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

  “What is this fellow speaking now, Verity?”

  “It’s a dialect of Cantonese, Major. He’s from down south, near Hong Kong, a province called Haiku. A fisherman, once, but he’s been in the army a long time.”

  The major nodded solemnly. “I wish I had some Chinese,” he said. “But at the Academy I took three years of French.”

  “Oh, good. French. Well,” Verity said.

  Tate looked away. It didn’t do for gunnery sergeants to make sport of Academy majors even when they were fools.

  The one-armed prisoner and three others Verity interrogated told much the same story. They were from the Forty-second Division CCF; they’d crossed into North Korea a month ago and had been hiding ever since. They were short of food and now of ammo, and there was a lot of frostbite.

  “Feet mostly, he says,” Verity told Colonel Fleet. “Their sneakers are no damned good. And they’ve got only one pair of socks. When the socks go, they’re barefoot inside the sneakers.”

  Fleet himself already had frostbitten toes, and he shuddered sympathetically.

  “It’s surprising how much Chinese troops know, Colonel,” Verity said. “Right down to platoon level they’ve been pretty well briefed on the mission and their adjoining units and they know they’re fighting Americans. Though they don’t seem tremendously impressed by our being Marines. They thought we were an army division.”

  “Bastards,” Fleet muttered. And was suddenly much less sympathetic about their goddamned frozen feet.

  Fleet’s battalion was up in the hills, three rifle companies scattered over three hills, linked only by radio and company runners and by sound-powered phone where they’d been able to lay wire. Now, as the morning filled, the casualty and ammo reports began to come in. One of his companies had lost forty men, fifteen of them dead or missing, the others wounded. Another had gotten off light. Eight men were dead, three missing, a dozen wounded in the third. By noon Colonel Fleet was off himself on foot, chugging uphill, wanting to visit with each of the three companies before dark fell, when the Chinese, it was assumed by everyone, would come again. The early snow flurries had ended, and in the brilliant blue sky you could see the vapor trails of the bombers high up heading farther north to bomb Chinese supply routes, the Yalu bridges. The tactical air support, carrier planes, and land-based fighters flying out of Kimpo and the other South Korean fields came in low over and over again, occasionally dropping napalm on a ridgeline or squeezing off machine-gun and cannon fire at likely targets.

  “They can’t see a frigging thing, Captain,” Izzo remarked idly. “They’re just firing for show.”

  They probably were. But it was good to know they were there. And if it was simply show, it would still have an effort on the Chinese in the hills waiting for night. Verity had been strafed on the ’Canal by Japanese Zeros and had not enjoyed the experience. If only they could get close air support during snowfall or by night.

  When the Chinese would come again.

  No one really gauged how bad the cold would be. Not even Puller.

  They were short of winter parkas in the First Marines, and as they set out from Hungnam on the march north toward the reservoir, in reasonably temperate weather, Puller rashly gave his parka away, to an enlisted man who didn’t have one.

  As he joined the convoy, Puller disclosed that he wore cotton underwear, wool underwear over that, a wool sweater and shirt, green wool trousers, then a pair of waterproof trousers, a fleecy woolen vest, and fleece-lined trousers and a field jacket.

  “How the hell I’m going to walk is a mystery,” he told people, “but by God, I won’t freeze.”

  He was wrong about that.

  By two in the afternoon his jeep had reached Koto-ri and Puller was shivering so violently he could spoon up only a bean or two from a can of rations heated on the engine. By now it was snowing and twenty-five degrees below zero here on the plateau. Puller’s driver and radioman and aide saw how bad he was and quickly got a tent erected, sealing in the canvas skirts with logs and then pouring water over the logs that froze instantly, and setting up a potbellied stove inside for the Old Man. Most Marines bivouacked outdoors at Koto-ri, sleeping bags their only shelter.

  “That damned wind came right out of the heart of Manchuria,” Puller said. “I believe Genghis Khan was right. . . . Nobody can win a winter campaign in the land of the Mongols.”

