Chosin Reservoir

Korean Peninsula

1950

   

   

   

THEY WERE TWO DAYS NORTH OF HUNGNAM, THE weather thinning into a high altitude cold he recognized. Morning had arrived with a formation of gull-winged Corsairs that passed over the rattling, coughing camp before turning to scan the hills for North Koreans. The glass bulbs of the planes’ cockpits burned with the fire of the rising sun. It was a good day to fly, Adams thought. The sky was clear and unclouded, the color of quartz. It was a damn freezing day to move a war into the mountains.

He was at the roadblock with his squad. Hobbs was there. And Devlin. And everybody else except Fryberg who’d been sent to the aid tent with his fever and pink, weepy eyes. They were supposed to control the flow of refugees, which they’d been trying to do since 0400. Nobody liked strong-arming the farmers and their families, especially when it meant shaking down the old mama-sans and children. In Seoul, where he and Hobbs had gotten their assignment three weeks earlier, the boys and girls had smiled at the marines and begged for gum and candy. Not here. Here the Communists hid among the peasants, so every native who wanted to go behind U.S. lines to Hungnam, where the Red Cross was passing out food and blankets, had to be searched. And questioned.

Just now Sergeant Devlin had Ry Pilcher stirring through the refugees’ rice bags with his bayonet while Hobbs stood guard over half a dozen men who’d been stripped naked by marines looking for grenades and guns. The squatting men were lethargic from starvation and fear. The shadows among their ribs were as blue as bruises. The rest of the refugees crowded the barriers of the roadblock, anxious to get out of the path of the converging armies. Adams could tell Hobbs hated his assignment. His knees were locked tight above the buckled canvas of his leggings. His mouth was a thin, set line. There was no opportunity to play the good guy because he was out of chocolate. They all were. They had nothing to give the bony, whey-faced kids whose cheeks were aflame with exposure. All they could do was stand duty in their jackets and heavy boots while the greasy smell of their well-fed bodies mixed with the stink of pickled cabbage and shit that clung to the few rags of clothing the natives still had.

Adams blew into the palms of his hands. His skin was cracked and scaly, and one of his fingernails was split. He kept his fingers moving so they wouldn’t get stiff in the cold. Devlin had put him in the machine-gun pit with Sutherland where he could afford an occasional glance at the peeled-back sky when he wasn’t deciphering the road that lay before their position. He crouched to the left of the watchful Sutherland, ready to belt feed the .30 caliber light machine gun if necessary. He doubted it would be necessary. The N.K.s didn’t come at a checkpoint head-on. It wasn’t their style. If he concentrated, however, he could dull the disturbing sounds of the refugee interrogations the Republic of Korea soldiers were conducting behind the gun pit.

The ROKs were slapping the face of an older girl. He could hear the blows snap through the crisp air as the Koreans shouted, Where is your brother? Where have you hidden his weapons? His comrades? They asked the questions as if they were bandits asking for treasure, mechanically, with a cruel hint of languor. They didn’t know whether the girl had a brother or not. They were looking for Reds in their own country, traitors, so they wanted to be thorough. It was a search that took time. Adams knew without checking that Hobbs still held his unblinking place, Ml at the ready, as the kneeling girl collapsed into a heap of noiseless sobs. Hobbs’s six black-eyed, hollow-eyed farmers stood on their fleshless legs to dress themselves in the pitiless morning light. Pilcher continued to search the half-empty bags of rice.

Next to Adams, Sutherland tugged at the collar of his field jacket as though some internal heat made the collar feel tight around his neck. His face, which was gashed by a thick set of eyebrows, remained impassive. Adams wondered if he and Sutherland shared the same acid thrum in their guts—from hunger, from the rough treatment they had witnessed. The long-necked manner in which Sutherland peered between the aiming stakes set before the gun suggested he wasn’t itching for action, but with Sutherland you couldn’t exactly ask. He was a twelve-year marine who’d been busted back to private for something excessive he’d done in Japan. He’d made it clear he didn’t care for the new arrivals like Adams who’d been ass-tagged to Easy Company because it was short of men.

Devlin stuck his helmeted head over the sandbags and informed them that a patrol from Fox Company was coming into the lines. He reminded them of the password. Sutherland asked if the patrol had made any contact. Sergeant Devlin, a tireless collector of operational information, said that was what he’d come to find out. Neither of them mentioned the subdued herd of refugees corralled by mud and broken stone against their right flank.

A child began to wail. A child was always wailing unless the big guns were firing and all human complaint was erased in their recoil. The crying reminded Adams of orphaned lambs and how they filled acres of corrals and sheds with their inconsolable grief. The land the Americans were moving into offered other misplaced reminders of his Wyoming home: the biting promise of the valley wind, the black, wooded hillsides that recalled the elk country of the Sierra Madres. He shook his head to counter the thick pounding he felt in his sinuses. Only the U.S. Marine Corps could have shipped him from Bell Butte to California to Japan to a part of Korea so remote it began to feel familiar.

