The Marines of Autumn: A Novel of the Korean War (35 page)

But the words, so familiar, were gentle. Not the usual bark.

“Right, Gunny.”

Izzo replaced the glasses after rubbing a chapped, dirty fist into his eyes.

The engine kicked in and the little car moved ahead.

Kate Verity ran to the window.

“The first snow!”

And it was. Georgetown’s first of the season.

Madame came at her excited call and joined in exclamation at the beauty and wonder of it.

“Oh, I wish Poppy could see it. He loves snow, too. And we could get out the sled and he could pull me.”

“We shall get out the sled, Kate, and I will pull you and then you will pull me. We will take turns.”

“Oh, yes,” the child said, clapping hands and, for the moment and in the joy of a first snow, forgetting her father.

The three of them came down out of the hills nearing Hamhung, and the road was smoother, mostly paved and downhill. There was plenty of traffic, enough to draw MPs urging drivers along and giving hand signals, irritating people and throwing their weight around.

“MPs,” Izzo said, disgusted.

The traffic was trucks and jeeps and occasionally a tank or even a big gun, a 105 or a 155 howitzer being towed along. Marines rode on the tanks, hitching rides, and the trucks were filled and so were the jeeps. Almost no one walked now. There were a few new dead, men freshly killed at Sudong or along the road in ambush and men who had died of cold or old wounds, over the last few days, their bodies stacked in the trucks, occasionally tied snug across the hood of a jeep. It was all very neat and antiseptic.

“Cold storage,” Izzo said.

They’d shed their own bodies north of here, at the rail depot of Chinhung-ni, including one without an arm. Izzo had been glad to get rid of that one. “I like to keep a tidy vehicle,” he told Tate, even though, in all fairness, the stump’s coagulated blood hadn’t made that much of a mess.

They carried only one body now, Verity’s, and they had him up in the front seat, slumped over slightly as if napping during the drive.

“It looks nicer, Gunny, than having the captain stretched out like just another stiff, you know what I mean?”

“I surely do, Izzo. He looks fine, sitting there like that.”

This wasn’t just a concern for Captain Verity’s appearance. Tate and Izzo had been having it out even before they came down from the last of the hills onto the coastal flats and while Hamhung was still only a smudge of smoke on the horizon. The sea was beyond that and they knew it was there, but they couldn’t see it. Not yet.

“I don’t want to turn him in with the rest of the stiffs, Gunny. Let’s take the captain right into Hungnam down by the port so they’ll be sure to get him aboard ship and the hell out, so they can’t plant him here.”

“Izzo, they got regulations. There’s MPs all the way from here on in, you know that, directing units and checking off numbers. We’re back, Izzo: this ain’t the war no more. It’s garrison duty and you do what they damn well tell you to do. We could get away with stuff up there fighting in the hills. Not here.”

As he spoke, Tate realized something terrible, that already he missed the war.

“Morgue’s up ahead. Turn left in about three hundred yards.”

That was another MP, waving them along.

Now Izzo became urgent.

“Look, Gunny, we keep the captain, see, and take him right into Hungnam. We leave him here who the hell knows what happens when the Chinks get here . . ?”

“He doesn’t like you calling ’em Chinks, Izzo. The captain is very particular about that and you know it.”

“OK, sorry. But them Chinese ain’t maybe eighteen hours behind us and coming quick. These army troops I see manning the perimeter around here couldn’t stop Steve Van Buren and the Philadelphia Eagles, never mind we got a dozen Chinese divisions coming.”

“So what?”

“So, I don’t want Captain Verity left here in Hamhung, dead and unable to help himself none, when the army is bugging out and him feeling the way he did about being buried in Korea.” The words tumbled out until, winded, Izzo paused. Then, more slowly, “So I think we just drive into Hungnam with the captain and see that he’s properly treated, as befits a man like him.”

Tate inhaled. He remembered Verity at Koto-ri, how the captain had looked and what he had said, about “no one needs tank treads mashing him under, dead or alive, Gunny.”

“Nosir,” Tate had said, very much in agreement.

After a bit, thinking it was the least they could do, Tate said crisply, “OK, Izzo, we take the captain into Hungnam.”

