The Run to Gitche Gumee

by Robert F. Jones

  “Oh shit,” Harry yelled. “Look at that wave!”

  It was mountainous, a skyhigh haystack to end all haystacks—the wind from the North Pole driving half of Gitche Gumee up over the sandbar at the Firesteel’s mouth. I could hear Curly’s rifle again over the roar of the surf, much louder now. He must be right behind us.

  Our bow slewed to the right as we neared the Haystack. Harry couldn’t control it alone. Somehow I dug in my paddle—a twenty-five-mile hike with full field pack, Sergeant Stingley waxing his mustache as he cursed out the cadence—and we hit the comber head on. The Haystack loomed above, waiting to devour us. Water crashed from its leering face, ice cold. The Old Town wallowed, her gunwales nearly awash. But then she responded, good old water sow. Raised her bow to the cloud-streaked sky, hovered for a moment as if she was going to topple over backward, then toppled over the crest. We were clear, and still afloat.

  I’d heard another shot as we peaked the top of the Haystack and a simultaneous thwap as it hit the tarp in front of me. I looked back. Doc and Curly’s canoe disappeared behind the wave and I saw it broach to, sideways to the crush of falling water. It rolled.

  I was feeling sick now and leaned over the side to throw up. There was no blood in it, thank God. Then I saw a sight that has never left me in the fifty years since that day. Doc Haugenbusch was sinking through the depths, his face turned upward, empty eyes staring, big blisters on his face, even on the old scar tissue. The bandage around his head unfurled and flapped in the lake’s rips and back eddies. Something big and silver darted out of the bluegreen dimness and grabbed the end of the cloth. Doc spun on his axis as the steelhead made off with the bandage.

  Harry’s urgent voice brought me back.

  “We’re sinking!” he yelled. “Can you make it?”

  I nodded yes. He looked doubtful.

  “Gayelord, it’s time to go!” Harry lifted the tarp. There was a bullet hole, smack in the center of it. Under the oiled canvas, Gayelord lay in a pool of blood. It spilled from the top of his head into the red-clouded water that filled the canoe.

  Harry looked up at me, aghast. He stood in the bow, up to his shins in lakewater, with the blade of his paddle braced against a duffel bag. I thought he was going to weep.

  Then, with the suddenness of a porpoise, Curly boiled up from the waves, right beside our foundering canoe. His Brillo pads bristling, he reached for the gunwales.

  Harry raised the paddle like a maul and smashed his skull. “You fucker,” he screamed, “you shot my dog!” The paddle blade split and Harry drove the splintered end of it deep into Curly’s throat. He left it there as Curly sank.

  Thus perished the Immortal Marine.

  Gayelord, I saw, was still breathing.

  I passed out then, but remember feeling Harry’s arm around my shoulder and chest as he swam us ashore. He had Gayelord by the collar in his other hand. Somehow he dragged us through the slambang surf and up onto the cold, cold sands. I must have grabbed the saxophone case while we were sinking. It was still in my grip when we hit the beach.

  Harry had me roll over onto my chest so he could examine the wound. “Not so bad,” he said, tracing the length of it lightly with his forefinger. “I was afraid it might have hit your kidney. It’s not even bleeding that bad anymore. We’ll stop at the clinic in Ashland and have the doctor sock a few stitches into you and Gayelord, maybe a shot of penicillin for both of you just to be safe. Hell, you’ll be good as new by the time you hit Korea.”

  Gayelord was sitting beside me, groggy but licking my neck.

  The cold water must have stanched the blood flow for now, and it had numbed me enough so that the pain was nearly gone. But I still felt sick. Unable to control the nausea, I rewarded Harry’s welcome news with a gallon of Gitche Gumee over his cold blue feet.

  We trudged up the beach through ankle-deep sand to where the truck waited. I leaned on Harry’s shoulder and carried the horn. That’s all we saved from the journey.

  “Well, boys,” said Ted or Red as we came limping up, “I see ya got a puppydog along the way. Was it a pleasant trip?”

  “Pretty good,” Harry said, his stutter forgotten. “A bit chilly though. You wouldn’t happen to have a cup of hot coffee, would you? Two would be even better. And maybe a dog biscuit?”

  ENTR’ACTE: IN THE FOREST OF THE NIGHT

  L’enfir, c’est les Autres.

