by Pat Frank
“Ekland,” Mackenzie called, “come over here.” The sergeant walked to the side of the jeep, and Mackenzie shared the map with him. “Ekland, what do you think of this?”
Ekland looked at the map hard. “Sir,” he said, “I’m not sure. This map is screwy.”
One of the good things about Ekland, the captain thought, was his frankness. When he didn’t know, he simply said he didn’t know. Mackenzie attempted to estimate the distance Dog Company had progressed since Koto, but time was blurred by hours of marching minus hours of fighting, and somewhere he feared he had dropped a whole day. Still, allowing for the hairpin turns in the road that the map ignored, and the dips and humps of the terrain, they might have covered two-thirds of the distance to the coastal plateau, where he judged they would bump into Ten Corps’ perimeter. Providing, of course, that Ten Corps still existed, and there was a perimeter. He had lost his radio jeep to an ambush of tanks and self-propelled guns in the first fight after Koto, and had not since been in touch with Battalion, or Regiment. So far as Mackenzie knew, his might be the only unit still fighting in Korea. Or the Eighth Army, over on the other coast, might have counter-attacked and put the Chinese to flight. Or everything might have been settled in UN. But all he knew for sure was that it was his job to get Dog Company over this road to Hungnam, if possible, and if that wasn’t possible, then to kill as many of the enemy as he could.
He stuffed the map back in his pocket, and wondered how many things he had forgotten. The socks, of course. He reached under the back seat of the jeep and pulled out the last bundle of clean, dry socks. Two pair he took for himself, and then he tossed the bundle out into the road and shouted, “All right, men, come and get it!”
They moaned, and swore, and the big Swede from Minnesota, Ostergaard, wept, but there was nothing they could do about it, because he had ordered it. They took off their shoepacs, and the clammy socks they had worn through the night, and rubbed each others feet for five minutes, and put on the clean socks. Mackenzie got out of the jeep and rubbed Ekland’s feet, and then he got back into the jeep, and let Ekland rub his feet.
On that very first day when the colonel had sauntered into his area, and hinted that Eighth Army was in trouble, Mackenzie had taken a long look at the map of Korea, and had then gone scrounging for extra socks. When they fought their way out of the trap at the reservoir, Dog Company’s vehicles carried five times as many socks as a company should need. But Mackenzie was determined of this, that he would accept wounds and death from the enemy, if he had to, but he’d be damned if he’d yield casualties to the weather. He’d be damned if one of his men would lose a foot to frostbite.
So every morning, and every nightfall, no matter what else happened, the men changed their socks. On the unexpectedly long breakout of Dog Company, the supply of socks dwindled alarmingly, but the attrition of personnel had been equally great, and it had come out even.
Sergeant Ekland leaned over the side of the jeep and said, “It’s a long way to go without cigarettes, sir. We’re out. All of us.”
“So am I,” the captain said. In Mackenzie’s estimation the lack of cigarettes might be as damaging as lack of food.
The sergeant looked over to the side, where the bodies lay marked by the rock, and then shambled off the road. The captain watched him bend over the bodies.
When he came back Sergeant Ekland was grinning through his frosted red beard, and he held close to his chest three boxes of combat rations, and one full pack of cigarettes, and one pack half full. “I’d forgotten,” the sergeant said. He began to slice open the cartons with his bayonet.
The captain didn’t say anything, but he rested his hand for a moment on Ekland’s shoulder. Then he announced, “Okay. Chow!”
Three rations split seventeen ways wasn’t much. But it was something. It was something for the belly. The captain counted the cigarettes. Twenty in the full pack, nine out of the ration cartons, and nine in the opened pack. That made thirty-eight. There would be one cigarette for each now, and another for some time later on, when it would be needed, and a few to spare.
As he ate his minute share of cheese and chocolate and biscuit, the captain wondered how he could have been so stupid as to forget the rations on the bodies of the dead. Raleigh Couzens and the others had been hit the morning before, and so had needed no meal at noon, for they were so torn inside. Ekland had used his head, as usual. Mackenzie hoped that if any were saved, Ekland would be one of them. The Corps, and the world, could use men like that.
