by Alyson Hagy
Adams blew into the palms of his hands. His skin was cracked and scaly, and one of his fingernails was split. He kept his fingers moving so they wouldn’t get stiff in the cold. Devlin had put him in the machine-gun pit with Sutherland where he could afford an occasional glance at the peeled-back sky when he wasn’t deciphering the road that lay before their position. He crouched to the left of the watchful Sutherland, ready to belt feed the .30 caliber light machine gun if necessary. He doubted it would be necessary. The N.K.s didn’t come at a checkpoint head-on. It wasn’t their style. If he concentrated, however, he could dull the disturbing sounds of the refugee interrogations the Republic of Korea soldiers were conducting behind the gun pit.
The ROKs were slapping the face of an older girl. He could hear the blows snap through the crisp air as the Koreans shouted, Where is your brother? Where have you hidden his weapons? His comrades? They asked the questions as if they were bandits asking for treasure, mechanically, with a cruel hint of languor. They didn’t know whether the girl had a brother or not. They were looking for Reds in their own country, traitors, so they wanted to be thorough. It was a search that took time. Adams knew without checking that Hobbs still held his unblinking place, Ml at the ready, as the kneeling girl collapsed into a heap of noiseless sobs. Hobbs’s six black-eyed, hollow-eyed farmers stood on their fleshless legs to dress themselves in the pitiless morning light. Pilcher continued to search the half-empty bags of rice.
Next to Adams, Sutherland tugged at the collar of his field jacket as though some internal heat made the collar feel tight around his neck. His face, which was gashed by a thick set of eyebrows, remained impassive. Adams wondered if he and Sutherland shared the same acid thrum in their guts—from hunger, from the rough treatment they had witnessed. The long-necked manner in which Sutherland peered between the aiming stakes set before the gun suggested he wasn’t itching for action, but with Sutherland you couldn’t exactly ask. He was a twelve-year marine who’d been busted back to private for something excessive he’d done in Japan. He’d made it clear he didn’t care for the new arrivals like Adams who’d been ass-tagged to Easy Company because it was short of men.
Devlin stuck his helmeted head over the sandbags and informed them that a patrol from Fox Company was coming into the lines. He reminded them of the password. Sutherland asked if the patrol had made any contact. Sergeant Devlin, a tireless collector of operational information, said that was what he’d come to find out. Neither of them mentioned the subdued herd of refugees corralled by mud and broken stone against their right flank.
A child began to wail. A child was always wailing unless the big guns were firing and all human complaint was erased in their recoil. The crying reminded Adams of orphaned lambs and how they filled acres of corrals and sheds with their inconsolable grief. The land the Americans were moving into offered other misplaced reminders of his Wyoming home: the biting promise of the valley wind, the black, wooded hillsides that recalled the elk country of the Sierra Madres. He shook his head to counter the thick pounding he felt in his sinuses. Only the U.S. Marine Corps could have shipped him from Bell Butte to California to Japan to a part of Korea so remote it began to feel familiar.
Like home, it was rough country. Steep and folded and bladed with granite ridges that looked no wider than a boot sole. The slender, exposed roads were barely more than cart paths. Adams knew it was bad ambush country just from looking at it. They all did. But to the salts like Sutherland and Devlin who’d been on Tarawa and Iwo in the war before this one, the country was no worse than it had ever been. Enemy country was always bad. Evil. It was always sutured with bunkers filled with men who fought like hell. It didn’t matter. They had no choice about it.
This was a truth hotter and more piercing than any bullet Adams could imagine. It throbbed beneath the skin of his body like a buried coal. He’d been in Korea less than a month, and it was time for him to learn to live without choice. There were certain deprivations that suited him—he knew this from his years on the ranch. But though he hated the stupid abiding military rules, he had come to hate his high-plains ignorance even more. He despised his lack of combat experience. He spit on his own greenhorn past. There was too much he didn’t know, too much he had to grow into. The 7th Marine Regiment was headed toward the Yalu River on the Chinese border. The advance was removing his options with every step of every march. Things were likely to get rough. There could be only one goal: to become honed, all necessity. What remained of John Fremont Adams when it ended, however it ended, would be a distillation of man and pursuing soldier, a potent liquor brewed from what he believed and whatever he discovered in the high hills of Korea.
