The Marines of Autumn: A Novel of the Korean War (27 page)

It was weird walking back through the darkened streets of the little town toward the hut he shared with Izzo and Tate, the dry, packed snow crunching under his boots, thinking about General Smith and his two guns. That wasn’t Georgie Patton bullshit with ivory-handled revolvers; this was because Smith knew Chinese soldiers might be coming through here later that night, that the general himself might be not only commanding a division of twenty thousand men but also fighting for his own life. It sobered you.

“Hey, Captain, some sergeant came by. Said I’ve been reassigned to some provisional platoon.”

Izzo disliked being told what to do. For once, Verity humored him.

“Ignore it, Izzo. You’re assigned to Gunny and me. Wherever we go, you come right along.”

“That’s right, Izzo, and don’t be bashful.” Tate delivered that line with a dry laugh. The notion of a bashful Izzo amused him.

Verity was glad the two men were still capable of resentment and humor. The Chinese army was about to come out of the hills, and they weren’t concerned with the details. Verity called his three squad leaders up and deployed his platoon. That part was easy.

Hope to hell I’m as cool as they are when the shooting starts
, he thought.

Verity remembered being afraid in the War but doing the work regardless. Then he was a kid. Now he was thirty; now he had sense.

Izzo took the first watch of an hour, Tate the second. Verity was to take the third, at midnight. But by eleven-fifteen everyone was awake.

The Chinese army was coming in.

At midnight, precisely, they were there. They seemed to be coming into the town from every direction.

But they can’t!
Verity told himself, crouching behind sandbags. There were blocking positions out there. They couldn’t have gotten through
everywhere
.

Still, they had, blowing bugles and trilling sweet, strange music on flutes.

Why don’t their lips freeze to metal?
men wondered.

A terrible moonlit serenade, a nightmare scene, a lunatic’s delight.

Verity had a rifle and he fired it over and over into the darkness at the looming, screaming shapes, a reasonable, rational American college professor in a war only shrinks might understand.

That night again the Chinese penetrated to Hagaru center before being thrown back. Why were they fighting so hard for this nothing place? Why were they so ready to die?

Once again, Tate and Izzo and Verity had been lucky. All round them men had been hit and gone down. Yet all three of them were there in the dawn, able to flex cold, cramped limbs and stand. It wasn’t logical to think that their luck would hold.

Especially after what happened toward dawn when Marines, having beaten down yet another wave of attacking Chinese, rose up spontaneously and without orders, to run at the remaining Chinese, firing and shouting and jabbing and slashing with their bayonets and clubbing them with rifle butts as, in a manic, frenzied rush, like surf sweeping up on a beach, they drove the Chinese before them, back out of the town and up into the foothills.

Verity, swept up in madness, ran with them, then paused at last, bent retching over his rifle, attempting to catch his breath and asking himself,
Now what the hell was
that
all about?

“And where is Poppy now, Madame?”

“In the mountains, Kate.”

“The Alps?”

“Oh, no, smaller, meaner mountains. But with much snow.”

The nanny had been following the war communiques in the
Washington Post
and on the radio. Kate was provided a somewhat bowdlerized version.

“Yes, much snow. Very deep and white.”

“Oh,” said Captain Verity’s daughter. “I hope they have sleds.”

It was as if the five years of civilization since Okinawa had never happened, Verity had never gone back to Yale . . , had never met Elizabeth or had a child named Kate
.

Now when he saw the Marines lying stiff and dead by the side of the road . . . he walked by as casually as men pass newstands where no headline catches their eye
.

P
lane after plane took off from the meager airstrip of Hagaru-ri in a gust of prop-driven snow and brown earth. Another four thousand men were flown out in two days, wounded, frozen, malingerers, factotums, brass, correspondents. Thomas Verity watched them go. Tate knew what the captain was thinking but said nothing.

Izzo, less sensitive, said aloud, “Jeez, Captain, we oughta be on one of them planes, seeing that we done our job so good.”

“Mouse.”

“Yes, Gunny?”

“Go see if you can scrounge some gas for the jeep.”

“Gunny, I already told you, they don’t got—”

“Gas, Izzo. And now!”

