by Alyson Hagy
No, he told Sutherland, he hadn’t seen Devlin. They were taking fire on the right and needed to get over the ridge before they were pinned down. Sutherland should consider himself in charge of the gunners because if the mortars could quiet the single Chinese gun on the heights, the rest would be up to him.
The Chinese machine gun fanned green tracers from left to right and back again. Adams could no longer separate the low pitch of the Chinese burp guns from other rifle fire. Men crawled past him. A concussion grenade from up top showered him with grit and a wetness he felt but couldn’t see. When more marines stood to rush over him, Sutherland lifted Adams by his webbed belt and moved the black cave of his mouth with urgency. It was time to go. He was deaf from the grenade, and he hadn’t even known it.
They took the heights and the tentlike ridge that stretched toward their camp. A B.A.R. man shut down the Chinese machine gun with flanking fire and grenades, and he got a chest wound for his trouble. They had a total of eight wounded, two of them bad enough to need carrying. They counted seven dead Chinese left on the field. And one of their own was missing. It was Devlin.
Sutherland demanded they stay and search. The corps did not leave men behind, ever. He screamed this aloud, the code everybody swore by, and two noncoms who’d known him and known Devlin for a long time held him back and kept him off the brand-new lieutenant. The lieutenant asked Spoonhauer when he’d last seen Devlin, and the gunner, whose jacket and pants had been shredded by shrapnel along one side of his body, couldn’t say. The lieutenant, who was a lawyer back in Virginia and a good one, sent volunteer scouts back along the saddle, but he told Sutherland a longer search was too dangerous. They had wounded to get home. The Chinese might regroup and come back in force. He ordered Sutherland to stay with his squad and prepare to move on. Sutherland complied with a rigidity of voice and bone that frightened Adams. It was the only time all night he felt that way: overwhelmed by the actions of another man.
Adams drew stretcher duty. He and a private named Dominick and two others tried to carry the wounded B.A.R. man. The B.A.R. man thrashed with pain and threw himself from the stretcher made of rifles and ponchos. They had to strap him down while he fought them, and a collapsed lung caused his breath come in long, sucking rattles that were terrible to hear. At one point, they dropped the B.A.R. man on a slippery decline, and he screamed through the blood in his mouth until Hebert gave him as much morphine as he could take. He died in agony and froth less than a mile from camp as he prayed into their bent, striving faces with verses they couldn’t understand. His desperate attempt to communicate left Adams’s own mouth shrunken and dry. Hebert closed the bulged eyes and tagged the body, and they shrouded him, the B.A.R. man, and the other stretcher-borne man who had died on the ridge soon after the fight, in their own ponchos, which were brittle with cold.
At the end of the final mile, Adams watched Sutherland make his way through the Dog Company lines with their machine gun across his back like a yoke. The dawn air was light enough to reveal the gun’s seared and smoky vents and Sutherland’s ferocious, bitten weariness. Adams could see also the blackish blood of the dead B.A.R. man on the gloves of his own hands. The blood had soaked him to the wrists. He worked in his seized, upended mind to halt the impending belief that the blood somehow belonged to Devlin.
Hobbs was waiting near the squad tent, but not in it. His eyes and hands leaped when he saw Adams, though he said nothing that might embarrass Adams or embarrass them both. Pilcher took a long, flat look at Hobbs, then told him about Devlin, who was Missing In Action, and about Rocque, and about the two men from Third Platoon who had been killed. Pilcher wanted to talk about all of it, he wanted to get it out, but he was too steamrollered to make much sense. Some of the other men lay down on their cots instead of walking across the camp to eat or get hot coffee. Adams, too, wanted to lie down and squeeze his eyes shut. He wanted to get off his aching feet. But the blind confinement of the tent made the skin of his face feel like melting wax, so he came back out into the morning where the camp was a bright game board of vehicles and stacked supplies and men who looked smaller than they should.
He asked Hobbs for a cigarette. Hobbs gave him one and pulled a lighter from his dungarees, and they both began to smoke with their eyes shelved against the morning glare. Adams’s hands continued to tremble. He didn’t care if Hobbs saw his hands. He asked Hobbs about his visit with the captain. Hobbs shied to one side as if he didn’t want to talk about that business, not first, but he went on with it when he sensed how Adams needed him to lay out a series of events that could be readily understood. The captain was fine, he said. He was just looking for some help.
