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

  “If you gotta break his damned leg, Gunny, break it. He ain’t feeling it.”

  “I don’t like to do that, Izzo.”

  “Here, gimme the BAR. I’ll whack him with the stock. That ought to frigging do it.”

  Tate imagined the sound of dead bone splintering and, revolted, gave one great final shove.

  “Good! He’s in,” Izzo enthused.

  They replaced Verity’s helmet snug over his cap and tidied up his parka a bit and propped his head at an angle that was almost jaunty. Izzo even breathed on his silver captain’s bars and polished them with a dirty sleeve.

  “If we had a pipe or something, he could almost be MacArthur his frigging self, Gunny,” Izzo said, very excited.

  “Well, he’s got a few cigars left.”

  Tate knew he, too, was becoming giddy. Snow had begun to fall again, and it was getting colder. Izzo tugged a Havana from the breast pocket of Verity’s dungaree jacket inside the parka and tried to shove it into his mouth, but the face was frozen now, not from cold alone but in death, the mouth taking on the hideous grin of rictus mortis, and he could not pry the teeth apart even a little.

  “Forget the cigar, Izzo,” Tate ordered, “and let’s move out or we’ll all be dead.”

  “Aye-aye, Gunny,” Izzo said, climbing in behind the wheel and patting Verity on the left knee. “We’re taking you home, Captain. They ain’t gonna bury you here.”

  As the snow came down heavier, he drove slowly back onto the road, maneuvering the jeep dexterously into a gap between marching men, bouncing slightly as the tires jounced over the rutted, frozen surface of the dirt road.

  There were lots of MPs now, officious and loud, shouting instructions, but they came through Hamhung in good order with a silent Captain Verity taking the salute.

  “Walking wounded turn left here. Nonwalking, drop ’em right here and we got people will pick ’em up. Stiffs, straight ahead half a mile. They got a morgue; make a hard right.”

  The MPs liked giving instructions, and neither Tate nor Izzo took it well, Tate because of his five stripes and gunnery sergeant’s sense of dignity and propriety and Izzo because he didn’t like policemen, military or otherwise.

  “Frig you,” he muttered under his breath.

  “Just shut up, Izzo, and drive slow. We’ll get the captain some-where we can find officers who knew him.”

  “That’s the ticket, Gunny.” Izzo brightened. “Glad you thought of that. I wondered what we was going to do if we got him this far.”

  “Well, that’s why they pay me gunny’s wages, Izzo, and you get two-striper’s.”

  “I knew it must be something like that,” Izzo said, a bit sulky at the reproof.

  There was one sticky moment when traffic slowed at the turnoff to the morgue, where trucks were adding their dead to a line of corpses on the ground, as Graves Registration men scrutinized dog tags and compiled lists.

  “There’s a job you couldn’t pay me to do, graves reg.,” Izzo said. “I knew a fat guy in high school, Murphy, he wanted to become an undertaker. Funny guy, too, and smart. Never could understand it.”

  “Let’s just get out of here,” Tate said, more prudent and a bit nervous now, their jeep idling in the traffic with Verity sitting there, very still. The snow had thinned again, and you could see better now. Could see too well.

  One of the graves reg. men looked up: “You got another stiff there or that guy’s asleep?”

  Tate gave him a hard look, a gunnery sergeant’s look.

  “That ‘guy’ is Captain Thomas Verity and he’s asleep. We had some fighting back there up the road a bit. Or hadn’t you heard?”

  “Sure, Gunny, sure.”

  Tate had ticked the five stripes on his sleeves with a mittened hand, casually, as if by accident.

  The graves man knew it was no accident and bent swiftly to his work as Izzo gunned the jeep and pulled slowly away.

  “Pull over when you get a break in the traffic, Izzo.”

  There were actual jams now, here on the outskirts of Hungnam, plenty of army vehicles, trucks and jeeps and such, servicing the perimeter troops and installations, and the Marine trucks and tanks and guns coming south from the reservoir.

  “OK,” Izzo said, looking for an opening.

  When they parked, Tate got out and began to build a fire.

  “We’re going to tidy up a bit before going into town, Izzo, look a little soldierly.”

