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

  “Looka that, Captain,” Izzo said, pulling off the road to a bumpy stop in a rice paddy, partially fenced by farmers, the rest in barbed wire, where perhaps a thousand men were sitting on the ground or lying flat, docile and not sufficiently curious even to look around.

  “North Koreans,” Tate said, “prisoners.”

  Good, Verity thought. That’s a thousand of them we won’t have to fight.

  “Yeah! And looka that,” said Izzo, his voice low and husky, conspiratorial.

  ROK officers and armed guards strolled unafraid among the seated or squatted POWs within the compound, looking down at men’s faces or scrutinizing uniforms for badges of rank and occasionally throwing a fist at a man’s head or kicking him in the thigh or knee or rear end. A long table, the length and shape of a dining-room table but quite flimsy, was set up by the gate of the stockade with ROK officers seated behind it on camp chairs, conducting interrogations.

  Then Tate spoke. “Over there, Captain,” he said, the flat, nasal Kansas voice lower than usual but urgent.

  Verity saw what he meant.

  A half-dozen stout posts had been driven into the ground, and from them hung North Koreans, men evidently executed by the ROKs after they took this town. Several of the dead men, officers probably, were naked and showed signs of beatings and deeper wounds, the sort bayonets might make. Now they just slumped there, tied with ropes, hanging on the posts like rag dolls, left to dry in the autumn sun. There were still other posts prepared and ready, to which no one had yet been tied. That must be the purpose of the interrogations now going on.

  Verity was still looking at the dead prisoners when an ROK officer, noticing their jeep, got up from the table and headed for them.

  “Get it in gear, Izzo,” Verity said. “Let’s get out of here. This isn’t our affair.”

  The ROK officer was closer now, and Verity tossed him a salute and Izzo had the jeep moving before the ROK officer had a chance to return it.

  Who knew what happened in this town before and during the fighting? Or what happened to ROK prisoners?

  Neither side had a corner on cruelty.

  The skim ice of early October on the Chosin had been freakish and soon melted as the country slipped back into what we call Indian summer and the first snows vanished and ran off the lower slopes into the creeks and small streams that led to rivers and eventually to the Sea of Japan. There were birds of all sort and red fox and deer, but because most of the trees were conifers, no leaves turned golden and fell.

  “Not much like China, is it?” Verity said, and Tate, also the old China hand, agreed.

  “Not much. The trees, for one. . . .”

  And they drove north through strange country, closer to China with every mile.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Enemy advancing, we retreat; enemy entrenched, we harass; enemy exhausted, we attack; enemy retreating, we pursue.

  —Chairman Mao’s military dictum.

  “Night’s best,” Tate said.

  “Why’s that?”

  “Signal carries better. Bounces off something up there called the Heaviside layer, and it’s why back home you can sometimes pick up a baseball game late at night from a ballpark a long way off. The signal’s clearer and travels farther after dark.”

  “Oh,” Verity said. He was notoriously unmechanical.

  From then on he stayed with the radio from six until midnight or so, which was when most of the traffic died. Tate showed him how the controls worked, how he could fiddle with various knobs and dials to provide a clearer signal and eliminate static, or at least some of it, how to use the antenna directionally to bring in a better sound. It amused Gunnery Sergeant Tate that they had sent him an “expert” whose entire assignment consisted of listening to a radio but who knew nothing of the Heaviside layer or even how to turn the dial. “The Marine Corps,” Tate told himself, a mix of love and wonder in his voice.

  From their first night on the drive north there was plenty of Chinese on the air. They camped by the side of the road; the whole column they’d joined did, not wanting to drive with the lights on in case of enemy planes, and the road too narrow and rough to drive it safely in the dark. None of the Chinese seemed especially important to Verity, but there was a lot of it and he found himself enjoying the sound, listening to it as he had every single day of the first fifteen years of his life, when Chinese was as much his native tongue as was English.

