Hold Back the Night

  Mackenzie leaped to his feet, his long johns bagging, his wool socks curled around his ankles, and the OD shirt which completed his night garb flapping around his thighs. He snatched his musette bag from its nail on the tentpole, plunged his hand to the bottom, and brought out the carefully wrapped and protected bottle of Scotch. He opened the bottle guard, and made certain the seal was intact. “Thank God!” he said.

  “Thought Smith had taken it?” said Couzens, who knew its story.

  “Who else? Where’d he get the stuff?”

  “Out of a jeep,” guessed Couzens. “Out of the radiator. Alcohol.”

  “That stuff is poison.”

  “Not to Beany Smith,” said Couzens. “Not much poison, anyway. Sam, if that bottle ever disappears, look inside me and you’ll find it. Don’t bother about anybody else.”

  “I’d brain you.”

  Couzens peered into his helmet, where the water was just beginning to swirl and steam. “You know when you’ll drink that Scotch, Sam? I’ll tell you.” He spread his palms over the helmet, and pretended an incantation.

  “‘Double, double toil and trouble; fire burn, and cauldron bubble,’” chanted Mackenzie. “Okay, swami, give.”

  “I see you sitting in your new home in Los Altos,” said Couzens, making his voice deep and funereal. “You are out on the patio—the one with the swimming pool you are always talking about building. Your wife is by your side, and you are drinking a martini, very dry, with a stuffed olive. I can see your son. He is tossing pebbles into the pool. He is older. He is about eight. You are reading the San Francisco Chronicle, and you notice something peculiar about the front page. There isn’t anything about fighting, or war, or black markets, or inflation. Joe Stalin has been dead a couple of years, the Russians have all gone back to Russia and the Chinese are all back in China and the Czechs again own Czechoslovakia and the Poles own Poland. Winston Churchill is Secretary General of the UN. He has taken up fishing, as well as painting. There isn’t much for him to do. Everybody minds his own business. We have a new president, and everybody loves him. MacArthur is writing his memoirs.”

  “Cut it out,” said Mackenzie.

  “Wait!” said Raleigh Couzens, waving his fingers in the steam. “There is more. All the atom bombs have been taken apart, and the stuff inside them used to produce power, and we don’t have any more coal mines, or coal miners, or strikes. Also we don’t have John L. Lewis. Everybody has free electricity. Now on this evening—yes, I see it is evening—you have invited friends to dinner.”

  “Their names, no doubt, are Mr. and Mrs. Couzens, visitors from Florida,” said Mackenzie. Now that he thought of it, he had never heard Couzens speak much of any particular girl, and he wondered whether there was a girl.

  “Yes, their names are Mr. and Mrs. Couzens, and they are to dine with the retired colonel of Marines, and Mrs. Mackenzie. Suddenly Mrs. Mackenzie says, ‘Sam, we’re plumb out of Scotch. And you told me Mr. Couzens loves Scotch. Sam, this is most embarrassing.’

  “‘Why, of course we have Scotch, dear,’ you say. ‘Remember that old beat-up bottle you gave me back in ’forty-two? There’s no reason to keep it any longer, is there, dear?’

  “And I see your wife kissing you and saying, ‘Why, no, dear.’ And you open the bottle of Scotch.”

  Mackenzie threw back his head and laughed. “So that’s the way you figure it, swami? That’s the way you think it will be?”

  Couzens glanced up at Mackenzie, his bright blue eyes for a moment wise and serious. “That’s the way it’s got to be, Sam. That’ll be the most important day in your life.”

  Mackenzie stepped into his trousers, and put on another shirt over the one he had worn in the night, and sat down at his table. He made a note in the company log. It would be necessary to have the motor sergeant check the transport, to discover which vehicle was low on alcohol. He began to wonder about a morning report. They had been camped at Ko-Bong only three days, he reflected, and yet so quickly did he fall into the routine of the barracks.

  Couzens’ water had now come to a boil. He measured instant coffee and sugar into their tin cups, removed the helmet from the burner, protecting his fingers with a wadded shirt, and carefully filled the cups, wasting not a drop. This was a bond between them, their first morning coffee. It was a ritual begun on the transport on the way out, and practiced daily since, come the hell of phosphorus grenades or the high water of blown dams. It gave some continuity to a life that at best was nomadic and insecure.