  Izzo looked down at himself. “My pants stink of shit and piss and the rest just stinks of me and you want me soldierly? Why don’t we get into town first? Maybe they got a Turkish bath.”

  “And we’ll start with a clean shave,” the gunny said, “soon as I get some water heated.”

  Exasperated, Izzo demanded, “And are we gonna shave the frigging captain, too?”

  Tate looked at him. “You know, Izzo, we just might. I hadn’t thought of it, but yes, we might.”

  And Gunnery Sergeant Tate mulled another idea, as well, relying on chaos and panic at the port of Hungnam. He was reasonably sure they were going to find the frightened bustle and impatience of a forced evacuation (“Sweet Jesus! Don’t leave me behind!”), the mingling of broken units and stragglers and deserters and the malingerers. With construction gangs throwing up temporary, jury-rigged shelters in counterpoint to the work of demolition parties. It was a situation made for bungling and brawling, officers gone mad, disobedience by surly enlisted men, frenzy and drunkenness, looting and panic, brutal and licentious soldiery all about and run amok.

  In confusion a determined man can usually do and get what he wants. In such confusion they just might smuggle Verity through.

  Soldiers manned the perimeter, men of the Seventh Army Division. “About time they did something,” Marines remarked, uncharitable. Marine MPs managed the few roads, waving Marine vehicles through and down toward the port, directed Marines walking in. Marines gave them the finger and moved on, saving their abuse for soldiers. Now the press was here. Not just David Douglas Duncan, an old Marine from the War who had walked back from Hagaru with the division (as a man should!), but new people no one had seen before. These new correspondents hurried about conscientiously, as if sheer industry would make up for their not having been there during the bad times. There were rumors James Michener was there, that Ed Murrow of CBS was on his way to do a “Christmas in Korea” report for TV. As their jeep moved slowly into the town along the clogged main road in the wake of trucks and tanks and tracked howitzers, Izzo saw Marguerite Higgins standing off to the side, leaning elegantly against a truck fender, wearing a fur-hooded parka that was decidedly nonissue, notebook in hand, interviewing Marines as they slogged past, a few who recalled her from early in the fighting or up at the airstrip of Hagaru, calling out, brash and familiar, “Hey, Maggie, it’s me!”

  “Sure, Marine, give me your name. I’ll get it in the paper if I can.”

  The correspondents were there to record salvation.

  “Crows,” one Marine called them, “hangin’ around, lookin’ for carcasses at the side of the road.”

  Puller thought they were more like professional mourners, people paid to attend funerals and keen at wakes.

  Others thought the reporters were just doing a job. And for a few of them, like Duncan, who had marched with them, the Marines demonstrated not just tolerance but affection.

  Maggie Higgins, chic in her parka, had a jeep and driver supplied by Almond. She was taking notes, scribbling fast, shouting to Marines as they passed, asking their names, their units. Izzo, whose eyesight was phenomenal when it came to loot or women, had seen her a long way off.

  “Hey, Gunny, it’s Maggie Higgins. You remember, her and the captain, they knew each other.”

  Tate, painfully aware of the dead Verity propped up next to Izzo, hissed orders.

  “Just shut up, Izzo. No waving or nothing. We drive by like she wasn’t even there. No eyes-right, no stunts. You get me?”

  “OK, OK, OK, Gunny, Jeez.”r />
  “Just keep driving. We don’t need to be noticed. Not by her, not by reporters, not by nobody.”

  “OK, Gunny, OK!”

  Jeez, the way they jumped all over you for nothing.

  Miss Higgins stayed there for more than an hour, talking to men she remembered or who remembered her, recognizing a few, faking it with others.

  Some senior officers, colonels, she knew. They snapped off salutes as they went by. To have come seventy miles down that road from Yudam-ni and still be alive, you had to feel pretty good. You had to be glad to see anyone you knew from before, not just an attractive woman. Being an attractive woman made it better, of course.

  Marguerite Higgins might have remembered Tom Verity if she saw him. Perhaps not his name. But she might have remembered.

  The jeep bearing the dead Verity rolled past and she didn’t even look, either at the vehicle or at the officer sitting stiffly next to the freshly clean-shaven driver.

  “Hey, Maggie! Put my name in the paper, huh?”