  It wasn’t cold, and while Tate and Izzo slept in the small nylon pyramidal tent they carried, Verity sat outside playing with the radio, sitting in the jeep smoking a good cigar and looking up at the stars. This night was clear, no wind. He jotted down the occasional note when a word or phrase caught at him and seemed to connote something. Nothing dramatic. He liked the Korean night sky, that at least reminding him of China, except that here the hills pressed in closer and you didn’t get that vast expanse of black. As black as the sky was, the hills were blacker. Once your eyes became accustomed to the dark and night vision took over, it was amazing how much you could see, and how clearly, without artificial light. There was no moon, but that only made the starlight brighter. Once your eyes adjusted you could read newspaper headlines with illumination from the stars alone.

  He picked up several names that had a familiar sound and that were repeated. Peng. Lin Piao. Common-enough names. There’d been a Peng in North China in ’45 that he dealt with, a major in the Communist Fourth Field Army. He couldn’t recall the rest of his name. Polite fellow and, if you could believe the stories, a veteran of the famous Long March of six thousand miles in the 1930s when Mao took his people north and then east to get away from Chiang Kai-shek and conserve men and resources until they were strong enough to fight back with a chance of winning. Lin Piao was a colonel in the Fourth. A Chinese field army under the Communist setup was equivalent to an American army corps with three infantry divisions each of about ten thousand men, a regiment of cavalry, and two or three regiments of artillery. Verity got along with Peng and had him to dinner at the officers’ mess a couple of times, where he demonstrated a fondness for bourbon. Old Forester, as Verity recalled. And, like Verity, he preferred coffee to tea, the ceremonial beverage.

  It would be funny if it was old Peng up there commanding the Chinese. Or even Lin. If it was one of them, he hoped it would be Peng. Maybe he and Verity could meet under a flag of truce and chat a bit, about old times, maybe pour a little Old Forester over ice. As he monitored the radio and listened to the sound of Chinese coming in over the static and tried to make something of it, that was how a man’s mind wandered; that was toward midnight, when Verity understood he was tired and should cut his losses and turn in.

  The big radio clicked into silence, and, with a final long look upward at the autumn stars, he got down on his hands and knees and crawled into the pyramidal tent, trying not to disturb Izzo or Tate en route to his own sleeping bag, where he dreamed of other late nights.

  Elizabeth liked a weekend in New York. They went up on the train and stayed at the Plaza or the Pierre and hit the clubs, 21 and El Morocco and the Stork. They weren’t regulars, but they had money and wore the right clothes and looked the part and she was undeniably beautiful and so they got good tables. Billingsley, who ran the Stork, was a shit to his employees and a phony in general, but he played up to the people he thought decorated the room and might be important.

  One night Hemingway and his current girl (or wife) were there, looking the way you hoped Hemingway and his girl would look, handsome, competent, assured people.

  Billingsley went to their table to chat. And then to Verity’s.

  “Nice to have you here again,” he said, not quite sure who they were but remembering the faces.

  “We always drop by en route to the house at Cap Ferrat,” Elizabeth replied, feigning languor. “It’s so restful before the parties begin.”

  “Oh, yes, the parties,” Billingsley said, not sure which parties.

  “The parties, the endless parties,” Eli
zabeth went on, overcome apparently by a fashionable ennui.

  “Yes, yes, quite,” Billingsley said, out of his snobbish depth and retreating to Winchell’s table.

  “Who are they?” Winchell inquired.

  “Cap Ferrat. South of France. Lots of money. Oil money, I think. Name of Verity. The wife’s rich as Croesus.”

  They danced until the band quit or the joints closed and then hailed cabs and drove around before returning to the hotel, where each time Elizabeth would astonish her husband with an imaginative lust good girls weren’t supposed to demonstrate and few wives could.

  Later, as they lay there spent and slick, he muttered, “Cap Ferrat, indeed.”

  “Why not admit it’s one of our playgrounds?”

  “Because it isn’t, brat. And you’ve never been there.”

  “Have too, have too.”

