The Marines of Autumn: A Novel of the Korean War (10 page)

“You really should draw the drapes, Elizabeth.”

“Oh?”

“Or put on a robe. Or a nightgown.”

“But the air is so—”

“I know, and
voyeur
is a French word.”

She made a face. “Tommie, don’t be so stuffy. Looking’s fun. So is being looked at.”

He lay on the bed looking up at her, smoking a cigarette, and watching how she moved, and he stopped arguing.

He saw Miss Higgins once more before they went north.

“It’s you. I forget your name. But you live in the countryside and don’t take my newspaper.”

“Not important. Any big stories this week?”

“Bob Hope. So far, he’s still the big story.”

“That’s pretty big,” Verity said, meaning it. Compared to a movie star with his own radio show, what were any of them, even MacArthur?

Maggie Higgins was wearing a dress, under an open trench coat.
The night was chilly. He wondered how much of a wardrobe she traveled with. Did someone carry it? Someone change typewriter ribbons for her?

“Tell me your name again.”

She could be imperious.

“Verity. Tom Verity.”

“Yes. I should have remembered.”

“Among all these soldiers and Marines? Why?”

She shrugged. “Why don’t you give me a story?” she said. “About going north.”

“I’m only a captain. They don’t tell me much.” He was tempted to say, “Ask your more exalted sources.” They said she knew MacArthur. That she was a “pet.”

“The best stories come from enlisted men, from platoon leaders and company grade officers. No one knows war the way they do. No one else tells the truth.”

“You sound . . . I dunno, cynical.”

Maggie Higgins laughed, looking younger than she was. “Me, the last of the romantics?”

He grinned back at her.

“Tell me what you do when you’re not listening to radios and dance bands at the St. Francis Hotel or sitting out in the country purposely not reading my column.”

“I’m a teacher. At Georgetown.”

“What do you teach, anything exotic? I’ll try to put a line in my next story. Your family can see it.”

He thought it was still a good idea to lie about the Chinese business, so he said, “General studies.”

“Oh,” she said, disappointed.

Maggie Higgins was forever recruiting heroes. Or creating them in her dispatches. Heroes were what made her stories sing. Real, live American heroes. Maybe this Marine captain would be one.

Feeling him out, she said, “But radio isn’t very glamorous.”

Verity had worked up a line and decided to use it.

“We also serve who only sit and listen.”

Well
, she thought,
he has wit.
She liked him.

Verity inhaled her scent. There was something of the excitement
about her that he would always associate with Elizabeth. Not quite it but the suggestion of it.

Then, before either of them could say more, an enlisted man came up, a bit awkward and unwashed, but when Verity saw him he went over immediately to hear what he had to say.

Then Verity returned to Marguerite Higgins. “I’ve got to leave,” he told her. “I’m sorry. There’s something I have to do.”

“You don’t really. Other people can tune radios—”

“Yes,” he said, shook her hand briskly, and wheeled.

The enlisted man had been Gunny Tate, who had been tuning radios and had come across a sudden flood of Chinese traffic that he thought might mean something.

“You were right, Gunny,” Verity said.

He’d barely cleared the door in departing before Maggie Higgins had been taken up by a flyboy major who was telling her marvelous stories of himself.

Elizabeth, Verity thought, would have liked her.

Or hated her.

Pale hills by moonlight, covered in snow
. . .
Vermont looked much like this along Route 7, with small, well-lighted towns. . . . Except that here the towns were dark and called Sudong and Chinhung-ni and Koto-ri and Hagaru. . . . The difference was at Stowe,. . . there was no one waiting to kill you.

T
he first snows weren’t real snow. North Korea wasn’t the Arctic. The October snows fell wet and heavy, turning the country white but enduring only on the hills, above two thousand feet. In the valleys the stubble of the rice paddies still showed through and on the roofs of huts it melted from the heat inside. On the roads, gravel and earth, the trucks rolled north, sliding sideways a bit on the wet snow, then mud instead of snow, and just as slippery. He remembered driving with his father in China years before in one of their GM pickup trucks and how the road seemed almost to melt beneath you, remembered New England during college winters and ski trips to North Conway and Pico Peak, where the bald tires of undergraduate cars made it icier.

