The Vicar of Christ

By Walter F. Murphy

The New York Times Bestseller is now available in modern digital formats, featuring a new Foreword by Justice Samuel Alito. This book has been considered an unusual, fascinating, and well-written observation of the life of a man who was first a war hero and Medal of Honor winner from the Korean War, then Chief Justice of the United States, later a monk, and finally elected Pope: Pope Francis I. His exciting life is described by three men who 'knew him well.' The first narrator is a Marine, telling of their time together in Korea. A constitutional scholar and Supreme Court Justice, appalled at the new Chief Justice, narrates the second phase. The third is a Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church: fat, kind, but distracted. The Marine cares for him the most, the Supreme Court Justice condescends and despises him, and the Cardinal is much more interested in food than his subject. But Declan Walsh was a man who earned the Medal of Honor while ordering the death of friends, ruled pragmatically and energetically on the Court but lost his way to death and neglect, and became a miraculous healer, assassinated for challenging the powers that rule the secular world.

New ebook edition features proper formatting, active and detailed Table of Contents, and linked notes and URLs in Justice Samuel Alito's extensive and substantive Foreword.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Quid Pro, LLC
• Release date: Jan 18, 2015
• ISBN: 9781610272537

Walter F. Murphy

Novelist and long-time professor of constitutional law at Princeton, Walter F. Murphy authored The Roman Enigma, Upon This Rock, and the New York Times bestselling novel The Vicar of Christ. His much-cited nonfiction works include Elements of Judicial Strategy and Congress and the Court.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

Papa Francesco was dead. I could do no more than pick out those few words from the Greek but the church bells and chanting monks dolefully confirmed what little I could translate from the radio. For the second time in twelve months, the Roman Catholic church had lost its ruler. How he had died was drowned in a garble of words that flowed as softly and swiftly as ouzo from a tipped bottle. I would not know any more until the next afternoon when the boat brought the Daily American from Rome or the International Herald Tribune from Geneva.

I can still remember exactly the thoughts that flashed across my mind when I understood what the radio was saying. It was a vivid recollection of the remark of a woman I had known in Torino, in the north of Italy. Now an ardent Communist, she marked her descent from centuries of Lombard Protestants, proud survivors of the holocaust of the Albigensian crusade. I can still hear her tell her young son the news of Papa Francesco’s election: See, Bambino, how sly those priests are! Now they even choose a good man to be il Papa! They will kill him, you watch.

How she or most people outside of the United States knew that Papa Francesco was a good man, escaped me. RAI, the state-owned television network to which we had been listening that noon, offered precious few details other than that he had been a simple monk. They will kill him, she had said.

They had now fulfilled her prophecy, whoever they were.

I walked down among the small whitewashed cottages toward the beach. I have always thought most clearly at the water’s edge. I wanted to absorb the news there, in the cool breeze of late afternoon. Before I had gone a hundred paces, however, I knew that I had already decided what I had to do—what I must do. Nevertheless, I walked for a half hour, occasionally looking up at the mountain that held the cave where John the Apostle, possibly mad from thirst, had received his visions of the Apocalypse.

John’s nightmares had been horrible fantasies; mine had been less horrible but real, as I suspected Papa Francesco’s had been. During the last few months I had found here in the simple life of Patmos some of the same sort of peace that must have once nourished Francesco when he was a monk. And yet, one recalls Aristotle: Happiness is for pigs. Eventually, Francesco’s conscience—or perhaps his personal devil—had compelled him to return to the world that had created his nightmares. I, too, now felt obliged, compelled, to return and resume my trade (for a writer a sabbatical becomes, after a while, a dry rot) to reenter a universe of psychoanalyzing, belittling, trivializing cynics who, for generations before Papa Francesco, had not seen (or perhaps had not recognized) a figure of truly heroic proportions, a man of great energy and intellect with the moral as well as the physical courage to try to change all our worlds. The compulsive need to learn, to understand, and to explain was once more riding my shoulders, dominating my life, as if it were the spirit of Papa Francesco himself, gasping out its last earthly commands.

PART I

SILK

HAT

SIX

our fear

does not have the face of a dead man

the dead are gentle to us

we carry them on our shoulders

sleep under the same blanket

close their eyes

adjust their lips

pick a dry spot

and bury them

not too deep

not too shallow

―ZBIGNIEW HERBERT

Our Fear

ONE

I know, you want to talk to me about those two articles I did for Leatherneck. I don’t mind. I got time I ain’t never used yet. And sitting around a frigging old soldiers’ home doesn’t give me a lot of jollies. I don’t like talking into those tape gismos, but if it’s for the colonel I’ll go along.

Okay, from the top: I’m Master Gunnery Sergeant Giuseppe Michelangelo Guicciardini, Jr., USMC retired. My father was born in Florence—Firenze, he always called it, like he always made me pronounce my middle name Meekelangelo. He was proud to become an American citizen, but he was proud of Florence, too, and of Michelangelo, and of the Italian language. I guess I was a disappointment to the old guy. He was a gardener, really a frustrated architect, and he wanted me to go to college and study art or architecture or something. But how the hell could a poor, skinny wop kid in Boston go to college in 1936? Especially a kid who had four little sisters and two little brothers? So I enlisted in the Marine Corps. Hell, there weren’t many other ways I could get chow, clothes, a bunk, spending money, and even a few bucks to send home.

I don’t mean the old man wasn’t happy when I got my promotions or when I won the Navy Cross on Guadalcanal. Maybe he blamed me just a little because Raffaello enlisted in the corps after Pearl Harbor and bought it trying to get ashore at Tarawa, or because I never got married and gave him grandchildren. But the old man got his grandchildren from the girls. Christ, he got the little bastards up the Yingyang, seventeen of the little turds, and a college son in Niccolo, though not until after the war. Niccolo is a lawyer now and in politics; he’s good but he’s never gone far, not with him having to fight both those snotty Back Bay bastards and the Irish Mafia.

