The Captains Read online

  That fucking M1 he carried was one more proof. The .30 caliber M1 Garand was the standard weapon of the infantry soldier. It was looked down upon by tankers, both as a tool of the infantry dogfaces and as a heavy unwieldy weapon which kicked like a fucking mule. Very few noncoms, and even fewer officers, even in the infantry, carried one.

  They were practically fucking unknown in a tank company, for Christ’s sake, except for such shits and feather merchants as the cooks and the truck drivers. The basic weapon for tank crews was the .45 caliber M3 submachine gun, called the grease gun because that’s what it looked like. Tank crewmen were also armed with the Colt Model 1911 A1 automatic pistol. If they could get one, the tankers, officers, noncoms, and troopers armed themselves with the Thompson .45 caliber ACP submachine gun, “the Thompson” or “tommy gun,” which was sometimes available for purchase at a going rate of $100; or with a carbine, either the M1, which was a semiautomatic shoulder weapon firing what was really a pretty hot pistol cartridge, or the M2 carbine, which had a lever permitting full automatic fire. Both versions were generally equipped with two curved, 30-round “Banana” clips, taped together upside down, so that as soon as you blew away thirty rounds, all you had to do was pull the empty magazine out, turn it over, and slam the other, loaded magazine back in.

  Comes the Duke, comes Deadeye, right out of the National Fucking Guard, and just about as soon as he had the mess sergeant’s fucking tent torn down to make sunshades for the tanks, he takes a Garand away from one of the assholes in the kitchen, and gives him his Grease Gun for it.

  And then he zeroes the sonofabitch, just like he was on some fucking basic training rifle range back in the land of the big PX, getting down on his goddamned belly, doing everything but wrapping the strap around his arm, and zeroes the sonfabitch, shooting holes in a fired 75 mm casing he set up by pacing off two hundred yards right behind the line.

  There’s the company, tearing down tents, and ripping them up, and filling in latrines and foxholes that had been dug someplace he don’t like, and here’s the mess sergeant boiling a thirty-gallon pot of water and stirring strawberry preserves around in it, and here’s practically everybody else working on the tanks (and the fucking gooks are going to hit us for sure, just as soon as it gets dark) and here’s the Duke on his belly like some basic trainee, going through that up-two-clicks, right-three-clicks, zero bullshit with a fucking Garand.

  For reasons of their own, the gooks didn’t hit us that first night the Duke took over. They hit us the next night.

  The way it worked, back then, was that they would wait until it got dark, or as dark as it was going to get, and then they’d throw mortars at us, and some artillery—not much, they weren’t in much better shape, supply-wise, than we were, and I guess maybe they knew they were pissing in the wind, since we had the bunkers and the tanks.

  So they’d lay in a barrage, and then they’d lift it, and then they’d start down to the edge of the river from their positions on the other side. Some of them had boats and floats, but you could practically walk across the Naktong River where we were.

  Once they lifted the mortars, they wouldn’t shoot their small arms until they were across the river. I guess they knew it wouldn’t do them any good. And we didn’t shoot back, either, until they were across the river and actually starting to come up the slope to our positions.

  We were in pretty shitty shape as far as ammo went. We needed what they called “canister,” which is sort of a super shotgun shell. Sonofabitch is filled with ball bearings; and when it goes off, it really blows troops away. Naturally, since we needed canister, what the bastards sent us was HEAT, which means High Explosive, Anti-Tank, and which is great if you’re shooting at tanks but is next to fucking worthless if you’re shooting at people. I mean, using HEAT against troops is like shooting fucking flies with a .45, you get my meaning?

  So what we did was call in artillery, and sometimes we got it and sometimes we didn’t, so what we usually wound up doing was firing the light weapons on the tanks. Thirty and fifty caliber machine guns. Now, the machine guns on a tank are air-cooled, which means that when you start firing one of them steady, the barrel heats up—I’ve seen them glow like coals—and pretty soon you have to change the sonofabitch, which is a pain in the ass when it’s cold, not to mention glowing red goddamned hot, and when people are coming up the hill shooting at you.

