The Marines of Autumn: A Novel of the Korean War (26 page)

Some men had already begun to do just that, Verity knew, lying down at the side of the road in the snow and dying. But he didn’t say anything, just watched Tate shaving in his cocoa and tried not to think about his own feet and how Mouse Izzo had just wet his pants.

They got plenty of people off the tarmac at Hagaru, the wounded and frozen and sick, plus the malingerers, but not without cost. Air Force Capt. Lillian M. Keil, a nurse, wrote of those flights in and return flights out: “We were fired upon and often had to land in slush, which was dangerous because the planes could skid. One of the nurses was killed.”

Captain Keil said of the Marines who came aboard the evacuation flights out: “Their hands and feet were so frostbitten they could hardly hold a gun or walk. . .  We wore hats and gloves and flight suits with fur-lined jackets. I gave my outer clothing to the shivering GIs that came aboard.”

For all the cold and the perimeter fighting and the occasional Chinese foray into the town itself, the nightly firefights, there was something almost quaint about Hagaru.

The airstrip gives us that
, Verity thought.
A link to the other world beyond the hills and the Chinese. In an hour a man could be out of here. In less than an hour a Maggie Higgins could fly in. Then leave as swiftly
.

“You know what it’s frigging like, Captain?”

“No, Izzo, what?”

“You ever see
Lost Horizon?”

“Sure, Shangri-la and Margo growing old and all that.”

“Remember the opening? Ronald Colman is the British ambassador or something and the warlords is killing everyone and Brits and Yanks and mandarins are trying to get out just as the warlords overrun the airport and there’s only one plane going out—”

“ADC-3, as I recall.”

“Right you are, sir, as always,” Izzo said, the quintessential enlisted man deferring to the officer, and then, having observed the niceties, resumed his narrative. “And Mr. Colman is shouting at coolies and he’s got a handgun—”

“A Webley revolver, as I recall.”

“Right again, sir, a Webley.” Izzo understood officers. “And there’s Mr. Colman ticking off names and shoving people into the plane and whacking at the coolies. And of course all the passengers are Westerners . . .  not a slant-eye among them, begging the captain’s pardon.”

“Go on,” Verity said, chillier.

Izzo sensed the rebuke.

“Well, that’s just about it, Captain. This frigging airstrip at Hagaru-ri International Airport reminds me of
Lost Horizon
with old Ronald shoving people into the DC-3 and shooting bandits and whacking at coolies and off they go with the warlords coming, bouncing along the runway as the control tower blows up and the huddled masses, like it says on the Statue of Liberty, are all panicking and running out on the tarmac and the plane lifts off just as a million Chinks—”

“I get the picture, Izzo.”

Captain Verity repressed a grin. “Hagaru-ri International.” That was pretty good. One dirt airstrip gouged out of the snow and the mountain hardscrabble.

Izzo wasn’t easily turned off.

“And I mean millions of them. Whoever made that movie, he knew his mob scenes. They didn’t burn Atlanta in
Gone with the Wind
better than
Lost Horizon
did mobs of guys in coolie suits running down the tarmac.”

“So?” Verity said.

“So the only difference is, instead of Ronald Colman, we got Chesty Puller.”

Tate was off with the jeep to look up fellow gunnies, to find out what they knew, and to scrounge or requisition supplies.

“What I can’t find Izzo can steal,” Tate said. Marines were nothing if not pragmatic.

Verity began seeing the little airstrip at Hagaru as Izzo did, through the eyes of a tired, gallant diplomat shoving people into aeroplanes (and that’s how it would have been spelled back then) before the rebels got there to rape the women and behead the men and sell the children into slavery. Hagaru even had its British, real-live Brits, Marine commandos in their ridiculous berets, carrying Sten guns (or were they Bren guns?) and being polite.

“It’s funny,” Verity said, “even when they’re cursing people out, the British sound civilized.”

Gunnery Sergeant Tate hadn’t seen many Brits before, only a few in prison camp, and he, too, marveled.

