Hold Back the Night

Chapter Twelve

IT WAS DURING this terrible night that the three wounded died, and the jeeps froze solid.

And it was on the following morning that Mackenzie jogged himself, and his men, into movement with the promise of the bottle of Scotch. It was the morning they ate combat rations that Ekland found in the pockets of the dead. It was the morning they were shadowed by the Mongol horsemen watching them from the cone-shaped hills across the gorge, and the morning they were ambushed by mortars when they reached a place of danger where the road left the protection of the cliff, and ran out into the rock-strewn flatland to touch a frozen stream.

And now Ackerman, the quiet corporal from Pennsylvania, lay dead out on the flatland, and under Ackerman was Dog Company’s last bazooka. Mackenzie had told Nick Tinker, the youngest of them all, to go out and bring back the bazooka, for without the bazooka he didn’t think they had a chance for it.

As Tinker slid out into the open from the shelter of the rocks, and the defilade of the hill, Mackenzie disposed his forces. He backed out of his own point of vantage, and in it placed Ekland with the BAR. “You cover Tinker,” Mackenzie ordered, “but don’t open fire unless you get a definite target. Don’t want to expose our position unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

He brought up Beany Smith, with an M-1, to support Ekland. Four men, under Heinzerling, he stationed further along the road, so that if a fire fight developed Dog Company would not be taken from the rear. For the others he found a secure place, around a corner of the hill, where they would be safe from fragments if the enemy brought the position under mortar fire. Then he himself squirmed up beside Ekland and Smith to observe Tinker’s progress.

Tinker was trying to remember how a jackrabbit behaved in the sand hills. This place reminded him of a wild canyon where one winter his brothers had spread a trap line, and he had stalked jacks with his twenty-two. This place looked much the same, and was no colder.

A jack ran a little, and then stopped dead, and when he stopped he blended into the background, and you could not see him. So Tinker paid careful attention to his surroundings, and avoided placing himself between the drifts of snow and the hills opposite, where the enemy watched. And he ran a little and then froze, like a jack.

Tinker wished his brothers could see him now. Matt, Pike, and Bill had been much older than he, and bigger, and stronger, and wiser in the ways of the ranch and the wilderness, and they had held him in contempt. But they could not have contempt for him now, darting out under the guns of the Chinese with more wit, and speed, and guts than they had ever shown. Specially picked by his captain—picked above all the older men.

Nick was the runt of the family, a child of the depression. And whenever, at table, Old Matt spoke of the depression—from which the Tinkers had never fully recovered and upon which he blamed most of his troubles—he looked at Nick. Nick was given to understand that in the cruel days of the depression his birth had been one in a series of undeserved financial catastrophes his father had endured. And he was given to understand he was unwanted, and entirely the fault of a careless mother.

The mother shielded him from insult and brutality as best she could, but there was little she could do, because she herself was trapped and enslaved. Sometimes, when the others were gone, she surrounded him with her arms and wept, and said, “My poor little boy. My poor little Nick.”

On his seventeenth birthday Nick saw a Marine Corps recruiting advertisement in a magazine, and was fascinated by it. The sergeant in the advertisement wore a splendid blue uniform, his chest was bright with ribbons, and the girl on his arm was incredibly pretty. His three brothers, when they had money, drove to Hyannis for the weekly Saturday night dances. They came back smelling of beer and boasting of girls. But Nick in all his life had never had a girl, or a drink, although of course he never admitted this to Dog Company. So he took a bus to Omaha, with his father’s written blessing, and joined the Marines.

There were no girls, and no blue uniforms either, in his seven months as a Marine. There was hard training at Lejeune, and then a long ocean voyage, and at Inchon he found himself a replacement in the First Division. He was given the patch of Guadalcanal, with the design of the Southern Cross, to wear on his sleeve. He was proud of it.

Now Tinker was close to Ackerman’s body. He had not yet been shot at. He hoped the captain was watching, to see how correctly he behaved.

The captain watched through his glasses. The kid was doing a wonderful job, and had not drawn fire. Sometimes the kid snaked on his belly, and sometimes he ran, and sometimes he vanished into the terrain. He wondered how the kid had learned it. Then Tinker disappeared entirely, and the captain shifted his glasses to Ackerman, because he couldn’t tell how close Tinker might be to the bazook.

Something moved within Mackenzie’s focus. It did not move like a man. It seemed only that a clod of earth shifted, but Mackenzie knew it was Tinker. Then, definitely, he saw Tinker bend over Ackerman, or what was left of Ackerman.

The two figures were fused, and immobile, for long seconds. Mackenzie found he was talking to himself. He was whispering, “Get the hell out of there, you dope. Get out, you stupid kid!”

