The Marines of Autumn: A Novel of the Korean War Page 22

  “The present situation,” Santee was going on now in a warming tent large enough for a platoon, “reminds me of nothing more or less than Xenophon and the ten thousand. The parallels are inescapable. All one need do is ponder.”

  “That’s what I do best, Colonel, ponder. I ponder all the time.”

  This was Major Peal, a Georgia cracker and somewhat dense. He could be ignored. The rest were too pleased to be inside and warm to spoil the moment with argument.

  “And just who was Xenophon and who played the ten thousand?” someone else asked.

  Verity was vague on the details. Greeks, he recalled, and at war with Persia. Beyond that, little. So he listened to Santee.

  “It seems that about 360 or 365 B.C. a mercenary army, employed by Athens, or it may have been Sparta, I tend to confuse the city-states on occasion, invaded Persia, intent on seizing power from Cyrus the Great. The army numbered about ten thousand troops and was led by Xenophon, not only a soldier but a poet. And a good one. But with Xenophon and the lads well inside Persia, and doing nicely, Cyrus sprung a trap. Very much like what old Mao did up here—”

  “Well, that’s a hell of a yarn, Santee. Might make a movie, too, if you could get John Wayne or someone to play whatsisname—”

  “Xenophon. With an X,” Santee responded, not at all annoyed. He was accustomed to being ragged. “And you’re right about its cinematic possibilities. But more to the point, consider the similarities in Xenophon’s account, which he entitled, incidentally, the ‘Anabasis,’ which means—”

  “Oh, for chrissakes,” someone muttered near one of the space heaters, and Santee caught the note of impatience.

  “. . . not that it matters,” he went on. “What is striking is how Xenophon and his ten thousand got out of Persia, fighting rear guard actions all the way, leapfrogging units, bulling through roadblocks and ambushes, fighting off a Persian army many times their size and doing it in enemy territory, all the while heading for the sea, the Aegean, in their case. Remarkably like what we’re attempting to do here.”

  “Attempting?” It was marvelous how objective a scholar could be, Verity thought, as if their predicament were for Santee simply an abstraction in a book and not a life-and-death matter.

  Some enlisted men and senior NCOs had gathered round, enjoying listening to officers insulting each other.

  “And how’d the mercenaries make out, Colonel? They ever get to the sea?”

  Santee looked blissful. “Why, yes, they did, and gazed again on the Aegean and ancient Hellas, which as you know is Greek for, well, for . . . Greece.”

  “Oh, Jesus, who wound him up?”

  Let them argue. Verity didn’t give a damn. He was in a warming tent. He didn’t even mind the pain of frozen joints, of knuckles and toes thawing. When they were frozen, the pain was dull; when you warmed, it was like hot needles. But he didn’t mind.

  Oh, God, let me stay here and not have to go out again in the cold, he thought.

  Then he remembered Tate and Izzo, who were still with the jeep, and he tugged on mittens and hat and parka tight around him and went reluctantly to the entrance of the tent and into the snow, back to his men.

  “Captain, what do you know of the Donner party?”

  Verity, numb, did not understand. “The what party?”

  “The Donner party. You know, the people who froze to death in the Donner Pass trying to get to California for the gold rush or something.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Verity said. He didn’t remember much.

  “Didn’t they eat one another?” Tate asked.

  Izzo couldn’t resist: “Jesus, Captain, with all respect, I don’t think we frigging need that!”

  “Sorry, Izzo.”

  Tate was sorry, too, that he had brought it up. “Forget it, Izzo, it was a long time ago. Not modern times like this.”

  “Well, I frigging hope so. Eating people! We don’t need that shit.”

  The snow fell more heavily and the road was once again blocked.

  “Well, Tom, and how are you keeping?”

  This was Mack, whom he knew from Okinawa and North China and now had a battalion.

  “Cold, like everyone else, Mack. But OK. You?”

  “I wish we were out of here, Tom. I don’t like this narrow road. There’s a scary feeling to it that we’d better hurry up or be left behind.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “And why are you here, a staff grandee of some sort? You ought to be back at Hungnam having a bourbon and branch water and waiting for the poor infantry.”

