Hold Back the Night

Chapter Three

AS THE COMMUNICATOR for Dog Company, Sergeant Ekland had charge of all the radio equipment. After the regiment settled down at the reservoir, and the company was assigned security patrol at Ko-Bong, guarding a triangular spit of land extending into the frozen waters, he moved a radio receiving unit to his tent, and placed it between his cot and Ackerman’s, so that he and Ackerman could listen to the news, and music, and Stateside shows broadcast by AFN.

Ekland and Ackerman had a number of things in common. They were older men. They were twenty-five. They each loved one woman. The four others in Ekland’s tent talked continuously of women, but the women of whom they talked weren’t their women. They were remote Hollywood beauties, or pin-up girls freshly clipped from Life, or high school steadies whom they now endowed with unmerited passion and sophistication, or the wise little tramps of San Diego and Norfolk dance halls and juke joints, who in warping memory acquired sincere lips and soft voices, and were no longer predatory. But Ekland and Ackerman really had women, Ackerman a wife and Ekland the girl he was to marry, if he ever got home. Time and distance, compassionate artists, were kind to all these women, painting over their defects, retouching their faces, and molding their bodies anew. So when the men told outrageous lies about their women, and boasted of their own sexual prowess, it was not that they lied, really. That was the way they remembered it.

After evening chow on November 24, Ackerman, Ekland, and the other four in the tent—Swede Ostergaard, Kato, Heinzerling, and Petrucci—listened to the six o’clock news and caught the MacArthur communique. Then Ekland clicked off the radio, for he knew that next to women, the men liked best to talk of the progress of the war, and their chances of getting home.

“What in hell does he mean?” asked Heinzerling. “Massive compression envelopment? Who’s compressing who?”

“Us,” said Ekland. “We’re compressing. Not us personally, but those boys from the Seventh up on the Yalu River, and our other regiments, over on the other side of the reservoir at Yudam-ni.”

“I bet they’re sitting on their fannies, just like us, trying to keep warm,” said Heinzerling, a dark, wide-shouldered man nurtured in the Youngstown steel mills.

“What a place to fight a war!” said Petrucci. “You could look all over the world, and not find a place like this. Why can’t we fight a war in a nice, clean country like Germany, with running water, and real houses, and indoor heads?” Petrucci lived in Garden City, Long Island, and his brother had served under Patton, so he knew about these things.

“It’s because we’re Marines,” said Heinzerling. “Where do they send the Marines? Either a jungle or a rock.”

“Chateau Thierry,” said Ekland. “Belleau Wood. Paris.”

“What’s that?” asked Heinzerling.

“You wouldn’t know,” said Ekland. “First World War.”

“I guess you were there,” said Heinzerling. “You weren’t even a glint in your old man’s eye.”

Ekland estimated Heinzerling’s age. “I was at a place called Iwo,” he said, “when you were a junior in high school. That is, if you got that far.”

“Well, what I would like to know,” said Petrucci, “is who picked out this goddam icebox full of fleas and gooks and goons and Chinks in uniforms that look like those old-fashioned comforters they used to put on beds. Who did it? Who’s responsible?”

“I guess MacArthur,” said Ackerman.

“It wasn’t MacArthur,” said Ekland. “It was Truman.”

Petrucci made a rude noise.

“I don’t think it was Truman,” said Heinzerling. “I think it was that Republican, Duller, or Dullest, or whatever his name is, in the State Department.”

And they argued politics. Both were too young to vote, and their thoughts on politics were vague and juvenile, and based on faulty information, but still they wrangled, and got mad, and perhaps might have fought with their fists if Ekland had not told them to shut up.

Ekland walked over to the map they had tacked to the top of an ammunition case and nailed to their tentpole. He swung the light so he could see better. They had everything, there alongside the reservoir, everything except women. Everything had come up behind them from Wonsan, even the mobile generators. That was American efficiency. That was the way this generation of Americans liked to fight their wars—with all modern conveniences. If death came they could accept it, providing it was a clean, antiseptic death, preferably in the shining aluminum shell of a fighter plane in the clean sky, or the shining steel armor of a ship in the clean sea. The high command recognized that Korea was filth, the anal passage of Asia, which American foot soldiers would consider an unfit place to die in unless proper facilities were provided. Ekland looked at the map and said, “It doesn’t look like much, does it?”