This was what he told himself.
He spotted the first of the men from Fox Company as they cleared a bend in the road that was half-blocked by a shattered ammunition trailer. The men trudged without chatter. They were unshaven, like everybody in camp, and footsore from climbing hills, and trousered in mud. Adams didn’t see any stretcher bearers, but it was clear the patrol had stepped on somebody’s wasp nest. Santo, the corpsman, was calling for a jeep. He had wounded men coming off the slopes. Adams counted the bandoleers of ammunition still worn by the B.A.R. men. One, two—there weren’t many. Fox had left its share of metal jackets on the route then, plenty of them. Then came the prisoners, four smallish men in fur hats and green quilted uniforms—the first like those he’d seen. The prisoners moved with short, unlifted strides and carried their chins level, as if they were curious and temporary visitors.
“Christ and His Most Blessed Mother,” said Sutherland.
Adams dropped to his haunches so his ear was at the level of the gunner’s mouth. Despite Sutherland’s silent bullying, Adams was supposed to anticipate his needs.
“Chinks,” Sutherland said, “and not for the first time. MacArthur and his Tokyo generals better get ready to shit dry.”
Adams looked again at the prisoners. He wondered how Sutherland could be so sure. The ROK soldiers had stopped their work; that might be a clue. The platoon lieutenant from Fox Company, a man whose name Adams didn’t know, looked puckered up tight for a guy in safe from a midnight march, but lieutenants always looked that way. Was it the faces? Did somebody in Fox know the difference between Chinese talk and Korean? Gooks looked the same to him, as little as he’d seen them.
Devlin returned in a half crouch, his hands encased in a pair of homemade woolen socks. His smile was crooked and dangerous above his patchy reddish beard.
“Spoonhauer’s coming to spring you for chow.” The platoon sergeant’s voice was whispery, almost girlish with its hints of secrets.
“You see that, Dev? You see what Fox fucking hooked on its line?” Sutherland was loud and guttural. Adams watched him squeeze the stock of the machine gun, as if he was personally offended by the sight of the prisoners.
Devlin hung a rictus smile in the air above Adams, his way of needling a buckass replacement private who knew no history. Then he replied to Sutherland. “I wasn’t in Nanking with you Raiders, but I hear what you’re saying. You’re saying somebody’s about to send us up the asshole of the whole Chinese army without a warning. God damn Tokyo command.” Devlin shook his helmeted head so hard his shouldered carbine began to sway. “Wish I could send you to H.Q. to straighten out those map-reading bastards, Suds, I really do. Best I can do is report that the captain’s sending out Third Platoon tonight. We’ll be attached. Tell me who you want.”
Sutherland hawked something upward into his mouth, then wall-eyed Adams while he seemed to savor the slickness that floated on his tongue. “We got baby shit.”
“Sure,” said Devlin, “but I’m asking.”
“I’ll take this one. He’s quiet.” Sutherland stared out over the black angles of his gun. “Not the whiner, though, and not the other cowboy, he won’t stick in a hard fight. Maybe the spic if I have to.”
“I’ll talk to the lieutenant.”
“We got one of those now?”
�
�Yeah. Reservist. From Vir-gin-i-a.” Devlin spoke the state’s name as if were a part of France.
Sutherland spat a white gob onto the straw mat Adams had unrolled in the bottom of the gun pit to pad his knees. “Sweet Mother of God.”
“May She be with us on this night,” Devlin crooned. Then he was gone, swifter and more affable than he had a right to be.
Sutherland jammed his hands into his pockets and began to curse in his name-filled Catholic way. His square chin jabbed outward with every word. He fiddled with the gun sights, then barked at Adams for a cigarette, which Adams had to fork over. Adams wanted to ask Sutherland what he knew about the Chinese. They’d trained the North Koreans, the Chinese had, and the N.K.s hadn’t been hard to handle since Pusan. That’s what Pilcher and Fryberg said. But maybe the Chinks had maneuvers they hadn’t shared with the N.K.s. Devlin and the other veterans acted like that was true for the marines, like they believed the corps had been holding itself back, was still doing so, waiting for the professional sons-a-bitches to take the field. The Chinese had done nothing but wage war for thirty years. They hadn’t been lying in their hammocks on Okinawa or shucking good soldiers from their full-strength regiments. They hadn’t been playing politics. If the Chinese got into things, the Americans were going to have their hands full.
