It wasn't simply a question of supplying the attacking divisions with food, fuel, and ammunition, or even also moving their supporting tactical units, the separate tank and artillery battalions, and so on—and their food, fuel, and ammunition—but the nonfighting units had also been ordered moved out of Wonsan. These ranged from Mobile Army Surgical Hospitals to Quartermaster Ration Depots, Ordnance Ammunition Supply Points, down to smaller units such as Water Purification Platoons, Shower Points, and a Mobile Dental Surgical Detachment.
Into this mix, all trying to move up the same winding, crumbling, narrow two-lane "highway," Colonel T. Howard Kennedy, the X Corps Transportation Officer, had added Captain MacNamara's 8023d Transportation Company (Depot, Forward) and the Replacement Company of the 7th United States Infantry Division.
It was worse than anything MacNamara had seen in France in World War II, and when he first got into the line of moving vehicles, he had used his experience in France to predict that it would take six hours to move the sixty miles. It took eighteen.
Not all of that time—in fact very little—was spent on the move. Most of it was spent stopped, as units, or individual vehicles, with a higher priority passed them on the left lane. The basic rule of thumb was that medical supplies went first, then ammunition, then food.
Overworked, and thus sometimes snarling, military policemen guided high-priority convoys onto the left lane, past stopped convoys with lesser priorities.
The first military police officer Captain MacNamara encountered had asked him for his movement priority, which would then be painted on the lead vehicle for the edification of military police along the route.
"Verbal orders of the X Corps Transportation Officer," MacNamara had replied, with as much assurance as he could muster. "The colonel said, 'Time is of the essence.' "
The MP officer, also a captain, had smiled at him.
"Good try, Captain," he said, and dabbed a blue paint circle on the windshield of MacNamara's jeep. Within an hour or so, MacNamara understood that the blue circle indicated a priority way down on the list.
Several times MacNamara seriously considered replacing the blue circle with a yellow one. Yellow seemed to represent the priority immediately after ration trucks, and there was an assortment of paint in one of the mobile workshops he had included in the first convoy, but he decided against it. For one thing, it didn't seem right, and for another, he didn't want another letter of reprimand in his service record, which he would get, sure as Christ made little green apples, if he was caught.
He wondered how long it was going to take him to return from wherever he was going in the Hamhung-Hungnam area to Wonsan. The southbound lane, so to speak, of the highway was usually crowded with northbound vehicles with a priority. Only a few vehicles were passing him going south.
He wondered if maybe he could somehow get a message to the officers he had left behind, telling them to saddle up and get moving as soon as they could because he would not be returning. In the end, he decided against this, too. It was his responsibility to go back and set things up, and he would.
Sixteen and a half hours after MacNamara had left Wonsan, he was again stopped in the right lane as priority convoys passed him in the left. Another MP officer, this one a lieutenant, came southward down the shoulder of the road in a jeep.
"Where are you headed, Captain?"
"Hamhung, Hungnam," MacNamara replied.
"Which?"
"I don't know. I have to find somewhere to set up—on the highway, preferably. I'm a vehicle replacement outfit. And I've got the advance party of the 7th Repple-Depple with me. They need a place too."
"When I come back, say, in thirty minutes or so, you—just you—follow me. The turn off to Hamhung's about five miles up the road. You can find a place, or places, to set up while the rest of your convoy is still on the highway."
MacNamara had little trouble finding a suitable area for the 8023d. It was about half a mile in on the turnoff to Hamhung. The only thing wrong with it was that it was terraced, which would seem to indicate that it had once been a rice paddy, or paddies.
It was dry now, and obviously hadn't been a rice paddy for some years. That left the question in his mind: How long would human shit contaminate a rice paddy?
He had no idea. But it didn't matter. He had seen enough of the area to know that the terrain was either rocky hills or flat areas that either were or once had been a rice paddy. He thought the one he had chosen didn't smell all that rotten, but on the other hand, he had smelled so many rotten things since arriving in the Land of the Morning Calm that he suspected his sniffer had been overwhelmed.
He consoled himself with the thought that it was now getting chilly—it had been as cold as a witch's teat in the jeep overnight—and one of the prerogatives of being a Transportation Depot commander was being able to tell your non-com in charge of the Radiator Repair Section to rig a heater for your jeep, and that would keep the smell down.
He set up a temporary headquarters in one of the mobile service vans he had thoughtfully included in the convoy. Nature called, and he didn't think it would wait until the men dug a quick latrine, so he went up the hill a little and dropped his trousers behind a large boulder.
The wind coming off the hill was surprisingly unpleasant on the cheeks of his ass, and he thought that about the first thing the men were going to do when they finished laying the perimeter barbed wire was build another latrine like the one he had just finished building in Wonsan.
Jesus! If I can get through to Wonsan on a landline, I can tell Lieutenant Wright to just put the sonofabitch on the back of a tank retriever. I'll have to tell Wright to cover it with a tarpaulin so people won't know what it is. But that would save a lot of work.
As soon as I finish my dump, I'm going to see if 1 can find a phone. There's no telling how long it'll take to get the X Corps Signal Company to lay a couple of lines in here.
He heard a sound he hadn't heard since those CIA guys dropped in on the 8023d in Inchon. Fluckata-fluckata-fluckata.
He looked up and around and, as the fluckata-fluckata-fluckata fluckata-fluckata-fluckata sound grew louder, located it in the sky.
It was flying over the road in the direction of Hungnam.
It was painted black. He wondered if it was one of the two he had seen at Inchon. He wondered what the hell it was doing.
Jesus, if I could get my hands on one of those, I'd have that goddamn latrine up here tonight!
[THREE]
Office of the Commanding General
Headquarters X United States Corps (Forward)
Wonsan, North Korea
1245 2 November 195O
The black H-19A fluttered to the ground fifty yards from a collection of vehicles of all descriptions parked in a somewhat random pattern outside a two-story brick building that had, before the war, housed a regional secondary school. The downwash from the rotor blades blew leaves all over the area as the helicopter touched down.
There was much activity as Engineers, Signal Corps personnel, and other technicians set up the X Corps headquarters. As Major Alex Donald, USA— very carefully, to make sure he didn't run into cables strung between telephone poles— set the H-19A down, Major K. R. McCoy, USMCR, saw two flags, their poles set in what looked like artillery shell casings, in front of a van, a 6 X 6 truck onto which was mounted a square boxlike structure.
Such vehicles usually housed either communications gear or the machines required for some sort of maintenance function, but were sometimes used as mobile offices. That was obviously the case here. The flags hung limply on their staffs, but McCoy could see that one of them was the blue and white X Corps flag, and the other was solid red with white stars. That meant the van was occupied for the moment by the X Corps Commander, until the support troops working frantically in and around the school building could get his office and command post set up there.