The Marines of Autumn: A Novel of the Korean War

by James Brady

  Giving Keiser the bad news, a staff officer assured him, “General Walker will take care of you with a job around headquarters.”

  “Dutch” Keiser responded, “Tell General Walker to shove his job up his ass.”

  Robert B. McClure, who replaced Keiser as division commander, promptly admitted to an aide that he was too old for the job and had not expected to ever again lead troops in combat.

  “I can only brace myself by hitting the bottle,” General McClure explained. “I’ll be doing a lot of drinking.”

  In his first order to this famous division of fifteen thousand soldiers, McClure ordered that every man grow a beard.

  A runner caught up with them just south of Hagaru past the airstrip. He was in a jeep and had been stopping every jeep he passed.

  “Captain Verity?”

  “Yes.”

  “Dispatch for you, sir.”

  It was very brief and from Smith: “Captain, General Puller will leave Hagaru last in line of march and his regiment will guard my rear. Please join him now. Your Chinese may be of help to him.”

  It was signed “Oliver Smith,” no rank or wax seals or anything.

  Verity felt his stomach fall. Just a few inches, but it definitely fell. He let Tate read the message and then Izzo. After all, it involved them, too.

  Izzo exhaled. “And I thought we were outta here.”

  Tate didn’t say anything. It wasn’t in the nature of gunnery sergeants to show emotion at such times. Verity swallowed disappointment, resentment. The sense that generals had ways of getting back a man.

  “Well, we’re not ‘outta here.’ So let’s go find Chesty Puller.”

  They U-turned the jeep to ride the shoulder back north, slowly, against the flow of traffic, of trucks and artillery pieces and tanks and jeeps, Marines marching in column, some soldiers doing that as well but most not, and what could even in kindness only be called mobs of South Korean soldiers slogging along, all headed south, all getting as much distance between themselves and the Chosin Reservoir as they could.

  For the first time, now that he was no longer part of but facing the line of march, Verity could see the retreat for what it was, mile after mile of men.

  He didn’t know how far back it stretched. Beyond Hagaru, surely, up west toward the reservoir. If Puller’s First Regiment was the rear guard for Smith’s division, there was someone back there behind Puller, watching out for his ass. There was always, Verity concluded, someone worse off than you, some last platoon, last squad, last rifleman cagily looking over his shoulder.

  Jesus, but they looked terrible, the troops coming south from the reservoir. The Marines looked bad enough, shivering and bearded, but they still marched, carried weapons, looked about them alertly. Looked for someone to kill. The army troops just walked. They’d thrown away everything, not only their rifles but also their web belts and packs and canteens and steel helmets. Not their sleeping bags. A night in the open without a bag would kill a man. Even the Seventh Division men knew that. And the ROKs looked worse than the American soldiers.

  As they drove north, back from where they’d come, there were still Marines with sufficient energy to hassle them: “Hey, Cap’n, that way’s Peking, y’know.”

  Verity grinned and waved a mittened hand. Izzo told them to go frig themselves. Tate said nothing but scanned the ridgelines on both flanks, keeping watch. He had the BAR cradled and ready. Occasionally he could see a Marine patrol up there, paralleling the line of the march, watching over its flanks so that the Chinese couldn’t come in and hit them from the high ground and pinch off the road. He nudged Verity’s arm, nodding toward the ridges.

  “Good to see that, Captain. With all that happened and the beating they took, they’ve still got people out patrolling, nice and proper.”

  Tate took a professional’s satisfaction in good soldiering.

  They were back in Hagaru-ri by about noon. A Marine lieutenant was watching a sergeant setting up three 60mm mortars on the margin of the airstrip.

  “Where’s Puller?”

  “Back there, Captain. Maybe a mile. He’s got a big tent.”

  Puller in a tent. That didn’t sound right. Men still talked of how he gave his parka away that first night of the march north. The Puller legend wasn’t yet complete, not with stories like that.

  There was only one road through the town and it was impossible to miss the regimental CP, and when Verity saw a big tent he told Izzo to pull over. A sentry stopped Verity at the entrance.

