The Marines of Autumn: A Novel of the Korean War (8 page)

“Yessir, in Washington.”

“So you know why you’re here.”

“To assess the Chinese threat and to report directly to General Smith and his staff on what I hear, what I find out, what I even suspect. Yessir.”

“Find out anything yet, Verity?”

“Not much. I have a good radio and a gunny who knows radio. We’re picking up plenty of Chinese traffic—”

“Traffic?”

“Conversation over the air. Transmissions. But the Chinese border isn’t two hundred miles from here. Without a lot of triangulation you can’t tell if what I hear is north of the Yalu in Manchuria or south of the line inside Korea. Or a bit of both.”

“If you went farther north, would you learn more? Better reception, that sort of thing?”

“Sure. A lot of this traffic is low-power stuff. The closer I get, the better the read.” That was what Tate had assured Verity, as he, shamelessly, now assured the colonel.

“Well then, when the rifle regiments finally get off those damned transports and start north, you go along.”

“With which regiment?”

“I don’t know what General Smith wants yet. You’ve got Litzenberg’s Seventh Marines, Murray’s Fifth, and Chesty Puller’s First. Whichever is the point regiment, I’d think.”

“And can I see General Smith?”

“Soon as he gets here, Verity. Headquarters Marine Corps seems to think you’re something special.”

“Yessir.”

Verity and Tate requisitioned an abandoned Wonsan house that was almost clean.

“I looked pretty close, Captain. Don’t want us to get lousy.”

They’d not yet decided whether to keep Izzo as a driver.

“I might get us a better,” Tate said, “young man with a bit less personality. When the division disembarks, this town will be a-crawl with promising young men eager to establish reputations and make a career for themselves. Then again, Izzo reads a good map, drives a good car.”

Verity took his time deciding about enlisted men, even gunnery sergeants, but he was starting to enjoy Tate. He knew his work and did it and had a sense of humor left over, a muted realization life was absurd and its comedy ought to be enjoyed. And he didn’t press Verity for family anecdotes or intimate details, the things old-timers often did to ingratiate themselves with an officer. Verity saw early on through that brand of bullshit. Izzo had tried it on Verity and been shot down.

It was taking the First Marine Division so long to get into Wonsan harbor (some thirty thousand mines had been laid, it was said), the town was crawling with journalists who’d flown in.

“There’s Maggie Higgins of the
Herald Tribune,”
an impressed lieutenant told Verity. “She’s pretty cute, for an older woman.”

Miss Higgins was in her thirties.

On October 24 Bob Hope and Miss Maxwell put on their show. The Marines didn’t land until the next day and were the butt of jokes. Verity had been invited, but he sent Tate instead.

“You go, Gunny. May be the last laugh you’ll have for a time.”

“Yessir, I will go,” Tate said, “and thank you.”

He didn’t know much about Verity as yet, but he knew the man wasn’t a big laugher. And, like most of us, had secrets and held them close.

Gunnery Sergeant Tate had never married. Nor did he think he ever would. And unlike most senior NCOs he knew in the Corps, many of them assertive and cocky men, he was awkward around women. Not so with other men. And he was very much at ease in all other ways, including with superior officers. So much so that he’d put in three years as a drill instructor at San Diego, at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot, where DIs fashioned raw boots into proper Marines and where only the finest sergeants and exceptional corporals drew duty as DIs.

Women, well, they were another quantity entirely. And although he rarely spoke of it, he’d pondered long and hard and thought he understood why. Japanese prison camp in China during the War.

When they are sent to prison and spend almost four of their formative years (Tate went behind the barbed wire at twenty) entirely among men and are beaten and humiliated and shamed, helpless to strike back, even the strongest men are unmanned. Even now, more than six years after his release and in the midst of a new and different war, Tate carried the weight of a guilt unearned, but no less real.

He handled men because he understood them. But he was nervous and fearful with women, sure they saw through his crisp, efficient exterior and to the shame and guilt inside.

