Pat Frank - Hold Back the Night

So Raleigh Couzens decided, as a fact of survival, that he must spend the night in Ko-Bong, and approach Dog Company in the light of day. He ground out his cigarette and crept silently into the nearest doorway. Braced to spring, he illuminated the single room with his lighter.

A woman sleeping on a mattress of rags and straw, with a child curled under her arm, opened her eyes in quick terror. Before she could scream he lifted his finger to his lips in the signal for silence, and made a smile. The woman shut her mouth. She was a young woman. She was the same woman, he believed, that Beany Smith had tried to rape. He didn’t move, for fear of frightening her into panic, and for a few seconds they examined each other. It seemed, then, that she understood she would not be hurt, for she motioned with her free arm towards the other side of the hut. There was a pallet there, empty. Once, no doubt, she had had a husband.

Couzens unbuttoned his parka, snapped off his lighter, and lay down. He couldn’t get comfortable. There was a rock, or something, under him. He squirmed, and finally groped under the straw. His hand touched metal. He had found a gun. It was an M-1. He knew it from its contours, in the dark, as a man knows his wife. He brought it out from under him and flicked his lighter. The woman’s eyes rolled in apprehension, but he was really smiling now and she relaxed. The gun was loaded. He was armed again. He was whole again. The fuel in his lighter would soon be gone, and he looked around the hut, and saw what he was seeking, a primitive brass lamp, and lit it and put his lighter back in his pocket.

Under the lamplight he saw that the gun was like his gun. It was filthy, yes. It had been dumped into the street’s frozen mire, and fought over, and ground underfoot, and filthied. But wherever there was not filth, it shone like silver at a candlelit dinner party. Some Korean had found it after the fire fight of the previous night, and hidden it here. He found a rag hung on a nail, and a beer bottle half-filled with peanut oil, and went to work. The woman watched him in wonder, but at last her eyes closed, and she slept.

Whenever he touched the gun he thought of his home, for a gun was part of his home. A gun was what he remembered best of his father. It was before the dawn in Ko-Bong, so it would be yesterday’s evening in Mandarin, and his mother would be watering the azaleas and hibiscus around the pool, and trimming the Australian pines that formed its backdrop. Now that he was gone, she had the duty. She would have stale bread for the bream in the pool, and balls of meat for his pet bass. Of course she couldn’t catch frogs, and shiners, and live shrimp for the bass, as he had, but she would feed them efficiently.

Everyone agreed that his mother was a wonderful and brilliant woman, and a great beauty for her age. She played bridge like a man, with slashing bids of slam and double, and she was shrewd in real estate, and the price of fruit. She could speak fluently of the situation in Iran, and the new tax laws, and she called senators by their first names, but of her husband, who had killed himself with fine brandy, she never spoke at all. He was the blank in her life.

Raleigh Couzens wasn’t sure whether he loved his mother, or hated her. He knew that only in the Marines had he escaped her, as he suspected his father could escape her only with alcohol.

And he blamed her, somehow, although his logic was amorphous and muddy, because he had lost his girl, his woman, Sue. His mother was always subtly sniping at Sue. It was that, he believed, that had caused their breach, really, although Sue hadn’t said it that way. Sue had said, frankly and precisely, “Darling, when I want a toss in the hay I want it to be the real thing. And with us it isn’t. You get all tense.”

“No I don’t.”

“Yes, you do, Raleigh. You feel guilty about something.”

And he’d protested, and called her dirty names, and Sue had been sweet to him, and told him to ask any good doctor. So he had. He’d asked several. They’d assured him it wasn’t uncommon. For men in his social stratum, particularly in the South, where boys are carefully taught that there is a great difference between “nice girls” and “bad girls,” it was more usual than unusual. He shouldn’t worry. He’d outgrow it. But he hadn’t, yet. He’d just joined up again, long before Korea. It had upset his mother, and she’d wept, and tried to bribe him with a trip to Europe. But once you volunteered, and were accepted, that was it.

And he continued to caress the rifle, and think of his home, and Sue, until the gray of the false dawn. It was better than thinking of the nightmare of his capture, and Colonel Chu.

When he knew there was sufficient light for him to be recognized—providing he got close enough to the outposts of Dog Company—he slipped out of the hut, and walked down the street of Ko-Bong. He passed the last house, and continued steadily until he knew he could be no more than two hundred yards from the line of foxholes, and knew that the machine guns, and the BAR’s, and the Garands would be trained on him. Now that he was almost back, he felt miserable. He didn’t give much of a damn whether they shot him or not, and he played with the idea of going straight in until someone said, “Fire!” But that wouldn’t be fair to one of his friends. He shouted, “Hey there!”

One word cracked back, “Halt!”

“This is Couzens! Lieutenant Couzens!”

There was silence for a second, and then he recognized Sam Mackenzie’s voice. “Come on in, Raleigh, you damn fool!”

THE CAPTAIN had slept four hours, and when his field phone woke him, just before first light, he was fresh. “Signal from Regiment, sir,” Ekland said. “Move out and join up at Hagaru. They’ve got a field hospital set up near the strip, and an air evac operating.”

“Good,” said Mackenzie. “Make a signal back. Tell ’em we can move at ten hundred hours. Tell ’em we’ve got twenty-four wounded.”

“Twenty-two, sir,” said Ekland.

Mackenzie knew that during the small hours two more had died. But those who lived would get out, if Dog Company got out. It was axiomatic, in the Marines, that you brought out your wounded. Sometimes it was costly. Sometimes it was not a fair trade. But it was a policy that helped make the Marines what they were. There was one certain thing in this world that a Marine could count on. He would not be abandoned by his buddies. “All right, twenty-two,” said Mackenzie. He had to ask: “Who went?”

“Lieutenant Travis and Cohane, the corpsman.”

“Too bad.” The casualties among his lieutenants and non-coms were distressingly high. This was always true. Always.

The captain rose, fully dressed, and picked up his carbine. There had been no new onslaught during the past night, and Dog Company was intact, but he hated to think of the good men he had lost. He suspected that the Chinese attack was a reconnaissance in force, or the objective may have been to capture the hydroelectric station. This they had done, although he had driven them out when daylight came. But they’d be back, and he was glad the move had been ordered. He could get the company out. He had sent a patrol into Ko-Bong during the night, and it was clear. Hagaru was only four miles to the south, and unless the Chinese had a block on the road, they’d make it easy. He might even punch through a block, if he could get air support, or an artillery barrage from the other end.

The captain checked his perimeter, and told his platoon leaders, and his sergeants, that the company was moving out. It was almost full light when he came to the Second Platoon, which had held the crucial point, the only road out, the night before, and had not been relieved since. It was just as he got there that the crew of a fifty-calibre machine gun swiveled the weapon, and waited, tense. On the road from the village, Mackenzie saw a figure walking, a figure with a rifle slung under his arm, insouciant as a hunter in the woods when the dogs range far.