  “I’m here because I was sent.”

  “Not a volunteer?”

  “Mack, when did I ever volunteer?”

  The trucks and the jeeps and the occasional tank moved slowly past and the men, on their frozen feet, even slower. There were Marines hanging onto every tank, every truck, and there were jeeps with six or seven men piled aboard. These were supposed to be the worst cases of frostbite, but how did you know? There were no corpsmen to check, and even if there were, how could you pry the boots off a man to examine his feet out here in the cold, and even if you could, how did you get the boots back on those swollen feet? Anyone who could was hitching a ride, even a few officers, though Litzenberg and Murray and, most quotably, Puller, had told their officers to walk. They’d changed orders again; now the men could ride. Not the able-bodied officers.

  “As long as there’s a Marine walking, my officers walk,” Puller growled, biting down on a stubby unlit pipe.

  Puller himself walked, fifty-two years old.

  Steep hills and ridgelines bordered the road, giving it that claustrophobic feeling Mack had talked about. And to guard their flanks the Marines had to put men up there, on the ridgelines and patrolling the hills. Else the road could be shut down by a few Chinese with a mortar and a couple of machine guns, else the column could be ambushed. It was hard enough slogging along the frozen road from Hagaru-ri; being sent out to patrol the ridgelines a thousand feet higher was asking what some men could no longer do.

  “I lost a patrol yesterday, Tom. Sent them out on the flank, maybe fifteen hundred feet up. They ran into some Chinks. We could hear the firefight. Then it was over. It had taken them four hours to climb up there through deep snow and there was no way I was going to send another squad, another platoon. I’d just lose them, too. Nice boy, the patrol leader I sent. Big, husky kid from Connecticut. Said he loved the look of this country, reminded him of New England. Well, he’s part of it now, that or a prisoner.”

  “I wouldn’t like to be a prisoner, Mack.”

  “Nor I, Tom. But I don’t brood on it.”

  Mack was a southerner, but he seemed to take the cold pretty well and moved as if his feet were still OK.

  But as the van of his battalion passed, three more tanks came by, the treads clanking metallic and crunching in the snow, and there were no Marines riding on these, only bodies, stacked crossways and lashed on with rope, maybe a half-dozen to each tank.

  As they passed, Verity heard a Marine remark, very flat and not emotional, “At least they’re trying to get the stiffs out. I’d like them to get me out if I was a stiff and not just leave me here.”

  “Shit, you wouldn’t know the difference, pal.”

  Verity listened to their conversation and that of other Marines and then got started himself. You chilled pretty fast when you stopped moving.

  There was no entertainment. Beyond talk. Or shooting Chinamen. Over smokes or at the fire, sometimes in the jeep when the column stalled, Izzo would get Tate talking about home, about Kansas, but being careful not to tell him again how foolish a name Engine was for a town.

  “Jesse James? Was he still alive when you was a kid, Gunny?”

  “Long dead. Him and brother Frank both, and Quantrill as well.”

  “I seen the movie. Tyrone Power was Jesse and Henry Fonda was Frank.”

  “Yes,” Tate said, “not historically very accurate.”

  “But they shot him,
Jesse, didn’t they? Or was that just Hollywood?”

  “No, a man named Bob Ford shot Jesse. Shot him in the back. Never would have taken him in a fair fight. Jesse was hiding out. Called himself Howard. They wrote a poem about it.”

  “No shit?”

  Tate regarded Izzo disdainfully. “Yes, they did, an actual poem. It ends like this: ‘And that dirty little coward; Shot poor Mister Howard.’ ”

  Izzo shook his head. “They don’t write poems about holdup men in Philly. Not that I know of. Kind of a shame, you know, seeing as how some of them was also outstanding personalities, much like the James boys, if you can believe the movies and like that.”

  “You can’t, Izzo. But take it from me, Jesse and Frank and Quantrill . . .”