Women were cleverer than men; he couldn’t kid them about his failures and his past.

And so he maintained a prudent distance and when friends proposed a social occasion where he might meet this splendid young woman or that, he invented reasons not to do so and went to a ball game or a movie or tugged from his footlocker a volume of
Lee’s Lieutenants
or an old and well-thumbed life of Cromwell.

“This is a small, odd country,” Verity wrote Kate in a letter Madame would read to her, “with big hills that already have some snow up high. Do you remember the snow on P Street last year
when I pulled you on the sled? The people live in small, funny houses and everything smells like the Chinese food we buy on Wisconsin Avenue. Or wet laundry. It is a smell I remember as a boy in China, and I find it pleasant.”

“Madame, is Daddy in France now?” the child asked.

“Non
, Kate, in France there are lovely smells of flowers and wine and the sea. Mr. Verity is in Asia, in a place called Korea.”

“Oh.”

Later, in such letters, Verity would not write as nostalgically of the snow.

At Bob Hope’s USO show for the troops at Wonsan, Gunny Tate sat well back in the audience of mostly GIs, trying to be inconspicuous, enjoying Marilyn Maxwell, leggy and blond, and Mr. Hope’s anti-Marine wit and double entendres. There were some ROKs in the audience as well, officers, who did not seem to understand just who Bob Hope was and why everyone laughed so heartily. Various celebrities in the audience were introduced and stood in acknowledgment, one of them Marguerite Higgins.

“She was banging some hotshot army general down at Pusan,” Izzo remarked the next day.

“There are no hotshot army generals,” Tate said rather stiffly. “Nearest thing they had to a hotshot was General Dean, and he was so dumb he got himself captured.”

“Well, it was a colonel, maybe, she was banging.”

“You don’t know, Izzo, and I don’t want to hear general officers or colonels being accused of consorting. Even if they are army.”

“It’s just what I heard, Gunny. No offense. Just what I read somewhere in the newspapers.”

There were no newspapers. Izzo didn’t really need any. He was one of those people to whom gossip and rumor gravitated like iron filings to a magnet.

“Our Walter Winchell,” Verity said.

“Why, thanks, Captain,” Izzo said, pleased. He knew Winchell was a famous columnist and broadcaster.

“Think nothing of of it,” Verity said.

That evening there was a reception in what passed for an officers’ mess and he met both Hope and Miss Higgins. By now there were more Marines, liaison officers off the first ships, landed early to prepare the way for the entire division. Hope was less comic in person than he was in movies or on the radio, rather elegant in a well-cut double-breasted gray business suit. He’d flown in with Miss Maxwell and a small troupe at some risk and seemed ready to be away, having done his show. But he chatted easily with the officers, signed a few autographs, promised to make the odd phone call to wife and family when he got back to the States.

“You look very much at ease with the troops,” someone remarked.

“I am,” Hope said. “I’ve been doing this since 1941. March Field, California. I did a radio show for Pepsodent and one night we went down there to do the show for a bunch of kids just drafted. The war wasn’t on yet and they were just kids and homesick and they laughed and cheered and stamped their feet and whistled and applauded and the producer said, ‘Hey, just wait a minute. We got something here. You’re going back there every week.’ So it wasn’t anything patriotic at the start, just a comedy hour in search of laughs.”

Most of the younger officers clustered around Miss Maxwell. She’d been the blonde in a big movie the year before,
Champion
, with Kirk Douglas, and they all wanted to meet her. Verity found himself talking to Marguerite Higgins. By the time she got to him the evening was nearly wasted.

“Hello. I’m Maggie Higgins.” She wore a light, fresh perfume.

“Verity. Thomas Verity.”

“And where are you from and what do you do, Captain?”

She knew rank.

“Oh, a place out in the country. We take a newspaper, but I regret to say it isn’t yours.”

“You win some, you lose some. And are you on General Smith’s staff?”