Mackenzie finished, and washed it down from his canteen. His canteen was almost empty, and he suspected that some of the others’ would be completely empty. More than food, more than cigarettes, they must have water. He called Ekland. “We need water,” he said. “Know how to get it?”
Ekland looked around at the world that held them, like a barred cell of rock and ice. “No, sir.”
“I’ll show you. Bring me those helmets.” He gestured at the dead, and watched as the sergeant stripped the dead of their helmets. Then the captain walked to a ledge of rock from which hung ice daggers downward pointed, and began to knock them away with the butt of his carbine. The sergeant filled the helmets with broken ice.
The sergeant waited to see where the captain would make his fire. Mackenzie pointed to the four jericans they would not take along. “Pour these over the vehicles,” he ordered. When the jeeps were saturated the sergeant set the three ice-packed helmets on one of the seats, and then set both jeeps afire. They burned hot and bright for ten minutes, and the captain allowed his men to crowd as close as they dared.
When the fire died he half-filled his canteen from the water in the helmets, and his men lined up and filled theirs. Then he shouted them into movement, and shepherded them into column as he wanted them, with Ekland and the automatic rifle in front, and Ackerman and his bazooka in the rear.
As they strung out along the road, stumbling in the frozen ruts of the ox carts, they bore no resemblance to a company of Marines, or even the remnants of a company. Nothing like them had ever been seen on the parade grounds of Quantico and Lejeune. Yet they were Marines, and armed, and on the move. They would fight, and they were dangerous.
Mackenzie took the lead, his carbine snug against his back and the bottle of Scotch tucked like a football under his arm. As they rounded the first bend of the road he shoved the bottle into the pocket of his parka, alongside the map, and glanced back at the crest of the hill across the gorge. The Mongol horsemen had vanished. He suspected he would see them again.
Chapter Two
ONCE THE MEN were in their stride, the captain timed their progress, counting the cadence in his head, and was surprised to find that their pace was as good as you would expect from boys still in boot camp, well-nourished, fresh, and strong, hiking over the Carolina hills. His men of Dog Company might be bedraggled, and sick with weariness and apprehension, but they had been tempered to an inner hardness by the blowtorch of battle.
He saw nothing of the enemy, but he knew they were there. This new enemy was not orthodox. This new enemy did not expose itself except on ground, and at a time, of its own choosing. Then it rose, as if birthed on the spot by the mud of Asia, in full strength and ferocity. A five-star general had discovered this, the hard way, in Tokyo, and Mackenzie had discovered it, the hard way, at the reservoir. This new enemy slithered around your flanks, and stabbed your rear, and ate at your guts. You could not put your hands on him. It was like trying to strangle a jellyfish.
At the end of an hour, when he reached a turn where he had a clear field of fire on both flanks, and a precipice rising at his rear, he called, “Okay, take a break.” His men halted, and carefully laid down their weapons, in the manner of veterans, and then propped themselves against the rocks.
Mackenzie busied himself building a small pyre of pebbles and what loose earth there was, and Sergeant Ekland, sensing the captain’s intent, joined him and jabbed and scraped the iron earth with his bayonet. “Trick I learned
from a fellow who was in the Aleutians,” the captain explained. “No fuel there, either.”
Then he called for the jericans, and emptied on the pyre a gallon from each. When the gasoline had soaked well into the stones and earth, he touched his lighter to it, and it blazed like a great torch. “Good for eight minutes, maybe ten,” the captain said. He stripped off his gloves and flexed his lean hands before the fire, and pushed back the hood of his parka and took off his helmet and his alpaca pile helmet-liner, and scratched his itching scalp. Then he squatted on the ground.
The men packed close around him, and he overheard a whisper, “He’s a hard bastard, but not dumb.” The corners of his mouth smiled, and he looked sideways at Ekland, and he saw that Ekland too had overheard, and was smiling behind the red beard. While they were separated by the tricky chasm between officers and men, the captain found that he and Ekland often thought alike, and acted alike. And while they never spoke of it, it was the captain’s belief that their aims and ideals were close kin—that both enjoyed the magnificent independence and occasional loneliness of free men.
