The Drifters (70 page)

The word which best symbolized Harvey Holt was patriotism, both in its ugly sense and in its best. He could not abide living in the United States, yet he loved the country and all it stood for: ‘By and large, it’s the best nation on earth, and if you can’t trust us, you can’t trust anybody.’ If you had asked him at seventeen why he wanted to enlist in the marines, he would have mumbled something about his country’s being in trouble. If you had asked why he acted as he had at Iwo Jima or Okinawa, he would have offered some incoherent answer about his nation and peril. And when I wanted an explanation as to why he was chucking a good job with UniCom to fight in Korea, he told me, ‘Who can rest easy if his country’s at war?’ And now, even though he did not understand the trouble in Vietnam too clearly, he supported our government and felt that Eisenhower and Kennedy had known what they were doing, but he wasn’t too sure about Johnson.

It was his opinion that a solid stint with the marines would be good for any young man, and he wished that more of the contemporary generation could spend some time with Sergeant Schumpeter: ‘He’d knock some sense into their heads.’

But his patriotism stopped short of blind subservience. It tended that way, but his shattering experience in Korea dispelled any idea he might have had that those who happen to be in command are always right.

The disaster began in late November of 1950 when his marine outfit started a triumphal march north from Hungnam
to the Chinese border. The North Korean army was in confusion, and our high command believed that if the marines could compress it against the reservoirs in the north, they could destroy it and the Koreans would have to surrender. There was even confident talk that the war would be cleaned up by Christmas.

But as the march proceeded, Holt became increasingly apprehensive. He was then a full lieutenant, and kept warning his captain, ‘You know, Sergeant Schumpeter would be sick if he ever saw this marching order.’

‘And who the hell is Sergeant Schumpeter?’

‘Boot camp.’

‘He probably knew a lot about drill, but this is war.’

‘He also knew a lot about war.’

Holt got nowhere with his warning, and this annoyed him, for he could see that his marines had to be headed for trouble. He was so concerned that he insisted upon speaking with the major and then the colonel.

He said, ‘I don’t want my marines spread so thin that one man can’t see the man ahead of him. The enemy could infiltrate us so easy …’ He was assured that the high command, both in Japan and Korea, knew what it was doing, that this was the final push and that with luck they’d have the North Koreans backed up to the reservoirs within six days.

‘What about the Chinese?’ he asked. They told him that intelligence had the Chinese problem under control, but when he returned to his men and found them even more strung out than when he left, he remembered Sergeant Schumpeter’s dictum that troops had to be kept compact, especially when moving into country that the enemy had recently held, so he tried to bring his front men back and his rear men forward, in order to maintain some semblance of cohesion, but when he had completed this move, a major stormed up and yelled, ‘Goddammit, Holt, you’re creating big gaps front and back. Now forget your own little problem and get these troops back into position.’

Holt had obeyed, but when he reviewed his men he found that it took him more than thirty minutes to run from the lead man to the tail. Few of his marines could see their buddies fore or aft, and as for enemy infiltration, he told me later, ‘Infiltration? Hell, the Chinese could have marched a company of men right across the heart of
our company, if they had spaced themselves. As a matter of fact, that’s what they did.’

‘How were you sure they were Chinese?’

‘Intelligence, of course, were sure they weren’t. But if you march straight at a country’s border, isn’t it natural for that country to send its troops south?’

At dusk on the fifth day, when Holt was numb with anxiety, the Chinese infiltrators struck, precisely as he knew they would, and because the marines were so strung out, so incapable of supporting one another, the slaughter was sickening. If ever in the history of American arms our leadership betrayed our foot soldiers, it was during this march north to the reservoirs. Our marines were thown blindly against an enemy that had not been identified, located, estimated or prepared against. Our men were forced to march in indefensible dispositions, with inadequate support, inadequate food, inadequate ammunition. It was not a gamble of great dimension which, if it had succeeded, would have led to some great triumph; it was sheer stupidity enforced by blind arrogance, and it collapsed in tragedy as it was destined to do from the first.

