Combat- Parallel Lines

by William Peter Grasso

  “A mile, sir. Maybe a little more.”

  “Good,” Ridgway replied as he took a few steps north. “That means they’ll be watching while I make it clear what I think of them.” He opened his parka, unbuttoned his trousers, and urinated in the direction of the Chinese lines.

  A little surprised by the gesture, Patchett warned, “You know, sir, we do have ourselves a little trouble with snipers every now and then.”

  That news didn’t seem to bother the general in the least. He leisurely put himself back in order.

  Sean Moon was delighted by Ridgway’s performance, telling the general, “You know, sir, I heard the stories about Patton pissing in the Rhine first time he crossed it. I’m sure you heard ’em, too, you being in the ETO and all. Wish I coulda seen it with my own eyes.”

  “Don’t worry, Sergeant,” the general replied. “You may get another chance when I cross the Han. So, you served with Patton?”

  “Yes, sir. Fourth Armored, Thirty-Seventh Tank.”

  “Outstanding, Sergeant. Thirty-Seventh Tank…the best of the best. When are we going to get your old C.O. over here to kick some chink ass?”

  “You talking about Colonel Abrams, sir? Hell, I was hoping you could tell me when he was gonna show up.”

  “Last I heard, he was real busy staring down the Russkies over in Germany. But be patient, son. Ol’ Creighton Abrams never missed a fight yet. I’m sure you know that better than any of us, though.”

  *****

  The biggest clue that the Chinese would be attacking soon was the constant daytime haze that hung in the valleys to the north. It was caused by CCF forces setting hardwood bonfires. Their bluish smoke remained low in the frigid air, shielding observation of Chinese assembly areas from aircraft or mountaintop OPs. But the ruse had its drawbacks; the predominant northwesterly winds of winter would carry the smoke along their route of attack, inhibiting their field of view just as much as it did the Americans’. When it blew strongly, as it often did in February, the windswept plumes became fingers pointing to the locations of the fires and the units who’d set them. Once those locations were observed by tactical fighters or spotter aircraft, an air strike or artillery raid was quick to follow. Unfortunately, those aircraft couldn’t be everywhere at once.

  The smoke and crazy music spilling from loudspeakers had started a spirited but fatalistic debate among the GIs about how the Chinese would come at them next. As a regimental staff meeting broke up, Sean Moon left no doubt what side of the debate he was on: “They’re gonna come right outta the smoke like ghosts, dancing to that FUBAR music of theirs. We won’t see ’em until they’re right on top of us, so we gotta start sweeping our zones of fire the second we hear them bugles sound off.”

  “Negative, Bubba,” Patchett replied. “When they’re getting ready to attack, they’re gonna let that smoke clear first and then paste us with some one-hundred-twenty-two millimeter so they can see where it’s landing and adjust accordingly. That’s why we been standing on our boys’ heads to dig in so deep. If our counter-battery fire can’t silence it, that barrage’ll go on all day. Once the sun starts going down, they’ll come with their human wave shit…and that’ll go on all damn night. You mark my words.”

  They would’ve bet money on it if they hadn’t both been broke.

  Lee Grossman walked by on the way to his jeep. His head was down; he didn’t even acknowledge the presence of the two senior NCOs. Patchett called out to him, “Hey, Major, me and Sergeant Moon here were just making a little gentleman’s bet on how the chinks are gonna come at us. You want a piece of the action?”

  His voice distracted, his gaze a thousand miles away, Grossman replied, “Quite frankly, Top, I don’t give a shit one way or the other.”

  Then he climbed into his jeep and drove off.

  “What the fuck’s his problem?” Sean asked.

  “I don’t know…but something sure ain’t right.”

  They headed into the CP and found Colonel Miles. Patchett asked, “How big’s the bug up Lee Grossman’s ass, sir?”

  Shaking his head sadly, Jock replied, “A pretty damn big one, Top. He just got a Dear John. His wife’s filing for divorce.”

  “Dammit,” Patchett said. “She got somebody else?”

  “Isn’t that always the case, Top?”