  Mackenzie sipped his coffee, and Couzens continued with their routine. He replaced the helmet on the stove, filled it to the brim again, and when it bubbled he poured half the boiling water into Mackenzie’s helmet, and then adjusted the temperature in both helmets by adding cold water from the jerican, using a finger as a thermometer. When he was satisfied he said, “Okay, excellency. Your bath.” They washed and shaved.

  Then in mid-morning Ekland entered the CP. “Regiment just made a signal, sir,” he said. “There’s an air drop coming our way. Plane just flashed the strip at Hagaru.”

  “Air drop? What’s up?”

  “Turkeys. That’s what they said. Turkeys from Japan.”

  “It must be Thanksgiving,” said Mackenzie. “Is today Thanksgiving?”

  Ekland said, “It’s the twenty-fifth.”

  “I know. But what day is it?”

  Neither Couzens nor Ekland said anything. Mackenzie grinned. They could keep track of dates, all right, because of the company log, but the days of the week nobody could remember, except that when a chaplain visited Dog Company, it was usually Sunday. You could get killed on Sundays as well as any other day, and there were no Saturday night parties. Come to think of it, Saturday night wasn’t party night back home any more. Party night was Friday night, or at least that was when the parties started. Mackenzie took his wallet from his pocket, and in it found a celluloid calendar. “This is Saturday,” he announced. “Thanksgiving was day before yesterday.”

  “I got another tip from my buddy at Regiment,” said Ekland. “Colonel’s jeeping up from Hagaru now.”

  “How’s the area look?” Mackenzie noted that Ekland was clean-shaven, neat, and spruce. This was good, because he planned to speak again to the colonel about Ekland, and the colonel might want to meet him.

  “Good, sir. Sergeant Kirby’s been around again.” The captain had warned his officers, and personally inspected, earlier in the morning.

  They heard the roar of aircraft engines, low and close, and stepped outside to watch the drop. A fat C-119, that the Air Force called a “flying boxcar,” and the Marines called “Pregnant Mame,” thundered over their heads, banked in a tight circle, and coasted back. When it was directly overhead yellow parachutes spilled from its tail. There were two figures standing in the open cavern in the back of the fuselage. They waved.

  “Oh, the Air Force has it tough,” said Ekland. “I can just see them, rising from their Beauty Rest mattresses this morning in Tokyo, with geisha girls, or maybe even their wives, to bring their coffee and the morning Stripes. Then after a nice hot bath, and breakfast, they maybe remember they have a job to do. ‘Oh, damn,’ they say. ‘We have to fly today. Korea.’

  “‘Korea. How awful! That filthy place!’” Ekland’s hands fluttered in what he considered was an imitation of an agitated female.

  “‘Oh, we’re not landing, dear.’

  “‘Even so, I wanted you to drive me over to the commissary this morning. Remember, we’re having a bridge tea this afternoon, and we’re utterly barren of goodies.’

  “‘Oh, I’ll be home in time.’

  “‘Well, alright, but you’re going to miss your golf, dear.’ Yep, the Air Force is rugged, real rugged.”

  Mackenzie looked down on Ekland, and his peculiar smile, which was hardly recognizable as a smile at all except for his eyes, touched the ends of his mouth. “You have a very short memory, sergeant,” he said. “Remember that B-two-six?”

  Ekland said
, “Yes, sir,” soberly. He knew he shouldn’t clown like that before the captain. He’d never wear shoulder straps. “I remember that B-two-six, sir.” In the fighting after the Inchon landing, a light bomber, flying too low for a bomber’s own good, had saved Ekland, and perhaps most of the company. The company had run into armor, and Ekland had taken a BAR, and led a bazooka team in an attack, and he had pinned down the enemy infantry, but not the enemy tanks. And an Air Force ground observer had seen what was happening, and had called in the B-two-six, and the B-two-six had dumped napalm on the tanks. Then the plane had been hit, or anyway something had gone wrong, for it had nosed into a hill and dissolved in a pillar of greasy black smoke. It was for his part in this action, and the mop-up that followed, that Ekland had been recommended for the Silver Star and battlefield promotion.

  “Okay,” said Mackenzie. “Get back to your net. If you pick up any more Chinese signals in voice, call Kato and see if he can make anything out of them.” Then Mackenzie prepared to meet the colonel, reminding himself to exhibit just the right degree of surprise when the colonel appeared.

