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

  Izzo was somewhat vague about that and noisily ran through the various gears, trying them out. Changing the subject. “Want to be sure you’ve got a good vehicle here, Captain.”

  “I’ll remember you said that, Izzo,” Verity replied.

  He knew about shifty-eyed enlisted men. It was funny, how quickly being a Marine officer came back.

  “All right,” Tate growled, “let’s move it.”

  The new driver no sooner had the jeep rolling when he reached into a field jacket to pull out a pair of silver-mirrored aviator glasses, which he hooked on his ears before squaring away his fatigue cap.

  Tate, in the backseat, tapped him on the shoulder. “You see with those things?”

  “See great, Gunny; they cut down the glare. Very restful on the eyes. Glorioso for distance vision. They—”

  “All right, Izzo, all right. I’m not pricing them, just asking if you can see.”

  “Just fine, Gunny.”

  Verity, amused, said nothing. You let senior NCOs chivy enlisted men and didn’t get into it yourself, not if you were smart. An officer lost authority that way, picking at every little thing and nagging.

  Izzo turned the engine over smoothly and drove the jeep slowly out of the army compound, resisting the temptation to burn rubber and showboat.

  “Where to, Captain?” he asked, polite as prep schools.

  Well, Verity thought, we’ve got ourselves a driver. Let’s hope he’s a good one.

  Izzo drove well but talked endlessly. Free association. About playing baseball in the Southern Association as a Phillies farmhand, selling cars, racing midget autos at the track at Upper Marlboro, Maryland. Verity marveled at the man’s imagination.

  “Begging the captain’s pardon,” Tate said, “there’s imagination and there’s lies. This boy lies like a newspaper.”

  The next time Izzo began his spiel, Tate cut him off.

  “What I’m interested in, Izzo, is a little more about your military experience, not how you pitched no-hitters or broke into movies.”

  Izzo looked hurt. He was about five-four, maybe one hundred and thirty pounds, but he made up in brass what he lacked in heft. And he’d go at you.

  “Anything you want to know, Gunny. You want fitness reports, I’m your man.”

  “In the War, Izzo. What’d you do in the War?”

  “Oh, yeah. Absolutely, Gunny. I carried a Browning Automatic Rifle on Peleliu. General Geiger himself noticed me. ‘Smallest BAR man we have,’ the general said. Proud about it. Bragged on me, he did.”

  “When did you make corporal?”

  “Well, that’s complicated, Gunny. I made corporal twice. Busted back once. A first sergeant had it in for me. Didn’t like Italians. ‘Wops,’ in his words. I don’t usually take offense, but who needs that? I don’t need being called wops or similar names.” He looked over brightly at Verity. “Right, Captain? Nobody needs that crap. Not even from top soldiers.”

  “You talk to me, Izzo,” Tate said. “Captain has other things on his mind. You address me.”

  “Absolutely, Gunny.”

  “Good. Now listen up, Corporal.”

  Izzo listened to instructions and swung the wheel right, sun glittering off the shades, his eyes invisible, impossible to read. Do you think he rally drove for holdup men? Verity asked himself. Or was that, too, a lie?

  On the day they found Izzo, October 4, though Verity didn’t know it (neither did Douglas MacArthur), Mao Tse-tung in Peking made his decision to intervene militarily in the war on the side of North Korea and gave orders for units of the CCF to cross the Yalu River and move south by night, hiding by day.

  Of course there was bitterness.

  They’d given Verity compassionate. His wife was dead; there was a small child. Then they’d taken it away, much as a cutpurse might steal a wallet. It was ludicrous to believe he was the only Chinese language expert they had. Surely at the CIA or at Naval Intelligence, if not in the Corps, there were such people. He wondered how far he would have gotten away with it back there in Washington if he’d simply refused to go. Not very far, he guessed. The Marine Corps had its ways. During the War he knew a professional football player, a running back named McHenry, who refused to play for the base team at San Diego.

  “I didn’t join the Marines to play football,” Mac said.

  They sent him instead to the Sixth Division as a rifle platoon leader, and he died in the push on Naha during the Okinawa fighting, legs blown off by a mine.