  “Damn right, sir. Can’t change horses if you ain’t got another one to hop on. He gonna be okay, you think?”

  “I’m not sure yet. We’re going to have to keep a real close eye on him. Help him out any way we can, okay?”

  Patchett nodded, thinking, Ain’t this hot shit? Here the colonel’s worried about soothing Lee Grossman’s ruffled feathers while he’s got his own pile of shit stirring back home. Ain’t no telling how this thing with Miss Jillian’s gonna play out.

  But I’m pretty sure it won’t be with her serving him papers. Their bond’s forged in some pretty tough steel after all they went through together back in the last war.

  Please don’t let me be wrong about that.

  As he and Sean left the CP, Patchett said, “Bubba, let’s you and me be grateful we never tied the knot with no female of the species.”

  “Affirmative, Top,” Sean replied, adding, “if the Army wanted you to have a wife…”

  Together, they finished the refrain: “They woulda issued you one.”

  *****

  In its initial phase, the Chinese assault didn’t seem like one at all. The blue haze persisted, and there was no artillery barrage. Instead of human wave attacks, a seemingly endless stream of “civilian refugees” was flooding to the American lines.

  In 26th Regiment, Lee Grossman’s 3rd Battalion was the first to encounter the “civilians.” His men had corralled over two hundred Korean peasants, largely women, children, and old men, but with a surprising number of military-aged men among them.

  “Something smells rotten here,” Grossman told Jock over the landline from his battalion CP. “I’ve got the ROK interpreter checking out all these young guys, and he’s telling me that only half of them are Korean, probably KPA. The rest are chinks who can half-assed speak the language. Together, they’re using the bona fide civilians as hostages. He’s telling me we should just kill them all.”

  “Have you found any weapons, Lee?” Jock asked.

  “Not yet, sir. But there are a ton of carts we haven’t been able to check yet. And I don’t have any real good place to hold all these men or enough people to do it. We can’t keep their headcount straight. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re slipping away in twos and threes.”

  Jock had just heard a similar story from 23rd Regiment down the road at Chip’yong-ni. They hadn’t found any weapons among their refugees, either, but had begun to suffer guerrilla attacks by infiltrators in civvies in their rear area. “Best we can tell,” the commander of the 23rd told him, “the prisoners are slipping away from us at night because our holding pens are pretty flimsy and we don’t have anything available to make them stronger. We believe these escapees are pilfering weapons from rear area detachments and then raiding our line units from behind. They haven’t caused much in the way of casualties yet, but they’ve destroyed a good bit of equipment. In one raid, though, they managed to wound all of my French interpreters, the ones working liaison with the French battalion assigned to me. We had to evacuate the three of them, and I have no idea when I’m getting replacements for them, if at all. As a result, I’m having a hell of a time coordinating my actions with the French. It’s been one fuckup after another the last few days. We nearly dumped artillery on their CP until some sharp fire direction officer called a hold on it while he rechecked the target data.”

  Jock made the most of the information from the 23rd. A group of escaped prisoners tried to raid a motor park in his regiment’s rear area that night, but forewarned, the GIs had been ready. They killed four of the intruders and scattered the rest back into the night, with none of their own killed or wounded.

  The next morning, a new order fro
m 8th Army HQ went out to all units: Turn back all refugees. No exceptions. ROK interpreters will make it clear that anyone attempting to bypass the checkpoints will be shot.

  “Them ROKs are gonna love that, the sick bastards,” Sean said to Jock. “Nothing they like better than fucking over their own kind. Too bad it’ll be GIs having to do the shooting, though.”

  Patchett told Jock, “You know there are gonna be mistakes, right, sir? If them chinks are using the civilians for hostages, some of them hostages are gonna get dead, even if it’s by accident. I can hear the commie propaganda now, crying about how we’re murdering innocent civilians.”

  “That’d be empty talk coming from the people who make it a practice of harming civilians intentionally,” Jock replied. “Of course we’re going to make mistakes, but General Ridgway doesn’t care about that right now, and neither do I. Those mistakes will be on the heads of the Chinese, not ours. We’ve got to keep our men safe.”

