Mackenzie sat at his table and concentrated on what there was to be done. First he called in his officers, and briefed them on what the colonel had said. He decided it was useless to strike the tents, and go to ground, until a direct threat developed, or Regiment ordered a move. His men would now need all the rest and relaxation they could get.
He sent Lieutenant Sellers, his supply officer, to Battalion in search of better maps. Sellers, who had not joined the company until just before the Inchon landing, wondered whether he should not take along a squad to guard against guerrillas, or snipers, on the Hagaru Road. Mackenzie didn’t feel this was necessary, but he told Sellers to do what he wished.
The captain dispatched Sergeant Kirby to the regimental supply dump with instructions to scrounge all the extra socks he could find. He had discovered that Kirby could come back with stores that generals and admirals could not command, or Department of Defense requisitions secure.
He ordered a thorough check on his transport, and extra supplies of gasoline lashed to the vehicles. .
He talked to his medical corpsmen, and gave them instructions to distribute their supplies and litters, and not load everything on one or two six-by-sixes or jeeps.
He ordered his reserve mortar tubes emplaced, and zeroed in on ground not completely covered by the fields of fire of the machine guns. He wished to make it impossible for any living thing to cross the neck of the Ko-Bong peninsula alive.
He doubled the size of the night watch. The First Platoon would have the duty until midnight, and would be reinforced by Raleigh Couzens’ Second Platoon from midnight on.
Then he cranked his field phone and asked that Ekland come to the CP. He might as well get it over with.
“Any news, sergeant?” he began, when Ekland stood before him.
“Yes, sir. Heard an AFN bulletin from Tokyo. Eighth Army is under heavy attack. The announcer said something about overwhelming numbers. And I intercepted a signal from some Second Division unit. In clear. They claim they’re surrounded, and they’re screaming for air.”
“Sounds pretty rugged, doesn’t it?”
“That isn’t all, sir. Kato has been listening in on the Chinese frequencies. He says their radio traffic has stepped up enormously, and he thinks most of it is coming from headquarters of the Chinese Fourth Field Army. That’s Lin Piao. He’s young, and he’s smart, and he’s tough. Every hour they broadcast an order-of-the-day. The usual crap about driving us into the sea, and then they end it with, ‘Strike down! Strike down! Strike down!’ I heard it. It doesn’t sound good, even in Chinese.”
Mackenzie wondered why Ekland should know anything of General Lin Piao, or even remember the name, but he had tabbed Ekland as an unusual young man, and this knowledge of the enemy seemed to confirm his judgment. “Sit down, sergeant,” he said. Ekland sat down on the edge of the chair. He felt apprehensive. It was not often that the captain asked one of the men to sit down for a talk in the CP. When he did, it usually was bad news, and usually it was bad news from home.
“I’ve got some good news for you, Ekland, and some bad news,” the captain said. “I told you I’d put you in for the Silver Star, and promotion. You’re getting gonged, okay, but no lieutenancy. Not now, anyway. Matter of the TO. However, my recommendation will always stay on your record.”
“Thank you, sir,” Ekland said. He knew that custom now required him to say, “Is that all, sir?” and then leave the CP. But the captain’s face, composed and sympathetic, invited something more, and Ekland felt free to speak. “I guess I was a dope, captain. I had a good job. Real good. A hundred and fifteen a week from NBC. But when this thing started I rushed back in. I wasn’t in the Reserves. I didn’t have to do it. But Johnny Ekland was first in line. You see, my girl and I decided there was a future for us in the Marines. Guess we were wrong.”
“I don’t think you were wrong,” said Mackenzie. “There is nobody in the Corps more important than a sergeant.”
“Oh, sure,” Ekland said. “A sergeant gets a good deal. But a sergeant’s wife travels second class. She can’t go to the ‘O’ Club, or swim in the pool, or even go to the movies with a girl friend who happens to be married to a second lieutenant. Just like you and me. Out here we eat out of the same mess kit. But when we get back Stateside, if we meet in a bar and want to talk, there has to be an empty stool between us.”
