The Run to Gitche Gumee

by Robert F. Jones

  Stingley reached in his pocket. “Here’s my snotrag,” he said, handing Morgan a neatly folded Marine green handkerchief. “Don’t worry, I haven’t used it. Slater, give him yours, and you damn well better have one.”

  Ben did. Morgan dusted the handkerchiefs with sulfa and pushed them into the holes in Luke’s sides. With his K-Bar he cut a long strip from Ben’s parka liner and knotted it around Luke’s waist. Luke was shivering hard. Ben took the parka off and stuffed Luke’s arms into the sleeves, then zipped it up around him.

  A white-phosphorus round from a Chinese 82 exploded on the lip of the gully. Marines fell back from the edge, batting at their uniforms, slapping handfuls of snow on their burns. But there’s no escape from Willy Peter’s bite.

  “What about the rest of the WIA?” Stingley asked. “How many can make it on their own steam? We’ve got about a mile to go and we have to clear out fast.”

  “There’s three leg wounds—fractures or torn ligaments. They’ll have to be carried. One blind guy but someone can lead him. Major Thomason . . . . He’s not gonna make it, gut shot, internal bleeding. With plasma and penicillin I could maybe save him.” He shook his head. “Not got. The rest are mostly bullet and frag wounds, arms, legs, butts, faces, nothing life threatening.”

  Stingley called five men down from the firing line and told them to start humping the wounded toward the pine ravine. “You can help your buddy Darwin,” he told Ben. “Move out, now.”

  When they reached the pines again, the sun was just clear of the horizon. Blood red, blink, bone white. The air sparked with frost motes. By 0900 the ground mist burned off. Long white snakes of Chinese troops were moving back toward the mountains but they’d left it too late. The first Corsairs of the day appeared. Two flights of three birds apiece. They roared in low with the sun behind them, hedgehopping the naked hills and the town itself, just clearing the two-story building that housed the mayor’s office.

  On the first pass they were firing their 20mm cannons, every third round high explosive, and tore long swaths in the Chinese columns. Distant bugles blared. The Chinese marched on, double-time but they didn’t break.

  The second pass was napalm. Fire flowers bloomed on the snow, red black and yellow. Little black and tan hulls littered the snow when the smoke blew clear. They were Chinese corpses, crisped up hard like the “spinsters” you find at the bottom of a popcorn bowl.

  The Corsairs saved their rockets for the finale. They hit the heads and tails of the columns, hoping to take out officers and their Korean guides. The bombs flung dirty snow and body parts into a clear blue sky.

  The Chinese marched on.

  Ben watched it all from the edge of the pines where he sat beside Luke in the sunshine. The sun had little heat to it but at least it gave an illusion of warmth. He took off his shoepacs to check his sore feet. The frostbite was severe. His toes had the color and stench of incipient gangrene. Well, there was nothing much he could do right now but air them out and let his wool socks dry in the sunlight.

  From the height of land he could see Marine engineers bulldozing the new airstrip on the south side of Hagaru. It was slow going. The ground was solid ice. The engineers had welded steel teeth to the dozer blades. Every few passes they stopped and knocked the frozen dirt clear. Even at this distance you could hear the clank of sledgehammers on the still, cold air.

  He looked down the road to the south, toward Koto-ri and the Funchilin Pass. The First Marines must be fighting their way up it right now, he thought. Once Chesty Puller’s boys get here the Chinese will realize they bit off more than they can chew. He saw the road that wound its way up to Yudam-ni. The Fifth and Seventh Marines were still up there. He could hear gunfire and the boom of 105mm howitzers. They’ll have to be pulling out soon, rejoining the Marines at Hagaru. After that . . . well, it’s seventy-eight miles back to Hungnam, fighting all the way.

  The wind picked up and the sky turned gray. It started to snow. Ben put his still damp socks and boots back on. He pulled up the collar of his field jacket and shrugged down into it. Morgan used one of his last morphine Syrettes on Luke, and he was feeling no pain.

  Pretty much out of it now, Ben thought.

  In a way you’re lucky.

  Luke was scatting bebop riffs.

  “Groovin’ High.”

  “Cool Breeze.”

  Ben knew those numbers. Gillespie compositions. He picked up the beat, rolled frozen fingers on the rifle stock.

  The bugles faded . . .