But even this early snow, which wouldn’t last, wet and heavy, building up on the helmets and rucksacks and bent shoulders of the Marines at march, cutting visibility, spinning under the wheels of trucks and jeeps and the heavy, clanking tank treads, was . . . inconvenient.

And an omen of worse yet to come. It was, after all, still October, only autumn.

There had been cold nights and mornings with frost, but when he and Gunnery Sergeant Tate and their driver drove out of Wonsan to find the leading Marine regiment and join up with it, a warm sun shone. They’d been warned to keep watch for retreating North Korean units. Just because they were retreating didn’t mean they were harmless. A North Korean regiment brushed against one of Puller’s companies in the night and killed twenty-five Marines in a firefight. If three men in a jeep ran into an enemy regiment. . . . And with both armies moving so fast now, the North Koreans falling back, the UN people advancing, no front as such existed; it was all fluid, shifting, difficult to define, hard to find. Verity sat up front with Izzo, while Tate and the radio lounged about in the backseat.

“Comfortable back there, Gunny?”

“Very posh, Captain, very pleasant.”

Verity wondered where in his travels Tate had picked up
posh.
The sergeant had the usual BAR cradled loosely, a cigar in his mouth. Cigars, Bob Hope, Maggie Higgins, not a shot fired at them yet, this war could be a lot worse.

The country north of Wonsan changed again. Off to the right was the Sea of Japan, and from the heights of ground they could still see it occasionally in the distance, see the odd ship out there, American warships screening X Corps’s right flank. On October 20 General Willoughby, the one who didn’t like Marines, had declared the war as good as over. From Far East Command in Japan he issued an intelligence summary. “Organized resistance on any large scale has ceased to be an enemy capability. . . . North Korean military and political headquarters may have fled to Manchuria . . . the enemy’s field units have dissipated to a point of ineffectiveness.”

The North Koreans, he admitted, showed no signs of surrendering and continued to fight “small-scale delaying actions.”

Verity had been shown the text by a Marine intelligence officer who said, “In Tokyo they’re making plans for the victory
parade. They say Third Cavalry will lead it, wearing their yellow neckerchiefs—”

“The Third Cav is a hundred miles away from here, pushing north fast.”

“Right, Captain. That’s the ‘Alice in Wonderland’ aspect of all this.”

It was as if they were fighting one war on the ground, the real war, and another at Far East Command and in Willoughby’s and MacArthur’s heads, an imaginary war of wishful thinking.

The roads here in North Korea were much worse than in the South—not battle damage, just maintenance. The few main roads were intelligently laid and well ballasted; that was the Japanese, as efficient as Mussolini with his on-time trains. Of course they’d worked a lot of Koreans to death doing it, both North and South. The roads also grew worse as the jeep climbed. The higher the elevation, the more winter’s snow, the greater the temperature differentials between night and midday, expansion and contraction to split and crack the macadam or even the simply oiled dirt and rock of more primitive rural roads. The air grew cooler as well. And just before 4:00
P.M.
Verity and his men actually drove through another brief flurry of snow.

Verity remembered snow in late September in Manchuria. In New England, for that matter.

They came out again to sunshine. The driver took both sun and snow with a certain equanimity. Captain Verity reminded himself to ask Tate, when they were alone, just why in the end they’d kept Izzo. Not that Verity didn’t trust Tate’s judgment, but he was curious.

They came up against and stalled for a time behind other Marine units. There was no shoulder onto which you could pull out to race past. But neither he nor Tate was impatient. If the Chinese were up there, they’d been there for ten thousand years and there were plenty of them and they weren’t going to go away.

“Plenty of time, Captain. Can’t hurry tomorrow.”

That was Gunny Tate. Verity was starting to realize how fortunate he was to have drawn a man like this, competent, cool. He
didn’t need a drama queen. The driver wasn’t nearly as important, but so far Izzo, too, had been OK.

It was cooler still as the road climbed. Verity looked at the map.

“Four thousand feet, this pass,” he said. “You can feel it.”

