Hold Back the Night

Chapter Ten

SINSONG-NI WAS NO larger than Ko-Bong, and more dismal, for few of its houses of mortar and clay, and huts of mud, remained intact. Some had been broken by bombs and rockets, and all had been holed by strafing planes. This seemed curious to Mackenzie, for he had heard of no ground fighting in this area. Sinsong-ni was merely an isolated village on an almost forgotten ribbon of road in a desolate section of an unimportant land. Then Mackenzie saw that the fronts of a number of the houses had been crushed in, as if by a great fist, although the roofs were undamaged, and he realized what must have happened here, some time in the past. Communist tanks, retreating from their defeats at Wonsan, must have chosen this village as a hideaway in the daylight hours, when American fighter-bombers, like swarms of hawks, sought them out. The Communists had discovered a quick and effective method for hiding a tank. You rammed it through a wall, and into a house. The tanks stayed in the houses until nightfall, like rabbits in thickets, but somehow they had been discovered, and the village had been shot up and rocketed and bombed.

Mackenzie saw smoke rising from only one chimney, and he chose this house as his CP, and sent in Kato and Vermillion to thaw out some rations, while he himself superintended the care of his vehicles. In the confusion after battle, the tarps for the hoods of the jeeps had been forgotten, or lost. But he found two sleeping bags, and protected the hoods of two of his jeeps with these, and the third jeep he drove into a house that had been bashed in by a tank. He assigned two men to each jeep, and ordered them to stand two-hour watches, and turn over the motors for five minutes in every hour. At this moment the jeeps were all-important. Without the jeeps Dog Company would lose its mobility in battle, its supply train, and whatever chance it had to push through to its objective.

Then Mackenzie went into the house with the fire. It was filled with his men. Like all Korean houses of its type, it was comfortably warm, for it had radiant heat, invented some four thousand years before the idea occurred to Americans. At the end of the larger room was the combination stove and fireplace, with its three holes to receive the great iron pots. At the far end of the house was the chimney, and the flue ran the whole length of the house, under the hard-packed clay floor, so that heat flowed everywhere evenly upward from the earth.

Some of his men already rested full length on the floor smoothed by the body oils and feet of generations. Others watched while cans of rations thawed and warmed in the pots. In the second room a lantern burned, and Mackenzie smelled the sour smoke of peanut oil.

In this second room was something he had not seen for so long a time that the sight of it startled him. It was a bed, a real bed with a mattress. It was true that it was a narrow, brass bed as hideous as if it had been imported from the back hallway of a four-dollar-a-week rooming house. But still it was a bed, and there was a spread on it, and it seemed as luxurious as a suite in the Waldorf. Raleigh Couzens was sitting on the edge of this bed, bouncing a bit, testing the springs and the mattress. “I saw it first,” Couzens said.

“I rank you,” said Mackenzie, shrugging his carbine and his musette bag from his shoulders.

“We can both use it,” suggested Couzens. “We’ll take turns.”

“Like hell,” said Mackenzie. “This one night, I’m going to sleep on a bed. If I get up to inspect the vehicles, and the guard, then you can use it while I’m gone.”

“Don’t you think it’s wide enough for both of us?” asked Couzens, plaintively.

“Nope,” said Mackenzie. “I don’t.” He noticed the old man sitting on the bench in the corner. The old man had been hidden by Kato’s back. He saw that Kato was speaking to the old man, in what sounded like Japanese, and Mackenzie walked over and put his hand on Kato’s shoulder, and took a better look.

He was a very old man, and the lines in his face were deep and dark, as if they had been burned in weathered wood, and he wore gold spectacles with square rims. He wore the cone-shaped hat, exactly like a Halloween witch’s, that marks the Korean patriarch. His ankles seemed no larger around than a small child’s, and his shoulders were bent and bony, and yet his shoulders carried his white robe with a certain grace, like a toga. “Who’s this?” Mackenzie asked Kato.

“This is the old man who lives here,” said Kato.

“Yes, but who is he?”

“Well, he teaches school here in this village. Or did.”