But you don’t want me to bang your ear about myself. You want to know about the colonel, Declan Walsh. Everybody does. That’s why I could peddle those articles in Leatherneck. Well, I knew him since Christ was a corporal. We were in the Old Crotch together. First time I met him was back in 1944 when he was a fresh-faced lieutenant, a second lieutenant at that. He’d been to law school for a year or two so he was a little older than most of the lieutenants. But twenty-two is young, especially for guys who are just about to die. I was part of the permanent—so I thought—personnel at the replacement command at Camp Pendleton. He was just another piece of gold-barred Jap bait waiting to be shipped out for the Fifth Division. We didn’t have a shitpot full of captains and first lieutenants then—too few made it past second lieutenant, for one thing—so we just picked every seventh or eighth second lieutenant and made him a company commander for a couple of hundred replacements. Walsh was one of those poor bastards. I don’t know who got the rawer deal, the lieutenants or the snuffies.

Just before this replacement draft left, my name got tacked on the list. I never found out exactly why, but I knew the official reason. Maybe the real reason was because the Old Man had warned me a couple of times about playing cards with officers. I knew all the official crap about officers and enlisted men—even senior NCO’s—getting too close socially, and I generally respected the rule. But, shit, when an officer, especially a bachelor second lieutenant, makes up his mind to lose his wad, I’ve always felt it was my duty to help. After all, part of a senior NCO’s job is training young officers, and you can learn a hell of a lot about military tactics from poker and cribbage.

I didn’t bitch about being shipped out. I’d been wounded on Bougainville, bounced around by a mortar shell and slipped a frigging disc in my back. After an operation in Australia I’d been shipped back to the States in the fall of ’43. The list of dead friends that got longer every few months had me ready to go back and nail a few more Japs’ asses to the barn. I was a bachelor, and the corps was all I had except for an occasional broad, if you know what I mean.

The official reason I was shipped out in ’44 was that Walsh’s first sergeant had appendicitis. So I replaced a replacement. I liked Walsh. Sure, I used to kid him then about hating second lieutenants and that the Crotch ought to abolish the rank. I’ve kidded all my lieutenants that way, but I really respect those guys. Some of them are wise little turds, but they’re the first to get clobbered. The casualty rates show that—better than nine out of ten of the poor bastards who were rifle platoon leaders in combat got killed or wounded in World War II. The figures were a little lower in Korea. I don’t know about Vietnam. I’d retired by then.

Walsh was something different. He was a tall kid, well built and sort of blondish—not straw but kind of light brown and the short GI haircut made it look lighter. I remember his eyes, real cool grey eyes. He smiled a lot and his eyes sort of, you know, sparkled, but there wasn’t the kind of warmth there that you’d expect from his voice or his smile. I don’t mean they were cruel eyes, or mean, or anything like that, just sort of cool, like he was always sizing you up or something.

I liked him, right off. I suppose it was because he could speak Italian better than I could, and liked to talk about Italy. His father had been with the American embassy, and Walsh had grown up in Rome and Dublin. I guess that’s why he spoke English funny—not with a foreign accent exactly, but with a different cadence, kind of like one of those light Irish brogues, going up at the end of sentences.

I liked him but I didn’t quite trust him, at least not for a long time. I can’t explain it exactly. He was always square with me and the troops, you know. He spent a good chunk of his time on that twenty-two-day boat ride trying to make life more bearable for the poor snuffies up in the bow. That damned liberty ship went after every wave in the Pacific. Up in the air, then kerchunk, slapping down again. The troops were stacked five high in canvas bunks, the frigging hatches closed most of the night—and during the day whenever there was a sub or air alert—hotter than a camel’s ass in the Sahara, with kids puking their guts out plus the smell of garbage cooking in the galleys and perfume from shit-filled toilets that wouldn’t flush. It was a dirty, stinking hole, like being locked up on a hot day in a room with Elizabeth—Elizabeth, New Jersey, that is.

You couldn’t do much with more than 200 men crowded together in that rolling shithouse. But Walsh tried, and he did a little good. For instance, there was that business of the water. A day out of Diego Town, the ship put the troops on water hours. Piss, shit, wash, and drink at set hours, morning, noon, and night. Too bad about the rest of the time, just cross your legs. The frigging ship’s crew had water all the time—the pog navy takes care of its own bastards, but they screw anybody else within range. Well, Walsh spent a lot of time up in the wardroom looking over diagrams of the ship and found a water line that ran behind a bulkhead in our area. After a little hacksaw surgery on the ship, we had water for three full days before the frigging anchorheads found out.

That was good sign, but there was bad sign, too, like the kid who got hold of some booze the morning we were set to leave Camp Pendleton for the boat ride. This snuffy—I don’t even remember what the shitbird looked like, now—came staggering into the company office, and one of the NCO’s tried to steer him back out. Well, the kid hauls off with a roundhouse right that starts back somewhere around the Mississippi River. The NCO has no trouble slipping under the punch, and two of his buddies grab the kid and start to haul him back to the barracks.

But the door to the CO’s office is open, and the lieutenant sees the whole bit. He walks out slow and calm, never raises his frigging voice or anything. But when we march through a piece of San Diego on the way to the ship, with everybody watching, there’s the poor snuffy, marching between two MP’s, obviously under arrest.

That was a rough way to handle it. Striking an officer or an NCO is serious business, but the kid missed; and he was too shit-faced drunk to know what he was doing. War is mostly head down, ass up, picking crap up off the deck; but to march off to war with your head high and crowds cheering takes a little of the sting out of it. The kid missed that. I hope he isn’t buried on one of those frigging islands out there.

Sure, I know, a tough streak’s no bad thing in an officer. Without it he’d be psycho the first time he’d have to order somebody to move out and get his ass blown off. But, you know, you got to ease off just a little bit, maybe look the other way once in a while. Tough ain’t mean.

