Combat Ineffective

by William Peter Grasso

  Sylvie had never called him Half and never would. So in those years between wars, he’d simply become Tommy.

  His first question: “Did I at least get that damn bridge?”

  “Yeah, you did,” Sean replied. “You flyboys knocked both them bridges down. My C.O.’s real pleased. But c’mon…get in the damn jeep, already. That crash left you looking like you been rode hard and put away wet.”

  “What are you, a cowboy now, Sean? The only horse you’ve ever been around was the one that pulled the junkman’s cart up Flatlands Avenue.”

  “Standard expression in this man’s army, Half. But really, ain’t you a little shook up or something? With all due respect, sir, you look like shit.”

  “I’m okay, Sean. I’ve been through a hell of a lot worse.”

  As they drove to the airfield’s operations shack, Tommy said, “You don’t have to be in such a hurry to get rid of me, Sean. I’ve been in combat on the ground before, remember?”

  “Yeah, I remember all too well, Half. But this is different. Real different. The only place we need you is up in the air, shooting up these gooks all you can.”

  He cast a probing glance in Tommy’s direction as he continued, “You do know what the score is here, right?”

  “Of course I do, Sean. Everybody does. We’re trying to fight a delaying operation with one hand tied behind our backs.”

  “Maybe it’s one hand for you aviator-types, Half, but for us jokers down on the ground, it’s more like both hands. We got nothing to work with here. Case in point—that dipshit who didn’t know your plane from a Russian job.”

  Tommy asked, “But from where you sit, do you think we’ll be able to pull the delaying action off?”

  “It’s gonna take a fucking miracle, Half. Just promise me you won’t be stuck on the ground in Pusan when the gooks break through. Just get your ass back to Japan, okay?”

  At Operations, Tommy came face to face with the pilot of the FAC ship named Spectral One-Seven. Captain Don Gerard was busy gathering his gear. “This airfield’s as good as closed,” he explained. “We’ve been ordered to pull back to K-2 at Taegu. I’ll be glad to give you a ride that far, sir, but I have to fly a mission first.”

  “Mind if I come along on the FAC run?” Tommy asked. “You’ve got a back seat in that T-6, right?”

  “Yeah, sure. The more the merrier…and another set of eyes won’t hurt. But are you sure you want to, sir, after just getting shot down and all?”

  Tommy replied, “You know that old saying about getting right back on the horse, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, I know it,” Gerard replied, “but you must’ve taken one hell of a beating, sir. There’s a hole in the top of your helmet, for cryin’ out loud.”

  Tommy stuck his finger through that hole and said, “Consider it ventilation. Now, are we going or not?”

  *****

  The weather wouldn’t give them much time for this FAC mission. Clouds were sweeping down from the north; a band of thunderstorms would arrive shortly. With Tommy in the back seat, Captain Gerard was piloting the T-6 over the small city of Kongju, located some twenty miles northwest of Taejon on the southern bank of the Kum River. At the junction of four major roads, it was suspected Kongju was being turned into a major logistics base by the North Koreans.

  “After the way we hit their supply points yesterday,” Gerard said, “I guess the KPA needs a few new places to stash their stuff.”

  Tommy cast a wary eye to the approaching storm. “If we find something, do we have anyone on station close enough to hit it before the weather socks in?”

  “I’ll give a call and see who answers,” Gerard replied. “They should be on tac eight if they’re there at all.”

  A B-26 flight responded, call sign Stranglehold. They were fifteen miles to the east.

  Stranglehold Leader said, “Roger, Spectral, but better make it quick if we’re going to make it at all. I don’t plan on being anywhere near that thunderstorm.”

  “No shit, Dick Tracy,” Gerard blurted, careful to keep his comment confined to the FAC plane’s interphone and not broadcast to the world. Then he asked Tommy, “How fast do you figure that storm’s moving?”

  “I think we’ve got about ten minutes.”

  “Damn, that ain’t much to work with. You want to fly her a little while I get out the binocs?”

  “Be glad to.”

  “Okay, your airplane,” Gerard said, relinquishing the controls. “Hold us at three thousand feet, give me an orbit left over the city.”