Like home, it was rough country. Steep and folded and bladed with granite ridges that looked no wider than a boot sole. The slender, exposed roads were barely more than cart paths. Adams knew it was bad ambush country just from looking at it. They all did. But to the salts like Sutherland and Devlin who’d been on Tarawa and Iwo in the war before this one, the country was no worse than it had ever been. Enemy country was always bad. Evil. It was always sutured with bunkers filled with men who fought like hell. It didn’t matter. They had no choice about it.

This was a truth hotter and more piercing than any bullet Adams could imagine. It throbbed beneath the skin of his body like a buried coal. He’d been in Korea less than a month, and it was time for him to learn to live without choice. There were certain deprivations that suited him—he knew this from his years on the ranch. But though he hated the stupid abiding military rules, he had come to hate his high-plains ignorance even more. He despised his lack of combat experience. He spit on his own greenhorn past. There was too much he didn’t know, too much he had to grow into. The 7th Marine Regiment was headed toward the Yalu River on the Chinese border. The advance was removing his options with every step of every march. Things were likely to get rough. There could be only one goal: to become honed, all necessity. What remained of John Fremont Adams when it ended, however it ended, would be a distillation of man and pursuing soldier, a potent liquor brewed from what he believed and whatever he discovered in the high hills of Korea.

This was what he told himself.

He spotted the first of the men from Fox Company as they cleared a bend in the road that was half-blocked by a shattered ammunition trailer. The men trudged without chatter. They were unshaven, like everybody in camp, and footsore from climbing hills, and trousered in mud. Adams didn’t see any stretcher bearers, but it was clear the patrol had stepped on somebody’s wasp nest. Santo, the corpsman, was calling for a jeep. He had wounded men coming off the slopes. Adams counted the bandoleers of ammunition still worn by the B.A.R. men. One, two—there weren’t many. Fox had left its share of metal jackets on the route then, plenty of them. Then came the prisoners, four smallish men in fur hats and green quilted uniforms—the first like those he’d seen. The prisoners moved with short, unlifted strides and carried their chins level, as if they were curious and temporary visitors.

“Christ and His Most Blessed Mother,” said Sutherland.

Adams dropped to his haunches so his ear was at the level of the gunner’s mouth. Despite Sutherland’s silent bullying, Adams was supposed to anticipate his needs.

“Chinks,” Sutherland said, “and not for the first time. MacArthur and his Tokyo generals better get ready to shit dry.”

Adams looked again at the prisoners. He wondered how Sutherland could be so sure. The ROK soldiers had stopped their work; that might be a clue. The platoon lieutenant from Fox Company, a man whose name Adams didn’t know, looked puckered up tight for a guy in safe from a midnight march, but lieutenants always looked that way. Was it the faces? Did somebody in Fox know the difference between Chinese talk and Korean? Gooks looked the same to him, as little as he’d seen them.

Devlin returned in a half crouch, his hands encased in a pair of homemade woolen socks. His smile was crooked and dangerous above his patchy reddish beard.

“Spoonhauer’s coming to spring you for chow.” The platoon sergeant’s voice was whispery, almost girlish with its hints of secrets.

“You see that, Dev? You see what Fox fucking hooked on its line?” Sutherland was loud and guttural. Adams watched him squeeze the stock of the machine gun, as if he was personally offended by the sight of the prisoners.

Devlin hung a rictus smile in the air above Adams, his way of needling a buckass replacement private who knew no history. Then he replied to Sutherland. “I wasn’t in Nanking with you Raiders, but I hear what you’re saying. You’re saying somebody’s about to send us up the asshole of the whole Chinese army without a warning. God damn Tokyo command.” Devlin shook his helmeted head so hard his shouldered carbine began to sway. “Wish I could send you to H.Q. to straighten out those map-reading bastards, Suds, I really do. Best I can do is report that the captain’s sending out Third Platoon tonight. We’ll be attached. Tell me who you want.”

Sutherland hawked something upward into his mouth, then wall-eyed Adams while he seemed to savor the slickness that floated on his tongue. “We got baby shit.”

“Sure,” said Devlin, “but I’m asking.”

“I’ll take this one. He’s quiet.” Sutherland stared out over the black angles of his gun. “Not the whiner, though, and not the other cowboy, he won’t stick in a hard fight. Maybe the spic if I have to.”

“I’ll talk to the lieutenant.”

“We got one of those now?”

“Yeah. Reservist. From Vir-gin-i-a.” Devlin spoke the state’s name as if were a part of France.

