The Marines of Autumn: A Novel of the Korean War (6 page)

Verity shrugged. “Hope not. I’m supposed to catch up with the division.”

“Yeah, Tom, well you take care. Regards to the missus.”

This was a man who didn’t know Verity’s wife was dead, and he saw no need to tell him. So he said thanks. And the next morning he and Tate were off north in the jeep, Izzo driving and Tate sitting in the back with a BAR, scanning the roadside and the near hills.

The country north of Seoul was less beat-up. There hadn’t been
the same fighting here. According to the people in Seoul, after the city fell the North Koreans seemed to lose stomach for it.

“They ran, Tom. May still be running. You’re gonna have to drive fast to catch up with this war.”

Tate was a very senior NCO and a regular, a tall, long-jawed man, very lean and hard, and neither he nor Verity took such counsel entirely to heart. Once the armies crossed over the Parallel into North Korea, they would be fighting on the enemy’s ground. Verity understood the difference, as did Tate.

“Like Lee in Virginia, Captain; in Virginia Lee was tougher to lick than he was up in Pennsylvania.” Tate was Kansan and had read some in military history.

The road north of Seoul was being worked over by an army engineer battalion with Korean civilians, some of them women, doing most of the labor. At the Imjin River, the bridges had been blown, “by us or by them” Verity didn’t know, and it didn’t matter. They crossed by pontoon bridge, an army MP officiously waving them on after careful scrutiny.

“I guess he thought we might be escaping North Koreans, sir,” Izzo said, and all three men laughed, Tate blond and Verity brownhaired and green-eyed. Izzo noticed the highly polished black jump boots on the MP, tied with white silk laces.

“They steal them laces from parachutes, Captain. Parachutes are in short supply. But they steal them anyways. They like the effect.”

They stopped to eat tinned rations on the hood of the jeep at noon and then drove for another four hours heading vaguely north, as if heading out of Washington for Philadelphia or New York. And it
was
nice country, as the major said, but for the occasional smashed house or downed high-tension tower. There were civilians, mostly dressed in white, but they were nervous, staying out of the way and pretty much off the road. Which was not surprising. This ground had already been fought over twice since June.

According to the map, they crossed the Thirty-eighth Parallel in midafternoon near a town called Yonch’on.

“I’d keep an eye peeled along here, Gunny,” Verity told Sergeant Tate. “We’re in their country now.”

But nothing happened and they spent the night sleeping out in their sleeping bags on the ground next to the jeep, near where an Australian brigade was momentarily encamped.

“I’d sure like to go over there and see them Aussies, Captain, maybe trade for stuff,” the driver said.

“You stay right here,” Tate said, answering for Verity. The sergeant didn’t know this Izzo they had for a driver yet and didn’t want him causing trouble with foreign troops. You never knew about foreign troops, not until you fought alongside them for a bit.

He had flown to Detroit and taken a cab to Grosse Pointe.

“Well, she’s very beautiful, Tommie,” his mother said, “if this picture is anything to go by. A very beautiful girl.”

“Jeffs?” His father said. “There’s a Jeffs in Wall Street, Arthur Jeffs.”

“She’s his daughter, yes.”

“Then she’s a Jew.”

“Well, I don’t know. Her father’s Jewish; her mother’s Presbyterian or something. What does it matter?”

“I guess it doesn’t,” Mr. Verity said. “I simply remarked on it.”

Mrs. Verity looked again at the photo of Elizabeth, the girl her son was going to marry. “When can we meet her, Tommie? She
is
lovely.”

Even his father conceded that.

They parked the jeep at the edge of the place, and Tate went in on foot, cradling the BAR in his arms as a bird shooter might carry a Purdey shotgun.

“You never know,” he said. “I’ll just take a look-see.”

He was back in twenty minutes.

“Raw, Captain, it’s raw. But no trouble I can see.”

Just bodies.

“Jeez, look at them,” Izzo said.

“Yeah,” Thomas Verity agreed.

A retreating North Korean regiment had come through here two
days before, the Americans and the ROKs hard after them, and it was the ROKs got there first. The North Koreans pretty much wiped out the village, and then the ROKs caught them at it and, in an almost casual cruelty, fought it out with them here. Ruin upon ruin, the dying among the dead. Why would North Koreans destroy their own village? Had someone put out a premature ROK flag of welcome? That’s all it took in a war.

“Raw,” was how Tate had described it. “Fierce,” said Izzo, “friggin’ fierce.”

They filled with water at that town and got out in a hurry. It was a hot day and the bodies, especially those gutted and lying open in the sun, had swollen and were starting to smell. There were still some people around who weren’t dead or too badly hurt, but they seemed incapable of burying their neighbors or kin or doing much of anything. It was as if the violence had shocked them mute, had drained them, and they watched the Marines at the town pump without saying anything or doing much.

“Not much heart nor soul left in that place, Captain.”

“No, Tate,” Verity agreed, “nor much of anything else.” They were across the Thirty-eighth Parallel now, the border with North Korea, and he wondered if that’s how it was going to be here.

Whatever men tell you, when they set off to war there is always the consideration they may not come back.

Verity had been to war before and had no neurotic or irrational fear of death, was not even all that afraid of dying. It was different this time, though, because Kate would be left alone. First her mother, now her father? That didn’t seem fair to a child not yet three years old who had never done anything to anyone and deserved better.

But even a less intelligent man than Verity could figure out the logic. If he died, Kate would be alone. There was the syllogism.

So it was one and the same thing, and for the first time in his life he was frightened of death.

Not for himself, but for her.

He kept this information to himself, of course.

