A corporal jumped on him and rolled up and down his legs, smothering the fire. The infantryman also had the mother wit to yell for a medic. He got one faster than Konstantin had thought he would. Between them, the medic and the corporal lugged him away from the front. “Do you want morphine?” the medic asked him.
The burns and the bruises all started to hurt at once. “Fuck your mother, yes!” Morozov exclaimed. The medic stuck him. The pain went away, or maybe Konstantin did.
–
Now that it was May, the snow had melted in Korea. The countryside turned muddy, then green. “Ain’t that sweet?” Sergeant Lou Klein said. “Spring is in the air. La-de-da!”
“Nice to know you’re enthused about it,” Cade Curtis said.
“Fuckin’-A…sir,” Klein replied. “The birdies’ll be singing their heads off. And us and the Chinks, we’ll be blowing each other’s heads off.”
“How long do you think this war can go on?” Curtis asked.
“I’m just a dumb sergeant. I don’t know nothin’. I don’t want to know nothin’,” Klein said.
“You’re a sandbagging dumb sergeant, is what you are,” Cade told him. “C’mon-give.”
“Well, I guess it kind of depends,” the veteran noncom said. “Sooner or later, they’re bound to run out of cities to plaster. When they do, I guess things’ll just peter out. Not much point to blowing up forests or prairies or anything. That’s how it looks to me, anyway. How do you see it?”
“I don’t think we can last even that long,” Cade said. “As soon as the logistics get so bad we can’t support the armies, we’ve got to quit.”
That applied with special force here in Korea, something he made a point of not mentioning to Lou Klein. The only functioning port on the West Coast was San Diego. All the ones north of there had taken A-bombs. With the Panama and Suez Canals gone, the harbors on the East Coast couldn’t quickly take up the slack. Everything that didn’t leave through San Diego would go around Cape Horn or the Cape of Good Hope. It would be only two or three days less than forever on the way.
Red China, in the meantime, sat right across the Yalu, right where it had always been. The logistics of a war in Korea had always been bad for America. With the ports and the canals destroyed, they’d gone from bad to worse.
Sergeant Klein looked amused. “Anybody can tell you’re an officer,” he said. “Officers go on and on about logistics.”
“You’ve got to,” Cade said. “They’re important.”
“As long as I’ve got ammo for my M-1, as long as the guys in the battery behind us have enough shells for their 105s, I won’t worry about it.”
Cade started to explain that that was what logistics were all about, that things would go horribly wrong if you didn’t worry about making sure dogfaces had plenty of cartridges and howitzers had plenty of shells. He started to, but a glint in Klein’s eye shut him up before the words came out. The sergeant was sandbagging again.
When Cade didn’t walk barefoot through the obvious, Klein looked disappointed for a moment. Then he grinned a grin that showed off his nicotine-stained choppers. “You’re learning, sir, damned if you ain’t.”
“Baby steps,” Cade said. “Baby steps.”
A moment later, they both dove for the dugout. Those screams in the air were incoming Red Chinese 105s. Klein dove no sooner than Cade-the young lieutenant really was learning. The dugout was cramped for two; it might have been cramped for one. As they huddled together, Klein said, “You come any closer, Lieutenant, you’re gonna kiss me.”
“No, thanks,” Cade said. “I’ve been overseas a while, but not that long.” The way they were twisted up with each other, he could just about whisper in Lou Klein’s ear. They both laughed. It wasn’t that funny, but Cade was glad for anything to take his mind off the artillery fire.
U.S. guns opened up, too, but they didn’t shoot back as hard as he would have liked. Save ammo was the new watchword. With the troubles back home, it had to be. Stalin might give the Chinks only what he didn’t feel like using himself, but he had plenty of old howitzers and rounds to shoot out of them. Artillery had always been an American advantage. It had been, but the balance was tilting.
When the shelling let up, Cade and Sergeant Klein untangled from each other and jumped up onto the firing step to see if the Red Chinese would follow it up with a ground attack. Not this time: no dun-colored wave of men slogging forward to get cut down. They’d shelled for the sake of shelling, because they had the tubes and ammunition. They’d made the Americans keep their heads down, and hurt or killed a few at no great cost to themselves.
By baby steps, they were learning, too.
A hundred yards down the trench, some unlucky GI was wailing for his mother. Curtis and Klein looked at each other. Their faces both wore the same expression. “Christ, but I hate that,” Klein said. “Just dumb luck I ain’t the one making those noises.”
“Uh-huh,” Cade said. “I’ve come too close to that too many times.”
“Ain’t we all?” Klein said. Cade remembered he had been wounded, and more than once. What kind of noises had he made when he got hit? Nothing so horrible as the ones rising now, or Cade hoped not. Those were the cries you let out when you were in agony, and death or lots of morphine were all you had to look forward to.
After what seemed like forever but was actually five or ten minutes, the wounded man fell silent. Either he was dead or they’d doped him not just to but past the eyebrows. Whichever, he wasn’t making that horrible racket any more. Cade didn’t care about anything else.
Klein lit a cigarette. He held the pack out to Curtis. “Want one, sir?”
Cade hadn’t smoked at all till he put on the uniform, or, in fact, till he came under fire. He hadn’t smoked much then; he hadn’t really got the habit before he was cut off from the Army’s logistical horn of plenty. So it wasn’t as if he needed a butt. He took one anyway, saying, “Thanks. Now watch me cough my head off.”
“I sure as hell did when I started smoking.” Klein pulled a Ronson that had seen plenty of hard use out of his pocket. Cade leaned over to get a light. “There you go,” the sergeant said when he took his first inexpert drag.
He did cough. It tasted terrible, as if he’d inhaled the smoke from burning leaves-which was just what he had done. He got dizzy and light-headed-no, he hadn’t tried this for quite a while. He gulped as his stomach did an Immelmann.
“You okay, sir?” Klein asked with what sounded like genuine concern. “You look kinda green.”
“I believe it.” Spit flooded into Cade’s mouth. His body was convinced he’d just gone and poisoned himself. Gulping again, he wasn’t so sure it was wrong. “Hope I don’t lose my lunch. Been too long since I did any of this.”
“Yeah, you gotta stay used to it,” Lou Klein agreed. “Even when you are, it ain’t like you get drunk or nothin’. Just kinda, I dunno, takes some of the edge offa things. Gives you somethin’ to do when you got five minutes with nothin’ goin’ on, too.”
“I guess so.” Cade nodded and cautiously inhaled again. It was almost as rugged as his first try. He turned his head and got rid of some of that outpouring of spit. Klein chuckled, but softly. Cade said, “The Indians must have been crazy when they started doing this.”
“I ain’t gonna argue with you,” the noncom said. “But the whole goddamn world sucks on coffin nails these days.” He smoked in quick, harsh drags, and ground out his cigarette on the callused palm of his left hand.
Cade took more time between puffs. He didn’t want to start puking his head off. His hands were hard, as any soldier’s had to be, but not hard enough to do duty for an ashtray. He killed his cigarette with the sole of his boot.
“Here ya go, sir.” Klein tossed him the opened pack. “I got plenty more.”