I can get out of these fucking pajamas, is what I can do. And if I am going to get blown away, maybe I can take some of them with me before I go. And get buried in a Marine uniform.
Ten minutes later, Captain George F. Hart came on the stern again. He was now in the prescribed semi-dress uniform for the summer months of the year for officers of the U.S. Marine Corps, including a field scarf. The uniform had lost its press and was not very clean. A Thompson Submachine Gun Model 1928 Caliber .45 ACP was hanging from his shoulder on a web strap.
When he looked around, the Flying Fish Channel lighthouse was behind him to his left.
There was a nautical way to say that, but he couldn’t think what it was.
[EIGHT]
TOKCHOK-KUNDO ISLAND 1535 25 AUGUST 1950
One of the two national policemen Major Kim had stationed on the end of the wharf came running down the wharf to where Kim was watching another of his men hammering at the dull red—not heated quite enough— shaft of Boat Two.
He reported that a junk was on the horizon, coming down the Flying Fish Channel, but that it was too early to tell whether it was headed for Tokchok-kundo.
Major Kim started to make the translation, then stopped when McCoy held up his hand.
“Thank you,” McCoy said, in Korean, to the national policeman. “I would be grateful if you would return to your post and perhaps climb down from the wharf itself, so that anyone looking might not see you. And please tell us what else you see.”
The national policeman saluted and ran back out onto the wharf.
“So what do we do,” Zimmerman said, “if it comes here, or even close enough to get a look?”
“Dave, could you climb onto that junk from the lifeboat if it was, say, fifty yards offshore?”
“I could if there weren’t people on the deck shooting at me,” Taylor replied.
“Zimmerman and I will try to make sure there’s nobody on the deck alive,” McCoy said. “We’ll go halfway up the hill, Ernie, so we’ll have a good shot at the deck. . . .”
“We could do sort of a TOT on it,” Zimmerman suggested. “We have enough firepower to really sweep it clean.”
“There’s probably no more than four or five people on it,” McCoy said. “I’ll start at the stern, you start at the bow.”
Zimmerman nodded his acceptance.
“I don’t want a sudden burst of small-arms fire to attract anybody else’s attention,” McCoy said, then turned to Major Kim: “Major Kim, see how well you can hide this”—he gestured at the upside-down lifeboat and the makeshift forge—“and then make sure everybody’s out of sight.”
Major Kim nodded.
“If we take it just as it approaches the wharf,” McCoy said to Zimmerman, “it would be moving slowly. And it would be, I’d say, about two hundred yards from halfway up the hill.”
“I’d make it two hundred yards,” Zimmerman agreed.
“Hold fire until I fire,” McCoy said.
Ten minutes later, from his firing position—behind a knee-high rock halfway up the hill—McCoy surveyed the village below him. There was no one in sight, no sign of activity at all.
He pulled the operating rod lever of his National Match Garand far enough back so that he could see the gleam of a cartridge halfway in the chamber, and then, after letting the operating rod slide forward again, hit it with the heel of his hand to make sure it was fully closed.
Then he took a quick sight—primarily to make sure he had a good firing position—at the end of the wharf, then carefully laid the rifle on the rock.
Then he put his binoculars to his eyes and took a good look at the junk, starting at the bow.
Then he said, “I’ll be a sonofabitch.”
“What?” Zimmerman asked from his position, twenty yards to McCoy’s left.
“I was just about to shoot George,” McCoy said, laughing, and got to his feet, picked up the Garand, put the safety back on, and started to go as fast as he could down the hill.
Zimmerman put his binoculars to his eyes and looked at the junk, then shook his head and got to his feet, and started after McCoy.
“Dispatch, Dispatch, H-1, H-1,” Hart said into his microphone.
“H-1, Dispatch, go.”
“Five, I say again, Five,” Hart said.
Five was a code phrase—one of eight hastily prepared in Pusan—that stood for: “In Tokchok-kundo. McCoy party safe.”