The Marines of Autumn: A Novel of the Korean War Read online

  PRAISE FOR

  JAMES BRADY AND THE MARINES OF AUTUMN

  “The Marines of Autumn is a you-are-there epic story that portrays the horror and the heroism of the Corps finest, yet most critical hour. A truly gripping tale of a war that America has sadly forgotten.”

  —David Hackworth, author of Hazardous Duty

  “Both novel and memoir {The Coldest War} are graphic reminders of what has been called the Forgotten War. But not by Brady.”

  —Time Magazine

  “The Marines of Autumn is a masterpiece [that] recalls the era with awesome authenticity. The novel’s outcome is one of thunderous dramatic beauty and power.”

  —The Associated Press

  “There are war novels and then there are great war novels—and James Brady’s engrossing tome, The Marines of Autumn, instantly falls into the latter category.”

  —The New York Post

  “Brady tells it like it was and tells it extremely well.”

  —Booklist

  “The battle scenes, and the bone-freezing cold, are drawn with the precision of a M.A.S.H surgeon’s scalpel. . . . The last two chapters are as tough, poignant, and darkly funny as war writing ever gets, and it rings all the more true for that. There is honor here, and all the promises a culture and tradition can keep. This is a hell of a book about a hell of war by a hell of a writer.”

  —Daily News

  “The Korean War has found an authentic voice.”

  —The Washington Times

  Also by JAMES BRADY

  The Coldest War

  The Hampton Novels

  Further Lane

  Gin Lane

  The House That Ate the Hamptons

  Superchic

  The Press Lord

  Nielsen’s Children

  Holy Wars

  Paris One

  Fashion Show

  Designs

  THE

  MARINES

  OF

  AUTUMN

  A NOVEL OF THE KOREAN WAR

  JAMES BRADY

  THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS

  ST. MARTIN’S GRIFFIN NEW YORK

  THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS

  An imprint of St. Martin’s Press

  THE MARINES OF AUTUMN. Copyright © 2000 by James Brady. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.stmartins.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Brady, James.

  The Marines of autumn : a novel of the Korean War / James Brady.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-312-26200-0 (hc)

  ISBN 0-312-28081-5 (pbk)

  1. Korean War, 1950-1953—Fiction. 2. United States. Marine Corps—Fiction.

  I. Title.

  PS3552.R243 M37 2000

  813'.54—dc21

  00-025472

  CIP

  10 9 8 7 6

  DEDICATION TO “THE CHOSIN FEW”

  This book is dedicated to the Marines and others, American and Allied, who fought and defeated the Chinese army in the autumn of 1950 in the mountains of North Korea near the Chosin Reservoir, those who ever since have called themselves, with a rare humor, the Chosin Few. It was my honor to serve with some of them.

  CONTENTS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  EPILOGUE

  AFTERWORD

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I fought as a Marine officer in the Taebaek Mountains of North Korea from Thanksgiving weekend of 1951 through that autumn and winter into the spring of 1952, first as a rifle platoon leader in Dog Company of the Seventh Marines, then as Dog Company’s executive officer, finally as battalion intelligence officer. This area of operations was just south of where the Chosin Reservoir fighting took place exactly a year earlier, in the autumn of 1950.

  In writing fictionally about the 1950 campaign I have drawn on conversations and correspondences with men who were there and on articles in general magazines and newspapers as well as such specialized publications as Leatherneck magazine, The Old Breed News, and the newsletter of the Chosin Few organization.

  Books on which I’ve drawn include:

  U. S. Marine Operations in Korea, 1950-1953, volume 3: The Chosin Reservoir Campaign, by Lynn Montross and Captain Nicholas A. Canzona, USMC; reprinted by R. J. Speights, Austin, Texas, 1990.

  Korea, the Untold Story of the War, by Joseph Goulden; Times Books, New York, 1982.

  This Is War, by David Douglas Duncan; Harper & Brothers, New York, 1951.

  Marine! The Life of Chesty Puller, by Burke Davis; Bantam Books, New York, 1962.

  Colder Than Hell, A Marine Rifle Company at Chosin Reservoir, by Joseph R. Owen; Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, Maryland, 1996.

  Retreat, Hell! by Jim Wilson; William Morrow, New York, 1988.

  Triumph on 1240, The Story of Dog Company Seventh Marines in Korea, by R. D. Humphreys; Professional Press, Chapel Hill, NC, 1998.

  Korean War Almanac, by Harry G. Summers, Jr.; Facts on File, New York, 1990.

  Breakout, by Martin Russ; Fromm International, New York, 1999.

  Witness to War, Korea, by Rod Paschall; Berkley Publishing, New York, 1995.

  Truman, by David McCullough; Simon & Schuster, New York, 1992.

  American Caesar (a biography of Douglas MacArthur), by William Manchester.

  And for general information about Korea, A Handbook of Korea, published in 1988 by Seoul International Publishing House for the Korean Overseas Information Service.

  We’ll be home for Christmas,

  The kids never missed us.

  So cheer up, my lads,

  Bless ’em all.

  —Polite variant on a Marine ditty,

  North Korea, Autumn 1950

  THE MARINES OF AUTUMN

  PROLOGUE

  This was mountain country, beautiful and terrible, and it was a country that had been at war almost four months, but with no fighting this far north.

  There were still tigers in these mountains and it was natural for the smallish deer, tawny with white markings, to move cautiously when it came down to drink on an autumn morning from the big lake that served as a reservoir and for the hydroelectric power system. The deer’s caution was normal and instinctive and had nothing to do with the country being at war. What was not normal, the morning’s cold.

  Winter was fierce in this place, the wind out of Siberia crossing a brief corner of Manchuria and heavy snow coming off the Sea of Japan, the two combining to bury the Taebaek Mountains of North Korea for five or six months of every year. November could be very cold, and true calendar winter, when it came, would fasten its chill grip on people and mountains until late April and into May. There were few gentle months in the Taebaeks.

  But this cold in early October?

  The deer, which of course had no knowledge of dates or frontiers, knew only it was strange to find skim ice at
the edge of the lake so soon after the summer’s heat. The ice was barely there and no obstacle to drinking, and the deer pawed it away easily with a hoof before bending its neck to drink. If there were a tiger about, now was its moment. But no tiger sprang and the deer drank its fill before moving back up the slope of the hill and away from the water. Beyond these low hills sloping upward from the natural bowl of the lake were real hills, mountains of twenty-five hundred meters or more, eight or nine thousand feet in height, with snow cresting their summits, even in autumn.

  This was mountain country, beautiful and terrible, slimly forested by fir and pine, spruce and cedar, with small, swift streams of pure water racing through narrow gorges that divided the steep hills, and it was a country that had been now at war almost four months but with no fighting this far north. Not even the dull pounding of distant guns or the rumor of war to disturb its calm.

  The lake at which the deer drank and where skim ice formed in the shallows was called Changjin. But on the maps, which were mostly in Japanese from forty years of occupation, this lake was marked down as the Chosin Reservoir rather than its proper, Korean name. And it was at the Chosin that two opposing armies would soon meet. Though in early October, with great China not yet in the war and Gen. Douglas MacArthur declaring the conflict almost won, no one knew this.

  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.

  CHAPTER ONE

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

  The 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 fro
nt.

  “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.”