  He didn’t say more, reckoning it was wasted on his audience.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “To a Chinese soldier,” Oliver Smith remarked, “a wound . . . was a death sentence. He was left to die of exposure.”

  The Marines could hear the Chinese . . . dying, could hear the cries of the Chinese wounded, cries which died away as they froze to death.

  Only from the air could you see the whole retreat. Only the carrier pilots coming in over the frozen mountains from the sea could appreciate it as spectacle, the long line of men and guns and vehicles moving south out of Hagaru and up over the passes and across the half-blown bridges and through the narrow places where the Chinese set their ambushes and their blocking positions; only the fliers could see the entire battle unfold. Thousands of Marines and all their goods plus God knows how many army troops and ROKs and Brits and all the flotsam and jetsam, all headed south, all trying to get out of the hills and the cold and reach the sea, and only the fliers, dodging in and out of snow squalls and trying not to collide with mountains, knew how long and ragged a column it was and how narrow the road.

  And how close behind them came the Chinese.

  Gen. Oliver Smith could feel their weight, knew how near they were. And he didn’t like the way the Chinese kept coming, taking their losses and still coming. Good troops. Very good troops. If they had big guns and some air it would be a narrow thing indeed.

  Narrow enough as it was.

  No good thinking of the numbers, thinking like this. The men would sense it; men could smell fear. Just let them smell it on him, Oliver Smith realized, and his fear would take hold of them.

  He could lose this division.

  That was the scary thing. Scarier even than the numbers. No general had ever lost a Marine division. Well, he’d been a Marine officer for a long time and he wasn’t going to start now getting all sweaty and upset the troops.

  General Smith pulled out a pipe and rapped it into his palm, shaking the dottle free. A pipe calmed a man; that was what the tobacco advertising always said.

  A drowsy Verity looked over to his left through the swirling snow to see Tate attempting to lift some sort of bundle from a drift beside the road.

  “Gunny, leave it. No room on the jeep now.”

  “It’s a Marine, Captain.”

  “Dead?”

  “Soon will be if I can’t get the son of a bitch on his feet.”

  Verity wearily got out of the jeep, swinging his frozen feet out first and then not sure if they’d yet reached the ground. Loss of feeling. He was riding again only for that.

  “Don’t get too far ahead of us, Izzo.”

  “Nosir, Captain.” Izzo knew what Verity was thinking. If he and Tate fell too far behind they might never catch up; they might be the ones left sitting on the snowdrifts, nodding off and falling into a sleep from which they would never wake.

  Together, Tate and Verity got the man to his feet.

  “Just wanna sleep,” he murmured, not really arguing but registering a small protest, as young children do when awakened in the night.

  Verity shook his head. “OK, lay him across the hood. Maybe the engine heat will keep him alive. Tie him on with his web belt.”

  Behind them a truck driver honked his horn and swore.

  “Move it the hell out, you bastards.”

  The dead and the dying had become an inconvenience, an annoyance.

  Verity and his men weren’t the only ones tidying up as they went. Puller had a big command car, twice the size of his original jeep. It was open to the sky, as was everything else, but it had a big engine that blew a little heat in along the floor, thawing his feet so he could get out and walk some more. He had his own three men along and two more, wounded. Now they paused beside a limping man. “You OK, lad?”

  “I’m from Loosiana, General. I never seed snow before.”

  “Well, son, I’m from Virginia, myself,” Puller said, “but that’s what being in the Marine Corps does for a young man, shows him the world and the glory of it.”

  “Yessir,” the Marine said, not quite sure just how great a consolation this was and nursing sore feet.

  “Indeed,” Puller said, warming somewhat to the task, “there are tours of duty so breathtaking a man should turn back his pay. Although,” he added, more thoughtful, “there are also hardship posts. Among which our present assignment might well qualify.”

  “I surely think it might, General, by your leave, sir.”

  Plenty of them had never seen snow before. From Camp Pendleton you could see snow on the Santa Ana Mountains or, just a bit off, the San Jacintos. But seeing snow in the distance was like picture postcards. This snow was real; this was cold; this chilled and intimidated men who gradually and grudgingly began to realize it could kill them.