  Winter was officially still a month off, and the campaign had hardly begun.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Less than five miles from Hagaru, Faith was killed. . . . His men, singly or in small, leaderless bands, were chivied and hunted like animals by the victorious Chinese chasing at their heels.

  Captain Verity suspected, and with reason, that a new hand had been dealt. For him. And perhaps for his child. The time of monitoring the radio and passing on unit identification numbers to a general officer, the time of questioning Chinese POWs, including those lacking a left arm, and telling a colonel like Fleet what he’d learned that might be of value to his battalion, the time of playing at war, was over.

  They had promised Verity that he wasn’t being sent to Korea to command troops and fight as an infantryman. “We’ve got plenty of rifle company commanders, Verity.”

  Oh, yeah.

  Verity hadn’t been lied to by that smooth headquarters colonel back there on a hot day in Virginia; he understood that. But the ground rules had changed. The war had changed. His role had changed.

  So had his chances of going home after a lousy month or six weeks. He was here; the Chinese were here; the First Marine Division was surrounded.

  “Oh, Kate, I tried to make everything right for you. I asked for compassionate and I thought I had it. We’d already planned our Christmas. And I’ve failed you. I won’t be keeping my promises to you. To your mother. To myself. . . .”

  MacArthur said “the boys” might be home for Christmas. He lied. Verity had told his daughter they’d see the bridges of Paris. Together.

  Now they wouldn’t. Not this year. Not this Christmas. He’d lied to his child. Now it was coming down to something more basic than Christmas. Would Tom Verity ever see Kate again?

  “Sur le Pont d’Avignon . . . ”

  Until the previous night, when they fought in town and beat back the Chinese, Thomas Verity hadn’t been in a firefight for five years, and then it had been against the Japanese, swift and clever, courageous and desperate, most competently supported by artillery and tanks and planes. Now it was Chinese infantrymen with no artillery at all beyond mortars, no tanks, no aviation.

  Thank God for small favors.

  The Marines held a low ridgeline a mile outside of the town, a ridge that despite no great height dominated the supply route. Verity and Tate and Izzo wouldn’t be freelancing anymore, fighting on their own. The three of them, along with spare artillerymen and company runners and truck drivers and other casuals, had been drafted into a makeshift rifle company to beef up the thin line. There had already been two attacks on the ridge, and Chinese bodies littered the slope, one or two still moving weakly, helplessly, but ignored. Other bodies had been dragged uphill to where the Marines lay in the snow. They couldn’t dig in, they had no sandbags, and the Chinese bodies functioned as primitive cover for the prone riflemen, who rested their rifle barrels on the torsos or heads of the dead to steady them.

  “Chop suey sandbags,” one Marine said, laughing, as Verity moved past to take his place, filling a gap in the line.

  He shuddered reflexively, not able to help himself. Then, because it made sense and it no longer mattered to the Chinese and might save his own life, he got back up and slipped and slid a dozen yards downhill to claim his own corpse, grabbing it by the ankle and dragging it back up.

  “Tate, you and Izzo get one, too!” he called out. Day before yesterday he had been advising the general; now he was dealing in carcasses. It was still light but going gray fast, and soon the night would close down and the Chinese would come again. These bodies were from l
ast night. Verity remembered the stench of the dead on Okinawa, on Guadalcanal, American bodies and Japanese. Both stank and sometimes, when a man had to dig in close, he would gag and retch, just from the smell. The dead in the Korean cold did not smell. They just lay there, stiff and waxy-looking. But they were just as dead.

  Now, the Marines waited. The hard part of that was the cold. You lay on your stomach on the snow, not moving about much to maintain sound discipline, but that didn’t mean you didn’t shiver. Verity cradled the M-l rifle at first, roughly sighting it over the Chinese body and down the slope up which the Chinese would come. He wanted to take advantage of the last light to read terrain, to pick out and register the ground, the draws and little dips through which the Chinese might come, taking brief shelter before they burst out to sprint toward the Marines. If they could sprint. No one moved very fast coming uphill over snow and ice. Even under fire, when men moved quicker than they were able to.