“Ask him whether there are any Chinese troops around. No, wait a minute. He wouldn’t know that. Ask him whether there are any North Korean guerrillas.”

“I did, sir. He doesn’t know. He says he never knows when soldiers are around until they come into his house. He doesn’t leave his house. He just stays here and reads.”

Mackenzie saw a wooden case in the corner. It was filled with paper-backed books. He picked up one of these books. It was in Japanese. Mackenzie noticed that the old man’s eyes followed his movements alertly, and the old man spoke to Kato. Kato replied, and the old man nodded.

“I told him you weren’t going to take his books,” said Kato.

“Tell him we won’t take anything that belongs to him,” said Mackenzie. “And ask him about the rest of the people in this place. What happened to them?”

Kato spoke to the old man, lengthily, and the old man replied, and in replying he became excited, and his bird-thin hands twisted and shook. When he finished speaking the old man nodded at Mackenzie, as if he knew that Mackenzie would understand.

“Do you mind if I sit down, captain?” Kato said. “I’m pooped.”

“No, of course not,” Mackenzie said. Kato sat down on the bench alongside the old man, and Mackenzie sat down on the other side.

Kato frowned, as if it required some thought to translate exactly. “Well, he says a short while ago the Communists came to the village with a great voice on a truck. I suppose he means the loudspeaker on a sound wagon. Everybody in the village had to come to listen. The Communists said that the Americans were invading the land, and would kill them all. So all the men between sixteen and forty had to enlist. Most of them did enlist, he said, but some didn’t believe this loudspeaker, and ran away. None of them came back, and so there was a very small crop.”

“A short while ago?” said Mackenzie. “How short?”

Kato asked a question and the old man replied. “Last summer,” said Kato.

“What happened to everybody else?” asked Mackenzie.

“Well, apparently North Korean units, and later Chinese units, came through the village, and most of the young women disappeared. Then there came what the old man called ‘the day of hell.’ Seems that the Chinese when they used this road would stop in the village during the daylight hours and hide their tanks, but one day a lot of planes came over and blew this place apart and killed a lot of people.”

“Not all of them?” Mackenzie said.

“Oh, no, sir. Not all of them. But those who were left alive were afraid to stay, for fear the planes would come back. So the older men had a meeting, and it was decided that the village should move. The older men, and the older women, and the children who were left, they moved to another place. The old man said he didn’t move because he could not take his books, and his books are all he has left. Besides, he is ready to die. He is old and tired and hungry and sick.”

“Where did they move to?” Mackenzie asked.

Kato asked the old man, and there were a good many Japanese monosyllables between them, and then Kato turned to the captain and said: “He won’t tell.”

“Why not?”

Kato hesitated, and then he said, “Captain, he’s afraid we might go out and find them and kill them.”

“You’re fooling!”

“No, sir, I’m not fooling. He thinks the Americans want to kill the Asiatics. He honestly does.”

It was warm in this house, and Mackenzie took off his gloves and rubbed his face with his fingers and discovered that he had grown a considerable beard. He put two cigarettes in his mouth, and lit them, and handed one to Kato. Then he thought of the old man, and offered him a cigarette, but the old man refused. “Where in hell did he get that idea?” Mackenzie said.

“It’s hard to put everything he said together,” said Kato. “But the way I figure it is like this. Most of his life, the Japanese have been in control here, and everybody read and spoke Japanese, and the Japanese put out a lot of anti-American propaganda, I guess. He spoke about the Oriental Exclusion Act, and the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. He doesn’t particularly like the Japanese. He said their administrators gouged everybody, and the country was run for the landlords. But he said at least the Japanese didn’t think the Koreans were an inferior race. They were the same color.”

Mackenzie realized that the color of which Kato spoke was also Kato’s color, and that Kato’s ancestors probably, for the most part, were Japanese, and Mackenzie for a moment felt embarrassed. He decided to ask a direct question. “What do you think about that, Kato?”

