The Marines of Autumn: A Novel of the Korean War

by James Brady

  And not foul trousers smelling of piss and shit and wool undershirts damp with sweat, thawing now in the blessed lee of walls and roof, steam rising from their bodies, crawling into a sleeping bag stiff with filth and body fluids and, here and there, a little blood.

  When Verity pulled off his socks they, too, were bloody where the soles of his feet had frozen to the wool and the skin pulled away in tatters and patches. But you had to get wet socks off your feet and pull on dry ones. Otherwise it wasn’t a little skin you lost; it was your feet.

  Nor in Georgetown, he realized, were people lousy. Or frostbitten. Or likely to die that day.

  “We ought to write a letter to your papa, Kate.”

  “Yes, Madame, Poppy would like that. We must tell him that here at home it is sunny and warm. So nice.”

  Kate thought.

  “And are there French soldiers there, too, with Poppy?”

  Madame beamed.

  “But of course, and gallant.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The general was wearing both a shoulder holster and an automatic shoved into the waist of his trousers. . . . That wasn’t Georgie Patton bullshit with ivory-handled revolvers; this was because Oliver Smith knew Chinese soldiers might be coming through here later that night, that the general himself might be not only commanding a division of twenty thousand men but also fighting for his own life. It sobered you.

  Hagaru-ri itself had not been spared during the fighting at Yudam-ni and the first leg of the march south. Once the Chinese cut the MSR south of Hagaru, cutting it in a half-dozen different places, it was obvious to both contending generals, Smith and Peng, that only Hagaru’s airstrip could keep the Marines supplied and fighting until attacks were mounted to smash the Chinese roadblocks and reopen the mountain road. That was when Peng threw in his men against the perimeter hill defenses of the town and against the town itself and its airstrip.

  “You can’t frigging believe it!” a Marine marveled as scores of Chinese soldiers rolled dizzily downhill in the snow toward his machine gun, rolling over and over until they reached the Marine lines and instantly sprang up, firing their burp guns and hurling grenades. There was a moon and even this unorthodox tactic failed, as Chinese bodies piled up in the snow in front of the machine guns. Inside the town a large Chinese unit broke through, very close to divisional HQ, only to evaporate in an orgy of looting, ransacking warehouses in search of boots and blankets and warm clothing. Artillerymen and engineers and army troops back from the north were all thrown into the fight along with the single Marine rifle battalion holding the town. And by the time the Seventh Marines and elements of the Fifth marched in from the north, the Chinese had melted away, leaving only crimson trails in the snow and their dead.

  With the airstrip again secure, the big C-47 cargo planes resumed their flights, carrying out the wounded and sick, carrying in ammo and rations and even five hundred fresh Marine reinforcements, a short battalion, and welcome. And along with them came reporters, David Douglas Duncan of Life and Maggie Hig-gins among them. Duncan would stay with the Marines the rest of the way. Miss Higgins would not.

  Verity was at the airstrip, seizing the opportunity to send out letters to Kate and try to find out what was going on. Then he saw Maggie Higgins.

  “Everyone’s trying to get out and you fly in,” he told her.

  “Oh, it’s you.”

  They were in a big warming tent erected on the margin of the airstrip. The tent was warm enough but sagged, buffeted over and over by the prop wash of the transport planes, and was lighted by Coleman lamps.

  She liked his eyes and the intelligence. You encountered many things in a war but not always intelligence. She pulled out a cigarette and he patted his pockets for matches but had none, and she lit it herself, deftly, using a big, battered Zippo.

  “I was vague on purpose back there at Hungnam,” Verity said, not apologizing but explaining. “I’m supposed to be a Chinese language expert. It’s something I teach at college. And a good reporter might interpret that as somehow significant. Now, of course, it doesn’t matter. The Chinese seem to have made their intentions clear.”

  “A Chinese expert?” she said, sloughing off evasions. “How did that come about?”

  “Born there. Lived in China until I was fifteen. My father had a business.”

  He smiled at her and she smiled back, as if this were the start of something and not two strangers caught up in chaos.