“Indeed you can, Captain,” Tate said. He could feel the air cooling. And thinning.

They were getting higher and there were plenty of hills ahead, that they could see, that were lots higher. Tate was glad he’d bribed a supply sergeant with a bottle of Haig to draw some cold weather gear. Credit this Verity for having the scotch and for telling him to scout around for heavier clothing. Captain Verity had good sense. Tate’d looked him up. Gunnery and master sergeants had ways; they looked up their officers. If a man were going to issue an order that might kill you, you deserved to know more than his name, rank, and serial number.

Gunnery sergeants took care of each other.

Verity was always aware he was being measured. Marines did that. On Guadalcanal he’d been measured as a kid enlisted man; on Okinawa as a young officer. He was being measured now, much as he’d be arrogant enough to measure Oliver P. Smith. And as Smith, in all likelihood, was measuring Ned Almond and General MacArthur. The process of natural selection, Verity concluded, as if Darwin himself had donned uniform and been called up for service in the war.

Gen. Oliver Smith had nearly eight hundred officers in his division and knew most of them. The regulars, that is—the reserves, those who’d been called up in June or July or even later, well, they were something else. The few dozen he’d met and talked with were educated college and university men. They were Marines, of course, with most of them having fought the Japanese.

But after that, in ’45 and ’46, they’d gone home to be schooled. To start careers, marry, and raise families. A few of them to make fortunes. Now, five years later, they were back.

Educated young men, properly reared and properly brought up.

Killing and being killed. And, once again, becoming so damned good at both.

Verity continued to monitor the radio. There was plenty of Chinese to listen to. He wrote it up at the end of each day and handed it in to General Smith’s people, who might make more sense of it than Verity did, since they knew some of the codes and he just knew Chinese. But there sure was plenty of traffic. There was something going on up there. He had new numbers now, new CCF divisions? That was his analysis.

On October 14, large units of the Chinese Communist army began infiltrating into North Korea, and on the following day MacArthur and President Truman met on Wake Island. Truman expressed concern about the Chinese, but MacArthur assured him they were not a factor. On October 17, ROK troops captured the port city of Hungnam, fifty miles north along the coast from Wonsan, and pushed on against almost no resistance to Iwon, one hundred miles away. October 19, the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, fell to the U. S. First Cavalry and ROKs. Did that mean it was over?

Then, ominously, on October 25, near Unsan to the west, a Chinese attack took place. A prisoner reported there were very large numbers of Chinese troops in the area. He was not believed. And on the very next day an ROK reconnaissance outfit reached the Yalu River in the west near Chosan. The Yalu was the border with China. And it was on that day and over the following two days that the First Marine Division had finally come ashore at Wonsan.

There were plenty of Smiths in the Marine Corps of course, even several Generals Smith, one of them named “Howlin’ Mad” Smith, who, during the Big War, had some difficulty with the American army, and they didn’t like him nor he them. But the Smith of concern to Tom Verity was Gen. Oliver Smith, commanding officer of the First Marine Division. General Smith reported to an army general, Ned Almond, who commanded X Corps, and both Almond and the Eighth Army had to check with MacArthur in Tokyo to do anything very significant. So here was one army divided in two, with each half
required to consult someone hundreds of miles away in another country before putting on any sort of big show. It was to Gen. Oliver Smith, who was not at all happy with these arrangements, that Verity had been told to report.

“Sit down, Captain, while I read this.”

Smith read through the brief letter from Headquarters Marine Corps.

“So you’re to attach yourself to my staff as an expert of sorts.”

“I’m not much of an expert on anything, General. But I speak and understand Chinese. I was born there, grew up there, and I teach Chinese history in college back home.”

“And you listen to the radio and translate Chinese for us. Question prisoners. Attempt to assess Chinese participation.”

“That’s pretty much it, yessir.”

Smith sat down now, too. “OK, Verity. I’m sending Litzenberg’s Seventh and Murray’s Fifth north toward Hungnam. I’m keeping Puller and the First here in Wonsan for now. The old Quantico school solution: two regiments up, one back.”