Combat Ineffective

by William Peter Grasso

  “Well, one thing’s for sure, Lieutenant,” Jock replied. “Tanks don’t float…not without one of those big inflatable donuts around them, anyway. There’s some kind of submerged bridge beneath her, that’s for damn sure.”

  An artillery round struck the water directly in front of the tank. By the time the geyser it caused finally collapsed, the tank had slid deeper into the river. Only the top of her cockeyed turret and the muzzle of her main gun protruded above the surface.

  “I think we just wrecked their underwater bridge,” Jock said.

  “What if they’ve got more of them, sir?” the lieutenant asked.

  “Then we’ve got ourselves more problems, Lieutenant. Listen close. You hear that?”

  In the silence between spasms of gunfire and artillery rounds landing, they could hear the faint sound of vehicle engines from across the river. Some of that sound was the deep-throated rumble of idling tanks.

  For the moment, at least, Jock was fairly sure they’d cut off the Korean’s path across the water. There was no point shelling the river itself anymore. Any KPA still waiting to cross were probably bunched up on the far bank.

  He told Baum, the RTO, “Call Major Harper’s CP and tell them to shift the artillery off the river. Target is vehicles and armor. Give them a correction of add two hundred, shell white phosphorous, repeat fire for effect.”

  After calling in the data, Baum said, “Major Harper says he thinks he’s got a couple of those gun trucks cornered near Hill One-Oh-Two. But there are groups of gook infantry everywhere.”

  Jock replied, “Tell him we’re headed that way.”

  “Shouldn’t we go back to the CP and get the jeep, sir?”

  “No. We’ll do it on foot. With everybody looking to shoot at vehicles, it’s probably safer that way.”

  *****

  Jock and Baum stumbled slowly in the darkness up the shallow slope. They could hear a fight going on well in front of them and see the flashes from weapons of all sorts. Baum asked, “All that shooting…is that where Hill One-Oh-Two is, sir?”

  “Looks like it,” Jock replied. “The compass says we’re headed the right way, and it’s pretty hard to get turned around when you’re going uphill.”

  “But those flashes…those tracers…they all look so close, sir. One-Oh-Two’s got to be almost a mile from here, easy. Maybe a little more.”

  “Here’s a little field wisdom for you, Baum,” Jock replied. “When you’re looking up, everything seems closer, especially at night.”

  “So if we were on top of this rise looking down, everything would seem farther away, sir?”

  “Affirmative. You catch on fast, Private.”

  “Well, sir, one thing I haven’t caught on to are these gook gun trucks. What’s the point of them? It’s not like they’re armored vehicles or anything.”

  “True, they are pretty vulnerable,” Jock replied, “but they’re a good way to get a lot of heavy firepower around quickly. Hell, we’ve done it, too. We mounted our quad fifties on deuces, didn’t we?”

  “Yeah,” Baum said, “but I sure hope when we did that, we didn’t give the gooks the big idea.”

  “I doubt we did, Private. They’re quite capable of figuring it out for themselves.” The voice in his head added, Maybe too damn capable.

  On the ridge that formed the base of Hill 102, they could see the shadowy figures of men—five, maybe six—moving in roughly the same direction as they were. Two of those men were lugging what looked like long pipes.

  “A rocket team,” Jock whispered as he dropped to a prone firing position. Baum quickly did the same.

  “Theirs or ours, sir?”

  “Let’s find out. Is your weapon on full auto?”

  “Affirmative, sir.”

  “Well, get ready to use it if we don’t get the right answer.”

  Jock called out, “Hey, any Red Sox fans over there?”

  The immediate reply: “Fuck the Red Sox. I’m a Tigers fan.”

  Then the GI from Detroit added, “You in the mood for some pale ale?”

  That would make no sense unless you knew that pale was the day’s challenge word.

  “Only if it’s spring, my friend,” Jock replied, spring being the current password.

  As Jock and Baum got up off the ground and joined the rocket team, the gunner caught the glint from his eagle. “Holy shit, sir,” he said, “you’re Colonel Miles, aren’t you?”