  “General Smith ordered me to report to General Puller.”

  The Marine looked at the piece of paper and saluted. Coming out of the midday light it was all gloom inside the tent, and for an instant Verity couldn’t see.

  Someone said, “Yes?”

  “Captain Verity, reporting as ordered to General Puller.” He handed over the single sheet of paper, by now smudged and starting to curl at the edges. His eyes were adjusting and he could see Puller, leaning over a sort of table, a pipe in his teeth, poking a gloved finger at a map. He looked up at Verity from under the bill of his fatigue cap.

  “What do you want?”

  “Captain Verity. General Smith told me to join you. I’m the guy who speaks Chinese.”

  “Oh, do you?” Puller was notorious for favoring old sergeants over young officers and rarely masked disdain.

  The general paused, then rattled off some Chinese.

  “No, I don’t think it’s going to rain, General,” Verity responded, also in Chinese.

  Puller’s flat mouth broke into a grin. “Come over here, old man; tell me where you learned your Chinese. You’re too young to have served there prewar. Not an old China hand.”

  “Nosir. I was born there. Lived in China until I was fifteen.”

  “What’d you do then?”

  “My parents sent me to the States for school.”

  “What school?”

  “Hotchkiss. It’s in—”

  “I know where it is. You attend college?”

  “Yale.”

  “My, my, my, a Yale man among us. This regiment is twice honored. They assign us the rear guard and send us a Yale man.”

  Verity didn’t say anything, but the other officers—there might have been eight or ten of them—laughed. They were Puller’s staff; they knew the cues. He didn’t and just stood there. Puller continued his little catechism.

  “Regular?”

  “No, General, reserve officer.”

  “Intelligence?”

  “Nosir, O-three-0-two.” That was the military occupation specialty number for experienced infantry officer.

  “Good,” Puller said. He liked 0302s. “Where’d you serve? Pusan?”

  “No, General, I just got here last month. I was on Guadalcanal and later Okinawa. After the war, North China for a time.”

  “What’d you do on the ‘Canal?”

  “Carried a rifle. I was just out of Parris Island boot camp.”

  “Good. What about Okinawa?”

  “I was commissioned by then. I had a rifle platoon, then a rifle company.”

  Puller smiled, a real smile this time, the pipe still there.

  “Verity. That means ‘truth,’ doesn’t it? Yes, it does. I know that much Latin. Well, Captain Verity, you tell the truth and we’ll get along just fine. This meeting’s just about over and we’re opening this tent to the troops to warm up. Come by about four for dinner, Captain. I’d like to hear more about you and China. And your adventures at Yale.”

  “Aye-aye, sir,” Verity said.

  “Too bad there won’t be wine. Then we could see if it’s true about your name, you know, ‘in vino, veritas.’ ”

  “Yes, sir,” Verity said, a bit stupefied that Chesty Puller was making sport.

  “Though from what I’ve noticed in a lifetime,” Puller continued, “most of what you get ‘in vino’ is boasts and other rot.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Hold up here.”

  Chesty Puller w
as out of the jeep before it stopped rolling, moving quickly for a man his age and so bundled up.

  A six-by truck stalled in traffic panted a few yards away. Puller looked up at the cab.

  “What about these headlights, old man?”

  “Well, sir . . ”

  There was supposed to be night discipline, no driving with headlights.

  “You have a wrench up there, a hammer, old man?”

  “Yessir,” the driver said, relieved Puller only wanted to borrow a tool and not make trouble. Sometimes these old officers got crazy.

  “Good,” Puller said, taking the wrench when it was handed down and circling briskly to the front of the truck, where he smashed first one and then the other headlight.

  “Here’s your wrench, old man,” he said mildly, handing the tool back up.

  “Yessir,” the driver said, stunned.

  That, too, was Puller, not taking names and numbers and writing people up, just taking direct action.

  Izzo was complaining. Tate was having little of it. But he was being tolerant, trying to improve the young man’s spirit, to elevate his morale.

