Mackenzie saw smoke rising from only one chimney, and he chose this house as his CP, and sent in Kato and Vermillion to thaw out some rations, while he himself superintended the care of his vehicles. In the confusion after battle, the tarps for the hoods of the jeeps had been forgotten, or lost. But he found two sleeping bags, and protected the hoods of two of his jeeps with these, and the third jeep he drove into a house that had been bashed in by a tank. He assigned two men to each jeep, and ordered them to stand two-hour watches, and turn over the motors for five minutes in every hour. At this moment the jeeps were all-important. Without the jeeps Dog Company would lose its mobility in battle, its supply train, and whatever chance it had to push through to its objective.
Then Mackenzie went into the house with the fire. It was filled with his men. Like all Korean houses of its type, it was comfortably warm, for it had radiant heat, invented some four thousand years before the idea occurred to Americans. At the end of the larger room was the combination stove and fireplace, with its three holes to receive the great iron pots. At the far end of the house was the chimney, and the flue ran the whole length of the house, under the hard-packed clay floor, so that heat flowed everywhere evenly upward from the earth.
Some of his men already rested full length on the floor smoothed by the body oils and feet of generations. Others watched while cans of rations thawed and warmed in the pots. In the second room a lantern burned, and Mackenzie smelled the sour smoke of peanut oil.
In this second room was something he had not seen for so long a time that the sight of it startled him. It was a bed, a real bed with a mattress. It was true that it was a narrow, brass bed as hideous as if it had been imported from the back hallway of a four-dollar-a-week rooming house. But still it was a bed, and there was a spread on it, and it seemed as luxurious as a suite in the Waldorf. Raleigh Couzens was sitting on the edge of this bed, bouncing a bit, testing the springs and the mattress. “I saw it first,” Couzens said.
“I rank you,” said Mackenzie, shrugging his carbine and his musette bag from his shoulders.
“We can both use it,” suggested Couzens. “We’ll take turns.”
“Like hell,” said Mackenzie. “This one night, I’m going to sleep on a bed. If I get up to inspect the vehicles, and the guard, then you can use it while I’m gone.”
“Don’t you think it’s wide enough for both of us?” asked Couzens, plaintively.
“Nope,” said Mackenzie. “I don’t.” He noticed the old man sitting on the bench in the corner. The old man had been hidden by Kato’s back. He saw that Kato was speaking to the old man, in what sounded like Japanese, and Mackenzie walked over and put his hand on Kato’s shoulder, and took a better look.
He was a very old man, and the lines in his face were deep and dark, as if they had been burned in weathered wood, and he wore gold spectacles with square rims. He wore the cone-shaped hat, exactly like a Halloween witch’s, that marks the Korean patriarch. His ankles seemed no larger around than a small child’s, and his shoulders were bent and bony, and yet his shoulders carried his white robe with a certain grace, like a toga. “Who’s this?” Mackenzie asked Kato.
“This is the old man who lives here,” said Kato.
“Yes, but who is he?”
“Well, he teaches school here in this village. Or did.”
“Ask him whether there are any Chinese troops around. No, wait a minute. He wouldn’t know that. Ask him whether there are any North Korean guerrillas.”
“I did, sir. He doesn’t know. He says he never knows when soldiers are around until they come into his house. He doesn’t leave his house. He just stays here and reads.”
Mackenzie saw a wooden case in the corner. It was filled with paper-backed books. He picked up one of these books. It was in Japanese. Mackenzie noticed that the old man’s eyes followed his movements alertly, and the old man spoke to Kato. Kato replied, and the old man nodded.
“I told him you weren’t going to take his books,” said Kato.
“Tell him we won’t take anything that belongs to him,” said Mackenzie. “And ask him about the rest of the people in this place. What happened to them?”
Kato spoke to the old man, lengthily, and the old man replied, and in replying he became excited, and his bird-thin hands twisted and shook. When he finished speaking the old man nodded at Mackenzie, as if he knew that Mackenzie would understand.
“Do you mind if I sit down, captain?” Kato said. “I’m pooped.”
“No, of course not,” Mackenzie said. Kato sat down on the bench alongside the old man, and Mackenzie sat down on the other side.
Kato frowned, as if it required some thought to translate exactly. “Well, he says a short while ago the Communists came to the village with a great voice on a truck. I suppose he means the loudspeaker on a sound wagon. Everybody in the village had to come to listen. The Communists said that the Americans were invading the land, and would kill them all. So all the men between sixteen and forty had to enlist. Most of them did enlist, he said, but some didn’t believe this loudspeaker, and ran away. None of them came back, and so there was a very small crop.”
“A short while ago?” said Mackenzie. “How short?”
Kato asked a question and the old man replied. “Last summer,” said Kato.
“What happened to everybody else?” asked Mackenzie.
“Well, apparently North Korean units, and later Chinese units, came through the village, and most of the young women disappeared. Then there came what the old man called ‘the day of hell.’ Seems that the Chinese when they used this road would stop in the village during the daylight hours and hide their tanks, but one day a lot of planes came over and blew this place apart and killed a lot of people.”
“Not all of them?” Mackenzie said.
“Oh, no, sir. Not all of them. But those who were left alive were afraid to stay, for fear the planes would come back. So the older men had a meeting, and it was decided that the village should move. The older men, and the older women, and the children who were left, they moved to another place. The old man said he didn’t move because he could not take his books, and his books are all he has left. Besides, he is ready to die. He is old and tired and hungry and sick.”
“Where did they move to?” Mackenzie asked.
Kato asked the old man, and there were a good many Japanese monosyllables between them, and then Kato turned to the captain and said: “He won’t tell.”
“Why not?”
Kato hesitated, and then he said, “Captain, he’s afraid we might go out and find them and kill them.”
“You’re fooling!”
“No, sir, I’m not fooling. He thinks the Americans want to kill the Asiatics. He honestly does.”
It was warm in this house, and Mackenzie took off his gloves and rubbed his face with his fingers and discovered that he had grown a considerable beard. He put two cigarettes in his mouth, and lit them, and handed one to Kato. Then he thought of the old man, and offered him a cigarette, but the old man refused. “Where in hell did he get that idea?” Mackenzie said.