  “Amen to that, sir,” Patchett replied.

  *****

  Patchett was right: there were mistakes. All along the 8th Army line, Chinese infiltrators continued to use civilians as hostages. Most of those groups were turned away at the checkpoints, not to be seen again. But there were some attempts to skirt checkpoints at night, and the GIs, always jumpy in the dark, never hesitated to open fire if a proper password wasn’t promptly given. Civilian refugees and Chinese infiltrators alike died. Even two GIs who’d gotten lost during a wire-laying detail were wounded by fellow soldiers when they couldn’t provide the right password, despite their frightened bellowing in unmistakable American dialects.

  Within forty-eight hours, the guerrilla attacks on American units stopped, and the groups of refugees arriving at the checkpoints no longer included military-aged males. But they were still turned away because orders were orders; in the face of an impending attack, no commander saw the need to amend them.

  *****

  On 13 February, the Chinese attacked in force, advancing in daylight out of the blue haze, much like the ghosts Sean Moon had predicted. As he’d prescribed, every weapon in 26th Regiment was ready for them. When a Chinese regiment tried to force its way into the Hajin perimeter, bugles and whistles blaring, they were met with a brutal wall of fire that forced them back up Highway 2. Badly battered, the CCF forces did little but probe unsuccessfully throughout the night. Suffering heavy casualties once again, they found no place to achieve a breakthrough at Hajin.

  When the sun rose on 14 February, the Chinese facing 26th Regiment had shifted their efforts east to Chip’yong-ni. As they shared canteen cups of coffee after the long and harrowing night, Sean told a sullen Patchett, “I was right, Top. I win the bet.”

  “Well, goodie for you, Yankee. Now go fuck yourself, okay?”

  “Hey, I told you…I’m a Dodgers fan.”

  “They can go fuck themselves, too,” Patchett replied.

  *****

  As Matthew Ridgway had assumed, the transportation crossroads at Chip’yong-ni was a prime objective of the CCF. Sitting on the western flank of X Corps, the town promptly became threatened on all sides when two ROK divisions to the east, units Ridgway had placed under General Almond’s command, began to collapse in disarray in the face of an assault by surprisingly resurgent North Korean forces. The collapse opened a veritable causeway for the main body of enemy forces in the area—the Chinese—to get behind 8th Army lines. It was the breakthrough they’d failed to achieve at Hajin.

  “I need to withdraw Twenty-Third Regiment from Chip’yong-ni,” Almond told Ridgway. “They’re about to be surrounded. The Chinese are already moving south of the town in force. The Twenty-Third will be cut off and slaughtered if I don’t move them immediately.”

  Ridgway silently cursed his decision to allow Almond control over those now-crumbling ROK divisions: The idiot placed two of them adjacent to each other, in mutually supporting positions. But what he should’ve known—like all my other commanders do—is that you don’t expect ROK divisions to support each other. When they get into trouble, they cut and run, plain and simple. That’s just what both divisions did…and suddenly, we’ve got enemy forces pouring through a breach in our line a couple of miles wide east of Chip’yong-ni and sweeping south toward Wonju. And it wasn’t the Chinese who opened that breach, either. It was the damn KPA, that depleted North Korean Army that’s been trying to make a comeback lately.

  This breakthrough should’ve never happened in a million years. Thank God I’ve got a big enough reserve to plug that gap and buck up those two fleeing ROK divisions. That’ll stop the collapse near Wonju.

  But if I let Almond give up Chip’yong-ni, that just moves the problem west, creating an even bigger salient. And that expanded salient will be filled with Chinese, not battle-weary KPA troops. My entire Army will have to pull back to avoid being enveloped. We could surrender everything we’ve gained since the start of the new year.

  Somehow, someway, I’ve got to get rid of Almond. The man is oblivious to reality. But every man I’ve considered to replace him is in Europe or the States and won’t be available for a few months, at the earliest. In the meantime, I’ve got no choice to keep his corps on the line while limiting the damage he can cause.

