The Captains Page 10

  His first impression of Korea was that it stank. Later that day he was to learn it stank because the Koreans fertilized their rice paddies with human waste. His second impression was that the U.S. Army in Korea was in shitty shape. There was an aura of desperation, of frenzy, even of fear. They were getting the shit kicked out of them, and it showed.

  He hitchhiked a ride in a three-quarter-ton ammo carrier into Pusan itself, and asked directions of an MP.

  “They’re somewhere up near the Naktong, I think,” the MP told him. “Everything’s all fucked up.”

  The MP flagged down an MP jeep for him, and they carried him to the outskirts of town to the main supply route, a two-lane, once-macadamized road now reduced to little more than a rough dirt trail by the crush of tanks and trucks and artillery passing over it.

  Lowell tried vainly to catch a ride with his extended thumb and finally stopped another three-quarter-ton ammo carrier by stepping into the middle of the road and holding up his hand like a traffic cop.

  Two hours later, he was at the command post of the 73rd Medium Tank Battalion (Separate), on the south bank of the Naktong River.

  The command post was new; it wasn’t even completed. Soldiers, naked to the waist, sweat-soaked, were filling sandbags with the sandy clay soil and stacking them against a timber-framed structure built into the side of a low hill.

  The unfinished structure, however, was already in use. When Lowell walked inside, a very large sergeant was marking on a celluloid-covered situation map with a grease pencil; a GI manned a field switchboard; and, most importantly, a wiry lieutenant colonel and a plump major were crowded together at a tiny, folding GI field desk, examining what Lowell thought was probably an inventory of some kind.

  He walked up to the desk and waited until they became aware of his presence. The major spoke first.

  “Something for you, Captain?”

  Lowell came to attention, saluted, and said: “Captain C. W. Lowell reporting for duty, sir.”

  The wiry little lieutenant colonel returned the salute. “Got your orders, Captain?” he asked, and Lowell handed them over. The lieutenant colonel read them carefully, and then passed them to the major.

  “You have a personal copy, Captain?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Let’s take a little walk,” the lieutenant colonel said. He stood up and put his hand out. “I’m Paul Jiggs,” he said, dryly. “Commander of this miraculous fighting force.”

  Lowell shook his hand.

  “Major Charley Ellis,” Jiggs continued. “S-3. We don’t have an exec at the moment. He got blown away before he got here.” Lowell was aware that Colonel Jiggs was watching his face for his reaction to that somewhat cold-blooded announcement. He tried to keep his face expressionless. Major Ellis offered his hand and gave Lowell a smile.

  “We won’t be long, Charley,” Colonel Jiggs said. “Do what you think has to be done.”

  “Yes, sir,” Major Ellis said. Colonel Jiggs put his hand on Lowell’s arm and led him out of the half-finished bunker, around it, and to the crest of the hill against which it was built.

  “That’s the Naktong,” he said, indicating the river. “If they get across that, it’ll be Dunkirk all over again, except that we’re not twenty miles from the White Cliffs of Dover. It will be a somewhat longer swim across the Sea of Japan.”

  “And are they going to get across?” Lowell asked.

  “Of course not,” Jiggs said, sarcastically. “If for no other reason than my magnificent fighting force is digging in to repel them. I say magnificent, Captain, because the 73rd Medium Tank Battalion, Separate, didn’t even exist a month ago. It sprang miraculously from the ground to do battle for God and country, manned with rejects, clerks, gentlemen from various Army of Occupation stockades, and equipped with junk from various abandoned ordance depots. Do you get the picture?”

  “Yes, sir, I think so,” Lowell said.

  “You will forgive me, Captain,” Colonel Jiggs said. “There is nothing personal in this. But I confess a certain disappointment in what I got in response to a desperate request for experienced company commanders. In my innocence I was hoping to get a battle-experienced company commander. And what I get is a National Guardsman, to judge by that Bloody Bucket patch on your sleeve. And—forgive me, Captain—a captain who doesn’t look either old enough to be a captain, or to have earned that CIB he’s wearing.”

  Lowell flushed but said nothing.

