The Marines of Autumn: A Novel of the Korean War (31 page)

“It’s gone,” General Smith was assured. “They blew it late yesterday afternoon. Laid it in the ravine as neat as you’d want. Nice, tidy job.”

This was an engineer officer reporting. Engineers admired competence, even in disasters. Oliver Smith listened carefully. Then he said, “OK, now let’s get ourselves a new bridge.”

Astonishingly, there were such things as “new bridges.” Steel spans barely wide enough to suit a tank’s treads, thirty feet in length. Thirty? The ravine was forty feet at least! No problem, you bolt two twenty-four foot lengths of bridge together, end to end.

For once, the army had them, steel treadway bridge sections, twenty-four feet long, heavy but not so that they couldn’t be dropped by air. Bigger parachutes were hurriedly flown over from Japan. The rear-guard Marines from the reservoir came south with their engineers; other Marines and army engineers came north to meet Puller’s people at the blown bridge and to go to work.

The cargo planes came in as low as they could and dropped four lengths of treadway. Two survived.

“Two is plenty!” the engineers exulted.

The steel spans were trucked the half-mile or so to the ravine and eased out into space, engineers performing high-wire acrobatics, while from the near hills Chinese snipers added to the entertainment, trying to pick off individual engineers swinging out over the void. That demanded a response and the forward air controllers called in a napalm drop on the hills above the road by the ravine. Now all the Chinese were firing, trying to bring down a plane while, south of the broken bridge, Marine howitzers joined in, targeting the hills. By the time the last bridge bolts had been secured, a full-blown, rather brisk firefight was under way.

Now the first trucks ventured out onto the new bridge, moving slow. The treadway spans creaked and bent.

And held.

Up ahead, with the Fifth and Seventh Marines, Oliver Smith breathed more easily. Puller would get out now, too. Wouldn’t have to leave his wounded and guns and vehicles behind. On such slender threads as bridges dropped by air, do men, and armies, live or perish.

They’d come through Koto-ri on the way north to the reservoir, and now they were coming through it again, a mere village between peaks, nothing compared to that thriving metropolis Hagaru. There wasn’t an airstrip long enough to take much more than OYs, small observation planes, two-seaters. Piper Cubs without the bright paint. This was plateau country, a remote steppe ringed by mountains.

It served now as headquarters for Chesty Puller’s First Regiment, acting as rear guard for the First Division and the entire X Corps.

It was the last flat place in the road for fifty miles, until they reached the coastal plain.

His officers came to Puller with the report.

“We have just enough trucks and other rolling stock to get the wounded out, General. Not the dead.”

And there was no way to bring in cargo planes.

Marines who’d come down the terrible road from Yudam-ni and Hagaru looked around now at Koto-ri and shrugged.

“This place ain’t much.”

Had they asked Puller, he might have agreed. At Koto-ri there wasn’t enough of anything. For the living or the dead.

Like Patton, Puller was an educated man. He’d read deeply and widely in history and recalled his Shakespeare,
Henry V
.

“You know,” he remarked one evening to his officers, “all anyone remembers of Henry the Fifth is the fight at Agincourt, the night visits he made to the troops, incognito and cloaked. And then the great speech just before the battle, ‘we happy few, we band of brothers,’ and all that about, Crispin’s Day.”

His officers nodded, even those who hadn’t the slightest notion of what Chesty was talking about, who Henry was. Then Puller went on.

“They forget what came just before. After Henry took Honfleur, he deputizes loyal officers to handle things there and tells them, ‘With winter coming on, we will go to quarters at Calais.’ ”

Chesty Puller looked around him and met looks of appalling blankness.

Ah, well, men don’t read anymore
, Puller thought. And then said, aloud but half to himself, “Calais was the French port closest to England that rather reminds me of our Hungnam, gentlemen, though with distinctions in the architecture and other things.”

“Sir?”

“Nothing,” Puller said. “Just thinking out loud, old man.”

Hungnam meant the sea; it meant safety. Even Chesty was thinking that way now.

There were only a couple of warming tents and huts still standing and little firewood to burn and no fuel to waste, and men lined up in patient, shivering queues, long lines in the wind and snow, much in the way homeless, idle men lined up during the depression for soup or a flophouse cot. And those had been vagrants and rummies or men simply down on their luck. These men queueing up at Kotori
were the officers and men of the United States Marine Corps, with its distinguished and famous history.

