“If they don’t give me a beast of my own, yeah,” Eigims answered. “I’ve had some real clowns give me orders just because they’re Russians. You at least know what you’re doing.”
“Thanks,” Konstantin said dryly. “Thanks a bunch.”
“Any time.” Eigims was unfazed. “You know what you’re doing so well, we didn’t quite get fried there at the front.” Morozov found himself without a snappy comeback for that.
–
New recruits came up to the line. Cade Curtis watched them with more than a little skepticism. They wore American olive drab and U.S. pot helmets, and carried M-1s or grease guns. But their narrow eyes and yellow-brown hides said they were South Koreans, not Yanks.
“We need some bodies in the trenches,” he said, trying to make the best of things.
Howard Sturgis, by contrast, eyed the ROK men with contempt if not loathing. “See how long they stay in the goddamn trenches, Captain,” the older man said. “See how soon we send out the HA signal.”
At the start of the Korean War, the Republic’s soldiers were anything but eager to fight. They fell back from Seoul so fast, some people wondered whether those two divisions were riddled with North Korean fifth columnists. HA was the American radio signal that warned they were retreating again. The letters stood for hauling ass.
“They aren’t as bad as they used to be,” Cade said.
“They still ain’t what you’d call good…sir,” Sturgis said. “The North Koreans, say what you want about the fuckers, but they fight like they mean it. These clowns-they’ll fight to the last drop of American blood, is what they’ll do.”
A South Korean lieutenant shouted at one of the men in his platoon. The soldier answered meekly. He wasn’t meek enough to suit the officer, who hauled off and clouted him. It was no love tap. It might have flattened Ezzard Charles. The soldier staggered and tramped on.
“That kind of thing doesn’t help,” Cade said.
“No shit,” Sturgis replied. “That looey, he was probably a corporal in a Jap labor brigade or something during the last war. The Japs, their sergeants and officers knocked the crap out of the ordinary guys for the fun of it, you know?”
“I’ve heard that, yes.” Cade knew he sounded troubled. He was troubled. The North Koreans were a bunch of Reds, sure. They cheerfully shot anybody whose ideology they didn’t like. But their leaders had mostly resisted the Japanese occupation of Korea and Manchuria.
The South Korean leaders had mostly worked with the Japs. Collaborated with the Japs, the North Koreans said. In Europe, plenty of people in places like France and Holland and Czechoslovakia who’d collaborated with the Japs’ Nazi allies wound up on the gallows or in front of a firing squad. Here, the collaborators were American allies now-and they also cheerfully shot anybody whose views they didn’t like.
It made you wonder. It really did.
“I wonder if we ought to break them up, put one of their squads with one of ours,” Cade said. “That way, we won’t have a hole in the line with all of them together.”
“We’d be less weak in any one place, but more over a longer stretch.” Sturgis shrugged. “Six of one, half a dozen of the other, you ask me. Other thing is, betcha the Chinks already know we’ve got gooks here. They’ll poke us just to see how bad things are-you wait.”
“Uh-huh.” That had already occurred to Cade. Koreans were gooks to him, too. Again, he did his damnedest to look on the bright side: “We’ve still got our artillery and air.”
“Hot damn.” No, Howard Sturgis wasn’t a bright-side guy.
“They might perform better if they had more of that stuff themselves,” Cade said.
“And rain makes applesauce,” Sturgis retorted. “Sir, one reason they don’t got it now is, they ran so fast they left it behind for the Commies to grab. If they didn’t cough up ten divisions’ worth o’ shit in the retreat to Pusan, you can call me a nigger.”
Cade had heard such stories, too. He hoped they were stretched-but he didn’t know they were. Sighing, he said, “I’ll go see if their company CO speaks English.”
“Yeah, that’d be nice. What’ll you do if he can’t?”
“Try Latin,” Cade said. Sturgis goggled, but he meant it. A surprising number of Koreans were Catholic, as was he. Bits and pieces of Latin had saved his bacon on the journey south from the Chosin Reservoir. Maybe they would again.
He turned out not to need to find out. The Korean captain knew enough English to get by. “We fight,” he said. “We tough. We tigers.”
“Good,” Cade said. “You want to mix your men with ours? We can support each other better that way.” He could have ordered the ROK officer to do that. They were both captains, but he headed the regiment. But he was willing-for now-to save the other man’s face and leave it up to him.
And the Korean-his name was Pak Ho-san-shook his head and said, “Oh, no, no, no.”
Koreans put the family name first; if Cade decided to get friendly, he’d call the other captain Ho-san. He wasn’t feeling friendly. He was nervous. “You sure?” he asked.
“Oh, yes, yes, yes.” Pak eyed him. He was close to Cade’s six-one: big for an Oriental. “You no think we do. You think we gooks.” He said the word as if he were upchucking. As Americans universally used it, so Koreans universally hated it. “You see. By God, we fight!” He didn’t say So fuck you, asshole, but it was in his bearing.
“Okay.” Cade still had his doubts about whether it was, but he didn’t see how he could show them.
Damned if the Red Chinese didn’t start lobbing mortars at the South Koreans within an hour. They yelled across no-man’s-land. They didn’t love Koreans, either. The people of the peninsula might not be niggers to them, but they sure as hell were poor yellow trash.
A few of the ROK guys took wounds. None of them HA’d, though. One of the wounded was that lieutenant who’d slugged the private. Cade wasn’t sorry to see him carried moaning to the rear. Sometimes subtraction was addition in disguise.
He quietly told his men to can the use of gook while the Koreans were in the line. If the locals recognized any one word of English, that was too likely to be it. And he warned them to stay on their toes after the sun went down. If the Red Chinese decided to test the South Koreans, they’d do it when American air power had a harder time making them pay.
And they did. One American picket got off a burst with his grease gun before a wail said he was done. But, alerted, the dogfaces in the main line launched flares and started shooting for all they were worth. Machine guns, submachine guns, semiautomatic rifles…
Caught under that merciless white light, quite a few of the Red Chinese raiders who’d scragged the sentry quickly fell. The others fired back. A tracer snapped past Cade’s head. A few of the enemy soldiers got into the trenches, but only a few. Then it was knives and entrenching tools and rifle butts: apes whacking away at one another with tree branches, as primitive and basic as combat got.
The Red Chinese didn’t need long to realize it wouldn’t be their night. They melted away toward their own positions, taking as many of their wounded as they could. A few men still whimpered and cried out north of the trenches. Machine guns swept the ground to make them shut up.
“I be damned,” Howard Sturgis said as the gunfire slowed to spatters. “The, uh, ROK guys really did hang in there. Who woulda thunk it?”
“They did great,” Cade agreed. “I should go tell Captain Pak they really are a bunch of tigers.” They weren’t, exactly, but they hadn’t bugged out and they’d pulled their weight. It would do. He started up the trench.
Pak Ho-san met him halfway. The Korean officer carried something that wasn’t a weapon in his right hand. “Here, Captain Curtis,” he said, holding it up. “I have for you. We fight, hey?”
“You fight, you bet.” Cade flicked his lighter to see what Pak was giving him. The Korean held a Red Chinese soldier’s head by the hair. “Jesus!” Cade said. “I don’t want that! Get rid of it!”