Hold Back the Night

by Pat Frank

  “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. Macke
nzie 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.

  Chapter Seven

  DOG COMPANY WAS relieved at noon that day, and pulled out. Battalion had messaged it was now situated in Koto-Ri. Division had assigned a battery—probably the one Dog Company had passed on the road from Ko-Bong—and two companies from another regiment, retreating along the track from Yudam-ni, to guard the Hagaru strip as long as feasible. Regiment wanted Dog Company to take up its mission at once, for Regiment, with its heavy equipment, was moving towards the coast, and needed protection on its northern flank.

  Now Mackenzie placed the radio jeep at the head of the column. There was a maze of local roads around the strip, and only one of these was certainly clear and led to the main road south to Koto-Ri. Mackenzie had memorized a map of the area. It would not do to get on the wrong road. If they got on the wrong road, they would undoubtedly encounter guerrillas, and probably mines. Mackenzie hated mines. They were treacherous, impersonal, robot killers. You could not shoot back at a mine.

  As the lead jeep bounced along, Sergeant Ekland noticed how morose Mackenzie was, how his long chin was tucked deep inside his parka, and how his eyes, usually so alert, so all-seeing, now seemed inattentive, and dulled as if by illness. Of course Ekland knew the reason for this. It is a terrible thing for a captain to discover that one of his lieutenants has bugged out, although Ekland, and most of the men of Dog Company, had known that Sellers was yellow. They had known it all the time.

  Almost always, Ekland thought, the men knew a lot more about their officers than the officers knew about each other, or themselves. The men could, and did, observe and discuss their officers dispassionately; while officers’ opinion of other officers was colored by rank and seniority, friendships and small jealousies, their manners at the poker table, the social graces of their wives, and the presumption that they were all born gentlemen, and all born brave.

  Even so perceptive a captain as Mackenzie might not notice the flaw in Sellers, because that flaw was concealed when the captain was around. And when things got rugged, the captain and Sellers were always in different places. When Dog Company rested out of reach of the enemy, Sellers was everywhere, the busiest, most active, most talkative officer in the command. But when there was fighting, it was impossible to find him. Sellers’ patrician New England nostrils could sense danger far off, as birds sense an approaching storm and take flight. Sellers couldn’t openly bug out. That would mean court-martial and public disgrace, which for a fearful, hollow man can be worse than death. Sellers was ingenious, and smart, and energetic, and he used all these qualities to insure himself safe duty in the safest place. He had discovered that Dog Company needed a liaison officer with a battalion of heavy artillery, Long Toms, set so deep in the perimeter that it could not be reached by enemy fire. At the Inchon landing, Sellers remained on the LST, to be certain all their gear reached shore, while Dog Company fought the T-34 tanks on the edge of Seoul. And when the first Chinese counterattack came, the month before, Sellers had volunteered to race back to Regiment, in an escorted jeep, to help map the enemy deployment.

  All these things the men noticed, and discussed, and it was strange that the captain never noticed them, the captain who could smell an unkempt gun barrel at twenty paces. It must have been humiliating to the captain, this business of the frozen hands. Company officers are fused together by the intimacy of war, the intimacy of those who sleep, wash, and eat and face death together for a long period of time. The captain must have felt as if one of his younger brothers had been proved a forger. Ekland felt sorry for the captain.

  The captain raised his chin and said, “Don’t take the right fork. Keep straight.”

  “Yes, sir.” Ekland wondered what created a coward. There was a difference between being a coward, and being afraid. Ekland always sweated with tenseness, and nervousness, when they moved into battle, and when they were pinned down and shells were coming in he was almost paralyzed. He’d spoken to Molly about this fear, frankly, and she’d said, “John, don’t ever let it worry you. Only a moron wouldn’t be afraid when he was in danger of losing his life.” For a girl her age she was awfully smart, Molly. She completed him. He needed her, all the time.

