The Marines of Autumn: A Novel of the Korean War

by James Brady

  Verity could not imagine and did not believe he would have been capable of doing their work. Not anymore, not at his age.

  That he was only thirty suggested no irony, none at all. At thirty on the march from the reservoir, you were an old man.

  “Captain, you know what I think. I think—”

  “Shut up, Izzo. I know what you think.”

  “Yessir, but—”

  Tate’s patience was also limited. “And you won’t argue with the officer in command.”

  “No, Gunny,” Izzo sulked. Jesus, you couldn’t say frigging nothing no more. . . .

  Something kept them going. Maybe that they were Marines. Maybe it was Puller.

  “Come on, lads. Pick ’em up; lay ’em down. Only thirty miles now to Chinhung. Only thirty more.”

  “Yessir, Colonel.”

  Puller was over fifty and if he could do it, young men told themselves. . .

  “Move along; keep moving. Saddle up and keep it going.”

  He was a general now, at last and much delayed by politics, but he’d not yet been confirmed by the Senate and so to himself and to some of the troops he was still “Colonel.” As he would always be, though not in his hearing, “Chesty.”

  “Move it; keep it moving. Only twenty-nine miles to Chinhung.”

  Men pinned fragile hopes on Chinhung. It was nothing but a wide place in the road, but as they focused on it more and more it became El Dorado, a city of infinite possibilities with its tall spires and golden pavements, perfumed and sweet with plants and decorative s and exotic flowers. The reality of Chinhung and why Puller kept its image shining before them was that it was a railhead. Here the narrow-gauge track to Hungnam and the sea swung back to parallel their mountain road. From Chinhung wounded men and the frostbitten could ride to the coast in trains. Freight cars, flat-cars, boxcars, hanging on locomotives, none of it mattered. If they could reach Chinhung, they were safe.

  “That’s the way, lad, another few days and we’ll be in Chin-hung. Just twenty-eight miles now. Just twenty-eight more.”

  What Puller did not tell them and what he knew was more than just a possibility was that when they got to Chinhung, if they got there, the rail lines would have been cut by the Chinese and they would have to walk, fighting all the way, to the sea.

  If so, they’d walk then, Puller rather reasonably concluded, not a man to agonize over things that might not happen.

  “Hurry them along there, Sergeant; keep them moving. Only twenty-seven miles to Chinhung-ni.”

  “Yessir, Colonel.”

  “Where’s your lieutenant?”

  “Got killed, Colonel. I took the platoon.”

  “Good for you, Sergeant. That’s what God made sergeants for, since getting killed is what lieutenants do best. Having been a lieu-tenant once myself, I can testify to that.”

  “Yessir, colonel,” the sergeant said, while around him men grinned.

  Their lieutenant was a replacement who’d flown into Hagaru-ri early in the retreat, and they hadn’t gotten to know him well enough to mourn.

  “Well, keep ’em moving, Sergeant.” Then, louder, “You men keep up with the sergeant here. He’ll get you to Chinhung-ni. You just keep up with him and don’t loiter.” As he limped off, back to his car, the men gave him a little cheer.

  Puller kept at them, kept after them, goading and encouraging and humoring and telling them forever, “Move it; move it; keep it moving.”

  There must have been ihen like Puller with Ney as the Grande Armee retreated in the snow from Moscow and through the Polish marshes and did not fall apart. When men are scared and cold and hungry and sick and there is a powerful and persistent foe nipping at their heels and killing stragglers and setting ambushes, it is easy for armies to fall apart.

  Bodies lay here and there in the dirty snow by the side of the road like trash waiting to be collected. Sensitive men had dragged them there or lifted them from the narrow road itself. They did not want the trucks and tanks to crush and grind over the bodies. Even dead, Marines deserved better than that. Some of the dead died of wounds, others of cold, still others of pneumonia or dysentery or hemorrhagic fever or other ills. It didn’t matter. They were all dead, laid out stiff and cold, young men now gone.

  When a truck came past that still had room and men strong enough, the bodies were picked up and stacked, head to foot, foot to head. It was the best they could do, trying to take the dead home.