  —J-P. Sartre

  The road north was lined with fruit trees. It was late October and they had shed their leaves. A few persimmons still hung from the boughs like puckered oranges. The days were sunny at first, Indian summer weather, but skim ice formed on the rice paddies overnight. Fires burned on the sawtooth mountains to the north where they were headed. Some of the more impressionable Marines imagined a great dragon brooding up there, watching and waiting, its breath kindling the grassfires, but it was only napalm.

  By 8 November there was frost in the Funchilin Pass and the next night they had their first snowfall. A week later the wind from Manchuria was blowing hard, as it would all winter, and the temperature dropped to fifteen below. They called it the Siberian Express. The wind tasted of sleet and fine dust. Manchurian camel dung, the old China Marines said. It stung their eyes and gritted in their teeth when they stopped to choke down their C-rats—wienerwurst, lima beans, fruit salad.

  Supply sergeants broke out cold-weather gear. The wool socks and shoepacs with felt insoles were welcome, but the long, alpaca-lined parkas tangled their legs as they marched.

  At night men cut firewood with their K-Bars. The wind died and they heard strange music from the mountains. Whistles and bugles. Distant dissonance. There were red deer and bear on the slopes and some said tigers too. Once they reached the high plateau they could see a big lake half a day’s march to the north. Steam rose from black ice. Marines bought Red Dot stogies, two for a nickel, and smoked them to ward off the cold. That’s where Ben acquired the cigar habit.

  Yes, the Crotch takes care of its own. Thanksgiving dinner was traditional—from roast turkey and mince pie to fruitcake, shrimp salad, mixed nuts, stuffed olives, cranberry sauce—the works. But Field Marshal Winter disapproved of such largesse. The gravy froze first, then the sweet potatoes . . .

  They moved north.

  On the following evening, the night of 25 November, the Chinese launched their assault. No one was prepared for their coming.

  General Douglas MacArthur’s staff in Japan had repeatedly assured Washington that there were no more than 16,000 to 30,000 Chinese troops operating in North Korea, all of them mere “volunteers.” In fact the CCF (Chinese Communist Forces, as they were officially known) numbered 300,000 troops.

  Across the Taebek Mountains a hundred miles to the west, General Lin Piao’s Thirteenth Army Group, eighteen divisions strong, slammed into Lieutenant General Walton Walker’s Eighth Army. Regimental commanders issued urgent orders to their battalion C.O.s who passed them on down to company level—How Able! “Haul Ass!” The doggies reeled back to the south, toward Pyongyang.

  Two days later, east of the mountains, General Sung Shihlun’s Ninth Army Group with a dozen divisions, hit Major General Edward Almond’s X Corps, which consisted of the First Marine Division and part of the U.S. Army’s Seventh Infantry. The Marines held.

  Up past the reservoir, near a village called Yudam-ni, the sky looked like Christmas come early. The moon was lopsided, four days past full. American tracers were red, the Chinese green, and those used by the North Koreans were blue. They crisscrossed in the air. Orange sparks gushed upward from mortar tubes firing illumination rounds. The flares popped overhead, lit the mountains all around in a hard white glare, and squeaked as they drifted down. Now and then a white phosphorus round from the mortars would send quick orange-tailed snakes slithering over the snow.

  You could smell the Chinese coming, like a gust of cold stale garlic breath. Even their gunpowder smelled different, like burning hair.

  Their basic infantry weapon was a 1
918 Mauser-style rifle in 7.92mm, manufactured in China, but they also carried Mauser machine-pistols, American Tommy guns, and Russian PPSh 41 burp guns. Some of their light machine guns were Japanese Nambus captured during World War II. They threw long-handled potato-masher grenades. To arm them they had to unscrew a cap from the bottom of the wooden handle, then pull a strip of cloth to light the fuse. These caps often froze, and in advance of an attack the grenadiers could be heard tapping the handles on a rifle butt or even the frozen ground to loosen them for action. Most of the grenades were frags, but the Chinese used a lot of concussion grenades too, perhaps in order to take more American prisoners.

  Over and through it all, a cacophony of bugles and whistles, drums and cymbals. This was how the Chinese officers maneuvered their troops.

  Sergeant Stingley had joined the regiment at Wonsan. He spotted Ben right away. “Slater,” he said, “I want you for my platoon. Most of these men are candyassed pogues—Reservists. The rest have been in country too long, from Pusan through Inchon to Seoul. They’ve gone Asiatic on me. You’re fresh meat. I know I can trust you. Hell, I trained you myself.” Stingley arranged the transfer.