  “And now you’re an officer.”

  “Only a captain. A civilian, really. Two months ago I was at Georgetown lecturing on the Ming dynasty. I’m not at all important, Miss Higgins.”

  “And I specialize in ‘important’ people?” She knew the gossip about herself.

  “You don’t have to be defensive, Miss Higgins,” Verity said mildly. “I meant nothing by it.”

  “OK then,” she forgave him.

  “How’d you get here? We’re supposed to be trapped.”

  “Hitched a ride. I knew a pilot.”

  I’ll bet you did, Verity thought, and disliked himself for it.

  She took a few notes and chatted with other men, officers and enlisted both, and then, warmed, she went out to see what else was happening, to count the planes or the stretchers or do whatever it was newspaper reporters were supposed to do in wars. Verity shook her hand and watched her go. Her scent, whatever it was, lingered in the big tent.

  Jesus, if I can smell her, Verity thought, she must have smelled me.

  Marguerite Higgins had been out on the tarmac less than an hour when Chesty Puller came along.

  “Is that a woman?” he demanded, knowing it was, and furious.

  Puller hadn’t been told of her arrival, and when he first caught sight of her she was doing interviews just off the airstrip, talking with wounded Marines on stretchers or laid out on the snow, waiting for the next plane.

  “There’s an active eight-holer over there!” Puller exploded.

  Old-school Virginian that he was, Chesty Puller could not accept a woman in close proximity to six or eight Marines sitting on old ammo crates, trousers down around their ankles, smoking and chatting and enjoying a good bowel movement.

  “I want her out of here!” General Puller ordered.

  Miss Higgins, objecting vigorously, would be aboard the next plane going out. The next day her airstrip interviews with the wounded and the dying ran on page one of the Herald Tribune. There was no mention of the eight-holer.

  Mouse Izzo, in a philosophical mode, inquired about Chesty. “Does he frigging think women don’t shit?”

  Verity had watched her climb into the battered C-47, moving well, her rear end surprisingly shapely considering the cold weather gear she wore.

  Twenty thousand Marines were trying to get the hell out and would do just about anything for a ride, and here was this New York newspaperwoman flying in and arguing her right to stay.

  Elizabeth. Elizabeth would have argued, too.

  Tom Verity wondered, if his wife possessed Miss Higgins’s professional skills, would she, too, have gone off alone to write about wars?

  And concluded, yes, had Elizabeth been a journalist, she very well might. And would have looked good, too, in whatever she wore.

  Men had different attitudes toward the war correspondents. Some gave them grudging admiration. They, after all, didn’t have to be there. Others hated them. Vultures, circling over the roadside and picking at the dead, earning big money and fame by auditing the casualty rolls.

  Verity had his opinion of the correspondents. They saw the war, sworn witnesses to its horror; they took notes, reported as truthfully as they could, chronicling the war. They did everything but fight it.

  And why hadn’t Tom Verity sent back via Miss Higgins his letters to Kate?

  There were the wounded, the dead, and the missing. And then again, some men just vanished.

  The sergeants were forever taking roll call, checking lists, keeping after the squad leaders and fire team corpora
ls.

  “. . . Keep an accurate muster. Only way.”

  “Yes, S’arnt,” the corporals agreed.

  That’s how it went down the line of command from General Smith to the last sore-assed private in the division. Someone was always supposed to know where you were. That was the standard procedure, the Marine routine, the only way you could keep the division from falling apart, becoming a mob like the army.

  Still, men disappeared into the night and the snow and the cold, falling out of the line of march to take a crap and never catching up, or turning the wrong way on patrol to end up tired and cold in a box canyon where you might sit down for a few minutes in the snow to work things out in your head and rest a bit, and then . . .

  Or being taken by a long shot, freakishlike, from a sniper. Those Marines, too, might never be found if they were out on the flank.

