The Marines of Autumn: A Novel of the Korean War by James Brady Page A

and flank patrols high above on the ridges and hillsides, a thousand feet or so higher than the road and the column itself, rifle platoon-size patrols moving fast, staying upwith the column or even ahead, and guarding its flanks against ambush and attack. You had to have discipline to get men to climb that high and that fast on steep slopes with snow and then to keep up and keep watch.
     
    Please do not think of Oliver Smith, for all his pipe smoking and courtesy, or of these Marine colonels, his battalion and regimental commanders, as kindly, avuncular, courtly, and graciously aging old gentlemen. Some of them were those excellent things, of course, but all of them were professional killers, employed in a hard trade: tenacious, cunning, resourceful, cold, cynical, and tough, not the kind of men who waited patiently for the Chinese to come and kill them.
    There was some of Nathan Bedford Forrest in most of them. Forrest had been one of Lee’s generals, a cavalryman capable of killing enemy soldiers at close or long range, with his regimental artillery at a mile’s distance or face-to-face-with sabre and revolver. Even Forrest’s fellow Southern generals were afraid of him. If you crossed Forrest, he would kill you. Toward the end of a battle he once raged at his men, urging them to finish off a beaten federal corps: “I did not come here to make half a job of it. I mean to have them all.” By that, Forrest’s men understood, he meant, “I mean to kill them all.”
    It was said Forrest was disappointed when Union troops surrendered and at Fort Pillow he killed prisoners. Nathan Forrest was not a nice man. Oliver Smith’s division contained men of equivalent ferocity. Not all, of course, but many. And many who had already killed.
    Tate had killed people, one of them a Japanese prison guard, others down on the Naktong in August’s heat. Izzo had killed on the Islands during the War. Maybe again in Korea; he was vague about that. Verity, too, had killed.
    It was the work Marine infantrymen did.

     
    Headquarters in Hungnam was a stone building two stories high with a tiled roof and a sort of center portico with chintzy pillars that attempted to convey grandeur. Windows had been shot out or blown by near hits, but otherwise the place was sound, and it was here Oliver Smith called his staff together, mostly colonels and majors, all armed, shoulder holsters mostly, which seemed this year’s style. One officer standing near Smith bore an iron face, as Boswell once said of an attorney, another barked an alehouse laugh, most were bluff and ruddy, but that was being outdoors and in the wind and, Tom supposed, aboard ship.
    It was five years since Verity had met with men like these in number; he was more accustomed today to the commons room with its tweeds and pipes.
    General Smith, long-faced, white-haired, and still wearing the old yellow canvas leggings, could have been himself, except for the Colt. 45, an academic, perhaps a tenured professor of Thomistic philosophy. And it turned out his divisional HQ had been a Jesuit secondary school.
    “The Jesuits seem to be long gone,” Smith’s operations officer remarked, “so we must pray for ourselves.”
    “I work for the Jesuits,” Verity said, “at Georgetown University.”
    “Oh?” The ops officer was not sufficiently interested to explore that opening further. “Well,” he said, “here’s General Smith.”
    They all stood, not snapping to attention but simply getting up, perhaps a dozen men in the room. Oliver Smith had seen a lot of war, and he motioned them to be seated.
    “Thanks for coming, gentlemen.”
    There was a sort of high stool, and Smith slid it under one buttock and perched there, rather as a schoolteacher might have done, then calling on one officer after another to brief the meeting and himself. There was an evident confusion.
    “The objective isn’t all that clear. General Almond seems to be sending the First Marine Division in three