  “Last time I checked, son.”

  “What the hell are you doing wandering around out here, sir?”

  “Same thing you are…trying to kick some gooks in the ass.”

  “Well, looks like you’re in the right place, sir. There are supposed to be some of those gun trucks around here somewhere.”

  They could just make out the hill rising above them, its deep gray outline one shade darker than the night sky framing it. The gunner identified himself as Corporal Bifulco and added, “If those gook trucks get up that hill, they’ll be able to spray every swinging dick down on this ridge.”

  Jock replied, “Our guys are still on top, Corporal, and that’s a pretty steep climb for a truck. My guess is they’re hiding behind the hill, trying to figure out what to do next.”

  “Any word on gook tanks in the area, sir?”

  “The only one I saw got blown up trying to cross the river. These gun trucks are probably a reconnaissance force for their armor, trying to find an easy path through our perimeter.”

  “So if the trucks get blown up, they won’t send the tanks?”

  “Let’s hope so,” Jock replied.

  “We keep hearing there’s gook infantry all over the place, sir. You seen any?”

  “No, Corporal. Have you?”

  Bifulco shook his head.

  “We’ll take that as a gift, for now. Let’s go find those trucks.”

  But the trucks found them before they’d walked fifty yards. Two large vehicles the size of deuces were moving slowly down a trail along the top of the ridge, headed their way.

  “Move right,” Jock told the team. “We’ll set up a little bit down the slope so we can get good flank shots.”

  They could barely see the trucks as their dark shapes blended into the mass of the hill behind them. But their sound was unmistakable.

  “Those are GI deuces, sir,” Bifulco said. “Just listen to those General Motors engines!”

  Jock replied, “They may be our deuces, but it’s not our guys driving them.”

  “I don’t know about that, sir. With all due respect, I’m not shooting friendlies.”

  “You won’t be, Corporal. See those guns on the beds?”

  Bifulco strained to make out the shape of the machine guns in the darkness.

  “Those aren’t GI guns,” Jock continued. “They’re Russian—dushkas. We don’t have anything shaped like that or pedestals like that to mount them on. Look at the flash suppressors on those guns, for cryin’ out loud. That’s not GI stuff.”

  “So what do we do, sir?”

  “Shoot the trucks. Hit them right in the gas tank.”

  For a moment, nothing happened; even in the face of imminent death, a man could wrestle with questions of right and wrong, hesitating as his uncertainty hid behind a curtain of righteousness. Jock was about to add That’s an order, Corporal to his instructions, but suddenly it wasn’t necessary; with a double whoosh, two rockets—one from each tube—became glowing dots streaking toward the trucks.

  A few armed men who’d survived the rockets’ impact leapt from the burning trucks and began running toward Jock and his men.

  There was no uncertainty this time as bullets from the GIs’ carbines cut them down, with one qualification: Jock was sure he heard a GI wail, “God, forgive me,” as he let loose with a burst of fire.

  And then it fell quiet except for the crackling of the flames incinerating the deuces.

  “There’ll be cook-offs,” Jock said, “but we’ve still got a minute. Corporal, come with me.”


  Together they low-crawled to the nearest body. Even in the darkness, there was no doubt the dead man was KPA.

  Bifulco asked, “Were you just guessing, sir? I mean, playing the odds?”

  “No, Corporal. I was pretty certain from the get-go.”

  “But how, sir? I mean, the trucks…the dark…”

  “Let’s just say that this isn’t my first dance,” Jock replied.

  As silence settled in along the Naktong, that dance was over for now.

  *****

  Sunrise provided answers the darkness would have never revealed.

  A quick examination of the charred markings on all six of the destroyed gun trucks showed they’d been captured from ROK units. “They probably got lots of GI vehicles to use as decoys,” Patchett said. “I guess it never occurs to them ROKs to destroy equipment they’re gonna abandon. Seems like they’re always in too big a hurry to skedaddle.”

