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

  “I guess so, Bob.”

  “I wonder if we are going to fight the Chinese, Tom.”

  “Guess that depends on them,” Verity said, shaking Bjornsen’s hand and sending him on his way.

  In the morning Verity was to see General Smith, and he supposed then he’d find out. That was, if MacArthur wasn’t keeping it to himself and had briefed Smith.

  MacArthur.

  Even among the Marines who claimed to despise, and certainly among army officers who both revered and feared, the General, they were obsessed by him.

  “You ever met him, Verity?”

  “Never even saw him. Not in the War, not out here.”

  “Too bad; he’s something to see.”

  “Oh, where did you get to know him?”

  “Never laid eyes on the man. But I feel like I know him. He’s all anyone bloody well talks about. Like as if he were God. And Satan at the same time. Some people claim he’s a nutcase; others say he walks on water. The Japs worship the son of a bitch; hell, they liked Tj, too.”

  Tom Verity made sure he was down at the waterfront to see the Marines come ashore from the troopships, reeking after ten days at sea.

  “I haven’t seen Marines in any number since ’46 in North China,” he told Tate. “I want to be there to see them.”

  He was not quite sure why. Maybe a bonding process, the need to reassure himself he belonged, that he was again a part of the glorious whole, even as a most reluctant warrior.

  The Marine reserve system worked. Oh, there were inequities, sure. But it was admirably pragmatic, calling up the men it needed to feed the war.

  What bothered Verity was a schizoid aspect to being a reserve. Was he at bottom an academician who taught college boys? Or was he again a professional soldier, the trained killer he had been for nearly four years of his life?

  Do we really shed civilization quite that easily? You put the uniform back on and you slip automatically into the skin of a man who kills for a living?

  What an odd thing.

  Izzo was off scrounging with the jeep, and so Verity walked down through the town toward the piers and quays and the handful of small coasters and fishing boats and lighters. There were plenty of Koreans about, but they were still shy of Americans and scuttled away. Well, we’re in bandit country, Verity thought. He wore the old .38 in its holster on his hip, hung from the web belt, the leather thongs dangling loose and not secured around his thigh the way he used to wear it in the War and up in North China, gun-fighter-style, strapped down for a quick draw.

  God, what a kid I was. Moving picture stuff.

  He would soon be thirty and was not at the movies.

  The North Koreans pulling out had blown up some of the docks, and there were a couple of big burned-out warehouses and some other damage, but the port was functioning. The ROKs had gotten in here too fast for the North Koreans to do a really proper job of demolition. Someone probably got shot for that. When you retreat you’re supposed to blow up what you can’t take along and have to leave behind, blow it up or burn it or, preferably, both. War was hell on insurance companies.

  Down here by the harbor it wasn’t cold. No breeze off the water, but a land wind from behind and not bad. The first big landing craft had nosed up sideways to a long pier, and when Verity arrived a gangway was already down and a couple of sergeants were shouting up at the ship. Sergeants, always shouting. Though, in fairness, Tate didn’t shout much. And still got things done. Out beyond this ship was a big old liner called the General Meigs, and there were other craft he could see, smallish mine sweepers and a few destroyers, the rest of them LSTs or, like this one, infantry craft. There must be others still hull-down beyond the horizon. Someone said a small coaster had hit a mine last night in the approaches, one the sweepers must have missed. Damned clever, the Russians, inventing mines you could sail over a dozen times and then, on the thirteenth pass, they blew the hell out of you. It took a curious sort of mind to come up with a notion like that, Verity concluded. He wondered if the number 13 had a sinister connotation for Russians as it did in the States.

  Now there was more shouting and the first troops started down the ramps, helmeted, heavily laden with field packs and weapons and canteens and bayonets and all variety of impedimenta hung from belts, plenty of the men slung with bandoliers around their chests and over their shoulders, cloth slings carrying clips of ammo; others lugging machine guns, two men to a gun, one carrying the gun itself, the other man the tripod and the metal cans of ammunition on belts. There were other two-man crews carrying the small mortars, the .60s, one man per tube, the other with the heavy metal plate it rested on.

