It started with cocktails at Si Cooper’s apartment, and then they had dinner at Luigi’s, the little Italian restaurant off Division Street. The Chianti was domestic, the antipasto scanty, and the pizza passable. But Luigi’s provided candlelight and an imaginative and sentimental violinist, so they often ate there, the four of them, when Grace Cooper could get a sitter.
Molly had started it, but Si Cooper had carried it through. Usually Si enjoyed his friends, and good talk, too well to try to drown himself in indifferent wine, but on this night he had jumped into the bottle.
Si talked a lot, and the gist of it, cutting through the rambling reminiscences of the Weisserhahn Hotel in Vienna, and the Astoria in Budapest, and the Parc in Istanbul, and the Athénée palace in Bucharest, was this: We fight for survival against the tide of barbarism. This is nothing new. It has happened before, many times. Consider Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Suleiman, Hitler, and all the other egomaniacs with a passion for shoving other people around. “Sometimes we lose,” Si Cooper said, “and sometimes we win. But so long as we keep on fighting, we move ahead a little. We always move ahead. One generation is”—he tried to say, “inconsequential,” but the word proved too much for him, and the syllables rolled around in his mouth like loose marbles.
“You’re not moving it much,” said his wife, Grace, who was irritated.
“I tried,” said Si, his bulk spreading across the end of the table. “I saw the beginning of it. I saw the League of Nations. Flopped, yes. The UN may flop too.”
“Hush,” said Grace.
“Won’t hush,” said Si. “But there’ll be another UN. There has to be.”
“Maybe.”
“We’re going to have one world,” said Si, with the sagacity of the very drunk. “Maybe it’ll be a slave world, or maybe it’ll be our kind of world. But it’ll only be one.”
Molly looked across the table. “Do you believe that, Johnny?” she asked.
“I believe it,” he said. “It’s just plain logic.”
“Then why don’t we do something about it?”
“What can we do?”
“You did something before—the last time.”
He examined Molly to see whether she meant it, and decided that she probably did. Molly was petite, and this night she wore her dark hair in schoolgirl braids, and her brown eyes with the gold flecks in them were clear and amazingly young, so that she looked about eighteen. “Know what I think you are?” he said. “I think you’re nothing but a one-worlder, do-gooder at heart, and still a freshman.”
“Do you love me?” she said.
“Sure. What’s that got to do with it?”
“Nothing.”
And they didn’t speak of it any more until he took her home. Then they sat on the steps, because one of her roommates slept in the living room, and tried to be logical about it. First of all, what did they want out of life? They wanted something bigger and more exciting than what they were doing, didn’t they? And if he went back into the Corps right now, there was sure to be promotion, because everybody needed technicians. This war in Korea wasn’t going to last long. Who ever heard of the North Korean army anyway? As soon as MacArthur got a full division or two in there, they’d fold up and go back where they came from. Probably he wouldn’t even see Korea. But the important thing was that there was going to be a real UN army, and of course the Marines would be part of it. So they’d travel, and see things, and really do the things they wanted to do. That’s what they agreed.
“Okay,” he said, “I’ll be a sucker—this one time.” And they’d laughed, and kissed, and they’d both known that he wasn’t being a sucker at all, but was being real smart. That was the way they’d laid out the future.
Ekland raised his head from his arms and shook it as if the motion would rid him of these thoughts. He left the tent and went out to the radio jeep, sheltered by its tarpaulin and windbreaker. He had work to do. At 2300 hours Battalion called to relay a message that the regiment on the other side of the reservoir had hit heavy resistance north of Yudam-ni, and all units should be on the alert. Ekland passed on this report to his captain. Mackenzie called the reinforced squad he had posted in the plant, to the company’s rear, just to be sure they were there, and awake. You couldn’t ring the whole peninsula with a single company, and this squad was his sole protection from the west.
For a few minutes Mackenzie lay awake to smoke a cigarette and watch, silently, while Raleigh Couzens anointed his rifle, massaging the oil into the thirsty steel. Couzens treated his rifle like a woman. Well, in some ways rifles were like women. While they came out of the factories alike as dancers in the Radio City chorus line, still they were individuals. Some were mischievous and tricky and unfaithful, and some were sweet tempered and reliable and easy to handle. Couzens had discarded his regulation carbine after the Inchon landing, protesting that he needed a more accurate weapon. He explained that he did a good deal of shooting at his place in Florida, and he was used to a good gun. So he had found this M-1 somewhere, and made it his. Couzens cleaned it every night, but on this night he gave it especial care.
Mackenzie wondered whether there was anything more that he could do, and he decided there was nothing, but that he had better be fully dressed. So before Couzens took out his platoon he dressed, and then flopped down and slept again. The next thing he heard was a bugle call, not reveille as it should be, but disturbing and eerie as a siren’s wail.
He was already groping for his carbine when he heard shots, and the bugle call again, and then cries of “Sha! Sha! Sha!” far off. He knew what sha meant. Kill. Outside the CP he watched the green Chinese rockets ascending in a semi-circle around his bivouac. His ears were attuned for the steady firing of Couzens’ heavy machine guns, which he knew should now commence, and the thud of his carefully sited mortars, but he did not hear them and he realized, suddenly and sickeningly, that the Chinese had not attacked across the spit of land. They were pouring across the ice, and had taken Dog Company in the rear.
Chapter Five
WHEN RALEIGH COUZENS led the Second Platoon down to the line of foxholes chopped into the neck of the Ko-Bong peninsula, he disposed two rifle squads on the alert, and inspected the mortar emplacements. He discovered that the night’s normal humidity, freezing on contact with the steel, had rimmed the tubes with ice, and he ordered this chipped away and the barrels kept clear. The foxholes were deep, and neatly shelved, so that a man could smoke, and lay out his gear, in comfort inside, and even light a little fire, when the circumstances permitted. On this night the circumstances, of course, did not permit.
He gave his sergeant the duty for two hours, and then curled up in his own hole and was immediately asleep. Couzens never suspected it, but his men were often puzzled by his able professional conduct in the field. When they were staged at Pendleton, they called him, behind his back, sometimes, “Our Playboy,” and sometimes, “Little Whitey.” Since he dressed meticulously and always had a girl on his arm, when off duty, and since it was usually a different girl each time, they speculated on his amours and his ancestry.
Some things about him they knew—that he had left college to join the Marines in the last war, and had been a second lieutenant in the fighting at Peleliu. He had graduated from the University of Virginia after the war, and then for some unfathomable reason had re-joined the Marines when obviously there was no need for it, for the poop was that at Quantico he had driven a Cadillac convertible. They also knew that he re-fought the Civil War loudly and endlessly with the Skipper, always taking the losing side. Once, so the word was, a Confederate flag had been discovered in his foot locker, and Mackenzie had been infuriated, but the flag had stayed aboard, so perhaps Couzens, in spite of his expensive uniforms and girls and cars, was a brave man.