They had shaved with McCoy’s electric razor, plugged into the 110-volt AC outlet of a gasoline generator whose primary outlet cable fed into the school building through an open window.
There was a great deal of activity, soldiers unloading from six-by-six trucks everything from folding field desks and file cabinets to Coca-Cola coolers and barracks bags, and either carrying them into the building or simply dumping them to the side of the door.
McCoy had entered the building, found the G-2 section, and—surprisingly to him, he was not challenged by anyone—took a look at the situation map. The action was around someplace called Taejon. McCoy made a compass with his fingers and determined that Taejon was about sixty miles—as the crow flies, probably considerably more on winding Korea National Highway One—from Taegu. They would need wheels to get there, and to move around once they did.
When he came out of the building, he found Master Gunner Ernest W. Zimmerman, USMC, waiting for him. Zimmerman had a Thompson .45-caliber submachine gun hanging from his shoulder. Two spare magazines for it were in one of the pockets on his utility jacket, and the other bulged with two, or possibly three, hand grenades.
“No wheels, Ernie,” he said. “You have any luck with rations? ”
“I took care of it,” Zimmerman replied. “Let’s get something to eat, and then get the hell out of here.”
“Where’s the rations?”
“I’ll show you when we’ve had something to eat,” Zimmerman said, and pointed to a line of people—officers and enlisted men—moving through a chow line.
Breakfast was powdered eggs, Spam, toast, and coffee served on a multicompartment plastic tray in a canteen mess cup. At the end of the line, there was a stainless-steel tray filled with butter already liquefied by the heat.
When they had finished, Zimmerman led him outside the not-yet-completed ring of concertina barbed wire surrounding the headquarters compound and down a road to a field in which sat half a dozen communications vans, and finally behind the most distant van, where a Jeep sat.
It had a wooden sign reading PRESS WAR CORRESPONDENT in yellow letters mounted below the windshield. There were two cases of C-rations and two five-gallon jerry cans of gasoline in the backseat. A third jerry can was in its mount on the back of the Jeep.
Zimmerman went to the Jeep, put his Thompson on the seat, raised the hood, and then reached into one of the cavernous pockets of his utilities and took out a distributor cap, a distributor rotor, and the ignition wires.
He put them in place.
“Where did you get this?” McCoy asked.
“With respect, sir, the captain does not want to know,” Zimmerman said, lowered the hood, fastened the hood retainers, and got behind the wheel. The engine started immediately.
“Let’s get the hell out of here before the wrong guy wakes up,” Zimmerman said.
McCoy jumped in the Jeep.
“Isn’t that press sign going to make us conspicuous?” McCoy asked, as Zimmerman started to move.
“I thought about that,” Zimmerman said. “Isn’t that what we’re doing? Sending reports from the war?”
Moments after they passed the entrance to the Eighth Army headquarters compound, a slight figure in an Army fatigue uniform leapt to his feet from the side of the road and jumped in front of them, angrily waving his arms.
“Guess who got up early?” McCoy said.
“That’s my Jeep, you sonsofbitches!” the angry creature shouted in a high-pitched voice.
“He’s a fucking fairy,” Zimmerman said, as he slammed on the brakes.
“He’s a she, Ernie,” McCoy said, chuckling.
The creature, now recognizable as a female by the hair tucked under her fatigue camp, and a swelling in her fatigue jacket that was not hand grenades, stormed up to the Jeep.
“MP!” she screamed. “MP!”
McCoy looked over his shoulder back toward the MPs standing at the entrance to the Eighth Army Headquarters compound. She had attracted their attention.
He jumped out of the Jeep, went to the woman, wrapped his arms around her waist, pulled her to the Jeep, sat down—his legs outside the Jeep, and with the woman in his lap—and ordered, “Go, Ernie! Go!”
Zimmerman let the clutch out and the Jeep took off.
“If you keep struggling, we’re both going to fall out,” McCoy said to the woman.
“You’re not going to get away with this, you bastard!” the woman said.