Early on the second day Verity and his two Marines drove up to a sort of stockade set up in a farm village. There were plenty of ROK troops about, and Verity wanted to check road conditions ahead if they could find someone who spoke English. It was ROKs who’d captured this place, apparently after a hard fight, if you could tell from the several burned-out tanks and damage to residential and farm buildings and smashed and flattened fencing.

“Looka that, Captain,” Izzo said, pulling off the road to a bumpy stop in a rice paddy, partially fenced by farmers, the rest in barbed wire, where perhaps a thousand men were sitting on the ground or lying flat, docile and not sufficiently curious even to look around.

“North Koreans,” Tate said, “prisoners.”

Good
, Verity thought.
That’s a thousand of them we won’t have to fight.

“Yeah! And looka that,” said Izzo, his voice low and husky, conspiratorial.

ROK officers and armed guards strolled unafraid among the seated or squatted POWs within the compound, looking down at men’s faces or scrutinizing uniforms for badges of rank and occasionally throwing a fist at a man’s head or kicking him in the thigh or knee or rear end. A long table, the length and shape of a dining-room table but quite flimsy, was set up by the gate of the stockade with ROK officers seated behind it on camp chairs, conducting interrogations.

Then Tate spoke. “Over there, Captain,” he said, the flat, nasal Kansas voice lower than usual but urgent.

Verity saw what he meant.

A half-dozen stout posts had been driven into the ground, and from them hung North Koreans, men evidently executed by the ROKs after they took this town. Several of the dead men, officers probably, were naked and showed signs of beatings and deeper wounds, the sort bayonets might make. Now they just slumped there, tied with ropes, hanging on the posts like rag dolls, left to
dry in the autumn sun. There were still other posts prepared and ready, to which no one had yet been tied. That must be the purpose of the interrogations now going on.

Verity was still looking at the dead prisoners when an ROK officer, noticing their jeep, got up from the table and headed for them.

“Get it in gear, Izzo,” Verity said. “Let’s get out of here. This isn’t our affair.”

The ROK officer was closer now, and Verity tossed him a salute and Izzo had the jeep moving before the ROK officer had a chance to return it.

Who knew what happened in this town before and during the fighting? Or what happened to ROK prisoners?

Neither side had a corner on cruelty.

The skim ice of early October on the Chosin had been freakish and soon melted as the country slipped back into what we call Indian summer and the first snows vanished and ran off the lower slopes into the creeks and small streams that led to rivers and eventually to the Sea of Japan. There were birds of all sort and red fox and deer, but because most of the trees were conifers, no leaves turned golden and fell.

“Not much like China, is it?” Verity said, and Tate, also the old China hand, agreed.

“Not much. The trees, for one. . . .”

And they drove north through strange country, closer to China with every mile.

Enemy advancing, we retreat; enemy entrenched, we harass; enemy exhausted, we attack; enemy retreating, we pursue.

—
Chairman Mao’s military dictum.

“
N
ight’s best,” Tate said.

“Why’s that?”

“Signal carries better. Bounces off something up there called the Heaviside layer, and it’s why back home you can sometimes pick up a baseball game late at night from a ballpark a long way off. The signal’s clearer and travels farther after dark.”

“Oh,” Verity said. He was notoriously unmechanical.

From then on he stayed with the radio from six until midnight or so, which was when most of the traffic died. Tate showed him how the controls worked, how he could fiddle with various knobs and dials to provide a clearer signal and eliminate static, or at least some of it, how to use the antenna directionally to bring in a better sound. It amused Gunnery Sergeant Tate that they had sent him an “expert” whose entire assignment consisted of listening to a radio but who knew nothing of the Heaviside layer or even how to turn the dial. “The Marine Corps,” Tate told himself, a mix of love and wonder in his voice.

From their first night on the drive north there was plenty of Chinese on the air. They camped by the side of the road; the whole
column they’d joined did, not wanting to drive with the lights on in case of enemy planes, and the road too narrow and rough to drive it safely in the dark. None of the Chinese seemed especially important to Verity, but there was a lot of it and he found himself enjoying the sound, listening to it as he had every single day of the first fifteen years of his life, when Chinese was as much his native tongue as was English.

It wasn’t cold, and while Tate and Izzo slept in the small nylon pyramidal tent they carried, Verity sat outside playing with the radio, sitting in the jeep smoking a good cigar and looking up at the stars. This night was clear, no wind. He jotted down the occasional note when a word or phrase caught at him and seemed to connote something. Nothing dramatic. He liked the Korean night sky, that at least reminding him of China, except that here the hills pressed in closer and you didn’t get that vast expanse of black. As black as the sky was, the hills were blacker. Once your eyes became accustomed to the dark and night vision took over, it was amazing how much you could see, and how clearly, without artificial light. There was no moon, but that only made the starlight brighter. Once your eyes adjusted you could read newspaper headlines with illumination from the stars alone.

He picked up several names that had a familiar sound and that were repeated. Peng. Lin Piao. Common-enough names. There’d been a Peng in North China in ’45 that he dealt with, a major in the Communist Fourth Field Army. He couldn’t recall the rest of his name. Polite fellow and, if you could believe the stories, a veteran of the famous Long March of six thousand miles in the 1930s when Mao took his people north and then east to get away from Chiang Kai-shek and conserve men and resources until they were strong enough to fight back with a chance of winning. Lin Piao was a colonel in the Fourth. A Chinese field army under the Communist setup was equivalent to an American army corps with three infantry divisions each of about ten thousand men, a regiment of cavalry, and two or three regiments of artillery. Verity got along with Peng and had him to dinner at the officers’ mess a couple of times, where he demonstrated a fondness for bourbon. Old
Forester, as Verity recalled. And, like Verity, he preferred coffee to tea, the ceremonial beverage.