had an air-cooled thirty-caliber Browning machine-gun section, we were taught that if you could hit something with a machine gun, you could hit it with a rifle. It’s the same cartridge.”
The sergeant shrugged.
Zimmerman made a give it to me gesture toward Mc-Coy’s Garand, and McCoy handed it to him.
The sergeant and the PFC were now fascinated.
“Where’s the zero?” Zimmerman asked.
“Two hundred,” McCoy said.
“You’re sure? I really hate to fuck with the sights.”
“Give it back, Ernie,” McCoy ordered. “You spot for me.”
Zimmerman shrugged, and handed the Garand back.
McCoy moved up to the sandbags, tried the sitting position, found that it placed him too low to fire, and assumed the kneeling position.
Then he reached up and moved two of the grenades out of the way.
“Sergeant,” he said. “If you think you might need those grenades in a hurry, it might be a good idea to take the tape off now.”
The sergeant looked at him a moment, and then offered a noncommittal, “Yes, sir.”
McCoy pounded the sandbag with the fore end of the Garand until the groove in the sandbag provided what he thought was adequate support. Then, with quick sure movements born of long practice, he unlooped the leather sling of the Garand from the stock, adjusted the brass hooks, and arranged it around his arm.
The sergeant and the PFC looked at him in fascination.
McCoy took a sight, then looked up at Zimmerman, who nodded and put the binoculars to his eyes.
McCoy took another sight and squeezed one off, then— very much as if they were on a known-distance rifle range firing at bull’s-eye targets—looked up at Zimmerman—the coach—to see how he was doing.
“You got the one closest to this bank,” Zimmerman reported.
“I held a foot over his head,” McCoy said, and then reached into his utilities jacket pocket for an eight-round Garand clip. He laid it on the sandbags beside the hand grenades and resumed his shooting position.
In the next sixty seconds, he fired the remaining seven cartridges in the Garand. The empty clip flew out of the open breech in an arc. Before it hit the ground, he reached for the spare clip and a moment later thumbed it into the Garand, and slammed the operating rod with the heel of his hand, ensuring that the fresh cartridge would be fully chambered. Then he quickly got in firing position again.
“They’re gone, Ken,” Zimmerman said. “Their side of the river. You got three of them, maybe four.”
“Jesus Christ!” the sergeant said.
“And in the Marine Corps, the captain’s considered only a so-so shot,” Zimmerman said, oozing sincerity.
“And in the Marine Corps, Master Gunner Zimmerman has a reputation for being as good a man as they come with the Garand,” McCoy said, “and that’s not bullshit.”
He pointed at the PFC’s Garand.
“Is that zeroed?”
“We got a chance to fire a couple of clips before we left Japan, sir.”
“What Mr. Zimmerman’s going to do now, Sergeant, is have a look at that Garand, and then—if the light doesn’t go—help you zero it at two hundred yards.”
“Jesus,” the PFC said. “Thank you.”
“And then, when it’s dark, you and I, Ernie, are going to go down to the bank and see if we can’t grab a prisoner.”
Zimmerman nodded.
[SIX]
HEADQUARTERS 19TH INFANTRY REGIMENT 24TH INFANTRY DIVISION KONGJU, SOUTH KOREA 0300 16 JULY 1950
“Incoming!” one of the sergeants in the G-3 section called out excitedly.
Quite unnecessarily, for everyone present had heard the sound an artillery shell makes in flight.
The impact came a moment later, a hundred yards away.
“It looks like you’re going to live, Major,” Zimmerman said to their North Korean prisoner. “I was beginning to wonder.”
“There will be more, much more,” the major said.
McCoy wondered: Was that a gratis offer of more information, or is he hoping that when they fire for effect, it will be right on our heads?
And then he wondered: Would I have caved in the way he did? Or Zimmerman? There’s two sides to that tell-the-enemy -nothing business. What’s the point of dying if it’s not going to change things?
His reverie was interrupted by more incoming.
Lots of incoming: Between the sound of the exploding incoming rounds, there could be heard the rumble of artillery—a lot of artillery—firing.
Very little seems to be directed at us, here at regimental headquarters, which probably means that it’s being directed at positions on the line.
They know where the positions are. They’ve been infiltrating men across the river all night. And some certainly infiltrated back, carrying maps on which are marked the position of every last goddamn foxhole and machine gun.