Hold Back the Night

Chapter Four

MACKENZIE AWOKE UNEASY. There was something left undone. For a minute he lay in his sack, hands locked behind his head, staring at the brown canvas, recalling all his actions, so to clear his decks from the previous day. “That son-of-a-bitch!” he exploded, sitting straight up. “Where did he get his liquor?”

“Calm yourself,” said Raleigh Couzens. “It’s too early in the day for excitement.” Couzens was sitting on the ground, cross-legged, before a Colman stove, a frowsy Buddha entranced by the flame of an altar. Atop the jet of flame was his steel helmet, filled with water.

Mackenzie leaped to his feet, his long johns bagging, his wool socks curled around his ankles, and the OD shirt which completed his night garb flapping around his thighs. He snatched his musette bag from its nail on the tentpole, plunged his hand to the bottom, and brought out the carefully wrapped and protected bottle of Scotch. He opened the bottle guard, and made certain the seal was intact. “Thank God!” he said.

“Thought Smith had taken it?” said Couzens, who knew its story.

“Who else? Where’d he get the stuff?”

“Out of a jeep,” guessed Couzens. “Out of the radiator. Alcohol.”

“That stuff is poison.”

“Not to Beany Smith,” said Couzens. “Not much poison, anyway. Sam, if that bottle ever disappears, look inside me and you’ll find it. Don’t bother about anybody else.”

“I’d brain you.”

Couzens peered into his helmet, where the water was just beginning to swirl and steam. “You know when you’ll drink that Scotch, Sam? I’ll tell you.” He spread his palms over the helmet, and pretended an incantation.

“‘Double, double toil and trouble; fire burn, and cauldron bubble,’” chanted Mackenzie. “Okay, swami, give.”

“I see you sitting in your new home in Los Altos,” said Couzens, making his voice deep and funereal. “You are out on the patio—the one with the swimming pool you are always talking about building. Your wife is by your side, and you are drinking a martini, very dry, with a stuffed olive. I can see your son. He is tossing pebbles into the pool. He is older. He is about eight. You are reading the San Francisco Chronicle, and you notice something peculiar about the front page. There isn’t anything about fighting, or war, or black markets, or inflation. Joe Stalin has been dead a couple of years, the Russians have all gone back to Russia and the Chinese are all back in China and the Czechs again own Czechoslovakia and the Poles own Poland. Winston Churchill is Secretary General of the UN. He has taken up fishing, as well as painting. There isn’t much for him to do. Everybody minds his own business. We have a new president, and everybody loves him. MacArthur is writing his memoirs.”

“Cut it out,” said Mackenzie.

“Wait!” said Raleigh Couzens, waving his fingers in the steam. “There is more. All the atom bombs have been taken apart, and the stuff inside them used to produce power, and we don’t have any more coal mines, or coal miners, or strikes. Also we don’t have John L. Lewis. Everybody has free electricity. Now on this evening—yes, I see it is evening—you have invited friends to dinner.”

“Their names, no doubt, are Mr. and Mrs. Couzens, visitors from Florida,” said Mackenzie. Now that he thought of it, he had never heard Couzens speak much of any particular girl, and he wondered whether there was a girl.

“Yes, their names are Mr. and Mrs. Couzens, and they are to dine with the retired colonel of Marines, and Mrs. Mackenzie. Suddenly Mrs. Mackenzie says, ‘Sam, we’re plumb out of Scotch. And you told me Mr. Couzens loves Scotch. Sam, this is most embarrassing.’

“‘Why, of course we have Scotch, dear,’ you say. ‘Remember that old beat-up bottle you gave me back in ’forty-two? There’s no reason to keep it any longer, is there, dear?’

“And I see your wife kissing you and saying, ‘Why, no, dear.’ And you open the bottle of Scotch.”

Mackenzie threw back his head and laughed. “So that’s the way you figure it, swami? That’s the way you think it will be?”

Couzens glanced up at Mackenzie, his bright blue eyes for a moment wise and serious. “That’s the way it’s got to be, Sam. That’ll be the most important day in your life.”

