Major Allman and others tried to call the battalion and company CPs, in many cases there was no response.
Major Allman, sensing McCoy’s eyes on him when he failed to make three connections in a row, said, “I guess the artillery cut a lot of wire.”
“Yes, sir,” McCoy said.
Or the outposts, the platoons, and maybe even the companies have been overrun.
McCoy went outside the command post. It was black dark. There was the sound of small-arms fire.
He went back into the command post.
“Let’s go,” he ordered.
“I thought you said we couldn’t leave until light,” Jeanette said.
“If you want to stay, stay,” McCoy said, and turned to the North Korean major.
“Let’s go, Major,” he said, in Russian.
The major got to his feet.
“If you try to run, you will die,” McCoy added. “They’re not here yet.”
It took them forty-five minutes, running with the Jeep’s blackout lights, to reach 24th Division Headquarters, and when McCoy asked where the provost marshal was, so that he could not only turn the prisoner over to military police but make sure that he was treated as an officer, he was told that the provost marshal had been pressed into service with the 21st Infantry, and the MPs had been fed into the 21st as replacement riflemen.
Taking the major with them, McCoy drove back to Eighth Army Headquarters in Taegu. There was a POW compound there, and McCoy was able to get rid of the prisoner.
They exchanged salutes. The major then offered his hand. After a moment’s hesitation, McCoy took it and wished him good luck.
But despite the “Dai-Ichi” orders, he got no further with the Eighth Army signal officer than he had with the Eighth Army headquarters motor officer when he’d arrived in Korea.
“Captain, I don’t care if you have orders from General MacArthur himself, I’ve got Operational Immediate messages in there that should have been sent hours ago, and I will not delay them further so that you can send your report. ”
And once again he got back into the Jeep.
“Pusan,” he said to Zimmerman. "K-1. Their commo is tied up.”
“I have dispatches to send,” Jeanette protested indignantly.
“I should probably encourage you to wait until the commo has cleared,” McCoy said. “But, from the way the signal officer talked, that’s not going to happen anytime soon. If you’re in a rush to get something out . . .”
“ ‘Rush’ is a massive understatement,” Jeanette said,
“. . . then I suggest you come back to Tokyo with us.”
Jeanette thought that over for a full two seconds.
“Okay,” she said. “Tokyo it is. I really need a good hot bath anyway.”
They departed K-1, outside Pusan, at one o’clock the next morning, aboard an Air Force Douglas C-54.
After they broke ground, McCoy took out his notebook and wrote down the time.
Then he did the arithmetic in his head.
He and Zimmerman had landed in Korea just after midnight on the fifteenth, and they were leaving forty-eight hours later.
But two days was enough. I saw enough to know that the Eighth United States Army really has its ass in a crack, and unless something happens soon, they’ll get pushed into the sea at Pusan.
IX
[ONE]
U.S. NAVY/MARINE CORPS RESERVE TRAINING CENTER ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI 1025 21 JULY 1950
Captain George F. Hart, USMCR, commanding Company B, 55th Marines, USMC Reserve, was more or less hiding in his office when First Lieutenant Paul T. Peterson, USMC, Baker Company’s inspector/instructor, came in with a copy of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in his hand.
“There’s a story in here I thought you would like to see, sir,” he said. “Apparently things are pretty bad over there.”
“Thank you,” Hart said.
By “over there,” Peterson obviously meant Korea.
It seemed self-evident that “apparently things are pretty bad over there”; otherwise Company B 55th Marines would not have been called to active duty for “an indefinite period.”
The official call had come forty-eight hours, more or less, before.
The Marine Corps had found Captain Hart, USMCR, in the office of the second deputy commissioner of the St. Louis Police Department, discussing a particularly unpleasant murder, that of a teenaged prostitute whose obscenely mutilated body had been found floating in the river.
The deputy commissioner had taken the call, then handed Hart the telephone: “For you, George.”
Hart had taken the phone and answered it with the announcement, “This had better be pretty goddamned important! ”
His caller had chuckled.
“Well, the Marine Corps thinks it is, Captain,” he said. “This is Colonel Bartlett, G-1 Section, Headquarters, Marine Corps.”
“Yes, sir?”
The second deputy commissioner looked at Hart with unabashed curiosity.