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

  It was five years since Verity had met with men like these in number; he was more accustomed today to the commons room with its tweeds and pipes.

  General Smith, long-faced, white-haired, and still wearing the old yellow canvas leggings, could have been himself, except for the Colt. 45, an academic, perhaps a tenured professor of Thomistic philosophy. And it turned out his divisional HQ had been a Jesuit secondary school.

  “The Jesuits seem to be long gone,” Smith’s operations officer remarked, “so we must pray for ourselves.”

  “I work for the Jesuits,” Verity said, “at Georgetown University.”

  “Oh?” The ops officer was not sufficiently interested to explore that opening further. “Well,” he said, “here’s General Smith.”

  They all stood, not snapping to attention but simply getting up, perhaps a dozen men in the room. Oliver Smith had seen a lot of war, and he motioned them to be seated.

  “Thanks for coming, gentlemen.”

  There was a sort of high stool, and Smith slid it under one buttock and perched there, rather as a schoolteacher might have done, then calling on one officer after another to brief the meeting and himself. There was an evident confusion.

  “The objective isn’t all that clear. General Almond seems to be sending the First Marine Division in three disparate directions,” the ops officer said. He was a full colonel and a bit of a schoolteacher himself. Using a pointer and an acetate overlay on a small-scale map of eastern North Korea, he lectured them a bit.

  “The division is to proceed northwest to Hagaru-ri, at the near or southernmost end of the Chosin Reservoir. At Hagaru we are to split up, with a right wing moving northeast toward the Fukien Reservoir, about twenty miles away. Based on Hagaru, the rest of the division is to move northwest to Yudam-ni, a village twelve or thirteen miles away on the high ground west of the Chosin. And from Yudam-ni, we divide again, dispatching a column due west to cross the Taebaek Mountain Range to make contact, vaguely out there [he motioned with a languorous hand], with Eighth Army’s right flank.”

  The colonel paused.

  “No one seems to know just how far away and where the Eighth Army might be.”

  Smith nodded. “Thank you, Colonel.” He made no comment on the apparent confusion in General Almond’s orders but permitted a moment or two of grousing by the others. This was standard procedure. Senior Marine officers had opinions and enjoyed airing them. Verity was, except for several staff NCOs, the lowest-ranked man in the room and offered nothing. Until Smith said: “This is Captain Verity. Headquarters Marine Corps sent him over. He speaks several Chinese dialects fluently. He’s been listening to Chinese radio traffic.”

  He then paused. “I might also say the captain fought on the ’Canal as an enlisted man and on Okinawa as a rifle platoon leader.”

  This last, with no editorial comment, was clearly intended by Smith to tell his officers, “This is not just another Washington charm boy.”

  “Captain?”

  Verity had been sitting on a wooden crate. He got up now. I talk better on my feet, he told himself.

  “Thank you, General. I am not an intelligence specialist. Because I was born and raised in China and I now teach Chinese lit and history in an American college I’m here, pretty simply, to listen to Chinese radio traffic. And, if it comes to that, to talk to Chinese POWs.”

  He paused, wondering how far his own hunches and biases should be indulged. So he went ahead and told the truth.

  “I think the Chinese are coming in. The father north we go, the more Chinese I hear. But that’s reasonable. We’re getting closer to the Chinese border. What has me interested is that I’m hearing numbers of Chinese corps and divisions that Headquarters Marine Corps provided me. And, on a personal note, I’m hearing the names, or at least similar names, of officers I knew in China five years ago.”

  This was a curveball. A full colonel jumped up.

  “Wait a minute. You knew these guys? You went back to China?”

  “Yes, Colonel. I left there at age fifteen. I went back in ’45 after the surrender and served as a company commander in North China into mid-’46. Because I could speak the language I also did a lot of liaison with Chinese Communist Forces in the Tientsin-Tsingtao area. There were regular Chinese army detachments; there were the Communists; there were plenty of bandits and local warlords. After seven years of fighting the Japanese and being occupied, it was a chaotic place. The Marines tried to keep the railroad open and missionaries from getting their heads chopped off, and I did some of the go-between haggling and dickering.”