  Verity remembered McHenry running through broken fields in the National Football League, long legs churning. And when he died, he had no legs.

  So you played the game, you went along, you snapped off a salute and an “aye-aye” and did the job.

  As he was doing it now.

  But it was unfair. After the War thousands of Marines had gone into the active reserve, attending armory meetings and drills Thursday nights, spending two weeks every summer at Camp Lejeune or Camp Pendleton, running field problems and taking courses and getting paid for it. Others, like Verity, were in the inactive reserve, carried on the rolls and answering their mail but nothing beyond that, nothing. No armory drills, no summer maneuvers, no pay. Yet now that a war was again on, the inactives had been recalled but not all the active units.

  “We’ve called the specialists we need,” the Marine Corps said, justified and pious.

  “You called who you friggin’ wanted,” Marines responded.

  And what they wanted were infantrymen and fighter pilots and, on rare occasions, Marines who spoke a half-dozen Chinese dialects.

  Verity realized there was a tinge of paranoia in how he felt. Elizabeth had died; he was left alone to raise Kate. Now a war was on, aimed personally at him, and by the accident of his knowing a little Chinese, he was someone they thought they needed.

  Jesus, what else could happen?

  Like most intelligent, informed people, Verity had followed the progress (or lack of same) of the war in its early months. He kept up with the fighting as best he could through the newspapers and radio and TV. There was a woman sending back some of the best reporting, a correspondent named Marguerite Higgins. She worked for the New York Herald Tribune, but her stuff was syndicated and he followed it in the Washington Post. Her pieces were a bit heavy on the human-interest angle, some of the soldiers’ quotes sounding suspiciously literate and portentous, but she had a way of setting the scene that rang true, of conveying swift violence and grinding fear.

  Maggie Higgins. America had had war heroines before but rarely a woman journalist. Verity was tempted to dismiss her as a press agent’s invention except that, when he thought about the possibilities, it came to him that if Elizabeth had been a reporter she might have done an equivalent job. Even the photos of Miss Higgins were suspect, portraying her, in helmet and field shoes and fatigues, as reasonably attractive. Verity had never seen a woman at war you would want to look at a second time. Bar nurses.

  Damned newspapers.

  The jeep hit a bad rut and tossed him heavily against the dash, eliciting a muttered curse and raising a bruise on his cheek.

  “I thought you were a driver,” he said, surly.

  “Yessir,” Izzo said. “Sorry about that, sir.”

  The road was crapola, Izzo thought, and blaming him was crapola, too.

  “Just watch the road,” Tate said. He knew it wasn’t Izzo’s fault, but you do not argue with a captain with a sore face.

  “Right, Gunny,” Izzo said. “Right you are.” He knew the position Tate was in and swallowed justifiable resentment.

  Verity knew he had been unfair. So to Tate, though not to Izzo, he now said, “Hell of a road, Gunny. It’s a miracle anyone can drive it.” Officers apologized, if they did, by indirection.

  “Yessir, it is that.”

  Well, Izzo thought, maybe he’s human after all.

  Verity recalled roads he’d driven with Elizabeth, she behind the wheel, and how close to disaster they’d brushed.

&n
bsp; “Well done, Izzo, good job,” he murmured finally.

  So he was OK, after all.

  Izzo did not know Verity used to fight with his wife over her fast driving. Or that he even had a wife, now dead at twenty-one.

  Nor did Verity enlighten him. Or do so with Tate, a more responsible man.

  Douglas MacArthur, our most brilliant general since Lee (also a West Point legend and not nearly as successful), sat on his ass (as the irreverent had it) in his Tokyo palace, the American embassy he’d requisitioned, running the war at long distance and contemplating his own greatness.

  The General had only rarely felt as smug.

  It was one thing to win a war as Ike had done in Europe five years earlier, smashing a drained, defeated enemy fighting on two fronts and losing on both; quite another matter to salvage a smallish army from the lip of disaster and, in a few weeks, turn a war around. It was, the general told himself, rather enjoying the parallel, as if Marshal Ney had abruptly at Smolensk wheeled his frozen and retreating French to smash the pursuing Russians snapping at Napoléon’s rear and head back to take Moscow all over again.