The map was a full page torn out of Stars and Stripes. It was a good map, for its size, just as Ekland was a good man, for his size. He wasn’t large, nor were his shoulders particularly broad or his chest deep, although he was tidily constructed, as if nature had fashioned him economically, to get the most energy out of the least poundage. “It doesn’t look like much,” Ekland said, “but I say it is much. I don’t give a damn who put us in here—MacArthur or Truman or the UN—I say it was right. Because if we lost Korea, we’d lose Asia. All Asia. India. The N.E.I. Hong Kong. Malaya. Indo-China. The Philippines, and finally Japan. Know what would happen then?”

“No,” said Heinzerling, somewhat awed. “What would happen then?”

“Then the Russians would have secured their Eastern flank, and they’d be free to pile it on the west. As it is now they don’t dare move in the west. We’re too close to Vladivostok and Khabarovsk. Those are their big bases out here. That’s where they stage their supplies for the Chinese. If we’d folded without a fight here in Korea, we’d have folded everywhere. If we didn’t fight here, then the French would know we wouldn’t fight for Indo-China—or France—and the Italians would know we wouldn’t fight for Italy, and the Germans—hell, they’d be speaking Russian. You know what Churchill said about the Germans—‘They’re either at your throats or your heels.’ Well, they’d be at our throats again, if we gave up Korea.”

“Where did you learn all that crap?” asked Petrucci.

Ekland wheeled on them. When Ekland began to speak, or move, as now, he increased in stature. Until then he had appeared simply an average young man with close-cropped red hair who had been an assistant engineer for NBC in the Merchandise Mart, Chicago. He started to explain where he had learned it, and then he realized that being much younger, and without his sophistication, they wouldn’t understand. You couldn’t explain the long, early morning seminars in Al’s Diner with Si Cooper. Si had been a foreign correspondent until his paper merged, and the new management considered foreign correspondents a useless luxury. Now Si covered Chicago crime, or tried to, for NBC. Nor could Ekland explain the long talks with Molly, and how stubborn she was for a girl of twenty-three, insisting that their only real security lay in a stable world. He remembered one phrase. “When we have babies,” she said, “I want to be pretty sure they’ll grow up. That’s the kind of social insurance I want.” And he couldn’t talk of the nights in the control room, when everything ran smoothly and there was time to read the fascinating books on the Balkans, and India, and Afghanistan, and the Middle East, that apparently nobody else wanted to read because you could buy them from publishers’ overstock in any book store. He and Molly joked about what she called his “nineteen-cent education,” and yet he always knew she was glad the walls of his two-room apartment were lined with such books, because she had plans for him. All he said to Petrucci was, “Never mind where I learned it. Logical, isn’t it?”

“Maybe,” said Petrucci. Petrucci would never dare talk to a platoon sergeant, or the Marine Gunner, like that, but Ekland, after all, was only a technical man, and a private could talk to a technical man who did not command troops. Men who commanded troops were different. They knew everything, and you didn’t dare dispute them.

“Not only that,” said Ekland, “but if the Russkies got Europe, then they’d have the Med too. They’d have the steel of the Ruhr, and the oil of the Middle East, and steel is the muscle of war, and oil is the blood of war. And when they got Belgium they’d get the Belgian Congo, and its uranium, and England would be helpless. We’d have isolation, all right. We’d have it!”

“Well,” said Ackerman, polishing his spectacles, “that made sense back in June, but what’s the sense in going on, now that we’ve won it?”

“Look, Milt,” Ekland said, “I’m not so sure we’ve won it.”

“That’s what you think,” said Ackerman. “What’s the scuttlebutt? What’s MacArthur say? Home by Christmas.” Ackerman took the sergeant’s buckboard from its nail on the tentpole, found a pencil, and radio dispatch blanks, sat cross-legged on his sleeping bag, and began to write.

“I suppose you’re telling her we’ll be home by Christmas,” said Ekland. “Well, you’re nuts. If we all started right now we couldn’t get home by Christmas. Not even with an air lift.”

Ackerman looked up from what he was writing. “No, I don’t say we’ll be home Christmas. I’m just telling her to go ahead and buy the car, because we’ll sure be home soon. She ought to get a good used car, say ’forty-nine Chevvy or Plymouth, for under thirteen hundred, don’t you think?” The Ackermans had been wanting to buy a car ever since they were married in 1948, but Priscilla wouldn’t have a jalopy, because she said it would be bad for their morale. And Milton didn’t believe in buying things on time. But now, with everything going so well, and the allotment money piling up, now was the time to buy one.