  If you could just stay in the sleeping bag, the cold could be tolerated. These down bags, Verity thought, whoever makes them was no Harry the Hat Lev. Mr. Lev was a garment manufacturer who was all over the papers back in the States for cheating the military by delivering shoddy goods, raincoats that didn’t shed rain and hats that fell apart and trousers short in the inseam. Maybe Harry the Hat Lev also made these damned shoepacs. He certainly hadn’t sewn up the wonderful down sleeping bags that kept them alive.

  Verity had long since stopped writing letters to Kate. The ball-point pen no longer functioned. The stub of a pencil Izzo gave him was less satisfactory. But mostly it was that his writing hand knotted up in the cold and the paper wouldn’t hold still and he trembled when he wrote. Hen scratchings, wasn’t that what people used to call bad penmanship? That Kate couldn’t read what he wrote even when it was impeccably Palmer method didn’t matter; he wanted always to send her whatever was the best in him.

  We have a social contract, Verity thought, and it cuts both ways.

  He dreamed a lot in the sleeping bag. Odd dreams, some of them very precisely focused on the war and where they were, on the cold and the hills and the killing. Other dreams, shapeless as Rorschach tests, peaceful and escapist. He liked those. Then some-times he dreamed of other wars.

  Those were weird dreams. Very odd.

  Waterloo. He was there, first with Wellington the night before as his officers danced the gavotte and charmed the Belgian ladies, and then with Napoléon at breakfast where they drank from crystal stemware and wielded silver cutlery at a table with the finest linen cloths and napery, officers and princes who by that evening would be dead, with their faces in the Belgian mud.

  He was at Gettysburg, where, the afternoon and evening before the battle, West Point classmates climbed one another’s hills under flags of truce and were passed through sentry lines to say hello and inquire after wives and to wish each other well on the morrow. Verity liked that, the cordiality and camaraderie.

  “Pray shoot first, messieurs les Françaises” . . “Mais non, gentlemen of England, vous tirez d’abord.”

  That was the Plains of Abraham, where both generals, Mont-calm and Wolfe, died in the very first minutes under the opening volleys after their exchange of pleasantries.

  Once in a dream he rode alongside Custer at that terrible moment when the Seventh Cavalry had gone too far into the ravines of the Little Bighorn where ten thousand Sioux waited and the troopers looked around, before even a single shot had been fired, and, seeing the massed horsemen and serried tepees stretching beyond them to the horizon, knew they were dead men. Tate, too, had that dream, or something like it.

  Oddly, Verity never dreamed of his own War, against the Japanese. That was too real for dreams. It lacked the charm of distance and the centuries.

  The division still tried to erect warming tents along the road. But they made such a splendid target for the mortars. Squeeze six or eight Marines into one tent and hit it with an .82mm mortar and six or eight Marines died. The men knew this yet continued to queue up.

  “You freeze to death out here. What’s the difference?”

  Whenever it was his turn and a warming tent had room, Verity squeezed inside. It didn’t happen often. The jeep would approach a warming tent being erected, and by the time it was ready to take them in the column had moved a hundred yards, two-hundred, and the jeep had to roll on and past.

  “Stop holding up the column, fer chrissakes!”

  It was a good thing he didn’t dream about Napoléon’s retreat
from Moscow, when the Grande Armee almost disintegrated. That also was too real for dreams, and they were already living nightmares.

  Company E of the First Medical Battalion estimated that from November 14 through December 9 they had treated thirty-eight hundred casualties. They couldn’t be more precise because on the night of December 11 the building they were using burned down after a field stove exploded, and paper records were destroyed.

  Corpsman Jay C. Smout recalled that when his medical company was evacuating casualties from the airstrip at Hagaru, they set up a primitive sort of triage to determine how badly frostbitten people were and who should go and who was fit to stay: “The division surgeon’s own frostbitten feet served as diagnostic model. Marines with injury worse than his were sent to the airstrip for evacuation. Marines with frostbite less severe than his were sent back to their units.”

  To fight and freeze some more.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  They caught up with the doctor, resting . . . on his haunches in the snow to the side of the road, back bent, eyes staring.

