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

  Then, in all the lengthy chronicle of horror during the march out, the most terrible thing happened.

  Puller buried his dead.

  For all the hardness and the stiff back, Chesty Puller was nur-turing and loving, jealous of men’s lives in his care. And that was why he did what he did in the snow at Koto-ri.

  “Come now, old man,” Puller said to his executive officer, the man who would command the regiment if Chesty fell. “You know it must be done.”

  There was no way to carry the bodies out. And you couldn’t just leave them behind. It was one reason Marines fought so well, knowing if they took a hit, they wouldn’t be left where they fell.

  At last count there were 117 dead at Koto-ri, mostly Marines, a few army troops and British Royal Marine Commandos, a couple ROKs, all of them laid out now in the open, shrouded only by snow.

  “Fly them out?” someone asked. A stupid question. They couldn’t even fly their wounded out of here, not as they’d done from the big strip at Hagaru.

  “We’ll bury them here,” Puller said. When Puller said things like that, those were orders.

  The small bulldozers they still had were put to work and had been digging now for two hours, and one of them had already broken its steel pan. Just snapped it in the cold. And the little earth and rock and ice the remaining ’dozers scraped up had to be chipped off the pans with pneumatic drills. It had been twenty-five degrees below zero Fahrenheit at dawn; had not warmed up much since.

  “General, if we had some shaped charges, we could dig holes with them.”

  Puller brightened. The demolitions officer was hustled up.

  “Not a one, sir. No real need for shaped charges unless you’re going up against fortified positions, bunkers and pillboxes and the like.”

  Puller never indulged his temper when a man told the truth.

  “All right, that’s good sense. Should have thought of it myself, old man. Thanks for your time.”

  Other schemes were briefly floated and rejected, as empty as Ponzi’s promises. Puller, impatient with failure and intolerant in general, grew restless.

  “Colonel?” Some couldn’t break habits or get used to Chesty’s new rank.

  “Yes, old man?”

  It was a master sergeant, one of Puller’s favorites, leathered and gnarled.

  “They got root cellars under some of these huts, Colonel. Below the frost line, to store potatoes, turnips, and such.”

  Puller brightened, the corners of his flat, turned-down mouth lifting and widening in a gorgeous smile.

  “Now that, by God, is creative thinking.” And not by some paint-fresh young officer but by an enlisted man with a little time on him. “Knock down the huts and blow the cellars out. Large and deep as you need.”

  “Yessir.”

  It didn’t take any time at all for the bulldozers to flatten the flimsy village huts of stucco and wood and straw and to clear the ground all about and for working parties of Marines to empty and tidy up a bit the blown root cellars beneath.

  The bodies handled easily, the 117 of them, stiff as telephone poles, neat, too, with no bodily fluids running or leaking out, not in this cold, just as if they’d been gutted and embalmed by the finest morticians at Campbell’s of Madison Avenue. It had begun to snow again, and in the early afternoon, the light was already fading. Puller wanted to get out of Koto-ri by tomorrow’s dawn at the latest, what with the Chinese again cutting the road south and edging closer to his rear from the north, but impatient as he was, Chesty wasn’t going to rush the dead.

  A funeral detachment was rounded up, Verity and his men among them, and mustered in the wind on the snowy field sur-rounding the place where the huts had been and where the root cel-lars gaped brown and open, not yet drifted over. The surviving officer of the Royal Marine Commandos and several of the officers from army units were fetched. There was even a ROK major they’d corralled somewhere.

  “We’ll have a squad of riflemen,” Puller told one of his staff.

  “Yessir.”

  Then Marines, four to a body, came up and laid the dead in, side by side, each laid flat, not just tumbled in, as straight as frozen limbs would permit. When they were all in their graves, the several hundred men on the field of Koto-ri were called to attention.

  “Fire!”

  A dozen rifles fired into the air. Then again. Then once more.

  There was no bugler to play taps. A bugler couldn’t put his lips to metal in this cold without their freezing to the mouthpiece.

  Verity stood between Tate and Izzo in the snow, saluting. He felt bad about looking so cruddy. At a Marine funeral an officer ought to be smart.