Adams drew in the harsh smell of Sutherland’s cigarette until his mouth began to water. He decided to smoke one himself. He was about to go on his first night patrol. He vowed he wouldn’t ask questions or appear too eager about anything. He’d just be ready to do the job, whatever Devlin or Sutherland said the job was. There wasn’t much a soldier had to understand about an enemy before his first fight. He’d heard plenty of guys say that. A long, hard day in Korea appeared simpler if you thought about it that way, or an hour.
Spoonhauer’s squad arrived right on time. There was no talk in the pit until the new gunner and assistant settled in. Hobbs and Pilcher backed off the refugee line where shawls and straw hats flapped like broken bird wings in the breeze. They set up on the machine gun’s flanks until Devlin waved them all in. The sergeant didn’t mention the upcoming patrol so Adams stayed shut about it. C.D. was talkative as he often was after a tense stretch of duty. He tended to behave like a spigot, on and off and on. Sometimes he wanted to talk about baseball, a passion he’d learned to imitate at Camp Pendleton. Sometimes he wanted to talk about food or some strange Korean thing he’d seen. Today it was letters.
“I just got a thing I want you to tell Charlotte. One thing, not a whole page worth. And hello to Old Etchepare from me. He’d be amazed by this country, don’t you think, how sorry it is for livestock except for the water. It can’t be a bit like France where he fought in that trench war. And will you say something about those Mongol ponies we seen? I bet those ponies would handle a winter logging camp in the Madres just fine, they got the build for it. Sergeant said to get breakfast and grab sack time until 1200. Are you worn out because I’m not. I thought I’d be tired. I should be tired. You’re going to write home today, right? Take a minute?”
Adams flattened his red hands until they were like trowel blades, then made an exaggerated attempt to peer under the brim of Hobbs’s helmet. Hobbs hadn’t changed much physically during their slogging weeks in the corps. He hadn’t shaved for several days, but it made less of a difference with him since he grew no hair on his face to speak of, even though he was nineteen. There were kids in the company who were younger than Hobbs, younger than both of them. None of them had the unblended look of Hobbs.
“There’s not much to say, C.D. We can’t talk about chasing Commies in letters. It gets censored.”
“We could tell something about Japan to Buren except he’s at the college in Laramie. And greetings to your ma and father.”
“Do it yourself,” he said, wanting to occupy himself with nothing but steaming hot coffee. “You know how to write.”
Hobbs pulled up at the rear bumper of an officer’s jeep, halting his progress toward the mess tent. “She don’t give a rat’s shit where I am, what I do,” he said, meaning his feckless mother who was supposedly shacked up with a government trapper near Kremmling, Colorado. Adams hadn’t meant to bring Hobbs’s mother into it. He’d been thinking of his own family, who wrote often to them both, or claimed to. They hadn’t received much mail since California. They’d been moving too fast.
“Come on,” he said to Hobbs. He walked his friend forward with such definition the grenades in their webbed belts beat hard against their hips. There was a long line of latecomers at the mess tent. It would do him and Hobbs both good if they decided they were hungry. “I hope you got a plan if I get hurt, though, or when I get that influenza Fryberg’s been breathing all over. I hope you got a extra postman in reserve.”
“You don’t need to talk that way, Fremont.” Hobbs kept pace, but he sounded genuinely gaffed under his helmet and coat.
“Why not? You think words like that ought to be secret? We’re machine gunners, and Sergeant says the whole damn Chinese army is waiting for us up this road. It don’t matter what we say in talk.” Adams felt the dismissal of his body, and his future, flood his veins right then and there, cleansing him of fatigue and anxiety all at once. He welcomed any opportunity to make superstitions public, especially his own. “Talk don’t make anybody less safe.”
Hobbs stopped again, and Adams braked his own heels. Soldiers passed them, some sauntering, others dragging their legs beneath their spines like weary cattle. All bore the red-rimmed gaze of sleeplessness and want. Hobbs’s face, what Adams could see of it, went still and unflushed. He said, “I know you’ll be all right.”
