In my opinion, the most surprising fact about Harvey Holt was his ability to quote poetry, for he was not a literary man, nor even one who bothered with the arts, yet in his freshman year at Colorado Aggies a Professor Carrington had asked during one of the first meetings of English 101 how many students could quote an entire poem, regardless of length. When only two hands went up, he cried, ‘Disgraceful. Poems are the world’s repository of significant experience and you ought to know some of them.’ He then said something which impressed Holt as being profound, as if no man prior to Carrington could have entertained such a thought: ‘Memorize a poem and you own it for life.’ Carrington had then made this proposition to his students: ‘For every fourteen lines of poetry you memorize before mid-terms, I will give you five extra points on your examination. Why do I nominate fourteen lines as the measure?’
A smart girl who had gone to high school in Massachusetts said, ‘Because that’s a sonnet.’
Holt had not heard the word before.
‘So there it is! You memorize twenty sonnets—and not only will your grade be one hundred, but you will be immeasurably richer.’
Holt, captivated by this bold proposal, went to Carrington’s office that afternoon to ask his advice on what to memorize, and Carrington asked, ‘Long or short?’ and to his own astonishment Holt replied, ‘Maybe something long,’ and Carrington said, ‘For a young man in an agricultural college, there are only three to consider’ and he laid them out: Matthew Arnold’s ‘The Scholar-Gypsy,’ Oliver Goldsmith’s ‘The Deserted Village’ and Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.’
The first was quite beyond Holt’s comprehension and the second was too long. He said, ‘I’ll try this one,’ and he could still remember those autumn days—when early snow appeared on the Rockies to the west and aspen turned gold along the Cache la Poudre—when he had memorized the simple, exquisite lines.
A curious thing happened. When he came to the last three stanzas, which constituted the epitaph, he found them printed in italic, and these he memorized in funereal tones, as if they were part of a church service. When it came time to recite the poem to Professor Carrington he botched up some of the more difficult central stanzas, but when he reached the italicized stanzas he could see them line by line engraved in heaven, and with profound gravity he delivered the epitaph for this young man who had lived and died unknown in a forgotten village:
Here rests his head upon the lap of Earth
A Youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown.
Fair Science frowned not on his humble birth,
And Melancholy marked him for her own.
Professor Carrington coughed and told the Okinawa veteran, ‘You pass.’
In his lonely work at the outposts, Holt had perfected his memorization of this poem and could now recite it practically without error. He had also memorized large chunks of ‘Horatius at the Bridge,’ and since this was done after his service on Okinawa, he recognized that certain lines of this poem epitomized Sergeant Schumpeter, and now when he recited them in the jungle or along the edge of the desert, he thought of his drill master:
Then out spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the Gate:
‘To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late;
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his Gods?’
But the two poems which Holt had grown to love best were two that I had not known before I heard him recite them. The first was a rollicking ballad he had picked up from some Australians who worked with him at one of his stations, ‘The Man from Snowy River.’ It dealt with a wild chase downhill during a stampede of horses, and it was a man’s poem, filled with manly images and robust rhymes. When Holt recited its larruping lines he threw his head back, and you could see him upon a horse, galloping down the side of some sunset mountain, disregarding the rocks and crevices. He always made you feel that the poem was better than it was, and I wondered why I had not heard of it. He told me it was a great favorite throughout Australia, and he made a deep impression on tough Aussies in various parts of Asia by standing in the shadows of some bar and slowly beginning the lines which made their pulses quicken:
He sent the flint-stones flying but the pony kept his feet
He cleared the fallen timber in his stride
And the man from Snowy River never shifted to his feet—
It was grand to see that mountain horseman ride.
The other poem was something quite special. I’ve asked a good many knowledgeable people about this epic of the American west, and so far no one has heard of it. Apparently it has always had wide circulation in states like Wyoming and Colorado, where almost any campfire will produce at least one man who has memorized it. The rhythm is peculiar in a wild, undisciplined prairie sort of way. I remember asking Holt several times if he was quoting the opening lines correctly, so he wrote off to Denver for a copy—and there it was:
… Lasca used to ride
On a mouse-gray mustang close to my side.
The poem told of an outlaw cowboy who had only one friend in the world, a tough Mexican girl named Lasca, who shared his luck through many adventures in the west, until the day when … Well, the ending is rather sticky, sort of a cowboy epic, but the power which these lines had to make ranch hands stare into space was extraordinary, or so Holt said.
I gathered that Harvey loved the poem because it assured him that occasionally in life lucky men sometimes do find women who will share the frontier, who will ride side by side. When the Ford Motor Company brought out a new car and called it the Mustang, Holt bought one of the first and had it shipped to Sumatra, but after a while he sold it.
Once as we drove across the semi-desert in Afghanistan he told me, ‘What I’d really like would be to have a couple of horses in one of the villages along the desert. And some girl who would be willing to ride … you know, she’d have her mustang, I’d have mine.’