Verity, who took his turn standing in the line, remembered Detroit in the late thirties, before the war economy kicked in, when workers laid off by the auto factories shuffled along broke and without hope, trying to sell apples no one wanted, and few could afford, what his father and the editorials and politicians called hard times.

Izzo, who had joined the warming queue an hour or more before Captain Verity, now emerged, oddly glowing, almost cherubic.

“Captain, this ain’t much of a town. I seen small towns before but never one without no gas station. Not until now. But there ain’t a mansion on the Main Line in Philly that stacks up against this here warming tent. Not for cash nor credit.”

“Maybe after the war you could come back, Izzo. Open a car dealership.”

“Water buffalo’s more like it, sir.” He moved away toward where they’d left the jeep to relieve Tate for his turn in the queue.

Another twenty men were allowed inside, and Verity shuffled ahead, closer to the tent, a bearded, unkempt figure with icicles hanging from his matted hair and upper lip. He knew how he looked, like a bum at a soup kitchen. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was that he would soon get out of the cold.

And once you’d been inside for a few minutes and the steam started to rise from the men and their layers of muffled, stained, discolored clothes, you caught the smell, the reeking stench.

Near Verity a man retched and threw up, the vomit thin, as sour as bile.

“We do have ourselves a time in the Crotch, don’t we?” someone remarked, drawing a rough laugh.

What the hell else could you do? It was laugh or lie down in your own filth and die.

Then Verity’s thirty minutes in the charnel house were up. He passed Tate coming in as he went out.

“Nice and warm, Gunny,” Verity said, “cushy.”

“Good to hear, sir.”

Tate looked frozen and Verity concluded there was no point in ruining his day. He’d smell the place soon enough.

Chesty Puller didn’t have to use the communal tent. He was a general officer and they had a pyramidal tent for him, and it was to this tent he now summoned his staff. Specifically to consider the dead, whose bodies were stacked like cardwood behind the big warmup tent.

It wasn’t snowing. But across the brief flats of Koto-ri and down the circling hills and through the coulees and little runs where streams ran in the summer, snow blew off the ground horizontally across ice and hard-packed brown earth tough as cement and scoured clear of snow by the awful wind. Up the road from them a respectable mile or three north was the Chinese army, trailing the Marine column, specifically trailing Puller’s rear guard, ready to pounce but wary, so often and so terribly bloodied in the fights of the last ten days.

December 8. The Feast of the Immaculate Conception. It wouldn’t be winter for two more weeks.

“You can’t dig graves, General,” Puller was told.

Puller hated to be told a thing couldn’t be done. But the heavy equipment, the big ’dozers and front-loaders, had already gone south or been blown up to deprive the Chinese. That was what rear guards did, got out what they could and burned and blew up the remainder. It took a certain destructive streak to be a successful rear guard. They called it scorched earth; that was what it had been called since Ney’s time. Perhaps since Xenophon’s.

“I won’t leave the dead to the wild dogs.”

That was Puller. He wouldn’t abandon his wounded; he wouldn’t betray the dead. Nor to the Chinese. Nor to dogs or whatever else hunted foul-breathed in these damned mountains.

Verity had served under and with fine men, good Marines, had commanded some and more than a few. Was there ever a better gunny than this Tate? He’d been sure of Tate almost from the first, when they met at Kimpo Airfield. But Mouse Izzo? He’d had his doubts about the Mouse. So had Gunny Tate. And with reason. But Izzo, too, had turned out fine. Maybe better than fine.

“Where’s your lieutenant?” Puller inquired
.

“Got killed, Colonel. I took the platoon.”

“Good for you, Sergeant. That’s what God made sergeants for, since getting killed is what lieutenants do best. Having been a lieutenant once myself, I can testify to that.”

“Yes sir, Colonel,” the sergeant said, while around him men grinned
.

T
hen, in all the lengthy chronicle of horror during the march out, the most terrible thing happened.

Puller buried his dead.

For all the hardness and the stiff back, Chesty Puller was nur-turing and loving, jealous of men’s lives in his care. And that was why he did what he did in the snow at Koto-ri.