Mackenzie stepped into his trousers, and put on another shirt over the one he had worn in the night, and sat down at his table. He made a note in the company log. It would be necessary to have the motor sergeant check the transport, to discover which vehicle was low on alcohol. He began to wonder about a morning report. They had been camped at Ko-Bong only three days, he reflected, and yet so quickly did he fall into the routine of the barracks.

Couzens’ water had now come to a boil. He measured instant coffee and sugar into their tin cups, removed the helmet from the burner, protecting his fingers with a wadded shirt, and carefully filled the cups, wasting not a drop. This was a bond between them, their first morning coffee. It was a ritual begun on the transport on the way out, and practiced daily since, come the hell of phosphorus grenades or the high water of blown dams. It gave some continuity to a life that at best was nomadic and insecure.

Mackenzie sipped his coffee, and Couzens continued with their routine. He replaced the helmet on the stove, filled it to the brim again, and when it bubbled he poured half the boiling water into Mackenzie’s helmet, and then adjusted the temperature in both helmets by adding cold water from the jerican, using a finger as a thermometer. When he was satisfied he said, “Okay, excellency. Your bath.” They washed and shaved.

Then in mid-morning Ekland entered the CP. “Regiment just made a signal, sir,” he said. “There’s an air drop coming our way. Plane just flashed the strip at Hagaru.”

“Air drop? What’s up?”

“Turkeys. That’s what they said. Turkeys from Japan.”

“It must be Thanksgiving,” said Mackenzie. “Is today Thanksgiving?”

Ekland said, “It’s the twenty-fifth.”

“I know. But what day is it?”

Neither Couzens nor Ekland said anything. Mackenzie grinned. They could keep track of dates, all right, because of the company log, but the days of the week nobody could remember, except that when a chaplain visited Dog Company, it was usually Sunday. You could get killed on Sundays as well as any other day, and there were no Saturday night parties. Come to think of it, Saturday night wasn’t party night back home any more. Party night was Friday night, or at least that was when the parties started. Mackenzie took his wallet from his pocket, and in it found a celluloid calendar. “This is Saturday,” he announced. “Thanksgiving was day before yesterday.”

“I got another tip from my buddy at Regiment,” said Ekland. “Colonel’s jeeping up from Hagaru now.”

“How’s the area look?” Mackenzie noted that Ekland was clean-shaven, neat, and spruce. This was good, because he planned to speak again to the colonel about Ekland, and the colonel might want to meet him.

“Good, sir. Sergeant Kirby’s been around again.” The captain had warned his officers, and personally inspected, earlier in the morning.

They heard the roar of aircraft engines, low and close, and stepped outside to watch the drop. A fat C-119, that the Air Force called a “flying boxcar,” and the Marines called “Pregnant Mame,” thundered over their heads, banked in a tight circle, and coasted back. When it was directly overhead yellow parachutes spilled from its tail. There were two figures standing in the open cavern in the back of the fuselage. They waved.

“Oh, the Air Force has it tough,” said Ekland. “I can just see them, rising from their Beauty Rest mattresses this morning in Tokyo, with geisha girls, or maybe even their wives, to bring their coffee and the morning Stripes. Then after a nice hot bath, and breakfast, they maybe remember they have a job to do. ‘Oh, damn,’ they say. ‘We have to fly today. Korea.’

“‘Korea. How awful! That filthy place!’” Ekland’s hands fluttered in what he considered was an imitation of an agitated female.

“‘Oh, we’re not landing, dear.’

“‘Even so, I wanted you to drive me over to the commissary this morning. Remember, we’re having a bridge tea this afternoon, and we’re utterly barren of goodies.’

“‘Oh, I’ll be home in time.’

“‘Well, alright, but you’re going to miss your golf, dear.’ Yep, the Air Force is rugged, real rugged.”

Mackenzie looked down on Ekland, and his peculiar smile, which was hardly recognizable as a smile at all except for his eyes, touched the ends of his mouth. “You have a very short memory, sergeant,” he said. “Remember that B-two-six?”