  “Fill ’em in!” the engineer officer shouted, and the bulldozers came up again, lowering their steel pans to shove frozen earth and rock and ice blasted out from the cellars atop the Marines laid out below the snowy ground. Puller had the tanks roll up then, clanking and creaking, motors screaming in low gear, headlights on, making cones of light through the falling snow, and then, two or three abreast, the tanks ran back and forth slowly over the graves, grinding frozen earth flat beneath the treads, sealing in the dead under their steel tracks.

  Less than a year before, Verity had watched the first gentle spadeful of soft Maryland earth fall atop the box that held Elizabeth Jeffs Verity and the smaller box that held their son. Now a hundred Marines were being buried crudely, grotesquely, and he found himself thinking instead of a tall young woman he loved, dead for reasons he did not yet understand and perhaps never would.

  “Captain?”

  It was Tate. The burial field was emptying. Even Puller was gone. Verity and a few others, lost as he in their own thoughts, remained, masked by the snow.

  “Captain,” Tate said again, taking him lightly by the arm.

  “There’s a warm-up tent over here without a line, Captain. Let’s get us in there a few minutes; maybe you could puff a cigar.”

  Verity was shivering, part cold, part the burial service, part memory.

  “I’m OK, Gunny. Fine.”

  “Yessir, but I’m cold as hell, so let’s just get over there for a bit.”

  Verity went with him, understanding he was being led but not objecting more. He went and silently thanked Tate for the generosity of spirit that provided warmth as much as the reeking, smoky oil stove blazing away in the center of the little tent. Izzo was already there, but Verity didn’t even see him. Nor did he want a cigar, not this once, but as he warmed his hands over the red belly of the stove, Captain Verity said, sounding himself again, “Gunny, when it comes my time, you get me back to Hungnam somehow, back to the sea. Get me out of here somehow, understand. Whatever happens, I won’t be buried here.”

  “Nosir,” Tate said. Then Izzo joined in.

  “Yes sir, Captain,” Izzo said, “and you do the same for me, sir, for me and Gunny, just as we’ll do for you. . . .”

  “You run your mouth too much, Izzo,” Tate said, but gently.

  I guess we’re all a bit shook, Verity concluded, all of them who’d watched Puller burying his dead at Koto-ri, aware how close a thing it was that others were laid out in root cellars and not themselves.

  And knowing that by tomorrow, they might be.

  Captain Verity could still see the tanks coming across the field with their headlights in the snow, the bogeys grinding and treads squeaking oilless in the cold, could still hear the tanks running back and forth over the dead.

  Gunny Tate could not recall having seen Marines look this bad. Not since the camps where the Japanese starved and beat them and men went nearly naked in their rags.

  He did not think he would ever see Marines look like this without being defeated. When men were whipped in battle, you expected them to slump and shuffle and stare at you with vacant eyes and then, quickly, look away in furtive, embarrassed glances. Some of these Marines were starting to look and behave like that and they hadn’t been whipped. At least, not yet they hadn’t.

  And it scared Tate, how
Captain Verity was at the graves.

  They were up and moving at dawn the next morning, ready to resume the march south, and none too early. The Chinese were all around them in the hills, and there was only the single road out, a road easily cut.

  Tate knew how easily this rear guard could still be bottled up and maybe even taken. God save me from another prison camp, he prayed. Gunny Tate did not think he could take being a POW again.

  Captain Verity knew he was being irrational. He also knew every man had his own wild, special fear. His funk. The thing that breaks him.

  I’ll be left behind. I’ll die here and be left behind and Puller will bury me as he did his own men, the dead of his regiment, under the ice and frozen rock, to be ground under by tanks and ’dozers into the cold earth of North Korea, ten thousand miles from home, without monument or cross or name.

  They passed the place of the dead now again in their jeep as they began the evacuation of Koto-ri and the next leg of the retreat toward Funchilin Pass.

  “Just hold up here a minute, Izzo,” Verity ordered. The driver, not knowing why, slowed to stop and then, when a truck tailgating close behind gave him a klaxon, cursed and pulled off to the shoulder.

