Combat- Parallel Lines

by William Peter Grasso

  “How am I doing? Not worth a shit, Top,” Captain Pop replied. “I gotta bird-dog every damn patrol, especially the night ones, to make sure they’re actually going out to where they’re supposed to. I ain’t got more than an hour’s sleep a day since Operation Thunderbolt cranked up. Tonight ain’t gonna be no different, I’m afraid.”

  *****

  First Sergeant Grundy, the top kick of Theo Papadakis’ Able Company, didn’t like what his commander was telling him to do. “Top sergeants don’t go on patrols, Captain,” he growled. “That’s not the way it’s done.”

  “I’m not telling you to go on a patrol, First Sergeant. I’m telling you to make sure the NCOs assigned to lead those patrols actually execute them as ordered. That sounds like something a guy wearing six stripes and a diamond should be able to handle pretty easy…”

  He considered saying this next thought out loud but decided not to: Even if that guy doesn’t want to stick his neck out because he’s a short-timer.

  Instead, Captain Pop finished with, “And in case you forgot, First Sergeant, I’m the one who decides the way things are done in this company. You’re the guy who enforces those decisions.”

  Grundy realized he’d overplayed his hand. He might be able to bluff some green lieutenant into surrendering his authority, but Theo Papadakis didn’t fit that bill. He was a highly experienced combat leader who’d led companies under fire before. As a result, he was wise to all the ways a soldier might try to shirk his duty…

  Or how a senior NCO might try to hide behind protocols and procedures he’d invented out of thin air to avoid the performance of distasteful tasks, like actually going out on a night patrol.

  Patchett would have a shit-fit if he caught an NCO doing that, Papadakis knew for a fact. He doesn’t play that game.

  “Are you giving me a die-rect order, sir?” Grundy asked.

  “I shouldn’t have to give you an order to get you to do your job, Sergeant.”

  “That’s first sergeant, Captain.”

  Papadakis said nothing in reply. There was no need; without a doubt, the look he gave Grundy got the message across loud and clear: You won’t be a first sergeant for long, pal, if you don’t watch your step. Those stripes are only sewn on.

  *****

  Able Company would send out two squad-sized recon patrols that night. The easy patrol—the one that covered the fairly open terrain along Highway 2 as it ran northeast out of Hajin—didn’t cause Papadakis much concern as he drafted the patrol orders.

  There’s no mountain climbing involved, and the level, frozen marshland makes for good fields of vision, even at night. As long as the squad stays alert, there’s little chance of them getting surprised by chinks coming out of the woodwork all of a sudden. It’s more like setting up a listening post than walking around looking for trouble.

  I’ll tell Grundy to keep tabs on them. I couldn’t care less how he does it, as long as the job gets done.

  The other patrol was a different story. That squad would have to scale the heavily wooded ridgeline north of Hajin. If the Chinese planned to infiltrate 26th Regiment’s area, there was little doubt those hills would be the most likely avenue of approach. Visibility in those dense woods at night would be almost nil. To see or hear anything at all of an enemy’s approach, the patrol would have to climb to the highest point on the icy ridge, a daunting task even in daylight. They’d be doing it in near pitch dark conditions.

  Even with a good sergeant in charge of the squad—which Becker seems to be—the urge to fuck the dog is gonna be real strong. I’ll keep an eye on this squad myself.

  To aid in tracking the squads in the dark, Papadakis had instructed his commo sergeant to rig two walkie-talkies with a loop antenna rather than the standard whip. A radio so equipped wouldn’t be able to transmit, only receive. But by panning the loop until maximum signal strength was received, a radio operator could determine a fairly accurate azimuth to the transmitter he was tracking.

  “Knowing that azimuth, you can usually tell right off the bat if somebody’s bullshitting you about where he is,” Captain Pop said.

  Sounding skeptical, Grundy asked, “Have you done stuff like this before, sir?”

  “Yep. Came in real handy, too. A bunch of times.”

  “But now we’ve got to carry two radios…the RTO’s backpack set and this direction-finding nigger-rig you cooked up. That’s a lot of extra humping, Captain.”