  “Coming right up,” Tommy replied.

  The feel of the T-6 came back to him quickly. She’d been designed to handle like a fighter—and she did—but without the brute force acceleration of a fighter’s powerful engine. Novice pilots had enough on their plate without having to worry about vicious prop torque flipping the ship on its back with a sudden advance of the throttle. He was proud of himself for not losing any altitude at all as he put her into the turn.

  “How long did you say it’s been since you flew one of these girls, sir?”

  “Seven years,” Tommy replied.

  “Well, you ain’t lost your touch, that’s for damn sure. I just may take myself a nap.”

  After they’d orbited the city once, Tommy asked, “You seeing much of anything downstairs?”

  “A couple military trucks, all going in different directions. But that’s about it.”

  Tommy said, “I’d say we’ve got one more orbit before the ground goes away and the ride starts to get rough.”

  Stranglehold Leader was back on the air. “We’ve got you in sight,” he said. “What’s the plan?”

  Gerard replied, “Hold over that northern bend in the river just east of Kongju.”

  “Roger, Spectral.”

  In the few minutes it took to complete the orbit, long fingers of cloud had moved in below the T-6, partially obscuring the ground. It wouldn’t be long before the burbling clouds at the storm’s leading edge blocked their downward view completely.

  “I’ve got a hunch that place is crawling with KPA,” Gerard said, “but they know the storm’s coming, too. They’re just staying concealed until we can’t see the ground anymore, the clever bastards. I’m calling this mission off and releasing Stranglehold. Maybe they can do some good someplace else.”

  As he made that transmission, the first waves of the storm’s turbulence made the T-6 shudder.

  Like a fiery orator, Gerard said, “Head east, young man—and quickly, before we get our brains beat in. You still okay with flying her, sir?”

  “Yeah, I’m good.”

  “Then take her to K-2. We’ve got the gas. Heading one-one-five.”

  Trimmed in level flight, the T-6 flew practically hands-off. A few minutes into the half-hour excursion to K-2 airfield at Taegu, Gerard had gotten so quiet that Tommy began to wonder if he really was taking a nap.

  “You okay up there?” he asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” Gerard replied. “Just enjoying letting somebody else do the driving. Hey, what’s the latest rumors around Pusan, sir? Are we really planning on bringing the jets in?”

  “Just as soon as we’ve got the runways and ground support for them,” Tommy replied.

  “I’ve got a few hours in F-80s, and I’d really like to get me some more jet time,” Gerard said. “But I got stuck in C-47s, driving what boiled down to a delivery truck all over the Pacific Rim. I hoped volunteering for Korea would put me in a jet again, but I got FAC instead.”

  “Your chance may come,” Tommy replied. “Sooner than you think.”

  “Maybe, maybe not, sir. I don’t see why the Air Force is bothering with this buildup, anyway. The word we’ve been getting is MacArthur’s going to put the gooks out of their misery by dropping a few A-bombs on them. Just a question of where to put them. Then that’ll be the end of all this nonsense.”

  Tommy replied, “Funny, but that’s not the word around Pusan. It’s not just the Air Force building up, either. T
he Army and Marine Corps are shipping units over as fast as they can…two or three divisions’ worth. There are a couple boatloads of helicopters on the way, too.”

  “I still think the bomb’s a whole lot easier, sir. By the way, take a look straight up at nine o’clock.”

  High above, Tommy could see four weaving vapor trails. “Yeah, I’ve got them. What about it?”

  “The contrails are from four F-80s,” Gerard said. “I could only make them out through the binocs. Can you see what’s right in the middle of them?”

  It was only a silver speck almost five miles above the T-6, but it would’ve had to be a pretty big aircraft to be seen at all.

  “Let me guess,” Tommy said. “A B-29, right?”

  “Exactly right, sir.”

  “Must be a recon ship with escorts,” Tommy said. “Wonder where they’re going and what they’re looking for?”