Ekland said, “Yes, sir,” soberly. He knew he shouldn’t clown like that before the captain. He’d never wear shoulder straps. “I remember that B-two-six, sir.” In the fighting after the Inchon landing, a light bomber, flying too low for a bomber’s own good, had saved Ekland, and perhaps most of the company. The company had run into armor, and Ekland had taken a BAR, and led a bazooka team in an attack, and he had pinned down the enemy infantry, but not the enemy tanks. And an Air Force ground observer had seen what was happening, and had called in the B-two-six, and the B-two-six had dumped napalm on the tanks. Then the plane had been hit, or anyway something had gone wrong, for it had nosed into a hill and dissolved in a pillar of greasy black smoke. It was for his part in this action, and the mop-up that followed, that Ekland had been recommended for the Silver Star and battlefield promotion.

“Okay,” said Mackenzie. “Get back to your net. If you pick up any more Chinese signals in voice, call Kato and see if he can make anything out of them.” Then Mackenzie prepared to meet the colonel, reminding himself to exhibit just the right degree of surprise when the colonel appeared.

It was said of Colonel Grimm that he would never make general, because he was too good a colonel. So far as anyone in the Corps remembered, he had always been a colonel. It was likely he would always remain a colonel, for he was in his upper fifties, and the Corps, like all the military establishment, was topheavy with brass. The Corps had been expanded enormously in the Second World War, and then drastically reduced. When that war was done, there was incentive for a young officer to accept discharge and make his way in the civilian world, but there was none for a general. When a general gets to be a general, even a buck general, he has reached the top of his profession. It was senseless for him to resign, and accept a bit more take-home pay as Vice-President for Sales of Toasty-Pops, Inc., or Executive Assistant to the General Manager of Non-Rip Nylon. His prospects as a business man were as poor as the future of a man of middle years who has been drafted into the Army. Quite soon, the office force would stop deferring to him as General, and concentrate their attention and flattery upon younger men, with savvy and know-how, who were hep to the business. Of course, if he were a five-star general, or a four-star general with a Name, then it was different. In that case he sold his memoirs, or became Chairman of the Board, and lived happily ever after. So because almost every general wanted to stay a general, Colonel Grimm remained a colonel commanding troops in the field, which was exactly what he wanted to be.

When Colonel Grimm entered the lines of Dog Company he left his jeep at the first watch post, ordered the stiffened sentry not to announce his arrival, and took a good hard look at the foxholes and sandbags that stretched across the neck of the Ko-Bong peninsula to deny the encampment to enemy surprise. Particularly he viewed the siting of the machine guns and the disposition of the mortar platoon. He must have been satisfied, because he said nothing and began his inspection of the bivouac, on foot, and unobtrusive and inconspicuous as a second-class private skulking back from an off-limits area. The hood of his parka was pulled over the white eagle stenciled on his helmet, and his chin grated against his chest, so that the deep canyons in his face, that stamped him as an old man and out of place in Dog Company, were shadowed.

The colonel saw that the noon chow line was forming up, and so he joined it. It is the custom of the Marines, when in the field, that the officers eat at the tag end of the line, and so the colonel, because of his rank, stepped behind the last man, who of course was Mackenzie. And Mackenzie, since he was accustomed to being last man, sensed something was wrong behind him, wheeled, and faced the colonel. “At ease, captain,” the colonel said, instantly.

“Glad to have you with us, sir.”

“Will you see that my driver is fed? My vehicle is at your last post.”

Mackenzie spotted Kato, his mess kit filled, and gave instructions. The word sifted along the chow line. You could not hear the word. It was a soundless zephyr, but the progress of the word could be seen, as far ahead as the cook tent, by the straightening of the line, and of backs. The colonel was there.

As the line inched ahead Mackenzie said, “Is everything okay, colonel?”

“I’ll talk about that later, in your CP,” the colonel said. “But tell me, did you get the drop okay? The turkeys, I mean? We forgot about you, stuck off by yourselves here, until just as we finished Thanksgiving dinner. So I messaged Wonsan, and they messaged Tokyo.”

“We got the drop fine, sir.”

“So I’ll have a second Thanksgiving dinner, heh?”

“No sir. We’re having C-rations. The turkeys were frozen. They were shipped that way from the States, of course, and they were kept frozen in Tokyo, and they didn’t get any warmer on the way here. Cooks say they won’t thaw out for twenty-four hours. We’ll have them tomorrow.”

“Perhaps,” the colonel said.