  Verity settled in, trying not to shiver too much. On both sides of him Marine enlisted men did the same. Tate was perhaps ten yards away; he’d lost track of Izzo. There was a moon and it came early, just after seven. That was good. A clear night with moonlight on the snow was good. You had visibility. When your eyes adjusted to the light you could see almost as well as by day. If the Chinese came tonight it would not be easy for them. Verity found himself feeling pretty good. If it weren’t so damned cold. He wouldn’t like to have fought Japanese in weather like this, not with your fingers stiff and hands shaking and eyes tearing while you tried to sight a rifle.

  At 10:00 P.M. they came.

  First there was incoming, forty or fifty mortar shells crashing down on the ridge, mostly light mortars, Verity thought, a few heavies, maybe .82mm stuff, and not very effective despite the Marines’ lack of shelter. Too diffuse, all up and down the line on the forward slope and behind them on the reverse. Somewhere off to the left a man was screaming, so they had hit somebody. Other-wise, as Tate might say, it was pretty cushy. The mortar concentration lasted only a few minutes, and then, way down the forward slope, they could hear the Chinese coming, blowing police whistles. That must be another way in which they retained march discipline by night. There were no bugles. From what he’d heard, Verity had expected bugles. He almost felt cheated, there being no bugles. Nor were there Mongolian ponies. The Chinese used them, too. But not tonight. Tonight it was just infantrymen coming heavily up the hill toward them over the snow and in the moonlight.

  These were familiar-looking figures to Verity, having grown up among them, small, compact men, most of them, but bulky in the padded cotton uniforms worn against the cold. Rotund, a bit like that French tire commercial of the Michelin man composed entirely of inflated tires, and moving very slowly uphill because of the slope and the footing and the weight of the weapons and ammo and the padded uniforms. Along the Marine line, no one fired. A lieutenant was in charge, and he was somewhere behind them toward the center of the line so his orders would carry by voice or could be passed along. Verity wasn’t playing captain now; he was just another rifleman, just another body thrown in to hold the line and keep the Chinese from taking yet another ridgeline from which they could cut the MSR, sever the lifeline, block the way out.

  Now he could see individual faces coming uphill toward him in the moonlight.

  “Fire at will!”

  The lieutenant’s voice sounded high and a little scared. Or maybe he was just cold.

  Verity’s rifle was sighted in on a tallish man coming straight for him, moving slow like the rest of them and with his mouth open, as if to draw in more breath against the exertion and the slope of the hill and the cold. Oddly, he looked a bit like a man who had worked at their place when Verity was a kid. That man would be very old now. He fired and the man fell. Verity didn’t know this weapon, and it may well have been another shot that dropped the Chinese with the open mouth. It didn’t matter, did it? He swung the weapon a few ticks right and sighted in on another Chinese, short and chunky. This one fell, too. Now the firing was constant all along the line, but the Chinese kept coming, some of them firing burp guns from the hip, others just intent on getting there. One Chinese stopped to throw a grenade. Then, when he attempted to launch another, he was hit in the face and fell backward. Verity could see the blood spurting from his chin. That’s how good the visibility was by moonlight off snow. But the first grenade had gotten somebody and off to his right there were sounds of a man rolling around on the ground, yelling. None of what he yelled made sense.

  Then there were no more Chinese coming and the few left standing were running away, downhill.

  “Cease fire!” the lieutenant called. He didn’t sound nervous anymore.

  Verity rolled over and propped himself on an elbow. Tate gave him a half-salute from down the line. He still didn’t know where Izzo was. Funny, he wasn’t cold now. It was good they had a moon. If the Chinese came up that slope in fog or falling snow or on a dark night, it would be a close thing indeed.

  The Chinese weren’t finished. They came up twice more that night to much the same result. After the second attack the lieutenant sent a working party halfway down the slope to pull bodies away and clear fields of fire. There were so many bodies now the oncoming Chinese were using them as cover, their own dead, much as the Marines did up here.

