Pete Hamill - Loving Women

The Marines shot them and shot them and shot them and they still kept comin. They was blood all over the snow and they still kept coming. One crazy fuckin Marine, his bolt froze and he stands up and throws the rifle at them and they shot him through the belly. And then they were on us, only nine of us left on that fuckin hill, and they wasn’t time to help the wounded, all you could do was try to live. So we fight them with everything. Trenchin tools. Spades. Knives. Bayonets. Them frozen fuckin unshootable fuckin guns .

Then one of their bugles blows and they all start to leave. Like that. Whoever that fuckin horn player was, I loved his ass. They was wounded guys everywhere and I did what I cud. The morphine Syrettes was frozen. The fuckin plasma froze and then the plasma bottles started explodin from the cold. We had fifty-four guys wounded, and a bunch of other guys dead. We went to scavenge among the dead Chinese for weapons. I almost shit when I saw what they had. They were fightin us with 1903 Springfields. We had the latest guns and they froze in that cold. They were fightin us with the equal of a bow and arrow. And kickin ass. Right then and there, I wanted to run. We all did. Just get off that goddamned hill and go somewhere. But we cuddin go anywhere. The orders were to hold the hill to keep the road open, down below us in the valley. That was it. Wait for reinforcements .

So we drag the Chinese bodies over and make a wall out of them and we fill sleeping bags with snow and lay them out on the slopes. The wind was blowing hard and it was colder. And that night they came again with their bugles and we just kept shootin and shootin. We shot them while they were bayonetin the sleepin bags. And we shot them when they came close to overrunnin us again. We just kept shootin. I think I shot nineteen of them. I never did see one of their faces. And then, just like that, they went away again. And an hour later here comes some more Marines, fifty, a hundred of them, another outfit cut off and fightin its way out. They were as fucked up as we were. It gets lighter, day coming, the sky gray as steel. An air-drop comes over at dawn and drops ammo and food and drugs, all we need, and I shoot up the worst wounded with morphine and bandage the others .

The Chinese stayed away a whole day and I began to think: maybe I’m gonna live. Cause for three fuckin days, I knew I was gonna die up there. Just knew it. And then I did die. Just let myself die. Knowing there was nothing to do about it. But now I got to thinking I was gonna live, and for the first time I got scared. Before I was just do in. Now I was think in. And I was afraid, I didn’t want to die, didn’t want to feel it, wanted to live and go home and play music and get laid. I didn’t want to freeze in my own piss, or wait for the fuckin Chinese to come and kill me. I heard later that’s what they did in their army. Fight two days, rest one. But we didn’t know that up on that goddamned hill. We shivered. We ate crackers. We ate snow. We waited to hear the Chinese bugles .

Then we hear we are leavin. A strategic withdrawal, they called it. Advancin in another direction, some Marine said later. But everyone knew it was a retreat. All up and down the line, the Chinese had beat the shit out of us and we were pullin out. We wunt going to the Yalu, we wunt going to fuckin China, no matter what MacArthur said. We were gettin the fuck out of there. And they was only one road, one way out, and we knew it and so did the Chinese. Somehow we buried the dead. Eighty-five of them. Still up there at Yudam. The men from Fox Company of the second Battalion of the Seventh Regiment. Still in Korea. Forever .

So we start out, with some trucks below us now on the road and more trucks comin and more and more fucked-up Marines staggerin outta the hills. We strap some of the worst wounded across the radiators of the trucks to keep them from freezin to death. Sometimes we cuddin tell who was dead and who was alive. You cuddin get a pulse, it was so fuckin cold. We cuddin change their dressins either. So right off, I learn that if the guy’s eyes move, he’s alive. If the eyes don’t move, fuck him, leave him .

The guys who were walking had diarrhea and they eyes was crazy but they kept movin. They wanted to live. To fuckin live. To get off the ice, to get to the warm, to go home. I cuddin feel my own feet. I just kept movin them. Tokin to them, sayin move, mothafucker, like Stepin fuckin Fetchit. Keep goin, feet, get me to the promised land, keep me alive.… We had some of the wounded on trucks on top of parachutes, tied on with primer cord. And we come to a bridge and start over and then the fuckin bridge collapsed. We all back up, but one truck went into the river. A half-frozen river, full of ice. And two of these crazy mothafuckin Marines dive into the river and rescued those guys. Cut em loose from the primer cord. Drug em up on the bank. Let them live. That’s why nobody can tell me no shit about Marines, man. I mean, I don’t take no crap from them, specially some rearguard asshole pullin guard duty in Florida. But I don’t give them no shit either. They dive into frozen rivers, man .

We got close to Hagaru on December third. That was a pretty good-size town. It was snowing like a bitch and we stop on a hill just outside the town. Then, through the snow, we see planes on a runway and an American flag and tents and trucks and so we know, shit, we fuckin made it, we might actually fuckin live. And then those crazy mothafuckin Marines got in drill formation. All shot up and hurt and frozen. And they march into that town, countin fuckin cadence. One captain had most of his fuckin jaw shot off. He had so many bandages around his head he looked like a mummy. But he walked, man . Marching. In step. Proud. The crazy mothafuckin Marines .

I dint even know I was shot till then. Frostbite, dehydration, shot in the left thigh, the hip. I don’t remember nothin about how that happened. I for shitsure wunt trying to be no hero. I was just trying to live, even that real bad coldass night I was sure I died. Yeah, I killed some guys. I must of. I don’t know how many. I dint take no names. I was just shooting, like every other poor mothafucka on the hill .

You think that changed me? Bet your sweet ofay ass it did. I come home knowin I wunt ever gonna take shit again. Never gonna be the white man’s nigger. Even if that meant everybody makes me to be a troublemaker. I went to Korea. I did my so-called fuckin duty to America. Nobody gonna tell me how to live anymore. No cracker. No bowin an scrapin Uncle Tom black man. Nobody. Whether they like it or not, whether you like it or not, I’m an American and I’m gonna start livin like one. I got six months to go in the Navy. In September I go to school somewhere, on the GI Bill, a free man. Music school .

Somewhere warm .

Somewhere hot .

The rain was over when I went out into the night to find my way to the barracks. I felt gorged: with food and with Eden; with this newer, raunchier, dirtier, music; with the intimate opening into the lives of what I still called Negroes. I was full of images of the frozen dead in Korea too. And with the rich loamy smell of the wet earth.

I walked along the footpaths and as the clouds moved on, I could see the stars. Men my age had died because plasma froze in bottles, but I was alive. Men slept here in these barracks, wifeless and womanless, but I had found Eden Santana. I felt as if I could reach out and gather the stars in my hand, pack them loosely like some cosmic snowball and release them again into the universe.