by Pat Frank
“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 rat
her 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.
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br /> “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.”