“Come now, old man,” Puller said to his executive officer, the man who would command the regiment if Chesty fell. “You know it must be done.”

There was no way to carry the bodies out. And you couldn’t just leave them behind. It was one reason Marines fought so well, knowing if they took a hit, they wouldn’t be left where they fell.

At last count there were 117 dead at Koto-ri, mostly Marines, a few army troops and British Royal Marine Commandos, a couple ROKs, all of them laid out now in the open, shrouded only by snow.

“Fly them out?” someone asked. A stupid question. They couldn’t even fly their wounded out of here, not as they’d done from the big strip at Hagaru.

“We’ll bury them here,” Puller said. When Puller said things like that, those were orders.

The small bulldozers they still had were put to work and had been digging now for two hours, and one of them had already broken its steel pan. Just snapped it in the cold. And the little earth and rock and ice the remaining ’dozers scraped up had to be chipped off the pans with pneumatic drills. It had been twenty-five degrees below zero Fahrenheit at dawn; had not warmed up much since.

“General, if we had some shaped charges, we could dig holes with them.”

Puller brightened. The demolitions officer was hustled up.

“Not a one, sir. No real need for shaped charges unless you’re going up against fortified positions, bunkers and pillboxes and the like.”

Puller never indulged his temper when a man told the truth.

“All right, that’s good sense. Should have thought of it myself, old man. Thanks for your time.”

Other schemes were briefly floated and rejected, as empty as Ponzi’s promises. Puller, impatient with failure and intolerant in general, grew restless.

“Colonel?” Some couldn’t break habits or get used to Chesty’s new rank.

“Yes, old man?”

It was a master sergeant, one of Puller’s favorites, leathered and gnarled.

“They got root cellars under some of these huts, Colonel. Below the frost line, to store potatoes, turnips, and such.”

Puller brightened, the corners of his flat, turned-down mouth lifting and widening in a gorgeous smile.

“Now that, by God, is creative thinking.” And not by some paint-fresh young officer but by an enlisted man with a little time on him. “Knock down the huts and blow the cellars out. Large and deep as you need.”

“Yessir.”

It didn’t take any time at all for the bulldozers to flatten the
flimsy village huts of stucco and wood and straw and to clear the ground all about and for working parties of Marines to empty and tidy up a bit the blown root cellars beneath.

The bodies handled easily, the 117 of them, stiff as telephone poles, neat, too, with no bodily fluids running or leaking out, not in this cold, just as if they’d been gutted and embalmed by the finest morticians at Campbell’s of Madison Avenue. It had begun to snow again, and in the early afternoon, the light was already fading. Puller wanted to get out of Koto-ri by tomorrow’s dawn at the latest, what with the Chinese again cutting the road south and edging closer to his rear from the north, but impatient as he was, Chesty wasn’t going to rush the dead.

A funeral detachment was rounded up, Verity and his men among them, and mustered in the wind on the snowy field sur-rounding the place where the huts had been and where the root cel-lars gaped brown and open, not yet drifted over. The surviving officer of the Royal Marine Commandos and several of the officers from army units were fetched. There was even a ROK major they’d corralled somewhere.

“We’ll have a squad of riflemen,” Puller told one of his staff.

“Yessir.”

Then Marines, four to a body, came up and laid the dead in, side by side, each laid flat, not just tumbled in, as straight as frozen limbs would permit. When they were all in their graves, the several hundred men on the field of Koto-ri were called to attention.

“Fire!”

A dozen rifles fired into the air. Then again. Then once more.

There was no bugler to play taps. A bugler couldn’t put his lips to metal in this cold without their freezing to the mouthpiece.

Verity stood between Tate and Izzo in the snow, saluting. He felt bad about looking so cruddy. At a Marine funeral an officer ought to be smart.

“Fill ’em in!” the engineer officer shouted, and the bulldozers came up again, lowering their steel pans to shove frozen earth and rock and ice blasted out from the cellars atop the Marines laid out below the snowy ground. Puller had the tanks roll up then, clanking
and creaking, motors screaming in low gear, headlights on, making cones of light through the falling snow, and then, two or three abreast, the tanks ran back and forth slowly over the graves, grinding frozen earth flat beneath the treads, sealing in the dead under their steel tracks.