Sutherland spat a white gob onto the straw mat Adams had unrolled in the bottom of the gun pit to pad his knees. “Sweet Mother of God.”

“May She be with us on this night,” Devlin crooned. Then he was gone, swifter and more affable than he had a right to be.

Sutherland jammed his hands into his pockets and began to curse in his name-filled Catholic way. His square chin jabbed outward with every word. He fiddled with the gun sights, then barked at Adams for a cigarette, which Adams had to fork over. Adams wanted to ask Sutherland what he knew about the Chinese. They’d trained the North Koreans, the Chinese had, and the N.K.s hadn’t been hard to handle since Pusan. That’s what Pilcher and Fryberg said. But maybe the Chinks had maneuvers they hadn’t shared with the N.K.s. Devlin and the other veterans acted like that was true for the marines, like they believed the corps had been holding itself back, was still doing so, waiting for the professional sons-a-bitches to take the field. The Chinese had done nothing but wage war for thirty years. They hadn’t been lying in their hammocks on Okinawa or shucking good soldiers from their full-strength regiments. They hadn’t been playing politics. If the Chinese got into things, the Americans were going to have their hands full.

Adams drew in the harsh smell of Sutherland’s cigarette until his mouth began to water. He decided to smoke one himself. He was about to go on his first night patrol. He vowed he wouldn’t ask questions or appear too eager about anything. He’d just be ready to do the job, whatever Devlin or Sutherland said the job was. There wasn’t much a soldier had to understand about an enemy before his first fight. He’d heard plenty of guys say that. A long, hard day in Korea appeared simpler if you thought about it that way, or an hour.

Spoonhauer’s squad arrived right on time. There was no talk in the pit until the new gunner and assistant settled in. Hobbs and Pilcher backed off the refugee line where shawls and straw hats flapped like broken bird wings in the breeze. They set up on the machine gun’s flanks until Devlin waved them all in. The sergeant didn’t mention the upcoming patrol so Adams stayed shut about it. C.D. was talkative as he often was after a tense stretch of duty. He tended to behave like a spigot, on and off and on. Sometimes he wanted to talk about baseball, a passion he’d learned to imitate at Camp Pendleton. Sometimes he wanted to talk about food or some strange Korean thing he’d seen. Today it was letters.

“I just got a thing I want you to tell Charlotte. One thing, not a whole page worth. And hello to Old Etchepare from me. He’d be amazed by this country, don’t you think, how sorry it is for livestock except for the water. It can’t be a bit like France where he fought in that trench war. And will you say something about those Mongol ponies we seen? I bet those ponies would handle a winter logging camp in the Madres just fine, they got the build for it. Sergeant said to get breakfast and grab sack time until 1200. Are you worn out because I’m not. I thought I’d be tired. I should be tired. You’re going to write home today, right? Take a minute?”

Adams flattened his red hands until they were like trowel blades, then made an exaggerated attempt to peer under the brim of Hobbs’s helmet. Hobbs hadn’t changed much physically during their slogging weeks in the corps. He hadn’t shaved for several days, but it made less of a difference with him since he grew no hair on his face to speak of, even though he was nineteen. There were kids in the company who were younger than Hobbs, younger than both of them. None of them had the unblended look of Hobbs.

“There’s not much to say, C.D. We can’t talk about chasing Commies in letters. It gets censored.”

“We could tell something about Japan to Buren except he’s at the college in Laramie. And greetings to your ma and father.”

“Do it yourself,” he said, wanting to occupy himself with nothing but steaming hot coffee. “You know how to write.”

Hobbs pulled up at the rear bumper of an officer’s jeep, halting his progress toward the mess tent. “She don’t give a rat’s shit where I am, what I do,” he said, meaning his feckless mother who was supposedly shacked up with a government trapper near Kremmling, Colorado. Adams hadn’t meant to bring Hobbs’s mother into it. He’d been thinking of his own family, who wrote often to them both, or claimed to. They hadn’t received much mail since California. They’d been moving too fast.

“Come on,” he said to Hobbs. He walked his friend forward with such definition the grenades in their webbed belts beat hard against their hips. There was a long line of latecomers at the mess tent. It would do him and Hobbs both good if they decided they were hungry. “I hope you got a plan if I get hurt, though, or when I get that influenza Fryberg’s been breathing all over. I hope you got a extra postman in reserve.”

“You don’t need to talk that way, Fremont.” Hobbs kept pace, but he sounded genuinely gaffed under his helmet and coat.

“Why not? You think words like that ought to be secret? We’re machine gunners, and Sergeant says the whole damn Chinese army is waiting for us up this road. It don’t matter what we say in talk.” Adams felt the dismissal of his body, and his future, flood his veins right then and there, cleansing him of fatigue and anxiety all at once. He welcomed any opportunity to make superstitions public, especially his own. “Talk don’t make anybody less safe.”