When they were in the CP, and alone, Colonel Grimm tossed back his hood, and unbuttoned his greatcoat, and laid his map case and helmet on the table, and sat down in one of the office chairs liberated from the hydroelectric plant. He eased his belt and said, “Your cooks aren’t bad, Mackenzie. Wish I could be here for the turkeys.”

“You’re invited, sir.”

“I doubt that I will be able to attend. I believe I will have other duties.” The colonel’s face was wry, as if he had made a prior date which he preferred not to keep; as if he had been invited to an all-male poker party, but was committed to address a garden club.

Mackenzie knew he dared not ask why the colonel couldn’t have his turkey. He waited for the colonel to speak, and the colonel spoke, his eyes opaque as gunmetal and his mouth straight as the eye-slit of a tank. “This area is too clean.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Mackenzie.

“I said it was too clean. Know I was coming, Mackenzie?”

“Yes, sir,” the captain admitted.

The colonel’s face softened, for an instant, with inner amusement. “My headquarters must be insecure.”

Mackenzie kept silent.

“But I didn’t come over here to speak of turkeys, or the fact that communications are passing between headquarters and your company outside of regular channels.” The colonel opened his map case, and spread on the table the map of the Division’s sector, extending from the reservoir to the sea. Then, thoughtfully, he folded this map, and replaced it with a map of all North Korea. “I think there’s hell to pay in the center,” he said, tracing a brown finger along the mountain range.

Mackenzie remembered what he had seen in the night, to the west. “I saw flares last night. Chinese.”

“They hit the ROK Corps. Nobody seems to know what happened, but there isn’t any ROK Corps there any more. Know what that means?”

“Sort of leaves a gap between our Ten Corps and Eighth Army, doesn’t it, sir?”

“Sort of does. Our regiment at Yudam-ni has been ordered to strike across the base of the Chinese attack, and we’ve been alerted for a move to support ’em. It won’t work.” The colonel looked at the map, spattered with cryptic symbols that he read easily as newspaper headlines. “I’ll tell you what’s going to happen, Mackenzie. If the Chinese have attacked in force anywhere, they’ll attack everywhere. Our counter-attack won’t get far, if it moves at all, and while I haven’t been told to do it, I’m going to prepare to attack in another direction—to the sea. I probably ought to be back at Regiment organizing it now, but I wanted to see you first, because if what I think is going to happen, happens, you’ll be cut off, and I want to give you your orders in advance.”

“Yes, sir.”

The colonel substituted the sector map for the map of North Korea. “In my opinion we will have to fight our way to the sea. We will use this road.” The colonel’s finger ran down the main road from Koto-Ri to Hamhung. “But we’ll need protection on our northern flank. That’s your mission, captain. That’s the mission of Dog Company. I want you, whatever happens, to put your company on this secondary road.” He traced it out. “See what I mean?”

“Yes, sir.” Mackenzie saw exactly what the colonel meant. If the retreat was ordered, and it went beyond Hagaru and Koto-Ri, then Dog Company would protect the northern flank. It was a necessity. It was also, perhaps, the sacrifice of Dog Company. “I’ll need tanks, sir,” Mackenzie said, “and some guns.”

The colonel shook his head. “Tanks won’t go on your road. Your road won’t hold them. But at Koto-Ri, if we get there, I’ll assign you a recoilless seventy-five. Two, if I can spare them.” The colonel folded the map case, and Mackenzie knew the inspection was over. He did not know whether Dog Company had been selected for the task because of its location, or because of other reasons. But he had one more question to ask.

“Colonel,” said Mackenzie, “do you remember, after Inchon, that I put in one of my sergeants—Ekland—for the Silver Star, and battlefield promotion? I wondered what happened?”

“I remember,” the colonel said. “Your communications sergeant, wasn’t he? I read the action reports. Well, he’ll get his Silver Star all right, but I’m afraid we can’t make any more officers in the regiment right now. We’ve got a batch of lieutenants fresh from the States, and our TO won’t stand it.”

“He’s officer material,” Mackenzie protested. “He’s better than a sergeant.”

“There is nobody in the Corps better than a sergeant,” the colonel said. “That is a fact, captain, and you keep on remembering it.”