“When you get around the next bend, Ernie, stop,” McCoy ordered.
“You’re going to wind up in the stockade!” the woman said.
Zimmerman made the turn in the road, then pulled to the side and stopped.
“What are you going to do, dump her here?” Zimmerman asked.
“Only if Miss Priestly can’t see the mutual benefit in the pooling of our assets,” McCoy said.
“You know who I am!” Jeanette Priestly said. She was now standing by the side of the road, her hands on her hips, glowering at McCoy.
“Jeanette Priestly of the Chicago Tribune,” McCoy said.
Slight recognition dawned.
“Do I know you?” she asked.
“We had dinner a couple of weeks ago in Tokyo,” McCoy said.
“McCoy,” she said. “The Marine.”
“Right,” McCoy said.
“Just what the fuck do you think you’re doing?” she said. “You just can’t steal my Jeep.”
“Let me explain your options,” McCoy said. “If we leave you here by the side of the road, you can run back to the MPs and tell them you just saw your Jeep driving off down the road—”
“My stolen Jeep!”
“—they will tell you they will do what they can, and you will go to the motor pool where—as I suspect you already know—that fat slob of a major will tell you he doesn’t even have enough Jeeps for full colonels—”
“You son of a bitch!”
“Which will leave you where we found each other, you walking,” McCoy continued. “I can’t imagine how they would do it, but let’s say they radio ahead of us, and we are stopped by some other MPs....”
“That’s exactly what’s going to happen to you,” she said. “And it’s off to the stockade you go.”
“First of all, I don’t think they’ve had time to set up a stockade, but let’s say we get stopped. At that point, we show them our orders, and say all we know . . .” He reached into his pocket and handed her the orders he had shown to the motor pool officer; she snatched them out of his hand and read them. “. . . is that we went to the motor officer, showed him our orders, and he said we sure had a high priority and gave us the Jeep.” He paused. “Who do you think will be believed?”
“You miserable son of a bitch!” Jeanette said after a moment.
“If you’re going to be traveling with us, Miss Priestly, you’re going to have to watch your mouth. Gunner Zimmerman is a very sensitive man. Say ‘hello’ to Miss Priestly, Ernie, and tell her you will forgive her for swearing like a Parris Island DI if she promises not to do that no more.”
Zimmerman smiled but didn’t say anything.
Although she really didn’t want to, Jeanette Priestly was aware that she was smiling, too.
“Traveling with you?” she said. “Traveling where with you?”
“We’re here to see how the war is going. According to the map in the G-2, that’s up around Taejon.”
“What’s in it for you, if I go along?” she asked.
“You’ve been here before; we haven’t. I think we can be very useful to each other.”
She thought that over a minute.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll go.”
“You have one more option,” McCoy said. “You can ride along and wait until we get to the next MP checkpoint, and then scream that we’ve stolen your Jeep and kidnapped you. What would happen then, I think, is that we would all be held until a senior officer could be found to straighten things out. Which would mean that none of us wo
uld get to the war.”
“You son of a bitch!” she said. There was an admiring tone in her voice.
“Are you coming, or not?”
She climbed into the backseat.
“Okay, Ernie,” McCoy ordered. “Let’s go.”
Five minutes later, Miss Jeanette Priestly, accredited war correspondent of the Chicago Tribune, leaned forward and asked, “What happened to the other fellow? The Trans-Global captain? Who set the speed record?”
“I expect about right now Major Malcolm S. Pickering, USMC Reserve, is trying to come up with a good excuse to get out of being mobilized,” McCoy said.
Zimmerman laughed.
[TWO]
HEADQUARTERS, 34TH INFANTRY REGIMENT 24TH U.S. INFANTRY DIVISION NONSAN, SOUTH KOREA 1530 15 JULY 1950
It had not proved hard to find the headquarters of the 34th Infantry Regiment, although the best location of it Captain McCoy had been able to extract from an S-3 sergeant at 24th Infantry Division headquarters had been rather vague:
“I think it’s probably here, Captain,” the sergeant had said, pointing to a map. “On Route One, a little village called Nonsan. That’s where it’s supposed to be.”