“Sure, I think she ought to get a car,” Ekland agreed.

“When I get home,” said Petrucci, “I’m going to get a convertible. Cream-colored.”

“I think she ought to get a car right now,” Ekland went on, “because I think this thing is going to last a long time, and it’s going to get worse, and pretty soon it’ll be like last time. No cars.”

“MacArthur says it’s all over. Ekland says it’s just starting. Who knows more, Ekland or MacArthur?” said Petrucci.

“About some things, MacArthur. About other things, me,” said Ekland. “MacArthur hasn’t been home in a long time. Years. He doesn’t know what the people are thinking. He remembers how it was after the last war, everybody screaming to bring the boys home. So it’s smart, politically, to talk about bringing the boys back home. That’s what he thinks, but he’s operating on past performance, and this is a different horse. Nobody wants us to come home this time. They want us to stay out here and fight. They’d rather have us fight on the Yalu than on theMississippi.”

“Personally,” said Petrucci, “I have fit enough.”

“Look,” said Ekland. “Nobody stuck a bayonet up your ass and said, ‘You’re a Marine!’”

“Now don’t get sore, sarge,” said Petrucci.

“I’m not sore. But we’re all here because we wanted to be here. Maybe for different reasons. Milt, he stayed in the reserve. Maybe he wanted that Navy gravy.” The Marine Corps reservists got their checks from the Navy Department. “You others, you all volunteered. I don’t know why. I don’t give a damn. But you know why. And this is where you wanted to be—right here.”

“Not me,” said Petrucci, a slim, olive-skinned boy over six foot. “I want to be in a cream-colored convertible driving out the Parkway.”

“With a broad,” Heinzerling added.

“Yeah, with a broad. Now I know a real hot thing who lives in Jackson Heights, and she—”

“I tell you what,” Ekland interrupted. “You may get a drive out the Parkway—in a box—with your dog tags on it instead of a license plate. Because these Chinks aren’t through. Their top guy, Mao—I can’t pronounce it—he isn’t through. He wants you, Petrucci, and he wants me.”

Vermillion, one of the captain’s runners, stuck his head through the tent flap, his breath steaming in front of his face as if he had come in a hurry, and said, “Kato here?” He saw Kato, flat on his back on his sleeping bag, with his eyes closed. “Kato. Skipper wants you. Right now!”

Kato lifted his head. “Yeah? Why?”

“He’s got Beany Smith up at mast. Some gook woman claims he tried to rape her.”

“Who’d want to rape a gook?” said Kato, lifting his head. “Particularly a Ko-Bong gook.” Kato, whose ancestry included Polynesian, Japanese, Chinese, and New England missionary, or so he believed, was undisturbed by the fact that sometimes gooks mistook him for a fellow gook.

“Beany Smith, he’d want to rape a gook,” said Heinzerling. “And maybe me, maybe I’d want to rape a gook, right now.”

“Kato, scram out of here!” Ekland commanded, suddenly serious and authoritative. If the captain was kept waiting, somebody’s hide would fry, and Ekland didn’t want it to be his.

Kato came to his feet in a lazy and yet lithe motion, and was gone.

“Now in Pusan,” said Heinzerling, “I saw some gook women who weren’t too bad. But I hear tell these Japanese girls, they’re terrific. Now, if I get leave in Tokyo, the first thing I’m going to do is…”

And they went back to their talk of women.

Geography is the scorecard of war, and so there were thousands of maps among the American forces in Korea, in addition to the one tacked on Ekland’s tentpole, and one of the most detailed of these was in the war room of the group which called itself JANAIC, in the South Korean city of Taejon. JANAIC meant Joint Army Navy Air Intentions-of-the-enemy Council. Of course this was a name that nobody could remember, and that is why it called itself JANAIC.

JANAIC had been established, when the war matured, to speed analysis about what the enemy intended to do. If news and information and intelligence about the enemy followed the long and twisting chain of command, with usual military rigidity, then everything from Korea would have to be funneled through Tokyo and Washington before it came back to Korea. JANAIC had been set up to short-circuit these attenuated communications. It sounded like a good idea at the time, but like all councils on what everyone calls “the very highest level,” it had no troops, and no authority.