  “I ain’t never getting on a fucking ship again!” he heard one Marine sing out. They were pale, and some of them looked drawn. You get the runs for ten days, you look pale; you look drawn. Otherwise, they looked pretty much like all the Marines he’d ever seen, some clean-shaven and baby-faced like kids’ bottoms; others hairy and tough; craggy men like Tate and gnomes like Izzo; pimpled boys and top sergeants going gray, men with their helmets securely fastened with chin straps, others with their steel hats cocked back off their faces, straps a-dangle.

  Hell, Verity thought, they look like . . . Marines.

  He watched for a while; satisfied he belonged, he walked slowly back up the hill of the town away from the docks in the noon sun. Some of the men were being trucked to the outskirts and others were marching, and suddenly Wonsan was how he had expected to find it, full of Marines and sergeants calling out and people with lists and men shouting hello to other men they knew, men off other ships. It was everything but a liberty town with bars and girls. That’s what they needed, a couple of gin mills, a couple of local girls, and a jukebox, and this could be Oceanside, California.

  They had all the Marines they needed. They might be pale and staggering and unsteady from their long voyage, but they were finally here and there were plenty of them. It was hard to imagine that what was left of the North Koreans could handle this bunch. But you never knew about the Chinese. And Verity remembered the “Japs,” small and skinny and wearing eyeglasses, and how in the beginning the Marines had laughed, contemptuous of them. And how swiftly we learned.

  He watched the first units marching through the port and through the town itself and out into the countryside beyond, where big tents were already going up and toilets being dug.

  Then he was on his way to report to General Smith’s G-2, a full colonel who was the division’s intelligence officer.

  “What do you have so far?” the colonel asked.

  “Numbers of three regular Chinese infantry divisions, the Eighty-sixth, Sixty-third, and Fortieth.”

  “On this side of the Yalu?”

  “Can’t tell that without triangulation, sir, but the signal’s pretty strong and the content of the traffic seems to indicate they’re in Korea and no longer in China.”

  “What’s the content tell you?” he asked.

  “That they’re on the move, Colonel. Lots of info going back and forth about kilometers marched that day and whether the supply train is keeping up with them and conditions of roads and bridges. Plus some chat about the need to move only at night to avoid aerial reconnaissance. It all hangs together.”

  “What do we know about those three CCF divisions? First-line troops?”

  “Don’t know that yet, sir. But if they’re regular CCF units, they could be pretty good. They’ll know how to fight.”

  Verity found himself in the odd position of defending Chinese intervention. After the G-2 left, other men on the staff asked questions.

  “Why would they be coming? What makes this their fight?”

  “Well, it’s their backyard. Used to be, anyway.”

  “Korea? I thought it was the Japs ran this place.”

  “They did, after they beat the Russians in 1904.”

  “The Russians?”

  “Yeah. China was forced to cede Korea and lots more up in this part of the world to Russia. Eig
hteen fifty-eight, Treaty of Algun, whatever that was. The rest of the area went to Russia at the Peking Treaty two years later. China was accustomed to being pushed around by all its neighbors back then.”

  “No more, babee!” one of Smith’s staff officers remarked, drawing a laugh. There was a hearsay respect for the Chinese soldiers.

  Another officer looked quizzically at Verity. “Tom, how do you know all this shit?”

  “Didn’t you know?” he asked innocently.

  “Know what?” several voices asked.

  “I’m native-born Chinese. . . .”

  It took two days for the Marine Division, nearly twenty thousand men, to pass through Wonsan and out into the country, where they dug latrines and did all the things Marines on the march have done for two centuries. There hadn’t been much fighting here, and except for the port, the town was nearly unscarred. Locals stood on the sidewalks to watch the Marines pass in their yellow canvas leggings and bent under huge backpacks and weapons. The Koreans looked exactly like the Koreans farther south, probably because they were the same people, divided only by an invisible line and a political philosophy. Verity had no Korean, but he knew some Japanese and tried that, to middling effect. He got very little response to his Chinese even though here at Wonsan they were little more than two hundred miles from the Yalu and the border.

