The Marines of Autumn: A Novel of the Korean War (5 page)

“I’m sure,” Verity said, measuring the man.

Izzo was a reservist called back into the Corps in July from a pleasant and constructive (he said) civilian life.

“I myself, Captain, independent of family connections, have a career marketing previously owned automobiles—”

“You sell used cars,” Tate interposed.

“—at fair market value with all warranties in order, working on pure commission at rates previously and amiably agreed upon by management and me. The neighborhood could vouch; they could give testimonials. If Izzo sells it, the car runs.” He never dealt a car that wasn’t “glorioso.”

The army said Izzo stole a jeep.

“It was there, Captain, abandoned, key in the ignition. All about me roving bands of North Korean soldiers in headlong retreat
north, plus guerrillas and irregulars. I am to leave a taxpayer asset like this where the enemy steals it? I was looking for its rightful owners when the MPs came upon me.”

“You a good driver?” Tate asked.

Izzo looked pained even to be asked. “Gunny, any year now they will invite me to drive the pace car at Indianapolis. Briefly as a lad I got in with bad company in South Philadelphia and drove for evil companions. I was in several major stickups, highly publicized in both the
Inquirer
and
Bulletin
, as wheelman. It was how I got to join the Marine Corps in the first place back in ’42. It was that or serve time. I was seventeen and wise beyond my years, so I enlisted in the Corps. After Peleliu I knew I’d make a mistake; I should have gone to friggin’ jail for life.”

Izzo was small and skinny and said his nickname was Mouse.

“Mouse. That’s what they call me, being small.”

Ferret
, Verity thought, more vicious than a mouse. Mice were soft and gray and issued little warning squeaks. This Izzo was neither soft nor colorless; all sinew and bone, no bulk. Cunning was his muscle.

Well, they were going to the wars. “Can you fix it, Gunny?” Verity asked.

“We’ll try, sir.”

Tate arranged things with an army master sergeant, a fifth of Verity’s scotch and some of Verity’s cigars changing hands, and they had Izzo released into Captain Verity’s custody.

“I was in the first wave at Inchon,” Izzo claimed as he got into the driver’s seat, running hands admiringly over the care-polished wheel.

“What outfit?” Tate inquired.

Izzo was somewhat vague about that and noisily ran through the various gears, trying them out. Changing the subject. “Want to be sure you’ve got a good vehicle here, Captain.”

“I’ll remember you said that, Izzo,” Verity replied.

He knew about shifty-eyed enlisted men. It was funny, how quickly being a Marine officer came back.

“All right,” Tate growled, “let’s move it.”

The new driver no sooner had the jeep rolling when he reached into a field jacket to pull out a pair of silver-mirrored aviator glasses, which he hooked on his ears before squaring away his fatigue cap.

Tate, in the backseat, tapped him on the shoulder. “You see with those things?”

“See great, Gunny; they cut down the glare. Very restful on the eyes. Glorioso for distance vision. They—”

“All right, Izzo, all right. I’m not pricing them, just asking if you can see.”

“Just fine, Gunny.”

Verity, amused, said nothing. You let senior NCOs chivy enlisted men and didn’t get into it yourself, not if you were smart. An officer lost authority that way, picking at every little thing and nagging.

Izzo turned the engine over smoothly and drove the jeep slowly out of the army compound, resisting the temptation to burn rubber and showboat.

“Where to, Captain?” he asked, polite as prep schools.

Well
, Verity thought,
we’ve got ourselves a driver. Let’s hope he’s a good one.

Izzo drove well but talked endlessly. Free association. About playing baseball in the Southern Association as a Phillies farmhand, selling cars, racing midget autos at the track at Upper Marlboro, Maryland. Verity marveled at the man’s imagination.

“Begging the captain’s pardon,” Tate said, “there’s imagination and there’s lies. This boy lies like a newspaper.”

The next time Izzo began his spiel, Tate cut him off.

“What I’m interested in, Izzo, is a little more about your military experience, not how you pitched no-hitters or broke into movies.”

Izzo looked hurt. He was about five-four, maybe one hundred and thirty pounds, but he made up in brass what he lacked in heft. And he’d go at you.

