by Pat Frank
“Eight, sir. With napalm.”
The admiral had found it expedient to keep part of his ground support squadron always in the air, for just such emergencies. “Send ’em in,” the admiral ordered. “And launch your others. With napalm.” Worse than anything else, the Chinese feared napalm.
Presently the Leyte, steaming at flank speed out of sight of land, with four destroyers foaming alongside, turned into the wind to launch more planes. And unheard and unseen, ten thousand feet up and five miles to the south of Dog Company, eight Corsairs nosed over and plunged down through the overcast.
Dog Company slaughtered the first wave. Mackenzie tried to hold his fire until the Chinese were within a hundred yards, but before he was quite ready, a machine gun to the rear chattered nervously, and this set the whole company going, so that the effect he planned was not perfect. Still, it was terribly effective. There were no longer shrill cries, and whistles from the plain now. There were only moans.
Another wave came at them. Mackenzie could not tell from where they came. It was almost as if the dead rose to fight again. It was a fearful thing. When they came on, in waves like that, it was like trying to stop the sea, for they flowed and eddied around the mounds of their own fallen.
Mackenzie wanted to run, and because he was afraid he knew the others of Dog Company must be afraid too, he took time, from firing his carbine, to observe the behavior of his men. They were inching back, those who were firing. They were huddling together. “Spread out!” he screamed. “Spread out!”
And so that they could see him, he walked towards the head of the column, pretending indifference to the snap and crack of enemy fire, and the wail of the ricochets off the rocks. Then he heard the whine of a high velocity shell coming in, and he threw himself on his face. When he looked up, he no longer had the jeep mounting the seventy-five, or any of that gun’s crew. Dog Company received more shells, and from their timing and their crackling noise Mackenzie knew that they were from tanks, or SP guns, and that the Chinese somehow had brought up tanks or SP’s out of those hills across the plain, and when they came at him again they could certainly break into his position. They would certainly wipe him out. He wondered about casualties, but there was no time to look. He re-loaded his carbine and rested on one knee. He had no thoughts and no further plans, except that he would hold his fire until they were very close, until he could clearly see their faces. He was tired, and he believed he was beaten.
Mackenzie didn’t see the Corsairs diving in until they had reached their release point, and then suddenly, where there had been the third wave of men, there was a wall of fire. It was a wall of fire that did not subside, for napalm is tenacious. It sticks and clings to whatever it burns, until it has burned everything entirely. Out on the plain, a wave of men was burning. It was the most frightening spectacle of war that Mackenzie had ever seen. He became aware that the butt of his carbine rested on the ground, and that his men no longer were firing. Like their captain, they could only watch. They were awed, and paralyzed.
Another flight of Corsairs came down, and this time Mackenzie heard their air-scream, and they dumped on something out of his sight that sent up a pillar of black smoke along with the flames. Mackenzie spotted more Corsairs, flying in pairs so close it seemed their wingtips held hands, far overhead, and these held course in a great circle over the battle area. Mackenzie realized, at last, that Dog Company had held the flank, and that the Chinese had been thrown back, and the Chinese would be forced to stay back so long as those friendly Corsairs held the sky overhead. But he must act quickly, and Dog Company must move on while this protection existed, and it would not be there forever.
Mackenzie surveyed what was left. His first impression was that his company had been destroyed, and that perhaps only five or six of his men remained alive, and unwounded, but this was because he could not immediately see everything that was left on the road, and the smoking wreckage and human debris of the battle was what first caught his attention.
The radio jeep was a tangle of steel and twisted wiring and broken batteries. The weapons carriers were gone, and with them almost all of his mortar ammunition. He no longer possessed fifty-calibre machine guns, or the jeeps that had mounted them.
The pharmacist’s mate who was the chief of his corpsmen appeared, and said, “We’ve just got to do something about the wounded.”
“Do what you can, and do it in a hurry.”
“I don’t have any plasma, sir. It’s all frozen, except maybe some that may have thawed when those there weapons carriers burned.”
