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

  He really did think about their Paris trip. Surely the small bar of the Ritz on the rue Cambon side could arrange a chicken sandwich and a glass of milk.

  “I’ll have a martini and you some milk and perhaps Dali in his flowing cape and hat will come in. Or Hemingway.”

  He would explain to her then who Hemingway and Dali were. And about martinis. And other inside information about Paris all three-year-old Americans should know. It was healthier thinking about Paris and the Ritz bar and Hemingway than brooding about the reality of where he was and the great hills and this cold that had begun to frighten him.

  They weren’t at Koto-ri long; it made no impression. Later, it would.

  “Move it; move it; move it.”

  Litzenberg was still ahead of them, by now having passed through Hagaru heading northwest for Yudam-ni around the shores of the big lake. Hagaru was a good-sized town with warehouses and two-story buildings and an actual grid of paved streets in a decent-sized valley.

  This is the place, Izzo told himself. We can do business here.

  The Marines were already building an airstrip. Hagaru was the one place north of Sudong and Chinhung-ni flat enough for a real airstrip that could take big cargo planes. Smith was counting on Hagaru. Without telling anyone, he was already planning to fall back on Hagaru if things got sticky up there at Yudam-ni or beyond. Hagaru could be defended, supplied. He was less sanguine about Yudam-ni.

  Verity and his two men drew hot rations from the engineer battalion hacking out the airstrip and ate sitting on the warm hood of the jeep, watching the engineers work. It was interesting to see, especially if you didn’t have to do it. The ground was so hard frozen the pans of the bulldozers could only scrape an inch or two deep at every pass, and then pneumatic drills had to be brought up to crack the frozen earth from the pans so the ’dozers could go back and scrape again.

  “I don’t think I want to grow up to become an engineer,” Tate remarked.

  “No, Gunny. Looks too much like work.”

  Nor were they long at Hagaru.

  “Colonel Litzenterg’s at Yudam-ni, sir,” Verity was told. “That’s Seventh Marine headquarters now.”

  “Not Hagaru? We were told they were here.”

  “Not no more, Captain. They went north.”

  Now they were closing on the Toktong Pass, at four thousand feet the highest ground traveled by road. Higher still, of course, and looming above the narrow road, the steep hills to either side.

  Narrower and steeper. Verity recalled an early line from Dickens, a wintry London just before Christmas, “foggier yet and colder.”

  Well, we don’t have the fog, Captain Verity thought. That was about all they’d been spared, and glad of it.

  They had the cold and they had the first snows and there were Chinese up there ahead somewhere and they had this damned narrow mountain road, claustrophobic as the Baltimore city tunnel, where the mountains on both sides squeezed the road and sometimes shut it down completely with slides of stone and rock and earth, and now snow, so that ’dozers had to be brought up to push the way clear again.

  “They maintain the streets better in Philly, Captain,” Izzo remarked, “where the commissioner is the mayor’s brother-in-law.”

  Tate, riding in back with the big radio, kept looking up, swinging back this way and that, watching for rockslides. Izzo had all he could do to keep the jeep solidly on the road and provide a running patter without the distractions of looking up.

  “Here’s some Chinese, Captain!” Tate would sing out, screwing the volume up higher so Verity in the front seat could hear.

  “Yeah.”

  Sometimes Verity waved Izzo out of the line of traffic grinding slowly north so they could cut the motor and perch by the side of the road without having to listen over the sound of the engine.

  Most of the Marines marched north. It wasn’t that tough. Not yet. The pace was slow. Litzenberg saw to that, and what his orders didn’t do the hills did. By now the men were in good shape again after the diarrhea and nausea of shipboard and as they moved past Verity’s jeep were still in good humor, sporting and calling out: “Take a crap for me, pal! I ain’t got time to stop!”