Frigging Marine Corps!

As they continued the evacuation by air, General Smith sent for Verity. Smith’s adjutant, a colonel, was there. But Smith spoke.

“Captain, you’ve done a fine job for us. We’ve had more hard intelligence on the CCF than any other division in Tenth Corps. I think more than MacArthur himself had. Some of what you
brought in may have saved the Fifth Marines at Yudam-ni. Maybe the entire division. You kept bringing in Chinese unit identification numbers, names of their commanding officers. No one else was getting us that stuff in such detail. Maybe a few of the brethren around here [he permitted himself a smile] were dubious at first. But you sold them. You made us believers. Job well done, as they say, Captain. Job well done. . . . ”

“Thank you, sir. My gunnery sergeant and driver shared the work and—”

“Yes, yes, give us their names. They’ll be suitably recognized.”

Verity felt the rebuke, stiffened, and said, “Aye-aye, sir.” The tent had gone cold.

General Smith smoked a pipe. And like the odd academic Verity knew, the general used it as a prop when he found it difficult to turn a phrase or answer a pointed question. Or tell a man he’d been lied to.

“Captain, I know promises were made. You were sent here to do a listening job on radio and report your finds. You did. Magnificently.”

Tom Verity saw it coming. He should have murmured the conventional, “Thank you, sir.” But didn’t.

“And that job is over. So you think you ought to be on one of those planes heading out. You think you’re getting screwed.”

This time he couldn’t resist.

“Yes sir, General, that’s what I think.” He was remembering Christmas promises to Kate.

Oliver Smith recoiled, almost as if he’d been cursed out. Verity was not going to make this easy for him. Then, as a good general should, Smith stiffened.

The hell with you, mister. You’re going to be screwed. And you’re going to stand there and take it
.

The general did not say any of this but went on, under control, pipe between clenched teeth, biting into the stem. Occasionally Smith lost pipes this way, biting right through. When he had to do things he hated to do and did them anyway.

“Well, I can’t send out an able-bodied officer with combat experience who knows how to fight and who also speaks Chinese. Can’t do it. We’ll need you to interrogate prisoners and more. You
might end up commanding a rifle company. A battalion, even. We’re short of officers now and losing more every day. I can’t put you on one of those planes, Verity. And I won’t.”

Tom’s knees sort of sagged.
I’ve just heard my death sentence
, he thought.

“No, sir,” he said dully, empty by now even of anger or righteous indignation.

Smith and his adjutant, the colonel, waited for Verity to say more. He wasn’t going to—what good did it do?—and then, sensing a last chance, he did. “When they came for me in Washington, General, came to my house, they told me flat out from the start, ‘Look, you’re unique. You’re the only guy we have who speaks all these dialects, who understands this stuff.’ I kept saying, ‘No, there are other people like me. Some of them better. I’ll give you their goddamn names.’ ”

Verity looked up at Smith, tall, glacial. Oliver Smith had twenty thousand men in his command. And on his conscience, if generals had consciences. His face was flat and unmoved. In a giddy instant, Verity thought,
Maybe that’s why they pay generals more. Because they have faces that don’t show pain. Or shame
.

Immediately he regretted this. Smith was a decent man and a good officer, and he was in a hell of a difficult position. Getting Verity here hadn’t been Oliver Smith’s notion.

But it was Oliver Smith who now represented the Marine Corps, not that smooth colonel in Washington. It was Smith who would decide if Verity might live. Or die. Smith who could send him home or keep him here, in this frozen hell. In a silly, vagrant thought, Verity wanted to tell the general, “Look, Maggie Higgins flies in and out every day. Just let me go along with her next time. I’ll brief her, tell her wonderful stories.”

He said nothing. Though he meant it. He would kiss Smith’s feet. Or his ass. To get out of here alive.

Smith, seeing he’d won, permitted a grim smile. “We might even need you to palaver a bit, with the Chinese, I mean.”

“Palaver?” Verity wasn’t thinking very crisply right now. He was thinking of Kate. And of promises of Paris, of Pere Noel.

“Yes. Palaver. In case the Chinese army decides we’ve surrounded them and they want to capitulate. . . ”

It was General Smith’s little joke, and he waited, briefly, for a laugh.