Mackenzie sensed that his pharmacist’s mate was close to collapse, although he could not clearly see his face, and it was necessary that this man keep his nerve, and so Mackenzie said, “We’ll get the wounded out in a hurry. Do what you can now. Where are the other corpsmen?”
“Wounded, sir. Both of them wounded.”
“Well, treat ’em. Do something for them.”
The face of the pharmacist’s mate went away and that of Raleigh Couzens appeared in its place and Couzens’ face was blackened with powder. “What’ve we got left?” Mackenzie asked.
“I can’t tell exactly, except we haven’t got Zimmerman or Sands.”
“Wounded?”
“Killed.”
Except for Couzens, Zimmerman and Sands were the last of Mackenzie’s officers. “How are we for sergeants?”
“We’ve still got Ekland. I saw him back a ways, helping with the wounded.”
“No others?”
“I don’t think so. Those tanks laid it into the mortar platoon.”
They walked together towards the tail of the column, continuing their evaluation. They counted, altogether, twenty-one dead, and forty-four wounded, and four men so dazed with battle shock they must be counted wounded, too. Mackenzie realized that he had come to the most important decision of his military career, and that whatever he decided would likely be considered wrong, if anyone ever bothered to examine his decisions and actions, later. Like any commander, whether of an army or a company, whose force has steadily been reduced by casualties, he had been deprived of alternatives of action. Eventually, such a force must have no alternatives at all, except death or capitulation.
“What in hell am I going to do?” Mackenzie said, his eyes taking in his wounded, holding in their pain, and his wrecked transport.
“Good God, Sam!” Couzens said, and Mackenzie realized that Couzens was shaken by his indecision, and that he must not display indecision again, or Couzens, and Dog Company, would shatter in panic. Well, there was one rule that he could go by, that superseded all others. He must not abandon his wounded. The six-by-sixes were still intact, and they would carry out the wounded, but even as Mackenzie thought of bringing the wounded along, on the six-by-sixes, he knew that they would never reach the sea alive, for at best it would be two more days before they found the sea. If the wounded were to be saved, they must reach an aid station this night. That meant returning to Koto-Ri, which he judged would be in American hands for another day or so. And it was impossible for Dog Company to return to Koto-Ri, for that meant deserting his regiment. It was improbable that Dog Company could be of much assistance in protecting Regiment’s flank, henceforth, but there was always the chance, and so long as that chance existed, then the company must hold to the road.
Mackenzie reached the only possible compromise. The wounded would return to Koto-Ri in the six-by-sixes. He would send along a few men to help the pharmacist’s mate. He would send with them four men in a jeep, to protect them from snipers. That was all he could do. The others, with all the ammunition and weapons and food that could be salvaged, would go on. Having reached his decision, Mackenzie began to shout his orders, and Dog Company took form again.
The Corsairs were still circling when it resumed its movement. It consisted of three jeeps heaped with supplies, and twenty-two men, all except the jeep drivers on foot. They had marched for only ten minutes when they reached the jeep that Mackenzie had
sent on reconnaissance. Mackenzie had forgotten all about these four men ahead of the column, and it was just as well. The jeep had run across a heavy bomb planted as a mine, and that was the explosion Mackenzie had heard as the battle began. The crater was so wide the jeeps had to leave the road to round it. At dark Dog Company reached the village of Sinsong-ni, and here Mackenzie called a halt for the night.