  “Better get up, Doc!” Tate called.

  The surgeon lifted his head. It seemed to take considerable effort.

  “Yes, yes. I’ll be along.”

  His voice was empty and unconvincing, and Tate suspected he would not get up but would die there.

  “Afreak shot. One in a million.”

  That was Tate’s read on it.

  The night of December 11, with the Marine convoys lurching south, the Chinese played one final trump card, ambushing the trucks at Sudong. Instead of their usual tactic of bursting from snow-clogged mountain defiles to descend suddenly on the MSR from above, this time the Chinese infiltrated the town to materialize out of the scatter of huts and shops and small factories, firing burp guns and tossing grenades and shooting lead truck drivers through their windshields to stall the column. Tate, walking alongside the jeep, dived off the road to return fire from an icy ditch. Izzo, braking the jeep to a careering halt, and Verity, nursing his feet, scrambled to join him.

  “Jesus!” Izzo panted. “After all we been through, to get it frigging now!”

  Verity was thinking the same thing and maybe Tate, too, but the gunny growled, “There isn’t any good time to get killed, you miserable little Mouse.”

  “No, Gunny, there ain’t,” Izzo said amiably, seeing the logic.

  By morning the Chinese, those they hadn’t killed, vanished back into the Sudong hills, and the convoy, in daylight, was again moving south at a prudent two miles an hour when Verity felt a thud high up on his back, as if punched there by a powerful fist.

  “Gunny!”

  Tate, walking alongside, turned. “Yessir?” Then he saw Verity’s face.

  “I think I’m hit, Gunny.”

  Izzo, hearing him, punched the gas, pulling out of the line of vehicles and speeding ahead to a wider stretch of road where he could pull off. He was out of the jeep almost before it came to a stop, sprinting to the passenger side to help. Tate was even faster.

  “I’ll take care of the captain, Izzo. Grab that BAR and scope them hills. If there’s one sniper up there maybe there’s more.”

  “Aye-aye, Gunny.”

  Izzo was as crisp as Tate. He crouched low a few yards off the road, the BAR swiveling slowly back and forth. And ready. The Mouse, too, was still dangerous, could still kill you.

  “It doesn’t hurt much, Gunny,” Verity said. “Maybe a spent shot. From a long way off.”

  “Yes, sir, I’ll get under this parka of yours and take a look. Probably you’re right. A spent shot.”

  They were very nearly right.

  The shot had been a long one, not quite at random but thrown out there at the rolling column of trucks and tanks and jeeps rather than at a single man. It had been fired by a Springfield ’03, an American rifle captured by the CCF from Chiang Kai-shek’s army in 1949. An American rifle first used in World War One and still accurate, it was capable of killing Americans. Or anyone else. The Chinese soldier who fired it, lying atop a low ridge and braced against boulders, was a thousand and seventy-five yards away when he squeezed it off, a final, despairing gesture from a man whose unit, a company of the Forty-second CCF Division, had been badly punished in the hand-to-hand fighting the night before at Sudong.

  He never knew he hit Verity. Or anyone. The shot was near its extreme range and in another two hundred yards or so would have fallen harmlessly to ground. Instead, it caught Thomas Verity where his left shoulder blade and spine came together.

  As Tate gingerly pulled away the layers of clothing, hands so stiff with cold a simple button was a challenge, Verity turned his head toward the sergeant.

  “I don’t think it even broke skin, Gunny. Doesn’t feel bad. I’m warming up back there.”

  By now Tate had peeled back the parka and pulled away the two sweaters and a wool shirt and a wool undershirt and had his hands on the captain’s T-shirt. It was wet. That was the warmth Verity felt. Blood. His own blood.

  The wound was small and neat. Sometimes the Chinese, the Marines as well, used a pocketknife or bayonet to gouge a deep cross into the soft lead point of a bullet so that when it hit a man it splayed out, creating a much bigger wound. Dum-dum bullets, they were called. They were supposed to be illegal, Geneva Convention rules, but everyone did them, both sides. Not this bullet. At nearly eleven hundred yards it was flying true, spinning and not whirling erratically, and it had entered Verity’s shoulder or upper back as cleanly as a bullet could.