  I can smell China, he told himself, and indeed he thought he could.

  Was it a smell wafting over a couple of hundred miles? Or was it vast China itself moving south, coming closer?

  He shivered. From cold, as the sun fell, not because of the Chinese. The nights were getting cooler. He wondered if he’d brought enough cold weather gear and if the Marine Corps were going to issue some. And he wasn’t the only Marine wondering about that.

  Then Verity shrugged. It was one of those things over which he had no control. The tanks and trucks and personnel carriers and the guns, .105s and even eight-inchers, and all the other rolling stock were coming off the ships down at the port and rolling, clanking, gears whining through the narrow streets of Wonsan, big tanks nearly touching buildings on both sides, they were so wide. Hundreds of vehicles moving through the town and out into the country, ready to start the offensive north. With all this, and considering the beating the North Koreans took at Inchon and in the fighting at Seoul, it ought to be a walkover.

  The Hotel San Regis was on the rue Jean Goujon, close to wonderful bars with slim girls who chain-smoked cigarettes and young men who believed in communism, especially over a fin, but doted on American films dubbed in French. Elizabeth and Tom had a fifth-floor room in back, a large room, with a small balcony.

  “You really should draw the drapes, Elizabeth.”

  “Oh?”

  “Or put on a robe. Or a nightgown.”

  “But the air is so—”

  “I know, and voyeur is a French word.”

  She made a face. “Tommie, don’t be so stuffy. Looking’s fun. So is being looked at.”

  He lay on the bed looking up at her, smoking a cigarette, and watching how she moved, and he stopped arguing.

  He saw Miss Higgins once more before they went north.

  “It’s you. I forget your name. But you live in the countryside and don’t take my newspaper.”

  “Not important. Any big stories this week?”

  “Bob Hope. So far, he’s still the big story.”

  “That’s pretty big,” Verity said, meaning it. Compared to a movie star with his own radio show, what were any of them, even MacArthur?

  Maggie Higgins was wearing a dress, under an open trench coat. The night was chilly. He wondered how much of a wardrobe she traveled with. Did someone carry it? Someone change typewriter ribbons for her?

  “Tell me your name again.”

  She could be imperious.

  “Verity. Tom Verity.”

  “Yes. I should have remembered.”

  “Among all these soldiers and Marines? Why?”

  She shrugged. “Why don’t you give me a story?” she said. “About going north.”

  “I’m only a captain. They don’t tell me much.” He was tempted to say, “Ask your more exalted sources.” They said she knew MacArthur. That she was a “pet.”

  “The best stories come from enlisted men, from platoon leaders and company grade officers. No one knows war the way they do. No one else tells the truth.”

  “You sound . . . I dunno, cynical.”

  Maggie Higgins laughed, looking younger than she was. “Me, the last of the romantics?”

  He grinned back at her.

  “Tell me what you do when you’re not listening to radios and dance bands at the St. Francis Hotel or sitting out in the country purposely not reading my column.”

  “I’m a teacher. At Georgetown.”

  “What do you teach, anything exotic? I’ll try to put a line in my next story. Your family can see it.”

  He thought it was still a good idea to lie about the Chinese business, so he said, “General studies.”

  “Oh,” she said, disappointed.

  Maggie Higgins was forever recruiting heroes. Or creating them in her dispatches. Heroes were what made her stories sing. Real, live American heroes. Maybe this Marine captain would be one.

  Feeling him out, she said, “But radio isn’t very glamorous.”

  Verity had worked up a line and decided to use it.

  “We also serve who only sit and listen.”

  Well, she thought, he has wit. She liked him.

  Verity inhaled her scent. There was something of the excitement about her that he would always associate with Elizabeth. Not quite it but the suggestion of it.