Mackenzie tapped a cigarette on the table, carefully arranging his words before he spoke. This was the first time this embarrassing social problem, always present and always shunned, had been placed so directly before him. “No army is a democracy,” he said. “If it was, it wouldn’t be an army. There has to be unquestioned obedience, and therefore there is unquestioned rank. Rank, and what goes with it, is a necessity.”
“I realize it’s a necessity, captain. Maybe it’s all right for me, but not for my girl. She isn’t a second-class woman.”
“Well, maybe the Corps isn’t for you,” Mackenzie said. “You’re a technician. You do fine on the outside.”
Ekland’s face was freckled, and when he grinned and cocked his red head on one side, as he did now, he was gamin off a Chicago playground, taunting the law. “Right, captain! I resign! Think I’ll fly back home right away. Like my travel orders now, if convenient.”
They both laughed. “But seriously, sir, that’s the trouble. My girl and I decided to give this thing a whirl. We figured that if I went in right away I had a good chance to make lieutenant, and if I didn’t make lieutenant I could get out pretty quick. We figured it would all be over in a few months in a little place like Korea. Now we’re trapped. This thing can go on forever.”
The captain didn’t reply immediately. Ekland felt that the captain was looking through him, and through the walls of the tent, and past the outcome of present battle and the confines of Korea. At last he said, “For us, for our generation, it might well go on forever. But our generation has the duty. If we win, our children are going to live.”
“Yes, sir. If we win.”
“We are going to win,” the captain said, as quietly and certainly as if he were saying he was going to have a cup of coffee, and Ekland knew the interview was over. So he rose, and made his military manners, and returned to his tent.
And there in his tent Ekland crawled into his sack, and Milt Ackerman, his friend, frowning behind his spectacles, came over and said, “What’s wrong, John? Sick?”
“I don’t feel too well,” Ekland said, and turned his face away.
“The GI’s?” In Korea, even when you stuck strictly to American rations, and boiled your water or dosed it with the little white pills that presumably made it fit to drink, diarrhea was always possible, as if the men were infected by an effluvium rising from the pores of the fetid soil.
“No. I just feel bad.”
“Anything I can do?”
“No.”
Ackerman left him alone, and Ekland closed his eyes and buried his head in his arms and re-lived their Day of Decision. It was a Monday night, and they were partying on this unaccustomed party night because the next day was July 4, and Molly, who worked in the office of the University of Chicago’s psychics laboratory, would have July 4 off.
It started with cocktails at Si Cooper’s apartment, and then they had dinner at Luigi’s, the little Italian restaurant off Division Street. The Chianti was domestic, the antipasto scanty, and the pizza passable. But Luigi’s provided candlelight and an imaginative and sentimental violinist, so they often ate there, the four of them, when Grace Cooper could get a sitter.
Molly had started it, but Si Cooper had carried it through. Usually Si enjoyed his friends, and good talk, too well to try to drown himself in indifferent wine, but on this night he had jumped into the bottle.
Si talked a lot, and the gist of it, cutting through the rambling reminiscences of the Weisserhahn Hotel in Vienna, and the Astoria in Budapest, and the Parc in Istanbul, and the Athénée palace in Bucharest, was this: We fight for survival against the tide of ba
rbarism. This is nothing new. It has happened before, many times. Consider Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Suleiman, Hitler, and all the other egomaniacs with a passion for shoving other people around. “Sometimes we lose,” Si Cooper said, “and sometimes we win. But so long as we keep on fighting, we move ahead a little. We always move ahead. One generation is”—he tried to say, “inconsequential,” but the word proved too much for him, and the syllables rolled around in his mouth like loose marbles.
“You’re not moving it much,” said his wife, Grace, who was irritated.
“I tried,” said Si, his bulk spreading across the end of the table. “I saw the beginning of it. I saw the League of Nations. Flopped, yes. The UN may flop too.”
“Hush,” said Grace.
“Won’t hush,” said Si. “But there’ll be another UN. There has to be.”
“Maybe.”