“Anything you want to know, Gunny. You want fitness reports, I’m your man.”

“In the War, Izzo. What’d you do in the War?”

“Oh, yeah. Absolutely, Gunny. I carried a Browning Automatic
Rifle on Peleliu. General Geiger himself noticed me. ‘Smallest BAR man we have,’ the general said. Proud about it. Bragged on me, he did.”

“When did you make corporal?”

“Well, that’s complicated, Gunny. I made corporal twice. Busted back once. A first sergeant had it in for me. Didn’t like Italians. ‘Wops,’ in his words. I don’t usually take offense, but who needs that? I don’t need being called wops or similar names.” He looked over brightly at Verity. “Right, Captain? Nobody needs that crap. Not even from top soldiers.”

“You talk to me, Izzo,” Tate said. “Captain has other things on his mind. You address me.”

“Absolutely, Gunny.”

“Good. Now listen up, Corporal.”

Izzo listened to instructions and swung the wheel right, sun glittering off the shades, his eyes invisible, impossible to read.
Do you think he rally drove for holdup men?
Verity asked himself.
Or was that, too, a lie?

On the day they found Izzo, October 4, though Verity didn’t know it (neither did Douglas MacArthur), Mao Tse-tung in Peking made his decision to intervene militarily in the war on the side of North Korea and gave orders for units of the CCF to cross the Yalu River and move south by night, hiding by day.

Of course there was bitterness.

They’d given Verity compassionate. His wife was dead; there was a small child. Then they’d taken it away, much as a cutpurse might steal a wallet. It was ludicrous to believe he was the only Chinese language expert they had. Surely at the CIA or at Naval Intelligence, if not in the Corps, there were such people. He wondered how far he would have gotten away with it back there in Washington if he’d simply refused to go. Not very far, he guessed. The Marine Corps had its ways. During the War he knew a professional
football player, a running back named McHenry, who refused to play for the base team at San Diego.

“I didn’t join the Marines to play football,” Mac said.

They sent him instead to the Sixth Division as a rifle platoon leader, and he died in the push on Naha during the Okinawa fighting, legs blown off by a mine.

Verity remembered McHenry running through broken fields in the National Football League, long legs churning. And when he died, he had no legs.

So you played the game, you went along, you snapped off a salute and an “aye-aye” and did the job.

As he was doing it now.

But it
was
unfair. After the War thousands of Marines had gone into the active reserve, attending armory meetings and drills Thursday nights, spending two weeks every summer at Camp Lejeune or Camp Pendleton, running field problems and taking courses and getting paid for it. Others, like Verity, were in the inactive reserve, carried on the rolls and answering their mail but nothing beyond that, nothing. No armory drills, no summer maneuvers, no pay. Yet now that a war was again on, the inactives had been recalled but not all the active units.

“We’ve called the specialists we need,” the Marine Corps said, justified and pious.

“You called who you friggin’ wanted,” Marines responded.

And what they wanted were infantrymen and fighter pilots and, on rare occasions, Marines who spoke a half-dozen Chinese dialects.

Verity realized there was a tinge of paranoia in how he felt. Elizabeth had died; he was left alone to raise Kate. Now a war was on, aimed personally at him, and by the accident of his knowing a little Chinese, he was someone they thought they needed.

Jesus, what else could happen?

Like most intelligent, informed people, Verity had followed the progress (or lack of same) of the war in its early months. He kept up with the fighting as best he could through the newspapers and radio and TV. There was a woman sending back some of the best
reporting, a correspondent named Marguerite Higgins. She worked for the
New York Herald Tribune
, but her stuff was syndicated and he followed it in the
Washington Post.
Her pieces were a bit heavy on the human-interest angle, some of the soldiers’ quotes sounding suspiciously literate and portentous, but she had a way of setting the scene that rang true, of conveying swift violence and grinding fear.

Maggie Higgins. America had had war heroines before but rarely a woman journalist. Verity was tempted to dismiss her as a press agent’s invention except that, when he thought about the possibilities, it came to him that if Elizabeth had been a reporter she might have done an equivalent job. Even the photos of Miss Higgins were suspect, portraying her, in helmet and field shoes and fatigues, as reasonably attractive. Verity had never seen a woman at war you would want to look at a second time. Bar nurses.

