Hold Back the Night

by Pat Frank

  It was awkward, very awkward. The other date was an Air Force major with a guardsman’s mustache and an Eighth Air Force patch on his sleeve and three rows of flashy ribbons on his chest. Mackenzie didn’t know what all these ribbons meant, but he felt they must have been legitimate, because one of them was a Purple Heart. The major seemed completely at home at the Longstreets’. He knew where to find the cheese in the refrigerator, and the ice tongs, and he made a point of brewing the coffee, and he joked with the Longstreets familiarly as if he were a favorite nephew—or a son-in-law.

  There took place between them one of those strange duels of patience that occur when two men are determined to have one woman alone, and are forced by the manners of the moment not to settle the matter in the way of cavemen, or cavaliers of the eighteenth century. The major won. The major outlasted him, and outwaited him. The major was fresh, while Mackenzie was tired from forty hours of flight across the Pacific. Or perhaps Mackenzie was not certain of his self-control, and feared he might blow up and cause a scene. Or perhaps he was deeply and secretly afraid that this was the way it would be, was bound to be, and was braced to accept it. And in addition to all this, Mackenzie’s uniform was uncomfortable and tight, the collar biting into his neck, and his trousers climbing his legs whenever he sat down.

  At midnight he gave up, and bade them goodnight with politeness as empty and insincere as a headwaiter’s smile. The major obligingly called a cab for him, and courteously refrained from following when Anne escorted him to the walk. “Well, fly off into the wild blue yonder. Be seeing you around,” Mackenzie told her, in parting.

  And she said, standing there in the moonlight, straight and angry and maddeningly desirable, because of her jasmine, and her new maturity, and her lithe beauty, and his long need for her, “Captain, you are a damned fool.”

  He turned his back on her, and returned to the hotel, and in the lobby he ran into some others from the First. They told him they had some old phone numbers that had been good deals, if the girls were still in town, and some new ones that sounded promising, and they invited him along. But he went to his room. Now that he had seen Anne again he had no heart for other women. When he was in the room he took out the bottle of Scotch that he’d lugged across half the world. First he thought of throwing it out of the window, and then he thought of drinking it, and finally he thought of sending it back to her, done up in ribbons. That would tell her how he felt, if anything would.

  So he ordered drinks sent up from the bar, and set them out in a row, a skirmish line of amber and crystal on the austere hotel writing desk. He killed the glasses in this line, one by one. He drank one, and then he wrote a paragraph he intended to enclose with the bottle. Then he drank another, and another.

  That was the way she found him, at three in the morning, except by then he’d finished the drinks, and was wondering whether it wouldn’t be just as effective to send her back the bottle—but empty.

  She knocked, and when he yelled, “Come in,” she walked into the room and straight into his arms. She found his mouth with her mouth, and tried to merge her body with his body, and for a long space of time neither wished to speak. Until he was tired, and out of breath. Then she said, “I love you, Sam. I don’t love anybody else.”

  He said, “That guy.”

  “I sent Tom home. I was rude to him, I guess. I’m sorry, because he was nice to me. He’s been nice to me for a long time.” And she spoke of how lonely and fearful girls could get when their men were away to the wars; and how they were afraid for their men, and being afraid, sometimes tied to another man as an anchor, and a hedge against total loss. She said she supposed this was a weakness, but that was the way it was, and what was he going to do about it?

  On that particular night Mackenzie wasn’t in shape to do anything about it, except talk, and he couldn’t talk very clearly. He sat on the edge of the bed and held his head in his hands, ashamed of his condition and his inadequacy, and tried to make straight words come out of a whirling brain. “I’m going to marry you. Right now. Right this minute. Call the preacher. Tell him to come up. Tell him to come up and have a drink and marry us and we’ll get the license in the morning.”

  At last she persuaded him to lie flat on the bed, and she undressed him, stilling his protests with kisses. When she had him between the sheets she kissed him one last time, and although he clutched at her, and begged her, and raved of his desire for her, she left him.

