The Marines of Autumn: A Novel of the Korean War

by James Brady

  His father had been more than a businessman and China more than a market, but Verity let it drop there. He was not accustomed to providing justifications. The thing spoke for itself, as lawyers say.

  “And you went back after the War.”

  “After the Japanese surrendered I went up to Tsingtao with the First Marine Division as a rifle company commander. After about six months I came back to the States and got out.”

  “And in North China those six months . . . ?”

  “We accepted the surrender of local Japanese units, kept the rails open, fought bandits and occasionally dickered with local Communist Red Army units, and tried to keep from freezing.”

  Then the colonel stopped fencing and began to talk about why Verity was in the office.

  His old uniforms from five years ago, the forest green worsted wool of winter and the khaki gabardine of summer, lay creased and flat and smelling of mothballs and locker boxes.

  “We could have them cleaned and pressed, Tommie,” his wife had suggested, “put them in garment bags, as women do with furs. They’re beautiful uniforms. Keep them nice.”

  “No need, Elizabeth. They’re only relics never to be worn again.”

  Now he pulled them out. Early autumn. Well, they’d be out of khaki any day now and into the forest green, and he was damned if he was going to carry two sets of uniforms. So he chose the forest green bought almost seven years ago from that tailor in the town of Quantico, down the street that ended at the river. Italian fellow. Good tailor.

  “Nell?”

  Nell was the maid. “Take this to the dry cleaner on Wisconsin, please, and tell him I need it back tomorrow.”

  “Yes, Mr. Verity.”

  As he handed it over he stopped. Wait a moment. He’d better try on the jacket. Elizabeth kept after him about that, about putting on weight. It was fine. He looked at himself in the mirror. “OK, Nell, you can take it. Not the ribbons.” You didn’t send them to the cleaner.

  There were ribbons in the locker box as well, and the rule was that you wore your ribbons. But no captain’s bars, no silver railroad tracks, only the old single silver bars of first lieutenant. The captaincy had come by mail. And without bars. Well, he supposed there were still PXs that sold such things.

  He’d not looked into mirrors while trying on the uniform jacket, and he wondered if he’d looked as strange as he felt.

  Like Henry Luce, another old China hand, when he got back to the States Tom Verity was enrolled first in Hotchkiss, then at Yale. At Hotchkiss, like Luce, he’d immediately been nicknamed Chink, in consequence of which he never used the word as slang, even later and among Marines. He was a senior at New Haven, majoring in Chinese history, when Pearl Harbor was attacked, and with several classmates he went downtown and enlisted in the Marine Corps.

  His father, and other prudent people, said they should have waited, that as Yale graduates the following spring they’d be assured of commissions. Instead, Verity was run through boot camp at Parris Island and in August, as a Marine private, found himself fighting the Japanese on Guadalcanal.

  Guadalcanal was the worst, Marines said then and some still say. Steamy tropical swamp and jungle surrounded rugged, chill mountains. Some of the natives were cannibals. The Japanese fought with a medieval savagery. One night five Allied cruisers, American and Australian, were sunk by the Japanese in a single disastrous battle.

  “There weren’t many sailors that got to the beaches,” the Marines reported. “The sharks ate them.”

  When the ’Canal fell Verity was a private first class and ticketed for an officer candidate program back in the States. He wrote his father in some glee: “So, you see, a Yale education, even short of a degree, has worth after all.”

  He came out of Guadalcanal with malaria and the usual skin infections from the heat and the swamp and sailed through OCS. In 1944 he was in Australia, and the following year, as a second lieutenant, he commanded a rifle platoon on Okinawa, winning a Silver Star and promotion to first lieutenant. When the war ended they shipped the First Division to North China, to Tientsin. Verity now had a company and with his fluency in the language was pressed into service negotiating with the local warlords and the Eighth Chinese Route Army, Mao Tse-tung’s people. He was twenty-five years old and for the first time back home.

  “You know, it even smells the same,” he told fellow officers.

  “Yeah, Tom, it stinks.”

  “No,” he said happily, “no, it doesn’t.”