  It was said of Colonel Grimm that he would never make general, because he was too good a colonel. So far as anyone in the Corps remembered, he had always been a colonel. It was likely he would always remain a colonel, for he was in his upper fifties, and the Corps, like all the military establishment, was topheavy with brass. The Corps had been expanded enormously in the Second World War, and then drastically reduced. When that war was done, there was incentive for a young officer to accept discharge and make his way in the civilian world, but there was none for a general. When a general gets to be a general, even a buck general, he has reached the top of his profession. It was senseless for him to resign, and accept a bit more take-home pay as Vice-President for Sales of Toasty-Pops, Inc., or Executive Assistant to the General Manager of Non-Rip Nylon. His prospects as a business man were as poor as the future of a man of middle years who has been drafted into the Army. Quite soon, the office force would stop deferring to him as General, and concentrate their attention and flattery upon younger men, with savvy and know-how, who were hep to the business. Of course, if he were a five-star general, or a four-star general with a Name, then it was different. In that case he sold his memoirs, or became Chairman of the Board, and lived happily ever after. So because almost every general wanted to stay a general, Colonel Grimm remained a colonel commanding troops in the field, which was exactly what he wanted to be.

  When Colonel Grimm entered the lines of Dog Company he left his jeep at the first watch post, ordered the stiffened sentry not to announce his arrival, and took a good hard look at the foxholes and sandbags that stretched across the neck of the Ko-Bong peninsula to deny the encampment to enemy surprise. Particularly he viewed the siting of the machine guns and the disposition of the mortar platoon. He must have been satisfied, because he said nothing and began his inspection of the bivouac, on foot, and unobtrusive and inconspicuous as a second-class private skulking back from an off-limits area. The hood of his parka was pulled over the white eagle stenciled on his helmet, and his chin grated against his chest, so that the deep canyons in his face, that stamped him as an old man and out of place in Dog Company, were shadowed.

  The colonel saw that the noon chow line was forming up, and so he joined it. It is the custom of the Marines, when in the field, that the officers eat at the tag end of the line, and so the colonel, because of his rank, stepped behind the last man, who of course was Mackenzie. And Mackenzie, since he was accustomed to being last man, sensed something was wrong behind him, wheeled, and faced the colonel. “At ease, captain,” the colonel said, instantly.

  “Glad to have you with us, sir.”

  “Will you see that my driver is fed? My vehicle is at your last post.”

  Mackenzie spotted Kato, his mess kit filled, and gave instructions. The word sifted along the chow line. You could not hear the word. It was a soundless zephyr, but the progress of the word could be seen, as far ahead as the cook tent, by the straightening of the line, and of backs. The colonel was there.

  As the line inched ahead Mackenzie said, “Is everything okay, colonel?”

  “I’ll talk about that later, in your CP,” the colonel said. “But tell me, did you get the drop okay? The turkeys, I mean? We forgot about you, stuck off by yourselves here, until just as we finished Thanksgiving dinner. So I messaged Wonsan, and they messaged Tokyo.”

  “We got the drop fine, sir.”

  “So I’ll have a second Thanksgiving dinner, heh?”

  “No sir. We’re having C-rations. The turkeys were frozen. They were shipped that way from the States, of course, and they were kept frozen in Tokyo, and they didn’t get any warmer on the way here. Cooks say they won’t thaw out for twenty-four hours. We’ll have them tomorrow.”

  “Perhaps,” the colonel said.

  When they were in the CP, and alone, Colonel Grimm tossed back his hood, and unbuttoned his greatcoat, and laid his map case and helmet on the table, and sat down in one of the office chairs liberated from the hydroelectric plant. He eased his belt and said, “Your cooks aren’t bad, Mackenzie. Wish I could be here for the turkeys.”

  “You’re invited, sir.”

  “I doubt that I will be able to attend. I believe I will have other duties.” The colonel’s face was wry, as if he had made a prior date which he preferred not to keep; as if he had been invited to an all-male poker party, but was committed to address a garden club.

  Mackenzie knew he dared not ask why the colonel couldn’t have his turkey. He waited for the colonel to speak, and the colonel spoke, his eyes opaque as gunmetal and his mouth straight as the eye-slit of a tank. “This area is too clean.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Mackenzie.

