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.
Mackenzie sat at his table and concentrated on what there was to be done. First he called in his officers, and briefed them on what the colonel had said. He decided it was useless to strike the tents, and go to ground, until a direct threat developed, or Regiment ordered a move. His men would now need all the rest and relaxation they could get.
He sent Lieutenant Sellers, his supply officer, to Battalion in search of better maps. Sellers, who had not joined the company until just before the Inchon landing, wondered whether he should not take along a squad to guard against guerrillas, or snipers, on the Hagaru Road. Mackenzie didn’t feel this was necessary, but he told Sellers to do what he wished.
The captain dispatched Sergeant Kirby to the regimental supply dump with instructions to scrounge all the extra socks he could find. He had discovered that Kirby could come back with stores that generals and admirals could not command, or Department of Defense requisitions secure.
He ordered a thorough check on his transport, and extra supplies of gasoline lashed to the vehicles. .
He talked to his medical corpsmen, and gave them instructions to distribute their supplies and litters, and not load everything on one or two six-by-sixes or jeeps.
He ordered his reserve mortar tubes emplaced, and zeroed in on ground not completely covered by the fields of fire of the machine guns. He wished to make it impossible for any living thing to cross the neck of the Ko-Bong peninsula alive.
He doubled the size of the night watch. The First Platoon would have the duty until midnight, and would be reinforced by Raleigh Couzens’ Second Platoon from midnight on.
Then he cranked his field phone and asked that Ekland come to the CP. He might as well get it over with.
“Any news, sergeant?” he began, when Ekland stood before him.
“Yes, sir. Heard an AFN bulletin from Tokyo. Eighth Army is under heavy attack. The announcer said something about overwhelming numbers. And I intercepted a signal from some Second Division unit. In clear. They claim they’re surrounded, and they’re screaming for air.”
“Sounds pretty rugged, doesn’t it?”
“That isn’t all, sir. Kato has been listening in on the Chinese frequencies. He says their radio traffic has stepped up enormously, and he thinks most of it is coming from headquarters of the Chinese Fourth Field Army. That’s Lin Piao. He’s young, and he’s smart, and he’s tough. Every hour they broadcast an order-of-the-day. The usual crap about driving us into the sea, and then they end it with, ‘Strike down! Strike down! Strike down!’ I heard it. It doesn’t sound good, even in Chinese.”
Mackenzie wondered why Ekland should know anything of General Lin Piao, or even remember the name, but he had tabbed Ekland as an unusual young man, and this knowledge of the enemy seemed to confirm his judgment. “Sit down, sergeant,” he said. Ekland sat down on the edge of the chair. He felt apprehensive. It was not often that the captain asked one of the men to sit down for a talk in the CP. When he did, it usually was bad news, and usually it was bad news from home.
“I’ve got some good news for you, Ekland, and some bad news,” the captain said. “I told you I’d put you in for the Silver Star, and promotion. You’re getting gonged, okay, but no lieutenancy. Not now, anyway. Matter of the TO. However, my recommendation will always stay on your record.”
“Thank you, sir,” Ekland said. He knew that custom now required him to say, “Is that all, sir?” and then leave the CP. But the captain’s face, composed and sympathetic, invited something more, and Ekland felt free to speak. “I guess I was a dope, captain. I had a good job. Real good. A hundred and fifteen a week from NBC. But when this thing started I rushed back in. I wasn’t in the Reserves. I didn’t have to do it. But Johnny Ekland was first in line. You see, my girl and I decided there was a future for us in the Marines. Guess we were wrong.”
“I don’t think you were wrong,” said Mackenzie. “There is nobody in the Corps more important than a sergeant.”
“Oh, sure,” Ekland said. “A sergeant gets a good deal. But a sergeant’s wife travels second class. She can’t go to the ‘O’ Club, or swim in the pool, or even go to the movies with a girl friend who happens to be married to a second lieutenant. Just like you and me. Out here we eat out of the same mess kit. But when we get back Stateside, if we meet in a bar and want to talk, there has to be an empty stool between us.”
Mackenzie tapped a cigarette on the table, carefully arranging his words before he spoke. This was the first time this embarrassing social problem, always present and always shunned, had been placed so directly before him. “No army is a democracy,” he said. “If it was, it wouldn’t be an army. There has to be unquestioned obedience, and therefore there is unquestioned rank. Rank, and what goes with it, is a necessity.”
“I realize it’s a necessity, captain. Maybe it’s all right for me, but not for my girl. She isn’t a second-class woman.”
“Well, maybe the Corps isn’t for you,” Mackenzie said. “You’re a technician. You do fine on the outside.”
Ekland’s face was freckled, and when he grinned and cocked his red head on one side, as he did now, he was gamin off a Chicago playground, taunting the law. “Right, captain! I resign! Think I’ll fly back home right away. Like my travel orders now, if convenient.”
They both laughed. “But seriously, sir, that’s the trouble. My girl and I decided to give this thing a whirl. We figured that if I went in right away I had a good chance to make lieutenant, and if I didn’t make lieutenant I could get out pretty quick. We figured it would all be over in a few months in a little place like Korea. Now we’re trapped. This thing can go on forever.”
The captain didn’t reply immediately. Ekland felt that the captain was looking through him, and through the walls of the tent, and past the outcome of present battle and the confines of Korea. At last he said, “For us, for our generation, it might well go on forever. But our generation has the duty. If we win, our children are going to live.”
“Yes, sir. If we win.”
“We are going to win,” the captain said, as quietly and certainly as if he were saying he was going to have a cup of coffee, and Ekland knew the interview was over. So he rose, and made his military manners, and returned to his tent.
And there in his tent Ekland crawled into his sack, and Milt Ackerman, his friend, frowning behind his spectacles, came over and said, “What’s wrong, John? Sick?”
“I don’t feel too well,” Ekland said, and turned his face away.
“The GI’s?” In Korea, even when you stuck strictly to American rations, and boiled your water or dosed it with the little white pills that presumably made it fit to drink, diarrhea was always possible, as if the men were infected by an effluvium rising from the pores of the fetid soil.
“No. I just feel bad.”
“Anything I can do?”
“No.”
Ackerman left him alone, and Ekland closed his eyes and buried his head in his arms and re-lived their Day of Decision. It was a Monday night, and they were partying on this unaccustomed party night because the next day was July 4, and Molly, who worked in the office of the University of Chicago’s psychics laboratory, would have July 4 off.