Hobbs stopped again, and Adams braked his own heels. Soldiers passed them, some sauntering, others dragging their legs beneath their spines like weary cattle. All bore the red-rimmed gaze of sleeplessness and want. Hobbs’s face, what Adams could see of it, went still and unflushed. He said, “I know you’ll be all right.”

As a further sign of benediction, the air around them suddenly tore itself in half as howitzers from the 11th Marines began to register on distant targets they couldn’t see. There were more Corsairs in the air as well, trailing dirty smoke.

“Hell on you, C.D., if you know so much. Let’s get breakfast while there’s something left to get.” Adams gave Hobbs what was meant to be a friendly punch on the arm, but he hated how he was pretending to be cheerful. What difference did it make? Hobbs was on a slide. Most of the new guys were, feeling down sometimes and then up, feeling whipped side to side, careening, as their abilities began to fall short of what was demanded of them. His own confidence tended to slip from moment to moment, and they hadn’t even done any fighting yet. Their relentless drill instructors had warned them about this danger, had tried to prepare them for it during the hurried time they had to fill the depleted marine ranks. But how did you train men for constant onslaught, inside their heads and out?

Adams knew this was why Hobbs might be left off the night patrol. Sutherland didn’t think C.D. and Begnini, who he called a whiner, had developed the right stomachs for the job. Adams didn’t know exactly why Sutherland thought that. Hobbs hauled gear as well as any of them, and he never complained about a single thing. But Sutherland had decided Hobbs was weak. Adams allowed himself a controlled moment of worry. He didn’t think C.D. was weak, that wasn’t the word he would use, but he wondered if the exclusion would be a problem. Hobbs liked it when the two of them stayed together, and maybe he liked it that way, too, if he was honest about it. They hadn’t been separated very often. But the sergeants had say on patrols. He and Hobbs hadn’t been given a choice.

Adams shoved through the flaps of the squad tent into the wavy green light produced by the kerosene stove. The air was thick with a stale, outpost warmth. He stripped off his field jacket and the gloves he was allowed to wear when he was not manning the gun. Some of the men were out mailing letters. Others were seeing a corpsman about blisters or bartering for beer and cigarettes or taking a rare crap. The rest were near their cots, moving quietly like animals in their stalls.

Hobbs, it seemed, had been coaxed into telling some of his stories. Miguel Rocque, who was from right in the city of Houston, Texas, liked Hobbs’s stories, and he often asked for one while the squad was cleaning its weapons. Adams made his way down a narrow aisle, then laid his coat on his cot. He ducked out of his heavy helmet. The drugstore reek of Rocque’s hair tonic was stronger than usual, and it made a poor mix of smells with the kerosene from the stove. Ry Pilcher seemed to be swabbing the hair tonic directly onto the grooved metal of his disassembled M1. That was news. Pilcher was taking Sergeant Spoonhaur’s advice. Spoonhauer, who’d fought at the Bulge against the Germans, claimed hair tonic was better than standard-issue gun oil if you wanted to keep a gun firing in the cold.

“Butch Cassidy had his Hole-in-the-Wall boys, see. And they started robbing Union Pacific trains in the desert….”

It sometimes took Adams a moment to recognize C.D. Hobbs’s entertainer voice when he heard it. C.D. had been a talker back home, but not the sort anybody really listened to. Since the marine-recruit depot in San Diego, however, there’d been a fullness to Hobbs’s public speech, an almost athletic confidence. His Wyoming stories featured a graceful patience that Adams realized Hobbs must have been hoarding for years. This patience led Hobbs to select details for his stories as carefully as another man might select a string of packhorses. He brought to life the fables and jokes of all the ranch hands he had ever known. It was a good trick, Adams thought. It gave Hobbs a piece of a bigger reputation and made him appear natural at living outdoors among men.

“One-eared Ike Dart was a colored slave who become a good cowboy before he started stealing folks’ cattle. He lost his ear to a Ute woman with a axe, if you can believe that. They say she did it for love….”

Hobbs, Adams thought, was nothing but natural. And gullible. He knelt to unclasp the top of his field pack. There were two photographs in a plastic sleeve near the top of the pack. One was a picture of his dun horse, Jackson, who was only three years old and still needed a firm hand. The other was a picture of his family taken at an ice-cream social in Savery. His father and Buren were both in ties and shirtsleeves. His mother and Charlotte wore matching summer dresses. Would the people in that photograph still recognize him, he wondered. Had he become as different as he needed to be?

He slipped the photos inside his field jacket, then paused to see if Hobbs would tell the one about Miss Minni, the Rawlins brothel keeper, and her trick poodle dog. That story was one of Hobbs’s favorites. It didn’t seemed to matter to anybody that Hobbs had never set foot in Miss Minni’s railroad hotel or never laid eyes on the poodle or Miss Minni’s infamous .44 caliber pistol. Hobbs’s first real try at whoring had come in Japan, and the attempt had resulted in a story Hobbs wasn’t likely to tell on this afternoon.

