The Marines of Autumn: A Novel of the Korean War Read Free

bars. Well, he supposed there were still PXs that sold such things.
    He’d not looked into mirrors while trying on the uniform jacket, and he wondered if he’d looked as strange as he felt.
     
    Like Henry Luce, another old China hand, when he got back to the States Tom Verity was enrolled first in Hotchkiss, then at Yale. At Hotchkiss, like Luce, he’d immediately been nicknamed Chink, in consequence of which he never used the word as slang, even later and among Marines. He was a senior at New Haven, majoring in Chinese history, when Pearl Harbor was attacked, and with several classmates he went downtown and enlisted in the Marine Corps.
    His father, and other prudent people, said they should have waited, that as Yale graduates the following spring they’d be assured of commissions. Instead, Verity was run through boot camp at Parris Island and in August, as a Marine private, found himself fighting the Japanese on Guadalcanal.
    Guadalcanal was the worst, Marines said then and some still say. Steamy tropical swamp and jungle surrounded rugged, chill mountains. Some of the natives were cannibals. The Japanese fought with a medieval savagery. One night five Allied cruisers, American and Australian, were sunk by the Japanese in a single disastrous battle.
    “There weren’t many sailors that got to the beaches,” the Marines reported. “The sharks ate them.”
    When the ’Canal fell Verity was a private first class and ticketed for an officer candidate program back in the States. He wrote hisfather in some glee: “So, you see, a Yale education, even short of a degree, has worth after all.”
    He came out of Guadalcanal with malaria and the usual skin infections from the heat and the swamp and sailed through OCS. In 1944 he was in Australia, and the following year, as a second lieutenant, he commanded a rifle platoon on Okinawa, winning a Silver Star and promotion to first lieutenant. When the war ended they shipped the First Division to North China, to Tientsin. Verity now had a company and with his fluency in the language was pressed into service negotiating with the local warlords and the Eighth Chinese Route Army, Mao Tse-tung’s people. He was twenty-five years old and for the first time back home.
    “You know, it even smells the same,” he told fellow officers.
    “Yeah, Tom, it stinks.”
    “No,” he said happily, “no, it doesn’t.”
    They didn’t understand this was really home; this was what he knew. And loved. Even the familiar, sweetly reeking smell of it.
    After you have been in hard fighting, garrison duty is both welcome and boring, and Tom was glad to be seconded into liaison work. The warlords were easy to handle: A combination bribe and threat was usually sufficient. The Communists, like religious zealots, were tougher. Stubborn, repetitive, endlessly patient, anything to win an argument, achieve an end. Other American officers, who didn’t know the Orient, lost their temper and pounded tables and cursed. Verity sipped tea and called everyone Comrade and was deferential to the older Chinese officers. He was relatively successful in getting what the Marines wanted, whether it was a rail line opened or a straggler returned or swapping canned goods for fresh turnips.
    “Tom, you understand these people and I don’t,” a fellow officer might say. “You like this country and I hate it. You don’t even seem anxious to get home, and I sure as hell am.”
    Verity just grinned. He’d had some close calls on Guadalcanal and more on Okinawa and understood how fortunate he was to be alive and unhurt, and it would take more than China to depress him. And, as he sometimes said, “Guys, I grew up here. I
am
home.”
    In the spring of ’46 he was released and returned to the States the other way round, through southern Asia (carefully skirting a suddenly surly Soviet Union) and Europe, sailing to New York on the recently refurbished
Queen Mary
, in a first-class stateroom, which was not how most GIs