  “But being the rear guards, Gunny, that’s a stinking job. Why us? Why not give it to someone else?”

  “Marines have to do it, Izzo. You couldn’t give an army outfit responsibility for keeping the Chinese off your ass, could you?”

  “No, but there’s other regiments. I think Puller puts in for these things. He sends in applications.”

  “Maybe. But whatever regiment pulled the duty, Captain Verity was going to go with ’em. And you and me.”

  “Yeah,” Izzo said, glum.

  “Anyway, cheer up. It’s an honor to be rear guards. Remember Marshal Ney?”

  “Which side’s he on?”

  “He was Napoléon’s best general. French. Marshal Ney was always up front, always leading the old charge. And then, later on, when Napoléon lost the occasional away game, they put Marshal Ney and his men in the back there as the rear guard. It was Ney fought his way all the way back from Moscow in winter and saved the army.”

  “Jesus,” Izzo said, “wasn’t he the fortunate one. Just like frigging us.”

  No one swaggered anymore; no one strutted.

  It was Guadalcanal after the bad fighting at the Tenaru River in the fever months that Verity first saw Marines lose their swagger. It struck him Marines at the ’Canal shuffled along like the unemployed from the Dearborn auto plants that he saw lined up at the soup kitchens of 1938.

  Now, in the dreadful miles along that road south from Chosin, the Marines had again lost it, that small, defining swagger.

  Occasionally a Marine would look into the rearview mirror of a truck and not recognize the face he saw there. Some officers tried to get their men to shave. Puller was one of those.

  “If there’s a little hot coffee left in the canteen cup in the morning, use that. Just as good as shaving cream and hot towels, everything but the shoe shine and the lilac water.” Gunny Tate agreed. But he was a gunnery sergeant and an exception.

  Most men didn’t shave. Their skin was red and chapped and pocked with blackheads and angry pimples and caked with soot from the fires, when they had them, and their eyes were sunken from lack of sleep and from staring at the snow by day and through the blackness of the night. Maybe it was better they didn’t shave. Hair helped flesh keep from freezing and hid the filth and grime and skin eruptions.

  In the cold, it was difficult to urinate. The testicles drew up into the body to retain warmth and the penis shriveled and shrank, and when a man stepped to the side of the road it was tough to find his cock inside all the layers of stinking clothes and when he did and pulled it out, the urine didn’t always come right away, not in the cold, and when it finally did, the way the penis was shrunken and the balls drawn up, he usually pissed all over himself, as poor Izzo had done, inside his trousers and down the front of them outside, so you always knew when a man had just taken a leak, from the yellow stains and the scum of yellow ice down his leg.

  You were always pissing on yourself, no matter how soldierly and neat you tried to be.

  Men died.

  Verity was surprised to realize he wasn’t shocked. It was as if the five years of civilization since Okinawa had never happened, he had never gone back to Yale to graduate, hadn’t studied at Harvard, had never met Elizabeth or had a child named Kate.

  Now when he saw the Marines lying stiff and dead by the side of the road after a minor skirmish to clear a roadblock, he walked by them as casually as men pass newsstands where no headline catches their eye.

  Tate remarked on it.

  “When they’re froze like this, it’s different, Captain. This summer on the Naktong down there it was hot as hell. Inchon and Seoul, it sure wasn’t cold. The dead stink; they swell up; they look . . . dead. I never saw dead men on ice before except at funerals back home. It’s like the mortician came in with the rouge and the pancake makeup and tidied them up a bit. I know they’re dead; they just don’t look like dead Marines used to look. . . . ”

  Verity knew what he meant. There were no maggots working at the dead, no flies buzzing, no slimy things coming right up out of the earth to take possession. Dead was dead. But still . . .

  Izzo took a more pragmatic tack.

  “Seems a shame to bury good parkas, Captain. And I seen a stiff back there with them new thermal boots.”

  Verity shook his head. “We’re not going to strip our own dead, Izzo.”

  Word came down that except for drivers, all able-bodied men were to walk out to the sea.