  So the way it worked was we waited until they were across the river and then opened fire. If we got artillery, fine. And if we didn’t, we did pretty well just with the machine guns and with what canister rounds we did have.

  Like I said, the first night that the Old Man had the company, the gooks didn’t hit us. So we knew they would the second night.

  So right after dark, the Old Man shows up in the positions. He’s puffing on this big black cigar, he’s got this fucking Garand in his arms, with a couple of extra clips to the strap, and, so help me, Christ, he’s got a hand grenade in each pocket of his fatigue jacket. And he’s dragging Lieutenant Whatsisname? The little fucker who got blown away two, three days later. The one who had been acting CO, after Captain Dale got it, until the Duke showed up. Sully was his name. Thomas J. Sully.

  Anyway, the Duke’s got Sully with him, and Sully explains what usually happens, and the Duke listens, and asks a couple of questions, and then Sully says that maybe it would be a good idea if they went back to the company CP, so they could be there when the gooks start coming.

  The Duke looks at me—we were standing by my tank, you see—and he says, “The radios in that rusty tub work, Sergeant?” and I tell him. “Yes, sir, most of the time,” and he asks me can I come up with enough wire to run an extension between the commander’s cupola commo panel and the platoon bunker, and I tell him sure.

  “Do it,” he says, and then he tells Sully he thinks he’ll stick around up here, and if Sully wants to go back to the CP, he can. Sully thinks it over, decides the Duke is out of his fucking mind, and shags his ass off the hill.

  So then we sat and waited for the gooks. The Duke asks us about where we come from, and whether we’re married or not, the usual officer bullshit, and sure enough, thirty, forty minutes later, the gooks start throwing mortars at us, the way we knew they would.

  It lasted maybe five, ten minutes, and then it lifted. And when it lifted, no Duke. I figured he got smart and went down the hill. I had a BC scope, you know what I mean? They’re like binoculars and a periscope put together? You can see over the edge of someplace without exposing your head. It stands for Battery Commander’s scope, I think. Anyway, I had a BC scope set up in the bunker, and I was looking through it. It was full moon, or nearly, and I could see pretty good.

  Sure enough, down their hill they came, first their point men, and then two guys maybe ten feet behind him, and then four, five guys behind them. Making sort of a triangle, and heading toward us.

  The gook point man was a good three hundred, maybe three hundred fifty yards from us.

  And then I hear, right over my head, three shots. Bang Bang Bang. Thirty caliber, but too far apart to be a machine gun. I am just wondering what the fuck our new National Guard commander is up to when I notice that the gook point man and one of the two guys behind him is down.

  That sort of upsets the gooks, and they all fell down, and started shooting up the other side of the river, the bank, I mean, right across from them, where they figure we stuck an outpost. They blow the shit out of it with their small arms, and even call mortars in on it. Now I know we don’t have anybody down there, so it has to be the Duke. So I go outside, and there he is, sitting on top of the bunker, this time with the strap of the M1 around his arm, and wearing a shit-eating grin.

  “I think they see ghosts, Sergeant,” he said. “Better they battle ghosts than us, wouldn’t you say?”

  So I told him he was pretty good with the Garand, and he said, “‘Pretty good’? Sergeant, I’m magnificent!” You see what I mean, class?

  So what happened after th
at was that we picked one guy, the best shot, from each platoon, and made him a sniper, and the Duke actually came up later with real sniper’s rifles, ’03A4 Springfields, and MICs, which is an M1 with a cheek piece on the stock and a four power scope. And after that, let me tell you, the gooks didn’t walk across the Naktong like it was a fucking street. They still came, but by Christ, they came careful!

  Sgt. Jared Mansfield:

  The Old Man had been called to battalion, and they talked about what was going on, even though he was called to battalion at least once a day. The Old Man, for all practical purposes, was the battalion S-3 (Plans and Training Officer). The S-3 was an ineffective old fart who couldn’t find his ass with both hands. If he didn’t have the Old Man showing him how to pour piss out of a boot, the outfit would be as fucked up as that nigger division had been. But they talked about the Old Man being at battalion again because there was nothing else to talk about. They wondered if he would be able to steal some more beer, or if there would be mail.