Chapter Ten
SINSONG-NI WAS NO larger than Ko-Bong, and more dismal, for few of its houses of mortar and clay, and huts of mud, remained intact. Some had been broken by bombs and rockets, and all had been holed by strafing planes. This seemed curious to Mackenzie, for he had heard of no ground fighting in this area. Sinsong-ni was merely an isolated village on an almost forgotten ribbon of road in a desolate section of an unimportant land. Then Mackenzie saw that the fronts of a number of the houses had been crushed in, as if by a great fist, although the roofs were undamaged, and he realized what must have happened here, some time in the past. Communist tanks, retreating from their defeats at Wonsan, must have chosen this village as a hideaway in the daylight hours, when American fighter-bombers, like swarms of hawks, sought them out. The Communists had discovered a quick and effective method for hiding a tank. You rammed it through a wall, and into a house. The tanks stayed in the houses until nightfall, like rabbits in thickets, but somehow they had been discovered, and the village had been shot up and rocketed and bombed.
Mackenzie saw smoke rising from only one chimney, and he chose this house as his CP, and sent in Kato and Vermillion to thaw out some rations, while he himself superintended the care of his vehicles. In the confusion after battle, the tarps for the hoods of the jeeps had been forgotten, or lost. But he found two sleeping bags, and protected the hoods of two of his jeeps with these, and the third jeep he drove into a house that had been bashed in by a tank. He assigned two men to each jeep, and ordered them to stand two-hour watches, and turn over the motors for five minutes in every hour. At this moment the jeeps were all-important. Without the jeeps Dog Company would lose its mobility in battle, its supply train, and whatever chance it had to push through to its objective.
Then Mackenzie went into the house with the fire. It was filled with his men. Like all Korean houses of its type, it was comfortably warm, for it had radiant heat, invented some four thousand years before the idea occurred to Americans. At the end of the larger room was the combination stove and fireplace, with its three holes to receive the great iron pots. At the far end of the house was the chimney, and the flue ran the whole length of the house, under the hard-packed clay floor, so that heat flowed everywhere evenly upward from the earth.
Some of his men already rested full length on the floor smoothed by the body oils and feet of generations. Others watched while cans of rations thawed and warmed in the pots. In the second room a lantern burned, and Mackenzie smelled the sour smoke of peanut oil.
In this second room was something he had not seen for so long a time that the sight of it startled him. It was a bed, a real bed with a mattress. It was true that it was a narrow, brass bed as hideous as if it had been imported from the back hallway of a four-dollar-a-week rooming house. But still it was a bed, and there was a spread on it, and it seemed as luxurious as a suite in the Waldorf. Raleigh Couzens was sitting on the edge of this bed, bouncing a bit, testing the springs and the mattress. “I saw it first,” Couzens said.
“I rank you,” said Mackenzie, shrugging his carbine and his musette bag from his shoulders.
“We can both use it,” suggested Couzens. “We’ll take turns.”
“Like hell,” said Mackenzie. “This one night, I’m going to sleep on a bed. If I get up to inspect the vehicles, and the guard, then you can use it while I’m gone.”
“Don’t you think it’s wide enough for both of us?” asked Couzens, plaintively.
“Nope,” said Mackenzie. “I don’t.” He noticed the old man sitting on the bench in the corner. The old man had been hidden by Kato’s back. He saw that Kato was speaking to the old man, in what sounded like Japanese, and Mackenzie walked over and put his hand on Kato’s shoulder, and took a better look.
He was a very old man, and the lines in his face were deep and dark, as if they had been burned in weathered wood, and he wore gold spectacles with square rims. He wore the cone-shaped hat, exactly like a Halloween witch’s, that marks the Korean patriarch. His ankles seemed no larger around than a small child’s, and his shoulders were bent and bony, and yet his shoulders carried his white robe with a certain grace, like a toga. “Who’s this?” Mackenzie asked Kato.
“This is the old man who lives here,” said Kato.
“Yes, but who is he?”
“Well, he teaches school here in this village. Or did.”
“Ask him whether there are any Chinese troops around. No, wait a minute. He wouldn’t know that. Ask him whether there are any North Korean guerrillas.”
“I did, sir. He doesn’t know. He says he never knows when soldiers are around until they come into his house. He doesn’t leave his house. He just stays here and reads.”