At last, he saw the two figures in his glasses separate, and in that moment Ekland shouted, “Here they come!” Ekland’s long-barreled automatic rifle began to speak, in short bursts.

Mackenzie watched three, then two, then three more Mongol cavalrymen debouch from a rent in the hills across the gorge. He said, quietly, “Aim low, sergeant. Get the horses.”

He saw Tinker running, but at this distance it seemed Tinker barely moved, but Tinker had the bazook, all right. And he saw the short-coupled, shaggy ponies eating up the distance like quarter horses, and he knew the boy could not make it. He shouted for his men, back of him, safe behind the shoulder of the hill. He shouted for them to come up. It would be all over, one way or another, in a minute, and he did not believe the Chinese mortars could zero in on him in that time, and he had to have more firepower if Tinker and the bazooka were to be saved.

At the strip of ice that was the stream the Mongol horsemen slowed, and it was there that Ekland’s BAR began to find targets. Two horses dropped. And Mackenzie was aware of the welcome bark of rifles behind him. His men were firing slowly and steadily, and he knew that it was aimed fire, and he hoped they had remembered to set their sights for range and windage. Often, in battle, men forgot. Often men forgot to fire at all. There was nothing he could do to instruct or guide them now. It was all a matter of their training.

Four cavalrymen got across the stream and bore down on Tinker, and the captain could see they’d be able to cut him off. Then another pony crashed, but its rider was uninjured, and bounced from the ground and continued his charge. Although the range was extreme, Mackenzie began shooting at this man with his carbine, and at the fifth shot the Mongol fell.

The captain saw that Tinker was on the ground now, crouched and firing. He had been run to earth, and three cavalrymen, dismounted, were closing in on him, and Mackenzie could faintly hear their cries, and the nasty snicker of their burp guns. Then two figures only were running, and the one in front must have been Tinker, because this figure was lugging a bazooka. Ekland’s BAR jumped and rattled, and the second figure sank to his knees, and then sprawled backwards, contorted, and did not move thereafter.

When Tinker came closer Mackenzie thought he was purposely weaving, like a quarterback dodging through a broken field, but then he saw that the boy was badly hurt, and the captain left his concealment and ran out to meet him. The captain grabbed the bazooka, and then half-carried Tinker into the shelter of the rocks. “Litter!” Mackenzie called. “Litter and four men!”

Tinker lay in the litter with his legs spread, writhing like a fighter who has been fouled in the groin, and grinning in agony, but there was no time to help him then. It was time to leave this evil place. The captain motioned Ostergaard to take up the bazooka, and said, “Let’s get out of here.” He lashed his column with his tongue, and it moved. They had gone only a few hundred yards when mortars began crashing in the place where they had been.

A mile further along the road, when they had put another ridge behind them, the captain called a halt. It was necessary to do something about Tinker. Tinker’s cries were unnerving his men. One of the jericans was back there somewhere behind the hill, foolishly abandoned in the scramble, but the other had been brought out, and it held perhaps three gallons. His men built another pyramid of pebbles and stones, and saturated it with the gasoline that was left, and he had his fire. He edged Tinker’s litter close to the fire. He took off his gloves, and flexed his fingers close to the flame until they were no longer numb. Then he went to work.

With such a wound as this he had no experience. If no large artery was severed, he guessed the boy had a chance. If he could be got to an aid station, or a doctor—any kind of a doctor—even a Chinese doctor. And if he did not die from pain alone. Mackenzie had never heard of such a thing, but he thought that in this case it would be possible. From his musette bag the captain brought his first-aid kit, which he had supplemented from medical stores of his own choosing. In the kit were two morphine syrettes. After his experience on the Tenaru River, he had never been without them in the field. He ripped the plastic cap from the top of one of the tubes, exposing the sterile needle. He slammed the needle into Tinker’s arm, squeezing the tube flat.

The boy kept on screaming.

The captain ignored the sounds, but a few of the men turned away, white-faced. The captain dusted the wound with sulfa powder, and taped a dressing over it the best he could. Some of the men still watched in silence, but he sensed their nerves were going. He tried to force the penicillin capsules into Tinker’s mouth. It didn’t work. The boy couldn’t close his mouth to swallow, because of his pain.

In a taut voice, Ekland said, “Give him the other shot, captain.”

Mackenzie considered this. A half grain ought to be plenty. A half grain was enough for any man. All the morphine needed was a little time. It would work. It had to work. And in any case, there was only this one syrette left, and it might be needed later. Maybe Tinker would need it later, maybe somebody else, maybe even himself.

He thought of an alternative. He said to Ekland, “Hand me that bottle.” He couldn’t reach it himself. He was holding Tinker down.

“The bottle of Scotch?” said Ekland.

“Yes. The bottle of Scotch.”