Ry Pilcher, a grocer’s son from Alabama, interrupted Hobbs. “That is a pure damn lie,” he snorted, trying not to laugh through his nose. “You’ve primed us with whoppers before, cowboy, but I ain’t listening to this one. It’s as bad as the bull you shoveled about that damn outlaw in his pickle barrel.”

“Shut up,” Rocque said. He’d wiped the hair tonic from his hands and was trying to roll a fresh cigarette. “I want to hear what he says. Leave him alone.”

Pilcher coughed until his eyes were shiny. “The cowboy is pulling your sweet Texas leg, Rocque, but if that’s the way you want it, be my guest. I bet Big Adams over there can set you straight.” Pilcher waggled a finger in Adams’s direction. “Give it to them, A-man. Tell us you didn’t really find no famous gunman salted down like one of my daddy’s hams.”

But they had, sort of. It depended on how you told the story. He and Hobbs and little Charlotte had driven to Rawlins that past spring to buy supplies at the mercantile. They’d gone to Molander’s to gawk at the new Chrysler sedan that was fresh off the train. They’d bribed Charlotte with two cherry Cokes to sit on the sidewalk while they went into Addington’s to shoot some pool. They were on their way to the no-name Mexican restaurant that served cheap food to sheepherders and ranch hands when Charlotte spotted a crowd gathered at the excavation site for Hested’s new store. She was off like a shot, the brat. Before Adams could catch her, she’d wormed through the crowd and slid down a muddy plank into the half-dug foundation. Two sweating excavators had just wrestled an ancient whiskey barrel from where it had been buried near an old foundation. The workers knew the barrel wasn’t sloshing with whiskey, so they claw-hammered it open, and the first thing that got to them was the stink. The second thing that got to them was the sight of a hand and arm bobbing in a moss-colored broth of formaldehyde and brine. Charlotte snuck close enough to see the show. Then she vomited all over her starched pinafore and Sunday shoes.

“Big Nose George,” Adams said. “They really did bury him that way. Nothing Christian about it. He got lynched in the old days for killing two deputies, then stuffed into a barrel. It was what he deserved.”

“And your governor skinned him out and made himself up a pair of shoes,” Rocque crowed. “Don’t forget that part. I never heard anything so loco.”

Adams grinned. “The governor did tan some of George’s hide. The rest went into that barrel. After sixty years, it weren’t a pretty sight.”

Adams tried to catch Hobbs’s eye as he finished his version of the tale, but Hobbs kept his head down while he reassembled his gleaming rifle. Hobbs had really helped him out that day. Adams had been so angry at Charlotte, so embarrassed, that he’d wanted to slap her, but Hobbs kept the lid on, using his own shirttail to wipe the vomit from Charlotte’s soiled pinafore. Hobbs had assured Adams’s little sister that it wasn’t chicken to puke when you saw a dead man. By the time they’d driven the fifty dusty miles back to the Trumpet Bell, Charlotte was as sassy as she’d ever been—if a little ripe smelling. She and Hobbs filled the truck cab with groans and wails and other mummy sounds they attributed to an unburied, revenge-seeking Big Nose George.

A few weeks later, as high-school graduation drew close and the newspapers ran worrisome columns about collaboration between the Russians and the Chinese, an army recruiter arrived hat in hand at the grange hall in Baggs. Maybe it came from missing the big war against the Germans and the Japs, maybe it came from wanting to get out into the world they’d heard about from Etchepare and Uncle Gene—but he and Hobbs soon found themselves on a train to Cheyenne where they volunteered to be marines. To Adams, the enlistment was like stringing one more bead onto a slender string, year after year, event after event, Hobbs never holding him back, Adams never obstructing Hobbs. Now they were in a place called Sudong on Sergeant Jonas Devlin’s smeared, inaccurate map, and they were stringing on more beads, faster. Times were changing. They were changing. Adams was glad C.D. was liked by the other men, that he had an easy capacity for friends. He, himself, didn’t feel the same need for company, though he liked how it happened among the others—the impulse, the crafted talk and laughter. He believed it could only be good for him to step into his days with those sounds in his head for as long as they might last.

Devlin wasn’t leading the patrol, but he might as well have been. The new lieutenant from Virginia was smart enough to let his sergeants run the squads. There were squads from mortars and squads from machine guns, in addition to Third Platoon’s riflemen and Hebert, the regular corpsman. Even with attachments, the patrol was under strength. That wasn’t supposed to be a problem since their job wasn’t to defeat the enemy but to find out where he’d laid his lines.

