The Marines of Autumn: A Novel of the Korean War

by James Brady

  “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.

  To Captain Verity, who dozed fitfully, it was like a ballroom, everything a-whirl, loud music and light, stage snow falling, his head spinning, crystal and frost, a manic and deadly Nutcracker Suite, with Chinese dancers. Too many Chinese dancers. And no Sugar Plum Fairy.

  Kate had never seen Nutcracker. Elizabeth had wanted to take her last year, but they decided that, at two, she was too young and might be frightened.

  Fat chance. This kid was Elizabeth’s. And (afterthought and no false modesty about it) his.

  “Captain?” Tate asked, having heard Verity say something.

  “Nothing, Gunny, just a night at the ballet, Tchaikovsky and all that. . . .”

  “Yessir.”

  Tate waited a few moments until Verity had calmed and then slid a hand over his forehead, lightly, to see if there was fever.

  Both hand and head were too cold to tell.

  Verity pondered past and future, yesterday and tomorrow. Today, and now, held little meaning.

  His feet didn’t hurt. That was how freezing took you. And the bullet in his back provided distraction. He was no longer removing his boots once a day to change from wet socks to dry. There was little point and he disliked seeing the blackened toes and the black moving up the instep, hated the stink of himself and the rotting flesh. And the last time he’d taken off the boots, three or four days ago, it had taken nearly an hour to get them back on, the leather stiff and unyielding. No man could walk barefoot or in socks. To lose your boots, to be unable to pull them on again, meant you stayed here by the side of the road to die. Or lie there helpless until the Chinese came and did the job for you.

  The Chinese were still close. They kept on the tail of the Marine column. The rear guards were always fighting; the Chinese forced that on them, keeping up the pressure. It was Mao’s guerrilla strategy at its most basic: when the enemy attacks, retreat; when the enemy retreats, pursue. The Chinese were as cold and tired and hungry as the Marines were and had taken far heavier casualties, yet they kept coming. Verity wondered who led them, if it really was Peng. It was too bad he didn’t know, wasn’t sure.

  I’d like to see old Peng once more, Verity thought, before he kills me. Share a coffee and have a chat.

  Now they could see the lights of Hamhung.

  “Eight miles, maybe ten,” Izzo said. “We got it made, Captain.”

  Verity was riding, of course. He didn’t feel guilty about that, because he could no longer walk. Jesus, he hoped he wasn’t going to lose the feet. To go through all this and then come home to Kate and not be able to walk down to the C. &C O. Canal to see the barges and the donkeys and then carry her back, that would be hard. His feet worried him more than the gunshot.

  By now they were under the navy’s guns. There was one battle-ship out there, firing sixteen-inch guns, projectiles that weighed two thousand pounds and landed twenty-five miles away. There were cruisers with eight-inch guns and a lot of destroyers. In the War they had called destroyers tin cans. Verity wondered if they still did that or if the military was more deferential this time. It didn’t matter. Under the umbrella of the navy guns the division could pause and rest and shelter. MacArthur was not going to lose his army after all. They were nearly there.

  The road south broadened as they neared the twin cities of Hamhung/Hungnam, the way rural roads do as they approach market towns or turnpikes do in the shadow of great cities. There was even paving now, in places, and the jeep ran more smoothly, jouncing only in the potholes.

  “Like a Cadillac, Captain,” Izzo said smugly, “a frigging Caddy, and I drove plenty of them.”

  A Cadillac? Well, not quite. But it had gotten them to Hamhung. Or nearly there. And he was trying like hell to drive smooth. For the captain’s sake.

  It was odd, Izzo thought, that the captain didn’t even wince when he hit a pothole, jouncing the jeep. It should hurt like hell. But Verity wasn’t saying a word, wasn’t even groaning.

  There were other things not explicable.

  This truth occurred to Thomas Verity as he sat, still and cramped, very cold but not hurting all that much, by Izzo’s side in the slow-moving jeep.

