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

wet laundry. It is a smell I remember as a boy in China, and I find it pleasant.”
    “Madame, is Daddy in France now?” the child asked.
    “Non
, Kate, in France there are lovely smells of flowers and wine and the sea. Mr. Verity is in Asia, in a place called Korea.”
    “Oh.”
    Later, in such letters, Verity would not write as nostalgically of the snow.
     
    At Bob Hope’s USO show for the troops at Wonsan, Gunny Tate sat well back in the audience of mostly GIs, trying to be inconspicuous, enjoying Marilyn Maxwell, leggy and blond, and Mr. Hope’s anti-Marine wit and double entendres. There were some ROKs in the audience as well, officers, who did not seem to understand just who Bob Hope was and why everyone laughed so heartily. Various celebrities in the audience were introduced and stood in acknowledgment, one of them Marguerite Higgins.
    “She was banging some hotshot army general down at Pusan,” Izzo remarked the next day.
    “There are no hotshot army generals,” Tate said rather stiffly. “Nearest thing they had to a hotshot was General Dean, and he was so dumb he got himself captured.”
    “Well, it was a colonel, maybe, she was banging.”
    “You don’t know, Izzo, and I don’t want to hear general officers or colonels being accused of consorting. Even if they are army.”
    “It’s just what I heard, Gunny. No offense. Just what I read somewhere in the newspapers.”
    There were no newspapers. Izzo didn’t really need any. He was one of those people to whom gossip and rumor gravitated like iron filings to a magnet.
    “Our Walter Winchell,” Verity said.
    “Why, thanks, Captain,” Izzo said, pleased. He knew Winchell was a famous columnist and broadcaster.
    “Think nothing of of it,” Verity said.
    That evening there was a reception in what passed for an officers’ mess and he met both Hope and Miss Higgins. By now there were more Marines, liaison officers off the first ships, landed early to prepare the way for the entire division. Hope was less comic in person than he was in movies or on the radio, rather elegant in a well-cut double-breasted gray business suit. He’d flown in with Miss Maxwell and a small troupe at some risk and seemed ready to be away, having done his show. But he chatted easily with the officers, signed a few autographs, promised to make the odd phone call to wife and family when he got back to the States.
    “You look very much at ease with the troops,” someone remarked.
    “I am,” Hope said. “I’ve been doing this since 1941. March Field, California. I did a radio show for Pepsodent and one night we went down there to do the show for a bunch of kids just drafted. The war wasn’t on yet and they were just kids and homesick and they laughed and cheered and stamped their feet and whistled and applauded and the producer said, ‘Hey, just wait a minute. We got something here. You’re going back there every week.’ So it wasn’t anything patriotic at the start, just a comedy hour in search of laughs.”
    Most of the younger officers clustered around Miss Maxwell. She’d been the blonde in a big movie the year before,
Champion
, with Kirk Douglas, and they all wanted to meet her. Verity found himself talking to Marguerite Higgins. By the time she got to him the evening was nearly wasted.
    “Hello. I’m Maggie Higgins.” She wore a light, fresh perfume.
    “Verity. Thomas Verity.”
    “And where are you from and what do you do, Captain?”
    She knew rank.
    “Oh, a place out in the country. We take a newspaper, but I regret to say it isn’t yours.”
    “You win some, you lose some. And are you on General Smith’s staff?”
    “No, I’m in communications. I work with radios.”
    It was only a half-lie. He wasn’t going to get her started asking why a Chinese expert was up here in North Korea with the Marine division.
    She asked, ready to move on to more promising material, “And what are the big radio programs this season in Korea?”
    “Oh, lot of