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

Army. MacArthur’s top intelligence guy is Willoughby. He hates Marines. Don’t know why, but he does. Some sour experience from the War probably. So we’re not confident the First Marine Division is getting the dope it needs. We want our own man.”
    “I’m not intelligence, Colonel. I’ve had a rifle platoon, a rifle company. Never even worked as a battalion-2.” A battalion-2 was a low-level intelligence officer.
    “Verity, you speak Chinese.”
Jesus
, the colonel thought,
we’re beginning to go round in circles.
    “There are others who do. I could supply you a few. . . .”
    The colonel tried one more approach.
    “Captain, now that we’ve crossed the Thirty-eighth Parallel there’s nothing between us and China but a dozen or so badly hurt North Korean divisions. If the politicians don’t put a hold order on him, MacArthur will be sprinting north. You know how he is; you know about the ego. And he’ll be doing what he did at Inchon. He’ll have the Marines going for China. Around here we’re edgy. We don’t want fifteen thousand Marines out there like raw meat on the end of a stick with a million Chinamen waiting around just north of the Yalu.”
    Verity said nothing but must have looked gloomy.
    “That’s the job, Verity. Find out if the Chinese are coming in, find out if the Chinese are going to fight, and then come home and tell us.”
     
    “Hello,” she had said, “I’m Elizabeth Jeffs. You’re not a professor or anything important, are you?”
    This was November of Verity’s year in the master’s program at Harvard, a football Saturday, with all variety of cocktail parties and mixers and dinners in and about Cambridge, and here comes this tall girl on someone else’s arm to an apartment Verity shared with three other graduate students in one of the narrow streets between Harvard Square and the river.
    “No, nothing as grand as that. A graduate student. And you?”
    “Oh, I’m a child. A freshman at Wellesley up quite past my bedtime.”
    “It’s only six.”
    “Is it?” she said. “Then I can stay awhile.”
    Harvard lost that afternoon, but gallantly, as Harvard customarily did, and people had wandered back across the river from Soldier Field to console themselves or celebrate. (There were, after all, men who’d done their undergraduate work at Yale and elsewhere and had other loyalties.) Verity was drinking a beer, and when he asked this girl what she wanted she said, “A martini, please, straight up with an olive.”
    She had long straight brown hair and a broad, placid, very beautiful face, and she certainly was tall, maybe five-nine or -ten, and with swimmer’s shoulders. When people told her she was beautiful she tossed her hair as if to say, “Yes, I know, but can’t you say anything clever?” and went on to dismiss beauty: “It’s the accident of birth. Mixed blood. My mother was a Dutch Presbyterian and a nurse, and my father’s a Jew who muscles people in Wall Street. The genes work out perfectly.”
    Verity asked her out for dinner, but she wouldn’t go. “Not fair to the man who brought me,” she said. “He’s besotted with passion, as any fool can plainly see.” (The man in question was across the room vigorously debating Harvard’s offensive strategies with two other men.)
    “Then tomorrow. Lunch.”
    “Yes,” she said, “I’d like that.”
    The brattiness was a pose, a defense mechanism. At that age it usually is. She was seventeen and Verity twenty-six. He was going on to become a teacher; she was bored with college already. Hisfamily had money; hers had a lot. Jailbait was his nickname for her; she liked it. They saw each other almost every weekend through that winter and into the spring. This was 1947 and it took that long for them to sleep together.
    “My gosh!” Elizabeth said. “That was terrific. Let’s do
that
again.”
    They married in May, spent three days in New York at the Plaza listening to Peggy Lee sing “Bye-bye,