  Izzo told them to go frig themselves. But good-naturedly. Verity, listening to the radio, taking the occasional note, liked watching the men marching past, weapons slung, rucksacks full, canteens and knives and bayonets and cartridge belts a-jangle, helmets kicked back off their faces, the men’s noses and cheeks red with cold but pleasantly so. When there was sun the cold was brisk, stiffening, not hurtful. There were things he didn’t like about the Marine Corps, never had, but he enjoyed seeing good troops march. Before battles. After a bad fight, troops didn’t walk the same.

  In all fairness, MacArthur did not fight the war entirely from his palace in Tokyo. On November 24, against the advice of his officers, he ordered his transport plane to fly north over enemy lines to scout out the ground between his armies and the Yalu.

  “An endless expanse of utterly barren countryside,” the General reported, “jagged hills, yawning crevices, and the black waters of the Yalu locked in the silent grip of snow and ice. It was a merciless wasteland.”

  Into which he had ordered Eighth Army and X Corps.

  On his return to Tokyo, MacArthur promptly issued a detailed communiqué regarding future operations. Seldom had any general so recklessly revealed his hand, and both Peng and Lin Piao received accurate translations of the communiqué within twenty four hours.

  Oh, yes. General MacArthur was awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross for his sight-seeing flight.

  The army’s Seventh Division, moving north toward Hagaru to relieve the Fifth Marines for the offensive to jump off from Yudam-ni, was already suffering severe frost-bite injuries and some deaths from the cold on November 24, nearly four weeks before the start of calendar winter. Along the MSR the division dropped off two-man MP posts to watch and secure the mountain road, the posts several miles apart. Now word came in of truck convoys coming through and finding MPs dead in the morning, dead from the cold if they’d tried to get through the night without a fire, dead of bullet wounds and bayonets by the ashes of a fire if they’d lighted one. One convoy, traveling by night, had to pull over to revive men who’d simply fainted from cold and could not be brought around by other men in the truck pressing against them and massaging them. An artilleryman reported the convoy was stopped, men ordered out to cut brush with their bayonets, and a fire built using spare gasoline. At which point, the fainted men regained consciousness.

  “I really think they would have died without them fires,” the artilleryman said.

  The night of November 24, the Seventh Division headquarters, situated in a valley near Pungsam, reported a temperature of thirty-six degrees below zero Fahrenheit. No one knew how cold it got in the hills above.

  On the approach march to the Chosin and then the left turn toward Yudam-ni, Verity monitored the radio and took notes, new names, new divisional numbers. Not that there was any question the Chinese were in. Hardly that after Sudong and what happened over in Eighth Army. They had the hard evidence of bodies, and not even that bastard Willoughby could ignore the dead.

  Now there were two questions: Had the Chinese pulled back to the border after those early fights, satisfied that they’d made their demonstration and bucked up the North Koreans? And if they hadn’t pulled back and were still close, lying low and waiting, how many of them were there, who led them, and what had they planned?

  This, largely, was Verity’s job. Whenever Verity heard a new unit number or some other fragment of what might be significant (and probably wasn’t, given his lack of intelligence training), he passed it on, sending Izzo back or ahead in the jeep to wherever higher-echelon headquarters seemed to be in the long, accordioning reptile of a column. Sometimes Izzo came back with thanks to Verity. Often he was turned away with scant courtesy.

  “They say they know all this frigging stuff, Captain,” the Mouse complained,
a man sore put upon. “They say they know there’s a million Chinks out there.”

  “OK, Izzo. We’ll try again tomorrow.”

  Chinks. People among whom he’d been born, his friends and tutors and neighbors. And now his enemies.

  A million of them. Well, he hadn’t counted that many, but it was possible. They had the men. And China was just a river away, across the Yalu. Some of the unit numbers he identified were familiar to him, units from Peng’s old Chinese Eighth Route Army, in ’45 and early ’46. It was almost like a reunion weekend with fellow alumni. But when he mentioned this to Tate, only half-serious, he got a look.

  “Yessir,” Tate said, an eyebrow figuratively raised.

  “Forget it, Gunny,” Verity said. He’d forgotten just how literal Marine gunnery sergeants could be. Well, it was precise, literal work they did, the good ones, men like Tate. Very precise, very literal.