As the troops poured through the market town of Hamhung and into the port of Hungnam, secure now under the naval guns and the close air support, all those jets screaming overhead and low, and freed of the narrow mountain road where the Chinese had hemmed them in, the whole attitude changed.

Time
magazine put it this way: “The running fight of the Marines and two battalions of the Army’s 7th Infantry Division from Hagaru to Hamhung, forty miles by air but sixty miles over the icy, twisting mountainous road, was a battle unparalleled in U. S. military history. It had some aspects of Bataan, some of Anzio, some of Dunkirk, some of Valley Forge, some of the ‘Retreat of the 10,000’ (401–400
B.C.
) as described in Xenophon’s ‘Anabasis.’ ”

“Glorioso!” Izzo said, rubbing his hands. “I got a plan.”

Tate was sure he had. He always did. By now he knew Izzo’s mind, shrewd and warped.

“Go ahead, talk.”

“OK,” Izzo said. “First of all, before he gets frozen too hard, Gunny, let’s you and me fix the captain up a bit, wedge him straight up in the seat but more lifelike, so he’ll be riding with me, his faithful driver, and you, the gunny, in back with the radio. Everything proper. That way none of these rear-echelon pogues will be telling us where to take him and what to do with him. They’ll be too busy snapping off salutes and saying ‘yessir’ and ‘nosir’ and clicking their frigging heels.”

Tate thought about it for a time. Gunnery sergeants are not paid for rashness and are noted for the judicial pause. That’s how they got all those stripes and how, one day, if they live long enough and
sufficient top sergeants are killed or retire, they might one day make top sergeant their own selves. So Tate meditated.

“Gunny. . .  , ” Izzo urged, impatient and risking retribution.

“OK, Izzo, we’ll try it your way.”

Once he said that, Tate felt better. They would take Verity into the port, where Graves Registration would get him aboard ship. For the gunny, weights had been removed.

But rearranging Verity’s frozen corpse into a naturally lifelike pose wasn’t as easy as Izzo suggested, the captain’s right leg taking on a will of its own, refusing to bend at the knee so he could sit up straight.

They wrestled with it, both of them, pushing and pulling. No good. Izzo threw up his hands in frustration.

“If you gotta break his damned leg, Gunny, break it. He ain’t feeling it.”

“I don’t like to do that, Izzo.”

“Here, gimme the BAR. I’ll whack him with the stock. That ought to frigging do it.”

Tate imagined the sound of dead bone splintering and, revolted, gave one great final shove.

“Good! He’s in,” Izzo enthused.

They replaced Verity’s helmet snug over his cap and tidied up his parka a bit and propped his head at an angle that was almost jaunty. Izzo even breathed on his silver captain’s bars and polished them with a dirty sleeve.

“If we had a pipe or something, he could almost be MacArthur his frigging self, Gunny,” Izzo said, very excited.

“Well, he’s got a few cigars left.”

Tate knew he, too, was becoming giddy. Snow had begun to fall again, and it was getting colder. Izzo tugged a Havana from the breast pocket of Verity’s dungaree jacket inside the parka and tried to shove it into his mouth, but the face was frozen now, not from cold alone but in death, the mouth taking on the hideous grin of rictus mortis, and he could not pry the teeth apart even a little.

“Forget the cigar, Izzo,” Tate ordered, “and let’s move out or we’ll all be dead.”

“Aye-aye, Gunny,” Izzo said, climbing in behind the wheel and
patting Verity on the left knee. “We’re taking you home, Captain. They ain’t gonna bury you here.”

As the snow came down heavier, he drove slowly back onto the road, maneuvering the jeep dexterously into a gap between marching men, bouncing slightly as the tires jounced over the rutted, frozen surface of the dirt road.

There were lots of MPs now, officious and loud, shouting instructions, but they came through Hamhung in good order with a silent Captain Verity taking the salute.

“Walking wounded turn left here. Nonwalking, drop ’em right here and we got people will pick ’em up. Stiffs, straight ahead half a mile. They got a morgue; make a hard right.”

The MPs liked giving instructions, and neither Tate nor Izzo took it well, Tate because of his five stripes and gunnery sergeant’s sense of dignity and propriety and Izzo because he didn’t like policemen, military or otherwise.