The colonel rose, and Mackenzie rose. “Goodbye, captain,” the colonel said.

“Can I take you to your vehicle, sir?”

“No. I can find my own way.” For no good reason, the colonel shook Mackenzie’s hand.

Mackenzie watched the colonel striding down the company street, his back straight as a rifle barrel, and he saw Sergeant Kirby, as if by accident, meet the colonel, and he watched while they talked closely together, and for a moment the colonel had his arm around the sergeant’s shoulders. Mackenzie sensed they were laughing, and he felt resentment, for he feared they were laughing at him. Then he realized they probably were laughing at something long past and done, an adventure on the China coast, an escapade in Port-au-Prince, or the remembrance of a girl in Havana. In this exclusive brotherhood, he was still a neophyte, he realized. He hoped, one day, to be a full member.

Mackenzie sat at his table and concentrated on what there was to be done. First he called in his officers, and briefed them on what the colonel had said. He decided it was useless to strike the tents, and go to ground, until a direct threat developed, or Regiment ordered a move. His men would now need all the rest and relaxation they could get.

He sent Lieutenant Sellers, his supply officer, to Battalion in search of better maps. Sellers, who had not joined the company until just before the Inchon landing, wondered whether he should not take along a squad to guard against guerrillas, or snipers, on the Hagaru Road. Mackenzie didn’t feel this was necessary, but he told Sellers to do what he wished.

The captain dispatched Sergeant Kirby to the regimental supply dump with instructions to scrounge all the extra socks he could find. He had discovered that Kirby could come back with stores that generals and admirals could not command, or Department of Defense requisitions secure.

He ordered a thorough check on his transport, and extra supplies of gasoline lashed to the vehicles. .

He talked to his medical corpsmen, and gave them instructions to distribute their supplies and litters, and not load everything on one or two six-by-sixes or jeeps.

He ordered his reserve mortar tubes emplaced, and zeroed in on ground not completely covered by the fields of fire of the machine guns. He wished to make it impossible for any living thing to cross the neck of the Ko-Bong peninsula alive.

He doubled the size of the night watch. The First Platoon would have the duty until midnight, and would be reinforced by Raleigh Couzens’ Second Platoon from midnight on.

Then he cranked his field phone and asked that Ekland come to the CP. He might as well get it over with.

“Any news, sergeant?” he began, when Ekland stood before him.

“Yes, sir. Heard an AFN bulletin from Tokyo. Eighth Army is under heavy attack. The announcer said something about overwhelming numbers. And I intercepted a signal from some Second Division unit. In clear. They claim they’re surrounded, and they’re screaming for air.”

“Sounds pretty rugged, doesn’t it?”

“That isn’t all, sir. Kato has been listening in on the Chinese frequencies. He says their radio traffic has stepped up enormously, and he thinks most of it is coming from headquarters of the Chinese Fourth Field Army. That’s Lin Piao. He’s young, and he’s smart, and he’s tough. Every hour they broadcast an order-of-the-day. The usual crap about driving us into the sea, and then they end it with, ‘Strike down! Strike down! Strike down!’ I heard it. It doesn’t sound good, even in Chinese.”

Mackenzie wondered why Ekland should know anything of General Lin Piao, or even remember the name, but he had tabbed Ekland as an unusual young man, and this knowledge of the enemy seemed to confirm his judgment. “Sit down, sergeant,” he said. Ekland sat down on the edge of the chair. He felt apprehensive. It was not often that the captain asked one of the men to sit down for a talk in the CP. When he did, it usually was bad news, and usually it was bad news from home.

“I’ve got some good news for you, Ekland, and some bad news,” the captain said. “I told you I’d put you in for the Silver Star, and promotion. You’re getting gonged, okay, but no lieutenancy. Not now, anyway. Matter of the TO. However, my recommendation will always stay on your record.”

“Thank you, sir,” Ekland said. He knew that custom now required him to say, “Is that all, sir?” and then leave the CP. But the captain’s face, composed and sympathetic, invited something more, and Ekland felt free to speak. “I guess I was a dope, captain. I had a good job. Real good. A hundred and fifteen a week from NBC. But when this thing started I rushed back in. I wasn’t in the Reserves. I didn’t have to do it. But Johnny Ekland was first in line. You see, my girl and I decided there was a future for us in the Marines. Guess we were wrong.”