“He’s got something,” Kato replied directly. “He hasn’t got anything for me. I’m a Hawaiian, and a Hawaiian is probably better off than anybody else in the world. We don’t have those problems. We don’t have them at all. Except for one thing, sir. Hawaii is a part of the United States. Hawaii is a good sound part of it. But Hawaii isn’t a state. We deserve to be a state. We’re anyway as good as Mississippi, aren’t we?”

“So far as I’m concerned,” said Mackenzie, “better.” He looked out through the door into the larger room, where Couzens warmed his hands over the fire. Somehow he was relieved that Couzens wasn’t listening.

Kato spoke again to the old man, gesturing, and then said to the captain: “I told him I was part Japanese, and part Chinese, and part Polynesian. But he doesn’t believe me. He says that’s impossible.”

Mackenzie said, “We really fouled it up, didn’t we? I mean when people like this old man can believe like that? They don’t know much about us, do they? They meet missionaries, and the Big Time Operators in Shanghai and Hong Kong, and the Standard Oil proconsuls. That’s all they know about us.”

“What’s a proconsul?” Kato asked.

The captain considered Kato’s question, and he realized Kato was only twenty, or at most twenty-one, and hadn’t had much of a chance to absorb ancient history, and so he was careful in his answer. “Well, he’s an official who performs executive duties outside his own country. He rules for his country outside his country. Like MacArthur. MacArthur’s our proconsul in Japan. It’s a Roman word.”

“I see,” said Kato.

The old man reached under the bench and brought out an ancient staff, polished and oiled by years of human touch, and the old man leaned on this staff, and spoke to Kato in Japanese, for a considerable time.

“This old man,” said Kato, “he wants to know… well, sir, he wants to know what cooks. He wants to know what we’re doing here. He wants to know what we want with Korea. He says he has read a lot about the United States, and he knows we are bigger than Korea, so what do we want with Korea?”

“Tell him—” Mackenzie began, and then he realized the futility of explanation, of the enormous and unbridgeable gap that separated their minds, and he said, “Tell him I don’t know.”

Kato spoke to the old man, and the old man replied, and Kato said, “He is tired and he asks your permission to lay down on the floor and sleep.”

“On the floor!” said Mackenzie. “Hell, tell him to get into his own bed. I don’t want his bed. I didn’t even know he was here when I told Couzens I wanted the bed. Take him to the bed, Kato.”

Kato took the old man to the bed, and Mackenzie sat on the floor to complete his day’s duties. He opened his musette bag, and took out his company roster, and then he called Couzens and Ekland, as a precaution. “I’m recording casualties,” he told them. “I’m checking off those I know were killed, up the road, and listing those who are still here. That bunch of wounded we sent back to Koto-Ri I’m marking wounded and missing, because there’s no way of telling whether they’ll make it back or not, and anyway I’m pretty sure some of them are going to hack before they get back. I’m making a special note on the corpsmen, and their escort. I want you guys to know this, because if anything happens to me you’ll have to take care of the records.”

“You give me the creeps,” said Ekland.

“Well, it gives me the creeps to have to do this, but this is a thing a company commander has to do, when he’s lost his gunnery sergeant and his clerk, and so you guys might as well know about it.”

“I’m not an officer,” said Ekland.

“Doesn’t matter,” said Mackenzie. “You never can tell. And both of you might as well know this too. You have to write the letters. You won’t want to write them, and you won’t know what to say, but you’ve got to do it.”

Mackenzie replaced the company roster, and lay down and put the musette bag under his head, and sighed and wriggled until he was comfortable, and slept. Ekland went into the larger room and made a pillow of his parka and lay down beside Ackerman. All the others were asleep, but Ackerman was still awake, looking up through his spectacles at the smoke eddying under the thatch. “What’s the trouble, Milt?” asked Ekland.

“Just thinking.”

“What about?”

“Pris. You remember I wrote that letter to Pris, telling her to buy a car?”

“Sure. Why shouldn’t she buy a car?”

“I’m thinking she won’t be able to afford it.”

“Why not?”

“I just don’t think she will,” said Ackerman, and turned on his side and pretended sleep, and Ekland, seeing that Ackerman had no desire to talk, slept.