  He’d always been able to control his fear, and not run. And once a fire fight started, and he was actually doing something, even something routine like encoding a plea for artillery, or sending out co-ordinates to the guns, then his fear miraculously vanished. A man wasn’t afraid when there was a job to do, and a man took pride in doing a good job, whether it was hitching up the network to the stations, in Chicago, or keeping Dog Company in touch with Battalion, or digging gooks out of a cave with a flamethrower. And there was another kind of pride, the pride of being in the First Division, with all its history; the pride of Regiment, and Battalion, and Company. A company was like a baseball team. One bad or lazy player could make the difference. Only a very selfish man would let down his company, so Ekland concluded Sellers must have been a spoiled and selfish man. Right now Sellers was safe in Japan, and in a few weeks he’d be back home, wearing ribbons. Ekland knew of self-inflicted wounds, and once he had seen a man incongruously blow out his brains in desperate fear of death, but getting yourself frostbitten was a shrewd and subtle way out. Nobody could prove frostbite was self-inflicted.

  Far ahead of them Ekland saw another jeep approaching, behaving erratically. It swerved into the shallow ditch and a man piled out and scrambled under it. Ekland thought he heard the hiss of a burp gun, and then he saw thin gouts of flame from the second floor window of a house on the other side of the road from the jeep. He tramped down hard with his right foot, and the tires spun in the snow, and then gripped, and they lunged forward.

  “What the hell?” said Mackenzie.

  “Sniper,” said Ekland, keeping his eyes on the window, and the road. “Got him marked.”

  Mackenzie put his carbine in his lap.

  When their jeep was a hundred yards from the house Ekland braked, and grabbed his BAR from the rack on the dash. “Cover me,” he said. “The window on this side, second floor. Kato, grenades for you.”

  Ekland hit the ground, running and doubled over, and left the road, with Vermillion and Kato behind him. Mackenzie followed, the butt of his carbine cradled in his elbow, like a boar hunter fascinated by the skill of his catch dogs. Nobody had to tell them what to do. They were good. They were pros.

  This house, with cracked and flaking plaster walls, on the outskirts of Hagaru, like most Korean two-story houses, had no windows except in front, and so they rushed its blind side. They deployed in the shelter of the wall. Vermillion backed cautiously into the street, and as soon as the window was in his sights, he began to fire, methodically, to keep the sniper down. Mackenzie joined him, his carbine at his shoulder, to take up the covering fire when Vermillion changed magazines, and to watch the other window, and the door. Kato appeared, careful not to obstruct their fire, drew back his arm, and lobbed a grenade through the window with the smooth, easy motion of a warm-up pitch. While the grenade was still in the air, he turned and ran, in case the grenade should miss, and bounce from the wall. He had never missed, but some day he might. With the grenade’s explosion, Ekland raced around the corner of the house, and through the door. Mackenzie heard four short bursts from the BAR, and then Ekland came
out of the house, examining the breech of his weapon. “There were two of them,” Ekland said. “Koreans, I guess.”

  The man under the jeep now crawled out, a pistol dangling from his hand. Mackenzie turned to Kato and Vermillion. “You two men go back and get the transport moving,” he ordered.

  The man with the pistol said, “Thanks. Pretty inadequate, isn’t it—thanks?” He was a chunky man, older than a Marine at the front should be, and Mackenzie could tell from the condition of his boots and his greatcoat, and by the fact that he carried a pistol, that he was fresh from the States. A forty-five was not much use in this war.

  “You hurt?” Mackenzie asked.

  “No. They got a tire. That’s all, I guess.” They glanced at the jeep. There was a semi-circle of small round holes in the steel. “Not quite all,” the man said. “I suppose you’re Dog Company.” He looked closely at Mackenzie. “You must be Mackenzie. Heard of you at Division CP. I’m on Division Staff. I’m Major Toomey.”

  “I’ll have my men in the tail jeep change your tire, major. They can catch up with us.”

  “That’s damn nice of you. I think I’d just as soon be shot as change a tire in this cold. I’m not exactly acclimatized.”

  “California?” said Mackenzie.

  “Yes. San José.”

  “Los Altos,” said Mackenzie.

  “Do you know the Woodruffs?”

  “Jim Woodruff? Sure. Lives on the Saratoga Road.”

  “Small world.”

  “Getting no bigger. What’s the poop at Division?”

  Major Toomey frowned. “Not very good. Not very good at all. Navy’s got a lot of ships at Hungnam, and more are coming in every day. We haven’t been told yet, officially, but I think there’s going to be an evacuation. I think there will have to be an evacuation.”