Holt once told me at Don Muang, when I met him after an upland trip through Thailand, ‘Marines like me were taught to think of the Chinese as skinny, weak-willed little guys from Canton who ate rice and ran laundries. The official doctrine was that one marine was equal to ten gooks. Well, the Chinese we met at the reservoirs were from the north. They ate meat and potatoes. They weren’t skinny. They weren’t weak-willed. And God knows, they weren’t little. In the first fights they kicked the shit out of us. Now grant they had every advantage. They were in compact formations and we were spread all over the landscape, but they licked us … they licked us very bad.’

It was against these big, well-fed northern Chinese that Harvey Holt performed one of the gallant acts of the Korean War. In weather that had turned bitter cold, with snow falling and supplies nonexistent, he gathered his shattered company in a low cover of trees, made a brutal assessment of their capacity—‘No food, no water, no ammunition, no heavy guns, no captain, no communication with headquarters, no plan’—and by sheer guts led them south for eleven days, holding them together, avoiding combat with the Chinese wherever possible, and inspiring
them with the belief that they could make it back to Hungnam and the boats that would evacuate them.

It was an ordeal. A newspaperman, who came upon the unit when it was one day out of Hungnam, wrote a glowing account of the bravery these men were exhibiting even then. He could only guess what it must have been like farther north. When the high command heard what Holt had accomplished they made him a captain on the spot, and every man among the survivors applauded. There was not one who said, ‘Aw, he didn’t know his ass from his elbow. He was lucky.’ They knew that Holt had known. It was of this experience that he once told me, ‘I owe my life to Sergeant Schumpeter,’ for apparently when the days and nights of retreat became intolerable—truly more than a man could bear—he had recalled the bellowed advice of Schumpeter: ‘Keep your men together. Keep to the high ground even if it kills you. In freezing weather wrap a cloth about your breechlock at night. Don’t bother to melt snow to drink it. Eat the snow. You’ll get the water.’ And so on, through that litany of accumulated experience that runs a straight line back to Hannibal and Scipio.

When memory of the disaster had faded, masked as much as possible by clever propaganda releases, the agencies of public opinion swung into action to convert the Hungnam retreat into a victory. The riposte of a marine colonel was widely broadcast: ‘Retreat, hell. We’re advancing in a new direction.’ Even a movie was made with that title, its flamboyant heroism sparking a new faith in the marines. It now became fashionable to speak of the retreat as a glorious feat of arms, planned for in advance and proving the superiority of American troops.

Holt knew different. It was a disaster, a crushing defeat. An ill-led and ill-prepared American army had been overwhelmed by a well-led and well-prepared Chinese army, and if there was glory in the affair, one had to fall back upon strange definitions to substantiate it. Heroism, yes. Glory, no. Unless there is glory in completely botching a job and escaping with more men than chance would have dictated.

In later years Holt tried to get his Korean experience into focus. The fact that it had been so sorely mismanaged did not disqualify the marines. They were following orders, and although they did look pathetic when the
Chinese hit, they had quickly reestablished themselves and had even shown a certain grandeur in their ability to absorb defeat and still withdraw in order and not in rout. In Holt’s reappraisal the ordinary marines did not suffer.

The high command, both marine in Korea and army in Japan, were subjected to severe criticism at first, for Holt, at the lieutenant’s level, had easily foreseen what was going to happen, what had to happen, and he thought it strange that the high-powered intelligence types had been blind to the inevitabilities. He blamed them principally.

General MacArthur came in for no blame whatever: ‘He was back in Tokyo and had to rely on what intelligence told him.’ I asked whether MacArthur could have known that the marines were marching north into the jaws of three hundred thousand enemy in single-file formation, with thirty yards between men. ‘A general can’t know everything. I don’t fault MacArthur. It was like when Humphrey Bogart guided his boat into those weeds with the leeches. He couldn’t be expected to know everything.’

