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

  “What, Izzo?”

  “Our rate of speed.”

  To the usual ambushes and mechanical breakdowns and skidding accidents were now added small snowslides, hardly real avalanches but sufficient to block the narrow road, and force the sergeants to resume shouting for men to wield entrenching tools and clear the way.

  “One quarter-mile an hour, Gunny. Just like Captain Verity calculated himself. What do you think of that? It takes us four hours to go one mile.”

  Tate wasn’t paying attention. He was thinking how much faster they could clear the snow if they had real shovels, broad-bladed aluminum snow shovels like they had leaning on porches back home. It would be odd to insist that along with all their other weapons and equipment a Marine division inventory snow shovels. Odd, but it would make sense.

  “Gunny?”

  “Shut up, Izzo; I’m thinking. About shovels.”

  “Jeez. . . . ”

  Verity had been listening to Izzo, agreeing with him. A quarter-mile an hour? Why, if a man had the endurance and was sufficiently determined, he could crawl at that pace and keep up. Maybe that’s how it would end for them, crawling out.

  He didn’t care. Captain Verity would crawl; he’d squirm on his goddamned belly, pulling himself along on his knuckles if he had to. Anything to get out.

  Anything.

  Captain Verity was hardly alone in having nightmares.

  Sergeant Tate’s were different, is all; didn’t mean they didn’t scare him.

  Tate’s derived from his having been in the Fourth Marines at Shanghai. In the clubby intimacy of the Marine Corps, you didn’t have to say much more. Marines all knew what had happened to the men of the Fourth Regiment at Shanghai, understood why, in a very special way, they hated the Japs. Verity didn’t much like the Japanese, either. But he’d been privileged to fight them, kill them. Tate had been their prisoner.

  Ten days before Pearl Harbor the detachment at Shanghai was issued a “war warning” and went over to a combat footing, a thousand of them (804 men more precisely) surrounded by a mil-lion Japs. Most of them were boarded November 27 onto the S. S. President Harrison to ship out to the Philippines. One small detachment including Tate and a few Marines manning garrisons upcountry and in Peking were to follow soonest. Except that war broke out first. There was talk of setting up a hedgehog defense in the town, talk of fighting their way upcountry to join up with Chiang, talk of getting away by sea in junks and small boats by night. In the end the Marines stacked arms and marched out in surrender. All those other options were but failed dreams.

  In all the horrors of the next four years Tate remembered most shockingly that first terrible moment as they stood in perfect formation to be inspected by their new captors, when the bandy-legged little Jap officer came strutting along and slapped a Marine captain’s face. Later there was worse.

  Of all the pain of imprisonment maybe shame was worst.

  Sergeant Tate tried hard to keep that in mind when the Japanese starved and beat and worked him near death and laughed at this tall American in his misery.

  Bastards!

  He’d rather die fighting the Chinese than ever again be taken.

  It was odd, even callous, but when Elizabeth died giving birth and the child died, too, Tom had wept and mourned and raged only for her. Not for the child.

  After all, in a way, it was the child that had killed her. A boy.

  Later, but only later, Tom felt guilt when he looked at Kate and tried to imagine how his son might have looked. The son he ignored in his first grief. And later mourned.

  Now, on the march south from the Chosin, he was thinking not only of Kate but of his dead boy whom he had never gotten to know. And had resented.

  And now, too late, had grown to love. To think of as, “my son, our son.”

  The snow crunched underfoot, loud as saltine crackers. Verity walked as often as he could, alongside Izzo’s jeep. His feet were frozen and he had an irrational dread of losing them. A strange country. There was plenty of snow on the flanking hills, and it lay deep and packed here on the road. But there weren’t that many snowstorms. It was as if the snow had fallen and then slacked off, leaving itself to the terrible cold to congeal and conserve until spring. Walking on the crunching snow was better than sitting on the slow-creeping jeep, even absent Puller’s orders. It kept the blood moving, almost raised a small sweat, and forcibly drove blood into the extremities of fingers and toes, earlobes and nose.