  He told Almond, “Negative, Ned. You’ll hold at Chip’yong-ni.”

  “But all resupply routes have been cut off. They’ll run out of ammunition in less than a day.”

  “They’ll be resupplied via parachute drop, effective immediately,” Ridgway said.

  There was a hint of privileged smugness in Almond’s voice as he replied, “I don’t think General MacArthur will go along with that decision, sir.”

  “He already has, Ned. And by the way, I’m taking the ROK divisions away from you and returning them to their Third Corps’ control. MacArthur’s gone along with that decision, too.”

  Ridgway found himself enjoying the crestfallen look on Almond’s face as he dismissed him.

  *****

  The top kick of Lee Grossman’s 3rd Battalion was a master sergeant named Bud Nye. He’d bitten his tongue under Colonel Beemon, the last C.O., although he’d been quite sure from the outset that the man was tactically incompetent and unfit for a combat command. But he’d rationalized his silence: I could think it all I wanted, but it wasn’t my place to say it out loud.

  When Colonel Miles relieved Beemon and named Major Grossman as his successor, Nye considered the new commander’s level-headed, no-nonsense demeanor a quantum improvement over the delusional bullshit of the previous one. Not only was his new boss a knowledgeable and experienced combat leader, but as Nye put it, The guy’s got balls to spare…

  But something’s wrong with Lee Grossman now. He’s never discussed his personal problems with me, and I’m not surprised…we don’t have that kind of close relationship, not like the one he and Mel Patchett share from the last war. But you don’t have to live in each other’s pockets to know he’s become a few cards shy of a full deck.

  When Patchett paid 3rd Battalion one of his frequent surprise visits, Nye took him aside for a private discussion. “I need your help with Major Grossman, Patch,” he said. “The man’s going off the rails.”

  His eyes narrowed skeptically as Patchett replied, “You better be real specific, Bud. I ain’t got time for no bullshit gripe session right now.”

  Nye quickly got down to the heart of the matter: Grossman was vanishing without a word every night, abandoning his CP and leaving the battalion functionally leaderless in his absence, since the XO, Nye claimed, wasn’t exactly a ball of fire. “Sure,” he added, “we can usually get Grossman on the radio if we need him, but he’s not here…and you know as well as I do, a commander’s presence can turn things around real fast when it all starts going to shit. We’re just lucky the chinks haven’t seriously hit us for the past few nights.”

  Then Nye added, “Even when he is here during the day, his mind’s a thousand miles away.”

  Patchett asked, “You have any idea wha
t the hell he’s doing when he’s vanishing, like you call it?”

  “Not specifically, but he claims he’s patrolling. To me, that sounds like he’s decided to do a sergeant’s job instead of his own. And that’s putting the whole battalion at risk.”

  “He doing this alone, Bud?”

  “I don’t think so. I believe he’s been taking a handful of bad apples with him, guys with a vicious streak he recruited specially for whatever task he’s got in mind. Regardless, I’m getting reports from the companies about a few of their guys going missing at night, only to show up before dawn with some bullshit story about where they’d been.”

  Patchett furrowed his brow and asked, “What kinda bad apples we talking here?”

  “The kind that were criminals back in civilian life, Patch. Still are, near as I can tell. A judge probably gave them a choice of jail or the Army. It’s a shame they picked the service, because those boys all need to do time, real bad. You know the type.”

  “How many of these patrols you reckon he’s run so far, Bud?”

  “Five, by my count. They started the night we dug in here at Hajin.”

  Right about the time Lee found out about his wife leaving him, Patchett thought. I seen it all before. A woman shits on a man’s head from ten thousand miles away, and he can’t do a damn thing about it. Fucks him up so bad he figures that if he gets hisself killed, she’ll feel so guilty it’ll ruin the rest of her natural life. Serve her cheating ass right.

  “But don’t tell the major I’m the one ratting him out, okay, Patch?”

  “Sure, Bud. I’ll keep your name out of it. But where is he now?”

  “Over at the mortar section.”

  “Think I’ll pay him a little visit,” Patchett said.

  *****