  “Yessir,” he said, a bit sulky and not wanting to stay at Koto-ri one moment longer than absolutely necessary.

  Verity looked out at the field where yesterday they had buried 117 men. Snow had fallen heavily in the night, and there was only a flat place in the snow. Tate knew why they’d paused and sat there, silent and patient. Verity continued to look across the field.

  “Deliver me from the valley of the shadow of death,” Verity murmured to himself. Not quite a prayer, for he did not pray, but a mute, desperate cry for help, the old psalm vaguely remembered. Then, inhaling deeply, feeling the cold sear his lungs, he turned briskly back to the road ahead, staring toward the high pass and the road south.

  “OK, Izzo, let’s move it.” He sounded angry, sore at something.

  “Aye-aye, sir.”

  Jesus, you’d think it was me slowing us up and not him, the driver thought. Maybe he’s going mental. And who could blame anyone for going mental in this shit?

  Verity turned again to look back, but there was nothing to see, only the long line of trucks and tanks and big guns and jeeps and marching men. The burial field was back there, he knew, unholy and unconsecrated, by now just another flat place between the hills.

  New snow began to fall, drawing a dull veil over everything as Koto-ri disappeared behind them.

  “Can’t you get a move on, Izzo?” Verity demanded, not entirely reasonable.

  “Trying my best, Captain,” the driver said.

  Tate knew what was bothering Captain Verity was not Mouse Izzo’s driving.

  “Well, get it going then,” Tate said, shouldering his share of Izzo’s resentment to help Verity, whatever it was that was eating at him.

  “OK, Gunny, oh-frigging-kay.”

  Izzo noisily shifted gears in a dumb show of acceleration. All three of them knew it was only for effect, since the trucks in front of them weren’t going to move any faster no matter what Verity feared or Izzo wanted.

  No letters had arrived at the house on P Street for weeks, and Madame invented many credible reasons for this.

  “The plane could not take off with all the snow, Kate.”

  “Oh.”

  Madame read the American newspapers and knew, vaguely, the truth. That an American army was trapped by the Chinese and the cold and that Kate’s father was one of them. It was not a truth for which three-year-old girls were prepared.

  “Madame, we haven’t sung ‘Sur le pont d’Avignon’ yet this week.”

  “No, we haven’t.”

  And so they sang, finishing very loudly, “On la danse, tout en coup!”

  “There one dances, all at once!”

  Madame prayed Mr. Verity would soon be home to sing to his daughter. Now her prayer changed.

  She prayed he would just get home.

  After each night of fighting their way south, Oliver Smith counseled in the morning with his staff.

  A rifle company commander whose two hundred men had been badly hurt and now numbered, of effectives, fewer than a hundred reported to Smith, telling him what it was like up there in the hills and on the ridgelines where rifle companies fought battalions and sometimes regiments of Chinese troops.

  “Good troops, too, General. They keep coming.”

  “How do they come, Captain?” This was Smith’s command, his division; he had to know the Chinese as well as they knew them-selves. Or they would defeat him.

  “They tease you in the middle and then come from both flanks. In waves. Like we did in the Pacific, on the Islands, hitting the beach in waves. Except here there’s no beach. Just the ridgelines and the hills, and they keep coming. And when they get there, them that’s left . . . ”

  “Yes, Captain,” Smith said, gentle and not pushing, knowing the story would come and knowing this man had lost half his company.

  “. . . then it’s hand-to-hand, rifle butts and knives, beating their brains out, spearing and clubbing and strangling . . . smothering them in the snow facedown and nailing them to the ground with bayonets. . . . ” He shook his head, wondering if he really remembered all this or was fantasizing. “You never saw anything like it, General. It must have been the way men fought a thousand years ago.”

  “And yesterday,” Smith remarked, half to himself, and the captain, who neither heard nor understood, said nothing.

  Smith stood now.

  “Well, Captain, thank you for coming in. Good report, Captain. Does you credit.”

  One day bled into another, each night into the next.