Well, I said there was good sign and bad sign. There was also some sign I couldn’t read at all. Like, that tub didn’t have a Catholic chaplain, so Walsh read prayers for the Catholics on the three Sundays we were on board; I went each time. I usually didn’t go to church in those days, but I went then because I’ve always gone to the curious—what’s the word?—exotic things, like a little exhibition in Cuba and China and the Med. Now don’t get me wrong. I’m a Catholic—sort of—and I respect religion and all that stuff. Besides, most of the stories you hear about marines and wild living are a crock of shit; just put it down to too much beer talking. Hell, what got me there was that I’d never seen a Holy Joe with a marine’s gold bars on his collar.

The first time I went I was thinking of the time a couple of days before when we had to show the troops a VD movie. Now that was a frigging waste of time. Those poor kids weren’t likely to see a woman of screwing age for a couple of years, unless they got wounded and shipped back. But the brass had a schedule of such stuff, and the CO was supposed to follow up the movie with a heart-to-heart talk with the boys—just the sort of thing some frigging Back Bay lady in Boston would dream up when she was playing with herself in the bathtub. Can you imagine a heart-to-heart talk about sex with a pack of horny nineteen-year-old kids who know the odds are damned high they’re going to get their balls blown off in a few weeks? Well, the movie was a pretty gory show, full color with cruddy whores, crabs, chancres, and dorks getting reamed out-—we hadn’t found out about penicillin curing syph yet; or if we had, nobody was telling the troops about it. After that movie, what with the rocking of the frigging ship, and the heat below decks, everybody’s stomach was ripe and rolling. A lot of CO’s went out for fresh air and let the company pecker checker—I mean corpsman—give that stupid talk. But Walsh got up in front of the troops himself. The message is simple: Flies carry disease. Keep yours closed.

Some days he was like that. Everything was a joke, even on him. You couldn’t get a sentence out without him twisting your words around so it sounded like you were propositioning the master-at-arms or one of the corpsmen. He was funny, I guess, but sometimes that got on my nerves. He could do it in Italian, too, and that really got to me because I’d have to stop and figure it out. But it wasn’t a come closer kind of humor; it was more a put-off, a put-off in a nice way, but you knew he was saying, Don’t get close to me.

There’s more to it, but you haven’t got all your life to listen to me shoot the shit. I just had an itchy feeling about that guy. I can’t explain it, you know. Part of it, I guess, was the natural fear any NCO, especially one who’s already had his ass half shot off, has about how an officer will turn out when the shooting starts. It bugs you worse when you can’t put the guy in a neat little slot, when you know he’s as likely to turn into a wild, frigging gung ho madman as a yellow belly or a psycho case. But—shit, I guess I ought to say it—more than that I had this gut feeling that he wanted to go some place, and that he might sacrifice the whole damned world to get there. Then again he might turn into a conscientious objector and not fight at all. Most guys I could figure the odds on, like picking up a fifth heart in seven-card stud or hitting sixteen in blackjack. But the sign on Walsh pointed in cross-assed ways.

Any worry about his guts was wasted. When we reached our staging area, both of us went as replacements to the same battalion in the Fifth Division. I went as a battalion sergeant major, Walsh as a rifle platoon leader. We went ashore at Iwo Jima four days later, the first battalion on that frigging black beach. Walsh did a bang-up job getting his boys inland. It’s funny; you train men for months, drill it into their frigging heads that when they get ashore they’ve got to get their asses off that beach if they want to live. You hammer it the Christ into them to the point where if you shake them awake at night they’ll spout off about getting inland. But then as soon as those mortars start whooshing in—and on Iwo those mammy-jamming buggers really whooshed—those same snuffies will burrow in the sand like frigging turtles laying eggs, just waiting to be slaughtered. And it was awful tempting to dig in on Iwo. The area we hit was soft volcanic ash. The tanks and amtracs bogged down, and us poor grunts sunk in to our ankles, sometimes right up to our rusty dorks. Just moving was hard work.

Walsh pushed and pulled and kicked ass and shoved and led and begged and bullied so that his boys moved inland faster than most—right into machine guns, grenades, and small arms. But they moved off that beach, and most of them lived. Walsh got hit twice, once just a pinkie in the leg. I don’t think he even knew about it at the time. The second was more serious. Just as he flipped a grenade into a bunker, a machine gun in the next bunker back caught him with a tracer in his left side under the ribs. It missed anything vital, but you can bet your sweet ass it burned like hell—literally, I mean—and it did tear out part of one rib. He lay there a few minutes and then told one of his troops to throw him a Willie Peter grenade—that’s white phosphorous, and that and napalm are the two things that scared me most—and, I shit you not, a lot of things in war scared me. He lobbed that Willie Peter right into the second bunker. He didn’t say anything about being hit until after the Japs came running out coughing and smoking. He got written up for a Bronze Star that day. He earned it; but, if every gyrene got what he earned those first few days on Iwo, half the Fourth and Fifth divisions would’ve got Congo medals.

Walsh, the lucky bastard, went back to a hospital ship. I didn’t see him again for six years, not until January 1951. I’d hear a bit now and then. You know how old soldiers gossip, and the Crotch is a small outfit. He’d been discharged after V-J Day, gone back to law school, and then, somebody told me, got himself one of those fancy Ph.D.’s to go along with his law degree and was teaching at the University of Chicago. Well that fit, especially that shit about him teaching international law. I guess he was still leading the boys in prayer, sort of. Maybe I shouldn’t make fun of his rice bowl, but the only international law I ever saw was survival—and by any way at all, any frigging way a-tall.

Like I say, the next time I see Walsh is in January 1951, during the first year of the Korean War. The two of us were assigned to the same replacement draft again. I’d been at the Swamp—Camp LeJeune, I mean—and he’d just finished a refresher course at Quantico for reserve officers who’d been recalled to active duty. We met at the motel in Oceanside, just outside Camp Pendleton. He had his wife with him. Now there was some lady. She had a pretty face, but, man, she was built like a brick shithouse with both doors open.