  They were all listening to him now with varying degrees of fascination. The division might be about to fight the Chinese army and here was a guy who’d been there and knew some of them.

  Sometimes Elizabeth would ask him about the War.

  “Did you shoot people, Tommie?”

  “Oh, you know,” he said, sloughing it off.

  “No, I don’t,” Elizabeth said, characteristically blunt, crisp. “I don’t know anything about war.”

  “Well, there’s a lot of waiting around. Standing in lines. Getting up early and getting pretty dirty. And then every once in awhile there’s a lot of shooting. If you’re lucky, it doesn’t last too long and you don’t get shot.”

  If he thought that would satisfy Elizabeth, he was wrong.

  “I know you never got shot,” she said, “because I know your body. No unnecessary holes anywhere.”

  He grinned. I’d hope not.

  She went solemn. “Did you shoot other people? The Japanese?”

  “Yes. On Guadalcanal. By the time I got to Okinawa I was an officer, and officers don’t go around shooting people unless things go very wrong.”

  She shook her head. “I can’t see you shooting people, Tommie. Or having them shoot at you. It’s just, well, it’s beyond my experience, beyond imagining.”

  “That’s what war is, Elizabeth, beyond most of us.”

  Then she cheered up. “Well, that’s all over. No one’s ever going to have to go to war again, are they?”

  “Of course not,” he said.

  “Now, Verity,” General Smith said, when they were alone, beckoning Tom to a camp stool closer to the stove, “tell me about this fellow Lin Po and whether you think he could be commanding over there.”

  It wasn’t that simple, Verity thought before speaking, not as if Lee called Longstreet in the night before Gettysburg to brief him about Meade.

  “It’s Lin Piao, sir. And there’s another name, Peng Teh-huai. Not quite clear as yet which man is senior.” He’d scoured memory for Peng’s full name.

  Smith asked Verity to spell both names, and the general wrote them down as if wanting to get his adversaries down on paper.

  “Go on, Captain. You knew them both?”

  “I knew Peng. Or a gent by that name. I’ve heard of Lin but never met him.”

  “But you met Peng.”

  “Yessir, in North China, the winter of ’45-’46. I was responsible for railroad security between Tientsin and Tsingtao. It was much too long a stretch for one company to patrol, so I concentrated my people at a town halfway along the right-of-way, sent reinforced squads to accompany trains, and tried to maintain contact with local Chinese forces—”

  “These Nationalists or Communists?”

  “Some of each. Plus a few local warlords with freelance armies of their own. Early in ’46 the United States proposed a cease-fire between Chiang and Mao and General Marshall was actually flown out to Nanking to chair armistice talks. The talks didn’t get anywhere, but the Reds agreed to the cease-fire anyway because they knew they were outgunned and would be until they could collect and service weapons the Japanese army left behind when it surrendered in September.”

  “And Lin and Peng, were they involved in the peace process?”

  “They might have been, at times. The talks dragged on for a year. I got to know Peng meanwhile up north. He was one of the local people in authority I went t
o, trying to keep it cool along the railroad and keep Marines from being killed. Despite the cease-fire there were occasional brushes between the Reds and Chiang’s regular army; there were the warlords raising odd hell; there were even reports up in the hills of rogue bands of Japanese infantry refusing to come in and lay down weapons. So it was a busy time. You tried to figure out who gave the orders to each of these distinct groups. Peng seemed to be the leading Red in our congressional district.”

  Smith gave a thin smile. “Tell me about him,” he said. “What sort of fellow he was and what you remember.”

  Verity was twenty-five years old again and back home in China and he and Peng Teh-huai were drinking coffee in a depot café along the Tientsin-Tsingtao main line on a February morning with snow. There was steam on the windows, and neither was anxious to leave the cozy table and hot coffee. Verity was in uniform and Peng in a sort of overall with a shapeless quilted parka and furred hood hung on a wall peg behind him. Verity rubbed reddened hands together.

  “Hate to be a Marine out there today on a flatcar behind a machine gun.”

  “Hate to be out there in the snow waiting for a Marine flatcar to come along,” Peng said.