Adams smoked his cigarette to the pinch of his fingernails before he stripped the damp butt and threw its pieces to the ground. His lips were so split and sore he could taste his own juices. “Captain could use you. He’d be lucky to have you running wire or being on the radios. You could go for Pfc over there.” He talked in a neutral tone, which took great effort. He could taste the tears that flowed behind his teeth.
Hobbs shook his head. “I told him I wouldn’t leave Weapons Platoon unless he ordered me to. Told him I appreciated the offer, that I was flat scared of his appreciation. He asked why I didn’t want to come over, and I told him I only knew how to do things with the gunners, and he asked me why I didn’t want to learn more, and I said I wanted to be a better marine at my assigned job first. He liked that.”
“You could have asked him to put you on motor transport.” Adams looked at his fat, aching fingers. They had almost stopped shaking. He had thrown his gloves away to be burned. “You could be king mechanic of the motor pool.”
“So could you, and you’re here,” Hobbs said. His upper body went rigid with an emotion Adams didn’t recognize. He sipped at the cold morning air with gray lips. “I just said I’d stay with weapons if Sergeant Devlin and the lieutenant would have me. It’s the place I was put.”
“We don’t have Devlin now. We lost him.” Adams tried to smooth the screech out of his voice.
Hobbs removed his helmet. He held it in front of him like a dark, empty basket. The damp pupils of his eyes were strangely blank and still. “I’m not clear on that yet, why it had to happen,” he said. “But I knew you’d be all right, Fremont. I knew it all along. I did. Just like I know I wouldn’t have been.”
Devlin was found the next night by a team at a listening post. He had crawled within range of the post, then rolled himself onto an open stretch of road until the men assigned to the post got permission to investigate. He had taken one bullet in the calf, which left his leg swollen and oozing, and one through the jaw, which caped his field jacket with blood. He had come for miles somehow, bleeding and emptied by shock. He didn’t last another night.
Sutherland found a Chinese canteen on Devlin’s belt and Chinese uniform insignia, which had been cut free with a knife, in his pockets. Sutherland stayed as close to Devlin as the surgeons would allow, he even spoke a few words with the sergeant, but he didn’t share the details with a single soul. He became like an aimed spear around the lieutenant and everybody else. The other noncoms gathered with mugs of weak coffee to talk about Devlin and what he’d done and how he deserved to survive this puny-ass war after what he’d been through with the Japanese in the last. They told themselves that he had burrowed like a wolf during the day to avoid capture. Somebody had seen the shell of mud on his uniform that proved it.
Devlin’s loss was a bad one, though nobody said it was unexpected. There was no use talking about it for long—Devlin wouldn’t have stood for the nattering, and it was the way of the veterans to bury a man when he was buried. But the gunners took the news hard. They tried all manner of things to barricade themselves with luck. Pilcher visited the chaplain. Spoonhauer shuffled and reshuffled his red-backed deck of cards. Adams replayed versions of the patrol in his head that ended with triumph and relief. Even Sutherland was seen worrying the black beads of a rosary. Rumor had it that the rosary ha
d belonged to Devlin.
Hobbs tried to relax the men in the gunner’s platoon by telling a few choice stories, but all his efforts seemed to go wrong. Because Sergeant Devlin had so obviously tried to have Hobbs transferred to another unit, most of the men thought it was out of line for Hobbs to participate in their grief. When Hobbs talked about the Green River mountain man who had once shot a bear for breakfast, Pilcher stopped him. Pilcher thought the story was disrespectful. When Hobbs worked up a good head of steam with a set of adventures that featured the cattle detective Nate Champion, he had to ease off as it became clear his restless audience would not tolerate the final episode that described Nate’s death during a fiery ambush. Nobody except Rocque wanted to hear Hobbs’s anxious, distracting rambles, and Rocque was soon shipped back to Hungnam because of his shoulder wound. Only the navy corpsmen, who labored in the now crowded aid tents, could stand to be around C.D. Hobbs. They didn’t care if he was an outcast or a nutcase or a shirker. They didn’t care what he said, or how he said it, as long as he was willing to handle bedpans and dirty bandages.