  “Suits me,” said Tate, who, like Verity, was already walking. You didn’t get as cold that way. And with ice and snow and the road surfaces and the inevitable breakdowns, it was no strain keeping up. Verity, who had a good map, reckoned on average they were moving at about a quarter-mile an hour.

  “At that rate, Captain,” Tate said, “figuring sixty-eight from Yudam-ni and that we march twelve hours a day, we’re going to be out here for about three weeks.”

  “Jesus,” Izzo said, “I can’t take three weeks of this frigging stuff.”

  “Cheer up, Izzo,” Verity said. “Think of the gas mileage you’re getting.”

  He didn’t know quite why, but Verity seemed to have thrown off the depression of a few days earlier, at what Smith had done to him. Maybe it was because they were a few miles, another couple of days, closer to the sea.

  If we can just get to Hamhung, he thought. If we can get there, we’re OK. We get there, we live. Staying alive was becoming an obsession, a full-time job, and not only with Tom Verity.

  Men were saved by their sleeping bags and sometimes died because of them. The standard-issue down bag, ironically coffin-shaped, could keep a man alive lying in the snow all night without a fire or tent in temperatures below zero. It was better if he had a rubber air mattress underneath, but the bag kept him alive.

  The rule was you zipped the bag all the way up, right under your chin. This wasn’t some arcane Marine fetish for uniformity and neatness; it was how the bag was designed, so that when zipped all the way it could be burst open instantly in an emergency by the man inside shoving upward with both arms. If it was zipped only part the way up, one hand had to be extended to the outside to unzip the bag all the way down. That took time; it could also take your life.

  That first night of November 27 when the Chinese came up on Hill 1240 and other hills against the Seventh Marines, men died in their bags before they ever had a chance to get out and fight. On the morning of the twenty-eighth in one platoon they found five Marines still in their bags on the ridgeline, dead of bullet wounds or bayonet thrusts.

  “They really are coffins,” Marines complained. “I’m sitting up tonight. Hell with it.”

  “Sure,” the NCOs said sourly. “That’s awful smart. By two in the morning you’ll be dead of cold and the Chinks won’t be able to do nothing to you.”

  “Well, I . . ”

  “Zip the bag like y
ou was told and you might live through another night and not freeze either. If you’re lucky.”

  There were the Chinese. There was the cold. One as inexorable, as unforgiving, as deadly, as the other.

  Wolfe wrote about “Time and the River,” “the Web and the Rock.” If he lived, Verity thought he might turn to literary composition. “Of the Chinese and the Cold.” It was a splendid title. Good as Thomas Wolfe’s. If only he could fashion a plot. How jealous would his colleagues in the commons room be with their “publish or perish” mind-set. There was consolation in such fantasies.

  On still nights without cloud and with all this snow cover, the earth’s heat simply oozed away at dark into the unfathomable depths of the void. How far out did it go? How distant was the Milky Way?

  The Chinese were more easily measured. They were only men. And the cold killed them as it did Marines.

  “Little bastards, ain’t they?” an enlisted man remarked on seeing his first Chinese dead and prisoners. Well, the Japanese were little, too, and bastards. They learned that soon enough. Verity supposed the Mongols had been small, cavalrymen on ponies. But Genghis Khan did all right. So did Attila and his Huns. Were they little bastards as well?

  But you could fight men. That was a trade the Marines knew. Be stronger, more clever, cagier, better armed, and you won. They’d won against the Japs; there was no reason they couldn’t defeat the Chinese. They might even have taken old Genghis and the Mongols, Attila and his boys on horseback. Being well armed and clever didn’t help much against the cold. When you got right down to it, there wasn’t a hell of a lot anyone could do up here in these mountains in cold like this. You built fires and found shelter or you died.

  Colonel Santee was a regular, and something of a classicist.

  “It is not unknown,” Santee was fond of informing people, “for a regular Marine officer to be widely and even deeply schooled in matters academic beyond the science and art of war.”

  He was a light colonel now and commanded a battalion. Verity enjoyed him; others thought him a bore and parodied his pompous language.