  Ben was assigned as a BAR man. He already had plenty of experience with the weapon. A loaded Browning Automatic Rifle weighs twenty pounds; its ammo belt with twelve magazines—another 240 rounds—weighs nearly as much. Ben fired them all that first night and many more. Twice the Chinese broke through their perimeter, but Stingley rallied the men and drove them back. He moved the platoon higher on the ridge they were defending and formed a tighter perimeter, on the crest. Ben not only carried his BAR but dragged the body of a dead Marine with him as well. Marines didn’t leave their dead or wounded behind.

  Another platoon was already on the hilltop, or anyway what was left of one. All of its officers had been killed or wounded. Stingley was senior N.C.O. He took command. The position was anchored by four .30 caliber Browning machine guns, one at each end and two in the middle.

  They piled the dead Marines in the center of the perimeter, near the 60mm mortar tubes, and covered them with a tarpaulin. Not a man in the outfit hadn’t been hit. Many had frostbitten feet, hands, and faces. Corpsmen worked on the badly wounded, popping morphine Syrettes and dusting perforated bellies with sulfa powder. The men who’d only been nicked tended their own wounds.

  At first light an L-19 spotter plane circled their position, and a few minutes later three gull-winged F4U Corsairs roared in low with 20mm cannonfire, five-inch rockets, and napalm. The Chinese faded into the surrounding hills. Pine trees blazed in their wake brighter than the rising sun. Mist rose from the frozen ground, writhing like ghosts. “They’ll be back come dark,” Stingley promised.

  They counted eighty-five Chinese bodies on the slope below. Snow was falling. Soon the bodies looked like nothing more than hummocks on the landscape. Stingley’s Marines had lost six, including Mr. Wittold, the platoon leader, who took a bullet in the groin and bled out before a corpsman could reach him. Ben helped the corpsman slide the lieutenant’s body under the tarp. Hoarfrost bloomed like mildew on the faces of the dead. Even on their eyeballs.

  All day they sweated it out under a bombardment from Chinese 82mm mortars and 76mm howitzers, firing from the reverse slope opposite them. ChiCom machine guns laced their position. The Chinese pulled their heavy Maxim MGs in two-wheeled dogcarts. The Marines dug their foxholes as deep as they could, not an easy job in that frozen, rocky soil. During a lull in the firing, Stingley sent out a work party to drag Chinese bodies upslope to their position. They drew sniper fire from the far ridge but no one was hit. Stingley had the corpses piled like sandbags around the foxholes. “Red revetments,” he called them.

  The ChiCom dead wore canvas tennis shoes with crepe soles and uniforms of quilted cotton. The uniforms were reversible, white on one side, mustard yellow or a murky pea-soup green on the other. Most of the Chinese had fur-lined caps with earmuffs. In their knapsacks they carried a four-day supply of garlic, rice, beans, and corn, along with eighty to one hundred rounds of ammo. Some of them also had plugs of opium and tins of Benzedrine tablets.

  Know your enemy, Stingley said. This was true intimacy. The cold weather kept the dead from bloating but the smell was overpowering. The bodies exuded essense of garlic. “Eat enough of it regularly and it comes out through your pores,” said Doc Magnuson, the Navy corpsman. “Eventually you’ll get used to the smell.”

  On Stingley’s orders they rifled the enemy packs for maps and scraps of paper. These were passed along to the ROK second lieutenant who traveled with them. He could read Chinese. From these papers the South Korean interpreter learned that the troops opposing them belonged to the Chinese Seventy-Ninth Division, part of Lin Piao’s Fourth Field Army. A map showed that the Chinese objective was the southern end of the Chosin Reservoir, just north of Hagaru-ri and fourteen miles east of the Marine positions around Yudam-ni. The units detached from the ChiCom main force had orders to destroy the Marines, or at least pin them down so they couldn’t blunt the assault on the reservoir. Stingley tried to radio this information to the intelligence staff at regimental HQ, but the surrounding mountains blocked his transmission.