Hobbs still managed to ruin himself with Sutherland. The way Adams put it together later, Hobbs found a black-beaded rosary on the ground between the supply dump and the latrines. The rosary was caked with mud, and its beads were tied in an ungainly series of knots, but Hobbs was sure it was the one that had belonged to Sergeant Devlin. So he rushed to find Sutherland who was collecting on a wager with one of the mess-hall sergeants. Sutherland’s arms were full of cigarette cartons. And he was not happy to see C.D. Hobbs. When Hobbs offered him the rosary, he wouldn’t take it.
“Not mine,” he said. “Get the hell out of here.”
But Hobbs insisted. He tried to wipe mud off a saint’s medal because he thought the shined medal would prove to Sutherland that the rosary was his.
“Please, sir. You want this,” he said. “I know you do.” When Hobbs tried to lay the rosary across the lid of a cigarette carton, Sutherland detonated.
“That was in my pack, you little thief,” he shouted, dropping his cigarettes so he could ready his fists. “You lifted it from my pack. I never took it out of there. I never lost it. You stole it, you fucking coward thief.” It took Greenbaugh and two others to pull the former sergeant off Hobbs, who weathered one hard punch to the face before he flattened himself on the ground like a rug.
The rosary was Devlin’s. There was no doubt about that. Everybody agreed. Yet nobody was able to get Sutherland to admit he’d seen or touched the thing since the day Devlin died. He refused to accept Devlin’s absence. The old salts in the company knew what that meant. It meant Sutherland perceived the sergeant’s death the only way he was capable of perceiving it—as a bad omen. And Sutherland made it his business to burn Hobbs to the ground from that moment on. The only enemy who deserved worse was the Chinese. “You listen to me,” he told Adams, his face in a merciless twist. “MacArthur’s put us in a noose made of Chinks, thousands of the godless bastards. Thousands. They’ll take their toll before we get out of here. The way I see it, your buddy is part of the toll. He’s weak, he’ll pay, that’s the way it’s got to be with us and the Chinks. You better get used to the idea that your friend is the kind who slows you down and gets you captured. I saw it happen in Nanking. I had friends who were tortured into pieces, who were treated worse than hung meat, and I won’t let it happen again. If that scum gets close to a front line while I’m a marine, I’ll finish him myself.”
Over the next three weeks, winter set in. The marines continued to move toward the Yalu River, crawling along the hip of the reservoir that lay like an unmarked scroll of light to the east. There was sporadic fighting, but the Chinese tended to melt off the hills in front of them. Adams did not believe the Chinese were retreating because they were whipped or scared. Sutherland wouldn’t let him, or any of them, believe the Chinese were scared, although that was what the pogues who talked to the newspaper reporters liked to say.
Hill 1281 was just another anvil of Korean rock. Its crest was all ice and wind-shorn granite, but the men of Easy Company tried to dig in because they had been ordered to do so. Every jolt of the pick jarred Adams’s arm bones deep into his abused shoulder sockets. He was hungry but barely able to eat. And the Manchurian cold gnawed at his muscles until it took him twice as long as it should to accomplish the most meager tasks. Like digging a hole. Or taking a piss. He had to get his dick past more than four inches of layered clothing to take a piss, and it wasn’t easy when his dick shrank up to a nub in the frigid clutch of the air. Then he didn’t want to think about what was dripping out of him or look at it making a spoiled mark in the snow.
He tried to dig to the rhythm of sentences he’d read and reread in the latest letter he’d received from his family. We are praying for a wet winter, his mother wrote, though nothing too harsh for the yearlings. Charlotte does well at school, and with her music. She rides Jackson just as you asked. Gene is making plans to travel to the stock show in Denver after Christmas. He hopes to purchase a few Herefords for the meat. He tried to dig his hole and listen to the sentences from home in a way that made him strong, not weak. Please tell C.D. I saw his mother in Dixon when I visited with the Ladies’ Aid Society. She mentions she will be moving to Encampment come spring. I have asked her to join us for a holiday celebration, but she does not yet know her plans. She sends her proud love to her son, as do I.
