“Yes, sir,” the corporal said, his face wooden. The MP’s saluted, pivoted, and were gone.
“Smith,” said the captain, “you’re fined a month’s pay. That isn’t all. You’re going to get every dirty job there is. You’re going to look at your ugly face in the bottom of a latrine every day until you’re ready to act like a human being.”
Mackenzie turned to the gunnery sergeant. “Sergeant, I want you to handle this man’s punishment, personally.”
“Aye-aye, sir.” In thirty-six years as a Marine, Sergeant Kirby had seen much shipboard duty, and he used strictly Navy talk, as the regulations prescribed.
“Take him away.”
When there were only four left in the tent Mackenzie looked at the woman, and she shrank away from his glance as if she expected his anger to lash out at her next. “Kato, tell her the man is to be punished. Tell her that I am sorry for what has happened. Tell her—” He was going to say that he was sorry for her people, and her country, but it sounded too theatrical. “Take her back to where she lives.”
“And give her this junk,” said Raleigh Couzens. In the rear of the tent he had located an empty carton, and half-filled it with C-rations, and chocolate, and sugar, and a can of hard candy, and as an afterthought two bars of soap.
Kato took the box under his arm, and led her away. She was smiling, and for the first time the captain noticed that she was quite young. This surprised him, for it always seemed that Korean women skipped a generation, and were transmuted from pot-bellied children into bent hags in an instant. You hardly ever saw a young woman.
When the gunnery sergeant was out of earshot of the company CP Kirby clamped the iron grapple of his fingers on Smith’s elbow and spun him around. Without a word, he smashed him in the face with the heel of his left hand, calloused by the barrel of his BAR. Smith crumpled to the ground, moaning. “Get up!” Kirby said, and Smith got to his knees, shielding his face.
“Up on your feet, scum!”
Beany Smith got to his feet, his hands pressed to his mouth.
“When I get up in the morning I want to see this whole area policed,” Kirby said. “If I find so much as one butt on the ground, I’ll really hit you. Then report to the cook tent, to stow slops.” He turned his back on the man and walked to his tent, an uncompromising figure of strength. Mackenzie was a good skipper, for his age, the sergeant thought, although perhaps a little soft. Mackenzie shouldn’t be concerned with scum like Beany Smith.
At midnight the captain’s field phone rang at his elbow. He had trouble unzipping his sleeping bag, and it rang again. Finally he wrestled an arm out of the bag and picked up the phone. It was Ekland. “I just got a message from a friend of mine at Regiment,” Ekland said. “We’ve got a sort of private code. The colonel’s coming up to inspect us tomorrow. I thought I’d better tell you, sir.”
“Thank you, sergeant,” Mackenzie said. Marine Corps sergeants were a strange race. They held together tight as a fist, a fraternity possessing secrets that no officer could penetrate, and practicing rites outside of regulations, law, and the rules of war.
“One other thing, sir. For the last hour all I’ve been able to get on our radio net has been Chinese. They’re jabbering on all the high frequencies.”
“Okay, sergeant, you can secure for the night.”
The captain closed his eyes, but sleep would not come. He rose, dressed in the dark so as not to awaken Raleigh Couzens, and walked outside into the clear, still night. Now that the wind had died it did not seem so cold. He walked briskly, a tall and lonely figure, to the line of foxholes Dog Company had dug across the base of his tiny peninsula.
The midnight watch had just changed. He went from hole to hole, stopping at each for a word with the shadowy figure within. To each he said, in parting, “Keep awake tonight, soldier.”
When he reached the last hole he saw, far to the west, a series of rockets bloom in the sky. He watched their green and yellow and red petals arch across the horizon, and fade into the gloom of earth. It was very beautiful, but he recognized them for Chinese rockets.
Chapter Four
MACKENZIE AWOKE UNEASY. There was something left undone. For a minute he lay in his sack, hands locked behind his head, staring at the brown canvas, recalling all his actions, so to clear his decks from the previous day. “That son-of-a-bitch!” he exploded, sitting straight up. “Where did he get his liquor?”
“Calm yourself,” said Raleigh Couzens. “It’s too early in the day for excitement.” Couzens was sitting on the ground, cross-legged, before a Colman stove, a frowsy Buddha entranced by the flame of an altar. Atop the jet of flame was his steel helmet, filled with water.
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.”