  Gerard replied, “If you ask me, sir, they’re looking for places to drop the big one.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  The storms that engulfed Kongju had moved southeast. Continuing throughout the afternoon, their heavy rain turned everything except the gravel runway on the Taejon Airfield to muck.

  “Be a hell of a time for the gooks to start dropping artillery and mortars,” Patchett said. “Every swinging dick in this outfit got his steel pot off, for sure, and he’s using it to bail out his hole.”

  Jock hung up the field phone. He’d been talking to General Keane, who’d offered a suggestion: Once it gets dark, drive those M19s I gave you around your position to make it sound like you’ve got a lot of armor at your disposal.

  He could tell by the look on Sean’s face that his tank expert didn’t think much of that idea.

  “First off,” Sean said, “you need at least a platoon of tanks to pull that little stunt off. Two vehicles driving around sound like nothing but two vehicles driving around, period. Second, as sloppy as the rain’s made everything, the only place we’d dare do that is on the runway. Those tracks’ll get bogged down in no time flat, otherwise. Kinda ruins the whole scheme, too, if that motor noise can’t get spread out back and forth across our entire position. With that skinny runway running perpendicular to where the gooks are at, it’ll sound like those tracks ain’t hardly moving at all.”

  “I take it you’ve used this technique before, Sergeant?”

  “Yes, sir. Used it on the Krauts a whole bunch of times.”

  Jock replied, “So in your expert opinion, we should respectfully decline the general’s suggestion, Sergeant?”

  “Well, sir, if that’s the same as shitcanning it, then yeah, that’s what I’m saying.”

  There was no doubt that KPA forces—as much as a division—were poised for attack just across the Kap Ch’on River. But there had been no sight of them. They’d been surprisingly quiet, too. Usually, the sound of massed tanks could be heard several miles away. But there’d been nothing.

  Patchett said, “Been thinking, sir. How about I run a recon patrol across the river tonight to see where the hell those gooks are and what they got in mind?”

  Jock wasn’t warming to the idea. “Just how big a patrol are you thinking of, Top?”

  “Something like the one we used back at the Kum breakthrough, sir. Just me and my choice of four savvy GIs.”

  “Count me in,” Sean said.

  “Negative, Sergeant Moon,” Jock replied. “Absolutely not. I can’t have both my senior NCOs out there. Besides, if we’re going to be fighting tanks again tonight, I need you right here.”

  “Amen to that, sir,” Patchett said. “You tankers make too damn much noise, anyway. Leave the recon patrolling to us infantry types. We know how to be real quiet-like.”

  *****

  As soon as night fell, Patchett and his patrol slipped across the Kap Ch’on, fording it at a point where the water barely reached their knees. The rain had stopped, but the ground was still a morass that clung to their sodden boots and trouser legs.

  Picking up a trail on the far bank, they moved west as quickly as the boggy ground would allow, the only sound the faint smacking of mud that accompanied each footstep. They’d only gone a few hundred yards when they heard urgent voices and sounds of activity.

  “Sounds like they’re breaking boxes open,” Patchett whispered. “I’m betting they’re either fixing to eat or loading up on ammo.”

  But still they heard no vehicles. For the moment, he considered that encouraging news.

  *****

  At 26th Regiment’s CP, the switchboard operator yelled to Jock, “LP Baker’s on the line, sir. Says it’s urgent…they hear tanks coming!”

  That made no sense. Listening Post Baker was on the road to Taejon at the back side of the regiment’s perimeter, about as far as could be from the last known KPA positions. If there were suddenly North Korean tanks moving up that road to the airfield, there had to have been a KPA breakthrough beyond Taejon nobody had bothered to tell 26th Regiment about.

  Jock told Sean, “Take an anti-tank team and get over there. Figure out what the hell’s going on.”

  The closest 3.5-inch rocket launcher team was a half mile away from LP Baker. Sean gathered them up in a jeep and raced through the darkness toward the road. When the section chief asked, “Why the Chinese fire drill, Sarge?” he replied, “We got tanks at our back door. Nobody knows whose tanks. That’s fucking why.”

  Still a hundred yards from the LP, they could see the silhouette of a tank on the road. It wasn’t moving.