  Gunnery Sergeant Tate felt the cold as much as Verity did. But he was handling it better.

  “Gunny, keep an eye on me. Don’t let me start to shake. If I ever start shaking, I may never stop.”

  Tom meant that, literally.

  Occasionally, as they trudged slowly along the mountain road, a man fell out, not from fatigue or illness but from sniper fire. A single shot.

  “We ought to have people up there, Captain,” Tate said disapprovingly, looking toward the ridgelines, standing out white and stark against the sky. Until today, or maybe yesterday, Marines still worked the ridgelines. No more.

  Verity knew Tate was right. The ridgelines paralleled the road a thousand feet higher. What a marvelous bit of high ground. The Marines preached that: “Take the high ground.” But exhaustion and ambush and just plain inertia discouraged officers from sending flanking patrols to the ridgelines. In this weather, in deep snow, it might take a handful of men hours to climb six or eight hundred feet, and by the time they got to the ridgelines there might be a hundred or five hundred Chinese infantrymen waiting. The few patrols that reached the ridges were either exhausted or swiftly killed. Right or wrong, Marine officers on the right-of-way had largely stopped sending men into the high ridges unless ordered by Higher Echelon.

  I know it’s wrong, Verity thought, but would I have the strength to drive them up there, to insist that they go, order them up, and then live with myself when they never came back? Five years ago, on Okinawa, I would have driven them up. With a pistol if need be. It’s this damned cold that dulls the mind and congeals spirit and freezes men’s hearts, as well as toes and fingers.

  “Sloppy,” he said aloud, critical of himself, “half-assed.”

  Chesty Puller would still have officers brought up before a court for not throwing out flank patrols, especially on higher ground. But they weren’t all “Chesty.”

  “Captain!” Izzo shouted from behind the wheel, more aggravated than alarmed.

  “Yes?”

  “Something going on up ahead.”

  Tate climbed up on the hood of the jeep, tallest of the three. Up there where the road narrowed between hills there seemed to be something.

  “Can’t tell what. Lot of milling around, Captain.”

  Verity had a map out, trying to unfold it in the wind and hold it steady in the cold.

  “The map shows a bridge. Maybe that’s it.”

  “Oh, shit,” Izzo groaned. “Maybe they blew the frigging bridge.”

  Captain Verity no longer wrote letters to his daughter. He wanted to; there was so much he had to say. But his fingers could not hold the pen. The earliest unmailed letters had been neatly folded and secreted in inside pockets deep in layers of stinking wool close to his chest. Later letters, folded more crudely, the writing not nearly as crisp, were shoved into outer pockets easier to reach, the pages wadded and balled up. And although Verity did not know it, the ink had begun to smudge and run, courtesy of the sweat of exertion and the melting snow filtering through cloth or driven by the wind.

  He still planned to mail Kate her letters. If they ever reached a place with such civilized conceits as a Fleet Post Office. And if he did not die on the road from the reservoir.

  “Cut off! We’re cut off! They blew the damned bridge!”

  So blazed the word up and down the line of march in minutes. When it came to gossip, Marines were worse than hairdressers.

  They all knew the bridge that the rumor said was blown. They’d marched across it going north, a one-l
ane structure less than fifty feet across, spanning a steep ravine. Now it was blown. Oh, shit.

  Infantry troops might scramble down the slope of the ravine and wade the stream at the bottom and climb up the other side. With the ice it would be tricky, but they could do it, carrying packs and weapons. There was no way trucks or tanks could do it, no way they could get the wounded across. You couldn’t carry wounded men down and then up frozen slopes like that. There weren’t enough choppers in the Pacific to lift them across. And the Chinese up there on the high ground would shoot down the choppers.

  Maybe the story of the bridge was all bullshit. Just a rumor. That possibility now sped up and down the line. The brass knew better.

  “It’s gone,” General Smith was assured. “They blew it late yesterday afternoon. Laid it in the ravine as neat as you’d want. Nice, tidy job.”