I don’t mean any disrespect, it’s the honest to God truth and the first thing anybody noticed. She knew it, too, and could live with it. But I meant it when I said she was a great lady. The three of us lived in the motel. I didn’t feel like mixing with the troops too much before going back into a war; and I had a lot more freedom than the colonel. Everybody figures that a reserve light colonel who’s been called back needs a lot of instruction; on the other hand, nobody figures he can teach a master gunnery sergeant with fifteen plus years of regular Marine Corps much about soldiering. So I got to know Kate pretty well—I say Kate because she insisted I call her that. None of that Mrs. Colonel crap. We spent a lot of time walking the beach or sitting in a local bistro waiting for the colonel to finish playing soldier boy for the day.

They had a real thing, a lot of passion—I had the room next to theirs and the walls were pretty thin, and so I know what I’m talking about—wall-shaking passion. Of course, they’d only been married about six months. But they had a lot more going between them than the hots. There was tenderness there, too, and you don’t see much of that in the corps—or the world, for that matter. She was a bright gal, not just some bubble-headed sexpot, and she understood the colonel. If she’d been my woman, I’d have been the most careful gyrene in that whole war. I’d have worn a sandbag as a jock and never stood straight up unless I was in a hole deeper than I was tall. Well, he was a lucky man there. I don’t know that he ever realized how lucky.

Okay, so the colonel and me and a couple of dozen other people, including a guy named Keller I’ll tell you about in a minute, get flown out to Korea on a special draft at the end of January, just in time to start Operation Ripper. We’d reached another one of those turning points, as the reporters say, in the war. You remember that the North Koreans just about drove the South Koreans and the dogfaces off the peninsula in the summer of 1950. Then in September, the First Marine Division made a landing behind the enemy at Inchon, and we drove the NK’s the hell out of the south, captured their capital, and some doggies even got to the Yalu. Old Dunghead Doug MacArthur was bragging about how the Chinese wouldn’t come into the war and he’d have the boys home for Christmas. Then the Chinks came in and, with MacArthur’s having divided his command, took us on sorta one at a time. The marines got hit at the Chosin Reservoir, where it was forty below zero, and the Chinks made the mistake of surrounding one marine division with only six of theirs.

Well, we beat the shit out of those gooks, but we still had to get to the coast and sail south, because the Chinese were rolling below the 38th parallel. By Christmas, however, Old Man Winter had taken a bite out of their steam, and we were reorganizing to push north again. Operation Ripper was part of that drive. Walsh got assigned as the commanding officer of the Second Battalion, First Marines. (That means, First Marine Regiment, if you’re not familiar with our lingo.) I tailed along as the battalion sergeant major, and Walsh pulled a string or two to get this Captain Keller to come with us as the Three—operations officer, the guy who does the tactical planning—for the battalion. He’s supposed to be a major, but in a war you can’t keep stockpiles of officers around. A captain’ll do, if it pleases the battalion CO, and it did.

Now Keller I got to tell you a little bit about—Sidney Michael Keller, to be exact. He was a kook, but the kind I could understand. There’s a lot of prejudice in this world but I’ve always liked Jews, especially rich Jews who want to play poker and aren’t very good at it. Keller—he liked to call himself the Smart Money—may not have been rich by your standards, but by mine he was rolling in dough. And he loved to gamble—poker, blackjack, cribbage, anything. We’d even bet on whether we’d be attacked at night and what time. When I got back to the States I bought a big, maroon Buick Super from Keller’s losings—tax-free, too. I’ve heard since that the Smart Money was a real lover. Classy bimbos all over the place, and a new one every night. Well, he had to be lucky at something.

He and the colonel were old friends. Walsh had stayed in the reserves—how else would he have gotten an all-expenses-paid trip to that frigging mass of hills? He’d been in the Ninth Infantry Battalion that used to meet in Chicago. Keller was a student at the university and joined the marine reserves. He went to law school and met Walsh when he was teaching there. Walsh got Keller—a second lieutenant then—to come into the Ninth Battalion. Actually, Walsh was only three years older than the Smart Money, but those few years in World War II had made him a light colonel and a battalion CO at thirty-one—not unusually young, either. The oldest light colonel we had in the regiment was thirty-six and the youngest thirty. You got to remember how many marine officers are buried on those cruddy little islands across the western Pacific.

Walsh had changed a little. His humor was nastier and he was less patient, too. I had the feeling that he was really more on the make now, like maybe he had a pile driver up his ass. I guess my problem was I couldn’t dope out the kinds of dreams he had, and I still couldn’t figure out the price he was willing to pay—or get others to pay—to get those dreams.

The troops didn’t especially cotton to him at first, and they never did in the way they worshipped old Chesty Puller or Big Foot Johnson. But they respected Walsh and they’d do any frigging thing he said, when he said it. That ain’t bad, not a-tall. You tell me you’re interested in leadership. Well, from what I saw in thirty years in the Old Crotch, three things were key. First, Walsh was just so damned good at his job. It was beautiful to watch him maneuver a battalion, weaving in air strikes, mortars, artillery, and tanks. He kept a couple of hundred things in his head all at the same time. He burned up a lot of taxpayers’ money shooting off ammunition; but I shit you not when I tell you there weren’t no snuffy who could meet him outside the pearly gates and tell him, Man, if it hadn’t been for you, I’d have got here a lot later. But there would be a line of gooks from here to Richmond with that word. So, what I’m saying is that the troops can’t help but respect an officer who’s a tactical genius. They may not like his ass, but they’ll play follow the leader with him all day—and night—long. When the bullets are coming in, that’s no little thing. (Of course, I’d seen how shrewd he was when he was a second lieutenant; he’d never play poker with me.)