“I don’t think you were wrong,” said Mackenzie. “There is nobody in the Corps more important than a sergeant.”

“Oh, sure,” Ekland said. “A sergeant gets a good deal. But a sergeant’s wife travels second class. She can’t go to the ‘O’ Club, or swim in the pool, or even go to the movies with a girl friend who happens to be married to a second lieutenant. Just like you and me. Out here we eat out of the same mess kit. But when we get back Stateside, if we meet in a bar and want to talk, there has to be an empty stool between us.”

Mackenzie tapped a cigarette on the table, carefully arranging his words before he spoke. This was the first time this embarrassing social problem, always present and always shunned, had been placed so directly before him. “No army is a democracy,” he said. “If it was, it wouldn’t be an army. There has to be unquestioned obedience, and therefore there is unquestioned rank. Rank, and what goes with it, is a necessity.”

“I realize it’s a necessity, captain. Maybe it’s all right for me, but not for my girl. She isn’t a second-class woman.”

“Well, maybe the Corps isn’t for you,” Mackenzie said. “You’re a technician. You do fine on the outside.”

Ekland’s face was freckled, and when he grinned and cocked his red head on one side, as he did now, he was gamin off a Chicago playground, taunting the law. “Right, captain! I resign! Think I’ll fly back home right away. Like my travel orders now, if convenient.”

They both laughed. “But seriously, sir, that’s the trouble. My girl and I decided to give this thing a whirl. We figured that if I went in right away I had a good chance to make lieutenant, and if I didn’t make lieutenant I could get out pretty quick. We figured it would all be over in a few months in a little place like Korea. Now we’re trapped. This thing can go on forever.”

The captain didn’t reply immediately. Ekland felt that the captain was looking through him, and through the walls of the tent, and past the outcome of present battle and the confines of Korea. At last he said, “For us, for our generation, it might well go on forever. But our generation has the duty. If we win, our children are going to live.”

“Yes, sir. If we win.”

“We are going to win,” the captain said, as quietly and certainly as if he were saying he was going to have a cup of coffee, and Ekland knew the interview was over. So he rose, and made his military manners, and returned to his tent.

And there in his tent Ekland crawled into his sack, and Milt Ackerman, his friend, frowning behind his spectacles, came over and said, “What’s wrong, John? Sick?”

“I don’t feel too well,” Ekland said, and turned his face away.

“The GI’s?” In Korea, even when you stuck strictly to American rations, and boiled your water or dosed it with the little white pills that presumably made it fit to drink, diarrhea was always possible, as if the men were infected by an effluvium rising from the pores of the fetid soil.

“No. I just feel bad.”

“Anything I can do?”

“No.”

Ackerman left him alone, and Ekland closed his eyes and buried his head in his arms and re-lived their Day of Decision. It was a Monday night, and they were partying on this unaccustomed party night because the next day was July 4, and Molly, who worked in the office of the University of Chicago’s psychics laboratory, would have July 4 off.

It started with cocktails at Si Cooper’s apartment, and then they had dinner at Luigi’s, the little Italian restaurant off Division Street. The Chianti was domestic, the antipasto scanty, and the pizza passable. But Luigi’s provided candlelight and an imaginative and sentimental violinist, so they often ate there, the four of them, when Grace Cooper could get a sitter.

Molly had started it, but Si Cooper had carried it through. Usually Si enjoyed his friends, and good talk, too well to try to drown himself in indifferent wine, but on this night he had jumped into the bottle.

Si talked a lot, and the gist of it, cutting through the rambling reminiscences of the Weisserhahn Hotel in Vienna, and the Astoria in Budapest, and the Parc in Istanbul, and the Athénée palace in Bucharest, was this: We fight for survival against the tide of barbarism. This is nothing new. It has happened before, many times. Consider Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Suleiman, Hitler, and all the other egomaniacs with a passion for shoving other people around. “Sometimes we lose,” Si Cooper said, “and sometimes we win. But so long as we keep on fighting, we move ahead a little. We always move ahead. One generation is”—he tried to say, “inconsequential,” but the word proved too much for him, and the syllables rolled around in his mouth like loose marbles.