  “Yessir,” Tate said, precise and literal.

  But wasn’t Verity the same? A matter of degree. Here they were flanked and trailed and hunted and quite possibly surrounded by Chinese divisions, maybe a quarter of a million men, maybe half a million, if not the million of Mouse Izzo’s rumor mill. And what was Verity doing? Listening to the radio to determine which Chinese were in the war; their names, ranks, and serial numbers.

  Marines ought to make good academics, cutting through vague generalizations to get to the heart of things, to the essence, to where truth resides.

  A bracket of mortar shells came in then, hitting frozen ground on either side of them, and Tate and Verity both swung quickly into the jeep. Izzo already had the motor running, and they pulled away, spinning wheels on the frozen snow and hard brown earth. The march to Yudam-ni was still getting organized, and a single jeep and three men, traveling on their own, could still cut in and out of traffic and move when they had to.

  “Frigging mortars,” Izzo muttered. He didn’t mind rifle fire or even artillery; he didn’t like mortars, the way they came straight down at you, following you right into holes. Or jeeps.

  The radio crackled now as they drove.

  “Chinese?” Tate prompted.

  “Chinese,” Verity said, “another dialect,” and again began taking notes. Unlike Izzo, he was cool about mortars, always had been.

  Izzo looked back at Verity, over his shoulder. “Frigging Chinks,” he said, slightly resentful, as if Captain Verity were to blame for them. Jesus, he could be in Philly, selling cars. Instead, he was here, driving a jeep on a mountain road in cold weather while frigging Chinks tried to kill him. Or maybe it was raggedy-ass North Koreans. Didn’t really matter, did it, just who was firing mortars, not if they frigging hit you.

  Verity looked at Izzo and grinned. Izzo grinned back, but deferentially. You never knew with officers. It didn’t pay to get them on your case, and what did a grin cost?

  Behind them another mortar crashed in now and then, but that was hardly their concern now. In a war, you move on to the next hand. You deal with new cards.

  As the Marines drove farther north, deeper into bandit country, the risk of ambush grated and rasped and men turned edgy. Jumpy.

  They argued endlessly, Which was the worst duty? To have the point? Or flank patrol?

  You know how it is being there on the point, the mines and the machine guns and the odd sniper and the serious ambushes waiting. And it is always the point man, the very first Marine of the twenty thousand yet to come, who first pads cautiously into view. But never cautious enough. And when the point man dies, the infantry always asks why they didn’t send a tank first, instead?

  But flank patrols? Man, in country like this, there was no serious debate; in mountains like these, flank patrol was the worst.

  Imagine it. You are tired already, with cold feet and carrying a fifty pound pack and a BAR along the frozen, windswept road, and suddenly the platoon sergeant calls out, “All right, you people, this here squad is now going on flank patrol and ascend this here hill to that ridgeline up there and from that vantage point you will ensure the safety and integrity and so forth of the entire battalion!”

  Or regiment, or division. It depended on how large a vision the sergeant possessed.

  So you cursed and spit (a disappointing crackle of frozen saliva) and hitched your fucking pack higher and began to climb. Sometimes there was a gentle slope, fifteen or twenty degrees, and if only you didn’t slide back so much, it wasn’t bad. Sometimes it was so steep, snow slid from the shelving rock and the men crawled, hand and knee like alpinists, fingers alert for handholds, cracks and fissures and crevices, or a runt pine, anything to cling to with frozen fingers. But they were not alpinists. They lugged weapons and heavy belts of ammo and huge packs and rations and sleeping bags. They might be up here on the ridgelines a thousand feet above the road on flank patrol for a day and a night, even two nights. They needed rations to live; without the sleeping bags they would die of the cold.

  And sometimes, on the ridgelines, they collided with other flank patrols, sent out by the retreating North Koreans or the advancing Chinese, and exhausted, frozen men fell upon each other in a chill rage and did themselves to death.

  Below, on the road, Verity and the others heard the sound of firing and kept moving north, glad they were here and not up there on the ridges on flank patrol.