  In the spring, maybe the war would be over, with Red Cross people allowed in, and somewhere up in these hills they’d find bones and teeth and know they were Marines from the belt buckles and the weapons, the metal grommets on the canvas leggings, the web gear and canteens, the tin hats and dog tags and Zippo lighters and leather wallets with photos of the kids or old Mom, the Barlow knives and eyeglass frames and religious medals, the things that didn’t rot or rust away under the snow when the men died.

  Things that wild animals wouldn’t bother eating.

  Izzo was cursing steadily, hopping around, first on one foot, then the other, next to the idling jeep.

  “What the hell are you . . .?“

  “I was trying to take a leak, Captain.”

  “Well, go ahead.”

  “With all these clothes and three pairs of pants and skivvies besides, by the time I get my cock out, Captain, begging the captain’s pardon, I forget what the hell I’m going to do with it.”

  Tate was the philosopher among them: “You know, Captain, it could be worse.” Tate was heating a canteen cup of cocoa over a meager fire in the lee of the Jeep, and snow was falling. The cocoa was for drinking and the dregs for his every-other-day shave.

  Verity didn’t bother to answer, but Izzo, furious, spoke up for him. “Worse, Gunny? It could be worse? You shook or somethin’? Here’s the captain with frozen feet, you’re shaving in cocoa, and I just pissed down my pants leg because it’s too cold to pull out my dick and with you things is just great? Jeeezus.”

  Tate ignored him. Instead, since it consoled him, he reached back in history to other wars: “Why, at Stalingrad, Captain, the Germans fought all summer and into fall to take the city and then fought all winter to hold it. Half a million Germans fighting half a million Russians in the ruins of a great city.”

  “That’s another thing, Gunny,” Izzo put in. “You come from Kansas or someplace. What do you know of cities, Gunny, not like the captain and me, who come from Washington and Philly?”

  “And it was cold there, too,” Tate went on, unperturbed. “I believe the first snow fell on Stalingrad in October and the Germans finally surrendered in February. Five months of winter fighting, a million men on both sides.”

  Izzo made a strangled noise of anger. Of disbelief. “You couldn’t fight five months in this shit, Gunny, I don’t care. Nazis, Commies, even Marines. Men can’t do it. They’d just lie down and die first.”

  Some men had already begun to do just that, Verity knew, lying down at the side of the road in the snow and dying. But he didn’t say anything, just watched Tate shaving in his cocoa and tried not to think about his own feet and how Mouse Izzo had just wet his pants.

  They got plenty of people off the tarmac at Hagaru, the wounded and frozen and sick, plus the malingerers, but not without cost. Air Force Capt. Lillian M. Keil, a nurse, wrote of those flights in and return flights out: “We were fired upon and often had to land in slush, which was dangerous because the planes could skid. One of the nurses was killed.”

  Captain Keil said of the Marines who came aboard the evacuation flights out: “Their hands and feet were so frostbitten they could hardly hold a gun or walk. . . We wore hats and gloves and flight suits with fur-lined jackets. I gave my outer clothing to the shivering GIs that came aboard.”

  For all the cold and the perimeter fighting and the occasional Chinese foray into the town itself, the nightly firefights, there was something almost quaint about Hagaru.

  The airstrip gives us that, Verity thought. A link to the other world beyond the hills and the Chinese. In an hour a man could be out of here. In less than an hour a Maggie Higgins could fly in. Then leave as swiftly.

  “You know what it’s frigging like, Captain?”

  “No, Izzo, what?”

  “You ever see Lost Horizon?”

  “Sure, Shangri-la and Margo growing old and all that.”

  “Remember the opening? Ronald Colman is the British ambassador or something and the warlords is killing everyone and Brits and Yanks and mandarins are trying to get out just as the warlords overrun the airport and there’s only one plane going out—”

  “ADC-3, as I recall.”

  “Right you are, sir, as always,” Izzo said, the quintessential enlisted man deferring to the officer, and then, having observed the niceties, resumed his narrative. “And Mr. Colman is shouting at coolies and he’s got a handgun—”

  “A Webley revolver, as I recall.”

  “Right again, sir, a Webley.” Izzo understood officers. “And there’s Mr. Colman ticking off names and shoving people into the plane and whacking at the coolies. And of course all the passengers are Westerners . . . not a slant-eye among them, begging the captain’s pardon.”