“You’re not moving it much,” said his wife, Grace, who was irritated.

“I tried,” said Si, his bulk spreading across the end of the table. “I saw the beginning of it. I saw the League of Nations. Flopped, yes. The UN may flop too.”

“Hush,” said Grace.

“Won’t hush,” said Si. “But there’ll be another UN. There has to be.”

“Maybe.”

“We’re going to have one world,” said Si, with the sagacity of the very drunk. “Maybe it’ll be a slave world, or maybe it’ll be our kind of world. But it’ll only be one.”

Molly looked across the table. “Do you believe that, Johnny?” she asked.

“I believe it,” he said. “It’s just plain logic.”

“Then why don’t we do something about it?”

“What can we do?”

“You did something before—the last time.”

He examined Molly to see whether she meant it, and decided that she probably did. Molly was petite, and this night she wore her dark hair in schoolgirl braids, and her brown eyes with the gold flecks in them were clear and amazingly young, so that she looked about eighteen. “Know what I think you are?” he said. “I think you’re nothing but a one-worlder, do-gooder at heart, and still a freshman.”

“Do you love me?” she said.

“Sure. What’s that got to do with it?”

“Nothing.”

And they didn’t speak of it any more until he took her home. Then they sat on the steps, because one of her roommates slept in the living room, and tried to be logical about it. First of all, what did they want out of life? They wanted something bigger and more exciting than what they were doing, didn’t they? And if he went back into the Corps right now, there was sure to be promotion, because everybody needed technicians. This war in Korea wasn’t going to last long. Who ever heard of the North Korean army anyway? As soon as MacArthur got a full division or two in there, they’d fold up and go back where they came from. Probably he wouldn’t even see Korea. But the important thing was that there was going to be a real UN army, and of course the Marines would be part of it. So they’d travel, and see things, and really do the things they wanted to do. That’s what they agreed.

“Okay,” he said, “I’ll be a sucker—this one time.” And they’d laughed, and kissed, and they’d both known that he wasn’t being a sucker at all, but was being real smart. That was the way they’d laid out the future.

Ekland raised his head from his arms and shook it as if the motion would rid him of these thoughts. He left the tent and went out to the radio jeep, sheltered by its tarpaulin and windbreaker. He had work to do. At 2300 hours Battalion called to relay a message that the regiment on the other side of the reservoir had hit heavy resistance north of Yudam-ni, and all units should be on the alert. Ekland passed on this report to his captain. Mackenzie called the reinforced squad he had posted in the plant, to the company’s rear, just to be sure they were there, and awake. You couldn’t ring the whole peninsula with a single company, and this squad was his sole protection from the west.

For a few minutes Mackenzie lay awake to smoke a cigarette and watch, silently, while Raleigh Couzens anointed his rifle, massaging the oil into the thirsty steel. Couzens treated his rifle like a woman. Well, in some ways rifles were like women. While they came out of the factories alike as dancers in the Radio City chorus line, still they were individuals. Some were mischievous and tricky and unfaithful, and some were sweet tempered and reliable and easy to handle. Couzens had discarded his regulation carbine after the Inchon landing, protesting that he needed a more accurate weapon. He explained that he did a good deal of shooting at his place in Florida, and he was used to a good gun. So he had found this M-1 somewhere, and made it his. Couzens cleaned it every night, but on this night he gave it especial care.

Mackenzie wondered whether there was anything more that he could do, and he decided there was nothing, but that he had better be fully dressed. So before Couzens took out his platoon he dressed, and then flopped down and slept again. The next thing he heard was a bugle call, not reveille as it should be, but disturbing and eerie as a siren’s wail.

He was already groping for his carbine when he heard shots, and the bugle call again, and then cries of “Sha! Sha! Sha!” far off. He knew what sha meant. Kill. Outside the CP he watched the green Chinese rockets ascending in a semi-circle around his bivouac. His ears were attuned for the steady firing of Couzens’ heavy machine guns, which he knew should now commence, and the thud of his carefully sited mortars, but he did not hear them and he realized, suddenly and sickeningly, that the Chinese had not attacked across the spit of land. They were pouring across the ice, and had taken Dog Company in the rear.