  Jock replied, “Those trucks could’ve just as easily come from an American unit, Top. GIs were abandoning stuff like it was going out of style, too, remember?”

  “You got a real good point there, sir. Unfortunately.”

  The burning question, however, was this: how did a submerged bridge across the Naktong get built right under the noses of the Americans?

  It didn’t take much investigation of the crossing site to understand the bridge’s construction. Sandbags had been piled across the river bottom and topped with weighted planks tied together to form a concealed roadway two feet below the water’s surface. Short poles protruding above the surface at regular intervals guided men and vehicles across the invisible pathway in the darkness. Building it would’ve been a Herculean task that could only be accomplished in the secrecy of night…

  And it would’ve had to happen last night.

  “It was that damn loud music,” Patchett said. “They could’ve had a thousand coolies toting them sandbags into place, and we never would’ve heard a thing. Wouldn’t’ve seen nothing from our positions on the high ground, neither. But if someone was standing real close…”

  He was glaring at Karpinski—the recon sergeant—as he spoke the word someone.

  Jock picked up the questioning. “There must’ve been quite a crowd at that crossing site while they were building it,” he said to Karpinski. “If you were patrolling the area you were supposed to, how do you account for not coming across them?”

  “We did come across a bunch of gooks,” Karpinski replied, “maybe twenty or so men and a couple of women. But they were civilians, sir.”

  “What makes you so sure, Sergeant?”

  “They weren’t in uniform or anything…and they didn’t carry weapons. They looked a hell of a lot more like refugees than soldiers.”

  Patchett interjected, “They coulda used civilians to haul them sandbags, sir. Maybe that’s who he ran into—a civilian labor party.”

  Jock said, “Show us on the map where you encountered them, Sergeant.”

  Karpinski pointed to a spot on the far side of the river, a fair distance north of the submerged bridge site.

  Jock continued, “I understand you didn’t bring any KATUSA with you, so I’m assuming you couldn’t talk to these Koreans. Am I right, Sergeant?”

  “I can’t trust anyone who’d eat a dog, sir, so I didn’t take any of them with me.”

  “And in not doing so, you fucked up, Sergeant. But we’re getting off track here. Did you have any sort of communication at all with these Korean civilians?”

  “Just a lot of hand signals, sir. They were real worked up about something. Kept pointing north while they jabbered away. I figured they were trying to tell us where the KPA were. So that’s where we went looking for them—north. Then the music stopped and all hell broke loose across the river. We heard that call for artillery fire, so we got the hell out of there, jumped in the rubber boat, and came home.”

  “Which way were these civilians going, Sergeant?”

  “South, sir.”

  “In other words, Sergeant, toward the site of the submerged bridge.”

  “How was I supposed to know that, sir?”

  “It’s not what you were supposed to know, Sergeant. It was what you were supposed to find out. That’s what recon does, remember? You didn’t cover half the area you were supposed to patrol. Instead, you retraced your steps north, across ground you’d already covered and found no trace of the KPA. You never set foot in the southern part of your patrol area…and I’ve got a big problem with that.”

  Patchett added, “And you didn’t radio in none of this while it was happening, neither, like you’re supposed to. Put this all together and we damn near had a breakthrough on our hands.”

  “Sergeant Patchett is right,” Jock said. “We could’ve stopped them on the other side of the Naktong if we had some idea they were planning to cross there. You could’ve—no, you should’ve—been the one to tell us that. Have you got anything else you want to say?”

  Karpinski’s voice quavered as he replied, “Yeah, I do, sir. You’re trying to hang this fuckup all on me, but that ain’t fair. I did what I thought was right under the circumstances. I couldn’t help it if—”

  Jock cut him off. “No, Sergeant, you could have helped it. All you had to do was follow your ops order. Now report back to your unit. You’re dismissed.”

  Patchett escorted Karpinski from the CP. Once they were outside, he said, “You really fucked the dog on this one, boy. You’re damn lucky the colonel ain’t looking to bust your ass.”