  Maybe the men of Valley Forge had endured cold. But they weren’t on the march; they were in winter quarters. The Marines were on the march, fighting a dozen times a day and sleeping out nights, when they weren’t attacking or being attacked.

  The Chinese were killing them. So was the cold.

  Not only the Marines were dying, the cold being an impartial killer, making few distinctions.

  The CCF Twenty-sixth Army reported: “The troops were hungry. They ate cold food. They were unable to maintain the physical strength for combat. The wounded could not be evacuated . . .”

  The Twentieth Chinese Army: “The troops did not have enough food, they did not have enough houses to live in, they could not stand the bitter cold . . . when the fighters bivouacked in snow-covered ground during combat, their feet, socks and hands were frozen together in one ice ball; they could not unscrew the caps on the hand grenades; the fuses would not ignite; the hands were not supple; the mortar tubes shrank on account of the cold; seventy percent of the shells failed to detonate; skin from the hands was stuck on the shell and mortar tubes . . .”

  “To a Chinese soldier,” Oliver Smith remarked, “a wound . . . was a death sentence. He was left to die of exposure.”

  The Marines could hear the Chinese around them dying, could hear the cries of the Chinese wounded, cries which died away as they froze to death.

  It was only early December, two weeks to go until winter, and Col. Ray Davis’s thermometer reported that nighttime temperatures fell to twenty-four below zero. And the men were living aboveground, most without tents, without fires. . . .

  Another bridge had been blown or another ambush sprung, and once again the long double line of men shuffled to a halt. Captain Verity had been walking alongside the jeep, forcing himself to keep his feet moving. Now a captain he knew by sight but whose name he had forgotten came up and sat down next to him on the crusted snow just off the road at the base of the hill.

  “Verity?”

  “Yes. How you doing?”

  “Not good. I lost my company back there three nights ago. Puller relieved me.”

  “Hey, I’m sorry.”

  “My fault. Puller did what he had to do. It’s just I keep seeing that company, how good it was, how they looked coming over the seawall at Inchon, working house-to-house in Seoul. When was that, Verity?”

  “September, I guess. Yeah, September.”

  “And now it’s December. Two mont
hs and a fine rifle company’s lost and a lot of good men dead.”

  “Yeah.” Verity didn’t know what to say except to agree with the man. He tugged a cigar from a pocket and stuck it in his mouth. It was really just half a cigar, smoked down, with the mouth end frozen and with no more taste than an icicle. The other officer saw this and pulled out a pack of cigarettes and a Zippo lighter, but his hands were too numbed to get a cigarette to light.

  “Aw, to hell,” he said. Verity could see tears on his cheeks, frozen solid, and he didn’t know if the man was crying now or his tears derived from earlier griefs.

  Verity got the man’s cigarette going and, grateful, the captain’s words just came out, like snow thawing, swiftly rushing.

  “I told Puller I couldn’t send out another flank patrol up those damned ridges. I lost an eleven-man squad up there six days ago, maybe seven. Then a couple days later I lost nine more men. I sent them up there and they just never came back. We heard firing, but they wouldn’t let me stop and go looking for them. ‘You’re holding up the column,’ they told me.

  “So the next day I refused. Just wouldn’t do it. Hell with it, let ’em run me up. I couldn’t send another dozen Marines up there, Tom, just couldn’t. I know I’m wrong, but it’s how I am.”

  He pulled at the cigarette, and as it came away from his lips the paper stuck and pulled away skin and a trickle of blood ran down his chin. The captain didn’t seem to notice, and the blood soon froze. His executive officer was dead, killed at Yudam-ni. They’d given his company to one of the rifle platoon leaders.

  “Nice kid, boy from the Jersey shore. I hope he does OK. It was a good company I had.”

  The captain looked into Verity’s face, trying to make him understand.

  “I’m pretty good myself, Tom. Used to be. That’s over now, I guess.”

  I guess it is, Verity thought but did not say.

  Izzo maintained sanity. By doing calculations.

  “I figured it out, Gunny.”