“Let me tell you bastards what the Chink bastards been telling the intelligence pinkies which you are not supposed to know.” Devlin wasn’t conspiratorial now. He was still in the bulk of his buttoned jacket and thick flannel shirts, poised and watchful, like a hawk in a barren tree. It wasn’t how Adams had imagined his sergeant whom he thought of as mischievous and catlike in attitude even when his business was serious. The skin of Devlin’s face was pasty under its smears of burned cork, and Adams could see newly deepened hollows under his eyes. There was a rumor that the sergeant had contracted the influenza but would in no damn way go off the patrol because he didn’t think much of the other noncoms except for Sutherland who’d lost his stripes. Adams didn’t believe the rumor. Devlin didn’t look sick to him.

“The bastards are bragging to the running dog capitalist soldiers of the United States of America. They say they’ve got a whole division up there.” Devlin gestured in the direction of their jump-off point. “They claim there are ten divisions south of the Yalu where we’re going for our riverside picnic with the 8th Army. They’ve given names, numbers, armament—every little thing but current addresses—because they invite war with the marine butchers and their imperialist generals. Tokyo says this is Commie prop-o-ganda bullshit, Chinese got nobody down here but a few hundred volunteers with the N.K. If you want me or the lieutenant to tell you what this really means, we can do it right now.”

Adams turned his head until he could see Sutherland squatting next to the light machine gun. He’d been assigned to carry ammunition for Sutherland. The older man was smoking and working the thongs that held his dog tags between a tight thumb and finger. His brown, close-set eyes were no more than slots. He seemed comforted by every syllable of bad news Devlin uttered.

Devlin went on. “We’re going out quiet, no helmets, and keep your canteens and bayonets secure. You’re supposed to have an extra day’s rations so you better have them. Password is ‘Deep Purple,’ don’t forget it. I’ll say this. This is the Chinks’ country, and they’re good at what they do. We’ll have to be better. Checkpoint will pass us through in ten minutes, so do your pissing and coughing now.”

Adams watched as the lieutenant laid out the order of march. A man on point would be followed by a rifle squad that included the lieutenant and his radioman. A mortar section would go next, then Sutherland’s gun crew, more riflemen, the second section of mortars, etc. Rocque would be Sutherland’s assistant. Adams and a kid named Greenbaugh were to lug a box of .30 caliber belts between them. Pilcher was back with Spoonhauer and the second machine gun.

Adams studied the white oval of the rising moon. It looked like a storm lantern hung just out of reach. The wind that rushed past his face bore the familiar, metallic taste of snow on its edge. He knew the wind would muffle their advance just as it obscured any movement by the Chinese or North Koreans. This wasn’t hunting, Adams told himself. When a man went hunting, he most often went onto land that was familiar and in conditions that were in his favor. This was blindness. And a kind of provocation. He knew he’d appreciate his bulky dress as the temperature fell, and he knew his well-worn boots wouldn’t give him any trouble. But he would be slower than usual with the ammunition to carry. This made him uneasy. Devlin had made it clear that action—especially action at night—sometimes spooked new guys, and he didn’t want to be the one who spooked.

The men drew themselves into formation. Adams saw Sutherland wave to him, and he moved closer to the gunner with Greenbaugh by his side. Sutherland had a wool cap and a felt-lined hat pulled tight over his wide forehead. He told them to get ready to hoist their load. “I want to say something about the fucking Chinks that maybe Dev don’t feel the need to say.” The guttural voice smelled bitterly of cigarettes. “I want to say they ain’t as cocky or desperate as the N.K.s. They’ll wait us out. They got discipline, and they don’t go stupid. But they like their bottleneck ambush coming from high ground just like the god damn Sioux did, so they’ll take their chance if they fucking get it which is likely in this hellhole terrain. You don’t want to get caught by them. You don’t want to be their prisoner.” His pinpoint eyes telescoped to the guarded barrier of a memory. When the eyes returned to their waiting faces, they reflected a wet, prismed anger. “Best advice you’ll ever get.”

They got the signal and passed through the line manned by Dog Company. They didn’t receive the usual taunts from their fellow marines, and they knew this was because of the crush of refugees and the unruly flight of the Republic of Korea army, which seemed to be dissolving in front of them. It wasn’t long before they could barely hear the noises of the camp, the tight fart of the diesel engines, the orchestra of aluminum and steel that crashed above the more easily dispersed murmurs of men. Adams and Greenbaugh shifted hands on the handles of the ammunition box. Its weight was awkward and cut off the circulation of their fingers even when they wore gloves. While they were on the road they found it easier to walk side by side, which they wouldn’t be able to do on paths in the hills.