  “And who is, moreover, to judge by his orders, either someone with friends in high places, or a fuck-up, and most probably both.” When Lowell didn’t reply, Colonel Jiggs went on. “I solicit your comments, Captain. And please don’t waste my time.”

  “What would you like me to say, Colonel?” Lowell asked.

  “For example, tell me how old you are?”

  “Twenty-three, sir.”

  “How the fuck did you get to be a captain at twenty-three?”

  “The truth of the matter, Colonel, is that I made a deal with a regimental commander in the Pennsylvania National Guard. If he would make me a captain, I would get his M46s running. He did, Colonel, and I did.”

  “That figures,” Colonel Jiggs said. “The goddamned National Guard has M46s, and here I sit with a motley collection of M4s!” Then he looked at Lowell. “How did you get to be an expert with the M46s?”

  “I was assigned to the Armor Board. I was project officer on the 90 mm tube project.”

  “How the hell did you get an assignment like that?”

  Lowell didn’t reply.

  “Not important. I’ll take your word about that. I have been promised, in the oh, so indefinite future, that we’ll be given M46s. If we’re both alive when that happens, we’ll be able to see if you’re an expert or not. Tell me about that CIB you’re wearing. Did you get it in War II? That would mean, if you’re twenty-three, that you are a very young veteran indeed of War II.”

  “I came in the army in 1946,” Lowell said. “I got the CIB in Greece.”

  “Doing what?”

  “I was an advisor to the 27th Mountain Division.”

  “They didn’t have tanks in Greece,” Jiggs said.

  “I didn’t say they did, Colonel,” Lowell said.

  “You want to explain those fascinating orders of yours? How come the Assistant Chief of Staff, Personnel, took a personal interest in your assignment?”

  “No, sir, I do not,” Lowell said.

  “Are you influential, Lowell, or a fuck-up?”

  “Both, sir,” Lowell said.

  For the first time, Colonel Jiggs smiled at him.

  “Do you think you’re qualified to command a tank company, Lowell?”

  “No, sir,” Lowell said. “I can probably command a platoon all right, but a company would be more than I can handle.”

  “Is that so? Are you modest, Captain Lowell?”

  “A realist, sir.”

  “You’re a captain. Platoon leaders are lieutenants.”

  “You can have the railroad tracks,” Lowell said. “I think I can hold my own with a platoon, if you’ll give me one.”

  “It doesn’t work that way, Lowell,” Colonel Jiggs said. “It doesn’t work that way at all. Captain, you now command Baker Company. Get your ass up there, look around, get settled, and I’ll be up either later today, or in the morning, and we’ll have another little chat.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “That’s all, ‘Yes, sir’?” Jiggs asked.

  “Yes, sir,” Lowell said.

  (Four)

  Company “B” 73rd Medium Tank Battalion (Separate)

  The Naktong River, South Korea

  24 July 1950

  The jeep driver who came from Baker Company to pick him up was a staff sergeant who needed a shave and whose fatigues were streaked under the arms, between the legs, and down the back with grayish-white. At least they were taking salt tablets, Craig Lowell thought; at least they had salt tablets to take.

  He was aware that th
e staff sergeant was examining him with contempt and resignation. The staff sergeant had seen the Bloody Bucket patch of the 28th Infantry Division, Pennsylvania National Guard, sewn to Lowell’s now sweat-soaked fatigue shirt.

  “You taking over, Captain?” the staff sergeant asked. When enlisted men dislike officers, they address them by their rank and avoid the use of the term “sir.”

  “Yes, I am,” Lowell said.

  “Just get in from the States?”

  “‘Just get in from the States, sir?’” Lowell corrected him. “Yes, Sergeant, I just got in from the States, and I’m a chickenshit candy-assed National Guardsman who will bust your ass down to private the next time you fail to call me ‘sir.’ ‘Captain’ will not do.”

  “Shit,” the sergeant said, and Lowell turned, surprised, to glower furiously at him. The sergeant was smiling at him. “You a mind reader, Captain? Sir.”

  “You can bet your regular army ass I am,” Lowell said.