  The Old Man returned from battalion at 1530. In his jeep were three bags of mail, six cases of beer, and one case of Coca-Cola. He carried one of the cases of beer into the CP himself, and the first sergeant and the clerk and the radio operator went out to collect the rest.

  The Old Man walked to where the executive officer was sleeping. It was a bed made from an air mattress suspended on communications wire woven between the tree trunks that also served as pillars to hold up the plank-and-sandbag roof of the bunker. He gently touched his arm.

  “The mail is here,” he said. The XO swung his feet off the bed, and got to his feet.

  “Send for runners for the mail,” the Old Man said. “And then we’ll have an officer’s call. Noncoms are invited, but I want at least a sergeant left in each platoon.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “There’s a little beer, and one lousy case of Coke,” the Old Man said.

  Runners from the platoons came quickly and stood impatiently as the company clerk went through the first-class mail pouch, breaking the mail down into platoons.

  The three platoon leaders and the chief warrant (who was supposed to be the administrative officer, but who had been a motor sergeant before taking the warrant exam and was now happily functioning as the motor officer) drifted into the command post as soon as they had determined if they had, or didn’t have, mail in the bag.

  “You, Tommy,” the Old Man said to the second platoon leader, “are a fucking disgrace to the officer corps.”

  “Yes, sir,” the second platoon leader replied, “I am. Does that mean, I hope, that the captain is thinking of sending me home in disgrace?”

  “Where the hell have you been, anyway? What have you been rolling in?”

  “We pulled the power package on Twenty-Two, sir. The transmission was losing fluid. When we pulled it, we found out why. The housing was cracked.”

  “All over you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Have you got it running?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Is everything else running?” the Old Man asked and looked at each officer in turn and finally at the chief warrant. The chief warrant reported that everything was running, and that he had managed to get three complete, in-the-crate, power packages and three complete, in-the-crate, sets of tracks.

  “Not individual tracks, Captain. Complete sets. Two complete tracks in a box. Christ only knows where they found them.”

  “I don’t suppose,” the Old Man said, innocently, “that they’d fit an M46?”

  “No, sir,” the warrant officer replied, and looked curious.

  “OK, then,” the Old Man said, “sometime in the next four days, put them on the tanks that need them most.”

  “I thought about that, sir,” the warrant officer said. “I thought I’d wait until we lose one. What the hell, there’s no sense in replacing a track until it goes.”

  “Make up your mind where you want to put them, but I want them put on the tanks that need them most, and as soon as you can get to it. What about the wheels?”

  “The jeeps are all running, sir, and in good shape. The both of them,” the warrant officer said. There were four jeeps in Company “B.” Two were authorized. Two had been “borrowed” when their drivers had left them momentarily unattended. The Old Man obviously knew about the two stolen jeeps, but said nothing about it.

  “We’re being relieved,” the Old Man announced.

  “Jesus, it’s about time,” one of the platoon leaders said.

  “As soon as it gets dark,” the Old Man went on, “a Korean captain and a platoon leader, and one platoon, will come up. They’ll be sneaked up. The idea is not to let the bad guys know we’ve been relieved by Koreans. They will be followed by another platoon tomorrow, and the third platoon the day after tomorrow. As soon as they have been checked out to my satisfaction, our platoons, one at a time, can come off the hill.”

  “What about the equipment, Captain?” the chief warrant officer asked.

  “We’ll turn our tanks over to them,” the Old Man said.

  “And go through the whole business of getting everything in fairly decent shape again? Why the hell can’t the slopes bring their own tanks, and let us keep ours?”

  “I made the same passionate speech to Colonel Jiggs,” the Old Man said. “He heard me out, and then he said, ‘OK, if you feel that strongly, you can keep your tanks, and I’ll give the M46s to the Koreans.’”

  “M46s? No shit!”