If any base at which he worked had married couples, he went out of his way to be courtly and proper to the wives. He said that marriage was by and large a good thing and one should do what he could to make women feel needed. It was obvious that his own divorce rankled deeply, a mark of defeat for which he was principally to blame, and whenever he contemplated his failure to find a faithful woman like Lasca, you could see the disappointment in his face.
I never heard him speak poorly of his wife, but a man who had known them both in Turkey said of her, ‘A real tramp. Slept with three different men in Istanbul and shacked up with the steward on the boat home. Harvey was lucky to get rid of her.’
Harvey did not think so. Frequently, he spoke of the excellent care she gave their son, and once when he showed me a photograph of the boy, I saw beside him a very attractive woman in her thirties with blond hair and a movie-star kind of face. I said, ‘She’s prettier than the girls who used to sing with the bands,’ and he agreed.
I never learned all of ‘Lasca.’ Its broken rhythms were not in my style, but I knew enough lines to throw them at Holt when we were driving from one base to another, and he would pick them up, and soon our car would become a pair of horses and we were riding through the west with a fiery Mexican girl at our side:
She would hunger that I might eat,
Would take the bitter and leave me the sweet;
But once, when I made her jealous for fun,
At something I’d whispered, or looked or done …
She drew from her garter a dear little dagger,
And—sting of a wasp!—it made me stagger!
An inch to the left, or an inch to the right,
And I shouldn’t be maundering here to-night;
But she sobbed, and sobbing, so swiftly bound
Her torn rebosa about the wound,
That I quickly forgave her. Scratches don’t count
In Texas, down by the Rio Grande.
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The word which best symbolized Harvey Holt was patriotism, both in its ugly sense and in its best. He could not abide living in the United States, yet he loved the country and all it stood for: ‘By and large, it’s the best nation on earth, and if you can’t trust us, you can’t trust anybody.’ If you had asked him at seventeen why he wanted to enlist in the marines, he would have mumbled something about his country’s being in trouble. If you had asked why he acted as he had at Iwo Jima or Okinawa, he would have offered some incoherent answer about his nation and peril. And when I wanted an explanation as to why he was chucking a good job with UniCom to fight in Korea, he told me, ‘Who can rest easy if his country’s at war?’ And now, even though he did not understand the trouble in Vietnam too clearly, he supported our government and felt that Eisenhower and Kennedy had known what they were doing, but he wasn’t too sure about Johnson.
It was his opinion that a solid stint with the marines would be good for any young man, and he wished that more of the contemporary generation could spend some time with Sergeant Schumpeter: ‘He’d knock some sense into their heads.’
But his patriotism stopped short of blind subservience. It tended that way, but his shattering experience in Korea dispelled any idea he might have had that those who happen to be in command are always right.
The disaster began in late November of 1950 when his marine outfit started a triumphal march north from Hungnam to the Chinese border. The North Korean army was in confusion, and our high command believed that if the marines could compress it against the reservoirs in the north, they could destroy it and the Koreans would have to surrender. There was even confident talk that the war would be cleaned up by Christmas.
But as the march proceeded, Holt became increasingly apprehensive. He was then a full lieutenant, and kept warning his captain, ‘You know, Sergeant Schumpeter would be sick if he ever saw this marching order.’
‘And who the hell is Sergeant Schumpeter?’
‘Boot camp.’
‘He probably knew a lot about drill, but this is war.’
‘He also knew a lot about war.’
Holt got nowhere with his warning, and this annoyed him, for he could see that his marines had to be headed for trouble. He was so concerned that he insisted upon speaking with the major and then the colonel.
He said, ‘I don’t want my marines spread so thin that one man can’t see the man ahead of him. The enemy could infiltrate us so easy …’ He was assured that the high command, both in Japan and Korea, knew what it was doing, that this was the final push and that with luck they’d have the North Koreans backed up to the reservoirs within six days.
‘What about the Chinese?’ he asked. They told him that intelligence had the Chinese problem under control, but when he returned to his men and found them even more strung out than when he left, he remembered Sergeant Schumpeter’s dictum that troops had to be kept compact, especially when moving into country that the enemy had recently held, so he tried to bring his front men back and his rear men forward, in order to maintain some semblance of cohesion, but when he had completed this move, a major stormed up and yelled, ‘Goddammit, Holt, you’re creating big gaps front and back. Now forget your own little problem and get these troops back into position.’
Holt had obeyed, but when he reviewed his men he found that it took him more than thirty minutes to run from the lead man to the tail. Few of his marines could see their buddies fore or aft, and as for enemy infiltration, he told me later, ‘Infiltration? Hell, the Chinese could have marched a company of men right across the heart of our company, if they had spaced themselves. As a matter of fact, that’s what they did.’
‘How were you sure they were Chinese?’
‘Intelligence, of course, were sure they weren’t. But if you march straight at a country’s border, isn’t it natural for that country to send its troops south?’