  “Most of the replacement officers show up in brand-new fatigues,” the sergeant asked. “Did they run out of them over there, too?”

  “I don’t know. They didn’t issue me any.”

  The sergeant nodded his understanding. He had not called Lowell “sir,” but there was no longer surly disrespect in his tone of voice. Lowell let the failure to call him “sir” pass.

  “The company’s short of clothing?” Lowell asked, as the jeep bounced up a narrow, rocky road.

  “We’re short of everything,” the sergeant said, and this time he remembered and added, “sir.”

  “What do you do?” Lowell asked.

  “I lost my tank,” the sergeant said. “Sir.”

  “What happened?”

  “Sonofabitch collapsed of old age,” the sergeant said, “Engines won’t take this fucking heat. Nothing takes this fucking heat long.”

  “What’s the company doing?” Lowell asked.

  “Sitting on this side of the Naktong, waiting for the gooks to cross it.”

  “Using the tanks as pillboxes?” Lowell asked.

  “That’s about it, sir,” the sergeant said, seemingly surprised that a replacement officer would know enough to ask that kind of a question.

  “Have the tracks been exercised? Will they run if they have to?” Lowell asked.

  “Some of them,” the sergeant replied. “And some of them won’t.”

  “Maintenance?”

  “Shit!” The disgust and resignation was infinite in the single word.

  They came to the command post. As at the battalion CP, a sandbag bunker was being built against the side of a hill. There was a field kitchen set up under a canvas awning, called a “fly,” and behind it was a grove of tall, thin poplars. There was an enormous mound of fired 75 mm shell casings and beside it an equally large mound of the cardboard tubes and wooden cases in which the shells had been shipped from the ammo dumps. There were three eiqht-man squad tents set up on the bare, baked ground; and sandbag-augmented foxholes—one-man, three-man, and one large enough for eight people—had been dug around them. They were intended to provide protection during mortar and artillery barrages, Lowell realized; but they were dug in the wrong places.

  The realization that he had spotted something wrong pleased him. It was a suggestion, however faint, that he knew more than whoever was presently in charge here.

  “The lieutenant’s in there, probably, Captain,” the staff sergeant said. Lowell looked at him. When Lowell’s eyebrows raised in question, the staff sergeant added the required “sir.”

  “You’re learning,” Lowell said, smiling at him. “You’re learning.”

  The staff sergeant had indicated the sandbag bunker, but Lowell didn’t go there when he got out of the jeep. He walked first to the eight-man tents and stuck his head inside them, one at a time. In each were sleeping men, stretched out on folding canvas cots. There was a strong smell of sweat in each tent.

  Lowell then walked up the gentle slope of the hill against which the CP bunker was being built.

  At the military crest (just below the actual crest) of the hill, eight M4A3 Sherman tanks had been emplaced so that in their present position, or by moving them no more than ten feet, their tubes could be brought to bear down the far side of the hill, which sloped gently down to the banks of the Naktong River. Four hundred yards to his left, Lowell saw a bridge, both rail and road, that had been dropped into the river.

  He walked to the nearest M4A3. Its crew members, sweat-soaked, were either sitting or lying on the ground in its shade. Two of them were shirtless, and all of them were dirty, tired, and unshaved. None of them moved when he walked up. He looked down at one crewman until he reluctantly got to his feet.

  “What shape is this thing in?” Lowell asked.

  “It overheats,” the crewman said. Lowell looked at him curiously as if he didn’t understand.

  “It overheats,” the crewman repeated. “Gets hot. Fucking filters are all fucked up, and so’s the radiator.”

  “From now on, you say ‘sir’ to me, soldier,” Lowell said.

  “It overheats, sir,” the soldier said. “You some kind of inspector or something? Sir?”

  “I’m your commanding officer,” Lowell said. “What do you plan to do about cleaning the filters? About flushing the radiator?” Lowell went to the tank and stood on the bogies and ran his hand into the slots in the armor over the engine. “And about getting the mud and crud out of there?”

  “You work on it in this heat, sir,” the crewman said, impatiently explaining something quite obvious to a moron, “you either burn your hand, or you get heat stroke.”