  “Go on,” Verity said, chillier.

  Izzo sensed the rebuke.

  “Well, that’s just about it, Captain. This frigging airstrip at Hagaru-ri International Airport reminds me of Lost Horizon with old Ronald shoving people into the DC-3 and shooting bandits and whacking at coolies and off they go with the warlords coming, bouncing along the runway as the control tower blows up and the huddled masses, like it says on the Statue of Liberty, are all panicking and running out on the tarmac and the plane lifts off just as a million Chinks—”

  “I get the picture, Izzo.”

  Captain Verity repressed a grin. “Hagaru-ri International.” That was pretty good. One dirt airstrip gouged out of the snow and the mountain hardscrabble.

  Izzo wasn’t easily turned off.

  “And I mean millions of them. Whoever made that movie, he knew his mob scenes. They didn’t burn Atlanta in Gone with the Wind better than Lost Horizon did mobs of guys in coolie suits running down the tarmac.”

  “So?” Verity said.

  “So the only difference is, instead of Ronald Colman, we got Chesty Puller.”

  Tate was off with the jeep to look up fellow gunnies, to find out what they knew, and to scrounge or requisition supplies.

  “What I can’t find Izzo can steal,” Tate said. Marines were nothing if not pragmatic.

  Verity began seeing the little airstrip at Hagaru as Izzo did, through the eyes of a tired, gallant diplomat shoving people into aeroplanes (and that’s how it would have been spelled back then) before the rebels got there to rape the women and behead the men and sell the children into slavery. Hagaru even had its British, real-live Brits, Marine commandos in their ridiculous berets, carrying Sten guns (or were they Bren guns?) and being polite.

  “It’s funny,” Verity said, “even when they’re cursing people out, the British sound civilized.”

  Gunnery Sergeant Tate hadn’t seen many Brits before, only a few in prison camp, and he, too, marveled.

  “Wouldn’t work in the Marine Corps, Captain. No one would take a first sergeant serious if he didn’t sound pissed off.”

  Izzo was making barter arrangements, staring at the British berets.

  “I know those hats don’t frigging begin to keep your ears warm, but I could use one of them hats.”

  Verity glanced over at the parked jeep to be sure the precious radio was still in place. To bar
ter you had to give something up to get something, and by now he knew Izzo.

  There was something else odd about the Brits. Tate saw it, too.

  “They don’t look whipped, Captain. Don’t look like they got their ass kicked.”

  Well, they had, as just about everyone had, but they didn’t look it. Verity knew exactly what Tate was saying. The British Royal Marine Commandos still looked like soldiers.

  You couldn’t say that about many of the American army outfits coming through and only a few of the ROKs.

  The Marines were sore about it.

  “The ROKs is just shit.” You heard that over and over. Their officers ran even before the men, most of them, and when an officer stood and tried to hold his men, to keep them in position, they ran right over him, sometimes clubbing him to death as they went. Few of the ROKs had weapons; they’d been thrown away. And it was their damned country, wasn’t it?

  The American army wasn’t that bad. But the Marines kept having to pull unwounded, able-bodied soldiers out of the queues of wounded waiting to be airlifted out. A few Marines tried that stunt, too, but only once. Some of the soldiers went back again and again. These were the men of the Seventh Army Division. Their division had been broken east of the Chosin and they were the worst. A Marine surgeon reported that if the soldiers just lay down on a stretcher and groaned they would eventually be carried to a plane. One day more than nine hundred “wounded” were flown out of Hagaru. The Marines reckoned maybe seven hundred were legitimate, the rest malingerers.

  By December 5 some forty-three hundred casualties, real and imagined, had been airlifted out.

  Verity was asked for dinner that night by General Smith. There were maybe a dozen officers in a big tent, and as a captain he was junior in rank. It didn’t stop Oliver Smith from sounding off, having a young captain there. It was pretty comfortable inside the tent, warm, and the food, too, was hot. It was rations, but they were hot.