Ekland found the leather case in the captain’s pocket, and pushed it into his hand.

“Tinker,” the captain said, bending low over the boy, “look at me. Look at me, I say! I’m going to give you a drink. I’m going to give you a big drink of Scotch whiskey and then you’ve got to swallow this penicillin.”

The men watched, wooden.

Tinker stopped making noises. He wet his lips with his tongue and said, “Sir, I don’t want whiskey. I want water.” He choked a little, and whimpered like a lost puppy and said, “I want my mother.”

The captain reached for one of the canteens thawing near the dwindling flame. “All right,” he told Tinker. “Water. One drink and then you swallow these.” He held out the pills.

The boy drank, and gulped the penicillin, and then the captain allowed him to wash it down with more water. Tinker was easier now, but his eyes were still desperate. “Captain,” he said, “you not going to leave me? You wouldn’t leave me, would you?”

“No,” the captain said gently. “We’re not going to leave you. Not now, or ever.” He brought out the cigarettes and counted them. “One to three men,” he said, “and Tinker can have one all to himself. Off your butts! Come on! Get going!”

Mackenzie trudged at the head of Dog Company, sharing his cigarette with Ekland and Beany Smith. Somewhere ahead he began to hear the thud and drum of cannon, and he knew it must be either the defenses of the perimeter—if there was a perimeter—or the guns of the fleet. The Chinese had no guns like that, nor would they spend ammunition so lavishly. It was encouraging, but the sound was far distant, and every fibre of him was tired. He realized that the ordeal with Tinker, now swinging quietly between four litter-bearers, had sapped his energy. It had dropped his vitality and reserves a full notch.

Beany Smith was aware that the captain was faltering. Back a few miles the Skipper had seemed fresh as any of them, but now Beany Smith knew he was fresher than the Skipper, and this frightened him. For the first time in his life Beany Smith had learned to depend on, and trust, somebody besides himself. He trusted the Skipper, even if the Skipper didn’t trust him.

Right from the first Beany Smith had hated Mackenzie, which was natural. Beany Smith hated authority, and the captain was authority. He began hating authority in his school, which was a very select school—selected for bastards, literal born-bastards, like himself. It was called an orphanage, and the papers referred to those at the school as “homeless waifs.” But he had known what the school was, and what he was, ever since he was six.

He ran off at fourteen, and was caught and sent back; and at fifteen he ran away twice again and was caught both times and returned, and he began to hate cops. At sixteen he knew enough of the world outside to make good an escape. He hitch-hiked to Memphis and got himself a job as a bag boy in a serve-yourself grocery store. After a year in the grocery he knew all the tricks, including those of the manager. For the first time he was eating well, but the manager and the company cops called it pilfering, and he was fired.

So he drifted with the seasons, picking apricots in California and apples in Oregon, and even oranges in Florida. He fell for a tired dance hall hostess in Chicago, and married her. She was something of a tramp. She spent her afternoons in the bedroom, reading the confession magazines littering her dressing table, and fixing her flaccid face. At night she’d usually be drunk. One night he looked behind the dirty cretonne skirts of the dressing table. That was where she cached her empty gin bottles.

He got himself a job selling mutuel tickets at Sportsman’s Park. When the racing season ended he hitchhiked to Reno and got a job as stickman at a dice table. It wasn’t true about his palming chips, but he was fired anyway, and the cops took him to the edge of town. Then they booted him.

So he went back to Memphis because in Memphis he knew a few people who’d buy him a meal, and give him a bed for a night or two. He was in trouble again soon enough. He snatched a car, although the technical charge was reduced to “joyriding.”

The judge asked his age and he said nineteen, although it was really twenty-two. That was smart. The judge gave him a choice—ninety days in the can or join the service. The Marines accepted him, after looking him over with tolerant care. His physical was good, and his mental test surprisingly high, and this seemed to have over-balanced his record, or what they knew of it.

This Skipper, this Old Man, had been rough on him, Smith thought, ever since they left the Stateside port of embarkation. But he’d got no more than he’d deserved. No phony raps. Mackenzie was rough, but square. Beany Smith sucked the last good from their cigarette, and said, “Captain, can I spell you with that musette bag, and the bottle?”

Mackenzie was startled. This was the first time that Beany Smith had ever volunteered for anything. The bottle, pulling at his pocket, had grown heavier, and the musette bag and carbine also seemed to be gaining weight. A man of thirty had already lost something. A march like this separated the men from the boys, and it was the boys, not the men, who could take it. “All right, Smith,” said the captain. “You can spell me.” He lowered his shoulder and slipped the strap of the bag, and he reached into his pocket and brought out the bottle and handed it to Private Smith. It was a surprising relief.

