It had been taken in the spring of 1948, during that thin slice of time when there was no fighting, and many people still spoke with confidence of peace, and everybody was getting on with business. In the photograph everybody was smiling, and nobody, not even Anne’s mother, had guessed they’d had quite an argument at breakfast.
He had been ordered to Parris Island, to train boots, and Anne wasn’t going with him. At first she’d said she couldn’t go because of the baby, and then she’d said, “Sam, I’m just damn sick and tired of moving, and trailing you around the country. Why don’t you get out of it?”
“Get out of what?”
“The Marines.”
“I thought you liked it?”
“I did. I don’t any more. I want to settle down. We’re always moving, moving, moving. I want a home of our own. I’m tired of renting. I want some security. We owe it to the baby. You can make more money, outside.”
“Doing what?”
She set down her coffee cup and said, “Well, for one thing, writing.” An article on firepower had been printed in the Marine Corps Gazette, and he’d sold an eight-line piece of verse to The Saturday Evening Post, and he’d written a short story which had been rejected by eight magazines, but by three of them not very emphatically.
Sam laughed. “Well, if what you want is security, we’d better keep on taking the King’s Shilling. Anne, this is a welfare state. Understand, I’m all for the welfare state. I think it’s the greatest invention since sex. Look at what we get out of it. Medical care free, or almost, and cheap cigarettes and whiskey, and you can buy stuff from ships’ stores at just about half price. But it isn’t available to writers. When they make it available to writers, I’ll quit the Marines, and be a writer.”
“Stop being silly, Sam. I’m serious.”
“I’m not being silly at all. Look at this egg.” He pointed his knife at his breakfast egg, cozy in its cup. “I just read in the paper that for every egg eaten at breakfast the government buys another egg that nobody wants to eat. The government buys these eggs by the billions, powders ’em, and buries ’em underground, like the gold in Fort Knox. Who pays for that egg nobody eats? Taxpayers. Writers.”
“You are too being silly, Sam.”
“I am not either. The government has to buy eggs, transport ’em, pulverize ’em, process ’em, package ’em, and bury ’em. That costs a lot of money. Then there must be overhead, like a Bureau of Unwanted Eggs, or something. That’s right, isn’t it?”
“Well, then, don’t eat the darn egg!” Anne said, angrily.
He decapitated his egg with a butter knife, and dug into it. “That wouldn’t do any good,” he said. “If I didn’t eat it, then the government would just have to buy one more egg.”
“Sam, you majored in literature, not economics.”
“It doesn’t take an economist to see what’s happening. Look at potatoes. Up in Aroostook County, Maine, they’re paying planters sixty-five millions a year to dig up potatoes, and paint ’em blue, because nobody wants to eat them.”
Anne looked at him suspiciously.
“Now, if the government would just treat sonnets like potatoes, I’d quit the Marines and be a writer. I don’t see why the government doesn’t. What’s a potato got that a sonnet hasn’t got, if nobody wants to buy either sonnets or potatoes?”
“You don’t have to write sonnets. You can write articles, or stories.”
“I’ll tell you when I’ll quit the Marines and go to writing,” he said. “Just as soon as the government pays me a five thousand dollar advance on a book—providing I don’t write it, or gives me ninety percent of parity for not writing articles and stories. Parity, of course, will be the top magazine price, plus twenty percent.”
She laughed, finally, but she hadn’t followed him East. When he got back to the Coast, after three months, they started talking about a house in Los Altos, not far from her parents’ home. They drew plans for it. The plan increased in size in ratio to their dream, and the cost of building materials kept pace. So it hadn’t been built, and a shooting war had come.
Mackenzie slipped the photographs back into his musette bag. And now he was moving again, just when he thought it was over. Well, he’d made his decision, back there that spring morning in forty-eight. Perhaps it had been a bad decision, but it was done, gone, past. Mackenzie called Ekland and said, “Bring your jeep over here. I’m riding with you.” He wanted to be in the radio jeep, in case they ran into a block, and he had to ask for artillery or air in a hurry.
Mackenzie lined up his column carefully. In the lead he placed a jeep with a fifty-seven millimeter recoilless gun mounted, and behind that a jeep with a fifty-calibre machine gun, and the radio jeep was third in line, and a weapons carrier with a squad of riflemen and a bazooka, fourth. Behind this point, sufficient for swift assault, he put his six-by-sixes, two of them loaded with the wounded. The other jeeps, and weapons carriers, were strung out behind, with the rest of his heavy machine guns at the tail of the column.
Dog Company began to roll out, and the squad he had assigned to burn the camp went to work with the jericans of gasoline. As they reached the village he stood up in the jeep and looked back. Flame and black smoke were shooting up from what had been the bivouac at Ko-Bong. Sherman had said it all, he thought, in three words. But then Sherman had been a captain, too. Sherman had been a company commander for a long time. Sherman knew.
As the column moved ahead, it began to snow again, at first only a few vagrant flakes, so he hoped the fall would not be heavy. Then the snowflakes grew smaller and more numerous, and the wind rose, so that Kato and Vermillion, the captain’s runner, huddled down in the back seat. Somewhere in the distance artillery was thumping. “If that’s their stuff,” Mackenzie said to Ekland, who was driving, “at least they won’t have direct observation—not with this snow.”
“They’re 105’s,” said Ekland. “They’re ours. I can tell.”
“I know they’re 105’s,” said Mackenzie, “but that doesn’t make them ours. The Nationalists surrendered plenty of them, back on the mainland.”
“And they’ve captured more,” said Ekland, “since this thing started in June. They got ’em from the South Koreans, and they got ’em from us too. Still, I think these are ours, just from the way they’re firing. They just sound right.”
Mackenzie listened closely, and agreed, and the firing grew louder, and presently they approached the battery. There were four guns, with Marines firing white phosphorus into the boondocks of a distant hill. Mackenzie had Ekland pull the jeep out of line, and they stopped for a moment and talked to the battery’s captain. This captain said that as far as he knew the road into Hagaru was clear. They should turn to the right at the next crossroads. This captain said the hills were crawling with Chinese, and he would be glad to get back to Hagaru himself. He said that if they had wounded they would find the field hospital in the center of the town. The air strip was all the way through the town, and a bit to the south.
Mackenzie thanked this battery captain, and Ekland raced and bumped along the side of the road until the jeep was back in column. They reached the crossroads, and turned, and came to a Bailey bridge over a narrow stream locked in ice. There was an MP on the bridge. He looked good to Mackenzie. He was a sign of regimental authority, and strength. When you saw an MP, you weren’t isolated any more.
The column passed three blocks of shot-up houses, and its center then came to a halt beside a building with a Red Cross flag stretched over the doorway. Mackenzie went inside, and found a medic, tired, harassed, wearing a bloody apron as if he worked in a butcher shop. “I’ve got twenty-two wounded,” Mackenzie said.