  In the morning there were no more live Chinese to be seen barring a few wounded thrashing about or crying out. The lieutenant, who looked about seventeen years old, a skinny kid, conducted a body count. Two hundred eleven Chinese. The Marines had lost three dead, fourteen wounded, only a few of them bad.

  “Boy, they kept coming, didn’t they?” Tate said.

  He was very calm.

  “You OK?” Verity asked.

  Tate nodded. “They only got one guy anywhere near me. Artilleryman. That’s what happens when you let artillerymen get in firefights like proper infantrymen. Get themselves killed.”

  At 8:00 A.M., the casual platoon was mustered on the hillside, including Izzo, also unhurt, glad the night was over. Verity hoped they wouldn’t have to do this again tonight.

  “Hut, hut!” Tate called as they marched back into Yudam-ni, not really trying to keep anyone in step, just to remind them who they were.

  Marines.

  For two days there were no new orders from Tokyo, no responses to General Smith’s call for guidance.

  “It’s as if they’re in a panic. They’re frozen. They don’t know what to do because suddenly they realize they could lose their army.”

  So concluded senior Marine officers and others on the ground.

  An aide thought MacArthur was starting to crack. They swapped stories about him, floated theories.

  “The Old Man’s expecting the Republicans to nominate him for president as the last American hero. And now he’s been suckered by the Chinese and screwed by Truman and his army is surrounded and maybe falling apart.”

  Another recalled MacArthur’s early penchant for drama and self-pity as army Chief of Staff way back in the thirties. His aide then, Lt. Thomas Jefferson Davis, did a memoir in which he remembered long conversations with MacArthur as he sat there, revolver in hand. And one train ride through the South.

  “We are nearing the area where my father won his medal of honor, Davis. I’ve done everything I can in army and life. As we pass over the Tennessee River bridge, I intend to jump from the train. This is where my life ends, Davis.”

  The lieutenant, who had been through this sort of thing before, told his commanding officer, “General, would you hurry up and get it over with so I can get back to sleep?”

  In the corridors of Far East HQ in the Dai Ichi building in Tokyo officers now recalled such yarns and repeated them with furtive whispers.

  They fought like that, up on the line as riflemen, for a second night. In the morning, there was rare sun, a real dawn, cold but clear. The Chinese had died pretty quickly. It was all very efficient. The gun-fire killed you or the cold did. A badly hit man didn’t l
ast long. Not when he lay on the snow on the side of the hill and the glass was at ten or fifteen below zero Fahrenheit. Blood froze on the snow like cherry topping on a vanilla sundae. Because he was still an officer, Tom Verity asked Tate how Izzo had done.

  “From what I saw, Captain, he was doing OK.”

  “Sure, he’ll be OK,” Verity said. He was less sure about himself. Last night had been bad. He didn’t know how many nights like that he could take. The fighting, the cold, and no sleep—they ganged up on a man, sapping his will. Lying in the snow all night without shelter while crazy Chinese came at you firing burp guns and yelling, that was something. He tried to recall if he’d ever been this frightened, either on the ’Canal or Okinawa. He didn’t think so. But on the ’Canal he was twenty-one; on Okinawa, twenty-four. And there hadn’t been the cold. There’d been the Japanese and that was bad enough. But you weren’t trembling with cold the whole time you were trying to fire back and hold steady and not get killed. Verity realized in all the excitement, he hadn’t even thought of Kate.

  He wanted to say something about this to Gunny Tate but didn’t. An officer doesn’t whine or seek guidance from men serving under him.

  Instead, he looked around. Up and down the ragged line Marines were getting stiffly to their feet, eighteen and twenty-year-olds moving creakily, like old men. The cold did that, too. It was seven o’clock and full light of morning. No wind, thank God. The cold alone could kill you; the wind only sped the process. Over-head were the morning vapor trails of the carrier jets, crisscrossing the front and the MSR. It was the jets and the artillery spotters that sent the Chinese to ground at first light, not the Marine infantry. Verity got up feeling like a man in his fifties, say, even older. He was just thirty. Tate was moving along the line, checking things out and taking names. That was what gunnery sergeants did.