The admiral turned to Major Toomey, as if out of courtesy to include a guest in the discussion. “How do you figure it, major?”
“I don’t know much about football,” Toomey said. “I don’t follow it.”
They all looked at him in surprise, as if he had admitted some curious thing about himself, like having six toes, or that his grandmother was a Romany gypsy. Toomey felt an explanation was necessary. “You see, my father was in the Foreign Service, and I went to school abroad.”
“Oh,” said Infantry.
“College, too?” asked Air.
“Yes,” said Toomey. “The American University in Istanbul, and then the Sorbonne.”
“Thought you might have studied in China?” said Air, hopefully.
“Not formally,” said Toomey. “Just language school, when my father was consul in Shanghai.”
“Well,” said Air, “let’s take off.” Air was slender and handsome, with just enough gray lacing his blond hair to disqualify him from jet fighters. “What’s your evaluation of the ground situation?” he asked Infantry.
Infantry looked at the map, and his eyes, bright, cold blue in a face leathered by the campaigns of Africa and Italy, flicked from attack arrows to phase lines to sector boundaries to the squiggles that described terrain to the red ovals above the Yalu. There were new red goose eggs, representing reports from Hong Kong, crayoned in within the last twenty-four hours. For a full minute he said nothing. It was as if he listened, and the map spoke to him in a language unintelligible to the ordinary ear. Then he said, “I don’t like it. I don’t like it worth a damn.”
Infantry came out of his chair and went over to the map and plucked a limber, seven-foot pointer from the rack at the base of the blackboard. “Eighth Army is strung out too far,” he said, whipping the pointer along the Korean west coast. “The road net above Pyongyang is in bad shape. Our own bombing.” He acknowledged Air with a small, tight smile. “If Eighth Army is hit, it’ll have a tough time getting out its transport. It’d be even worse trying to bring up support.”
Infantry paused so that they could have time to absorb the immutable logic of supply. “Ten Corps,” he went on, “is in an extremely hazardous position. Particularly the Marines around the reservoir. They’re strung out worse than Eighth Army.” His pointer touched Yudam-ni, Hagaru, and rested for an instant on the dot that was Ko-Bong. Nobody noticed the names. They were not important.
“Yes,” said the admiral. “Admitted. But the Navy can give direct support to Ten Corps. We can’t to Eighth Army. That’s the difference.”
“That isn’t the difference,” said Air. “The most important difference is that the closer we get to the Manchurian border, the less space we have for aerial warfare. The Air Force has been deprived of its battleground. We have lost our principal weapon.”
The admiral’s face, ruddy from the winds of all the oceans and all the seas, turned brighter red. “Our principal weapon,” he said, “floats. Guns and planes, both.”
Infantry ignored them. He shifted his pointer to the mountains of North Korea. “Now this ROK Corps in the middle has been moving too fast for its own good. They’ve outrun their supplies, and maybe their artillery, and they’re going to get hell kicked out of them. That is, if the enemy has the capacity to attack. I’m scared of that ROK Corps. If they break—watch out. If they break they’ll unhinge all the flanks, and there won’t be a regular line any more. There won’t be any communications between Eighth Army and Ten Corps, except through Tokyo.”
“No communications now,” said Air. “Two commands. Private wars.”
“I think it is sort of silly,” said the admiral. “Here they are all unified, and everything, in Washington, and they ought to have a unified field command in a little place like Korea.”
“Well, we suggested it,” said Air. “We made a proposal. And look what happened.”
They were all silent. Nothing had happened.
“But will the Chinese attack?” said Air. “That’s the question.”
Infantry returned the pointer to its rack, and took his seat, and scratched with a yellow pencil on the pad before him. “I don’t know,” he said. “But if they do, I’d say we were in a helluva spot.”
Air nodded, and turned to Major Toomey. “That’s where you come in,” he said. “What’s your evaluation of the enemy intentions? What’s Mao Tse-tung thinking?”
Toomey wanted to say, “If I knew what Mao was thinking I’d have a couple of stars on my shoulders, like you birds.” But he didn’t say that. He said, a proverb bubbling out of his memory, “‘When the enemy advances, we retreat. When he escapes, we harass. When he retreats, we pursue. When he is tired, we attack.’”
“What’s that?” asked Infantry, puzzled.
“A Chinese verse, written by Mao Tse-tung.”
“Verse!” said the admiral. “What is he, a poet?”
“He’s not only a poet,” said Toomey, “but he’s perhaps the best known contemporary poet in China. Of course Chinese poetry is all formalized, and lots of modern Chinese poetry is merely rewriting of the ancient Chinese poets, and I presume this is too. Still, it’s significant.”
“A poet!” said the admiral. “What are we worrying about?”
“Well, Mao sticks pretty close to his writings,” Toomey explained. “So the question is, are our troops tired? Because if they’re tired, then I think the Chinese will attack.”
“They’re worse than tired,” said Infantry. “If they were just physically tired I wouldn’t worry. They’re worse than that. They figure the war is over, and they want to go home. I remember Italy. V-E Day, ’forty-five. There is nobody so alert and resourceful as the American soldier when the going is bad, and nothing disintegrates so fast as an American Army with a victory.”
“Mao is smart,” said Toomey. “Mao will know that. Furthermore, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he didn’t have a couple of divisions of guerrillas stashed out behind our lines right now.”
“Oh, come,” protested Air. “If that was true, we’d all know about it.”
Toomey reminded himself that he should not argue with all this rank. Yet he felt compelled to say, “‘Guerrillas should be as cautious as virgins and quick as rabbits.’”
“More Mao poetry?” asked Air.
“Yes, sir. He’s a specialist in guerrilla warfare. When the Germans were pounding at Moscow and Stalingrad, the Russians adopted his guerrilla tactics. He’s written manuals on the subject.”
Air looked at his watch. He had another conference, Target Analysis, in twenty minutes.
Toomey felt there was more he must say. “Mao has expressed his intentions in writing,” he said, “and I think I’d better quote him: ‘We want to take the enemy’s eyes and ears, and seal them as completely as possible. We want to make them blind and deaf; we want to take out the hearts of their officers; we want to throw them into utter confusion, driving them mad.’ I think that’s what he’s trying to do to us, right now.”
“Well, he won’t get away with it!” said the admiral.
“As to his final intentions,” Toomey persisted, “I think you’ll find a remarkable parallel with Genghis Khan. Genghis Khan said, ‘A man’s greatest joy in life is to break his enemies, and to take from them all the things that have been theirs.’ Like Genghis Khan, Mao accepts war as glorious and inevitable. And he doesn’t care how long a war lasts, for he has limitless time, and unlimited lives. In the history of China, a hundred years is like a single year to us, and a hundred dead is like one dead.”
The three of the Intentions Conference now examined Toomey, silently, evaluating him as he had evaluated the enemy. Toomey was not impressive. Had they seen him in the Burma jungle in ’forty-four they would have categorized him as a good, tough officer, tan and lean. But he had eaten too well at Fisherman’s Wharf, and Dinah’s, and Omar Khayyam’s, so that now he was a bit paunchy, and he wore spectacles, and his color was not good. Malaria, and atabrine, would always be in his veins, but they did not know this. It was simply that his color was not good. “Where did you learn all this crap?” asked the admiral.