  Papadakis just smiled and said, “Can’t fool you, can I, First Sergeant?”

  “But word’s going to get down to the patrol squads real quick that their radios are being tracked,” Grundy complained.

  “I don’t see that as a bad thing, First Sergeant. Might help keep them on their toes.”

  “Negative, sir. They’ll just clam up. Won’t report in or nothing.”

  “They will if they want credit for the patrol,” Papadakis replied. “There’s a new rule that just came out, effective immediately: if you don’t report in when required, you didn’t walk the patrol. You stay at the top of the assignment list.”

  “What the hell are you talking about, Captain? What new rule?”

  “The one I just made, First Sergeant. You’d better spread the word, too, so there are no misunderstandings.”

  *****

  Captain Pop didn’t find it necessary to physically track Sergeant Becker’s patrol. He followed their progress by radio, easily plotting their transmissions as they scaled the ridge. To be certain of the plots, he and his RTO moved eastward along Highway 2, allowing the direction-finding walkie-talkie an ever-broadening angle to provide unambiguous azimuth readings. Those readings left him with little doubt that Becker’s patrol was doing its job.

  That eastward movement also allowed Papadakis to stay close to the easy patrol, the one First Sergeant Grundy was supposed to be keeping tabs on. Ordinarily, he’d never felt it necessary to bird-dog a senior NCO; a man with six stripes on his sleeve could usually get any job assigned to him done with no supervision whatsoever. But there was something about Grundy…

  I don’t trust the guy. He does what I tell him…but that’s the problem: he never takes the initiative. I always have to tell him what to do. And even after I do tell him, I get the feeling he’s scheming how to do as little as possible to get by.

  I need to see what his idea of supervising this patrol comes down to.

  To add to Captain Pop’s uneasiness, the Chinese had begun to play their strange music over loudspeakers again, the sound drifting southward to the American lines in the stillness of night, reverberating through the valleys. The GIs had come to accept it as some sort of signal; broadcasting that signal in musical code made sense for an ill-equipped army that had little in the way of radio communications. Still, they found it unnerving.

  It’s gotta be pretty basic stuff they’re trying to get across, like “attack at 0500” or “switch to plan B.” I mean how much information can you get across by sticking messages in a piece of weird music that sounds like it’s being played by drunken monkeys?

  When you got as many people as the chinks do, though, I guess you gotta communicate by the old KISS rule: keep it simple, stupid.

  There had been two transmissions from the easy patrol—call sign Snowball Four-Six—each transmission giving Battalion the name of a coded waypoint and reporting negative contact. Neither Pop nor his RTO recognized the voices.

  “Those guys sound like they’ve never keyed a mike before, sir,” the RTO said. “They’re all kinds of nervous. Practically screeching, for cryin’ out loud.”

  Scared, more than likely, Papadakis told himself, probably outta their fucking minds. Night patrols’ll do that to you.

  “Where do they plot?” he asked the RTO.

  “Funny thing, sir…it’s like they’re walking in circles. The azimuth is staying within the same arc…about twenty degrees.” He held the map up so the captain could take a look.

  “That don’t look right,” Pop said. “Get Seven
on the horn.”

  Snowball Seven: First Sergeant Grundy’s call sign.

  When a voice replied—the same nervous voice that had been on the air as Snowball Four-Six—Papadakis said, “That don’t sound right, neither. We gotta get over there. Gimme the azimuth.”

  “Zero-four-zero,” the RTO replied, “toward some village called Maryong-ni.”

  *****

  In a culvert halfway to the village, they found First Sergeant Grundy and six other members of Fourth Squad. They were nestled in their sleeping bags around the smoldering remains of a small fire that appeared to have been stamped out. In the glow of Papadakis’ flashlight, the pools of frozen blood beside each sleeping bag glowed black like obsidian.

  Grundy and the others were dead, gutted by bayonets in their sleep. Their sleeping bags, contorted in the postures of violent death, had been unzipped, no doubt to loot the weapons inside.

