Hold Back the Night

Chapter Six

THE CAPTAIN had slept four hours, and when his field phone woke him, just before first light, he was fresh. “Signal from Regiment, sir,” Ekland said. “Move out and join up at Hagaru. They’ve got a field hospital set up near the strip, and an air evac operating.”

“Good,” said Mackenzie. “Make a signal back. Tell ’em we can move at ten hundred hours. Tell ’em we’ve got twenty-four wounded.”

“Twenty-two, sir,” said Ekland.

Mackenzie knew that during the small hours two more had died. But those who lived would get out, if Dog Company got out. It was axiomatic, in the Marines, that you brought out your wounded. Sometimes it was costly. Sometimes it was not a fair trade. But it was a policy that helped make the Marines what they were. There was one certain thing in this world that a Marine could count on. He would not be abandoned by his buddies. “All right, twenty-two,” said Mackenzie. He had to ask: “Who went?”

“Lieutenant Travis and Cohane, the corpsman.”

“Too bad.” The casualties among his lieutenants and non-coms were distressingly high. This was always true. Always.

The captain rose, fully dressed, and picked up his carbine. There had been no new onslaught during the past night, and Dog Company was intact, but he hated to think of the good men he had lost. He suspected that the Chinese attack was a reconnaissance in force, or the objective may have been to capture the hydroelectric station. This they had done, although he had driven them out when daylight came. But they’d be back, and he was glad the move had been ordered. He could get the company out. He had sent a patrol into Ko-Bong during the night, and it was clear. Hagaru was only four miles to the south, and unless the Chinese had a block on the road, they’d make it easy. He might even punch through a block, if he could get air support, or an artillery barrage from the other end.

The captain checked his perimeter, and told his platoon leaders, and his sergeants, that the company was moving out. It was almost full light when he came to the Second Platoon, which had held the crucial point, the only road out, the night before, and had not been relieved since. It was just as he got there that the crew of a fifty-calibre machine gun swiveled the weapon, and waited, tense. On the road from the village, Mackenzie saw a figure walking, a figure with a rifle slung under his arm, insouciant as a hunter in the woods when the dogs range far.

“Nervy bastard, isn’t he?” said the man squinting through the sights.

“Give him a squirt,” said the loader.

“Naw. Wait’ll he gets closer.”

“You can knock him off from here. If you don’t, somebody else will.”

“Want to make sure.”

“Sure of what?”

Mackenzie, behind them, said, “Hold your fire.” He looked up and down the line of foxholes. Every gun was trained on this single figure. Mackenzie had a hunch that it might be a Chinese deserter, and deserters were valuable. “Hold your fire!” he called, louder. “Pass the word.”

It was then that Couzens’ first shout drifted down to the lines, and a minute later he had Couzens by the shoulders, and was beating him on the back, and shouting, “Where in hell have you been, you dope? Where’ve you been?”

“They jumped me in the village,” Couzens said.

“I know. When the fighting started your men went up there after you. They found your three men, dead. They figured you were captured.”

“I was.”

“Well, then—”

“They turned me loose. They took me to their Army HQ, and tried to question me, and turned me loose.”

The men of Couzens’ platoon were now popping out of their foxholes, grinning, and crowding around them. “Get back where you ought to be,” Mackenzie ordered. “You start bunching up and they’ll lay a shell in here. They’re watching us, you bet.” He turned to Couzens. “They turned you loose? Why?”

“Beats me. Maybe they didn’t want me. You should see how they operate. You should see how they move at night.”

“We’ll talk about that later,” said Mackenzie. “We’re moving out of this place. We’re moving at ten hundred. You got back just in time. You better come up to the CP, and get some chow, and help me get the stuff rolling. Everything’s quiet this morning. It’s been quiet ever since they hit us, that one time.”

“What happened?” Couzens asked, as they walked along.