  He heard a far, frantic, whinnying sound, oddly in tune with Luke’s music. Some of the higher-ranking Chinese officers rode ponies—shaggy little animals with long manes and forelocks, short coupled and sturdy legged. Now one of them ran across the snow, uphill toward where the Marines were lying. It was badly burned by the napalm strike. Twice it stopped to roll in the snow, then bounced to its feet again and galloped—trying to outrun the unrelenting hornets that were searing their way through its hide.

  Ben raised his rifle and clicked off the safety.

  “Good thinking, Slater.” Stingley had moved up beside him, attracted by the screaming. “We can use the meat. It’s already half cooked.”

  “I just want to put the poor bastard out of his misery.”

  Stingley laughed. Then he nodded. “That too.”

  They broke their fast on horsemeat tartare. Stingley said no fires. The pony meat was tough but hot, plenty of blood to put hair on their chests. They washed it down with canteens of ice water from the rivulet.

  Nobody complained.

  Stingley sent a work party with orders to bring back any weapons, ammo, and clothing they could find—even burned uniforms would do. Padded cotton was better than nothing. “If it don’t fall apart when you touch it, you damn well better bring it in. It’s gonna be a ballfreezin’ hike into town and we gotta keep the WIAs warm.”

  When the last of the Chinese units had disappeared into the hills, Stingley mustered the men. Every man who could walk had a weapon now. The detail that went down to loot the Chinese dead had brought two sleds back with them, piled high with burp guns, grenades, ammo belts, and uniforms. Morgan lashed the worst of the wounded to these toboggans. Major Thomason was dead. The corpsman planned to bury him in the snow and mark the spot for later retrieval by Graves Registration. Stingley brought the Major’s body along.

  It took six men to drag the toboggans.

  They were a strange-looking platoon when they set out for Hagaru, many of the smaller men wearing scorched Chinese uniforms, others with quilted jackets and trousers draped across their shoulders or tied around their waists. At Stingley’s orders all the Chinese clothing was turned inside out, with the field green color showing, for fear that trigger-happy defenders in Hagaru would mistake them for another Chinese suicide squad and grant their wishes. It was a wise precaution. Twice on the march Corsairs peeled off and dove on them but checked their fire on closer inspection. Finally a Corsair pilot must have radioed Hagaru because as they neared town, a patrol slogged out to meet them. They were doggies—raggedy-ass troops of the U.S. Army’s 31st Infantry Regiment. The patrol was led by a Jeep mounted with an air-cooled .50 caliber machine gun. Stingley called his men to attention. They snapped to.

  “Hand salute,” Stingley bellowed.

  An army captain climbed down from the Jeep and touched the brim of his helmet with a limp, loosely cupped hand.

  “What outfit are you men with?” he asked.

  “The United States Marine Corps, sir.”

  Ben limped back down the line to the toboggans. Luke was on the second one. He was dead. The cold had killed him. Everyone on the toboggans was dead. Graves Registration was already there. They removed a dead man’s dog tags from the chain around his neck and attached one to his ankle, the other around his wrist. Then they scribbled his name, rank, and serial number in a little Marine green notebook.

  Gone but not forgotten.

  Ben looked down at his friend’s cold face. Hoarfrost b
loomed on Luke Darwin’s eyeballs.

  Ben said, “Cool-breeze it, man.”

  PART II

  THE SAME RIVER TWICE

  (Autumn: 2000)

  Old men ought to be explorers . . .

  —Eliot, “East Coker”

  1

  TIMOR MORTIS

  Like many doctors, I am reluctant—no, downright averse—to subjecting myself to an annual physical. In the first place, or so goes our reasoning, I am myself an ordained physician, fully capable of diagnosing whatever might ail me, prescribing the proper protocol to correct the problem, administering said treatment in the most efficacious manner, and thus in the fullness of time . . . of healing myself. This despite my seemingly limited medical specialty, which is the human eye in all its aqueous good humor.

  In the second, I know that if I submit my frail flesh to the scrutiny of a colleague, the bastard will certainly find something wrong with me. This in turn will only lead to a lot of what my Jewish colleagues call tsuris. Once you’re in our clutches, we never let you go. Not until the last shovel of dirt falls on your coffin lid. You can’t really blame us, though. It’s what we’re trained to do. And, too, many of us are just in it for the money.