JANAIC could analyze, JANAIC could deduce, JANAIC could ponder, and JANAIC could recommend. But JANAIC could not act, and so when the Red tide receded, JANAIC found itself in a backwash. Who cared about the enemy if the war was practically over? What was really important was the shipping schedule, Stateside-bound.

Nevertheless, on this evening JANAIC met as usual in its room in the modern brick schoolhouse. Unless JANAIC was in session, the map was covered with black curtains, and the room was guarded. For this map held all the secrets—the movements of fleets and air groups and divisions, the locations of headquarters and ammunition dumps and prospective airfields, the crayoned black circles on the acetate overlays that told of friendly forces operating in enemy territory.

The map dominated the front wall of the schoolroom and hid the blackboards. There were only four men in the room, each cramped in a child’s desk, attentive to the map as if it were the teacher. Two of the men were drinking coffee from paper cups, and all were smoking. There was an admiral, an air general, a general with paratrooper’s insigne on his chest, and a major, his oak leaves drab under all the stars around him.

The admiral and the two generals, Air and Infantry, comprised JANAIC. They were selected for the job because they were, in Army slang, “brains.” The headlines, and quick promotion, usually went to the swashbuckling fighters, like Patton. But recently “brains” had been doing better in the military services. Eisenhower was a “brain,” and so was Gruenther. Marshall had been a “brain,” and so had Zacharias.

Sometimes these three men reached a conclusion, and this conclusion was transmitted to Eighth Army, and Ten Corps, and Seventh Fleet, and Fifth Air Force. Often they were bewildered, and could not agree, for the enemy’s tactics were rubbery and his political and military maneuvers seemingly erratic, although his strategic objective was always clear—the isolation and destruction of the one power that stood between him and hegemony over the world.

Major Toomey, freshly arrived from the United States and attached to Staff, First Marine Division, had been invited to the council because, reputedly, he knew a good deal about the Chinese. In spite of the Tokyo communiqué, JANAIC was still worried about the Chinese. The Chinese were quiet, yes, but the red goose eggs on the map, representing new enemy units, had been multiplying daily, until now they interlaced into a solid mass all along the front.

Further, something stirred in Manchuria, disturbing as the rustle of leaves when there is no wind. From Saigon and Hong Kong and New Delhi, gathered by intelligence, and funneled through Washington to Tokyo and finally Korea, were coded cables that the Communists had massed new armies above the Yalu, and Mao Tse-tung had bent the bow, and nothing could stay release of the arrow. When air reconnaissance is impossible, not because of weather but because of policy, and patrols bloody their noses against the foe, and the communiques of the theater general conflict with the reports of intelligence, then is the time to be wary, and call in an expert. So JANAIC had called in Major Toomey.

When he wasn’t a major of Marines, Toomey was a history professor at Berkeley, and he gave a weekly lecture in psychology. The major told himself he must be steady. He must not make a speech. He must not exhibit too much knowledge. Like a child among his elders, he must not speak until spoken to. He kept his eyes on the towering situation map, frowned in pretended thought, waited, and listened.

The admiral had opened the discussion. “The way I see it,” he said, “is that Army is getting a full week’s rest, and Blaik will have cooked up a whole new offensive system, so even if we are pointed for this game, I don’t think we’ve got too much of a chance.”

“The game I’d like to hear,” said the air general, “is Kentucky-Tennessee. Probably the two best teams in the country.”

“What about Princeton?” asked Infantry.

“Ivy League stuff,” said Air. “Good amateurs.”

The admiral turned to Major Toomey, as if out of courtesy to include a guest in the discussion. “How do you figure it, major?”

“I don’t know much about football,” Toomey said. “I don’t follow it.”

They all looked at him in surprise, as if he had admitted some curious thing about himself, like having six toes, or that his grandmother was a Romany gypsy. Toomey felt an explanation was necessary. “You see, my father was in the Foreign Service, and I went to school abroad.”

“Oh,” said Infantry.

“College, too?” asked Air.

“Yes,” said Toomey. “The American University in Istanbul, and then the Sorbonne.”

“Thought you might have studied in China?” said Air, hopefully.

“Not formally,” said Toomey. “Just language school, when my father was consul in Shanghai.”