  Izzo contrived hot meals by wiring cans of C-ration ham and limas to the jeep’s manifold so they heated as they drove. Verity had little appetite but ate anyway. To fast was to die. The cold drained body heat. Men pared lean, wire-thin, by the summer fighting at Pusan and those days of runs and seasickness aboard ship now lost another ten or twenty pounds they could not afford, eyes sunken deep behind hollowed cheeks.

  Verity’s anus bled intermittently, rubbed raw from cold toilet paper and diarrhea. Tate, Verity knew from how he walked, was the same.

  Some men just shit in their trousers as they marched. Verity resisted for days before joining them.

  It only stinks for a while, he realized. Then it froze. But before it froze there were a few moments when it was pleasantly moist and warming, like a soothing poultice. But only for a time. Then it solidified into a lump of frozen shit down around the bottom of your trousers where they tucked into boot tops or canvas leggings.

  What the hell, Verity thought.

  He wasn’t the only man too weak and too cold or whose hands were too frozen to go through the whole damned rigamarole of dropping gun belts and packs and opening parkas to get at the several pairs of pants everyone wore and the two sets of yellowed, odorous underpants inside, to open themselves bare to the wind and the snow.

  So they shambled along, a stinking, rotten, tired column of freezing men who, for no rational reason, continued to behave not as a mob but as an army, still dangerous, still capable of fighting back and killing its enemies, not just in defense, but in attack and pursuit, running the Chinese to death in the low hills bordering the terrible road south toward the sea.

  While Izzo by miracles of improvisation produced the odd hot meal, you needed a vehicle’s engine for that. The marching infantry lived pretty much off dried rations, crackers and candy bars and cheese. The pork and beans and ham and limas were frozen solid in their little cans and soon thrown away as useless weight. For miles behind the column starving Korean refugees, trailing the army but afraid to approach too close, scavanged discarded tins from the snow, some of them exploded by cold.

  The Marines wore their canteens inside their shirts against their bellies to keep the water liquid and drinkable. This gave slim young men the bulbous look of the old and obese, of women late in
pregnancy. Or suggested the distended bellies of starving children in some sub-Saharan famine area.

  Some of the men could still urinate normally. A simpler anatomical function performed swiftly by the side of the road into snow-drifts, only complicated by the wind that required a man to piss to leeward and not to windward. Desperately seeking a jocular note, men passed the word: “Don’t eat yellow snow.”

  Men with cramp were another category entirely. The cramp came from eating frozen food, and to relieve the pain as best they could men walked stooped over, bent almost in two from the waist. For some reason, that seemed to dull pain. Tate, well over six feet, had been taken by cramp and was no longer anywhere near as tall as Captain Verity.

  What could the corpsmen do, the few doctors that they did have? Prescribe bed rest? A week in a warm climate?

  Such things existed in other worlds, miles and years from here.

  And the corpsmen themselves, the occasional doctors passing through, they, too, were sick and frostbitten and, from time to time, fell off to the side of the road to sleep awhile. And did not wake.

  This was how it was on the line of march, along the narrow mountain road.

  It was worse on the ridges where the rifle companies fought the Chinese to keep the way open. On the road, at night, Marines like Verity could at least sleep, unless they were rousted out and formed into irregular ad hoc skirmish lines, officers and men and corpsmen and truck drivers and chaplain’s aides alike, to beat back a Chinese attack that had broken through the thin ranks of riflemen above. When they could sleep, Tate rigged ponchos and shelter halves from jeep to ground, weighting down their hems with chunks of frozen snow and with rock, pissing on the canvas edges to seal them with ice against the cold, creating a sort of lean-to that cut the wind and under which three men in their sleeping bags huddled and hugged together, sharing body heat. God knows, we stink, Verity thought, though he could no longer smell himself, not through nostrils clogged with green snot. What must it be like for the riflemen up there in the hills who couldn’t steal even a few hours of sleep in their bags but must be up and about, patrolling and manning the perimeter and fighting off the midnight assaults by the Chinese before, at dawn, resuming the march south?