Her son. Adams reckoned Posie Hobbs wouldn’t be so proud of her son now, if she ever had been, which he doubted. Hobbs was no longer welcome among the gunners. Sutherland wouldn’t have him in the unit. Only the cooks and the corpsmen would have him, which was maybe all right because, ever since Sergeant Devlin’s death, C.D. had remained a pariah, the kind of hexed, bad-luck soldier nobody wanted to admit he knew.
Adams fumbled the clods of dirt he’d hacked free into a burlap bag. He could see Greenbaugh trying to do the same fifteen yards away, but even the sight of Greenbaugh didn’t reduce his sense of solitude. Easy Company didn’t have enough men to lug supplies up Hill 1281. They didn’t have enough men to fill the holes and gun pits they were trying to dig. Illness and frostbite had shredded their ranks. When he stood to tighten the parka hood that failed to protect his numb chin, he thought of the legendary Scottish clansman that Blue Pete Tosh used to tell stories about, the mad, loyal McKinney who froze to death on a highlands hilltop overlooking the storm-killed bodies of his sheep. McKinney wouldnae leave his herd, Blue Pete said, not even when all were lost or dead.
A hill like 1281 would suit Mad McKinney, Adams thought. Empty. Weather-bled. It was the kind of place a man could lose everything he cared about.
Then he saw Pilcher—skinny, unsteady Ry Pilcher. Pilcher was carrying the gun. Since Sudong, nobody but Sutherland was allowed to carry the gun.
Adams dropped his pick and went to meet Pilcher near the jury-rigged command post where the captain’s men were splicing communications wire with their bare hands. They looked like children trying to tie shoelaces, the captain’s men did, their fingers were so awkward and stiff. Hobbs should have had that job, Adams told himself. Hobbs should have done what Devlin asked him to do. He’d have a place—and some dignity—if he’d listened to Devlin. Instead, Hobbs had fallen into a bad crack of his own creation. Shaking his head, Adams started to offer Pilcher a cigarette, but the continuous cold ruined cigarettes now; it fractured the paper and tobacco into fragments that had no taste. So he offered nothing.
Pilcher’s once-pink face was gray with malnutrition beneath the rind of his hood. But he still had a reckless, knowing smile framed by a pair of sharp canine teeth, and he was still able to laugh about the breaks that did or didn’t come his way. The machine gun was on his back, wrapped in its tarpaulin and cloths.
“God damn Hill number 1-2-kiss-my-ass. They get steeper every day.” Pilcher wheezed as he spoke, his words cornered and tight. Adams felt the whistle in his own lungs as he listened to what he knew would be bad news. “You ain’t gonna believe this.
I wouldn’t if I hadn’t seen it myself. Suds is sent back. Lieutenant’s orders.” Pilcher loosened the muffler he wore over his mouth as he spoke. The muffler was bright gold and blue, the colors of his football team back home. It was so visible in the gray and green world in which they lived that Sutherland made him take it off whenever they were on the line.
“He give you the gun?” Adams couldn’t believe Sutherland hadn’t carried the gun uphill, lieutenant or no lieutenant. The gun was like a flag to Sutherland, a warning to the Chinese he hated, a sign that the struggling marines were nowhere near the end of their rope.
Pilcher’s body wavered into what looked like a shrug. “Lieutenant told me to haul it up here after they arm-wrestled if off Suds. His breathing’s real bad. He was going to his knees like a lung-shot hog.”
Sutherland had been sick for days, chilled, coughing, but he wouldn’t let the corpsmen touch him. Said he’d had the fucking malaria in the Philippines, the Japanese hadn’t stopped for that, and he wasn’t going to take some wounded son-of-a-bitching marine’s place on a cot.
“They done hung us on the buck pole this time,” Pilcher said, his smile in place but no feeling behind it. “Spoonhauer’s got the platoon, you got the squad. I got nary a problem with that, but this hill is too big for us. Battalion thinks the Chinks won’t do nothing, that we’re buffaloing them by squatting up here like we’re all high and mighty. Suds has got me thinking otherwise.”