  “I guess they wanted to keep their guns warm,” the RTO said almost flippantly, as if slaughter like this couldn’t affect him anymore.

  “Fat lot of good that did them,” Captain Pop replied. “It don’t look like they even had sentries out. They all just crawled into the sack and went to sleep.”

  “Yeah, forever,” the RTO added.

  His eyes cast to the heavens, Pop said, “How the hell do I keep these idiots alive when being short’s making them stupid?”

  The radio squawked, startling them both. It was that same voice, the one who’d given the patrol’s reports and also replied to the call to Grundy. But if that voice was tense before, it was absolutely terrified now.

  “Help! Help!” the voice said, dropping any pretense of radio discipline. “This is Fourth Squad. We’re lost. We hear chinks everywhere. Help!”

  “Get an azimuth to him,” Papadakis told his RTO.

  “He’s got to keep talking for me to do that, sir.”

  “I know. Tell him to say The Lord’s Prayer—or any other prayer he remembers—while you get a bead on him.”

  The voice got to Thy kingdom come when the RTO said, “Got him.”

  “Outstanding. Now give him the reverse azimuth and tell him to start walking. He does have a compass on him, right?”

  “Yeah, he says so, sir.”

  “Good. We’ll wait for him right here.”

  *****

  A few minutes later, a man materialized out of the darkness on the dead run, a radio strapped to his back. Behind him came another GI, encumbered only by an M1 rifle.

  Papadakis asked the man with the radio, “What’s your name, Private?”

  “Pratt, sir, James C., PFC, serial number two-six—”

  “Hold it, Pratt. You ain’t been captured or nothing, so save the name, rank, and serial number stuff. What the hell were the two of you doing strolling around out there?”

  Pratt and his partner—another PFC named Springer—began a convoluted tale of how the two of them, junior members of the squad and decidedly not short, were told by their squad leader to walk a circuit along Highway 2—ten minutes north and then turn around and do ten minutes south—reporting in to Battalion every thirty minutes per the new SOP.

  “While the rest of them took a nap?” the captain asked.

  “I don’t know nothing about that, sir,” Pratt replied. “Are they really…all…”

  “Yeah, they’re all fucking dead. Was the late First Sergeant Grundy with the squad the whole time?”

  “Yes, sir. He was the one who picked out this culvert. Said it would make a nice, safe base of operations.”

  “Safe, huh? I guess he was wrong about that. Did his RTO have two radios with him?”

  “Yes, sir. A Prick-Ten just like mine. And a walkie-talkie, too, with some weird antenna I’ve never seen before.”

  Shit. The chinks copped both radios, then...because they’re gone.

  Shaking from cold, fear, or both, PFC Pratt asked, “Can we go in now, sir?”

  “Not a chance,” Captain Pop replied. “You got Battalion all stirred up with that chinks are everywhere shit. I had to calm them down from putting artillery fire all over us. Now tell me straight…did you really see or hear any chinks?”

  “Well, sir…we were sure…well, pretty sure we heard something.”

  “You might’ve heard the handful of chinks who did this to your buddies,” Papadakis said, “but my money says they’re long gone by now.”

  “Do you really think it was just a handful of them, sir?”

  “It don’t take a lot of chinks to stab seven sleeping GIs to death, Pratt. But we’re gonna get the drop on them now, because we ain’t going to sleep. We’re gonna form ourselves a nice little LP right here until sunrise…and finish the job you guys were supposed to be doing.”

  “We’re going to stay here, sir? With all these…these dead bodies?”

  “Yeah, with all these poor stiffs. But don’t worry…they ain’t gonna be no trouble.”

  *****

  The fifth floor of Tokyo’s Dai-ichi Building emptied as the bulk of MacArthur’s staff left for the night, their nine-to-five paper war finished for another day. Just a handful of Americans remained to put in a few hours more, as MacArthur—the Supreme Commander—would be doing in his office on the floor above. One staffer who’d remained was a pencil-pushing aide to General Almond, the man who still wore two hats as MacArthur’s chief of staff and commander of X Corps.