“Wouldn’t work in the Marine Corps, Captain. No one would take a first sergeant serious if he didn’t sound pissed off.”

Izzo was making barter arrangements, staring at the British berets.

“I know those hats don’t frigging begin to keep your ears warm, but I could use one of them hats.”

Verity glanced over at the parked jeep to be sure the precious radio was still in place. To barter you had to give something up to get something, and by now he knew Izzo.

There was something else odd about the Brits. Tate saw it, too.

“They don’t look whipped, Captain. Don’t look like they got their ass kicked.”

Well, they had, as just about everyone had, but they didn’t look it. Verity knew exactly what Tate was saying. The British Royal Marine Commandos still looked like soldiers.

You couldn’t say that about many of the American army outfits coming through and only a few of the ROKs.

The Marines were sore about it.

“The ROKs is just shit.” You heard that over and over. Their officers ran even before the men, most of them, and when an officer stood and tried to hold his men, to keep them in position, they ran right over him, sometimes clubbing him to death as they went. Few of the ROKs had weapons; they’d been thrown away. And it was their damned country, wasn’t it?

The American army wasn’t that bad. But the Marines kept having to pull unwounded, able-bodied soldiers out of the queues of wounded waiting to be airlifted out. A few Marines tried that stunt, too, but only once. Some of the soldiers went back again and again. These were the men of the Seventh Army Division. Their division had been broken east of the Chosin and they were the worst. A Marine surgeon reported that if the soldiers just lay down on a stretcher and groaned they would eventually be carried to a plane. One day more than nine hundred “wounded” were flown out of Hagaru. The Marines reckoned maybe seven hundred were legitimate, the rest malingerers.

By December 5 some forty-three hundred casualties, real and imagined, had been airlifted out.

Verity was asked for dinner that night by General Smith. There were maybe a dozen officers in a big tent, and as a captain he was junior in rank. It didn’t stop Oliver Smith from sounding off, having a young captain there. It was pretty comfortable inside the tent, warm, and the food, too, was hot. It was rations, but they were hot.

“Ned Almond didn’t want me to build this airstrip,” General Smith said. “He raised hell. ‘Waste of time and effort and energy,’
he told me. So I stopped telling him about the airstrip and just built it.”

Smith was irate about the performance of American army troops.

“Most of them just threw away their weapons. Then they tried to sneak aboard the medical evacuation planes. And now that they’re here, they refuse to put up tents or organize latrines or even feed themselves. Lazy, undisciplined mob, that’s what they are. They aren’t even soldiers.”

Among the enlisted Marines, who saw the army troops up close, General Smith’s criticism would have been taken as understatement.

Verity felt so good after a hot meal and listening to Smith black-guarding the army that when the smoking lamp was lighted after dinner he pulled out a Havana cigar and, rather showily, smoked it with enormous pleasure before the envious, all of them officers who outranked him.

“You shouldn’t, Captain; you really shouldn’t,” Tate said when Verity got back and told the gunny.

“Well, it’s one of the advantages of being a reserve, Gunny. A career man like you’d be different.”

“Yessir,” Tate said, enjoying the thought of lighting a cigar in front of the commanding officer of the First Marine Division. But disapproving, still, the way regulars always disapproved, at least mildly, of reservists.

The end of May, the same Saturday they ran the Kentucky Derby, was the Virginia Gold Cup in Warrenton, and Tom and Elizabeth Verity drove down for it on Friday, getting there in time for the Gold Cup Ball the night before.

“I wish you could ride, Tommie,” she said. “Maybe you could take lessons.”

“I’d just fall off. Or the horse would fall on me. And what does a horse weigh?”

“A thousand pounds, maybe twelve hundred.”

“Well, I won’t do it. And what do you care anyway?”

“If you could ride, then I could get you one of those wonderful pink coats to wear at the dance, instead of your stuffy dinner jacket.”