  Not explicable how ordinary men could work and walk and shit and eat and sleep and survive wounds in such weather at these temperatures without shelter of any sort, even at night, and still fight, still kill the other guy. When was the last time he or Tate or Izzo had even entered a warming tent to thaw? Three days? More? And for some of the riflemen up there on the ridgelines it might have been a week. Maybe Eskimos could live in this, burrowing into snow in their furs, rolling up fetal-like to leech off the body’s own heat. But no one was coming to kill the Eskimos in their holes.

  Also strange, with Koto-ri days and miles behind them, the smoke of rifles long since drifted away over the graves, but Verity still heard the grinding metal-against-metal of the tank bogeys, the gears screaming, the crunch of the tracks, could see again the yellow cones of tank headlights through the falling snow as they rolled back and forth, back and forth, over the root cellars of Koto-ri, the Marines’ cemetery.

  “Gunny!” he shouted in panic, voice strangled.

  “Yes, sir?”

  Tate was there instantly, and solicitous.

  “Get me out, Gunny. Don’t let Puller . . .”

  Tate saw the fear in his face. And understood, without the words being said.

  “Yes sir, we’ll get you out, skipper. Just be easy about it, sir. Count on Izzo and me.”

  “Yes,” Verity said, sitting back, calmed and easier about things, not as fearful.

  Then, suspecting he might be dying and wanting finally to understand the inexplicable, he said, “Gunny, one other thing.”

  “Yessir?”

  “I can’t feel my feet, Gunny.”

  “That’s the cold, sir,” Tate responded, knowing that it wasn’t.

  Nor could Verity understand where Elizabeth came from. How she was here in Korea and alive.

  There, all in white, on a sun-bleached court, she lunged, long-legged, long-armed, for a tennis ball just out of reach.

  “Your shot, Tommie,” she pouted, sweat-slick and golden.

  “My shot?” She was forever poaching in doubles and then blaming him. Damned nerve!

  “Your shot, Tommie,” she insisted. My, but Elizabeth could be firm.

  He stretched out his racquet for the ball as her call echoed, her voice different now. No longer chiding, but shocked.

  “You’re shot, Tommie.”

  “Yes,” he said, “I am.”

  And he ran toward her in the hot sun, laughing at their private joke.

  Izzo was talking to the captain. Or rather, at Verity, next to him in the front seat.

  “Shut up, Izzo,” Tate ordered.

  “I’m just talking, Gunny. Trying to take the captain’s mind off of his own troubles. It’s a consolation, y’know, when you hear of people worse off than you.”

  “The captain don’t want to hear your tale of woe, Izzo. An officer don’t want to know a damned thing about your private life. You been in the Corps long enough to know he don’t.”

  “Sure, Gunny. But considering all we been through, me and you and the captain, you make exceptions. Right?”

  Since Verity was asleep or unconscious or both and taking no notice of Izzo or his accounts, Tate felt the question was reasonable.

  “OK, Izzo,” he said.

  “Why, thanks, Gunny. What I was about to say to the captain was a kind of confession, you know, like us Catholics do Saturday afternoon to the priest. ‘Bless me, Faddah, for I have sinned. . . . ’ ”

  Tate said nothing. He was out of his depth when Catholics got started on the sacraments.

  “. . . so I ju
st wanted the captain to know that I was sorry for bullshitting him all this time and I wanted to—”

  “What the hell kind of religion is that? Telling the captain, or telling a priest, you were ‘bullshitting’ him? Catholics talk like that in church?”

  Izzo ignored the question. “I wanted to let the captain know I never was a wheelman. Never ran with a stickup gang. I stole a car once, hot-wired and heisted it. And got caught. That was when they gave me the choice. The Corps or six months inside reform school.” He paused. “God knows why I didn’t just frigging go inside.”

  “So you were only bragging what a big, important gangster you were?”

  “Well, yeah. Guy as small as me, he makes himself bigger, y’know? I never even held a gun ’til boot camp. I was just looking for an edge back there in Philly, looking for a little respect from the guys. To be well thought of.”

  “And telling him you drove for stickup men would make the captain think highly of you?”

  “Yeah. I only wish now that he’s shot that I told the captain the truth. That I was just a wild kid trying to sound dangerous.”

