two officers and a platoon and a half of men.”
“You’ll have some of the people who went down with the heat back by then, and as I say, some replacements.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” the company commander said.
“And the softening barrage may be more effective this time. We’ve been promised a bunch—including some 155-mm—from the Army, and half the ammunition will be fused for airburst, which should do a better job on the far slopes. And it will be TOT8.”
“I wondered if anyone here had ever heard of airbursts, or thought about TOT,” the company commander said.
“We’re hurting them, too, Captain,” the exec said.
“Yes, sir, but there seems to be a lot more of them than us,” the company commander said.
“I’ll be back before you move out. The 1st is up there. I don’t think the NKs will try to come this way. Get the men as much rest as you can.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
“You hurt your hand, Captain? You seem to be favoring it.”
“My finger was hurt on the airplane on the way over here, sir. Little sore, nothing serious.”
But if I ever see that candy-ass captain who did this to me again, I’m going to pull his arm off and shove it up his ass.
I wonder what that cocksucker’s doing right now. Probably playing tennis with his wife, the general’s daughter.
Goddamn the U.S. Marine Corps!
[THREE]
TOKCHOK-KUNDO ISLAND 1215 20 AUGUST 1950
“A little problem, Mr. Zimmerman?” Captain McCoy asked, surveying what was left of the small stone, thatch-roofed building that had housed the small German diesel generator and, the last time McCoy had been there, the SCR-300 radio. “I would say we have a world-class, A-NUMBER -One fucking problem.”
There was nothing left of the building but three walls, one of them on the edge of falling over, and the generator, which now lay on its side. The floor of the building—and the generator—was covered with a six-inch-thick layer of foul-smelling mud.
“When the storm really started getting bad, we moved the SCR-300 up the hill,” Zimmerman said. “We didn’t have the muscle to move the generator. By then, anyway, there was three feet of water in here. I mean all the time. When the waves hit, it was deeper; you had a hard time standing up.”
Ernie means, “I had a hard time standing up,” McCoy decided. I left him in charge, and he met that responsibility as best he could.
He had a mental picture of the barrel-chested Marine gunner standing in water up to his waist trying to salvage something, anything, in the generator building from the fury of the storm.
“I guess the diesel fuel’s gone, too? Even if we can get that generator running again.”
Zimmerman nodded.
“Everything that wasn’t up the hill got washed away,” he said. “Including most of the ammo for the Jap weapons.”
“What about food?”
“We moved the rations up the hill, including the rice the Koreans had. And a couple of their boats are left. They were starting to try to get them back in the water when we saw you. Major Kim says he thinks they can catch enough fish to feed them and us.”
“Anybody get hurt?”
Zimmerman shook his head, “no.”
“I was thinking that maybe if we hit one of their islands—Taemuui -do is closest—maybe they’d have some diesel fuel,” Zimmerman said.
If they had diesel fuel in the first place, what makes you think they’d still have it? Taemuui-do and Yonghung-do got hit by the storm as hard as Tokchok-kundo did. And if we hit Taemuui-do now, and didn’t hit Yonghung-do immediately afterward, when we finally did hit it, they’d be expecting an attack, and certainly would have reported that right after the storm somebody took Taemuui-do. They’d be curious as hell about that.
Dumb idea, Ernie.
“Do you think that diesel’s going to run after being under water for hours?”
“We’ll have to take it apart and make sure there’s no water in the cylinders. And then who knows?”
“Let’s hold off on getting diesel for a diesel engine we’re not sure can be fixed,” McCoy said.
Zimmerman nodded.
“There are engines in the lifeboats,” McCoy said. “Can we use those to power the SCR-300?”
“Wrong voltage, I’ll bet,” Zimmerman said. “But maybe we can rig something.”
“Okay. First things first,” McCoy ordered. “Put people to work helping Taylor unload the lifeboats, and then drag them on shore and get them covered. Then get the Korean fisherman’s boats in the water. Send Major Kim with one of them. Maybe he will see what the storm did to Taemuui-do and Yonghung-do.”
“And then what?”
“Ernie, I don’t have the faintest