  This was an engineer officer reporting. Engineers admired competence, even in disasters. Oliver Smith listened carefully. Then he said, “OK, now let’s get ourselves a new bridge.”

  Astonishingly, there were such things as “new bridges.” Steel spans barely wide enough to suit a tank’s treads, thirty feet in length. Thirty? The ravine was forty feet at least! No problem, you bolt two twenty-four foot lengths of bridge together, end to end.

  For once, the army had them, steel treadway bridge sections, twenty-four feet long, heavy but not so that they couldn’t be dropped by air. Bigger parachutes were hurriedly flown over from Japan. The rear-guard Marines from the reservoir came south with their engineers; other Marines and army engineers came north to meet Puller’s people at the blown bridge and to go to work.

  The cargo planes came in as low as they could and dropped four lengths of treadway. Two survived.

  “Two is plenty!” the engineers exulted.

  The steel spans were trucked the half-mile or so to the ravine and eased out into space, engineers performing high-wire acrobatics, while from the near hills Chinese snipers added to the entertainment, trying to pick off individual engineers swinging out over the void. That demanded a response and the forward air controllers called in a napalm drop on the hills above the road by the ravine. Now all the Chinese were firing, trying to bring down a plane while, south of the broken bridge, Marine howitzers joined in, targeting the hills. By the time the last bridge bolts had been secured, a full-blown, rather brisk firefight was under way.

  Now the first trucks ventured out onto the new bridge, moving slow. The treadway spans creaked and bent.

  And held.

  Up ahead, with the Fifth and Seventh Marines, Oliver Smith breathed more easily. Puller would get out now, too. Wouldn’t have to leave his wounded and guns and vehicles behind. On such slender threads as bridges dropped by air, do men, and armies, live or perish.

  They’d come through Koto-ri on the way north to the reservoir, and now they were coming through it again, a mere village between peaks, nothing compared to that thriving metropolis Hagaru. There wasn’t an airstrip long enough to take much more than OYs, small observation planes, two-seaters. Piper Cubs without the bright paint. This was plateau country, a remote steppe ringed by mountains.

  It served now as headquarters for Chesty Puller’s First Regiment, acting as rear guard for the First Division and the entire X Corps.

  It was the last flat place in the road for fifty miles, until they reached the coastal plain.

  His officers came to Puller with the report.

  “We have just enough trucks and other rolling stock to get the wounded out, General. Not the dead.”

  And there was no way to bring in cargo planes.

  Marines who’d come down the terrible road from Yudam-ni and Hagaru looked around now at Koto-ri and shrugged.

  “This place ain’t much.”

  Had they asked Puller, he might have agreed. At Koto-ri there wasn’t enough of anything. For the living or the dead.

  Like Patton, Puller was an educated man. He’d read deeply and widely in history and recalled his Shakespeare, Henry V.

  “You know,” he remarked one evening to his officers, “all anyone remembers of Henry the Fifth is the fight at Agincourt, the night visits he made to the troops, incognito and cloaked. And then the great speech just before the battle, ‘we happy few, we band of brothers,’ and all that about, Crispin’s Day.”

  His officers nodded, even those who hadn’t the slightest notion of what Chesty was talking about, who Henry was. Then Puller went on.

  “They forget what came just before. After Henry took Honfleur, he deputizes loyal officers to handle things there and tells them, ‘With winter coming on, we will go to quarters at Calais.’ ”

  Chesty Puller looked around him and met looks of appalling blankness.

  Ah, well, men don’t read anymore, Puller thought. And then said, aloud but half to himself, “Calais was the French port closest to England that rather reminds me of our Hungnam, gentlemen, though with distinctions in the architecture and other things.”

  “Sir?”

  “Nothing,” Puller said. “Just thinking out loud, old man.”

  Hungnam meant the sea; it meant safety. Even Chesty was thinking that way now.

  There were only a couple of warming tents and huts still standing and little firewood to burn and no fuel to waste, and men lined up in patient, shivering queues, long lines in the wind and snow, much in the way homeless, idle men lined up during the depression for soup or a flophouse cot. And those had been vagrants and rummies or men simply down on their luck. These men queueing up at Kotori were the officers and men of the United States Marine Corps, with its distinguished and famous history.

