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

disparate directions,” the ops officer said. He was a full colonel and a bit of a schoolteacher himself. Using a pointer and an acetate overlay on a small-scale map of eastern North Korea, he lectured them a bit.
    “The division is to proceed northwest to Hagaru-ri, at the nearor southernmost end of the Chosin Reservoir. At Hagaru we are to split up, with a right wing moving northeast toward the Fukien Reservoir, about twenty miles away. Based on Hagaru, the rest of the division is to move northwest to Yudam-ni, a village twelve or thirteen miles away on the high ground west of the Chosin. And from Yudam-ni, we divide again, dispatching a column due west to cross the Taebaek Mountain Range to make contact, vaguely out there [he motioned with a languorous hand], with Eighth Army’s right flank.”
    The colonel paused.
    “No one seems to know just how far away and where the Eighth Army might be.”
    Smith nodded. “Thank you, Colonel.” He made no comment on the apparent confusion in General Almond’s orders but permitted a moment or two of grousing by the others. This was standard procedure. Senior Marine officers had opinions and enjoyed airing them. Verity was, except for several staff NCOs, the lowest-ranked man in the room and offered nothing. Until Smith said: “This is Captain Verity. Headquarters Marine Corps sent him over. He speaks several Chinese dialects fluently. He’s been listening to Chinese radio traffic.”
    He then paused. “I might also say the captain fought on the ’Canal as an enlisted man and on Okinawa as a rifle platoon leader.”
    This last, with no editorial comment, was clearly intended by Smith to tell his officers, “This is not just another Washington charm boy.”
    “Captain?”
    Verity had been sitting on a wooden crate. He got up now.
I talk better on my feet
, he told himself.
    “Thank you, General. I am not an intelligence specialist. Because I was born and raised in China and I now teach Chinese lit and history in an American college I’m here, pretty simply, to listen to Chinese radio traffic. And, if it comes to that, to talk to Chinese POWs.”
    He paused, wondering how far his own hunches and biases should be indulged. So he went ahead and told the truth.
    “I think the Chinese are coming in. The father north we go, the more Chinese I hear. But that’s reasonable. We’re getting closer to the Chinese border. What has me interested is that I’m hearing numbers of Chinese corps and divisions that Headquarters Marine Corps provided me. And, on a personal note, I’m hearing the names, or at least similar names, of officers I knew in China five years ago.”
    This was a curveball. A full colonel jumped up.
    “Wait a minute. You
knew
these guys? You went back to China?”
    “Yes, Colonel. I left there at age fifteen. I went back in ’45 after the surrender and served as a company commander in North China into mid-’46. Because I could speak the language I also did a lot of liaison with Chinese Communist Forces in the Tientsin-Tsingtao area. There were regular Chinese army detachments; there were the Communists; there were plenty of bandits and local warlords. After seven years of fighting the Japanese and being occupied, it was a chaotic place. The Marines tried to keep the railroad open and missionaries from getting their heads chopped off, and I did some of the go-between haggling and dickering.”
    They were all listening to him now with varying degrees of fascination. The division might be about to fight the Chinese army and here was a guy who’d been there and knew some of them.
     
    Sometimes Elizabeth would ask him about the War.
    “Did you shoot people, Tommie?”
    “Oh, you know,” he said, sloughing it off.
    “No, I don’t,” Elizabeth said, characteristically blunt, crisp. “I don’t know
anything
about war.”
    “Well, there’s a lot of waiting around. Standing in lines. Getting up early and getting pretty dirty. And then every once in awhile