  “Wouldn’t it be nice if they’d leave it to you and me to settle things,” Verity said, “both being reasonable men.”

  “Far too sensible a solution, Tom,” the Communist officer said. “How would the old men justify their souls?”

  Verity found nothing strange about Communists discussing the soul. The Chinese were Chinese first and everything else second, even believers in dialectical atheism and the Communist Manifesto. Besides, theoretical debate was harmless, since both men understood nothing was to be settled, not at conference tables.

  “I just hope we’re the hell out of here before you and Chiang get started again,” Verity said. He meant it. Caught between two armies of a million men each was no place for a single Marine division.

  “I also,” said Peng. “I’d hate to fight the United States Marine Corps in any serious way.” He meant it as well; he knew what they’d done against the Japanese. His men had been fighting in unserious ways much of the fall and winter. No one took it amiss. It was expected that trains would be derailed and locomotives occasionally shot up and that Marines on flatcars behind sandbags would fire back.

  “Cost of doing business,” was how the Marines put it. Men who’d fought their way across the Pacific and defeated Japan were not likely to go all sweaty over a few bandits or irregular troops raising hell. It cut the boredom, enabled them to forget the lousy weather and not yet having been rotated home.

  That didn’t mean men didn’t die. Nor did Verity and Peng travel alone.

  Verity’s jeep, parked outside, carried a mounted, .50-caliber machine gun, while his driver and company runner now sat smoking and talking and drinking coffee at a table near the door from which they could watch the station platform and beyond up the road that paralleled the narrow-gauge track. Peng had four men. They waited for him outside.

  Gamesmanship, Verity thought. His men stay out in the snow. Ergo, they’ve gained a little face over us.

  Peng would have agreed to this. There was another reason. He was more at risk from Chiang’s Nationalists than was the American. Verity might be killed by accident during a railroad ambush; Peng would be a target of immense opportunity. Still only thirty, he ran this province for Mao Tse-tung.

  Verity told General Smith all this and more, whatever he recalled of Peng, plus an assessment of his leadership philosophy, just how aggressive or cautious he might be in a fight.

  “He’d go out and get you, General. That’s how he was five years ago. He went after a guy.”

  Smith smiled. “Good,” he said. Oliver Smith liked a soldier who fought, who came out at you instead of just skulking about, nibbling at the edges. And in a set-piece battle Smith knew a Marine division could outgun the Chinese. If only, he thought, they’ll give us a set-piece battle.

  As General Smith told Verity, “I hate those cagey fellas tap-dancing and shadow-boxing that frustrate you into doing something silly and then they turn right around and bite off your head. I like a gent who slugs it out in the center of the ring.”

  “Yessir,” said Verity, a bit out of his depth with all this divisional big-picture stuff.

  Dear Kate,

  I met the general. His name is Oliver Smith and he is very tall and smokes a pipe. So there is always a cloud of smoke around his head.

  He asked me a lot of questions about China, where I grew up, and about some Chinese gentlemen I used to know who might be coming to visit us one day soon.

  I told him everything I knew and he just puffed and more smoke came out.

  Isn’t that a funny way for a general to behave?

  All love,

  Poppy

  xxx ooo

  The real hills would begin at Sudong.

  “The radio pick up better on high ground, Gunny?”

  “Yessir, certainly should. Radio waves being directional, you get a tall building or a hill in between and it cuts the signal.”

  Verity studied the map. Sudong, situated in a high valley, was the next serious town beyond Hamhung, about thirty-seven miles away. The South Koreans were said to be in control at Sudong. And a lot farther north than that. Trouble was, no one with sense trusted the South Koreans. Not that they lied, men said, just exaggerated. Or were mistaken. All in the constructive spirit of encouraging their gallant allies, the Americans, of course. A ROK told you what he thought you wanted to hear, whatever the reality.