And Mackenzie told him what had happened. A detachment of Chinese had crossed the ice, using the white dress of Koreans as camouflage in the snow, and had fallen upon the squad bivouacked in the hydroelectric station, comfortable in their sleeping bags in the office on the ground floor, and probably not keeping a proper alert. “The gunnery sergeant was with them,” Mackenzie said. “I didn’t tell Kirby to take that detail, but he always picks a good, comfortable, dry place to sleep.”

“What happened to Kirby?”

“He’s dead.”

“No!” It didn’t seem possible that Sergeant Kirby would get killed in war. He was too old, and experienced, and careful.

“He couldn’t get out of his sack. His zipper stuck. They bayoneted him, maybe twenty times.”

“And the others?”

“One boy’s alive. They shot him through the legs. He played dead.”

“What happened then?” Couzens asked.

“It was more of a raid than anything else, as if they were after prisoners. This business across the ice wasn’t much more than a diversion, and then they hit us frontally. Your platoon did real good. Your platoon counter-attacked. But when we went after that bunch in the plant, they were dug in, and we lost pretty heavily. Travis, Krakauskas, Phillips, and Scalpe dead. Simmons and Players wounded.” All those he named were lieutenants, or sergeants. “Altogether, seventeen dead, twenty-two wounded.”

“And prisoners?”

“You were the only prisoner.”

Couzens didn’t like the sound of it. He reviewed his interrogation by the commissar. He wondered what he had said that was wrong. If what he’d said was right enough, from the Chinese viewpoint, then it must have been wrong from the viewpoint of his own country. He was worried, and a little frightened. Some time he’d have to tell Mackenzie the whole story, and he was afraid it wouldn’t sound right. He didn’t think he’d be reprimanded or anything. After all, the important thing was that he was back in the line. But suppose he lost Mackenzie’s confidence, and friendship?

Couzens, in the tent, began to gather up what he could take with him. Then he went out to check on the loadings for the Second Platoon, and the Third Platoon also, that had been the platoon of Travis. He relayed Mackenzie’s orders that all vehicles be combat-loaded. Everything else would burn. He told the motor pool sergeant to start distributing gasoline for the burning.

Mackenzie sat at the table, and found the folder that contained the company records, and went over his roster, and carefully marked KIA, and the date, after the names of Travis and Cohane. And he scratched out the MIA he had written after the name of Raleigh Couzens. He’d heard rumors of the Chinese releasing prisoners, for propaganda purposes, or because of obscure oriental or Communist reasons that nobody could fathom. But Raleigh Couzens wasn’t one to fall for propaganda, and he wondered what had really happened. He also wondered when he’d have time to find out. It would be necessary to report the incident to Regiment. It was something for Military Intelligence—intelligence on a fairly high level. Raleigh was going to have to do a lot of talking, and perhaps some explaining.

He looked at the roster again. Seventeen dead, twenty-two wounded. He couldn’t shake the feeling that it was his fault. He had fouled up. Oh, sure, the colonel had approved his dispositions. But whatever bad happened to a company, that was the responsibility of its captain, just as whatever happened to Regiment was the responsibility of the colonel. It was something you couldn’t duck. He should have figured the Chinese would sneak across the ice, and hit the plant on the edge of the reservoir, and he should have had more men there.

Seventeen dead. Seventeen letters to write, when he got a chance. You couldn’t be very original in those letters, because there always seemed to be so many of them, and everything that could be said in them, he had said before. He knew exactly what his pen would say. “Your husband was a fine officer, and an inspiration to his men…. I feel great personal loss…. Your son was liked by everyone in the company who knew him…. Your son was shot during a Chinese attack. He died painlessly.” What a lie. Nobody died painlessly, not when you were twenty years old, or twenty-five, or even thirty, as he was. When you are young it always hurts to die.

A corporal, one of the cooks and the only fat man in Dog Company, entered the CP. “What about the turkeys, sir?” he asked. “They’ve thawed. They’ve thawed fine, sir.” In the fighting of the day before, of course, no one had thought of the turkeys.

