by Pat Frank
“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, ‘Sig
nals 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.
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.