  The drive to Sudong took four hours. That was the quality of the road rather than weather or the enemy. They saw no enemy, only plenty of ROK troops lazing about and civilians, alternately sullen and wide-eyed with wonder, and the weather was splendid, maybe sixty degrees and sunny. Izzo drove in a T-shirt and Verity hatless to get some sun. Only Tate, the professional, remained tightly buttoned up. Alongside, paralleling the road, ran the narrow-gauge railroad. Verity knew narrow-gauge from China, two feet, six inches between the rails. Along here the rails were already rusting and weeds grew between the wooden ties, the railroad’s normal schedules being somewhat and understandably disrupted.

  They were getting very little on the radio that was intelligible, so it got Tate talking. Which was rare, Izzo being the talker among them.

  “I’m from the part of Kansas where Quantrill’s Raiders rode in the Civil War, Frank and Jesse James and them. They still got plaques up in town squares and county seats, memorializing ‘Bloody Kansas.’ ”

  Verity, from Yale, was a bit vague as to just which side Quantrill had been on.

  “No confusion about that in Kansas, Captain. ‘William Clarke Quantrill, Confederate raider.’ That’s how the Yankees put it. The South, well, they felt different, thought of him and remember him as a great man.” Tate paused. “Burned a lot of towns, Quantrill did, hanged a lot of men. He probably would have done well in the Marine Corps. If we still rode horseback.”

  “Horses? We had horses? Like John Wayne?”

  “Just watch the road, Izzo,” Tate said mildly.

  He’d been reading up on the Civil War, Tate said, until Korea interrupted.

  “I got through tenth grade and then joined the Marine Corps,” he said. “Family was short of money; the Depression was on. I joined up at seventeen in 1937. Been in thirteen years, going on thirty. Shanghai with the old Fourth Marines was where I picked up a little Chinese.”

  “No shit, Gunny, so that’s how you could parlez Chink.”

  “Shut up, Izzo. Just watch—”

  “I know, ‘watch the road.’ ”

  Tate had spent nearly four years in a succession of Japanese prison camps.

  “Curious to think of now, considering where we are and what we’re doing, but the Korean guards were the worst. The Japs didn’t treat them very well, and so the Koreans treated us worse. We were even lower than the Chinese who worked around the camps. It was barnyard pecking order all
the way, and we were the lowest, the Marines and later on whatever fliers they caught, some sailors off torpedoed ships, a few soldiers from God knows where, some Brits, and even a couple of French and Aussies and one South African with a blond beard. He died early of something. I forget what.”

  The Chinese, Tate said, while ill-handled, were still civilians and went home at night to wives and children, hearth and hut.

  “We stayed behind the wire.”

  Some of the Fourth Marines and other Americans were shipped to prison camps in Japan itself. There was a crude system to it. The Japanese needed certain categories of laborer, coal miners for one, steel puddlers for another, and such men were sent to Japan, usually to be worked to death.

  “But you see, Captain, we didn’t know that at the time. There were these big arguments, debates really, about whether to tell them you were a coal miner or something else they seemed to want or to hide the fact. One school said you’d be better fed, better treated, because they needed you. The other said, ‘Stay here; it’s bad, but we’re alive. Who knows what it’s like back there?’ ” He screwed up his face in a half-smile. “Didn’t really matter all that much; most of us died one place or t’other.”

  He sounded sufficiently thoughtful that Verity didn’t say anything and even Mouse Izzo was quiet. Then Tate continued:

  “It did matter once, whether you stayed or went. They pulled out fifteen hundred or two thousand Yanks at one time late in ’44 when the War was going bad for the Japs and good for us and crammed them into an old tramp, the Maru something, to take them back to Japan, to repair bomb damage, that’s what was said, and the Maru something was halfway up the Formosa Strait when it was torpedoed by a U. S. sub. The sub didn’t know it was carrying prisoners, of course. A dozen or so Americans were on deck when it hit, hauling water and chow back down to the hold to the others. They got off. A few of them survived the War, and I met one of them a few years ago at Camp Lejeune. He said none of the two thousand below got out. They were chained and the Japanese didn’t have time, or didn’t care to bother, to unleash them. He said even in the water, swimming around and looking for something to hang on to, he could hear the men still on the Maru something and the sound they made chained below. He said it wasn’t like men at all, that sound. . . .”