  She lied incorrigibly. Except about important things.

  He propped himself on one elbow. “Just when were you in Cap Ferrat, Elizabeth?”

  “In Tender Is the Night. Fitzgerald stole me for a terrific scene in chapter five.”

  “Come here,” Thomas Verity said. “I’m going to spank you.”

  She licked ripe lips.

  “Oh, good,” she said, tossing the bedsheet away.

  On Monday, as they rode the train back home to Tom’s job teaching college boys, their names appeared in Winchell’s column as en route to their château in the South of France and they read it aloud and giggled about it almost all the way to Baltimore.

  There were plenty of ROK troops rolling north, and sometimes they traveled with them. Not that ROK troops were any good; most of them weren’t, Tate said, but three Marines in a jeep couldn’t just go joyriding through North Korea alone. The towns and villages they passed through were pretty much untouched, nothing like the wreckage Verity had seen in just a few days down near the Parallel. The people, the civilians, made themselves scarce. But any one of the villages could have concealed a company of North Korean regulars. For three Marines, a company of North Korean regulars could be somewhat embarrassing.

  So they traveled with the ROKs and from time to time an American outfit.

  “Hey, Marines, what the hell you doing here?”

  “Out for a drive!” Izzo shouted. “A friggin’ Sunday drive!”

  They got the finger for their trouble and some cheerful obscenity. The soldiers knew what the Marines had done at Inchon and in taking Seoul, so it wasn’t that tough. These men were part of the Eighth Army. The Marine division would be part of X Corps in a few days when it got to Wonsan. Both arms of the UN army would then push north, toward the Yalu River, toward China.

  That, at least, was the idea.

  Mouse Izzo was a good driver. On that he hadn’t lied. As for the rest of his story, and cautioned by Tate, Verity continued to reserve judgment.

  “I got separated from my unit, Seventh Marines, in the fighting north of Seoul. I ran into some North Koreans and offered to take them prisoner—you know, Captain, put in a good word for them. Instead they put a gun on me, and since there was maybe a dozen of them and one of me, I was reasonable; I didn’t make life difficult and I went along. I was with them two days. Then they joined up with some other NK and I guess they heard how bad things was going and they gave me back half my cigarettes and turned me loose.

  “ ‘Hey,’ I said, ‘my weapon. I’m not touring Korea without a weapon, not with all the shit and chaos going on.’ So they gave me back my M-l. Amazing thing. I think if I’d had time to stand around bargaining with those guys I would have ended up owning them. Near glorioso it was. But I didn’t have time and I took off, heading south. That’s when I found the jeep and attempted to return it to the rightful owner.”

  He remained vague as to how he’d gotten separated from the Seventh Marines and precisely what outfit he’d been in.

  The country was changing again now. In ways it was like northern New England—short, steep hills, narrow valleys with water, six-foot streams and thirty-yard rivers running through the bottoms, and the hillsides covered with firs and spruce and pine and other conifers Tom didn’t know. Nothing Asian or exotic. It could be the country between White River Junction and Stowe, Vermont. He didn’t like the Japanese very much and had fought against them, but no one could argue with reforestation in a country this poor. If the country was pleasant, give some credit to the Japanese, damn them! No, take that back. The War was five years ago. He no longer hated except for the thing that had killed his wife.

  No one died in childbirth anymore. Not in the States. Not in a great city. Not when the mother-to-be was educated, had money and the best doctors, and was intelligent and knew about exercises and diet and all the rubbish that was supposed to make us safe, immune to tragedy. And, in this instance, had not.

  The road now ran almost straight north to Wonsan.

  “That’s where you’ll find the division, Tom. Or should.” That’s what he’d been told before he and Tate left Kimpo.

  Now, with the division still at sea aboard troopships, the ROKs had captured Wonsan without much of a fight. The port city was one hundred and ten miles north of the Thirty-eighth Parallel. That’s how fast the war was moving when even ROKs went a hundred miles in a few days; that’s how completely the North Korean army had fallen apart.