“Burn ’em,” Mackenzie said. He thought for a moment, and then amended this order. “On the way through the village, maybe you can drop off a case or two for the civilians.”

“Yes, sir,” said the corporal, his voice dreary, and he left, and Mackenzie was alone again.

He replaced the company roster in its folder, and shoved it down into his musette bag, alongside the bottle of Scotch, and the few personal possessions he carried there. There was an envelope stuffed with snapshots, and Mackenzie riffled through them, the way he often did when he was unhappy, or depressed. He came to a photograph of Anne, and Sam, junior, and himself, all united in a clinch at Hamilton Field, with a big Military Air Transport Service C-54 in the background. He examined its smallest detail, as a man often will when he possesses a picture with special meaning. The focus had been sharp, and Anne’s clean features and the splendid line of her body seemed so alive that she’d move any second, although all you could see of the baby was a blob of nose and cheek, and his mop of blond curls.

It had been taken in the spring of 1948, during that thin slice of time when there was no fighting, and many people still spoke with confidence of peace, and everybody was getting on with business. In the photograph everybody was smiling, and nobody, not even Anne’s mother, had guessed they’d had quite an argument at breakfast.

He had been ordered to Parris Island, to train boots, and Anne wasn’t going with him. At first she’d said she couldn’t go because of the baby, and then she’d said, “Sam, I’m just damn sick and tired of moving, and trailing you around the country. Why don’t you get out of it?”

“Get out of what?”

“The Marines.”

“I thought you liked it?”

“I did. I don’t any more. I want to settle down. We’re always moving, moving, moving. I want a home of our own. I’m tired of renting. I want some security. We owe it to the baby. You can make more money, outside.”

“Doing what?”

She set down her coffee cup and said, “Well, for one thing, writing.” An article on firepower had been printed in the Marine Corps Gazette, and he’d sold an eight-line piece of verse to The Saturday Evening Post, and he’d written a short story which had been rejected by eight magazines, but by three of them not very emphatically.

Sam laughed. “Well, if what you want is security, we’d better keep on taking the King’s Shilling. Anne, this is a welfare state. Understand, I’m all for the welfare state. I think it’s the greatest invention since sex. Look at what we get out of it. Medical care free, or almost, and cheap cigarettes and whiskey, and you can buy stuff from ships’ stores at just about half price. But it isn’t available to writers. When they make it available to writers, I’ll quit the Marines, and be a writer.”

“Stop being silly, Sam. I’m serious.”

“I’m not being silly at all. Look at this egg.” He pointed his knife at his breakfast egg, cozy in its cup. “I just read in the paper that for every egg eaten at breakfast the government buys another egg that nobody wants to eat. The government buys these eggs by the billions, powders ’em, and buries ’em underground, like the gold in Fort Knox. Who pays for that egg nobody eats? Taxpayers. Writers.”

“You are too being silly, Sam.”

“I am not either. The government has to buy eggs, transport ’em, pulverize ’em, process ’em, package ’em, and bury ’em. That costs a lot of money. Then there must be overhead, like a Bureau of Unwanted Eggs, or something. That’s right, isn’t it?”

“Well, then, don’t eat the darn egg!” Anne said, angrily.

He decapitated his egg with a butter knife, and dug into it. “That wouldn’t do any good,” he said. “If I didn’t eat it, then the government would just have to buy one more egg.”

“Sam, you majored in literature, not economics.”

“It doesn’t take an economist to see what’s happening. Look at potatoes. Up in Aroostook County, Maine, they’re paying planters sixty-five millions a year to dig up potatoes, and paint ’em blue, because nobody wants to eat them.”

Anne looked at him suspiciously.

“Now, if the government would just treat sonnets like potatoes, I’d quit the Marines and be a writer. I don’t see why the government doesn’t. What’s a potato got that a sonnet hasn’t got, if nobody wants to buy either sonnets or potatoes?”