Beany Smith slung the bag over his shoulder, and cuddled the bottle under his arm, as the captain had in the early morning, when they started. And somehow he felt stronger. He felt he could carry the bag, and the bottle, forever. The Skipper had trusted him. The Skipper had made him part of something. He was part of Dog Company. He no longer hated the Skipper, or feared him, or was jealous or envious of him. “Captain,” said Beany Smith, “the girl who gave you this bottle—she’s your wife now, isn’t she?”

“That’s right—she’s my wife.”

“Get along pretty good with her?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I had a wife once. We didn’t get along so hot.”

“That’s too bad.”

“But I wish I was back with her now.” They walked in silence, matching strides, and then Smith said, “How come you didn’t drink the bottle when you got married? That was the time, wasn’t it?”

The captain’s laugh was muffled in his parka. “We talked it over, and decided not. Anyway, there was too much champagne.”

“It must have been a swell wedding.”

“Not so swell, it was wartime.” Even at that, it had been too fancy for his taste, and Anne’s, but the Longstreets had insisted on the full treatment. The marriage was three weeks after he’d got home, three weeks after he thought he’d lost her to the Air Force major. There’d been everything, even an arch of swords, and a general to lift a toast.

Mackenzie looked down at the bottle, in its red leather case, firm under Beany Smith’s arm. He recalled how they had the bottle between them, he and Anne, as they drove towards Tahoe that night, and how they talked about it. “Another reason we didn’t open it on the night we were married,” Mackenzie said to Beany Smith, “was because we decided to wait until V-E Day. We were sure that would be the biggest day in the lives of all of us.”

“That was right, wasn’t it, captain?”

“No, it wasn’t right. It should’ve been right, but it wasn’t. Anyway, we decided to postpone it until we had a baby.”

“Have one?”

“We certainly did!”

“Well, why didn’t you drink it then?”

Beany Smith was being awfully inquisitive for a second-class private, but Mackenzie found he didn’t mind, and wasn’t even irritated. “Well, when Sam, junior, was born we decided it wasn’t the time, either. It wouldn’t be fair to the ones that came after, if we drank it then.”

“So you’ve got other kids, captain?”

“No, not yet.” He found the men had been inching close to him, so they could listen. “Stop bunching up!” he roared. They fell back into column, as they should.

Mackenzie now believed that the walls of the gorge were not quite so sheer, and then he noted, through a gap in the hills off to the right, clouds of greasy smoke ascending to the glowering, slate-colored sky. He knew it was time to work out his problem on the map, and form a plan. “Take five,” he ordered. Without a fire to warm them, five minutes’ rest would be all they’d want.

He broke out the cigarettes, and distributed one to three men, as he had before, and posted his watch front and rear. Little Nick Tinker was asleep, or unconscious, so the cigarettes came out even. Then, as his men dropped to the ground, Mackenzie pulled out his map, and called for Ekland. Those fat columns of smoke, he knew from experience, came from burning fuel dumps. “Where do you figure those would be?” he asked Ekland, pointing at the pillars of smoke.

“Well, sir, Ten Corps has big ammo and fuel dumps at Hamhung. I think it must be those dumps burning.” Hamhung was the grimy industrial city six miles inland from the port of Hungnam.

Mackenzie inspected the map, and estimated their progress on the road from Koto-Ri. It checked. The pillars of smoke told him other things. Hamhung had been abandoned, but very recently. So a perimeter probably existed, although it must be much compressed. Still, in three or four miles they might run into the American lines, or anyway encounter a patrol.

The main Communist effort would naturally be on the main road, and the railroad, that ran through Hamhung. There, also, would be their heaviest concentration of troops. If he knew them, they’d all be rushing to Hamhung anyway, for the loot.

Then Mackenzie saw something on the map that made him frown. At a point ahead which he could not see, with his glasses, but still not far ahead, where according to the map the hills dropped away, a heavier road crossed his secondary road. “What do you think of this?” he asked the red-bearded sergeant, and jabbed with his gloved finger at the map.

Ekland looked at the map, and then looked up and concentrated on the terrain. “That looks like a bad spot, sir. But we’ve come further than I thought. We’ve done real good.”

“It doesn’t matter how far we’ve come. It’s where we’re going that counts. Think we’ll find a road block there?”

“If they have one anywhere, that’s where it’ll be. If they’re bringing tanks on down from the north, that’s where those tanks will be crossing our road. Right there.”

The captain nodded. Ekland had confirmed his own deduction. He turned to Beany Smith. “I’ll take the musette bag, and the bottle, now,” he said.

“I don’t mind carrying it on, sir.”

“Thanks, Smith, but from here on it’s all downhill. And it isn’t far.”

He slipped the bag over his shoulder, shoved the bottle into his pocket, and yelled, “All right, off your butts!” And they moved forward again.