“Well,” said Air, “let’s take off.” Air was slender and handsome, with just enough gray lacing his blond hair to disqualify him from jet fighters. “What’s your evaluation of the ground situation?” he asked Infantry.

Infantry looked at the map, and his eyes, bright, cold blue in a face leathered by the campaigns of Africa and Italy, flicked from attack arrows to phase lines to sector boundaries to the squiggles that described terrain to the red ovals above the Yalu. There were new red goose eggs, representing reports from Hong Kong, crayoned in within the last twenty-four hours. For a full minute he said nothing. It was as if he listened, and the map spoke to him in a language unintelligible to the ordinary ear. Then he said, “I don’t like it. I don’t like it worth a damn.”

Infantry came out of his chair and went over to the map and plucked a limber, seven-foot pointer from the rack at the base of the blackboard. “Eighth Army is strung out too far,” he said, whipping the pointer along the Korean west coast. “The road net above Pyongyang is in bad shape. Our own bombing.” He acknowledged Air with a small, tight smile. “If Eighth Army is hit, it’ll have a tough time getting out its transport. It’d be even worse trying to bring up support.”

Infantry paused so that they could have time to absorb the immutable logic of supply. “Ten Corps,” he went on, “is in an extremely hazardous position. Particularly the Marines around the reservoir. They’re strung out worse than Eighth Army.” His pointer touched Yudam-ni, Hagaru, and rested for an instant on the dot that was Ko-Bong. Nobody noticed the names. They were not important.

“Yes,” said the admiral. “Admitted. But the Navy can give direct support to Ten Corps. We can’t to Eighth Army. That’s the difference.”

“That isn’t the difference,” said Air. “The most important difference is that the closer we get to the Manchurian border, the less space we have for aerial warfare. The Air Force has been deprived of its battleground. We have lost our principal weapon.”

The admiral’s face, ruddy from the winds of all the oceans and all the seas, turned brighter red. “Our principal weapon,” he said, “floats. Guns and planes, both.”

Infantry ignored them. He shifted his pointer to the mountains of North Korea. “Now this ROK Corps in the middle has been moving too fast for its own good. They’ve outrun their supplies, and maybe their artillery, and they’re going to get hell kicked out of them. That is, if the enemy has the capacity to attack. I’m scared of that ROK Corps. If they break—watch out. If they break they’ll unhinge all the flanks, and there won’t be a regular line any more. There won’t be any communications between Eighth Army and Ten Corps, except through Tokyo.”

“No communications now,” said Air. “Two commands. Private wars.”

“I think it is sort of silly,” said the admiral. “Here they are all unified, and everything, in Washington, and they ought to have a unified field command in a little place like Korea.”

“Well, we suggested it,” said Air. “We made a proposal. And look what happened.”

They were all silent. Nothing had happened.

“But will the Chinese attack?” said Air. “That’s the question.”

Infantry returned the pointer to its rack, and took his seat, and scratched with a yellow pencil on the pad before him. “I don’t know,” he said. “But if they do, I’d say we were in a helluva spot.”

Air nodded, and turned to Major Toomey. “That’s where you come in,” he said. “What’s your evaluation of the enemy intentions? What’s Mao Tse-tung thinking?”

Toomey wanted to say, “If I knew what Mao was thinking I’d have a couple of stars on my shoulders, like you birds.” But he didn’t say that. He said, a proverb bubbling out of his memory, “‘When the enemy advances, we retreat. When he escapes, we harass. When he retreats, we pursue. When he is tired, we attack.’”

“What’s that?” asked Infantry, puzzled.

“A Chinese verse, written by Mao Tse-tung.”

“Verse!” said the admiral. “What is he, a poet?”

“He’s not only a poet,” said Toomey, “but he’s perhaps the best known contemporary poet in China. Of course Chinese poetry is all formalized, and lots of modern Chinese poetry is merely rewriting of the ancient Chinese poets, and I presume this is too. Still, it’s significant.”

“A poet!” said the admiral. “What are we worrying about?”

“Well, Mao sticks pretty close to his writings,” Toomey explained. “So the question is, are our troops tired? Because if they’re tired, then I think the Chinese will attack.”

“They’re worse than tired,” said Infantry. “If they were just physically tired I wouldn’t worry. They’re worse than that. They figure the war is over, and they want to go home. I remember Italy. V-E Day, ’forty-five. There is nobody so alert and resourceful as the American soldier when the going is bad, and nothing disintegrates so fast as an American Army with a victory.”