At dusk on the fifth day, when Holt was numb with anxiety, the Chinese infiltrators struck, precisely as he knew they would, and because the marines were so strung out, so incapable of supporting one another, the slaughter was sickening. If ever in the history of American arms our leadership betrayed our foot soldiers, it was during this march north to the reservoirs. Our marines were thown blindly against an enemy that had not been identified, located, estimated or prepared against. Our men were forced to march in indefensible dispositions, with inadequate support, inadequate food, inadequate ammunition. It was not a gamble of great dimension which, if it had succeeded, would have led to some great triumph; it was sheer stupidity enforced by blind arrogance, and it collapsed in tragedy as it was destined to do from the first.
Holt once told me at Don Muang, when I met him after an upland trip through Thailand, ‘Marines like me were taught to think of the Chinese as skinny, weak-willed little guys from Canton who ate rice and ran laundries. The official doctrine was that one marine was equal to ten gooks. Well, the Chinese we met at the reservoirs were from the north. They ate meat and potatoes. They weren’t skinny. They weren’t weak-willed. And God knows, they weren’t little. In the first fights they kicked the shit out of us. Now grant they had every advantage. They were in compact formations and we were spread all over the landscape, but they licked us … they licked us very bad.’
It was against these big, well-fed northern Chinese that Harvey Holt performed one of the gallant acts of the Korean War. In weather that had turned bitter cold, with snow falling and supplies nonexistent, he gathered his shattered company in a low cover of trees, made a brutal assessment of their capacity—‘No food, no water, no ammunition, no heavy guns, no captain, no communication with headquarters, no plan’—and by sheer guts led them south for eleven days, holding them together, avoiding combat with the Chinese wherever possible, and inspiring them with the belief that they could make it back to Hungnam and the boats that would evacuate them.
It was an ordeal. A newspaperman, who came upon the unit when it was one day out of Hungnam, wrote a glowing account of the bravery these men were exhibiting even then. He could only guess what it must have been like farther north. When the high command heard what Holt had accomplished they made him a captain on the spot, and every man among the survivors applauded. There was not one who said, ‘Aw, he didn’t know his ass from his elbow. He was lucky.’ They knew that Holt had known. It was of this experience that he once told me, ‘I owe my life to Sergeant Schumpeter,’ for apparently when the days and nights of retreat became intolerable—truly more than a man could bear—he had recalled the bellowed advice of Schumpeter: ‘Keep your men together. Keep to the high ground even if it kills you. In freezing weather wrap a cloth about your breechlock at night. Don’t bother to melt snow to drink it. Eat the snow. You’ll get the water.’ And so on, through that litany of accumulated experience that runs a straight line back to Hannibal and Scipio.
When memory of the disaster had faded, masked as much as possible by clever propaganda releases, the agencies of public opinion swung into action to convert the Hungnam retreat into a victory. The riposte of a marine colonel was widely broadcast: ‘Retreat, hell. We’re advancing in a new direction.’ Even a movie was made with that title, its flamboyant heroism sparking a new faith in the marines. It now became fashionable to speak of the retreat as a glorious feat of arms, planned for in advance and proving the superiority of American troops.
Holt knew different. It was a disaster, a crushing defeat. An ill-led and ill-prepared American army had been overwhelmed by a well-led and well-prepared Chinese army, and if there was glory in the affair, one had to fall back upon strange definitions to substantiate it. Heroism, yes. Glory, no. Unless there is glory in completely botching a job and escaping with more men than chance would have dictated.
In later years Holt tried to get his Korean experience into focus. The fact that it had been so sorely mismanaged did not disqualify the marines. They were following orders, and although they did look pathetic when the Chinese hit, they had quickly reestablished themselves
and had even shown a certain grandeur in their ability to absorb defeat and still withdraw in order and not in rout. In Holt’s reappraisal the ordinary marines did not suffer.
The high command, both marine in Korea and army in Japan, were subjected to severe criticism at first, for Holt, at the lieutenant’s level, had easily foreseen what was going to happen, what had to happen, and he thought it strange that the high-powered intelligence types had been blind to the inevitabilities. He blamed them principally.
General MacArthur came in for no blame whatever: ‘He was back in Tokyo and had to rely on what intelligence told him.’ I asked whether MacArthur could have known that the marines were marching north into the jaws of three hundred thousand enemy in single-file formation, with thirty yards between men. ‘A general can’t know everything. I don’t fault MacArthur. It was like when Humphrey Bogart guided his boat into those weeds with the leeches. He couldn’t be expected to know everything.’
Then, as time passed, Holt looked back upon the Hungnam catastrophe as a minor incident that overtakes armies and nations: ‘We pulled out of it.’ In fact, when the Vietnam war escalated, he made a great effort to get an active assignment, but was informed that he was too old for his rank. He told me once that he thought of the whole Vietnam war as an overgrown Hungnam miscalculation. ‘Something went wrong somewhere, but a few good men could straighten it out.’ If he had not had his experience with the incompetence of Hungnam, he would surely have blamed Vietnam solely on the politicians, as did most of the other tech reps. Holt, having seen for himself what could happen with even the best intentions, was not so sure.