“We’re going to have one world,” said Si, with the sagacity of the very drunk. “Maybe it’ll be a slave world, or maybe it’ll be our kind of world. But it’ll only be one.”
Molly looked across the table. “Do you believe that, Johnny?” she asked.
“I believe it,” he said. “It’s just plain logic.”
“Then why don’t we do something about it?”
“What can we do?”
“You did something before—the last time.”
He examined Molly to see whether she meant it, and decided that she probably did. Molly was petite, and this night she wore her dark hair in schoolgirl braids, and her brown eyes with the gold flecks in them were clear and amazingly young, so that she looked about eighteen. “Know what I think you are?” he said. “I think you’re nothing but a one-worlder, do-gooder at heart, and still a freshman.”
“Do you love me?” she said.
“Sure. What’s that got to do with it?”
“Nothing.”
And they didn’t speak of it any more until he took her home. Then they sat on the steps, because one of her roommates slept in the living room, and tried to be logical about it. First of all, what did they want out of life? They wanted something bigger and more exciting than what they were doing, didn’t they? And if he went back into the Corps right now, there was sure to be promotion, because everybody needed technicians. This war in Korea wasn’t going to last long. Who ever heard of the North Korean army anyway? As soon as MacArthur got a full division or two in there, they’d fold up and go back where they came from. Probably he wouldn’t even see Korea. But the important thing was that there was going to be a real UN army, and of course the Marines would be part of it. So they’d travel, and see things, and really do the things they wanted to do. That’s what they agreed.
“Okay,” he said, “I’ll be a sucker—this one time.” And they’d laughed, and kissed, and they’d both known that he wasn’t being a sucker at all, but was being real smart. That was the way they’d laid out the future.
Ekland raised his head from his arms and shook it as if the motion would rid him of these thoughts. He left the tent and went out to the radio jeep, sheltered by its tarpaulin and windbreaker. He had work to do. At 2300 hours Battalion called to relay a message that the regiment on the other side of the reservoir had hit heavy resistance north of Yudam-ni, and all units should be on the alert. Ekland passed on this report to his captain. Mackenzie called the reinforced squad he had posted in the plant, to the company’s rear, just to be sure they were there, and awake. You couldn’t ring the whole peninsula with a single company, and this squad was his sole protection from the west.
For a few minutes Mackenzie lay awake to smoke a cigarette and watch, silently, while Raleigh Couzens anointed his rifle, massaging the oil into the thirsty steel. Couzens treated his rifle like a woman. Well, in some ways rifles were like women. While they came out of the factories alike as dancers in the Radio City chorus line, still they were individuals. Some were mischievous and tricky and unfaithful, and some were sweet tempered and reliable and easy to handle. Couzens had discarded his regulation carbine after the Inchon landing, protesting that he needed a more accurate weapon. He explained that he did a good deal of shooting at his place in Florida, and he was used to a good gun. So he had found this M-1 somewhere, and made it his. Couzens cleaned it every night, but on this night he gave it especial care.
Mackenzie wondered whether there was anything more that he could do, and he decided there was nothing, but that he had better be fully dressed. So before Couzens took out his platoon he dressed, and then flopped down and slept again. The next thing he heard was a bugle call, not reveille as it should be, but disturbing and eerie as a siren’s wail.
He was already groping for his carbine when he heard shots, and the bugle call again, and then cries of “Sha! Sha! Sha!” far off. He knew what sha meant. Kill. Outside the CP he watched the green Chinese rockets ascending in a semi-circle around his bivouac. His ears were attuned for the steady firing of Couzens’ heavy machine guns, which he knew should now commence, and the thud of his carefully sited mortars, but he did not hear them and he realized, suddenly and sickeningly, that the Chinese had not attacked across the spit of land. They were pouring across the ice, and had taken Dog Company in the rear.