As the patrol snaked forward, Adams heard movement, panicked and sudden, from the roadside ditches. He was prepared for this. There were refugees to consider. And ROK deserters. They were supposed to be careful about firing at anything along a road. The drainages around Sudong were also full of small Korean deer that were high-hocked and quick. “There’s another one,” Greenbaugh whispered, nodding toward the tangled brush. Greenbaugh was from near Chicago, but every fall he took his deer meat from the forests of Wisconsin. He’d been watching the roads and ditches for several days. “They’re being pushed out of their cover,” he said. “Whatever’s in those mountains has got them on the run.”

He hadn’t even said good-bye to Hobbs. C.D. was gearing up for the patrol when Devlin came into the squad tent and called his name. Hobbs followed the sergeant with his rifle and helmet in hand, but not his pack. He carried his shoulders loose in their sockets as though he expected to return. He hadn’t. Devlin had walked him straight to the command post to meet with the captain.

He thought of Hobbs as they crossed the small creeks that were silvered with ice, as they toiled through underbrush at the base of the black, treed slopes that towered over them. Hobbs would probably compare the patrol to night duty with the sheep herd. With sheep, you sometimes had to stay out until dawn tracking a lion or coyote. You sometimes had to scout for a lost band of ewes and lambs in the darkness as carefully as you’d scout an enemy. Except this wasn’t the same as herding sheep. It couldn’t be. You didn’t have your dogs, for one thing. What you had instead was the huffing and banging of thirty men trying to maintain a silence that couldn’t be maintained. And you weren’t going to get shot at when you were with sheep. Not normally. The biggest danger in those mountains was lightning.

Adams wondered if Hobbs was thinking of him. He’d seen men marking time in camp after they’d been taken off assignment. They looked uncomfortable, shrunken, as if they’d been drenched in the wrong kind of rain. How would C.D. handle it? Would he sleep off his disappointment or twist himself into a double barb of energy? Adams wished he’d been able to say a few words to Hobbs, to explain himself. Because now, as the hours passed and the wind began to needle his skin with invisible sleet, he felt himself begin to drift. Maybe it was the fatigue. Maybe it was the endless valley they were in, the way the patrol’s path wound into a complete and foreign darkness, but Adams found he couldn’t conjure up a clear image of C.D.’s face. Only the weather remained real to him. And the quiver of his exhausted muscles. The slow stumble of Greenbaugh’s feet was also very real. Nothing else mattered for the moment. What else could matter? C.D. Hobbs, whoever he was, was not part of this struggling body. C.D. Hobbs had been left far, far behind.

A few hours before dawn they struck a trail that ran north. Somebody had recently used the trail, that was obvious, so they waited while the lieutenant sent out scouts. The place was a wallow of long-bladed grass and stagnant water that would have been brown with tannins if they could have seen it. Rocks were notched like teeth along the length of a mucky creek bed. The lieutenant quickly decided he wanted them on better ground. They would climb a small hill to the west, then cross a narrow, unprotected saddle to a longer ridge that led south. The lieutenant was afraid they had put themselves behind more enemy than they could handle. He was fresh from Virginia, but he still had that feeling. Adams would later be told that the scouts had heard Chinese pickets talking to one another as they withdrew up the northern trail. The scouts had gotten close enough to smell garlic on the pickets’ breath.

Climbing the hill was awkward business because of the heavy ammunition box and the eroded soil that gave way under their feet. Adams and Greenbaugh scrambled as well as they could, both of them working their thighs in short, paired strokes like pistons. Adams slid onto his face more than once. The earth that worked its way into his mouth tasted of frozen, unliving rock before he spit it out.

Sergeant Devlin knew what to look for on the hilltop, and he found it—a shallow, elongated pit already scraped out for a gun. The pit afforded a clear field of fire across the saddle toward the southern ridge. Devlin also found some enemy soldiers, a small number of them, abandoning the crest as he and a team of riflemen elbowed themselves over the top. A marine with a big .50 caliber Browning Automatic Rifle began to fire at the departing soldiers before Devlin could stop him. The lone cough of the B.A.R. made Adams’s pulse double. “Nothing but scouts,” Devlin hissed. “They wanted us to see them. Get the gun up. We need to secure this spot because what those S.O.B.s will do is try to keep us off that next hill, which is our way home.” And he pointed into the jabbing wind toward a raised brow of stone they couldn’t even see.

Adams couldn’t remember taking cover behind a comb of brush with Greenbaugh. He felt his sweat go clammy against his skin, but he did not identify its chill as a discomfort. It was just there like the light of the moon was there, blue and withdrawn. The enemy did return to probe their position. Sutherland was ordered not to fire the machine gun until necessary because they didn’t want the enemy to mark it. Uneven rifle fire crackled around the perimeter, then a precious illumination round from one of their own mortars lit the sky, and they could see men bellying across the saddle under the false, stagy light, all of them in green quilted coats. Chinese, not Korean.