  They didn’t understand this was really home; this was what he knew. And loved. Even the familiar, sweetly reeking smell of it.

  After you have been in hard fighting, garrison duty is both welcome and boring, and Tom was glad to be seconded into liaison work. The warlords were easy to handle: A combination bribe and threat was usually sufficient. The Communists, like religious zealots, were tougher. Stubborn, repetitive, endlessly patient, anything to win an argument, achieve an end. Other American officers, who didn’t know the Orient, lost their temper and pounded tables and cursed. Verity sipped tea and called everyone Comrade and was deferential to the older Chinese officers. He was relatively successful in getting what the Marines wanted, whether it was a rail line opened or a straggler returned or swapping canned goods for fresh turnips.

  “Tom, you understand these people and I don’t,” a fellow officer might say. “You like this country and I hate it. You don’t even seem anxious to get home, and I sure as hell am.”

  Verity just grinned. He’d had some close calls on Guadalcanal and more on Okinawa and understood how fortunate he was to be alive and unhurt, and it would take more than China to depress him. And, as he sometimes said, “Guys, I grew up here. I am home.”

  In the spring of ’46 he was released and returned to the States the other way round, through southern Asia (carefully skirting a suddenly surly Soviet Union) and Europe, sailing to New York on the recently refurbished Queen Mary, in a first-class stateroom, which was not how most GIs came back. He’d already been accepted in the graduate program at Harvard, and a day trip to New Haven assured him his work in North China qualified for something or other and they would send his bachelor’s degree along in due course.

  The Marine Corps promoted him to captain by mail, the passage of time in grade being what it was, and then, on a football weekend in November of ’46, he met Elizabeth Jeffs.

  “. . .Now that we’ve taken Seoul,” the headquarters colonel at Arlington was saying, “UN forces, specifically the ROKs [Republic of Korea units], will be crossing the Thirty-eighth Parallel into North Korea.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Verity said.

  “Not in the papers yet, Captain, a political decision, not a military one. Crossing an invisible line doesn’t mean a damned thing to most of the soldiers on either side. The North Koreans seem to be beaten. In any event, they’re running. The UN troops report very little organized resistance. So crossing the Thirty-eighth Parallel is militarily insignificant. But it could be very important to the Chinese.”

  Verity exhaled. He suspected where all this was leading.

  “To the Chinese,” he said numbly, aware of the repetition.

  “They’ve been sending strong messages, both directly and through their Indian mouthpiece at the UN, Krishna Menon, that for us to cross the Parallel would be considered a hostile act toward China. Washington isn’t sure. MacArthur assures everyone there’s nothing scary going on north of the Yalu—”

  “The Yalu?”

  “Border river, divides North Korea and China.”

  “So nothing’s going on.”

  “So MacArthur says. Here at HQ Marine Corps, we’re not all that sure.”

  Verity sat there hoping he wasn’t going to hear what he was going to hear.

  “Captain,” the colonel said, leaning forward on both elbows, “we’d like you to go over there and do some listening. Just listen.”

  “In Korea.” Verity wanted to be sure. Maybe they wanted him in New York, at th
e UN. Small chance.

  “In Korea,” the colonel said. He was very reasonable. Amused, even. Easygoing.

  But he could see the alarm in Verity’s face and tried to reassure him.

  “Look, we’ve got enough company commanders in the pipeline. No one’s sending you over there to command troops. We need an intelligent man who’s seen combat and who knows Chinese.”

  “Colonel, the Marine Corps gave me a compassionate pass on Korea. I asked for one; they gave it. I’m trying to raise a kid without a mother.”

  “It might come to nothing. This could all be political posturing by the Chinks. Who the hell knows?”

  “You said MacArthur does.”

  The colonel was less amused. Losing patience, perhaps.

  “Headquarters Marine Corps wants its own assessment. A second opinion, so to speak. You know, is this appendectomy really necessary?”

  This was pointless. Why should Verity be arguing the merits of the case? He was a civilian. Well, not quite. He was still a captain in the reserve. Truman had authorized calling up the reserves. He didn’t want to get into the subtleties of that argument.

