him. Instead, since it consoled him, he reached back in history to other wars: “Why, at Stalingrad, Captain, the Germans fought all summer and into fall to take the city and then fought all winter to hold it. Half a million Germans fighting half a million Russians in the ruins of a great city.”

“That’s another thing, Gunny,” Izzo put in. “You come from Kansas or someplace. What do you know of cities, Gunny, not like the captain and me, who come from Washington and Philly?”

“And it was cold there, too,” Tate went on, unperturbed. “I believe the first snow fell on Stalingrad in October and the Germans finally surrendered in February. Five months of winter fighting, a million men on both sides.”

Izzo made a strangled noise of anger. Of disbelief. “You couldn’t fight five months in this shit, Gunny, I don’t care. Nazis, Commies, even Marines. Men can’t do it. They’d just lie down and die first.”