  Few of his aides, the smart, tailored young ones, had ever seen MacArthur as crisply confident. He had two splendid victorious armies racing north, straight for China and the Yalu, the war’s finishing tape. The MacArthur who conquered the Empire of Japan would now turn back Communism and cow great China. A sprint north, before winter, and at the end of it victory and, just maybe, the presidency of the United States! Already the phone calls and adulatory letters from Washington poured in, the confidential communications from Henry Luce, the praise even from Senator Taft, the Hearst headlines, wires from corporate chairmen and the smooth men of Wall Street.

  In October of 1950 Douglas MacArthur was quite sure of himself and his destiny.

  What was surprising, Captain Verity thought, was how pleasant the war had been so far. If it doesn’t get any worse than this, he told himself, it’s a stroll. And this was enemy country.

  He and Tate and the driver had left in warm sunshine already hazed over from the dust lifted by trucks and tanks and other transport clogging the dirt roads, the usual traffic you see in the van of armies. Near Seoul the country was badly beaten up, buildings burned and blown, roads pitted, and trees and wires down. That was what house-to-house fighting did to you. The city hadn’t been secured until September 29, and not much worked, not yet. But Verity saw some old friends, men he’d not seen in five years, men left to tidy up after the division sailed.

  “Heard about your wife, Tom. Sorry.”

  “Gracious of you. Thanks.”

  The Marine Corps is so small you know just about everyone else. Or if you don’t, you know someone who knows him. Especially officers. Captain Verity had been a Marine in the War, and these were friends he knew from back then. It was like that with senior noncommissioned officers as well. Master sergeants knew other master sergeants, or, if they didn’t, had heard of them. One master sergeant would know if another drank or played a good hand of poker or chased skirts or ran a good organization. Most of all, he usually knew if the other master sergeant could fight.

  Not that first sergeants are in the normal course supposed to be out there getting into firefights and shooting people, not men as distinguished as that.

  “What’s the country like north of here?” Captain Verity asked a major he knew.

  “Nice country, Tom. Low hills and rolling. Roads not worth a damn. They say farther north it’s like the Alps up there, ten-thousand-foot mountains with snow, even this early, even now. You going far, Tom?”

  Verity shrugged. “Hope not. I’m supposed to catch up with the division.”

  “Yeah, Tom, well you take care. Regards to the missus.”

  This was a man who didn’t know Verity’s wife was dead, and he saw no need to tell him. So he said thanks. And the next morning he and Tate were off north in the jeep, Izzo driving and Tate sitting in the back with a BAR, scanning the roadside and the near hills.

  The country north of Seoul was less beat-up. There hadn’t been the same fighting here. According to the people in Seoul, after the city fell the North Koreans seemed to lose stomach for it.

  “They ran, Tom. May still be running. You’re gonna have to drive fast to catch up with this war.”

  Tate was a very senior NCO and a regular, a tall, long-jawed man, very lean and hard, and neither he nor Verity took such counsel entirely to heart. Once the armies crossed over the Parallel into North Korea, they would be fighting on the enemy’s ground. Verity understood the difference, as did Tate.

  “Like Lee in Virginia, Captain; in Virginia Lee was tougher to lick than he was up in Pennsylvania.” Tate was Kansan and had read some in military history.

  The road north of Seoul was being worked over by an army engineer battalion with Korean civilians, some of them women, doing most of the labor. At the Imjin River, the bridges had been blown, “by us or by them” Verity didn’t know, and it didn’t matter. They crossed by pontoon bridge, an army MP officiously waving them on after careful scrutiny.

  “I guess he thought we might be escaping North Koreans, sir,” Izzo said, and all three men laughed, Tate blond and Verity brownhaired and green-eyed. Izzo noticed the highly polished black jump boots on the MP, tied with white silk laces.

  “They steal them laces from parachutes, Captain. Parachutes are in short supply. But they steal them anyways. They like the effect.”