  That had been a bad night, a worse night than this. But his next night with Anne had been different, and so now again the next night might be different.

  Maybe he’d wake up in the morning and discover that the Communists were all through, that Eighth Army had rallied and was driving them back, and that the retreat was at an end. Or it might even be that this war would end. All wars ended some time, didn’t they? But some lasted for generations. Rome and Carthage. Greece and Persia. The Crusades. The Mongols and the West. England and Spain. America and Russia. No, that was wrong. That wasn’t the way to say it. The way to say it was to paraphrase Lincoln. It should read, “I believe this world cannot endure permanently half slave and half free,” for indeed in point of time, by which the space of the world was now reckoned, the world was smaller and more compact and one than Lincoln’s country, all his awkward, gangling country, of 1861.

  This war between the free world and the slave world could carry on for generations, as had other wars, but this one was more important, because it might decide things forever. This thing in Korea didn’t look like much. It looked ridiculous. It was a skirmish over a piece of third-class real estate of no strategic importance. Yet it would be decisive, Mackenzie sensed. It was a clash of wills. What was the final objective of warfare? He brought it out of the textbooks, “to break the will of the enemy.” Here in Korea, somebody’s will was going to be broken.

  And if this war was important, then Dog Company was important, because Dog Company had the duty. It was necessary that the First Marine Division reach the coast intact, whether or not there was an evacuation. It was necessary his regiment get through, and this depended upon Dog Company’s aptitude on the flank.

  If the Marines were destroyed, or so battered they could not soon again be committed to combat, it’d make a difference. It would influence the Army commander, back in Pusan, and even the theater general, in Tokyo. They had little enough, the Americans. They couldn’t afford to lose a division. They could afford to lose a company, but not a division. And if Tokyo was disheartened, then Washington would be shaken. Washington might decide it had all been a mistake, and draw back, and once having committed itself to drawing back, Washington might decide to draw back all the way—to the shores of North America. To isolation, on the shores of North America.

  It was a damn shame that the young ones, and the good ones, had to die first. It was a goddam shame that a boy like Bishop got blown to shreds by a Russian shell out of a Russian barrel fired from a Russian tank, when Bishop had never had a chance to shoot back at Russians. But if Dog Company won out in the end, then Bishop had got in his licks, because it was to be decided here. Here, in Korea. Sam Mackenzie slammed his open palm on the floor hard enough to kill a man.

  “Go to sleep, Sam,” said Raleigh Couzens.

  “Okay,” Mackenzie said, and he slept.

  Chapter Nine

  DOG COMPANY PULLED out of Koto-Ri at 0600. Everybody rode rubber. Mackenzie had eight jeeps, three six-by-sixes, and two weapons carriers. The radio jeep led the column, snaking out through the Koto-Ri streets until Ekland located the narrow set of tracks that Dog Company had been instructed to follow to the sea. They left habitations and paddy fields behind, and the hills rose slowly around them. The sound of artillery defending the Koto-Ri strip became a dull thump, like distant drums, out of rhythm.

  Then the sounds of war faded entirely, and Dog Company was alone. It was lonely on that road, lonely and cold and desolate, and all of them were afraid, although their fear was visible only in a negati
ve way, by their silence. Dog Company had left the protective arm of Division, and Regiment, and Battalion. Dog Company was on its own. Later, in the official action reports, it would be called a Task Force, but it was a task force without much punch or power. Even the private soldiers, the riflemen, who never were told anything, sensed this isolation, this nakedness, and sought the comfort of a buddy’s shoulder in the six-by-sixes and the weapons carriers. The private soldiers, almost all of them, were very young. They were so young that in the unusual and scanty periods of peace, referred to as “ordinary times,” they would have been office boys and soda jerks and filling-station flunkies and Golden Gloves fighters and cowhands and grocery clerks. Yet there was this distinctive thing about them. They had volunteered. They were distinct and apart.

  There was no sign of the enemy. And all the people, the people that armies call “indigenous personnel,” seemed to have disappeared. This disturbed Mackenzie. “Where are the people?” he asked Ekland.