“You don’t have to write sonnets. You can write articles, or stories.”

“I’ll tell you when I’ll quit the Marines and go to writing,” he said. “Just as soon as the government pays me a five thousand dollar advance on a book—providing I don’t write it, or gives me ninety percent of parity for not writing articles and stories. Parity, of course, will be the top magazine price, plus twenty percent.”

She laughed, finally, but she hadn’t followed him East. When he got back to the Coast, after three months, they started talking about a house in Los Altos, not far from her parents’ home. They drew plans for it. The plan increased in size in ratio to their dream, and the cost of building materials kept pace. So it hadn’t been built, and a shooting war had come.

Mackenzie slipped the photographs back into his musette bag. And now he was moving again, just when he thought it was over. Well, he’d made his decision, back there that spring morning in forty-eight. Perhaps it had been a bad decision, but it was done, gone, past. Mackenzie called Ekland and said, “Bring your jeep over here. I’m riding with you.” He wanted to be in the radio jeep, in case they ran into a block, and he had to ask for artillery or air in a hurry.

Mackenzie lined up his column carefully. In the lead he placed a jeep with a fifty-seven millimeter recoilless gun mounted, and behind that a jeep with a fifty-calibre machine gun, and the radio jeep was third in line, and a weapons carrier with a squad of riflemen and a bazooka, fourth. Behind this point, sufficient for swift assault, he put his six-by-sixes, two of them loaded with the wounded. The other jeeps, and weapons carriers, were strung out behind, with the rest of his heavy machine guns at the tail of the column.

Dog Company began to roll out, and the squad he had assigned to burn the camp went to work with the jericans of gasoline. As they reached the village he stood up in the jeep and looked back. Flame and black smoke were shooting up from what had been the bivouac at Ko-Bong. Sherman had said it all, he thought, in three words. But then Sherman had been a captain, too. Sherman had been a company commander for a long time. Sherman knew.

As the column moved ahead, it began to snow again, at first only a few vagrant flakes, so he hoped the fall would not be heavy. Then the snowflakes grew smaller and more numerous, and the wind rose, so that Kato and Vermillion, the captain’s runner, huddled down in the back seat. Somewhere in the distance artillery was thumping. “If that’s their stuff,” Mackenzie said to Ekland, who was driving, “at least they won’t have direct observation—not with this snow.”

“They’re 105’s,” said Ekland. “They’re ours. I can tell.”

“I know they’re 105’s,” said Mackenzie, “but that doesn’t make them ours. The Nationalists surrendered plenty of them, back on the mainland.”

“And they’ve captured more,” said Ekland, “since this thing started in June. They got ’em from the South Koreans, and they got ’em from us too. Still, I think these are ours, just from the way they’re firing. They just sound right.”

Mackenzie listened closely, and agreed, and the firing grew louder, and presently they approached the battery. There were four guns, with Marines firing white phosphorus into the boondocks of a distant hill. Mackenzie had Ekland pull the jeep out of line, and they stopped for a moment and talked to the battery’s captain. This captain said that as far as he knew the road into Hagaru was clear. They should turn to the right at the next crossroads. This captain said the hills were crawling with Chinese, and he would be glad to get back to Hagaru himself. He said that if they had wounded they would find the field hospital in the center of the town. The air strip was all the way through the town, and a bit to the south.

Mackenzie thanked this battery captain, and Ekland raced and bumped along the side of the road until the jeep was back in column. They reached the crossroads, and turned, and came to a Bailey bridge over a narrow stream locked in ice. There was an MP on the bridge. He looked good to Mackenzie. He was a sign of regimental authority, and strength. When you saw an MP, you weren’t isolated any more.

The column passed three blocks of shot-up houses, and its center then came to a halt beside a building with a Red Cross flag stretched over the doorway. Mackenzie went inside, and found a medic, tired, harassed, wearing a bloody apron as if he worked in a butcher shop. “I’ve got twenty-two wounded,” Mackenzie said.

