Read Online The Marines of Autumn: A Novel of the Korean War by James Brady - Free Book Online Page A

Smith?”
    “Soon as he gets here, Verity. Headquarters Marine Corps seems to think you’re something special.”
    “Yessir.”
     
    Verity and Tate requisitioned an abandoned Wonsan house that was almost clean.
    “I looked pretty close, Captain. Don’t want us to get lousy.”
    They’d not yet decided whether to keep Izzo as a driver.
    “I might get us a better,” Tate said, “young man with a bit less personality. When the division disembarks, this town will be a-crawl with promising young men eager to establish reputations and make a career for themselves. Then again, Izzo reads a good map, drives a good car.”
    Verity took his time deciding about enlisted men, even gunnery sergeants, but he was starting to enjoy Tate. He knew his work and did it and had a sense of humor left over, a muted realization life was absurd and its comedy ought to be enjoyed. And he didn’t press Verity for family anecdotes or intimate details, the things old-timers often did to ingratiate themselves with an officer. Verity saw early on through that brand of bullshit. Izzo had tried it on Verity and been shot down.
    It was taking the First Marine Division so long to get into Wonsan harbor (some thirty thousand mines had been laid, it was said), the town was crawling with journalists who’d flown in.
    “There’s Maggie Higgins of the
Herald Tribune,”
an impressed lieutenant told Verity. “She’s pretty cute, for an older woman.”
    Miss Higgins was in her thirties.
    On October 24 Bob Hope and Miss Maxwell put on their show. The Marines didn’t land until the next day and were the butt of jokes. Verity had been invited, but he sent Tate instead.
    “You go, Gunny. May be the last laugh you’ll have for a time.”
    “Yessir, I will go,” Tate said, “and thank you.”
    He didn’t know much about Verity as yet, but he knew the man wasn’t a big laugher. And, like most of us, had secrets and held them close.

     
    Gunnery Sergeant Tate had never married. Nor did he think he ever would. And unlike most senior NCOs he knew in the Corps, many of them assertive and cocky men, he was awkward around women. Not so with other men. And he was very much at ease in all other ways, including with superior officers. So much so that he’d put in three years as a drill instructor at San Diego, at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot, where DIs fashioned raw boots into proper Marines and where only the finest sergeants and exceptional corporals drew duty as DIs.
    Women, well, they were another quantity entirely. And although he rarely spoke of it, he’d pondered long and hard and thought he understood why. Japanese prison camp in China during the War.
    When they are sent to prison and spend almost four of their formative years (Tate went behind the barbed wire at twenty) entirely among men and are beaten and humiliated and shamed, helpless to strike back, even the strongest men are unmanned. Even now, more than six years after his release and in the midst of a new and different war, Tate carried the weight of a guilt unearned, but no less real.
    He handled men because he understood them. But he was nervous and fearful with women, sure they saw through his crisp, efficient exterior and to the shame and guilt inside.
    Women were cleverer than men; he couldn’t kid them about his failures and his past.
    And so he maintained a prudent distance and when friends proposed a social occasion where he might meet this splendid young woman or that, he invented reasons not to do so and went to a ball game or a movie or tugged from his footlocker a volume of
Lee’s Lieutenants
or an old and well-thumbed life of Cromwell.
     
    “This is a small, odd country,” Verity wrote Kate in a letter Madame would read to her, “with big hills that already have some snow up high. Do you remember the snow on P Street last yearwhen I pulled you on the sled? The people live in small, funny houses and everything smells like the Chinese food we buy on Wisconsin Avenue. Or