Damned newspapers.

The jeep hit a bad rut and tossed him heavily against the dash, eliciting a muttered curse and raising a bruise on his cheek.

“I thought you were a driver,” he said, surly.

“Yessir,” Izzo said. “Sorry about that, sir.”

The road was crapola
, Izzo thought,
and blaming him was crapola, too.

“Just watch the road,” Tate said. He knew it wasn’t Izzo’s fault, but you do not argue with a captain with a sore face.

“Right, Gunny,” Izzo said. “Right you are.” He knew the position Tate was in and swallowed justifiable resentment.

Verity knew he had been unfair. So to Tate, though not to Izzo, he now said, “Hell of a road, Gunny. It’s a miracle anyone can drive it.” Officers apologized, if they did, by indirection.

“Yessir, it is that.”

Well
, Izzo thought,
maybe he’s human after all.

Verity recalled roads he’d driven with Elizabeth, she behind the wheel, and how close to disaster they’d brushed.

“Well done, Izzo, good job,” he murmured finally.

So he was OK, after all.

Izzo did not know Verity used to fight with his wife over her fast driving. Or that he even had a wife, now dead at twenty-one.

Nor did Verity enlighten him. Or do so with Tate, a more responsible man.

Douglas MacArthur, our most brilliant general since Lee (also a West Point legend and not nearly as successful), sat on his ass (as the irreverent had it) in his Tokyo palace, the American embassy he’d requisitioned, running the war at long distance and contemplating his own greatness.

The General had only rarely felt as smug.

It was one thing to win a war as Ike had done in Europe five years earlier, smashing a drained, defeated enemy fighting on two fronts and losing on both; quite another matter to salvage a smallish army from the lip of disaster and, in a few weeks, turn a war around. It was, the general told himself, rather enjoying the parallel, as if Marshal Ney had abruptly at Smolensk wheeled his frozen and retreating French to smash the pursuing Russians snapping at Napoléon’s rear and head back to take Moscow all over again.

Few of his aides, the smart, tailored young ones, had ever seen MacArthur as crisply confident. He had two splendid victorious armies racing north, straight for China and the Yalu, the war’s finishing tape. The MacArthur who conquered the Empire of Japan would now turn back Communism and cow great China. A sprint north, before winter, and at the end of it victory and, just maybe, the presidency of the United States! Already the phone calls and adulatory letters from Washington poured in, the confidential communications from Henry Luce, the praise even from Senator Taft, the
Hearst
headlines, wires from corporate chairmen and the smooth men of Wall Street.

In October of 1950 Douglas MacArthur was quite sure of himself and his destiny.

What was surprising, Captain Verity thought, was how pleasant the war had been so far.
If it doesn’t get any worse than this
, he told himself,
it’s a stroll.
And this was enemy country.

He and Tate and the driver had left in warm sunshine already
hazed over from the dust lifted by trucks and tanks and other transport clogging the dirt roads, the usual traffic you see in the van of armies. Near Seoul the country was badly beaten up, buildings burned and blown, roads pitted, and trees and wires down. That was what house-to-house fighting did to you. The city hadn’t been secured until September 29, and not much worked, not yet. But Verity saw some old friends, men he’d not seen in five years, men left to tidy up after the division sailed.

“Heard about your wife, Tom. Sorry.”

“Gracious of you. Thanks.”

The Marine Corps is so small you know just about everyone else. Or if you don’t, you know someone who knows him. Especially officers. Captain Verity had been a Marine in the War, and these were friends he knew from back then. It was like that with senior noncommissioned officers as well. Master sergeants knew other master sergeants, or, if they didn’t, had heard of them. One master sergeant would know if another drank or played a good hand of poker or chased skirts or ran a good organization. Most of all, he usually knew if the other master sergeant could fight.

Not that first sergeants are in the normal course supposed to be out there getting into firefights and shooting people, not men as distinguished as that.

“What’s the country like north of here?” Captain Verity asked a major he knew.

“Nice country, Tom. Low hills and rolling. Roads not worth a damn. They say farther north it’s like the Alps up there, ten-thousand-foot mountains with snow, even this early, even now. You going far, Tom?”