  So instead he said, “Colonel, I’m not your man. Get someone else who speaks Chinese.” (He was going to say “Chink,” but the sarcasm might irritate the colonel. Captains don’t irritate colonels.)

  The colonel didn’t take offense, despite having been told no.

  “Verity, reserve officers activated so far are in for the duration. Six months or six years, however long it lasts. Could be over by Christmas, could still be going in 1955. Nobody really knows for sure, not even MacArthur. I’m authorized to offer you a deal:

  “Go over there, monitor this Chinese ‘intervention’, try to ascertain if it’s just sabre rattling or something substantive, make a report, and come home. We won’t keep you in. You’ll spend a month, maybe less, maybe a little more, depending.

  “We’re not satisfied, Verity, with the intelligence we’re getting from Eighth Army. MacArthur’s top intelligence guy is Willoughby. He hates Marines. Don’t know why, but he does. Some sour experience from the War probably. So we’re not confident the First Marine Division is getting the dope it needs. We want our own man.”

  “I’m not intelligence, Colonel. I’ve had a rifle platoon, a rifle company. Never even worked as a battalion-2.” A battalion-2 was a low-level intelligence officer.

  “Verity, you speak Chinese.” Jesus, the colonel thought, we’re beginning to go round in circles.

  “There are others who do. I could supply you a few. . . .”

  The colonel tried one more approach.

  “Captain, now that we’ve crossed the Thirty-eighth Parallel there’s nothing between us and China but a dozen or so badly hurt North Korean divisions. If the politicians don’t put a hold order on him, MacArthur will be sprinting north. You know how he is; you know about the ego. And he’ll be doing what he did at Inchon. He’ll have the Marines going for China. Around here we’re edgy. We don’t want fifteen thousand Marines out there like raw meat on the end of a stick with a million Chinamen waiting around just north of the Yalu.”

  Verity said nothing but must have looked gloomy.

  “That’s the job, Verity. Find out if the Chinese are coming in, find out if the Chinese are going to fight, and then come home and tell us.”

  “Hello,” she had said, “I’m Elizabeth Jeffs. You’re not a professor or anything important, are you?”

  This was November of Verity’s year in the master’s program at Harvard, a football Saturday, with all variety of cocktail parties and mixers and dinners in and about Cambridge, and here comes this tall girl on someone else’s arm to an apartment Verity shared with three other graduate students in one of the narrow streets between Harvard Square and the river.

  “No, nothing as grand as that. A graduate student. And you?”

  “Oh, I’m a child. A freshman at Wellesley up quite past my bedtime.”

  “It’s only six.”

  “Is it?” she said. “Then I can stay awhile.”

  Harvard lost that afternoon, but gallantly, as Harvard customarily did, and people had wandered back across the river from Soldier Field to console themselves or celebrate. (There were, after all, men who’d done their undergraduate work at Yale and elsewhere and had other loyalties.) Verity was drinking a beer, and when he asked this girl what she wanted she said, “A martini, please, straight up with an olive.”

  She had long straight brown hair and a broad, placid, very beautiful face, and she certainly was tall, maybe five-nine or -ten, and with swimmer’s shoulders. When people told her she was beautiful she tossed her hair as if to say, “Yes, I know, but can’t you say anything clever?” and went on to dismiss beauty: “It’s the accident of birth. Mixed blood. My mother was a Dutch Presbyterian and a nurse, and my father’s a Jew who muscles people in Wall Street. The genes work out perfectly.”

  Verity asked her out for dinner, but she wouldn’t go. “Not fair to the man who brought me,” she said. “He’s besotted with passion, as any fool can plainly see.” (The man in question was across the room vigorously debating Harvard’s offensive strategies with two other men.)

  “Then tomorrow. Lunch.”

  “Yes,” she said, “I’d like that.”

  The brattiness was a pose, a defense mechanism. At that age it usually is. She was seventeen and Verity twenty-six. He was going on to become a teacher; she was bored with college already. His family had money; hers had a lot. Jailbait was his nickname for her; she liked it. They saw each other almost every weekend through that winter and into the spring. This was 1947 and it took that long for them to sleep together.