  “Beats me,” said Ekland. “Except—”

  “Except what?”

  “Except I haven’t seen any civilian traffic. None at all. I haven’t seen any ox carts, or anything. It isn’t natural. There ought to be some movement on this road. You always see something, maybe only an old woman with a goat, or some kids crying.”

  “The poor kids,” said Mackenzie. “They don’t know what it’s all about.”

  “I’d go crazy if I had a kid and he was lost and alone and hungry, like these Korean kids,” said Ekland.

  “Ever think of getting married?” said Mackenzie.

  This was the first time that the captain had inquired about his private life, and it was not a usual thing. Usually, a company skipper avoided speaking of the private life of his men, for with some of the men it was a touchy matter. For some of the men the anonymity of a uniform was protective coloration, as in the French Foreign Legion, and they would resent it if an officer asked about their private lives. But since the captain had asked, and since the captain was sensitive to the thoughts and moods of his men, Ekland knew that he was genuinely interested, and not just curious, and Ekland felt he could speak frankly to the captain. “I should be married,” he said. “By rights I should be married right now. I should be married and have my feet propped up on a hassock in my living room and be watching the Army-Navy game. Today’s Saturday, isn’t it?”

  “Damned if I know.”

  “Well, if it’s Saturday that’s what I ought to be doing. I ought to have a wife and a good job with NBC, and not be wandering around some place at the rear end of the earth expecting to get my head blown off any minute.”

  “Well, why didn’t you get married, instead of coming back in?”

  Ekland laughed. “It was necessary that I save the world. Crazy, that’s what we were. Nuts.”

  He twisted the wheel, and they skidded, and stopped, for in his thoughts of himself he had forgotten that he was at the head of the column, and those behind could not keep pace.

  “Those civilians are hiding,” the captain said. “Hiding like small game when the tigers are out.”

  “We’re not tigers,” said Ekland.

  “They are,” said Mackenzie. “They’re tigers.”

  The jeep crept forward again, and both of them were silent, but they were thinking the same thing. They were under observation. They could see nothing, but they could feel it. When they reached a point where the road was wide enough for vehicles to pass comfortably, Mackenzie told Ekland to stop. “I’m going to shuffle up the column,” he said. “We want more firepower up front here.”

  He put the jeep with the seventy-five in the van, and behind it a jeep mounting a fifty-calibre machine gun, and also carrying Ackerman, his serious bazooka man. He himself, in the radio jeep, took station between the weapons carriers in the center of the column. He had a heavy machine gun bring up the rear. Then, as an afterthought, he sent a four-man jeep patrol far out in front. He wished he had skirmishers on his flanks, too, but there wasn’t time for movement afoot. He had to keep pace with Regiment. And the terrain was nasty.

  The terrain got worse. The road climbed interminably, but the mountains climbed faster on either side, and it developed, finally, that they were ascending through a gorge, a cliff binding their right, while on the left the road fell steeply away into a canyon. In this gorge the wind rose, and it seemed to grow colder. It was not really that it grew colder. It was simply that the wind provided the cold with a weapon, a thin blade to slice through the tiniest crevice in a man’s clothes, and to stab at his mouth and eyes.

  When a man is very cold, or very hot, it is difficult for him to stay alert for danger. The immediate discomfort is more pressing than the unseen threat. Mackenzie realized this, and so he forced himself to ignore the wind, and the cold, and concentrate on his job.

  At noon he called for a break, and the men piled out of the vehicles, stiff and weary, and huddled in the lee of the cliff to their right. He walked among them, cautioning them on the care of their weapons and their feet and their vehicles. The C-rations in the six-by-sixes were frozen solid, and long ago the wood had been stripped from these mountains, so there was no fuel for fire except gasoline, and Mackenzie would not use gasoline for fires when he wasn’t sure how much his transport would consume on the way to Hungnam. In any case, there was no time to thaw out food. The men ate combat rations. They beat out chunks of tropical chocolate and solidified cheese with their bayonets and thawed these chunks in their mouths. It was difficult, but it was food.