  “Break skin?” Verity asked, almost clinically curious and quite calm.

  “Yes, sir, a bit. But a nice clean wound, far as I can see. Medium-caliber, probably a thirty-ought something. No bigger’n that, for sure.”

  “How’s he doin’, Gunny?”

  “Just keep watching the ridgelines, Izzo, and leave the medicine to me.”

  Jesus, I just asked.

  Trucks rolled past and jeeps and the occasional tracked big gun, and snow began again to fall as Tate poured iodine into the wound and then, clumsily, stuck a gauze pad onto Verity’s upper body and began to stuff him back into the parka.

  “Sorry if it hurts, sir. I’ve got morphine if you think you need it.”

  “Doesn’t hurt, Tate. You can have my business anytime. Give testimonials. Dr. Kildare couldn’t have done better. Don’t feel a thing.”

  That was what bothered Gunny Tate.

  Verity should at least have winced and probably should have cursed him out when he used the iodine.

  It wasn’t normal that he didn’t hurt.

  A small, triumphant thrill ran through the column, starting at the head, the word being passed north.

  “We’ve won! We’ve won! We’re out!”

  They were out of the trap, saved. That was what passed back from the point. Men moved with surprising quickness off the road to scramble up hillsides, seeking height and a vantage point.

  “Is that the sea? The damned sea out there? Oh, babee!”

  “The sea? They can see it, the sea?”

  Izzo slowed the jeep and then came to a halt, had to, the truck in front of them stopped so that a Marine could climb atop the cab on tiptoes.

  “Can you see anything, Gunny?” Verity asked. Tate was still the tallest of them, unless the cramp was at him.

  “Just the line of trucks, and I don’t think anyone can see the sea yet, Captain. I think they’re just imagining.”

  Up ahead there was a V-shaped gap in the hills. Verity couldn’t see beyond that, and he knew Tate was probably right, while wishing him mistaken.

  Men continued to shout that they were out, that they’d won, that the sea was just ahead, and then, picking up momentum slowly, the column again began to move, accordionlike, along the road south. Verity kept looking, but even after they’d passed through the V of the hills, he still couldn’t see the Sea of Japan.

  Not that he couldn’t imagine it, toy boats out there, white against the blue-green water, flat and welcoming, t
he distant surface smooth as billiard tables.

  Izzo kept them moving, but it was slow. Still, they were getting close. What was it Henry V called for at Agincourt, after they’d beaten the French?

  Te Deums. Glory to God. If there was a God, Verity suggested, He’d gotten them out. Who else could?

  In Tokyo, MacArthur, confidence restored, had resumed issuing sunny communiqués and meeting with the press.

  “The First Marine Division has cleared Chinhung-ni and is intact, men, guns, and vehicles, and is heading south. The first elements of the division should reach the Hamhung-Hungnam area by midnight December eleventh to the twelfth. They are coming out as a division and with their wounded and their dead.”

  Delicately, there was no mention of men buried at places like Yudam-ni or Koto-ri.

  No mention, either, of minor scraps and small ambushes and snipers harassing the tail end of the column near Sudong.

  “Good news for a change, Jean,” the General told his wife.

  He might still get out of this thing with his reputation intact.

  Tate found a navy surgeon on the road, another tired figure bent under his pack, looking frozen, but walking out.

  “You could look at him, Doctor.”

  The surgeon did, briefly. Barely bothering to pull back Verity’s parka.

  “Bleeding’s stopped,” he said. “Just don’t bounce him around too much and get it started again.”

  This was what medical science had come to on the road from Chosin.

  “Could you take a look at his back? Where he got hit?”

  “Stripping him out here would freeze tissue, Sergeant. It’s shock kills a man, not just the wound. Besides,” he said, “my fingers are frozen. I can’t do an examination. Fingers won’t move.”

  He gave Tate a clumsy gloved pat on the arm and shuffled off ahead of them, their jeep again stalled in this line of march. Two hours later, maybe three, they caught up with the doctor, resting with a couple of Marines on his haunches in the snow to the side of the road, back bent, eyes staring.