The Marines of Autumn: A Novel of the Korean War (2 page)

Now a pinecone fell noisily and the deer, in some alarm, scampered from the lake into the shelter of trees.

In the district of Georgetown, Washington it still felt like summer, hot and humid, and Tom Verity was promising his daughter Kate a Christmas in Paris.

“Madame told me so much,” the little girl said, “about places she lived when she was young.”

“I know a few places myself, Kate,” her father said, remembering a wedding trip, “places even Madame doesn’t know,” “Madame” being the French nanny.

“Oh, good!” Kate exclaimed, clapping her hands, enjoying conspiracy.

“And we’ll practice our French with cabbies and waiters,” Verity said, “and you’ll help me with my verbs. And we’ll walk across bridges over the Seine.”

“Bien sur, Papa,”
the child said, in an accent not at all bad for her age and for someone who lived not in France but in Washington, D. C.

Father and daughter pored over a book of pictures of bridges and churches and sidewalk cafés and formal gardens where little boys in short pants sailed boats on ancient ponds, and the two made plans for things they would do and marvels they would see in Paris that winter.

Then the call came from Arlington, Virginia, where the Marine Corps had its headquarters, asking Tom Verity to come by on a matter of some importance.

“MacArthur will be sprinting north. You know how he is; you know about the ego.”

T
he Marines, hard men and realists, had never heard of the Chosin Reservoir, but they did not believe the war was over. Not yet. Nor did they truly trust MacArthur.

When they “liberated” (a headline writer’s word no Marine ever used) Seoul, the South Korean capital, MacArthur flew in for ceremonies with that old fart Syngman Rhee, accompanied by honor guards of spit-and-polish South Korean troops who had run away and hadn’t fought. MacArthur and President Rhee accepted the city as explorers returning from the South Pole once had received the keys of New York from Mayor La Guardia.

It was all bullshit. In the two or three days after MacArthur and Rhee took the salute, another two hundred Marines were killed in the house-to-house fighting that continued after Seoul was “liberated.”

Within a few weeks MacArthur would be announcing that “the boys,” his phrase, might be “home for Christmas.”

In the early autumn of 1950 MacArthur’s image had rarely shone as brightly. At his vice-regal headquarters in Tokyo he could look back on the extraordinary events of September, when a
battered American and South Korean army pulled itself together at Pusan, swept ashore at Inchon, recaptured Seoul, and burst north to the Thirty-eighth Parallel toward victory. MacArthur had never gone back to America after defeating the Japanese, and if he could win this new war swiftly, he would at last come home and on a giddy wave of popularity. The
Chicago Tribune
and the
Hearst
papers were already pushing his cause for the 1952 Republican nomination for president. If he could beat out colorless Senator Taft and the politically equivocal, naive Eisenhower, well, who knew? But he had to win this latest war first, and quickly, settling the affair before winter closed down. Even the general, with a solemn regard for his own divinity, knew you could not fight a modern war in the mountains during a north Asian winter.

As his troops crossed the Parallel into North Korea there were warnings, diplomatic and military, that Communist China would not idly permit its Korean ally to be crushed or tolerate a UN, largely American, army installed on China’s border at the Yalu River. MacArthur, out of pride or ambition (who knew which dominated?), ignored the warnings and at the end of September divided his triumphant army and ordered it to push rapidly north, one column to the east, the other column to the west of a spine of mountains through which there were no roads, only trails and footpaths.

He did not know that in what was then called Peking, on October 4, Mao Tse-tung ordered Chinese Communist Forces (CCF) to intervene, secretly at first, filtering across the Yalu by night and hiding in the North Korean hills until sufficient force had built up, out of sight of marauding American planes (each man carried a sort of bedsheet as camouflage in the snow), to fall upon and destroy MacArthur’s two armies fatally divided by mountains. There were rules about splitting your army in two like this, with mountains or swamps or deserts separating one column from the other. But Douglas MacArthur or, “The General,” as Jean MacArthur invariably called her husband, was an officer whose legend was founded on broken rules.