I’ll tell you something real interesting, too. He enjoyed himself planning that war. Now wait, I don’t mean that he liked killing people or almost being killed. I’d say he was as shit-scared as the next guy when we were getting incoming mail, and a lot more pissed off than most at being in Koh-rhea in the first place. But he was good at tactics, and he liked grabbing old Mousey Dung’s boys by the short hairs and twisting. The colonel had a lot of brains, but he didn’t run the battalion at a distance like some guru, the way a lot of CO’s do. In fact, he worked more like a coolie. He’d be up half the night going over maps—and when we had ’em, aerial photographs. He’d go over them again and again. We usually had a piece of clear plastic over the battalion’s operation map so we could mark our lines of attack and defense; the colonel’d drive the poor Smart Money up the frigging tent flaps the way he was always wiping the Smart Money’s marks off the plastic and putting fresh ones on to eyeball different ideas.

When his plans worked out—which for him was taking a hill with no casualties at all or with less than we’d had any good reason to expect—he was like a little kid the way he’d get excited. He sweated blood on those plans, and it showed in the way our kids didn’t bleed when they carried them out.

The second thing that made him a good leader was he really seemed to care about the troops. More important even, they thought he cared. It was part of the business of knowing his job and doing it better than anybody else. He wouldn’t just break his ass to find the way that’d save kids’ lives; he’d stand up on his hind legs and say go fuck yourself to the regimental CO when he told us to do something that was likely to get somebody killed for no good reason. The snuffies knew that, and they appreciated it; and they showed their appreciation the best way a snuffy can—by fighting like a wildcat with a burr up his ass.

There was also the funny business about Walsh and our dead. The troops noticed it, too, but I don’t think he ever knew that they did. After a firefight, he always went over to where we’d stacked our dead for the trucks or helicopters. He wouldn’t move the ponchos, but he’d stare at the pile. You could see he was all torn up inside. I heard one of the troops say one day that he thought the colonel might try to bring them back to life. There’s always a smart ass or two in every marine outfit.

Now, wait, I don’t mean he seemed like a saint or anything crazy like that. I told you about his humor. It was always kind of down to earth. He had a great collection of dirty jokes, like the queer bear who laid his paw on the table. I think he probably enjoyed a little nookie as much as any man, maybe more. From what I heard through the motel wall in Oceanside, there couldn’t be any doubt there, none a-tall.

Well, anyway, like I was saying, the colonel never talked about his personal life. He wouldn’t even play the game What’s the second thing you’re going to do when you get home? He’d laugh when somebody would say Take off my hat or Let go of the doorknob, but he never said anything himself. And he never let off steam by talking about how scared he was. Most of us found that helped, but he’d just pick up his map board and draw arrows or look for places artillery could fire on.

Oh yeah, I said three things were key. The third was training and learning. Now when an officer or NCO comes into an outfit as a replacement, he hasn’t had a thing to do with the people he takes over. Some other bastards, maybe a lot of them, have trained them and led them until the minute the replacement takes over. So whether they’re sharp or shitty, he can’t take any credit or blame for it. But, if he’s good, really good I mean, he can pretty frigging-A-well soon shape those guys the way he wants. But he’s got to know what he wants them to look like; and he’s got to be tough and stubborn, because chances are with marines they think they’re already hot shit.

Well, the colonel knew what he wanted, and he was tough and he was stubborn. He’d tell his staff and his company commanders what he wanted, and they knew their asses’d be in a five-foot sling if they didn’t deliver. He didn’t shout or scream or throw temper tantrums. No kid shit like that. He just laid it straight on the line what they had to do—and straight up the old Yingyang if they didn’t deliver, but a lot of praise and maybe a citation for a medal if they did an A-1 job.

That much’ll get a replacement CO pretty far pretty quick, but the colonel didn’t stop there. In Operation Ripper—which, like I say, was where he comes into my war—we didn’t have it too rough, if you don’t count it rough getting your hairy cajunes frozen off and having some gook trying to put a bullet between your horns once or twice a day. What I mean is we never had a big, pitched, bloody battle like Iwo, or Tarawa, or the Tenaru Ridge on the ’Canal. The Chinks were trying to hurt us as bad as they could without committing big chunks of their army to full battle. They’d retreat slow. Their rear guard’d stand and make us pay a few casualties for a hill, bug out quick and set up on the next hill, and then play the same little game all over again.

For each day’s operations, Regiment would give us an area to clean out and assign an objective for us to occupy, usually a hill mass a few miles north. How we did it was pretty much up to us. Like I say, that’s where Walsh was great, using air and artillery and mortars to sting the Chinks before they could sting us and at the same time maneuvering the battalion so we hit them where they weren’t expecting us. They don’t pass out medals for that sort of thing, but you get lots of brownie points from the grunts whose lives you save.

We’d go through that routine every day for three weeks or so, then we’d get a week in reserve. That’s when the colonel turned the big screw. First off, he’d give everybody twenty-four hours to crap out. Man, you needed it, because we’d been running every day all the Christ up and down those frigging mountains, and the gooks’d be probing us at night—not trying to wipe us out or anything, but keeping us awake and tiring us out.

Well, after we’d flaked out for twenty-four hours, the colonel’d start us on a training schedule. Exercises before breakfast, hikes to keep the legs going, and war games ranging from squads up to the full battalion. But only for five or six hours a day. We’d still need lots of rest, and the colonel didn’t try to kill us.

The big thing when we were resting up was those morning meetings with the officers and senior NCO’s. The colonel would take our unit diaries—the records every outfit keeps of each day’s operations—and we’d sit in the mess tent, freezing our asses off looking at maps and rerunning every step of some firefight we’d been in a week or two before. We’d cry-tique that battle, and when I say cry-tique, I mean cry-fucking-tique. And I shit you not. The colonel’d have every officer or NCO whose troops had been in the fight explain what he did exactly when and exactly why he did it that way. Man, you damned well better have a good reason why you’d done it your way and not some other. The colonel was just as likely to push hard if the fight had come out okay as if it had gone sour. Like one of the senior NCO’s said, That man ain’t satisfied with nothing less than per-fucking-fection. And that was gospel, and you’d better give it to him—or at least do a hell of a lot better the next time.