  As he watched Karpinski walk away, Patchett muttered, “That whole circus wouldn’t’ve happened if ol’ Potts had been running that patrol, that’s for damn sure. At least that man had hisself a lick of sense.”

  Back inside the CP, the S2 began his report on the interrogation of the four KPA prisoners the regiment had captured during last night’s action. “This is what the ROK interpreters learned from the POWs,” the intel officer began. “They’re a pretty ragged lot. They don’t appear to have eaten in days. Doc says they’re weak and dehydrated.”

  “For a pretty ragged lot, they’re sure causing us a lot of trouble, Captain,” Jock said. “What else did you learn?”

  “Quite a bit, sir,” the S2 continued. “Once we fed them, they spilled their guts. It seems the KPA are running short of everything—food, ammo, gasoline, medical supplies, spare parts…not to mention people. But their officers remain intent on pressing the attack and are severely punishing malingerers. We suspect their supply lines are badly overextended now and taking a terrible beating from our air attacks. In this regiment’s sector, we’re facing elements of a depleted division, which is at no more than half-strength.”

  Jock asked, “How many troops is that?”

  “We estimate about two thousand, sir.”

  “Two thousand,” Jock said at almost a whisper, “against our five hundred.”

  “But their combat effectiveness appears marginal, at best, sir.”

  “I hope you’re right about that, Captain. What’s the estimate of their artillery and armor capabilities?”

  “In bad shape, sir. Our POWs say they haven’t had effective artillery support for over a week—again, it’s taken a pounding from air attacks—and a large part of their armor has either been destroyed in combat, suffered mechanical breakdowns, or is just flat out of fuel.”

  “What do they know about that submerged bridge?”

  “Not much, sir. Apparently, soldiers didn’t construct it. Our POWs suspect that was done by impressed labor. They said they knew nothing about it until told to cross the river. They were sure they were going to drown but were very surprised when the water never got above the wheel hubs.”

  “Yeah, we were pretty damn surprised, too,” Jock replied.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Hurry up and wait…

  It’s a dish as old as the military itself, and it doesn’t matter what rank you are; if you’re lower than general grade, you’ll taste of it frequently. Major Tommy Moon
was handed a hefty helping of it as soon as he stepped off the plane at Yokota Air Base, Tokyo.

  Shouting over the noise of the busy airfield ramp, a captain told him, “The jets aren’t here yet, Major Moon. The ships have been delayed. Bad weather in the Pacific. We don’t expect them to dock in Yokohama for at least another forty-eight hours. Then they’ll have to be uncrated and reassembled, of course. That’ll take a while.”

  Tommy resisted the urge to fling his flight bag at the captain, an Air Force logistics officer overseeing the shipment of the F-84s. If they’d bothered to send word to K-9 about the delay, he could’ve kept flying missions against the KPA for a few more days.

  And maybe I could’ve spent a little more time with my brother.

  “So what the hell am I supposed to do until then?” he fumed. “Cool my heels?”

  “Tokyo offers many delights, sir,” the captain replied.

  “Yeah, I know about the delights. I’ve been here before. Just give me a ride to the transient officers’ quarters so I can get my gear squared away.”

  After securing his room—a glorified closet with just a bunk, a rack on which to hang clothes, a small desk, and a single window which offered a depressing view of the base’s scrap yard—Tommy wandered to the officers club for a late supper and nightcap. He was surprised that he didn’t know a living soul in the place, but he struck up a conversation with another major who was nursing his beer at the bar.

  Introducing himself as Case Cantrell, the major hoisted his pilsner glass and said, “Only one for me. I’ve got an early hop in the morning.”

  Tommy asked, “What do you fly?”

  “A C-54. I’ve got to do the diplomatic shuttle.”

  “Diplomatic shuttle…what’s that?”

  “Just like it sounds, Tommy. We fly diplomats—and by that I mean CIA spooks—all over the Philippines and Indochina. Their secret cargo, too. Supposed to be real hush-hush, but the plane’s still got US Air Force markings plastered all over it.”