Chapter Five
WHEN RALEIGH COUZENS led the Second Platoon down to the line of foxholes chopped into the neck of the Ko-Bong peninsula, he disposed two rifle squads on the alert, and inspected the mortar emplacements. He discovered that the night’s normal humidity, freezing on contact with the steel, had rimmed the tubes with ice, and he ordered this chipped away and the barrels kept clear. The foxholes were deep, and neatly shelved, so that a man could smoke, and lay out his gear, in comfort inside, and even light a little fire, when the circumstances permitted. On this night the circumstances, of course, did not permit.
He gave his sergeant the duty for two hours, and then curled up in his own hole and was immediately asleep. Couzens never suspected it, but his men were often puzzled by his able professional conduct in the field. When they were staged at Pendleton, they called him, behind his back, sometimes, “Our Playboy,” and sometimes, “Little Whitey.” Since he dressed meticulously and always had a girl on his arm, when off duty, and since it was usually a different girl each time, they speculated on his amours and his ancestry.
Some things about him they knew—that he had left college to join the Marines in the last war, and had been a second lieutenant in the fighting at Peleliu. He had graduated from the University of Virginia after the war, and then for some unfathomable reason had re-joined the Marines when obviously there was no need for it, for the poop was that at Quantico he had driven a Cadillac convertible. They also knew that he re-fought the Civil War loudly and endlessly with the Skipper, always taking the losing side. Once, so the word was, a Confederate flag had been discovered in his foot locker, and Mackenzie had been infuriated, but the flag had stayed aboard, so perhaps Couzens, in spite of his expensive uniforms and girls and cars, was a brave man.
When the sergeant awoke him at 0230 hours, Couzens took up his rifle, made certain the action was unfrozen, and then prowled his position, his senses tuned to the night. The moon was only two days past its fullness, and unobscured, so that anything moving in the white wastes around him should be easy to pick up. Couzens hoped this was true, for on just such a night the enemy could swiftly move an army that in daylight hid in the boondocks from the prying eyes of reconnaissance planes. He wished he had borrowed Sam’s good glasses.
Directly ahead of his defense line the road twisted through half-ruined Ko-Bong, lifeless as a village in a crater of the moon. But was it dead? Or were ghosts playing in Ko-Bong? He could swear he saw ghosts floating in the village street, slipping from house to house. It was as if all the dead men of Ko-Bong were stealing back into their homes. “Now this is strictly imagination,” he told himself aloud. But he saw them again, and this time he saw a shadow, and ghosts cast no shadows. He knew he had spotted something tangible, but logically it would be a white-clad Korean emptyi
ng his pot. Still, he would have to investigate. He nudged three men from their holes with the butt of his rifle, and in single file they started down the road to Ko-Bong, soundless except for the hiss of their boots through the powdered snow, Couzens in the lead.
It was like a stalk, Couzens thought, a careful, silent stalk for a chicken hawk you fancied hidden behind the Spanish moss in a tall cypress by the river. In Mandarin. Whenever he held his rifle in his hands, like this, he thought of his boyhood days when his father was alive and taught him the secrets of the hummocks and the swamp and the river. There seemed no possible point of meeting between Mandarin and Ko-Bong, except by the whim of war, and yet there was. There was the very name, Mandarin. It was said that one of his ancestors, a British sea captain who traded with the East, had brought the first Chinese orange seedlings to Florida, and these oranges, larger than the original Spanish oranges, were called Mandarin oranges. And this ancestor, this Captain Couzens, had planted the seedlings where the St. Johns curved around his property like a sinuous and protective arm, and thereafter the place was called Mandarin. China had given it the name.
And he remembered nights in Mandarin utterly quiet and still, like this night. The peace of Mandarin was so profound that the fall of pine needles on the warm and welcoming soil made a clatter, and Ko-Bong seemed just as peaceful. But Ko-Bong was dead and full of ghosts. His rifle was perfectly balanced, ready.
They were close to the first house of the village now, and Couzens raised his arm, and the patrol halted. Couzens listened. He subordinated every other sense to listening, as he had learned in the woods. He listened until he heard scratching sounds in the thatch roofs over the gray mud and dark clay walls, and he listened until he was sure those sounds were made by rats. And when he was certain he heard nothing else, he beckoned his men ahead.