I don’t say that the company CO’s were more afraid of having to explain in front of the rest of us—with the colonel popping questions—than they were of getting shot; nobody’s that scared by somebody on his side. But you can bet your Sunday-go-to-meeting douche bag that knowing they were going to have to explain every frigging decision they made kept those guys on their toes when the shit was hitting the fan—and it made them think what they would do even before the crap started to fly. Maybe that was more important. Our troops just never got surprised or bushwhacked.

The last part of it was the best, I think. When we were resting in the same area as a fight we’d had, the colonel’d run us through the map drill a couple of times. Then he’d move out the whole battalion if we’d all been involved, or only one or two companies if that was all that had been in the firefight—but always every frigging officer in the battalion—and we’d walk through the whole battle all over again, this time the right way, and do it slow so everybody’d learn. If we had time, we’d fight it a third time, with the colonel on the radio throwing in new wrinkles to make his officers think and the troops react.

We learned, we all did, and I didn’t think after fifteen, sixteen years of crunching gravel I had anything left to learn about infantry tactics. Learn from your mistakes, gentlemen; live and learn and live, was what he’d tell them. And he’d help. He’d explain, nice and clear, all the big things and most of the little ones you’d have to keep in mind; like whether artillery could reach a place or whether it was so steep you need mortars with their high angles of fire; or like, when the gooks’d have their heads down, how to coordinate air strikes with troop movements so you could surprise the little bastards; and like how to feel for the enemy’s flank so you slip around him rather than bang ass up the middle where he was strongest.

You’d better frigging-A-well learn. He’d help, he’d explain, nice and patient and all clear, but make the same mistake twice and it hurt marines or meant gooks got away unhurt, and you’d lose a good hunk of your ass, or maybe even your command. The colonel relieved one company commander and two platoon leaders that I remember. That’s a rough thing to do, relieve an officer of his command in combat. He’s got no career in the service after that, none a-tall. But he was still alive, and a screw-up cost his snuffies a lot more than a career and a pension. The officers bitched, but they respected the colonel for what he was teaching them about tactics and discipline. And so did the troops. They could appreciate that tactical training most of all. They knew whose balls got thrown into the meat grinder when some mammy-jammer screwed up.

That’s why we were the best battalion in the Marine Corps. From the colonel right on down to the lowest-assed snuffy, we knew our jobs better’n any son of a bitch in this mammy-jamming world—and what’s more we knew we knew it better.

TWO

I won’t bang your ear anymore about Operation Ripper in February and March of 1951. We did pretty good, not much hero crap, just a lot of firepower, a lot of smarts, a lot of frigging agony, and we were back in North Korea again, a little north of the 38th parallel. The thing that I remember most was moving north of Hoengsong, recapturing Massacre Valley. Earlier in that winter the gooks had ambushed a convoy from the Dutch Battalion attached to the Second Army Division. It must have been an honest to God massacre. The valley was narrow and it was still covered with wrecked trucks and dead Dutchmen. At the rear of one truck we found a paymaster, frozen solid, killed while paying his frozen troops.

Sorry, I’m off again. Old soldiers love to talk. Like the man says, we don’t die; we just bore everybody else to death. What you’re interested in happened in April, just after Ripper ended. The other day I read in a travel section of the Post that April is a lovely month in Korea. Lovely, shit! Maybe there was something pretty there. I didn’t notice a mammy-jamming thing worth seeing. By then it wasn’t so cold compared to the Chosin Reservoir or even Ripper, except occasionally at night when that frigging wind would whip down out of Siberia. But you didn’t mind so much, because you knew it was getting better. You could see the snow sort of crawling back up to the tops of the mountains, and the scrub pines on the slopes had more life in them. There was even some green spackled along the floors of the paddied valleys.

But I need peace to appreciate things like that, and April 1951 was not a peaceful month in Korea. We heard—the senior NCO’s usually hear these things just before the commanding general—that there were peace feelers out all around the world. Those diplomatic jerks in New Delhi, Peking, Moscow, London, and Washington were supposedly having little secret talks mixed in with their boozing and fagging; and even Dunghead Doug said he was willing to meet on the field of honor with the gooks and talk about peace. That was A-okay with me. It wasn’t his honor, because it damned well hadn’t been his war, but it might be my peace.

We had another goodie that took a lot of joy out of life. This one wasn’t rumor. It was TSNS—top secret, no shit. Intelligence had the hot, hard cock. The Chinese wanted to go to any peace talks with a big victory tucked away in their jocks. They were going to ram down the middle of the peninsula, beat the bejesus out of us, and agree to talk before we could recover. Then they could dictate the terms. I don’t know if Harry Truman or General Ridgeway liked that idea, but we sure didn’t.

I guess the best place to begin is at Oran-ni, the little town where we bivouacked one night in the rain and woke up in the morning in a sea of tiny, hopping, frigging frogs—I mean it. Those frogs were hopping on each other like all they ate was Spanish fly. Well, anyway, there was this big staff conference that Colonel Big Foot Johnson, our regimental CO, was holding for his battalion commanders. James was the colonel’s first name, but everybody called him Big Foot—when he wasn’t around, that is. He knew it and I don’t think he liked it, but a man who wears size thirteen boots can’t do much about a nickname like that. It fit his feet, but not him, really. He was a tall guy, just a little taller than Walsh, about six three, with a neat silver mustache—like mine is now, although mine was black then, you know. So was my hair. Well, I think the guys would have called Big Foot handsome, not one of those pretty Hollywood fags, but a real man type. You know what I mean? He looked like a movie British brigadier in India fighting for the queen. He was a real dude, the way he dressed. His green utilities were always shiny, and he wore a red silk scarf around his neck like one of those British things—yeah, ascots. It wasn’t regulation, but neither were those Corcoran paratrooper boots. Still, a lot of the officers wore them. Walsh did. They were better than the frigging GI stuff except when you had to walk a lot in the snow.