The First Marine Division was to spearhead the eastern half of
the UN army, what was called X Corps, in its sprint to the Yalu River and to China.

Perhaps Omar Bradley should have spoken up. Later (but only later) he said of MacArthur’s plan to divide the army, “To me it doesn’t make sense . . . the enemy himself could not have concocted a more diabolical scheme. . . .” Bradley was chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

Joe Collins, “Lightning Joe,” admitted he was “worried.” He was army Chief of Staff. But as Matt Ridgway said later: “No one was questioning the judgment of the man who had just worked a military miracle,” at Inchon, where the Joint Chiefs had registered doubt and had been proven wrong.

Nor were
any
of Truman’s chieftains willing to argue the toss with MacArthur.

Captain Verity didn’t want to be in Korea in the autumn of 1950. Of course, what American did except a few crazy regulars like Col. Chesty Puller and maybe MacArthur himself, hungry even at age seventy for a military encore after five years of playing shogun to the Japanese? Verity had a specific reason for wanting to stay home. A child to whom he was both mother and father. The war began in Korea in June, and thousands of Marine officers and enlisted reservists had been called back. Even Ted Williams of the Red Sox. Verity had not. He was still living and working in Washington, still a civilian.

Verity’s home was on P Street, just west of Wisconsin Avenue. It was a narrow house on a narrow plot on a leafy, cobbled street with trolley tracks, a five-minute stroll from Georgetown University, where he worked.

Verity was a disciplined sort who ran three mornings a week before changing to stroll over to Georgetown, where he taught Chinese history as an adjunct professor and, in addition, helped out at the School of Foreign Service with the translation of sticky bits in a
dialect none of the resident scholars understood. In this, Verity was something of a freak. Few Americans spoke Chinese at all; almost none, even the scholars, could handle more than several dialects. Tom Verity, it was said, could speak and read a half-dozen.

And now, on this morning, when he got back to the house, sweatshirt soaked and shorts hanging baggy and damp on his midsize frame, the olive drab sedan with Marine Corps plates was parked out front.

“You were granted compassionate relief from active duty when the reserves were mobilized in July, then, Captain?”

“Yes, I requested compassionate and it came through.”

“Your wife—”

“She died last winter. We have a small child, a daughter, almost three.”

The colonel asking these questions knew all this. But he was a regular and they like to establish the line. The two men sat across the desk from each other in an office in Henderson Hall, the Marine Corps headquarters over the Potomac from Washington in Arlington, close by the cemetery. Sun streamed in the windows behind the colonel, and he was still dressed in summer khakis. Verity wore a navy poplin suit. There was no air-conditioning and both men sat easy as they spoke, conserving energy in the heat.

“And you have qualified help at home, for the child?”

“I hired a full-time child’s nanny, through a French placement firm. She’s been very satisfactory, very professional.”

The colonel also knew Verity had money.

“And your daughter likes her?”

“Kate likes her very much, yes.” He wondered where this was going and worried that he already knew.

“Now about China,” the colonel said, “you were born there.”

“I lived in China pretty much all my life until age fifteen.”

“Your parents were missionaries?” The colonel knew that they weren’t.

“No, my father worked for GM and then went off on his own, building and selling light trucks to the Chinese. He made a very
good living off it until the Japanese came. Then we got out. I was already in the States at school and my parents came back in ’38 and bought a place in Grosse Pointe. During the War he did things for GM.”

His father had been more than a businessman and China more than a market, but Verity let it drop there. He was not accustomed to providing justifications. The thing spoke for itself, as lawyers say.

“And you went back after the War.”

“After the Japanese surrendered I went up to Tsingtao with the First Marine Division as a rifle company commander. After about six months I came back to the States and got out.”

“And in North China those six months . . . ?”

“We accepted the surrender of local Japanese units, kept the rails open, fought bandits and occasionally dickered with local Communist Red Army units, and tried to keep from freezing.”

Then the colonel stopped fencing and began to talk about why Verity was in the office.

His old uniforms from five years ago, the forest green worsted wool of winter and the khaki gabardine of summer, lay creased and flat and smelling of mothballs and locker boxes.