  “Sure, Marine, what’s your name? What’s your hometown?”

  Men yelled back and she took notes. A few would find their way into print. Most of them she would toss away.

  For hours the Marines trudged down the road into Hungnam, men reprieved by the governor, granted a new trial.

  “Wave and look happy! Wave and look happy!”

  That was from the press photographers there at Hungnam down by the port, standing by the side of the road, looking for the good shot for tomorrow’s front page.

  “Wave and look happy!”

  Some of the grimy, tired Marines did just that. Others just slogged silently past. And one called back.

  “Fuck you and the horse you rode in on!”

  Peng and Lin, the senior generals in the field, had smashed Eighth Army and sent it reeling back hundred of miles and would shortly cross into South Korea and take Seoul. Again. In the East, X Corps had been battered and bloodied and forced to evacuate by sea. Two great Western armies had been defeated. Remarkable feats for a Chinese force without air or big guns and moving on foot through deep snow in winter mountains.

  But Lin and Peng had committed the unforgivable sin, of defeating an enemy army while failing to destroy it.

  This was noted in Peking, and eventually the two victorious generals would be returned to China, where, having embraced this dialectic or that, having backed one party faction or another, Lin and Peng fell into Mao Tse-tung’s disfavor and were stripped of honors.

  Then they were fastened to wooden posts and shot.

  “It’s a drive in the country, Gunny,” Izzo enthused, “a day at the Jersey Shore.”

  It was, too. Hungnam was full of replacements and broken units and Marines and soldiers and even sailors off the ships, and thou-sands of North Korean refugees wanting to get away, and plenty of ROK troops that had just bugged out without asking anyone’s per-mission, and a corral holding a couple thousand Chinese and North Korean prisoners, and too much traffic, with engineers wiring explosives to warehouses and docks and the town hall and just about everything else, for when the word came down to blow it all. Choppers circled overhead, landed, and rose again, ferrying staff officers and the badly wounded out to the ships. Higher up, the white vapor trails of the jets streaked the December sky.

  They were through the town and down in the dock area and on the beach before they knew it. Which was where Izzo pulled over, slamming on the brake hard, tossing Verity’s body forward and Tate damned near out of the backseat.

  “Izzo!” the gunny said menacingly.

  “Gunny, it’s the most fabuloso idea ever. Look at them LSTs pulled up on the beach with their ramps down and trucks and tanks and jeeps going aboard. The whole First Marine Division is leaving town, twenty thousand of us. Why, all we got to do is drive right down there with Captain Verity and we—”

  “We’re turning in the body, Izzo. We’re not smuggling bodies aboard naval vessels.”

  “Gunny, this ain’t a body. It’s Captain Verity.”

  “Don’t tell me about Captain Verity, you Mouse you! There are rules and regulations—”

  “He’s dead, Gunny. He’s frigging dead. There’s some sort of statute of limitations when you’re dead? I never heard that, not even in Rocks & Shoals.”

  Rocks & Shoals was what Marines called their official book of regulations.

  There were seven LSTs lined up abreast where the surf came up lazily onto the sand as if it were too cold even for the sea to make much of a fuss.

  Queues of six-by trucks and jeeps and tanks and armored personnel carriers and tracked howitzers were lined up, quite neatly, along the waterfront and then down onto the sand. Here at the water’s edge, there was very little snow, just a bit drifted gray and dirty against the tin sheds and piers and warehouses and other structures of the port. The hills, inland beyond the town, were completely white.

  “Well, Gunny?” Izzo said.

  “You’re getting shook, Izzo. Just don’t get shook.”

  “Shook? Shook? Me frigging shook?” There was an uncharacteristic nerviness in his voice.

  He was at the wheel of the jeep and Tate was behind him, next to the radio, with the BARs and their sleeping bags and packs. Up front, next to Izzo, Captain Verity, upright and frozen, dead eyes open and staring.

  “Well, well?” Izzo asked. He wished they’d closed the captain’s damned eyes. They were creepy.

  “Just put a sock in it, Izzo.” There was a finality in Tate’s flat tone. But he was the whole time watching the beach, and thinking.