Ekland said, “Sir, do you think we could split up a few of the cigarettes?”
“Okay,” the captain agreed. He broke out four cigarettes. “One to four men,” he said. He knew Ackerman didn’t smoke. They crowded the fire and burned up the cigarettes, inhaling deep, and when their fingers scorched they impaled the yellow ends on sharpened match sticks for a last puff. Mackenzie shared his cigarette with Ekland and Ostergaard and Joe Kato, the lazy Hawaiian boy whose surprising agility with languages made him a valuable asset in the linguistic morass of Asia, so that he had become a PFC and the unofficial interpreter for the captain. Captains weren’t assigned interpreters, but this captain, by the luck of orders, had one, and had found good use for him. Mackenzie had discovered America deficient in one technical weapon of war—the languages of other peoples.
Kato took the last drag on the captain’s cigarette, and said, “Sir, tell us more about that bottle of Scotch. Weren’t you ever tempted?”
“Yeah,” Beany Smith said. “How come you never drank it? Nothing big ever happen?”
Mackenzie laughed. “Big things happened-at least they seemed big at the time. Lots of times I almost opened it. I almost drank it at Guadalcanal, after I was hit when the Japs attacked on the Tenaru. I had shrapnel in my back, and I could hear the Japs prowling around in the night, and I had to lay there quiet, in my hole, until morning, and I almost drank it then.”
“Why didn’t you?” Beany Smith asked, somewhat awed.
“I wanted it bad enough, God knows. I didn’t have any morphine syrettes, and I was afraid to yell for the aid men. Every once in a while, that night, I’d hear a scream and a scuffle, and I knew that a Jap had fallen into somebody’s foxhole, and that one or the other was dead. I started to open the Scotch. I figured four or five drinks would put me out of pain. But I didn’t open it because I was afraid I’d drink too much and pass out, and a Jap would slip into my hole and murder me.”
“Like we were murdered at Ko-Bong,” Ostergaard said, and then realized that he had said something clumsy, and wished he hadn’t said it.
“Yes,” Mackenzie said, accepting the blame, “as we were murdered at Ko-Bong.”
Then Mackenzie told them of Guadalcanal, of the stinking jungle and the weird Banzai charges, and the uncertain days after the Navy lost four cruisers off Savo Island, and the thin-hulled transports fled the beach. He told how the lonely Marines lay in the mud while the Japanese battleships steamed past, hurling 14-inch shells down upon them, lording it over the night.
As Mackenzie talked he kept looking over the shoulders of his men, examining the cone-shaped hills on the other side of the gorge, and the road as far as he could see it. He noted that Ekland, like an experienced hunter in the field, always searching for signs of movement, did the same.
Mackenzie spoke of malaria, and dysentery, and jungle rot, and the crud. He told them of the foot-long centipedes that would creep between your belt and waistband in the night, and fasten on your thumb in the morning, and leave you screaming in agony like childbirth for a full day. He spoke of the leeches that fell from the trees to suck your blood, and the ants with a bite like hot pokers, and the wasps three inches long, and the three-foot lizards, and spiders big as dinner plates. He told of men brained by falling coconuts and rotten trees, and the stealthy crocodiles, and the stench of the enemy’s abandoned dead, so you retched before your morning coffee.
He made it sound as bad as it actually had been. That was his intention.
“Jeepers!” said little Nick Tinker. “That must’ve been rugged!”
“Them wild Japs!” said Beany Smith. “They must’ve been awful!”
“They were pretty shrewd,” the captain said, “and pretty tough. But we licked ’em on The ’Canal, and we won out in the end.” The flame in the earthen pyramid was dying in blue spasms, each weaker than the last. “All right!” Mackenzie commanded. “Off your butts and on the way!”
Mackenzie, walking in the van with the bottle snug in the sack-like pocket of his parka, wondered if the crags and hills ever would begin to lose height, and give him hope of the coastal plains beyond; but as far ahead as he could see the truculent hills brooded over the gorge. Ahead the road veered from the protection of the cliff, and twisted out to touch the winter-paralyzed stream that in flood had so brutally eroded this tortured land. He did not like the looks of it. He called Ekland. “What d’you think?” he said.