  And I’m proud to admit that I made a bundle of it over my forty-year career as an ophthalmologist. By the time I retired from practice last year—the last year of the ultraviolent twentieth century (lots of ocular trauma!)—I’d salted away nearly a quarter of a gigabuck, most of it paper money admittedly, from market investments, and lived disgustingly well in the process.

  After graduating from Marquette University med school in 1957 I served out my internship and residency in the U.S. Navy, first at the naval hospital in San Diego and then on an attack transport, the USS Talladega (APA 208) attached to Phibron Seven, home ported in Long Beach, California. On the Douche Boat, as we called her, we cruised the western Pacific, stopping at such exotic ports of call as Sasebo and Yokosuka in Japan; Inchon, Pusan, and Wonsan in South Korea; Taipei on the ChiNat island of Taiwan; Iwo Jima; Okinawa; and Guam, not to mention my favorite liberty ports, Dingalan Bay and Zamboanga and Olangapo-Where-the-Sewer-Meets-the-Sea in the sunny Philippine archipelago.

  Most of the medical emergencies I dealt with in the Navy were of the gonorrheal persuasion, though now and then a whitehat would knock a shipmate’s jaw adrift from its moorings, or fall down a ship’s ladder in heavy seas, sustaining minor fractures and contusions. Once, in the midst of a typhoon en route from Pearl Harbor to Midway, a first-class bosun’s mate named Boynton reported to sickbay with a bad bellyache.

  The poor guy was running a temp of 103 and already starting to hallucinate. Classic signs of acute appendicitis. I palpated his hairy lower abdomen and discovered that the peccant appendage was about to rupture, flooding the poor salt’s innards with poison. I sent a corpsman with word to the officer of the deck that I wanted to perform an emergency appendectomy before it was too late. Emergency surgery at sea, in the grip of a typhoon no less—this was the stuff that articles in the New England Journal of Medicine are made on, and thus reputations . . .

  The skipper paged me on the 1-MC—“Now hear this. Doc Taggart, report to the bridge on the double. Doc Taggart to the bridge, ASAP.”

  The ship was wallowing like the pig she was, taking green water over the bow and tossing great swimming-pool loads of it eighty feet high onto the flying bridge. Each scoop of seawater hit with a crash that made the old tub shudder clear down to her keel. I scrambled up the slick wet ladders topside, squinting against waves of windblown drift that cut like a horsewhip, drenched to the skin by the time I reached the Old Man.

  His name was Harold W. Becker, USN, a tall, square-shouldered four-striper, and the best skipper—the best man—I ever served with, military or medical. He stood there ramrod straight in his black foul-weather gear, swaying with the ship’s pitch and roll like a white pine in a windstorm, the braid and scrambled eggs on his hat gone puke green with salt corrosion. He had the chinstrap pulled down tight under his lantern jaw, to keep the hat from going adrift in the breeze, and I was surprised to see by the light of the radar console that he needed a shave—but then, we’d been eighteen hours in the grip of this typhoon and he hadn’t left the bridge in all that time, except once, the OOD told me, to take a whiz in his cabin.

  “You want to cut this kid wide open, Doc?” he said. “In seas like this?”

  “I have to, Captain, otherwise his appendix will pop and all the penicillin in the Pacific won’t likely save him.”

  “Can you do it with the ship tossing like this?”

  At that moment the Douche Boat pitched up her bow nearly to the vertical, then rolled almost perpendicular to the hollow of the seas. We both skidded ten feet sideways. I looked up. The slashing, moaning, white-maned crests of the waves were taller than the kingposts.

  “I can secure him on the operating table with sandbags and strap him down tight, sir. Sedate him into cloud-cuckoo-land. Then if you can put her bow into the wind and hold her steady, I’ll whip that nasty thing out, quick as a cat, pack him with antibiotics, and zip him back up again. Whole thing won’t take fifteen minutes.”

  He gave me a dubious look.

  “Level with me, Doc. You’re not just doing this to get in the medical journals, are you?” He watched my eyes. His were like bright blue drill bits.

  “N-no, sir,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “What would be your best considered alternative, if it came to that?”

  “Well, sir, I could pack his lower abdomen in ice to reduce the internal swelling and lower his body temp, shoot him up with penicillin, and dose him with febrifuges. Then we could hope this weather blows through and head for Midway or Wake, whichever is nearest when we come clear. An appendectomy would be a cinch on dry land. But how long will it take us to get out of this weather, sir? How long to reach Wake or Midway?”