“They been given penicillin, or aureomycin?” the medic asked.

“My corpsmen took care of them.”

“Then you’d better get them out of here. You’d better get them on the air evac. We’re full up. We’re full up and then some.” He hesitated, looking at Mackenzie. “Of course, if your corpsmen don’t think they can make the trip. It’s only two hours—”

“You’d better talk to my pharmacist’s mate.”

“Okay.”

The Navy doctor, and the pharmacist’s mate talked together for a while, professionally, and then the doctor said, “They’ll all make it.”

The column moved on, until they came to the air strip. Mackenzie took a good look at the strip. “It looks like a roller coaster,” he said to Ekland.

“Those C-47’s,” Ekland said. “They can land anywhere. They’re old, but they’re good.”

Planes were coming in, loading, and taking off through the snow. As his trucks filled with his wounded rolled up to the strip, Mackenzie timed the planes. One every ten minutes. He got out of his jeep, and watched to see that his wounded were gently handled. His wounded had to wait in line behind other wounded, and while they waited they were tagged, and checked by a doctor. Once in a while, when a man groaned, the doctor, or a nurse, bent over him with alcohol-soaked cotton and a hypodermic. All the medical people looked as if they were stumbling about in their sleep. Dog Company wasn’t the only outfit that had had a bad time.

Mackenzie moved among the litters. “Tokyo,” he said to some, “in two hours.” And to others, who were worse hit, he said, “Tokyo, bud—and then maybe home.”

Some of them, he knew, would be back home in two or three days, but most of them would soon be back in the line. In this war one wound wasn’t enough. One wound would give you a week’s convalescence, and perhaps another week’s leave, and play, in Japan. And that was about all a man could hope for. Modern surgery was a wonderful thing,

That night Dog Company, by Battalion orders, dug in to protect the north end of the Hagaru air strip. Regiment wanted to keep the strip open as long as possible. The spearhead of the regiment was already moving south through Koto-Ri. Their battalion would be last to leave, and Dog Company, after passing through Koto-Ri, would have its mission on the secondary road, and pass under regimental command. This had not changed.

In the morning Chinese guns found the air strip. They were heavy guns, about 170’s, Mackenzie guessed. But they were conserving ammunition, as usual, and while the strip was cratered in places, planes continued to land, and take off with the wounded. Finally the medical unit from the field hospital came down to the strip, and Mackenzie knew Hagaru was gone, and soon he must take the company on to Koto-Ri.

The snow had stopped falling, and apparently American counter-battery had found the Chinese guns, for they stopped too, and Mackenzie checked his vehicles, and then called in his officers, and his non-coms, to tell them what they might expect in the day. There was a lieutenant missing, and Mackenzie could not sort out which one it was, until he saw Sellers limping towards them, his face twisted, and his forearms outstretched. Mackenzie recalled that this was the first time he had seen Sellers since they left Ko-Bong.

When Sellers came closer, the captain saw that the hands at the ends of the forearms were blackened, frozen lumps. “I lost my gloves, sir,” Sellers said. Sellers’ face was shining with pain, or fear.

“You lost your gloves!” It was incomprehensible. A man could no more lose his gloves than he could lose his hands, for if you lost your gloves there was a pretty good chance that in this cold you would lose your hands. And there were spare gloves. Mackenzie had always insisted on that, just as he insisted there be enough dry, clean socks so that every man could change morning and night. So it was not only incomprehensible; it was impossible.

Mackenzie’s face was bleak as the sky, bleak as the ground at his feet. He started to speak, and then choked back the words. Sellers was a coward. Sellers was a malingerer. Sellers was a traitor to them all. What the captain started to say he did not say. All he did was point his finger at a C-47, loading, and say, “All right, get aboard!” And Sellers hurried away.

Mackenzie looked from one to the other of the silent faces in the semi-circle around him, and he said, “I’ll shoot the next man who loses his gloves!”

And he turned his back on them all.