Pat Frank - Hold Back the Night

Couzens thought he must be mad. Then he remembered. The Korean national anthem, their song of unity and freedom, was written to the tune of “Auld Lang Syne.” It was absurd, but it was true. It was their “Star-Spangled Banner,” their “God Save the King,” their “Marine Hymn,” their “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” their “Dixie.” They had fought the Japs to this song, and particularly in this wild and rangy country, which military strategists called a “redoubt area,” they had fought, and never ceased fighting, the conquerors. Now Couzens realized they were fighting the new conquerors, the Communists, with this same song. Dog Company was being serenaded into battle with a song of freedom, but quietly, quietly, so Couzens knew the enemy was not far distant. The enemy would be at the crossing.

Five hundred yards from the crossing, short of the first house of the village, Mackenzie halted his main body, and prepared either to support the patrol, if Couzens met light resistance, or to flee if the company was out-gunned and out-numbered. He scrambled up a rise alongside the road, sat down on a rock, and brought out his field glasses. “Come up here with me, sergeant,” he called to Ekland. When Ekland came up beside him he said, “I want you to see Couzens work. Watch him work this patrol.”

A ragged boy darted from the door of one of the houses and grabbed at Couzens’ arm. “’Ello, Joe,” he said. He was no larger than a boy of nine, but he was probably thirteen, and excitement and intelligence shone out of his eyes.

“Hi, Kim,” said Couzens, halting. All the little boys of Korea—the boys that the Army and the Marines adopted and fed and made their mascots—were named Kim. Couzens knew an American column had passed through this village before, although in the opposite direction.

“Joe, they up there!” The boy pointed.

“How many?”

The boy did not understand the words, but he understood the question, for it was the natural question for an American officer to ask. He didn’t know the word for the answer. He held up nine fingers.

“Nine?” said Couzens. That would be par for the course. That would be a squad.

“Nine,” the boy mimicked, shaking his nine fingers at Couzens.

“They got mortars?” Couzens extended his forearm at a forty-five degree angle and added, “Poom!”

The boy shook his head, no. “Macines!” he said. “Marines!” The boy held an imaginary sub-machine gun in his hands and swept the street with it, saying, “Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah,” just like the small fry of America, destroying gangsters, or Indians, or spies, or Men from Mars in their radio-stimulated world of dreams.

“Thanks, Kim,” said Couzens. He rested the butt of his rifle on the glazed dirt, and removed a glove, and fished in an inside pocket until he found two bars of chocolate. These he gave to the boy.

The boy said, “Thanks, Joe. I come.”

“Get the hell out of here!” said Couzens, smiling and aiming an imaginary kick at the boy, and the boy grinned and scuttled back into the house, where a woman’s face waited anxiously.

All this Mackenzie saw through his glasses, and while of course he could not hear the words, he interpreted the pantomime accurately. He could even reconstruct the dialogue. He chuckled, and explained it to Ekland.

Now that Couzens knew the strength and location and armament of the enemy, he could make a plan. He walked back to the jeep, and called in his flankers, and said, “They’re at the crossing—nine of ’em. They don’t have mortars. All they’ve got is burp guns. Now they’ve probably got three men out on sentry duty and the others are probably in the station shack at the crossing, keeping warm.” At a flag stop like this there was always a frame shack, built by the Japanese when they laid down the line, to serve as a freight and passenger depot.

“Now the thing to do,” Couzens went on, “is kill the six men in the shack first. Then pick up the strays. That calls for surprise.”

Couzens’ bazooka man, Jack Kavanaugh, said, “Well, if this jeep pokes its head outside the village, so they can see it from the crossing, there won’t be a helluva lot of surprise.”

“You win the eighteen thousand in cash and prizes, Jack,” said the lieutenant. “I was going to get to that. You and me and Cohen are going to hit the shack, and Seitner and Flynn are going to have the jeep behind the last house on the street—the two-story house. See it, Seitner?”

“I see it, sir,” Seitner said.

“Well, you and Flynn stay behind it until Kavanaugh opens up with the bazook. Then you two whip out and take care of the watch.”

“Yessir.”

“We go quietly, Jack,” Couzens said to Kavanaugh, the bazooka man. “You and me and Cohen. We go real quiet and we don’t do any shooting until you get that bazook on the shack.”

So Couzens and Kavanaugh and Cohen, a rifleman, stalked the shack. Smoke came out of the shack’s chimney. They were in there, all right. Couzens led, stalking the shack carefully as if he sought deer in Palm Valley. He never took a step until he was sure where that step would carry him.

On the slope five hundred yards behind, Mackenzie said, “Watch this. It’ll be wonderful.” And he passed the glasses to Ekland.

When Couzens was a hundred yards from the shack he eased to the ground, and took a prone position that was correct for a target range. He brought his rifle to his shoulder, and balanced it delicately, and then with a half wave of his arm, motioned to Kavanaugh to fire. A rocket left the bazook and the shack heaved and smoke poured out of it. One figure came out of the door, legs churning, and Couzens’ first bullet met him before he had taken two steps. The man writhed on the snow in front of the door and Couzens shot him again. Through the head. Couzens patted his rifle.

Couzens waited for others, but they did not come, and he motioned to Cohen and Cohen charged. He charged bent far over and with shoulders hunched as men do who do not want to get hit before they can use the bayonet. He looked awkward, but he moved fast. He went through the door like a sixteen-inch shell. Nothing happened. Nothing at all. There were no shots, and in seconds Cohen appeared again, beckoning.

Couzens ran to the shack. Inside were two dead from the bazook. One was dead outside. That left six. Where were they?

Five hundred yards back, on the slope above the road, Ekland stood up and screamed and shouted, for he had seen a disastrous thing. Tiny black objects had fallen from the second floor of the house on the far end of the street. They were grenades, and they had fallen upon the jeep hiding behind this house, and the jeep had exploded and was burning. Ekland and Mackenzie jumped down the slope and into the jeeps. Mackenzie yelled, “Let’s go!”

When the grenades exploded behind, in the village, Couzens guessed what had happened. His logic had been wrong, all wrong. The squad of Chinese assigned to guard the crossing had not maintained normal security. Instead of having three men out on watch, and six in the shack, which they should have done if they were good soldiers, they had assumed there was no enemy in the area. After all, had they not only to listen to the radio to know the Americans were defeated?

So the Chinese had been lax. Their watch on the crossing consisted of three men, and these three Couzens had destroyed. But they kept six men back in the village, sleeping and resting and eating in comfort. The house in which they bivouacked was easy to spot, because the jeep, its spare gas cans alight, blazed under it, giving out many colors of smoke. Couzens knew that Seitner and Elynn were probably dead.

And he knew that his calculations had been wrong. He had failed again. He had failed Mackenzie.