“Frig you,” he muttered under his breath.

“Just shut up, Izzo, and drive slow. We’ll get the captain some-where we can find officers who knew him.”

“That’s the ticket, Gunny.” Izzo brightened. “Glad you thought of that. I wondered what we was going to do if we got him this far.”

“Well, that’s why they pay me gunny’s wages, Izzo, and you get two-striper’s.”

“I knew it must be something like that,” Izzo said, a bit sulky at the reproof.

There was one sticky moment when traffic slowed at the turnoff to the morgue, where trucks were adding their dead to a line of corpses on the ground, as Graves Registration men scrutinized dog tags and compiled lists.

“There’s a job you couldn’t pay me to do, graves reg.,” Izzo said. “I knew a fat guy in high school, Murphy, he wanted to become an undertaker. Funny guy, too, and smart. Never could understand it.”

“Let’s just get out of here,” Tate said, more prudent and a bit nervous now, their jeep idling in the traffic with Verity sitting there, very still. The snow had thinned again, and you could see better now. Could see too well.

One of the graves reg. men looked up: “You got another stiff there or that guy’s asleep?”

Tate gave him a hard look, a gunnery sergeant’s look.

“That ‘guy’ is Captain Thomas Verity and he’s asleep. We had some fighting back there up the road a bit. Or hadn’t you heard?”

“Sure, Gunny, sure.”

Tate had ticked the five stripes on his sleeves with a mittened hand, casually, as if by accident.

The graves man knew it was no accident and bent swiftly to his work as Izzo gunned the jeep and pulled slowly away.

“Pull over when you get a break in the traffic, Izzo.”

There were actual jams now, here on the outskirts of Hungnam, plenty of army vehicles, trucks and jeeps and such, servicing the perimeter troops and installations, and the Marine trucks and tanks and guns coming south from the reservoir.

“OK,” Izzo said, looking for an opening.

When they parked, Tate got out and began to build a fire.

“We’re going to tidy up a bit before going into town, Izzo, look a little soldierly.”

Izzo looked down at himself. “My pants stink of shit and piss and the rest just stinks of me and you want me soldierly? Why don’t we get into town first? Maybe they got a Turkish bath.”

“And we’ll start with a clean shave,” the gunny said, “soon as I get some water heated.”

Exasperated, Izzo demanded, “And are we gonna shave the frigging captain, too?”

Tate looked at him. “You know, Izzo, we just might. I hadn’t thought of it, but yes, we might.”

And Gunnery Sergeant Tate mulled another idea, as well, relying on chaos and panic at the port of Hungnam. He was reasonably sure they were going to find the frightened bustle and impatience of a forced evacuation (“Sweet Jesus! Don’t leave me behind!”), the mingling of broken units and stragglers and deserters and the malingerers. With construction gangs throwing up temporary, jury-rigged shelters in counterpoint to the work of
demolition parties. It was a situation made for bungling and brawling, officers gone mad, disobedience by surly enlisted men, frenzy and drunkenness, looting and panic, brutal and licentious soldiery all about and run amok.

In confusion a determined man can usually do and get what he wants. In such confusion they just might smuggle Verity through.

Soldiers manned the perimeter, men of the Seventh Army Division. “About time they did something,” Marines remarked, uncharitable. Marine MPs managed the few roads, waving Marine vehicles through and down toward the port, directed Marines walking in. Marines gave them the finger and moved on, saving their abuse for soldiers. Now the press was here. Not just David Douglas Duncan, an old Marine from the War who had walked back from Hagaru with the division (as a man should!), but new people no one had seen before. These new correspondents hurried about conscientiously, as if sheer industry would make up for their not having been there during the bad times. There were rumors James Michener was there, that Ed Murrow of CBS was on his way to do a “Christmas in Korea” report for TV. As their jeep moved slowly into the town along the clogged main road in the wake of trucks and tanks and tracked howitzers, Izzo saw Marguerite Higgins standing off to the side, leaning elegantly against a truck fender, wearing a fur-hooded parka that was decidedly nonissue, notebook in hand, interviewing Marines as they slogged past, a few who recalled her from early in the fighting or up at the airstrip of Hagaru, calling out, brash and familiar, “Hey, Maggie, it’s me!”