  The captain inspected the map that Regiment had left for him at Koto-Ri. There was a steep peak across the gorge, to his left. It didn’t have a name, but the map said it was two thousand meters high, and he believed it. He guessed the Chinese would have an OP on that peak. It was the logical place. He ordered Dog Company to move on.

  The company crawled upward until it was opposite this peak, and then they passed it, and the road tilted downward again until the ravine on their left became flat plain, studded with clusters of rock and mounds of stones, as if they had been scattered by a careless giant. On this plain nothing moved, nothing stirred, until there was a single dull explosion, far ahead. His patrol jeep ought to be somewhere around that explosion, and he was debating whether to order his point up to their support, or whether to halt the whole company in place and prepare for defense, when the decision was taken out of his hands.

  Out on the plain bugles blew, and cymbals clashed, and whistles shrilled, and incredibly the plain moved. It moved in waves. The waves were gray, like the plain, but the waves were men. It was incredible, and it was frightening. Mackenzie knew at once that this was the real thing. This was a mass attack by at least one battalion, perhaps two, and unless he was very lucky Dog Company would be destroyed right here, to the last man, and the Chinese flood would pour over him, and across the ridge to his right, and take Regiment on the flank. He began to give orders, Ekland relaying them through the walkie-talkie.

  “Out of the vehicles! Keep away from the vehicles! Hit the dirt!”

  The six-by-sixes and the weapons carriers were big and vulnerable targets.

  Then, “Find cover! Find cover!”

  Then there were special orders for the mortarmen, to emplace their weapons behind rocks, and start them going. But to the machine gunners and the riflemen there were different orders—to hold their fire. A mass attack, like this, should be met by mass firepower. The firepower should not be dispersed. It should be used, in the old-fashioned way, like a volley, a volley that in one blast of firing would throw back a wave. Like Wellington’s thin red lines, throwing back the massed Continental infantry.

  Ekland, relaying the captain’s orders, found time to start his command set warming on Channel Five, and the captain noticed this and said, “We’ve got to have air. We’ve got to have air or we haven’t got much chance.”

  The mortars began to speak, and Mackenzie saw them bursting with speed and precision in and in front of the waves. And he could
see that the Chinese, even as they ran, were firing automatic weapons, but the range was too great, and they were firing wildly, and they were wasting ammunition. They were screaming as they ran. “Sha! Sha!” They were mad, and Mackenzie was grateful for their madness.

  “You raise Battalion?” he asked Ekland.

  “I think so, sir.” Ekland began to speak on Channel Five. “This is Lightning Four. This is Lightning Four. We’re under attack. We’re under heavy attack. We’ve got to have air.”

  Regiment acknowledged, and asked for co-ordinates.

  “Tell him we don’t have any co-ordinates,” said Mackenzie. “Tell him about that mountain. Call it Hill 2000. They’ve got the same maps. They’ll place it. Tell him we’ve just passed it, on the road, and the Chinese are attacking across the open.”

  Ekland told Regiment, moving on the parallel road to the south. Colonel Grimm, riding in a six-by-six fitted out as a CP, heard it, placed Dog Company on the map with his forefinger, and instantly saw the danger of the situation. He sent a request to Division, urgent, for air. He sent a recommendation with it. After they bombed, the planes should go in and strafe, and if it was at all possible, they should maintain air cover over Dog Company until the company was out of trouble. This was all Colonel Grimm could do. Regiment had troubles of its own.

  The message from Regiment went to Division, and from there to Seventh Fleet, and from Seventh Fleet to Task Force 77. In this task force was the carrier Leyte, with a Marine Corps air group aboard. The Marines always were supported by their own fliers. From the time Ekland gave Dog Company’s position, until the time the admiral found that position with his dividers in the plot room of the Leyte, six minutes passed. “How many’ve we got up?” the admiral asked the commander of the Marine squadron aboard.