  “Have you checked the water in the batteries today?” Lowell asked.

  “Yes, sir,” the crewman said.

  “Then it could be reasonably expected to start?” Lowell asked.

  “It would probably start, yes, sir.”

  Lowell quickly climbed onto the side of the tank and then dropped into the hatch over the driver’s seat. The temperature inside the tank, which had been exposed to the sun all day, was probably 120 degrees, possibly even higher. His body was instantly soaked in sweat. The batteries sounded weak when he started the engine. By the time he had it running and the engine smoothed down enough to move it, the lever—exposed through the open hatch to the direct rays of the sun—was too hot to hold. He squirmed around and got a handkerchief from his pocket and used it to keep his hand from being burned.

  Then he raced the engine to signal he was going to move, locked the left track, and threw the right into reverse. The M4A3 backed out of its position. When he had it pointing in the right direction, he drove it quickly down the hill, past the field kitchen, and ten yards into the grove of poplars, crushing them under the tank. Then he got out of the tank.

  By the time he walked back to the field kitchen, his presence had been made known to the acting company commander, who was waiting for him. The acting company commander was a thin first lieutenant in salt-streaked fatigues. He needed a shave.

  “Are you Captain Lowell, sir?” he asked.

  “Get yourself a shave and a clean uniform, Lieutenant,” Lowell said, cutting him off in midsentence. “And then report to me properly.”

  He turned his back on him and looked up the hill to the revetment from which he had driven the M4A3. The crew was standing up now, looking down to see what the hell was going on. Lowell pointed at them, finger and arm extended, and then made a fist with his hand and pumped it up and down over his head, the signal to “form on me.” Hesitantly at first, the crew of the M4A3 started down the hill, eventually breaking into a little trot.

  “Yes, sir?” the man he had spoken to on the hill said.

  “You’re the tank commander?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Do you know in which of those squad tents the mess sergeant is asleep?”

  “Yes, sir,” the tank commander said, baffled by the question.

  “Ask the mess sergeant to report to me, please, Sergeant,” Lowell s
aid. “And then take those tents down, slit the seams, and rig a sunshade where I parked your tank. Then flush the radiator and the filters. When you’ve done that, you and your crew can get some sleep.”

  “Rip the tent up?” the tank commander asked, incredulously.

  “A fightable tank is liable to keep us all alive, Sergeant,” Lowell said. “That makes more sense to me than providing a place for the mess sergeant to sleep.”

  “Yes, sir,” the tank commander said, more than a little pleased that this new company commander was going to throw the mess sergeant’s ass out of bed.

  The mess sergeant, a fat, heavily sweating, nearly bald man in his middle thirties, his fatigue shirt unbuttoned, his feet jammed into laceless combat boots, approached Lowell a few minutes later, his bluster fading as Lowell met his eyes.

  “The captain’s got to understand that other people, I mean not just the cooks and KPs, use them tents.”

  “Not anymore they don’t,” Lowell said. “What have you got cool to drink, Sergeant?”

  “We ain’t got any ice or anything like that, Captain,” the mess sergeant said, “if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “Get me what you have, please,” Lowell said, coldly.

  The mess sergeant waddled to a Lister bag and returned in a moment with a canteen-cup full of water. Lowell took it, tasted the water, and spit it out.

  “That’s the purifier, Captain,” the mess sergeant said. “Can’t do nothing about that.”

  “You can purify drinking water by boiling it,” Lowell said. “Water purification pills are intended for use only when there’s no other means available. Why is it that I don’t see water boiling?”

  There was no reply that could be made to that. The mess sergeant flashed Lowell a wounded look.

  “You do know how to make GI strawberry soda, don’t you?” Lowell asked.

  “Sir?” the mess sergeant replied, baffled by the question.

  “You heat cans of strawberry preserves and gradually add water which has been boiled,” Lowell said. “It’s not much, but it’s a hell of a lot better than that chemically flavored horse piss you’re handing out. Put someone to work on that right away.”

  “Sir, I don’t know if we got any strawberry preserves,” the mess sergeant said.