  They stopped to eat tinned rations on the hood of the jeep at noon and then drove for another four hours heading vaguely north, as if heading out of Washington for Philadelphia or New York. And it was nice country, as the major said, but for the occasional smashed house or downed high-tension tower. There were civilians, mostly dressed in white, but they were nervous, staying out of the way and pretty much off the road. Which was not surprising. This ground had already been fought over twice since June.

  According to the map, they crossed the Thirty-eighth Parallel in midafternoon near a town called Yonch’on.

  “I’d keep an eye peeled along here, Gunny,” Verity told Sergeant Tate. “We’re in their country now.”

  But nothing happened and they spent the night sleeping out in their sleeping bags on the ground next to the jeep, near where an Australian brigade was momentarily encamped.

  “I’d sure like to go over there and see them Aussies, Captain, maybe trade for stuff,” the driver said.

  “You stay right here,” Tate said, answering for Verity. The sergeant didn’t know this Izzo they had for a driver yet and didn’t want him causing trouble with foreign troops. You never knew about foreign troops, not until you fought alongside them for a bit.

  He had flown to Detroit and taken a cab to Grosse Pointe.

  “Well, she’s very beautiful, Tommie,” his mother said, “if this picture is anything to go by. A very beautiful girl.”

  “Jeffs?” His father said. “There’s a Jeffs in Wall Street, Arthur Jeffs.”

  “She’s his daughter, yes.”

  “Then she’s a Jew.”

  “Well, I don’t know. Her father’s Jewish; her mother’s Presbyterian or something. What does it matter?”

  “I guess it doesn’t,” Mr. Verity said. “I simply remarked on it.”

  Mrs. Verity looked again at the photo of Elizabeth, the girl her son was going to marry. “When can we meet her, Tommie? She is lovely.”

  Even his father conceded that.

  They parked the jeep at the edge of the place, and Tate went in on foot, cradling the BAR in his arms as a bird shooter might carry a Purdey shotgun.

  “You never know,” he said. “I’ll just take a look-see.”

  He was back in twenty minutes.

  “Raw, Captain, it’s raw. But no trouble I can see.”

  Just bodies.

  “Jeez, look at them,” Izzo said.

  “Yeah,” Thomas Verity agreed.

  A retreating North Korean regiment had come through here two days before,
the Americans and the ROKs hard after them, and it was the ROKs got there first. The North Koreans pretty much wiped out the village, and then the ROKs caught them at it and, in an almost casual cruelty, fought it out with them here. Ruin upon ruin, the dying among the dead. Why would North Koreans destroy their own village? Had someone put out a premature ROK flag of welcome? That’s all it took in a war.

  “Raw,” was how Tate had described it. “Fierce,” said Izzo, “friggin’ fierce.”

  They filled with water at that town and got out in a hurry. It was a hot day and the bodies, especially those gutted and lying open in the sun, had swollen and were starting to smell. There were still some people around who weren’t dead or too badly hurt, but they seemed incapable of burying their neighbors or kin or doing much of anything. It was as if the violence had shocked them mute, had drained them, and they watched the Marines at the town pump without saying anything or doing much.

  “Not much heart nor soul left in that place, Captain.”

  “No, Tate,” Verity agreed, “nor much of anything else.” They were across the Thirty-eighth Parallel now, the border with North Korea, and he wondered if that’s how it was going to be here.

  Whatever men tell you, when they set off to war there is always the consideration they may not come back.

  Verity had been to war before and had no neurotic or irrational fear of death, was not even all that afraid of dying. It was different this time, though, because Kate would be left alone. First her mother, now her father? That didn’t seem fair to a child not yet three years old who had never done anything to anyone and deserved better.

  But even a less intelligent man than Verity could figure out the logic. If he died, Kate would be alone. There was the syllogism.

  So it was one and the same thing, and for the first time in his life he was frightened of death.

  Not for himself, but for her.

  He kept this information to himself, of course.

  Early on the second day Verity and his two Marines drove up to a sort of stockade set up in a farm village. There were plenty of ROK troops about, and Verity wanted to check road conditions ahead if they could find someone who spoke English. It was ROKs who’d captured this place, apparently after a hard fight, if you could tell from the several burned-out tanks and damage to residential and farm buildings and smashed and flattened fencing.