Nonsan turned out to be a typical small Korean town, a collection of thatch-roofed stone buildings surrounding a short, sort of shopping strip of connected two-story, tin-roofed buildings, two of which, according to a plywood sign, had been taken over by “Hq 34th Inf Regt.”
The officer standing outside one of the stores—probably the regimental commander; there was a white colonel’s eagle painted on his helmet—looked, McCoy thought, a lot like the motor officer at Headquarters, Eighth Army.
Not only was he a portly man armed with a .45 ACP pistol, his fatigue jacket sweat-stained under his armpits, and with a sweaty forehead, as the major had been, but from the moment he had seen the Jeep, it was clear he was not at all pleased at what he saw.
McCoy pulled the Jeep in beside two other Jeeps and a three-quarter-ton truck, and got out.
“Stay in the Jeep,” he ordered, then walked up to the colonel and saluted.
The colonel returned the salute.
“Who’s the woman?” the colonel asked.
“Miss Jeanette Priestly, of the Chicago Tribune, sir,” McCoy replied.
The colonel motioned for McCoy to precede him into the building, and when they were both inside, asked, disgustedly, “What’s she doing here?”
“She’s an accredited war correspondent, sir, with orders permitting her to go wherever she wants to go.”
“Jesus H. Christ!” the colonel said. “With two body-guards, right?”
“Not exactly, sir,” McCoy said. “May I show you my orders? ”
The colonel gestured impatiently for McCoy to hand them over. McCoy gave him the Dai-Ichi orders. The colonel read them and handed them back.
“Marines, huh? I thought your fatigues were a little odd.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Okay, Captain McCoy of the Marine Corps, what exactly is your mission, except for escorting a female—who has absolutely no business being here—around?”
“We’ve been sent here, sir, to see what’s going on.”
“By who? General Almond himself?”
McCoy didn’t reply.
“That was a question, Captain,” the colonel said, sharply.
“Sir, we work for General Pickering.”
Almost visibly, the colonel searched his memory for that name, and failed.
“He’s in the Dai Ichi Building?”
“Yes, sir.”
“So what is your connection with the lady?”
“When Eighth Army couldn’t give us a Jeep, sir, I commandeered hers.”
“And brought her along with you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, Captain, she’s your responsibility. I don’t want to be responsible for her safety. Not that I could if I wanted to.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You want to ‘see what’s going on’? Presumably you somehow intend to relay what you see to your boss—General Pickering, you said?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I don’t have any communications that will permit you to do that, and I would be surprised if division does.”
“Yes, sir.”
“But it has just occurred to me,” the colonel said, somewhat bitterly, “presuming you can find some way to communicate with the Dai Ichi Building, that it might be a very good thing for our senior officers to learn ‘what’s going on’ here. Come with me, Captain, and I’ll tell you what I know about ‘what’s going on.’ ”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”
The colonel turned and walked farther into the long and narrow building, which, judging from the shelves on both walls, had been a store of some kind or another.
There were the usual officers and enlisted men, and their equipment, of a regimental headquarters crowding the room, and the colonel had apparently elected to put his field desk at the far end, where there was another door.
As McCoy followed the colonel between the desks and around the field telephone switchboard and radio sets, he glanced into a side room.
In it were three North Korean soldiers, wearing insignia that identified them as a sergeant, a corporal, and a private. They were seated with their backs against a wall. A sergeant with an M1 carbine sat on a folding chair, guarding them.
“Colonel,” McCoy called. “Excuse me, Colonel.”
The colonel looked impatiently over his shoulder. By then, McCoy had gone into the room.
“God damn!” the colonel said, and went after him.
The sergeant looked at McCoy curiously.
“Get to your feet when an officer enters a room, Sergeant!” McCoy snapped unpleasantly.
The sergeant did so with very little enthusiasm.