  “Quartermaster of the watch?”

  That worthy, who’d been listening in on our conversation as had all the watchhands, bent over his chart with parallel rules and protractor and quickly paced off the distance on a rhumb line.

  “At least twelve hours to Midway, sir. Sixteen or more to Wake. That’s figuring flank speed, maybe eighteen knots—all she’ll turn without blowing a boiler, sir.”

  Captain Becker stroked his chin. It rasped, and he got a sour look on his face. “Can he last that long without popping his guts?” he asked me.

  “I doubt it, sir.”

  He pondered a moment more. Then, “Okay, Doc. I can rig a sea anchor to hold her head into the wind and steady her down a bit more, once we’ve turned her bow into the seas. Lay below and have at it. Pass the word when you’re ready to slice.”

  It never came to pass. Boatswain’s Mate First Class William J. Boynton, USN, proved allergic to anesthesia. At the first whiff of ether he erupted from his bed of sandbags, ripped the mask from his face, burst the straps that bound him to the table, staggered to his feet on the heaving deck, and with a Gaelic roar came at the attending anesthetist, Dr. Heracles Zagoras, the ship’s dentist, with clear intent to inflict grave bodily harm. My corpsmen had a hell of a time subduing him.

  Once the boatswain was quiescent again, we had to fall back to Plan B. The icebags, antibiotics, febrifuges, and a mild diet of pablum and fruit juices kept Boynton’s appendix intact until we reached Subic Bay in the Philippines. There he underwent an appendectomy in the naval hospital and was soon on his feet again. Indeed, the night before we left that port for Cap San Jacques in troubled French Indochina, I saw him outside the Papagayo Bar & Grill in downtown Olangapo, the scuzzy brothel town that served Subic in those days when we still had a naval presence in the Philippines. The bosun was reeling with drink as he duked it out with a whitehat off another APA, our sister ship and squadron rival, the Okanogan. As I recall, Boynton was so well recovered that he knocked his opponent—splat on his keister—into the Shit River (yes, that was indeed its name), which slouched sludgily th
rough town at that point.

  I rather liked Boynton, not simply for his swift recovery from an infection that would have laid low a lesser man, but also because he reminded me of my old high school pal Ben Slater. I’d had only two letters from Ben since our memorable canoe trip on the Firesteel River in the fall of 1950. One was postmarked from Inchon, where he joined his USMC outfit that fall. Korea was a rathole, he said. Little kids everywhere selling chewing gum, Korean booze, shoelaces, and their sisters. Artillery fire w/ accompanying muzzle flash evident just beyond the hooches of town. The big surprise was when his nemesis from boot camp had joined his platoon—Sergeant Fuckin’ Stingley, his old drill instructor. Their unit was deploying shortly for the east coast, he said. A place called Wonsan. That letter was dated October 24.

  The second one reached me just after Christmas. He’d mailed it from Yokosuka, where he was cooped up in the big naval hospital, recovering from frostbite and a few “minor nicks and perforations,” as he put it. “Nothing worse than after a football game.” He’d been in the big fight up near the Chosin Reservoir, where the First Marine Division had fought its way out of a trap when the ChiComs invaded. “You think Wisconsin’s cold in the winter,” he said, “you oughta come to Frozen Chosin.” When he was patched up, he said, he was heading back for the MLR—the Main Line of Resistance—up near the thirty-eighth parallel. “Trench warfare,” he said, “just like France in ’17 and ’ 18. Ho-hum . . . .”

  I got to Wonsan myself eight years later, on the Talladega. We were ferrying a regiment of ROK troops over there from Inchon. The fighting part of the war was long over, though sporadic ambushes flared now and then like endemic fever along the DMZ. The ROKs were tough, thieving little fuckers. They were desperate for anything they could swipe from us. One of them reached through the porthole in the navigator’s stateroom while he was dozing in his fartsack one evening after chow. “I saw this arm come in and sniff around like a blind dog,” he told us later in the wardroom. “The fingers touched the washbasin, just grazed my tube of toothpaste, felt and rejected a bar of soap, then glommed on to the blackout curtain over the port and lifted it. I jumped up and yelled. The steward’s mates came swarming topside and nailed the guy redhanded. The OOD turned him over to the cognizant ROK authorities.”