As a further sign of benediction, the air around them suddenly tore itself in half as howitzers from the 11th Marines began to register on distant targets they couldn’t see. There were more Corsairs in the air as well, trailing dirty smoke.
“Hell on you, C.D., if you know so much. Let’s get breakfast while there’s something left to get.” Adams gave Hobbs what was meant to be a friendly punch on the arm, but he hated how he was pretending to be cheerful. What difference did it make? Hobbs was on a slide. Most of the new guys were, feeling down sometimes and then up, feeling whipped side to side, careening, as their abilities began to fall short of what was demanded of them. His own confidence tended to slip from moment to moment, and they hadn’t even done any fighting yet. Their relentless drill instructors had warned them about this danger, had tried to prepare them for it during the hurried time they had to fill the depleted marine ranks. But how did you train men for constant onslaught, inside their heads and out?
Adams knew this was why Hobbs might be left off the night patrol. Sutherland didn’t think C.D. and Begnini, who he called a whiner, had developed the right stomachs for the job. Adams didn’t know exactly why Sutherland thought that. Hobbs hauled gear as well as any of them, and he never complained about a single thing. But Sutherland had decided Hobbs was weak. Adams allowed himself a controlled moment of worry. He didn’t think C.D. was weak, that wasn’t the word he would use, but he wondered if the exclusion would be a problem. Hobbs liked it when the two of them stayed together, and maybe he liked it that way, too, if he was honest about it. They hadn’t been separated very often. But the sergeants had say on patrols. He and Hobbs hadn’t been given a choice.
Adams shoved through the flaps of the squad tent into the wavy green light produced by the kerosene stove. The air was thick with a stale, outpost warmth. He stripped off his field jacket and the gloves he was allowed to wear when he was not manning the gun. Some of the men were out mailing letters. Others were seeing a corpsman about blisters or bartering for beer and cigarettes or taking a rare crap. The rest were near their cots, moving quietly like animals in their stalls.
Hobbs, it seemed, had been coaxed into telling some of his stories. Miguel Rocque, who was from right in the city of Houston, Texas, liked Hobbs’s stories, and he often asked for one while the squad was cleaning its weapons. Adams made his way down a
narrow aisle, then laid his coat on his cot. He ducked out of his heavy helmet. The drugstore reek of Rocque’s hair tonic was stronger than usual, and it made a poor mix of smells with the kerosene from the stove. Ry Pilcher seemed to be swabbing the hair tonic directly onto the grooved metal of his disassembled M1. That was news. Pilcher was taking Sergeant Spoonhaur’s advice. Spoonhauer, who’d fought at the Bulge against the Germans, claimed hair tonic was better than standard-issue gun oil if you wanted to keep a gun firing in the cold.
“Butch Cassidy had his Hole-in-the-Wall boys, see. And they started robbing Union Pacific trains in the desert….”
It sometimes took Adams a moment to recognize C.D. Hobbs’s entertainer voice when he heard it. C.D. had been a talker back home, but not the sort anybody really listened to. Since the marine-recruit depot in San Diego, however, there’d been a fullness to Hobbs’s public speech, an almost athletic confidence. His Wyoming stories featured a graceful patience that Adams realized Hobbs must have been hoarding for years. This patience led Hobbs to select details for his stories as carefully as another man might select a string of packhorses. He brought to life the fables and jokes of all the ranch hands he had ever known. It was a good trick, Adams thought. It gave Hobbs a piece of a bigger reputation and made him appear natural at living outdoors among men.
“One-eared Ike Dart was a colored slave who become a good cowboy before he started stealing folks’ cattle. He lost his ear to a Ute woman with a axe, if you can believe that. They say she did it for love….”
Hobbs, Adams thought, was nothing but natural. And gullible. He knelt to unclasp the top of his field pack. There were two photographs in a plastic sleeve near the top of the pack. One was a picture of his dun horse, Jackson, who was only three years old and still needed a firm hand. The other was a picture of his family taken at an ice-cream social in Savery. His father and Buren were both in ties and shirtsleeves. His mother and Charlotte wore matching summer dresses. Would the people in that photograph still recognize him, he wondered. Had he become as different as he needed to be?