  Verity still wasn’t listening. Not that Tate could see. The jeep moved ahead, slowly, Izzo nursing the wheel with his usual competence. So Tate said, “You’re well thought of here, Izzo.”

  The driver’s head swiveled. “Why, Gunny. That’s something. Coming from you and all. . . . ”

  “You did OK, Izzo. No one can say you didn’t.”

  “You mean that?”

  “I do. And I know the captain thinks so, too.”

  Izzo shook his head. “No shit.”

  Behind them someone shouted from the cab of a six-by, “Move the hell out, you peepul!”

  Izzo gunned the motor, and their jeep moved another dozen yards south along the mountain road.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Time magazine put it this way: “The running fight of the Marines and two battalions of the Army’s 7th Infantry Division from Hagaru to Hamhung, forty miles by air but sixty miles over the icy, twisting mountainous road, was a battle unparalleled in U. S. military history. It had some aspects of Bataan, some of Anzio, some of Dunkirk, some of Valley Forge, some of the ‘Retreat of the 10,000’ (401–400 B.C.) as described in Xenophon’s ‘Anabasis.’ ”

  “He’s dead, Gunny.”

  “Yes, he is, Izzo.”

  The driver pulled off his pile hat and then, more significantly and deferential, removed his shades, blinking his eyes in the unaccustomed light.

  Tate reached over to straighten Verity’s cap, gone just slightly askew. The captain ought to look right, the gunnery sergeant thought, coming into town and all. A shame he didn’t have a clean uniform laid away they could get him into, tidy him up a bit.

  Then, seeing that Izzo was still just sitting there, as trucks and jeeps and a Sherman tank rolled by, heading into Hamhung:

  “All right, Izzo, not making money sitting here. Let’s get rolling.”

  But the words, so familiar, were gentle. Not the usual bark.

  “Right, Gunny.”

  Izzo replaced the glasses after rubbing a chapped, dirty fist into his eyes.

  The engine kicked in and the little car moved ahead.

  Kate Verity ran to the window.

  “The first snow!”

  And it was. Georgetown’s first of the season.

  Madame came at her excited call and joined in exclamation at the beauty and wonder of it.

  “Oh, I wish Poppy could see it. He loves snow, too. And we could get out the sled and he could pull me.”

  “We shall get out the sled, Kate, and I will pull you and then you will pull me. We will take turns.”

  “Oh, yes,” the child said, clapping hands and, for the moment and in the joy of a first snow, forgetting her father.

  The three of them came down out of the hills nearing Hamhung, and the road was smoother, mostly paved and downhill. There was plenty of traffic, enough to draw MPs urging drivers along and giving hand signals, irritating people and throwing their weight around.

  “MPs,” Izzo said, disgusted.

  The traffic was trucks and jeeps and occasionally a tank or even a big gun, a 105 or a 155 howitzer being towed along. Marines rode on the tanks, hitching rides, and the trucks were filled and so were the jeeps. Almost no one walked now. There were a few new dead, men freshly killed at Sudong or along the road in ambush and men who had died of cold or old wounds, over the last few days, their bodies stacked in the trucks, occasionally tied snug across the hood of a jeep. It was all very neat and antiseptic.

  “Cold storage,” Izzo said.

  They’d shed their own bodies north of here, at the rail depot of Chinhung-ni, including one without an arm. Izzo had been glad to get rid of that one. “I like to keep a tidy vehicle,” he told Tate, even though, in all fairness, the stump’s coagulated blood hadn’t made that much of a mess.

  They carried only one body now, Verity’s, and they had him up in the front seat, slumped over slightly as if napping during the drive.

  “It looks nicer, Gunny, than having the captain stretched out like just another stiff, you know what I mean?”

  “I surely do, Izzo. He looks fine, sitting there like that.”

  This wasn’t just a concern for Captain Verity’s appearance. Tate and Izzo had been having it out even before they came down from the last of the hills onto the coastal flats and while Hamhung was still only a smudge of smoke on the horizon. The sea was beyond that and they knew it was there, but they couldn’t see it. Not yet.