  “So I said, ‘Yes, sir, I know the stalwart men of Baker Company would much prefer their spotless and shining M4A3s to dirty new M46s.’”

  There was laughter, and then the lieutenant that the Old Man had jumped on spoke up.

  “What’s the catch, Captain?”

  “My orders are to insure that everybody is checked out in the M46, and to prepare for an attack,” the Old Man said.

  “Attack? Whose stupid idea is that? Walker’s?”

  The reference was to Lt. Gen. Walton “Bulldog” Walker, the Eighth Army commander, who shared a surname with a Company “B” cook.

  “It came to him when he was slicing Four Ways,” the Old Man said, referring to the field ration meat, which could be used in four ways.

  There was more easy laughter.

  “Goddamn, Captain, every other slant-eye in the world is out there. And what are we supposed to do for support? They even pulled the Third Marines out of here.”

  “I will bring your solemn assessment of the situation to the colonel’s attention,” the Old Man said. “But in the meantime, at least until he sees the error of his ways, I’m afraid we’re just going to have to go along with him.”

  There was laughter.

  “Tell the troops,” the Old Man said, “but make sure you also tell them I’m going to be the judge of whether or not the Koreans are capable of relieving us. That’s all.”

  (Two)

  They left the bunker. The Old Man made a levitating signal with his hand to the company clerk, who had sat down again behind the typewriter.

  “Yes, sir,” he said.

  “I would be profoundly grateful for a sheet of paper and an envelope,” the Old Man said.

  The executive officer gave him some with Officer’s Open Mess, Fort Shafter, Hawaii printed on it in golden ink. The Old Man rolled the paper into the typewriter, carefully X-ed out Fort Shafter, Hawaii, and typed in “Fortress Lowell, South Korea.

  Then he typed, very rapidly, as if he had been thinking for some time about what he was going to say.

  My Darling Ilse,

  I have a few moments between golf and the cocktail hour, and I thought I would pass it dropping you a note instead of dancing with the ladies, although I know my actions will break their hearts.

  There was no mail from you today, and I could cheerfully boil in oil the bureaucrat who decided that since we can mail letters post-free from here to America, there was no point in sending any stamps here. My letters, as you’ve noticed, have to make a sto
p at the firm, so that they can be remailed to you. God only knows what has happened to your letters to me. I have had only one, the one you sent to Fort Lawton, since I got here. The others are probably en route by sea, via the Suez Canal and mysterious India.

  Despite that, my morale is reasonably high, as high as any man denied the pleasure of the company of his wife and son can be. I have a fine company, as I’ve written before, good officers, good noncoms, and a few unmitigated sonsofbitches.

  They’ve apparently finally gotten the supply system into gear, for today I was informed that we will be reequipped with M46 tanks starting tomorrow. Your father will be able to explain that they have a 90 mm tube, as opposed to the 75 mm on the M4A3s, a lower profile, and are generally a far better tank all around.

  What I suppose I’m leading up to saying, Liebchen, and please don’t misunderstand me, is that although I bleed at being separated from you and P.P., I really would much rather be here, doing what I’m doing, than I would be at the firm. In some strange, perverse way (and I wouldn’t tell anyone else this), I feel as if I belong here, in the sandbags, surrounded by weapons, and the sometimes really ghastly smell of the army.

  I’m a good officer. I say that with all modesty. I don’t think it’s anything that I do. I just seem to be able to understand the system, and the people that make it up, and to make the whole thing fit together like a jigsaw puzzle or a well-oiled clock. There is no question in my mind (or in the colonel’s either; he as much as told me) that Baker Company is the most efficient in the battalion. We seem to work together. The company is alive. I’m proud of it and of being part of it, and most of all for knowing that I’m responsible for it.

  So, Liebchen, I’m going to take up the offer you made me in Philadelphia, when you said I could go back in the army. We’ll be here about a year, I would judge, and then I’ll be coming home to you. I’ll take a month’s leave in Germany.

  I won’t write how much I miss you and P.P., because I’m a big boy now and big boys aren’t supposed to cry. You won’t mind me saying that I adore you, though, will you?