“It looks chancy, sir,” said Ekland.
“It does, doesn’t it? But there’s only one way to go, and that’s ahead.”
Yonder, where the road ran in team with the stream, Dog Company would be naked, exposed to fire and assault from every direction. But the point of danger was still a mile distant, and his mind returned to Kato’s question. There’d been another temptation, not long after Guadalcanal, that he’d omitted.
They’d sent him out of the fleet hospital in Noumea with a Purple Heart and a couple of other ribbons pinned on a uniform so fresh it still bore its warehouse creases. They gave him two weeks’ leave in Sydney.
Fairest city south of the line,
Sydney,
Women, whiskey; women, wine.
Bid me, Sydney.
Her first name was Kitty, and he was never quite sure of her last name and so he had not written her afterward. He met her on the last day of his leave. An artilleryman, hurrying back to the New Guinea front, introduced them during the lunch hour at Romano’s. When you were on leave in Sydney you rendezvoused for lunch, or a late breakfast with martinis, at Romano’s, just as you went to Prince’s at night. Now that he thought of it, he was pretty sure her last name was Turcott. That was it, Kitty Turcott, “more white and red than doves or roses are,” and stacked like a Venus in miniature to boot. It was strange that he should remember the name, after all the years, just now. Perhaps it was true that once you tucked a fact in your brain it was there for keeps, never truly lost.
He took her to Prince’s that night. All the Aussie girls at their table—the table of the First Marine Division—were attractive, but she was the prettiest, and vivacious and gay, almost, he thought, to the borderline of panic. She laughed the loudest and drank the most. It didn’t matter. He wanted her. They danced every dance in the tiny oval of the merry, noisy amphitheater, with the tables, immaculate in linen and silver and crystal, rising in concentric circles around them. She was a tantalizing, golden sprite, first pressing close to him, then fending him off with practiced grace. His share of the check was sixteen pounds, Australian, which did not seem exorbitant at the time.
At midnight the band played “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and then, “God Save the King,” and as they stood erect, her hand alive and warm on his arm, she whispered, “No more drink after twelve. Austerity, you know. I do wish I had another drink.”
“Know any place where we can get it?” Mackenzie had been a child during prohibition, but he
remembered his dad’s tales of the speakeasies.
“We don’t have any bottle clubs in Sydney. We aren’t civilized. In London they have bottle clubs and therefore are civilized—so they say.”
He whispered, “I’ve got a bottle at the pub.” In Australia, you called your hotel a pub.
“Let’s get it,” she said, as the band rolled to its crescendo. “Let’s get it and go up to my flat.”
So they managed to find a cab in the brownout, and they went to the Hotel Australia and picked up a bottle—this bottle. The captain pressed it close to his side. It seemed crazy now, but it had seemed important at the time. On his last night in Sydney, it was important not to lose that golden, rounded, sprite of a girl, for in the morning he had to catch a SCAT plane back to the Solomons. SCAT. It meant Southern Cross Air Transport, the wildest, coolest, most reliable airline that ever took off nonchalantly with a two-ton overload. He wondered whether anyone beside himself remembered, and blessed, SCAT now.
Then the cab took them to her flat, on Point Piper, overlooking Lady Martin’s Beach and Rose Bay, and of course it had reminded him of San Francisco. It was not only the marine view. He remembered the advertisements in the San Francisco newspapers that always began, MARINE VIEW . . . A marine view in San Francisco might mean a slice of the bay an inch wide, but in Kitty Turcott’s apartment the marine view meant the whole wide sweep, through a curved picture window, of one of the magnificent harbors of the world. It was not only the marine view, but the flat itself. Just such an apartment, furnished with a flair for style and still in good taste, you might find in the newest buildings on Telegraph Hill. If you were lucky. It was surprising that two cities, and two peoples, could be separated by the whole thickness of the world, and yet be as close, in spirit, as cities split by rivers only, like Minneapolis and St. Paul, and Omaha and Council Bluffs. They were very close, San Francisco and Sydney, bound together by ties of language and humanity, and common blood and aspiration that transcended geography. When you looked out across the bay from Kitty’s flat, only the stars were different.