“No, I’m in communications. I work with radios.”

It was only a half-lie. He wasn’t going to get her started asking why a Chinese expert was up here in North Korea with the Marine division.

She asked, ready to move on to more promising material, “And what are the big radio programs this season in Korea?”

“Oh, lot of stuff no one understands.” Then, brighter, as though he didn’t want her to think him a total bore, he said, “But sometimes at night, very late, if you twist the dial, you pick up dance music, American bands, from a long way off.”

“Oh? You can?”

“Yes, it’s something called the Heaviside layer,” he said, cribbing from Tate. “It’s an effect that fetches radio waves from a long way off. Perth, Australia, Honolulu, I’ve picked them up. And one night San Francisco. An orchestra playing at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. . . .”

“Dance music.”

“Yes, dance music.”

She took his hand and shook it. “Thank you, Captain, for reminding me. It would be nice to hear dance music again some night.”

“I’ll try to let you know, Miss Higgins, the next time it comes through.”

“The Heaviside layer?”

“Yes, the Heaviside layer.”

A light colonel made his way over. “What was that all about, Tom? You seemed to have fascinated
la belle
Higgins.”

“Dull dog like me?”

But he grinned as he said it. And when he went back to the house he shared with Tate and Izzo he was still grinning.

“Anything interesting on the air, Gunny?”

“No, sir. Not much. A little music came in for a few minutes. Tinny and lots of static. But it was American music.”

“You turn in,” Verity said. “I’ll listen for a while.”

He wasn’t sleepy and stayed with the radio until 2:00
A.M.
but didn’t get much, and there was no more music that night. He wondered what perfume Maggie Higgins had been wearing and
whether there had really been an army general down at Pusan and disliked himself for wondering.

He’d not made love to a woman since Elizabeth.

There were chaplains, of course, traveling with the army and praying over the men. Verity, who did not attend church in peacetime, wondered about their value; didn’t all this piety cause men to ponder and, perhaps, reduce the thirst for battle?

Regardless of denomination, every chaplain was called Padre. Even the rabbi.

Izzo, who was forever looking for an edge, attended services regularly, whatever the sect or theology. “Look, Gunny, who knows what’s gonna happen? You get ready; you make friends in high places, right?” And during the singing, if he knew the words, he shouted the hymns with enormous fervor.

He also kept close watch for when, before a Catholic mass, the priest would offer the men general absolution. “You can save up the sins and then get rid of them all at once without saying nothing. You know, ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. I got laid twice; I whacked off three times; I got drunk once.’ Who needs that when you can be just as sorry without blabbing it out?”

Izzo said sinners were also expected to resolve not to commit the same offenses again.

“But you always do, don’t you?” Tate inquired.

“Yeah, Gunny, but I always promise not to. Otherwise it’s negative thinking, ya know?”

Tate, a Presbyterian, limited himself at times of stress to the quiet recitation of Scottish psalms.

Tom Verity wished he were able to share their faith. It seemed such a consolation. And as Izzo remarked on leaving a Jewish service, “Ya can’t be too careful, Captain.”

There was plenty of gossip that did not involve Marguerite Higgins. Except in the military it was called rumor.

The war was nearly over. No, it wasn’t; the Chinese were coming
in. Not only the Chinese, the Russians. No, they weren’t. A deal had been worked out at the UN, brokered by the Indians. The French. By the king of Denmark. By Emperor Hirohito. Half a million Chiang Kai-shek regulars were on ships heading for Wonsan and would take over. The Marines would be back at Camp Pendleton before Christmas. Before Thanksgiving. Before Election Day.

“Tom? Tom Verity?”

It was Bjornsen, whom he’d known in the War, a career forest ranger from Nevada up near the California line above Reno.

“What do you hear, Bob?”

“War’s about over is what they’re saying. And I keep saying, then why are we pouring this division and a hell of a lot more into a two-bit port like this one?”