  “I don’t want to turn him in with the rest of the stiffs, Gunny. Let’s take the captain right into Hungnam down by the port so they’ll be sure to get him aboard ship and the hell out, so they can’t plant him here.”

  “Izzo, they got regulations. There’s MPs all the way from here on in, you know that, directing units and checking off numbers. We’re back, Izzo: this ain’t the war no more. It’s garrison duty and you do what they damn well tell you to do. We could get away with stuff up there fighting in the hills. Not here.”

  As he spoke, Tate realized something terrible, that already he missed the war.

  “Morgue’s up ahead. Turn left in about three hundred yards.”

  That was another MP, waving them along.

  Now Izzo became urgent.

  “Look, Gunny, we keep the captain, see, and take him right into Hungnam. We leave him here who the hell knows what happens when the Chinks get here . . ?”

  “He doesn’t like you calling ’em Chinks, Izzo. The captain is very particular about that and you know it.”

  “OK, sorry. But them Chinese ain’t maybe eighteen hours behind us and coming quick. These army troops I see manning the perimeter around here couldn’t stop Steve Van Buren and the Philadelphia Eagles, never mind we got a dozen Chinese divisions coming.”

  “So what?”

  “So, I don’t want Captain Verity left here in Hamhung, dead and unable to help himself none, when the army is bugging out and him feeling the way he did about being buried in Korea.” The words tumbled out until, winded, Izzo paused. Then, more slowly, “So I think we just drive into Hungnam with the captain and see that he’s properly treated, as befits a man like him.”

  Tate inhaled. He remembered Verity at Koto-ri, how the captain had looked and what he had said, about “no one needs tank treads mashing him under, dead or alive, Gunny.”

  “Nosir,” Tate had said, very much in agreement.

  After a bit, thinking it was the least they could do, Tate said crisply, “OK, Izzo, we take the captain into Hungnam.”

  As the troops poured through the market town of Hamhung and into the port of Hungnam, secure now under the naval guns and the close air support, all those jets screaming overhead and low, and freed of the narrow mountain road where the Chinese had hemmed them in, the whole attitude changed.

  Time magazine put it this way: “The running fight of the Marines and two battalions of the Army’s 7th Infantry Division
from Hagaru to Hamhung, forty miles by air but sixty miles over the icy, twisting mountainous road, was a battle unparalleled in U. S. military history. It had some aspects of Bataan, some of Anzio, some of Dunkirk, some of Valley Forge, some of the ‘Retreat of the 10,000’ (401–400 B.C.) as described in Xenophon’s ‘Anabasis.’ ”

  “Glorioso!” Izzo said, rubbing his hands. “I got a plan.”

  Tate was sure he had. He always did. By now he knew Izzo’s mind, shrewd and warped.

  “Go ahead, talk.”

  “OK,” Izzo said. “First of all, before he gets frozen too hard, Gunny, let’s you and me fix the captain up a bit, wedge him straight up in the seat but more lifelike, so he’ll be riding with me, his faithful driver, and you, the gunny, in back with the radio. Everything proper. That way none of these rear-echelon pogues will be telling us where to take him and what to do with him. They’ll be too busy snapping off salutes and saying ‘yessir’ and ‘nosir’ and clicking their frigging heels.”

  Tate thought about it for a time. Gunnery sergeants are not paid for rashness and are noted for the judicial pause. That’s how they got all those stripes and how, one day, if they live long enough and sufficient top sergeants are killed or retire, they might one day make top sergeant their own selves. So Tate meditated.

  “Gunny. . . , ” Izzo urged, impatient and risking retribution.

  “OK, Izzo, we’ll try it your way.”

  Once he said that, Tate felt better. They would take Verity into the port, where Graves Registration would get him aboard ship. For the gunny, weights had been removed.

  But rearranging Verity’s frozen corpse into a naturally lifelike pose wasn’t as easy as Izzo suggested, the captain’s right leg taking on a will of its own, refusing to bend at the knee so he could sit up straight.

  They wrestled with it, both of them, pushing and pulling. No good. Izzo threw up his hands in frustration.