  Then, before either of them could say more, an enlisted man came up, a bit awkward and unwashed, but when Verity saw him he went over immediately to hear what he had to say.

  Then Verity returned to Marguerite Higgins. “I’ve got to leave,” he told her. “I’m sorry. There’s something I have to do.”

  “You don’t really. Other people can tune radios—”

  “Yes,” he said, shook her hand briskly, and wheeled.

  The enlisted man had been Gunny Tate, who had been tuning radios and had come across a sudden flood of Chinese traffic that he thought might mean something.

  “You were right, Gunny,” Verity said.

  He’d barely cleared the door in departing before Maggie Higgins had been taken up by a flyboy major who was telling her marvelous stories of himself.

  Elizabeth, Verity thought, would have liked her.

  Or hated her.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Pale hills by moonlight, covered in snow. . . Vermont looked much like this along Route 7, with small, well-lighted towns. . . . Except that here the towns were dark and called Sudong and Chinhung-ni and Koto-ri and Hagaru. . . . The difference was at Stowe,. . . there was no one waiting to kill you.

  The first snows weren’t real snow. North Korea wasn’t the Arctic. The October snows fell wet and heavy, turning the country white but enduring only on the hills, above two thousand feet. In the valleys the stubble of the rice paddies still showed through and on the roofs of huts it melted from the heat inside. On the roads, gravel and earth, the trucks rolled north, sliding sideways a bit on the wet snow, then mud instead of snow, and just as slippery. He remembered driving with his father in China years before in one of their GM pickup trucks and how the road seemed almost to melt beneath you, remembered New England during college winters and ski trips to North Conway and Pico Peak, where the bald tires of undergraduate cars made it icier.

  But even this early snow, which wouldn’t last, wet and heavy, building up on the helmets and rucksacks and bent shoulders of the Marines at march, cutting visibility, spinning under the wheels of trucks and jeeps and the heavy, clanking tank treads, was . . . inconvenient.

  And an omen of worse yet to come. It was, after all, still October, only autumn.

  There had been cold nights and mornings with frost, but when he and Gunner
y Sergeant Tate and their driver drove out of Wonsan to find the leading Marine regiment and join up with it, a warm sun shone. They’d been warned to keep watch for retreating North Korean units. Just because they were retreating didn’t mean they were harmless. A North Korean regiment brushed against one of Puller’s companies in the night and killed twenty-five Marines in a firefight. If three men in a jeep ran into an enemy regiment. . . . And with both armies moving so fast now, the North Koreans falling back, the UN people advancing, no front as such existed; it was all fluid, shifting, difficult to define, hard to find. Verity sat up front with Izzo, while Tate and the radio lounged about in the backseat.

  “Comfortable back there, Gunny?”

  “Very posh, Captain, very pleasant.”

  Verity wondered where in his travels Tate had picked up posh. The sergeant had the usual BAR cradled loosely, a cigar in his mouth. Cigars, Bob Hope, Maggie Higgins, not a shot fired at them yet, this war could be a lot worse.

  The country north of Wonsan changed again. Off to the right was the Sea of Japan, and from the heights of ground they could still see it occasionally in the distance, see the odd ship out there, American warships screening X Corps’s right flank. On October 20 General Willoughby, the one who didn’t like Marines, had declared the war as good as over. From Far East Command in Japan he issued an intelligence summary. “Organized resistance on any large scale has ceased to be an enemy capability. . . . North Korean military and political headquarters may have fled to Manchuria . . . the enemy’s field units have dissipated to a point of ineffectiveness.”

  The North Koreans, he admitted, showed no signs of surrendering and continued to fight “small-scale delaying actions.”

  Verity had been shown the text by a Marine intelligence officer who said, “In Tokyo they’re making plans for the victory parade. They say Third Cavalry will lead it, wearing their yellow neckerchiefs—”

  “The Third Cav is a hundred miles away from here, pushing north fast.”