  “My gosh!” Elizabeth said. “That was terrific. Let’s do that again.”

  They married in May, spent three days in New York at the Plaza listening to Peggy Lee sing “Bye-bye, Blackbird,” and then took the Queen Mary to Southhampton. In London it was the Con-naught and the car dealer’s where they bought an MG roadster in British racing green, spent a couple of weeks speeding about England and then France, and sailed back home again on the Mary. In September he began teaching at Georgetown, and Elizabeth had baby Kate in November.

  “Premature,” they explained, if anyone asked.

  By spring Elizabeth had her figure back and was the bane of faculty wives.

  “She plays tennis without a bra.”

  It was true.

  “I am bouncy,” she admitted, “but Tommie likes me that way, don’t you, darling?”

  That was true, too.

  A fundamentally serious man who could have become ponderous found himself dizzyingly in love.

  “You’ll keep me young.”

  “Of course I will,” she said, “and must. You know, Tommie, you have a frightening potential for ‘stuffy.’ And I absolutely refuse to let you lapse into it.”

  That was also true. And he knew it.

  She drove the little MG with its steering wheel on the wrong side onto the campus to pick him up after class, hitting the brakes hard and skidding to stops, alarming Jesuits and delighting undergraduates. She was not yet twenty and married to a “prof,” and Verity’s reputation among the students soared. Some knew he had been a Marine officer; now here was this sex-bomb wife zooming around in her sports car.

  “Wow!” teenage boys marveled. “I want to grow up to be Thomas Verity.” Just imagine, a “nice” girl, already a mother, who looked and acted like this. There was fevered speculation about just how Verity, at his age, could satisfy such an obviously randy younger woman.

  He was not yet thirty.

  Elizabeth became pregnant again in the late summer of ’49. She died the following February, the child born dead.

  Verity, maddened, cried out, “But nobody dies in childbirth anymore! Nobody!”

  The Jesuits, who recognized a good man when they had one, gathered about supportively. They and his daughter, who didn’t entirely understand, pulled him through.

  “Poor little p
oppy,” Kate said when she caught him staring into nothing. She was not yet three.

  The Korean War began that June, and the Marine Corps called him back in late September.

  Verity phoned Elizabeth’s married sister in Philadelphia to tell her where he was going. She was a reliable, responsible woman, and she promised to keep in touch with Madame. When Verity thanked her, he wondered how he was going to tell Kate.

  Putting it off, he packed a few things. They’d issue him fresh fatigues in Korea, he supposed. And web gear. And a tin hat. There was an old down jacket he’d worn that winter in North China, bulky but light, and feeling foolish in the heat of Georgetown, he decided to take it along. Plus a couple of good wool sweaters and some long Johns. He put in his L. L. Bean hunting boots as well. Not that he ever hunted, but still . . .

  Last of all, self-conscious about it, he packed his .38, the Smith & Wesson Military and Police Special revolver with a four-inch barrel, the blue steel worn smooth, the old leather holster soft and easy as he slid the weapon in and out a few times.

  Verity packed that, too. In a war, you never know.

  CHAPTER TWO

  What was surprising, Captain Verity thought, was how pleasant the war had been so far. If it doesn’t get any worse than this, he told himself, it’s a stroll. And this was enemy country.

  It took three days to fly Verity from Washington to Tokyo, where he reported in at Far East Command to the ranking Marine on MacArthur’s staff, a full colonel, who endorsed his orders and sent him on.

  “The Mikado himself is in the building, so keep an eye out,” the colonel said. “If you witness officers prostrating themselves and elderly Japanese gentlemen practicing disembowelment, you’ll know you’ve seen General MacArthur pass.”

  No such wonders occurred and Verity got himself and his one piece of luggage, an antique valpack, into a Tokyo taxicab and sufficiently well understood to reach Haneda Airport. There was an army transport laid on, and he sat up front with the pilots. It took only an hour and a half and then they were over Kimpo, the big airfield nearest Seoul, some of the runways still cratered from shell fire, with burned-out planes, most of them North Korean, littering the margins of the tarmac, bodily shoved out of the way by bulldozers.