The colonel appeared at the door, his mouth open to speak.
McCoy spoke first. He pointed at the North Korean private.
“That applies to you, too,” he said, nastily, in Korean.
The private looked for a moment as if he was going to stand, but then relaxed against the wall.
“On your feet, all of you,” McCoy barked, in Korean.
They all stood up.
“Have you eaten?” McCoy asked. “Do you need water?”
The North Korean sergeant said “water” in Korean.
The private glowered at him.
“Colonel,” McCoy said, “the private of the 83rd Motorcycle Regiment, the one with the good leather boots, is almost certainly an officer, and very probably speaks English. Most of the officers of the 83rd do. I will speak with him, with all of them, after your sergeant gets them water, rations, and some cigarettes.”
The colonel looked at McCoy for a long moment, then turned to the sergeant.
“You heard the captain,” he said. “Get a canteen and a box of C-rations in here.”
McCoy took the sergeant’s carbine from him and held it on his hip, like a hunter, until the sergeant returned with two canteens and a box of C-rations.
He set the box on the floor, and tried to hand one of the canteens to the North Korean sergeant. He shook his head, “no.”
“Take the water,” McCoy ordered in Korean. “You are all prisoners. I give the orders here, not your officer.”
The sergeant looked at the private, then took the canteen.
“Bingo,” McCoy said, very softly, to the colonel, handed the American sergeant his carbine, and walked out of the room.
He walked out of earshot of the room, then stopped.
“You speak Korean. I’m impressed,” the colonel said.
“Are they your prisoners, sir? Or did you inherit them?”
“My third battalion captured them,” the colonel said. “Division was supposed to send for them—take them for interrogation. . . .”
“They’re from the 83rd Motorcycle Regiment,” McCoy said. “They’re pretty good. The regimental commander is—the last I heard, a
Colonel Pak Sun Hae, who used to be a lieutenant in the Soviet Army. They’re well trained, and well equipped.”
“Which is, sadly, more than I can say about the 34th Infantry, ” the colonel said.
“Colonel, for my purposes—it would make them even more uncomfortable than they are—I’d like Miss Priestly to take their picture. Would that be all right?”
The colonel thought that over.
“Why not?” he said, after a minute, and turned to a master sergeant standing nearby. “There’s a lady and a Marine in a Jeep outside, Sergeant. Would you ask them to come in, please?”
“Tell her to bring her camera, Sergeant,” McCoy ordered.
As Jeanette Priestly followed Zimmerman and the sergeant through the narrow building, there were looks of disbelief on the faces of the regimental officers and soldiers.
“With the caveat that I don’t think you should be here,” the colonel said, “welcome to the 34th Infantry, Miss Priestly.”
“Thank you,” she said, and looked at McCoy. “What’s up?”
“There’re three North Korean prisoners in there,” McCoy said, pointing. “I want you to take their picture. Plural. Pictures.”
“And then you take my film, right?”
“No. I don’t want your film. When you have it processed in Tokyo, I’m sure they’ll make prints for G-2. Ernie, you go in there and see if you think any of them speak Chinese. The little guy in the good boots is, I suspect, an officer. He’s not going to say much, but if you think one of the others speaks Chinese, take him someplace and see what he knows. They’re from the 83rd Motorcycle Regiment.”
Zimmerman nodded. “Aye, aye, sir.”
“I would like to use the ladies’ room,” Jeanette announced.
“I’m afraid we can’t offer you much, Miss Priestly,” the colonel said.
“I didn’t expect that you could,” she said, and smiled dazzlingly at him. “Why don’t you call me ‘Jennie,’ Colonel. We’re friends, right?”
“Sergeant, escort Miss Priestly to the latrine, and stand guard,” the colonel ordered. Then he turned to McCoy. “Would you like to have a look at the map, Captain?”
“Yes, sir. Thank you.”
The map, covered with transparent celluloid, was mounted on a sheet of plywood against the wall behind the colonel’s desk.
Under Fire Page 25