  “If that ain’t a fucking Chaffee, I’ll eat my hat, Sarge,” the section chief said. “But wait a minute…do you figure the gooks would use our captured tanks against us?”

  Sean parked the jeep behind a derelict shack and shut the engine. “They’d be out of their fucking minds if they did,” he replied. “And real desperate, too. A T-34 is five times the tank a Chaffee is. Take your team and set up in them trees over there. I’ll figure out what the hell’s going on.”

  LP Baker was nothing more than a shed with a scrap wood frame, sandbag walls, a tin roof, and a field phone. Two GIs were crouched inside, holding their weapons on a third man standing in the road with his hands up.

  “Look, pal,” the man in the road said, “I told you already…I don’t know the fucking password. All I know is I was told to report to 26th Regiment. That’s you, ain’t it?”

  Sean couldn’t make out the man’s face, but he thought he recognized his voice. “If I didn’t know better,” he said, “ I’d swear that dumb sack of shit was none other than Sergeant Sal Nuzzi.”

  One of the GI guards asked Sean, “You know this guy, Sarge?”

  “Unfortunately. Put your fucking hands down, Sal. What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Well, as I live and breathe, it’s Master Sergeant Sean Moon, greatest tanker that ever fucking lived,” Nuzzi said as the two shook hands in the middle of the road.

  “Third greatest, Sal, after George S. Patton and Creighton W. Abrams. I’d love to chitchat about old times, but we’re a little under the gun here. So what are you, lost or something?”

  They weren’t lost, Tech Sergeant Nuzzi explained. His platoon had been ordered to provide whatever fire support it could to 26th Regiment.

  “Be nice if somebody told us about it,” Sean said. “I got guys in the bushes ready to toast you, you dumb shit. And where’s this platoon of yours? I only see two Chaffees.”

  “We had four until about an hour ago. Two broke down almost as soon as they rolled off the flatcars. Fucking transmissions, you know?”

  “Shit. Ain’t that typical?” Sean mumbled. “The only one we had left burned up her engine last night.”

  “But if you don’t want our company, Sergeant Moon, we can turn around and—”

  “Not so fast, Sal. I got just the job for you. Climb back in that junk wagon of yours and follow me. Just let me tell the CP we’re coming so maybe some other GI morons don’t start shooting you up.”

  *****


  Patchett’s patrol was a half mile past the river now, moving cautiously up the slope of a low ridge. At the peak, the usual odor of Korea—excrement used as fertilizer—was replaced by something far more stomach-turning: the stench of death. Among a group of shacks that once, no doubt, comprised a small village, they stumbled onto more corpses than they could count in the darkness. Most seemed to be ROKs, their hands bound behind their backs with wire, a bullet hole in the back of their skulls. But a few were civilians: men, women, and children.

  One of Patchett’s GIs—PFC Staley, the BAR gunner—hadn’t seen much killing yet. He struggled to hold down the vomit he felt rising in his throat. But he’d rather swallow it than let the sound of his retching give them away. Then they’d be captured and executed by the North Koreans just like those unfortunate souls.

  For all its horrors, the ridge proved an excellent vantage point. In a ravine to its north, they found the KPA armor assembling to attack. With their engines shut down, they loaded ammunition and refueled with hand pumps from barrels in near silence. Patchett counted twenty-eight tanks in the ravine; there might be more hidden in the folds of the foothills farther to the west.

  Despite the USAF’s efforts to deny them fuel, they’d found a way to get it to their tanks. The next KPA assault against the airfield wouldn’t be infantry alone like the last one. It would be a combined arms action that would take a miracle to defeat.

  “That’s at least two tank companies, I reckon,” he whispered to Corporal Potts, the colored trooper he’d handpicked as his second-in-command for this patrol. “Listen to how quiet those boys are. Excellent noise discipline. Puts our tankers to shame. They can’t zip up their damn flies without making a ruckus.”

  He gathered his patrol close and said, “I reckon we’ve seen all we’re gonna see. Let’s head back toward the river. Once we’re out of earshot, we can radio the bad news that their tanks are back in the game.”