  The aide, a lieutenant colonel, was at his wit’s end, not sure what to do with all the paperwork piling up in Almond’s office. This mess could be dealt with in just a few hours if only General Almond were here. But General Ridgway, the current 8th Army commander, won’t let him come back to Tokyo, not as long as Almond still commands a corps in contact with the enemy. Without the chief of staff’s guidance, I don’t know how to handle some of these documents…

  And I don’t dare ask anyone else in this headquarters for guidance. It would make me look indecisive. Unpromotable.

  Almond always keeps a tight grip on what gets shuttled to the States in accordance with the Supreme Commander’s wishes. Nothing leaves this office before it’s been checked, rewritten as directed, and approved by him personally.

  If it doesn’t get that approval, it goes straight to limbo.

  He picked up a thin manila envelope addressed to a US Senator in Washington and marked URGENT—PERSONAL. Its address of origin was Commanding General, 8th US Army. It wasn’t sealed; the flap was just tied shut with the attached string looped in a figure eight around the cardboard buttons.

  I don’t imagine it would hurt anything if I took a look inside…

  And who’d know, anyway?

  He slid the envelope’s contents onto his desk. It was a letter from General Ridgway in his own hand to the senator, who he addressed by first name, asking for his help in a deportation case. According to Ridgway, the wife of a regimental commander was possibly being railroaded by an immigration court in Northern California and faced expulsion from the United States within two months. Anything the senator could do to clear this matter up would be greatly appreciated.

  Deportation…what is she? A chink?

  Wait a minute. It says here her name’s Jillian, so maybe she’s English? Eurasian?

  Whatever she is, she’s not an American, that’s for damn sure.

  The thrill of doing something illicit—and knowing you wouldn’t get caught doing it—inspired the colonel to undo the string on another envelope from Commanding General, 8th US Army. This one contained paperwork endorsing a colonel’s promotion to brigadier general; oddly enough, it was for the same regimental commander whose wife was in jeopardy of deportation, as described in the first envelope he’d opened.

  He’d recognized the regimental commander’s name from the first envelope into which he’d snooped: Miles, Maynard J…

  And he remembered seeing an eyes only memorandum from Almond late last year. It stated that Miles, Maynard J., Colonel, Infantry, was not to be considered for promotion by this headquarters under a
ny circumstances, by order of the Supreme Commander.

  He was quite certain that memorandum had not been rescinded.

  That’s a shame, too, because according to Ridgway, this guy Miles walks on water.

  But walking on water didn’t matter if the big boss had already declared you sunk.

  Jock Miles’ promotion paperwork would go directly into limbo: an unsorted drawer of random files in a storeroom cabinet, pending possible action at some later date…

  Or, more than likely, no action at all.

  Swept up in the heady exercise of power over the lives of others, the aide decided that the matter in Ridgway’s letter to the senator didn’t deserve the urgency the sender had attached to it: It sounds like personal business, and that should never be transmitted through Army channels. Righteously indignant that the military correspondence network was being abused in this way, he swept up the letter to the senator along with the promotion paperwork, took a brief walk to the storeroom, and filed them both in limbo.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  By the second week of February 1951, Operation Thunderbolt had achieved its objectives. Eighth Army forces were now aligned east to west across South Korea some forty miles south of the 38th Parallel. Only the Han River separated the westernmost of those forces—an assortment of American, ROK, and Turkish regiments—from Seoul.

  “We’ll dig in along this line,” General Ridgway told his commanders as they met at Hajin, “because there’s no doubt the Chinese will be launching another of their great offensives any day now. The confluence of Highways 2 and 24 north of Hajin and Chip’yong-ni will be the most likely avenue for the main thrust of their offensive. They’ll try to break through our line at one of those two places, maybe both. We’ll be ready for them.”

  Since Hajin was occupied by 26th Regiment, Ridgway made a special point to visit with Jock Miles. Standing together outside the CP van, they looked toward the Chinese lines. The general asked Jock, “How far do you figure the chinks are from this ridge?”