Mackenzie saw a wooden case in the corner. It was filled with paper-backed books. He picked up one of these books. It was in Japanese. Mackenzie noticed that the old man’s eyes followed his movements alertly, and the old man spoke to Kato. Kato replied, and the old man nodded.
“I told him you weren’t going to take his books,” said Kato.
“Tell him we won’t take anything that belongs to him,” said Mackenzie. “And ask him about the rest of the people in this place. What happened to them?”
Kato spoke to the old man, lengthily, and the old man replied, and in replying he became excited, and his bird-thin hands twisted and shook. When he finished speaking the old man nodded at Mackenzie, as if he knew that Mackenzie would understand.
“Do you mind if I sit down, captain?” Kato said. “I’m pooped.”
“No, of course not,” Mackenzie said. Kato sat down on the bench alongside the old man, and Mackenzie sat down on the other side.
Kato frowned, as if it required some thought to translate exactly. “Well, he says a short while ago the Communists came to the village with a great voice on a truck. I suppose he means the loudspeaker on a sound wagon. Everybody in the village had to come to listen. The Communists said that the Americans were invading the land, and would kill them all. So all the men between sixteen and forty had to enlist. Most of them did enlist, he said, but some didn’t believe this loudspeaker, and ran away. None of them came back, and so there was a very small crop.”
“A short while ago?” said Mackenzie. “How short?”
Kato asked a question and the old man replied. “Last summer,” said Kato.
“What happened to everybody else?” asked Mackenzie.
“Well, apparently North Korean units, and later Chinese units, came through the village, and most of the young women disappeared. Then there came what the old man called ‘the day of hell.’ Seems that the Chinese when they used this road would stop in the village during the daylight hours and hide their tanks, but one day a lot of planes came over and blew this place apart and killed a lot of people.”
“Not all of them?” Mackenzie said.
“Oh, no, sir. Not all of them. But those who were left alive were afraid to stay, for fear the planes would come back. So the older men had a meeting, and it was decided that the village should move. The older men, and the older women, and the children who were left, they moved to another place. The old man said he didn’t move because he could not take his books, and his books are all he has left. Besides, he is ready to die. He is old and tired and hungry and sick.”
“Where did they move to?” Mackenzie asked.
Kato asked the old man, and there were a good many Japanese monosyllables between them, and then Kato turned to the captain and said: “He won’t tell.”
“Why not?”
Kato hesitated, and then he said, “Captain, he’s afraid we might go out and find them an
d kill them.”
“You’re fooling!”
“No, sir, I’m not fooling. He thinks the Americans want to kill the Asiatics. He honestly does.”
It was warm in this house, and Mackenzie took off his gloves and rubbed his face with his fingers and discovered that he had grown a considerable beard. He put two cigarettes in his mouth, and lit them, and handed one to Kato. Then he thought of the old man, and offered him a cigarette, but the old man refused. “Where in hell did he get that idea?” Mackenzie said.
“It’s hard to put everything he said together,” said Kato. “But the way I figure it is like this. Most of his life, the Japanese have been in control here, and everybody read and spoke Japanese, and the Japanese put out a lot of anti-American propaganda, I guess. He spoke about the Oriental Exclusion Act, and the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. He doesn’t particularly like the Japanese. He said their administrators gouged everybody, and the country was run for the landlords. But he said at least the Japanese didn’t think the Koreans were an inferior race. They were the same color.”
Mackenzie realized that the color of which Kato spoke was also Kato’s color, and that Kato’s ancestors probably, for the most part, were Japanese, and Mackenzie for a moment felt embarrassed. He decided to ask a direct question. “What do you think about that, Kato?”
“He’s got something,” Kato replied directly. “He hasn’t got anything for me. I’m a Hawaiian, and a Hawaiian is probably better off than anybody else in the world. We don’t have those problems. We don’t have them at all. Except for one thing, sir. Hawaii is a part of the United States. Hawaii is a good sound part of it. But Hawaii isn’t a state. We deserve to be a state. We’re anyway as good as Mississippi, aren’t we?”