  Verity, who took his turn standing in the line, remembered Detroit in the late thirties, before the war economy kicked in, when workers laid off by the auto factories shuffled along broke and without hope, trying to sell apples no one wanted, and few could afford, what his father and the editorials and politicians called hard times.

  Izzo, who had joined the warming queue an hour or more before Captain Verity, now emerged, oddly glowing, almost cherubic.

  “Captain, this ain’t much of a town. I seen small towns before but never one without no gas station. Not until now. But there ain’t a mansion on the Main Line in Philly that stacks up against this here warming tent. Not for cash nor credit.”

  “Maybe after the war you could come back, Izzo. Open a car dealership.”

  “Water buffalo’s more like it, sir.” He moved away toward where they’d left the jeep to relieve Tate for his turn in the queue.

  Another twenty men were allowed inside, and Verity shuffled ahead, closer to the tent, a bearded, unkempt figure with icicles hanging from his matted hair and upper lip. He knew how he looked, like a bum at a soup kitchen. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was that he would soon get out of the cold.

  And once you’d been inside for a few minutes and the steam started to rise from the men and their layers of muffled, stained, discolored clothes, you caught the smell, the reeking stench.

  Near Verity a man retched and threw up, the vomit thin, as sour as bile.

  “We do have ourselves a time in the Crotch, don’t we?” someone remarked, drawing a rough laugh.

  What the hell else could you do? It was laugh or lie down in your own filth and die.

  Then Verity’s thirty minutes in the charnel house were up. He passed Tate coming in as he went out.

  “Nice and warm, Gunny,” Verity said, “cushy.”

  “Good to hear, sir.”

  Tate looked frozen and Verity concluded there was no point in ruining his day. He’d smell the place soon enough.

  Chesty Puller didn’t have to use the communal tent. He was a general officer and they had a pyramidal tent for him, and it was to this tent he now summoned his staff. Specifically to consider the dead, whose bodies were stacked like cardwood behind the big warmup tent.

  It wasn’t snowing. But across the brief flats of Koto-ri and down the circling hills and through the coulees and litt
le runs where streams ran in the summer, snow blew off the ground horizontally across ice and hard-packed brown earth tough as cement and scoured clear of snow by the awful wind. Up the road from them a respectable mile or three north was the Chinese army, trailing the Marine column, specifically trailing Puller’s rear guard, ready to pounce but wary, so often and so terribly bloodied in the fights of the last ten days.

  December 8. The Feast of the Immaculate Conception. It wouldn’t be winter for two more weeks.

  “You can’t dig graves, General,” Puller was told.

  Puller hated to be told a thing couldn’t be done. But the heavy equipment, the big ’dozers and front-loaders, had already gone south or been blown up to deprive the Chinese. That was what rear guards did, got out what they could and burned and blew up the remainder. It took a certain destructive streak to be a successful rear guard. They called it scorched earth; that was what it had been called since Ney’s time. Perhaps since Xenophon’s.

  “I won’t leave the dead to the wild dogs.”

  That was Puller. He wouldn’t abandon his wounded; he wouldn’t betray the dead. Nor to the Chinese. Nor to dogs or whatever else hunted foul-breathed in these damned mountains.

  Verity had served under and with fine men, good Marines, had commanded some and more than a few. Was there ever a better gunny than this Tate? He’d been sure of Tate almost from the first, when they met at Kimpo Airfield. But Mouse Izzo? He’d had his doubts about the Mouse. So had Gunny Tate. And with reason. But Izzo, too, had turned out fine. Maybe better than fine.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “Where’s your lieutenant?” Puller inquired.

  “Got killed, Colonel. I took the platoon.”

  “Good for you, Sergeant. That’s what God made sergeants for, since getting killed is what lieutenants do best. Having been a lieutenant once myself, I can testify to that.”

  “Yes sir, Colonel,” the sergeant said, while around him men grinned.