  “I said it was too clean. Know I was coming, Mackenzie?”

  “Yes, sir,” the captain admitted.

  The colonel’s face softened, for an instant, with inner amusement. “My headquarters must be insecure.”

  Mackenzie kept silent.

  “But I didn’t come over here to speak of turkeys, or the fact that communications are passing between headquarters and your company outside of regular channels.” The colonel opened his map case, and spread on the table the map of the Division’s sector, extending from the reservoir to the sea. Then, thoughtfully, he folded this map, and replaced it with a map of all North Korea. “I think there’s hell to pay in the center,” he said, tracing a brown finger along the mountain range.

  Mackenzie remembered what he had seen in the night, to the west. “I saw flares last night. Chinese.”

  “They hit the ROK Corps. Nobody seems to know what happened, but there isn’t any ROK Corps there any more. Know what that means?”

  “Sort of leaves a gap between our Ten Corps and Eighth Army, doesn’t it, sir?”

  “Sort of does. Our regiment at Yudam-ni has been ordered to strike across the base of the Chinese attack, and we’ve been alerted for a move to support ’em. It won’t work.” The colonel looked at the map, spattered with cryptic symbols that he read easily as newspaper headlines. “I’ll tell you what’s going to happen, Mackenzie. If the Chinese have attacked in force anywhere, they’ll attack everywhere. Our counter-attack won’t get far, if it moves at all, and while I haven’t been told to do it, I’m going to prepare to attack in another direction—to the sea. I probably ought to be back at Regiment organizing it now, but I wanted to see you first, because if what I think is going to happen, happens, you’ll be cut off, and I want to give you your orders in advance.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The colonel substituted the sector map for the map of North Korea. “In my opinion we will have to fight our way to the sea. We will use this road.” The colonel’s finger ran down the main road from Koto-Ri to Hamhung. “But we’ll need protection on our northern flank. That’s your mission, captain. That’s the mission of Dog Company. I want you, whatever happens, to put your company on this secondary road.” He traced
it out. “See what I mean?”

  “Yes, sir.” Mackenzie saw exactly what the colonel meant. If the retreat was ordered, and it went beyond Hagaru and Koto-Ri, then Dog Company would protect the northern flank. It was a necessity. It was also, perhaps, the sacrifice of Dog Company. “I’ll need tanks, sir,” Mackenzie said, “and some guns.”

  The colonel shook his head. “Tanks won’t go on your road. Your road won’t hold them. But at Koto-Ri, if we get there, I’ll assign you a recoilless seventy-five. Two, if I can spare them.” The colonel folded the map case, and Mackenzie knew the inspection was over. He did not know whether Dog Company had been selected for the task because of its location, or because of other reasons. But he had one more question to ask.

  “Colonel,” said Mackenzie, “do you remember, after Inchon, that I put in one of my sergeants—Ekland—for the Silver Star, and battlefield promotion? I wondered what happened?”

  “I remember,” the colonel said. “Your communications sergeant, wasn’t he? I read the action reports. Well, he’ll get his Silver Star all right, but I’m afraid we can’t make any more officers in the regiment right now. We’ve got a batch of lieutenants fresh from the States, and our TO won’t stand it.”

  “He’s officer material,” Mackenzie protested. “He’s better than a sergeant.”

  “There is nobody in the Corps better than a sergeant,” the colonel said. “That is a fact, captain, and you keep on remembering it.”

  The colonel rose, and Mackenzie rose. “Goodbye, captain,” the colonel said.

  “Can I take you to your vehicle, sir?”

  “No. I can find my own way.” For no good reason, the colonel shook Mackenzie’s hand.

  Mackenzie watched the colonel striding down the company street, his back straight as a rifle barrel, and he saw Sergeant Kirby, as if by accident, meet the colonel, and he watched while they talked closely together, and for a moment the colonel had his arm around the sergeant’s shoulders. Mackenzie sensed they were laughing, and he felt resentment, for he feared they were laughing at him. Then he realized they probably were laughing at something long past and done, an adventure on the China coast, an escapade in Port-au-Prince, or the remembrance of a girl in Havana. In this exclusive brotherhood, he was still a neophyte, he realized. He hoped, one day, to be a full member.