“Mao is smart,” said Toomey. “Mao will know that. Furthermore, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he didn’t have a couple of divisions of guerrillas stashed out behind our lines right now.”

“Oh, come,” protested Air. “If that was true, we’d all know about it.”

Toomey reminded himself that he should not argue with all this rank. Yet he felt compelled to say, “‘Guerrillas should be as cautious as virgins and quick as rabbits.’”

“More Mao poetry?” asked Air.

“Yes, sir. He’s a specialist in guerrilla warfare. When the Germans were pounding at Moscow and Stalingrad, the Russians adopted his guerrilla tactics. He’s written manuals on the subject.”

Air looked at his watch. He had another conference, Target Analysis, in twenty minutes.

Toomey felt there was more he must say. “Mao has expressed his intentions in writing,” he said, “and I think I’d better quote him: ‘We want to take the enemy’s eyes and ears, and seal them as completely as possible. We want to make them blind and deaf; we want to take out the hearts of their officers; we want to throw them into utter confusion, driving them mad.’ I think that’s what he’s trying to do to us, right now.”

“Well, he won’t get away with it!” said the admiral.

“As to his final intentions,” Toomey persisted, “I think you’ll find a remarkable parallel with Genghis Khan. Genghis Khan said, ‘A man’s greatest joy in life is to break his enemies, and to take from them all the things that have been theirs.’ Like Genghis Khan, Mao accepts war as glorious and inevitable. And he doesn’t care how long a war lasts, for he has limitless time, and unlimited lives. In the history of China, a hundred years is like a single year to us, and a hundred dead is like one dead.”

The three of the Intentions Conference now examined Toomey, silently, evaluating him as he had evaluated the enemy. Toomey was not impressive. Had they seen him in the Burma jungle in ’forty-four they would have categorized him as a good, tough officer, tan and lean. But he had eaten too well at Fisherman’s Wharf, and Dinah’s, and Omar Khayyam’s, so that now he was a bit paunchy, and he wore spectacles, and his color was not good. Malaria, and atabrine, would always be in his veins, but they did not know this. It was simply that his color was not good. “Where did you learn all this crap?” asked the admiral.

“I was in China, sir, when people were just beginning to talk about Mao. And later I was on one of General Marshall’s peace teams. But I’ve never seen or met Mao. All I know about his personality I got out of books.”

“Books!” the admiral snorted. “I never read books. Don’t have time. Why there isn’t a day my desk isn’t eighteen inches deep in intelligence reports, all classified secret, or tops.” For a moment the admiral was thoughtful. “You know,” he said, “sometimes I think the people in the lower echelons put a high classification on their documents, just so everybody will read ’em.”

Major Toomey saw that the conference was drifting, and that it was necessary to bring it back on the track. It was his duty. “In my opinion, gentlemen,” he said, “Mao will attack very shortly.” He paused, so JANAIC could realize the importance of what he had said. “He’s in a perfect position. As the general said—” he turned to Air— “we no longer have aerial supremacy, because there is no battleground for our planes. Because of political considerations, we cannot hit the enemy where he lives. So long as Mao’s lines of communication, and his supply dumps, and airfields are immune from attack, he can stage troops for an offensive. Mao knows that. He’s no dummy. He’ll take advantage of it.”

Air leaned back in his chair. “Well, gentlemen, what do we do?” he inquired. “Do we draft a message to Eighth Army, and Ten Corps, saying we believe an attack is coming? Or do we let things rock along for a few days until we have more definite information?” He looked at his watch again. “Personally, I think we ought to frame some sort of message, if only for the record.”

“Doesn’t Tokyo have the same information we have from Saigon and Hong Kong and New Delhi, and from the Corps and Divisions?” asked Infantry.

“Well, I would assume so,” said Air. “Tokyo ought to have more than we have.” Then Air remembered Pearl Harbor, and how everyone had assumed that everyone else had all the intelligence, and it turned out that nobody had all of it, although everyone had a piece of it. Air decided to hedge. “It wouldn’t hurt if we just drafted a caution message, nothing absolutely definite, but just what we’ve discussed here.”

“Wouldn’t it be a bit presumptuous?” asked the admiral. “I mean, in view of today’s communiqué?”