Then, as time passed, Holt looked back upon the Hungnam catastrophe as a minor incident that overtakes armies and nations: ‘We pulled out of it.’ In fact, when the Vietnam war escalated, he made a great effort to get an active assignment, but was informed that he was too old for his rank. He told me once that he thought of the whole Vietnam war as an overgrown Hungnam miscalculation. ‘Something went wrong somewhere, but a few good men could straighten it out.’ If he had not had his experience with the incompetence of Hungnam, he would surely have blamed Vietnam solely on the politicians, as did most of the other tech reps. Holt, having seen for himself what could happen with even the best intentions, was not so sure.

Why, in my travels, did I go out of my way to see Harvey Holt? Why, of all the tech reps I worked with, was he the one who captivated my interest?

The reason was bizarre. I first met Holt, as I have said, at Yesilkoy in 1954, just after his wife had stormed out of Turkey. Since his quarters were empty, he offered me a bedroom while I peddled World Mutual to other technicians
in the Constantinople area; and one day when I was about to take my shower, I ran into Holt leaving the bathroom with a towel about his middle. Across his chest I saw a vivid scar. It looked as if a jagged streak of lightning had struck and seared itself into position. Normally one ignores the wounds of others, uncertain as to how the wounded will react to questioning, but this was so conspicuous, so fearsome you might say, that I had to speak.

‘You get it in Korea?’

‘Nope. Pamplona. Last year.’

This stopped me, and Holt obviously intended saying nothing more, but then a flash of memory came to my assistance. ‘Isn’t that the town in northern Spain that Hemingway wrote about?’

‘Yep.’

‘You mean a bull did that?’

‘Yep.’ And that was all he said that day, but a couple of evenings later, when a friend of his had some Spanish records he wanted transferred to tape, and when the garish trumpets and flourishes had died away, Holt said, ‘We were putting in a Big Rally III at Portela, and in late June some of the men who had been in Portugal for a couple of years asked me if I was going up to Pamplona for the running of the bulls. I’d never heard of the place, but they made it sound so interesting that I said I’d like to go along, but I didn’t want any part of running in front of bulls. “Hell,” they said, “we never touch the bulls. We check in at Bar Vasca and stay drunk for eight days and listen to music and watch other damned fools run with the bulls. That’s for idiots.”

‘So I went to Pamplona, and I checked in at Bar Vasca and listened to the music, and for three mornings I watched others run before the bulls, and on the fourth morning—why, I’ll never know—I was there in the narrow street as the bulls thundered past me. On the eighth morning a big Pablo Romero caught me right in the chest. But for horn wounds, Pamplona has the best doctors in the world. They get practice.’ Instinctively he pressed his right hand against his shirt to feel the ridges of scar left by the operation.

After that first experience with Pamplona, Holt’s contract with UniCom had provided that his vacation begin on July 1. On that day he would report to the nearest airfield
and fly to Rome, which he considered the best city in the world. Perched in the lovely square that faces the ancient church of Santa Maria in Trastevere, he would waste two days watching the stately vaudeville show of tourists, priests, cadgers, pretty girls, gigolos and harassed waiters. Late in the afternoon of July 3 he would fly to Madrid, where I would be waiting, for after my initiation in 1958, I, too, became addicted to Pamplona and the ridiculous hilarity of Bar Vasca. On the Fourth of July, Holt would report formally to the American embassy, where he would sign the book and present his respects to the ambassador. That night we would go to bed early, so that on the fifth we could rise before dawn, take our last warm bath for a long time, pack our rented car and be on our way by sunrise.

We planned our arrival in Pamplona for late afternoon, so that we could have our pick of rooms at Bar Vasca—not that any of them were any good—and on the sixth we would sit in the public square and watch the fireworks and meet old friends from all parts of Europe. Five-thirty on the morning of the seventh all hell would break loose from the marching bands assembled in the plaza before Bar Vasca, at which Holt would carefully climb out of bed and stand before the clothes which he had laid out with neat care the night before: tennis shoes, white pants, red belt, white shirt, red scarf. Clad in this historic costume he would go forth to meet the bulls.