  “Wonsan coming up, Captain,” Izzo announced. He drove with a map folded on his lap and knew how to read it.

  “Noted,” Verity said, charm exhausted elsewhere, thought elsewhere.

  They rolled into Wonsan at midafternoon, drawing salutes and impressed stares from ROK troops and one or two Americans along for the ride as advisers.

  “Make way for the First Marine Division!” Izzo shouted. “General officer coming! . . .”

  Men stood in the dust they raised, straightening their caps and preparing to salute.

  Down by the wharves Izzo asked directions and was given them.

  “Good drive, Izzo,” Verity said.

  “Why, thank you, Captain, very generous of the captain to say so.”

  Maybe he wasn’t all that surly. Maybe the man had suffered. Izzo was always ready to give an officer a chance. It could always pay dividends.

  He was respectful, too, of senior NCOs like Tate. But didn’t give them an entirely free ride.

  Tate came from a place called Engine, Kansas, which drove Izzo near to distraction.

  “What the hell kind of name is that for a town? Engine! Jeez, Gunny, you got to be kidding.”

  For all his cool, Tate was sensitive. You could get to him. And while he would never agree aloud, he knew Engine was some name for your hometown.

  “It was a railhead, Izzo,” he said patiently, “on one of the early transcontinental routes to the Pacific, the Union Pacific or Northern Pacific, one of them. Engine was where they repaired locomotives, did boiler work and the like. There was a big roundhouse. I remember seeing it as a kid, a big red-brick building that—”

  “Jeez, Gunny, I used to think Philadelphia sounded like a stupid place to be from. But, Engine? . . .”

  “Just watch your mouth, Izzo,” Tate said, turning crisp, “and while you’re at it, get under the jeep and see if you can find that rattle. No reason we got to have a rattle interfering with radio monitoring all the way to the Yalu.”

  “No, Gunny.”

  The ground was wet and muddy and Izzo knew he was being punished. And unfairly.

  But what the hell did you expect from people that lived in a shit place like Engine, Kansas?

  Chairman Mao had long ago shaped his military philosophy, one that still directed the strategic and tactical thought of his generals.

  “Enemy advancing, we retreat; enemy entrenched, we harass; enemy exhausted, we attack; enemy retreating, we pursue.”

  Both Lin Piao and Peng Teh-huai, Mao’s leading generals in North Korea, held fiercely to his way, though both men were nimble thinkers who knew how to improvise. Variations on a theme. Peng also knew the Marines. Some
of their young officers had impressed him in North China in the winter of ’45–’46, after the Japanese surrender, when the country was in chaos with bandits and not yet disarmed Japanese troops and Kuomintang forces and Communist units wandering the land and engaging in pitched battles until the Marines came in to establish some variety of crude order.

  Peng wished he were assigned the sector west of the Taebaek Mountains, where the American army and the ROKs were advancing, and not here in the east near the Chosin, where, when the word came to attack, his command would meet the First Marine Division.

  He wondered if any of the Marines he’d met five years ago at Tsingtao and Tientsin were still serving. And would they recall him?

  By October 20, though no one on the Allied side could yet know this, four Chinese armies numbering about thirty thousand men each and under the command of Communist veteran soldier Peng Teh-huai, had crossed the border into Korea. Three of the four armies lurked in the hills north of the Eighth Army; the Fourth was positioned opposite X Corps in eastern North Korea in the mountain territory roughly encircling the Chosin Reservoir. By the end of October two additional Chinese field armies would join them. On October 15 President Truman and General MacArthur held their summit conference on Wake Island. MacArthur assured the president there was little danger of Chinese intervention.

  According to Truman, “He [MacArthur] said the Chinese Commies would not attack, that we had won the war, and that we could send a division from Korea to Europe in January.”

  As for rumblings back home that MacArthur had his eye on a run for the White House two years from then, the General said politicians had made “a chump” of him in 1948 and he assured the president “it would not happen again.”