I remember hearing that when Big Foot was an NCO—he was a mustang, you know—he had twenty-six changes of uniform in his locker. I believe it. I had a reputation about being a dude, too, even in the field—especially in the field. That’s where it really counts—when there’s no showers, no hot water, and no laundry. Then you got to be clean-shaven and have a fresh uniform on. It’s a trick I learned from the old guys who were in Nicaragua—some of them with Big Foot. Being dirty is bad for morale. There’s nothing that makes you want to drag ass more than getting up before dawn and pulling on clothes that’re still stinking wet from yesterday’s sweat.

Like I was saying, the troops called me a dude and I was happy about that, but I didn’t like it when they used to kid me about my suede liberty shoes. What a man wears on liberty is his business. Anyway, Big Foot was a nattier dresser even than I was. He was a bachelor, too. The corps was his life, just like it was mine. He’d put in thirty-five years—Mexico, World War I, Haiti, Nicaragua, long dull stretches during the Depression, World War II, and now Korea. He wasn’t a thinking man’s marine; his tactics were strictly Fix bayonets and banzai. But he had a shitpot more sense than he seemed to. Most of the gung ho crap was for the kids. He was a tin god to them. If there was fighting anywhere in the regimental sector, Big Foot would be there, like a cheering section. The snuffies loved to tell the story about his looking at an 81-mm mortar and asking how the hell you could hook a bayonet on it. I think the story’s true. It’s the kind of thing Big Foot would say.

I don’t think he was very happy listening to the briefing at Oran-ni that day. I was there because I always went to CO’s briefings with Walsh and the Smart Money. When you’ve been around the corps as long as I have you learn that the main trick to being a top-notch sergeant major is to find a couple of bright young clerks and look over their shoulders just enough to know what’s going on—and boot them in the ass often enough so they’ll think they can’t fool you. It gave me a lot of free time. Colonel Walsh liked me to come along because he valued my opinion. I liked to come along because I wanted to be near Captain Keller. When a man owes me as much hard cash as the Smart Money did, I get nervous when I can’t eyeball him.

I was getting more nervous looking at Big Foot. He was pretending to be listening to the briefing, but I could tell by the way his mouth was twitching that he had the rag on. The war didn’t usually upset him, but he had plenty of reason to be worried that day. Major Charles Stambert, the regimental three—that’s the operations officer, I told you—was outlining our battle plan.

It’s a classic hammer and anvil technique, gentlemen, Stambert is saying. We’re to be the anvil; the rest of the division, the Korean Marine Regiment, the army’s 187th Regimental Combat Team and Seventh Division will be the hammer. Look here, Stambert points to the large map that took up most of one side of the tent, "Intelligence says the main push is going to come almost straight down the middle of the peninsula. They estimate the Chinese will head right for where we are now, near Chunchon, then turn west and run down the valley of the Pukhan-Gang to where it flows into the Han, cross the river and swing south of Seoul, cutting off that city and with it most of the American and British forces.

You know from the reports you’ve been getting that the rest of the First Marine Division has been shifting east. The Chinese have apparently been shifting with them—or we with them. They want to launch their attack against a South Korean unit. It’s been a cat and mouse game, but it’s just about over. We’re running out of peninsula. There’s only one more valley east of the Pukhan that would give them a decent route back to the west, and that’s the Soyang-Gang. If they take that one, they’ll have to cross a steep pass to get back west or else attack on a much broader front than they like to. . . .

The point, please, Major, Walsh cuts in. Anyone who can read a map can see how the terrain constrains the Chinese. That was the way he talked—words like terrain and constrain, and his grammar was always good.

Walsh didn’t win any points with Colonel Johnson on that one. The Old Man snapped the twig he’d been playing with. It made a loud crack that caused everybody but Walsh and Major Stambert to turn around. Big Foot and Walsh never got along. Walsh thought Big Foot was dumb—which was wrong—and had no other interest in life but the corps—which was right. Johnson was a gruff but friendly old bear. To him the corps was a band of brothers. They had their faults but like all soul brothers they should love one another, and Big Foot could see that, with Walsh, the Crotch just didn’t come first. He was the best of the battalion commanders because he was the smartest and the toughest, and because of Walsh the Second Batt was the best in the regiment. When they were sober even the people from the First and Third Batts would admit it, but as far as Big Foot was concerned Walsh was never in. He just didn’t have the loyalty to the Crotch that for us old regulars came before every-frigging-thing else in life. Big Foot could respect him, but he couldn’t ever like him, even though Walsh was a reserve officer and there was no special reason why the corps should be his life like it was ours. You could please me a hell of a lot easier. Christ, I’d even follow a dogface if he was any good, and I suppose a few of them must be.

Our missions, Stamberg didn’t even break stride, are to help channelize the advance of the Chinese and then move down and cut off their avenue of retreat when the rest of the Tenth Corps smacks into them with a counterattack. To accomplish these missions we’ll have to be isolated from the rest of the division. The nearest marines will be about four miles south and west of us. The nearest UN unit will be the South Korean division just south of Inje.

Does this caper have a name? Walsh asks.

"Yes, sir. Operation Rat Trap. Now if you’ll look at the map again, you’ll see that the Pukhan River flows out of the Hwachon Reservoir up here west of the Town of Yanggu. The brunt of the Chinese offensive should fall a couple of miles west of us. We can’t try and stop that. All we’re supposed to do is to stop them from taking this east ridge. And we don’t want to deny them use of the valley or the Hwachon flats—at least not immediately.

