“So what we’re going to do is hope they stay stupid,” Zimmerman interrupted.
“You’re getting close to the line, Ernie,” McCoy said very coldly. “What we’re going to do is when they send a couple of boats—and they will—to see what happened on Taemuui-do and Yonghung-do, is have the militia fire on them with rifles. They may get lucky—none of the militia can really shoot, and all they have is the Japanese Arisakas—and kill a couple of the NKs. But even if they don’t, bullets will be flying, and nobody likes that. The first time that happens, the NKs may pull back. But they’ll come back, and when they do, the militia takes a couple more shots at them, and then takes off into the hills. The NKs, we hope, will take a look around, see no evidence of anybody but Koreans being there, and maybe, maybe, go into the hills after them. More likely, they’ll just get back in the boats. They won’t have enough men, we don’t think, to leave enough men on the islands to garrison them. And why should they? There’s nothing on the islands but a bunch of South Koreans armed with some Jap rifles, pissing in the wind against the inevitable triumph of the Armies of Socialism. Their misguided brethren can be left there to be dealt with later, by somebody else.”
“And when they come here? They’ll know Americans are here.”
“We’ll deal with that when it happens,” McCoy said. “And pray it doesn’t happen in the next two weeks. What we have to do now is buy time. You got all that straight, now?”
“I got it,” Zimmerman said.
“What I was hoping to get, Mr. Zimmerman, was the expected response of a Marine who has been given an order.”
Zimmerman met his eyes.
“Aye, aye, sir,” he said.
“Thank you, Mr. Zimmerman.”
“Jesus, Killer, all I was doing was asking.”
“I’ll leave you lovebirds now,” Lieutenant Taylor said. “With a little luck, I’ll be back in forty-eight hours.”
“With fresh eggs, chickens, and bread, right?” Zimmerman asked.
“With fresh eggs, chickens, and bread,” Taylor said.
He saluted, which surprised McCoy, and walked down onto the wharf, gestured to the crew of the Wind of Good Fortune to let loose her lines, and climbed aboard. The ebbing tide immediately started to pull her away from the wharf and toward the Flying Fish Channel, even before Taylor made it to the stern and started her engine.
“Can I say something?” Zimmerman said.
“Why not?”
“Remember Guadalcanal? The Navy dumped the First Division on the beach, and then they took off with the heavy artillery and the rations, leaving the Division on the beach?”
“I remember hearing something about that,” McCoy said.
“I used to wonder how those guys felt about getting dumped on some island and watching the Navy sail away. Now I know.”
[SIX]
U.S. NAVY BASE SASEBO SASEBO, KYUSHU, JAPAN 1500 5 SEPTEMBER 1950
LST stands for Landing Ship, Tank, which means the vessel was designed to deposit tracked armored fighting vehicles directly onto beaches. When approaching a beach, the less draft—the portion of the vessel extending underwater—the better. So the design for the LST had provided for a flat bottom. It was known by the Naval architects, of course, that a flat-bottomed oceangoing vessel was, in any but the calmest of waters, going to toss and turn and twist and otherwise move in such a manner that passengers aboard were liable to be very uncomfortable and possibly, even probably, suffer mal de mer, but passenger comfort was not a design criterion, and getting tanks as close to the beach as possible was.
The first Marine of B Company, 5th Marines, to suffer mal de mer became nauseous ten minutes after LST-450 left Pusan for Sasebo. By the time LST-450 tied up at Sasebo, all but three members of B Company had suffered mal de mer to one degree or another, including Captain Howard Dunwood, USMCR, the company commander.
He found this both depressing and professionally humiliating. A commanding officer tossing his cookies countless times hardly stands as an example for his men to follow.
The commanding officer of LST-450, Lieutenant John X. McNear—a thirty-year-old naval reservist who six weeks before had been the golf professional at Happy Hollow Country Club, Phoenix, Arizona—extended to Captain Dunwood the privilege of his bridge, and between bouts of nausea, Captain Dunwood learned from Lieutenant McNEAR that while this—the weather, the seas—was pretty bad, it was nothing like the weather he had experienced sailing the sonofabitch from San Diego, California, to Pusan.