  As the trucks and tanks and jeeps ground slowly in low gear toward the steel-gridded ramps of the big landing craft and then up and in, disappearing into the great, dark ship’s maws, MPs kept tally, working with clipboards to take down vehicle serial numbers and keep the traffic moving. There was no sense of urgency here at the beach, simply efficiency. But the MPs were there at each ramp. Watching.

  Tate suffered the curse of indiscriminate memory, his historian’s mind retaining trivial facts of little use, and now as he watched the MPs and the lines of vehicles crossing the beach and being waved aboard landing ships, a nagging recall began to take hold.

  “Gunny, you know what I—”

  “Shut up, Izzo!”

  Tate was thinking faster now. The Cid! When he was killed in battle, didn’t his wife or somebody put him back dead on his horse and tie him on, the sword in his hand, trot him out in his armor, so that when the Moors saw him they were astonished and fell back in disarray and Valencia, or someplace, was saved for Christianity and the king?

  Turning now to Izzo, sulking and silent, Tate addressed him scornfully. “Don’t you know anything, you ignorant little man? Didn’t you ever hear of El Cid?”

  Izzo stared at him. They were all a bit nuts coming down from the reservoir, but Tate? The gunny?

  “Sid who? Gunny, you frigging lost me.”

  “Old boyhood hero of mine, Izzo. Spanish gent. Good soldier.”

  “Yes, sir,” Izzo said, brightening, “like you and Captain Verity are heroes of mine. Always will be, too.” Pause. “What regiment was this Sid in?”

  Tate didn’t reply. He was too busy puzzling the thing out. If there was some way they could disguise Verity, mask his death, they, too, might might be able to confound the Moors.

  “The MPs, Izzo. That’s the problem. MPs are policemen, Izzo; they’re cops.”

  Izzo shuddered slightly; the police were an irritating memory. “Hell, Gunny. I know they’re cops and you’re a gunny. I’m a frigging driver. The captain . . . well, he’s a frigging captain. On the staff and all.”

  “The captain, Izzo, is dead.”

  “Hell, I know he’s dead. And I remember how he felt about being left behind and buried by a ’dozer. We both know that.”

  “We surely do, Izzo.” Tate was still thinking. And while he thought, he watched the MPs, nothing which of them seemed alert and nosy, which more languid, in his inspection.
/>   “You see, what I think—”

  “Shut up, Izzo.”

  Boy, he could be stiff, Izzo thought. As if the whole thing were my fault. . . .

  Tate knew he was being unfair. Truth was, he didn’t know what to do. He leaned forward, looking at Verity’s face. The dead eyes bothered him. Then!

  “Izzo, give me your sunglasses.”

  “My shades? You want my shades?”

  “Izzo, we don’t need a debate every time I want you to do some-thing. Whatever you call them, just damned well do it!”

  “All right, Gunny,” Izzo said sulkily, injured. “I won’t ask. Just take my personal property like it was nothing but—”

  Tate examined the glasses, breathing on the lenses and then polishing them against the bandanna tied across his frozen nose. His nose hurt. Here at the water’s edge the temperatures were higher, so the frozen tissue was thawing. Rotting. And it hurt. While it was still frozen there was only a dull ache. Now it was like a bad burn.

  “Jesus, Gunny,” Izzo said, “it’s getting warmer. We don’t want him . . . you know . . . melting or something.”

  “No, we don’t want that.” Tate was almost gentle and Izzo silently forgave him.

  Now Tate reached around Verity’s shoulders very carefully and placed the sunglasses on his face, delicately inserting the wire legs under the earflaps and helmet behind the captain’s ears.

  He then looked at Verity’s face, three-quartered, from behind.

  “Mmmmm.”

  “What?” Izzo demanded. “WHAT?”

  “How does he look now, Izzo? Can’t see the eyes now, can you?”

  Mouse Izzo turned now to examine Verity, full face on. He came from a family of barbers and beauticians, those were his bloodlines, and he scrutinized the dead man intensely for a moment or two.

  “Gunny, I gotta say he looks pretty good. For a dead man, you couldn’t do better.”

  Tate grunted assent, not listening, really. The Marine Corps had plenty of rules about live people, but beyond the regulations laid out for proper military funerals, he couldn’t think of a one about the dead.