“Yes, sir,” Verity said, acknowledging the reality of his situation but not sharing in the amusement. Not one bit!

Smith, who had a temper, stood up.

“All right, Captain, you can go now.”

“Aye-aye, sir.”

Verity started to say something more but didn’t. Smith was silent, his face set. The interview was over. Verity and the adjutant walked from the tent together.

“Verity.”

“Sir?”

“You know,” the colonel said, his voice hard, righteously angered that a lousy captain had annoyed the boss, “maybe you never were all that unique, Verity. Maybe the Marine Corps had three or four other men doing exactly the same job you were doing on the Chinks. And we took cross-bearings, compared their reports with yours. Ever think of
that
, Mister?”

Verity couldn’t help it; his mouth fell open.

Had they been lying the whole time, right from that day in Henderson Hall? It wasn’t desperate need that took him from Kate; it was a goddamned Marine lie! Or was this bastard lying
now?
Just rubbing it in because he’d given the general a hard time?

Verity’s eyes began to fill and he pushed past the colonel and out. The Marine sentry saluted as he went by.

Friggin’ officers
, the sentry told himself,
don’t bother to salute back. Friggin’ staff
.

It was a lousy job pulling sentry duty at the general’s tent. Dull, boring duty. Nothing ever happened. You just stood around in the cold trying to look sharp and you saluted people coming and going and acting as if important things were happening, and nothing ever did.

Right across the entire front American officers were breaking down or snarling in defiance.

At Kunu-ri in the west, in I Corps, Lt. Col. Melvin Blair, commanding
the Third Battalion Twenty-fourth Infantry, fled the field. Colonel Blair blamed his black troops, claiming they said “Bugout Boogie” was their official regimental ditty.

The black soldiers said their colonel ran first and they only followed.

The commanding general of the Second Army Division, Gen. “Dutch” Keiser, was fired when his division crumbled and broke.

Giving Keiser the bad news, a staff officer assured him, “General Walker will take care of you with a job around headquarters.”

“Dutch” Keiser responded, “Tell General Walker to shove his job up his ass.”

Robert B. McClure, who replaced Keiser as division commander, promptly admitted to an aide that he was too old for the job and had not expected to ever again lead troops in combat.

“I can only brace myself by hitting the bottle,” General McClure explained. “I’ll be doing a lot of drinking.”

In his first order to this famous division of fifteen thousand soldiers, McClure ordered that every man grow a beard.

A runner caught up with them just south of Hagaru past the airstrip. He was in a jeep and had been stopping every jeep he passed.

“Captain Verity?”

“Yes.”

“Dispatch for you, sir.”

It was very brief and from Smith: “Captain, General Puller will leave Hagaru last in line of march and his regiment will guard my rear. Please join him now. Your Chinese may be of help to him.”

It was signed “Oliver Smith,” no rank or wax seals or anything.

Verity felt his stomach fall. Just a few inches, but it definitely fell. He let Tate read the message and then Izzo. After all, it involved them, too.

Izzo exhaled. “And I thought we were outta here.”

Tate didn’t say anything. It wasn’t in the nature of gunnery sergeants to show emotion at such times. Verity swallowed disappointment, resentment. The sense that generals had ways of getting back a man.

“Well, we’re not ‘outta here.’ So let’s go find Chesty Puller.”

They U-turned the jeep to ride the shoulder back north, slowly, against the flow of traffic, of trucks and artillery pieces and tanks and jeeps, Marines marching in column, some soldiers doing that as well but most not, and what could even in kindness only be called mobs of South Korean soldiers slogging along, all headed south, all getting as much distance between themselves and the Chosin Reservoir as they could.

For the first time, now that he was no longer part of but facing the line of march, Verity could see the retreat for what it was, mile after mile of men.

He didn’t know how far back it stretched. Beyond Hagaru, surely, up west toward the reservoir. If Puller’s First Regiment was the rear guard for Smith’s division, there was someone back there behind Puller, watching out for his ass. There was always, Verity concluded, someone worse off than you, some last platoon, last squad, last rifleman cagily looking over his shoulder.