Free The Marines of Autumn: A Novel of the Korean War by James Brady Page A

about over is what they’re saying. And I keep saying, then why are we pouring this division and a hell of a lot more into a two-bit port like this one?”
    “I dunno. They don’t consult me.”
    “Say, weren’t you some sort of China watcher? Born there or something?”
    “Born and raised, Bob.” He let it go at that, sure of Bjornsen as he wasn’t of Miss Higgins but figuring the less said the better. He’d always had his taciturn side; Elizabeth’s death made silence a refuge within which he did not make a fool of himself, blubbering sadness and loss.
    Bjornsen had a rifle company in Murray’s regiment.
    “Good man. And at my age I sure don’t need Chesty Puller running me about, thank you ma’am.”
    Bjornsen was thirty-three, six-foot-four, blond, resembling the actor Sterling Hayden, and built like a redwood tree. Yet he didn’t want any part of Chesty Puller.
    “How’s the company?” Verity asked, glad to be talking about Bjornsen’s work and not his own.
    “Good. Almost all regulars. I took over toward the end of the Pusan fighting when they lost their captain. Tough boys. We’ll do OK up north.”
    Bob Bjornsen was what they called a mustang, an enlisted man who’d become an officer who hadn’t gone to college. There was always a residual snobbery. But not with Verity, who remembered Bjornsen as a platoon leader on Okinawa five years before.
    “Well, I’ve got to see to the company, Tom.”
    “Sure.”
    “We’ll get together later. I guess we’re all going north together.”
    “I guess so, Bob.”
    “I wonder if we are going to fight the Chinese, Tom.”
    “Guess that depends on them,” Verity said, shaking Bjornsen’s hand and sending him on his way.
    In the morning Verity was to see General Smith, and he supposed then he’d find out. That was, if MacArthur wasn’t keeping it to himself and had briefed Smith.
     
    MacArthur.
    Even among the Marines who claimed to despise, and certainly among army officers who both revered and feared, the General, they were obsessed by him.
    “You ever met him, Verity?”
    “Never even saw him. Not in the War, not out here.”
    “Too bad; he’s something to see.”
    “Oh, where did you get to know him?”
    “Never laid eyes on the man. But I feel like I know him. He’s all anyone bloody well talks about. Like as if he were God. And Satan at the same time. Some people claim he’s a nutcase; others say he walks on water. The Japs worship the son of a bitch; hell, they liked Tj, too.”
     
    Tom Verity made sure he was down at the waterfront to see the Marines come ashore from the troopships, reeking after ten days at sea.
    “I haven’t seen Marines in any number since ’46 in North China,” he told Tate. “I want to be there to see them.”
    He was not quite sure why. Maybe a bonding process, the need to reassure himself he belonged, that he was again a part of the glorious whole, even as a most reluctant warrior.
    The Marine reserve system worked. Oh, there were inequities, sure. But it was admirably pragmatic, calling up the men it needed to feed the war.
    What bothered Verity was a schizoid aspect to being a reserve. Was he at bottom an academician who taught college boys? Or was he again a professional soldier, the trained killer he had been for nearly four years of his life?
    Do we really shed civilization quite that easily? You put the uniform back on and you slip automatically into the skin of a man who kills for a living?
    What an odd thing.
    Izzo was off scrounging with the jeep, and so Verity walked down through the town toward the piers and quays and the handful of small coasters and fishing boats and lighters. There were plenty of Koreans about, but they were still shy of Americans and scuttled away.
Well, we’re in bandit country
, Verity thought. He wore the old .38 in its holster on his hip, hung from the web belt, the leather thongs dangling loose and not secured around his thigh the way he used to wear it in the War and