“Think you’re right,” Infantry agreed. “Take me. If I were in Tokyo, and I’d just announced we’d won it, I’d be pretty sore if someone way up here in Taejon said, ‘Signals over. The enemy is going to attack.’”

“Still—” Air began, and then realized that the vote would be two to one against him. “Yes, Tokyo must have better intelligence than we have.” He looked around at all of them. Major Toomey started to say something, but nothing came out of his mouth. “Well, gentlemen, that’s all, I guess,” Air said. “We want to thank you, Major Toomey, for a most enlightening report. I’ll see that air transport is arranged for you back to your division.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Toomey.

After Dog Company was assigned security patrol around the hydroelectric plant on the little peninsula at Ko-Bong, Sam Mackenzie and Raleigh Couzens had set up housekeeping, and established a Command Post, in the efficient manner of soldiers who make the best of every respite in battle. In the plant office Mackenzie had discovered a substantial steel table, and steel chairs. During the day this table served as the captain’s desk, and during the night it was for company officers’ poker. But on this evening it was the bench of a court of military law, and Mackenzie was the judge.

Kato entered the captain’s CP, and saluted. The tent was crowded.

“Kato, come over here,” said the captain, returning the salute.

Kato slipped between two big regimental MP’s, and past Kirby, gunnery sergeant of Dog Company and perhaps the oldest man in the regiment—older than the colonel, even. Kato glanced at Kirby’s face, square and forbidding as a concrete blockhouse, and it frightened him. Behind the captain, fondling his rifle as usual, sat Lieutenant Couzens. Directly before the desk stood Beany Smith, and the woman.

Mackenzie was now ready to proceed. He had heard the story of the MP’s. They had been patrolling the single street of Ko-Bong, walking cautiously so as not to step into what the orientation pamphlets primly called “nightsoil,” freshly emptied and foully steaming on the frozen slime, when they heard a woman scream. In a clay hut they had found this woman struggling with this private on her straw pallet. The private was drunk.

Beany Smith had been sick down the front of his jacket, and the stink of him filled the tent, and his eyes were puffed and swollen. Although he weaved with weakness from the dregs of the liquor, he was now sufficiently sobered by vomiting, and fear, to be questioned, in the opinion of the captain.

Mackenzie looked at the woman. Her face was flat, and one cheek was raw and darkened with dirt, and she was flat-chested and dressed in a shapeless and filthy garment. Her eyes were bright black buttons, and she was so frightened that she sweated and trembled. The captain turned to Kato. “Ask her what happened?”

Kato began speaking to the woman in the even sibilants of Japanese. She looked at the ground, silent. Kato repeated a question. The woman began to speak, haltingly, and then in flood.

As he turned to the captain Kato tried to avoid the eyes of Beany Smith. “Sir,” Kato said, “this civilian says that she was standing in her doorway, just before dark, when she saw Smith come down the street. When he saw her he offered her a can of peanuts. When she took them he grabbed her, and dragged her into the house. Then he—” Kato hesitated. It was one thing to talk like this to the men, but it was another thing to use the ordinary verbs in front of the captain.

“He what?” Mackenzie demanded.

“Well, he tried to lay her,” Kato said, hoping it was the right word.

“Did he?”

Kato addressed another question to the woman, and she replied in a single syllable, and followed it with a string of sentences.

“No, sir. He didn’t.”

“Did he use violence?”

“I can’t quite make out, sir.”

Mackenzie turned to Beany Smith. “What about it?” he asked, his voice flat and metallic, like the dull click from a forty-five when the hammer is drawn back.

“I didn’t do nothin’, sir. I thought she wanted it. I didn’t rape this gook.”

“You bastard! You swine!” Mackenzie exploded, and then he controlled himself, but only for a second. “You call this poor creature a gook! You’re worse than a gook, Smith! I’d like to see you shot. Right now!”

Mackenzie stopped. He realized they were all shocked by his outburst. He had not meant to expose his feelings so. It would be all over regimental Headquarters by morning, how he had blown up. He pressed the palms of his hands to the underside of the table, so they could not see how he trembled. “Smith,” he said, bringing his voice back to normal, “do you know the penalty for attempted rape, under the Articles of War?”

“No, sir.” Beany Smith was now entirely sober.

“You can get twenty years.”