We want them to move down the valley toward Chunchon. We’ll sting them a bit, and air and artillery will pound the living shit out of them. When they hit our main line, they’ll have lost a lot of steam. When the counterattack comes, it’ll push them back toward the Hwachon Reservoir. We’ll squeeze them from the east, the Army’s 187th Regimental Combat Team will make an air drop west of the Hwachon, and the rest of the Tenth Corps will come straight ahead.

For a couple of minutes nobody said anything because nobody believed a frigging word they’d heard. How large will the counterattack be? Walsh finally asked.

As I said, sir, the rest of the First Marine Division, the Korean Marine Regiment, the 187th RCT, the Seventh Division, and of course us.

And of course, us. About 40,000 men all told?

Yes, sir.

About how many Chinese?

Intelligence estimates that the Chinese will commit 280,000 men to this attack. They’ll probably use half, more or less, in this sector.

We hold them, channel them, and then eat them up, Walsh sneered, before breakfast, I suppose.

Colonel, Big Foot broke in, if I say with breakfast then your battalion will eat all 280,000 Chinese with their C rations.

Yes, sir, but we may have to shit a regiment or two.

If I tell you to shit, Johnson snapped, you’ll squat and strain and by God gooks better come flowing out.

Once the Chinese are fully committed between Yanggu and Chunchon, Stambert droned on, "they’ll heavily outnumber us, but we’ll be several thousand feet above them. Artillery and air will be killing gooks by the ton, and the ground is open enough in some places that the counterattack can make effective use of tanks.

If you look at the map again, I’ll point out the exact positions we’ll occupy. We have responsibility for the ridge starting about three miles south of the road that crosses the mountains east and west, and links Yanggu and Inje. Obviously there’s a better position just north of the road, but the laundrymen won’t move south unless they control a main road that leads straight into their rear. Our lines will be shaped like a large V, with the closed end pointing north here at Hill 915. One leg runs off south and east, and the other south and just a little west.

Big Foot stood up. "Gentlemen, a hill 915 meters tall gives us 3,000 feet of altitude. The valley floor is only 600 feet above sea level. We’ll have direct observation of every ant that tries to piss in that valley. We’ll hold that ridge until the counterattack comes and then we’ll close off that valley like a vise. We don’t want to spoil it by calling any fire against the Chinese in the valley, so that area is indexed. It’ll take my personal order to fire there. We just watch and tell the division about any movement. They can decide whether to take it under fire. We want to look pretty harmless.

As Stambert said, we’ll be in a V opening to the south. As you can see from the map, the ground is highest at the point, Hill 915 in the north, and runs down on both sides to the opening of the V. But even at the opening, we’ve still got a thousand feet of altitude above the valley floor. The Second Batt will be at the point, right on the peak of Hill 915. Walsh, you’ll bear the brunt of any attempt to push us off that ridge; and if I were a Chinaman, I’d do my best to get us off that ridge.

So would I, Colonel, Walsh nodded. Let me play the devil’s advocate and ask what makes anybody think one regiment—even a regiment of marines— that slight lilt to Walsh’s voice grated on Johnson—can stop a Route Army?

Several things, Colonel, several, Colonel Johnson answered. One of the most important is time. The Chinese know that they have to punch through our main line quickly. The longer they have to lock assholes with us on a set battlefield, the less chance they have. Like Stambert says, in a small area air and artillery can kill gooks by the ton. They’ll hit us hard, but if we let them have what they really need—use of the valley—they’re likely to head south and leave us to be mopped up later.

You mentioned several factors, Colonel.

"Several thousand, Colonel—3,800 to be exact. Since we came ashore at Inchon seven months ago, this regiment has never lost a hill it’s been ordered to hold, or failed to take a hill it’s been ordered to capture. We’re not going to start anything different now.

As I said, Johnson went on, "the Second Batt will hold 915, and the First Batt will assume responsibility for the east leg of the V, Third for the west. Chances are the First won’t get engaged in any serious fight and can also act as regimental reserve. We’ll have our five regimental tanks with us—they’ll help us seal off the opening of the V where the ground is lower and flatter—and we’ll have two batteries of self-propelled 105-mm howitzers from Tenth Corps. That’ll give us eight howitzers, plus my eight 4.2-inch mortars, and each of you has six 81-mm mortars. We’ll have plenty of firepower, but we’re going to have a real ammunition problem. Once the fighting starts, there’ll be no trucks or even pack trains getting through to us, and an airdrop will be difficult with all the artillery that’ll be shooting. So don’t call for any heavy support unless you absolutely need it. We can get a little help from the 196th Army Field Artillery and their Long Toms, but they’ll have lots of other business. We’ll have our own Forward Air Control Teams with us from the First Marine Air Wing, but when the big attack starts they’ll have other calls, too. We have to remember that stopping the Chinese around Chunchon will be given a higher priority than holding our ridge.

As I see it, Big Foot added, the operation depends on three factors: us stopping the Chinese at Hill 915; the rest of the division stopping them near Chunchon; and Tenth Corps mounting a quick counterattack. Three if’s, gentlemen, and we risk our lives on all three coming out right.

There’s a fourth if, Colonel, Walsh said.

Yes? Big Foot’s voice was cold. He had reached the dramatic point of the briefing, when he was going to talk about blood and guts and fixed bayonets, and he was pissed at being interrupted.

The fourth factor is a Chinese decision not to make a serious effort to hit down the Soyang River in the next valley to the east of us around Inje and cut us and the whole division off. That’s a ROK division around Inje. They wouldn’t do anything more aggressive than try to choke the Chinese to death with heel dust. If the Chinese move that way, we’ll be caught as flat-footed as a pregnant kangaroo.

That’s a possibility, Johnson admitted, "but Intelligence doesn’t think the Chinks will hit that far east. It’s a risk we have to take. We can’t put American divisions