  A small shrine stood on a knob just to the left and a bit forward of the perimeter. Toward dusk Stingley crawled over to Ben’s foxhole. “See that Buddhahead over there—no, not the dead gook, that stone thing on the hilltop. I want you to go up there with the BAR. From that position we’ll have a crossfire on any goonies that come up the slope. Take your buddy Darwin with you. He can cover your ass with his M1 in case they try to come up behind you. Take plenty of ammo—four belts anyways. Slip over the back of the ridge and make your way up to the shrine from behind. Maybe they won’t see you.”

  “When can I come back?”

  “When we’ve killed them all.”

  Luke Darwin was a tall, lanky, jet-black PFC from Harlem. He was a bebop fancier. “Too cool for school,” as he put it. Ben and Luke had hit it off from the get-go. Luke had brought a few platters with him, cushioned with cotton in his seabag, and in Wonsan before they moved out to the north they’d commandeered a phonograph in the Navy enlisted men’s club. He had Dizzy Gillespie’s Manteca, among others, along with Bud Powell’s Get Happy and a number called “Epistrophy” with Shadow Wilson on the drums, Milt Jackson on vibes, and a new pianist named Thelonius Monk who’d composed the thing. Monk was a bluesy marvel, Ellington times ten. “The Loneliest Monk,” Luke Darwin called him. They drank Old Overholt with beer chasers. It was a pleasant evening.

  When Ben crawled over to Luke Darwin’s foxhole, he found his friend in mourning. “Them goddamn Chinamen,” he said, “they busted my platters. Lookit this!” He shook shards of black shellac out of his sleeping bag. “A fuckin’ mortar frag. I’ve got to get me some revenge.”

  “You’ll have your chance come nightfall,” Ben told him. They slithered over the crest of the ridge and ran in a low crouch to the Buddhist shrine. Luke was draped in bandoleers and dragged a burlap sack of grenades along with his M1 rifle. They drew no fire from the opposite slope. They crouched beneath the Buddha, breathing hard. Ben pulled a few stones from the retaining wall and set up his BAR behind it. He spread the bipod and looked down the sights. With a short traverse he could rake the entire slope. Luke covered their rear.

  The Buddhahead smiled down upon them. His broad calm face had been chipped by stray rounds, brow and chin. Two of the fingers on his upturned right palm were gone. He didn’t seem to miss them.

  Red and green flares began to pop on the far side of the pass. Then came the bugles and what sounded like a shepherd’s horn. Dim shapes emerged from the rocks six hundred yards away. Too far yet for accurate fire. The Chinese mustered in the ditch on the south side of the road. Ben estimated their numbers to be more than five hundred, perhaps as much as battalion strength. The Chinese waited until full dark before moving out. A single bugle blared and was joined an instant later by the sound of a entire lunatic orchestra—dr
ums, flutes, fifes, cymbals, pennywhistles—gone spastic on reefer.

  “Dig it,” Luke said. “We gotta bring some of these cats to Birdland.”

  “Whatever you say,” Ben whispered. “Let’s hold our fire until they’re almost on top of us. ‘Don’t disclose your position.’ That’s the word from Sergeant Stingley.”

  Behind them, on the crest, mortar tubes chugged and illumination rounds popped high over the hillside, swaying as they descended, sending out long blue shadows that danced in the wake of their glare. The dissonant music stopped for a minute. The Chinese slogged uphill with tiny mincing steps, in perfect formation. The flares lent a jerky quality to their movement, like something from an old silent movie. Birth of a Nation, maybe. Some of the Chinese wore long olive-drab parkas that trailed behind them in the snow. Those coats, Ben realized, had been stripped from Marine Corps dead.

  Up top the .30s opened fire, quick bursts, four or five rounds at a squirt. Gaps opened in the Chinese ranks. M1s joined the machine guns, measured shots, well aimed. A Chinese officer yelled something through a megaphone and his troops began to run, screaming as they came. More and more of them fell. Bodies piled up on the hillside. The first wave fell back. More Chinese emerged from the darkness beyond the road and came pouring uphill at a dead run. Now mortar rounds burst among them. They were only a hundred yards away. Ben leaned into the butt of the BAR and flicked off the safety. Fifty yards. Forty. He touched the trigger . . . . Chinese fell in windrows. He emptied the magazine and slapped in another.

  Ben saw a Chinese officer glance his way and yell to his men. Then he blew his police whistle. Ben cut them down. This time his muzzle flash caught other enemy eyes. An entire wing of the assault formation peeled off and headed their way. Too many, too fast . . .