“But, sir, I honest thought that she—”

“Pipe down!” Mackenzie leaned back against his chair. It called for a General Court, or at least a Special Court, of course, but this was not the place and time for formal trials, which would necessitate the summoning of officers from other companies, or Battalion. Any of them might be ordered to move out, any minute. And the regiment had no clerks to be tied up in court proceedings. There was another thing that troubled him. He had taken the time to look through Beany Smith’s 201 file, when it was obvious the man would be a problem, and from what was in the file he had deduced it was early environment, as much as anything else, that had twisted this bandy-legged little bastard with the pushed-in face. And while a company captain had no time to practice psychiatry, still he believed that background should be considered in punishment. Mackenzie addressed the MP corporal. “I have decided to handle this right here on the deck, as Summary Court.”

“Yes, sir,” the corporal said, his face wooden. The MP’s saluted, pivoted, and were gone.

“Smith,” said the captain, “you’re fined a month’s pay. That isn’t all. You’re going to get every dirty job there is. You’re going to look at your ugly face in the bottom of a latrine every day until you’re ready to act like a human being.”

Mackenzie turned to the gunnery sergeant. “Sergeant, I want you to handle this man’s punishment, personally.”

“Aye-aye, sir.” In thirty-six years as a Marine, Sergeant Kirby had seen much shipboard duty, and he used strictly Navy talk, as the regulations prescribed.

“Take him away.”

When there were only four left in the tent Mackenzie looked at the woman, and she shrank away from his glance as if she expected his anger to lash out at her next. “Kato, tell her the man is to be punished. Tell her that I am sorry for what has happened. Tell her—” He was going to say that he was sorry for her people, and her country, but it sounded too theatrical. “Take her back to where she lives.”

“And give her this junk,” said Raleigh Couzens. In the rear of the tent he had located an empty carton, and half-filled it with C-rations, and chocolate, and sugar, and a can of hard candy, and as an afterthought two bars of soap.

Kato took the box under his arm, and led her away. She was smiling, and for the first time the captain noticed that she was quite young. This surprised him, for it always seemed that Korean women skipped a generation, and were transmuted from pot-bellied children into bent hags in an instant. You hardly ever saw a young woman.

When the gunnery sergeant was out of earshot of the company CP Kirby clamped the iron grapple of his fingers on Smith’s elbow and spun him around. Without a word, he smashed him in the face with the heel of his left hand, calloused by the barrel of his BAR. Smith crumpled to the ground, moaning. “Get up!” Kirby said, and Smith got to his knees, shielding his face.

“Up on your feet, scum!”

Beany Smith got to his feet, his hands pressed to his mouth.

“When I get up in the morning I want to see this whole area policed,” Kirby said. “If I find so much as one butt on the ground, I’ll really hit you. Then report to the cook tent, to stow slops.” He turned his back on the man and walked to his tent, an uncompromising figure of strength. Mackenzie was a good skipper, for his age, the sergeant thought, although perhaps a little soft. Mackenzie shouldn’t be concerned with scum like Beany Smith.

At midnight the captain’s field phone rang at his elbow. He had trouble unzipping his sleeping bag, and it rang again. Finally he wrestled an arm out of the bag and picked up the phone. It was Ekland. “I just got a message from a friend of mine at Regiment,” Ekland said. “We’ve got a sort of private code. The colonel’s coming up to inspect us tomorrow. I thought I’d better tell you, sir.”

“Thank you, sergeant,” Mackenzie said. Marine Corps sergeants were a strange race. They held together tight as a fist, a fraternity possessing secrets that no officer could penetrate, and practicing rites outside of regulations, law, and the rules of war.

“One other thing, sir. For the last hour all I’ve been able to get on our radio net has been Chinese. They’re jabbering on all the high frequencies.”

“Okay, sergeant, you can secure for the night.”

The captain closed his eyes, but sleep would not come. He rose, dressed in the dark so as not to awaken Raleigh Couzens, and walked outside into the clear, still night. Now that the wind had died it did not seem so cold. He walked briskly, a tall and lonely figure, to the line of foxholes Dog Company had dug across the base of his tiny peninsula.

The midnight watch had just changed. He went from hole to hole, stopping at each for a word with the shadowy figure within. To each he said, in parting, “Keep awake tonight, soldier.”

When he reached the last hole he saw, far to the west, a series of rockets bloom in the sky. He watched their green and yellow and red petals arch across the horizon, and fade into the gloom of earth. It was very beautiful, but he recognized them for Chinese rockets.