The “pink” coats were red, as far as Verity could tell, but everyone called them pink and only men who rode in one of the local hunts were permitted to wear them and, he had to admit, they did look dashing.

The next day it was sunny and there were bookmakers taking bets and chalking them up on portable blackboards and the horses ran around for four miles jumping fences and some of them falling, and people sat on the roofs of the cars to see and the Veritys had their little MG and they met Scotty Reston of the
New York Times
, who lived nearby, and everyone drank a lot and cheered the horses and Elizabeth’s nose got sunburned in the early spring sunshine and she looked very wonderful with her red nose.

They stayed in a country inn with a big bed and drove back home to Georgetown Sunday, and Elizabeth said while they drove and her hair streamed out in the wind, “Let’s have another baby, Tommie.”

“Just one?”

“Well, one at a time.”

With the rifle companies moved up into the hills establishing a perimeter, Hagaru-ri itself was defended by an odd lot of rear-echelon people.

At Yudam-ni the last line of resistance in the town center had been a squad of South Korean policemen with two machine guns. Here the mix was somewhat better organized, not quite as droll.

“Verity, you’ve had a rifle platoon before, haven’t you?”

“Yessir, Okinawa, long time ago.”

The ops officer, a major, was a hard man. “Like riding a bike. You never forget how.”

“Yeah, well, I’m supposed to be here translating Chinese radio traffic for Division. I—” He was damned if he’d volunteer. Yudamni had been different, a last minute desperation. He’d had little choice.

“And I’m supposed to be sitting in a warm tent drawing plans on acetate overlays, Captain. When the Chinese get inside the perimeter you and me and General Oliver himself Smith are going to be playing riflemen like that asshole General Dean down by the Naktong last summer.”

Verity didn’t say anything. It was an argument he couldn’t win, and anyway, he saw the merit in it. At Yudam-ni he’d played rifleman; platoon leader was a promotion.

“Just point me in the right direction, Major.”

The ops officer smiled. “Good. We’re pulling a provisional rifle company together from truck drivers and bandsmen and radio operators and cooks and engineers and company clerks and whatever the hell else we got. You have a good NCO?”

“A gunny. Named Tate. Good man.”

“Then he’s your platoon sergeant. Pick out the squad leaders yourself. I wouldn’t be particular whether they’re sergeants or corporals or PFCs. Just pick your own and let them run with it.”

“I’ll pick riflemen if I can find any.”

“Makes sense.” The major was feeling better about this Verity already.

Last light would be around five in the afternoon. A full colonel whose name Verity never got mustered the makeshift company on the street in front of where Smith had made his divisional HQ and personal quarters as well. There were maybe one hundred and fifty enlisted men, a dozen or so officers. Above the barked orders they could hear an occasional shot echoing down from the hills. There was no snow, but the mercury was falling fast.

“Zero already,” someone muttered. Zero and not yet dark.

“How do they look to you, Gunny?” Verity asked. He trusted Tate’s judgment on the men more than his own. Tate was closer to combat.

Tate sort of wiggled his hand, palm down and flat. “They’re Marines, Captain. About all I can say.”

Bandsmen. Motor transport drivers. Clerks. And we got the Chinese army coming for dinner
. That was what Tate was thinking. But Marine gunnery sergeants do not indulge themselves.

“Well, they’re what we’ve got,” Verity said, remembering fondly his platoon on Okinawa.

He reverted to his staff role during an officers’ meeting called by Oliver Smith at 8:00
P.M.
“We think they’ll hit the perimeter about eleven tonight,” the commanding general said. “We had counter-intelligence people out there all day. It’s quite extraordinary. Either our people are very persuasive or the Chinese just talk too much. But that’s what they said. They’ll hit our rifle companies in the hills about eleven. No information as to whether they’ll come through here as well.”

Verity, standing in the semicircle of officers around Smith, noticed the general was wearing both a shoulder holster and an automatic shoved into the waist of his trousers.