  Tate, with his fondness for military history, was having walking, waking nightmares about Custer and the Seventh Cavalry as he and Captain Verity and driver Izzo made their way slowly north through Hagaru and then beyond it to Yudam-ni. Even the numbers seemed ominous, the Seventh Cavalry under Custer and the Seventh Marines, to which they were attached. He kept all this to himself, not wanting to spook Izzo or worry Verity. But he could not help brooding on Custer’s approach march through southern Montana toward the Little Bighorn and ten thousand waiting Crow and Cheyenne and Sioux.

  They’d been cocky, too, Custer’s men, his Irishmen and the veterans of Shiloh and hard men from the borders, confident they could whip any hostiles out there, sure of themselves and their regiment and of “the Boy General” who led them. Smelling the offal fertilizing the small farms and the firs and other needled trees and the distant cooking smoke of the villages of conquered North Korea, Tate wondered if the Seventh Cavalry had enjoyed their ride toward death, if they’d stopped to smell the freshly trampled grass under the hooves, the prairie ripe in the sun, the beautiful country, to savor the look of far mountains.

  Tate trusted his officers, General Smith and Colonel Litzenberg and Murray and old Chesty Puller. But he expected the men of the doomed Seventh Cavalry had trusted Reno and Tom Custer and Benteen and Yellowhair himself, George Armstrong Custer.

  Walking beside the jeep, Tate looked across to Verity, ambling along the gravel road, chewing comfortably on an unlit cigar. It was on his tongue to ask Verity what he thought. He bit off the question, saying nothing except, to himself, are we, too, walking into a trap?

  Verity, hardly as comfortable as he looked, was wondering the same thing, wondering if they were, just how he would handle it.

  While Tate, who had been a prisoner before in Asia, angrily rejected the idea of ever being one again.

  Maybe the wind was worse than the snow or the cold.

  “It comes out of Siberia,” Tate said. “Not a hundred fifty miles from here to Siberia.”

  “That’s Russia, ain’t it?” Izzo said.

  “That’s Russia,” Tate agreed.

  Izzo laughed. “Hell, we finish off these Chinamen, we go a hundred fifty miles north and start up with the Russkis.”

  “Sure, Izzo, sure.”

  Verity didn’t really think they need go looking for further difficulties.

  When the wind came it scoured the road clear of loose, dry new snow and left it a glistening, ribbed, shining, rutted ribbon of ice off which the sun, when it shone, bounced, blinding the men and reflecting off Izzo’s mirrored glasses like theatrical spotlights. The ice was steel-hard, even in the sun, at those temperatures, and the de
eply cut rubber tread of snow tires spun helplessly on the up-inclines and ran madly out of control on the way down, so that men were drafted into service as draft animals might have been, pushing the skidding trucks uphill and hanging onto them, feet planted and skidding on the way down.

  “You men, get on that there truck; grab hold; pull!”

  The sergeants drove them. But who drove the sergeants? Men with frozen feet shuffled obediently to push or heave against a fender, a bumper, the tailgate of a laboring, careening truck.

  Even tracked vehicles skidded wildly.

  The sergeants shouted at them, too, and the tank drivers, perched a dozen feet above in the open turrets, shouted and cursed back.

  Nothing was accomplished, the tanks and motorized guns too heavy for even a dozen men to make much difference pushing up or braking down, not on the ice, not on the inclines, and every so often they lost a truck or a howitzer, memorably once a tank, or a jeep, and watched it slide and bounce away down the side of a mountain toward the ravine and frozen stream below, men leaping off at a great rate, rolling or sliding downhill on the snow until they came up against a rock or a tree and stopped with a sudden whack. Incredibly, except for a few men they lost in this way, most of the Marines crawled or climbed their way back up the slope to the road to continue the journey as pedestrians, sore and limping and cursing long and steadily against their fate.

  “Does the men good to curse,” Tate remarked. “Healthy to let off a little steam.”

  “It does,” Verity agreed, and concluded that if he thought it would help him even one bit, he would let off a power of oaths.

  Izzo made up for him.

  It was an empty country.