“We could have them cleaned and pressed, Tommie,” his wife had suggested, “put them in garment bags, as women do with furs. They’re beautiful uniforms. Keep them nice.”

“No need, Elizabeth. They’re only relics never to be worn again.”

Now he pulled them out. Early autumn. Well, they’d be out of khaki any day now and into the forest green, and he was damned if he was going to carry two sets of uniforms. So he chose the forest green bought almost seven years ago from that tailor in the town of Quantico, down the street that ended at the river. Italian fellow. Good tailor.

“Nell?”

Nell was the maid. “Take this to the dry cleaner on Wisconsin, please, and tell him I need it back tomorrow.”

“Yes, Mr. Verity.”

As he handed it over he stopped. Wait a moment. He’d better try on the jacket. Elizabeth kept after him about that, about putting on weight. It was fine. He looked at himself in the mirror. “OK, Nell, you can take it. Not the ribbons.” You didn’t send them to the cleaner.

There were ribbons in the locker box as well, and the rule was that you wore your ribbons. But no captain’s bars, no silver railroad tracks, only the old single silver bars of first lieutenant. The captaincy had come by mail. And without bars. Well, he supposed there were still PXs that sold such things.

He’d not looked into mirrors while trying on the uniform jacket, and he wondered if he’d looked as strange as he felt.

Like Henry Luce, another old China hand, when he got back to the States Tom Verity was enrolled first in Hotchkiss, then at Yale. At Hotchkiss, like Luce, he’d immediately been nicknamed Chink, in consequence of which he never used the word as slang, even later and among Marines. He was a senior at New Haven, majoring in Chinese history, when Pearl Harbor was attacked, and with several classmates he went downtown and enlisted in the Marine Corps.

His father, and other prudent people, said they should have waited, that as Yale graduates the following spring they’d be assured of commissions. Instead, Verity was run through boot camp at Parris Island and in August, as a Marine private, found himself fighting the Japanese on Guadalcanal.

Guadalcanal was the worst, Marines said then and some still say. Steamy tropical swamp and jungle surrounded rugged, chill mountains. Some of the natives were cannibals. The Japanese fought with a medieval savagery. One night five Allied cruisers, American and Australian, were sunk by the Japanese in a single disastrous battle.

“There weren’t many sailors that got to the beaches,” the Marines reported. “The sharks ate them.”

When the ’Canal fell Verity was a private first class and ticketed for an officer candidate program back in the States. He wrote his
father in some glee: “So, you see, a Yale education, even short of a degree, has worth after all.”

He came out of Guadalcanal with malaria and the usual skin infections from the heat and the swamp and sailed through OCS. In 1944 he was in Australia, and the following year, as a second lieutenant, he commanded a rifle platoon on Okinawa, winning a Silver Star and promotion to first lieutenant. When the war ended they shipped the First Division to North China, to Tientsin. Verity now had a company and with his fluency in the language was pressed into service negotiating with the local warlords and the Eighth Chinese Route Army, Mao Tse-tung’s people. He was twenty-five years old and for the first time back home.

“You know, it even smells the same,” he told fellow officers.

“Yeah, Tom, it stinks.”

“No,” he said happily, “no, it doesn’t.”

They didn’t understand this was really home; this was what he knew. And loved. Even the familiar, sweetly reeking smell of it.

After you have been in hard fighting, garrison duty is both welcome and boring, and Tom was glad to be seconded into liaison work. The warlords were easy to handle: A combination bribe and threat was usually sufficient. The Communists, like religious zealots, were tougher. Stubborn, repetitive, endlessly patient, anything to win an argument, achieve an end. Other American officers, who didn’t know the Orient, lost their temper and pounded tables and cursed. Verity sipped tea and called everyone Comrade and was deferential to the older Chinese officers. He was relatively successful in getting what the Marines wanted, whether it was a rail line opened or a straggler returned or swapping canned goods for fresh turnips.

“Tom, you understand these people and I don’t,” a fellow officer might say. “You like this country and I hate it. You don’t even seem anxious to get home, and I sure as hell am.”