The rifle fire from the marines rose in pitch. Adams saw men trying to ascend the steep slope below him and below Greenbaugh. The sight choked him with adrenaline. Greenbaugh rolled a grenade downhill, then another. He hurried the first one, but the second one shattered the incline with light. Adams fired his rifle several times in that direction, but his fire went unanswered. He reloaded, striving for something like efficiency even as he paused to vomit from a stomach that held no food.

Soon there was shouting and gunfire from all points; it made orientation nearly impossible. Adams swore to himself, over and over, that he wouldn’t spook, and he watched for the floating shadow that was Devlin. He watched Sutherland, who seemed to operate at a deliberate, balletic pace, keeping Rocque calm as Rocque fed the icy belts of brass cartridges into the chittering gun that they’d begun to fire. Devlin came to them, flick-eyed and kneeling, his gaze thick with some kind of internal purpose but fixed directly on their faces. He told Adams and Greenbaugh to sling whatever ammunition they could carry onto their shoulders. He would lead them forward, shortly. All the way across that damn saddle.

Adams tried to look at Greenbaugh, tried to ask Greenbaugh if he was all right. Greenbaugh’s breath was steaming so hard and fast from his lungs it seemed as if he must be hurt. But Greenbaugh wasn’t hurt. The two of them peered again over the drop-off to their left. It was like peering into a quarry filled with undisturbed water. Then Devlin waved them out.

He saw some of them get hit. A rifleman buckled to his knees in front of him. And he high-stepped over another splayed shape as he ran parallel to the hot red stitchery of the tracers from Spoonhauer’s machine gun. There was shouting, some of it from pain, some from haste and fear. The marine mortars were pummeling the high ground now, and it was their luck the Chinese had no mortars. Sutherland and Rocque got their gun two-thirds of the way across a narrow bridge of land that looked as gray as cement under their racing feet before Rocque was hit. Bullets took the meat from his right shoulder. Sutherland pumped his arm to draw Adams forward, and he was there, ready to set the bipod under the gun while they hunkered in a shallow depression made by their own mortar shell. The corpsman found Rocque lying conscious in his geometry of bandoleers. He could use his legs. Greenbaugh was on his stomach to Adams’s left. The hood of his jacket had fallen away from his blackened face, which was panting but expressionless, wiped clean by exertion. Adams wondered if he looked that way. He fought the need to make noise as he exhaled. The lieutenant came up with his radioman. The lieutenant asked Sutherland if he could make it to the base of the hill. There was apparently some trouble with the other machine gun.

No, he told Sutherland, he hadn’t seen Devlin. They were taking fire on the right and needed to get over the ridge before they were pinned down. Sutherland should consider himself in charge of the gunners because if the mortars could quiet the single Chinese gun on the heights, the rest would be up to him.

The Chinese machine gun fanned green tracers from left to right and back again. Adams could no longer separate the low pitch of the Chinese burp guns from other rifle fire. Men crawled past him. A concussion grenade from up top showered him with grit and a wetness he felt but couldn’t see. When more marines stood to rush over him, Sutherland lifted Adams by his webbed belt and moved the black cave of his mouth with urgency. It was time to go. He was deaf from the grenade, and he hadn’t even known it.

They took the heights and the tentlike ridge that stretched toward their camp. A B.A.R. man shut down the Chinese machine gun with flanking fire and grenades, and he got a chest wound for his trouble. They had a total of eight wounded, two of them bad enough to need carrying. They counted seven dead Chinese left on the field. And one of their own was missing. It was Devlin.

Sutherland demanded they stay and search. The corps did not leave men behind, ever. He screamed this aloud, the code everybody swore by, and two noncoms who’d known him and known Devlin for a long time held him back and kept him off the brand-new lieutenant. The lieutenant asked Spoonhauer when he’d last seen Devlin, and the gunner, whose jacket and pants had been shredded by shrapnel along one side of his body, couldn’t say. The lieutenant, who was a lawyer back in Virginia and a good one, sent volunteer scouts back along the saddle, but he told Sutherland a longer search was too dangerous. They had wounded to get home. The Chinese might regroup and come back in force. He ordered Sutherland to stay with his squad and prepare to move on. Sutherland complied with a rigidity of voice and bone that frightened Adams. It was the only time all night he felt that way: overwhelmed by the actions of another man.

Adams drew stretcher duty. He and a private named Dominick and two others tried to carry the wounded B.A.R. man. The B.A.R. man thrashed with pain and threw himself from the stretcher made of rifles and ponchos. They had to strap him down while he fought them, and a collapsed lung caused his breath come in long, sucking rattles that were terrible to hear. At one point, they dropped the B.A.R. man on a slippery decline, and he screamed through the blood in his mouth until Hebert gave him as much morphine as he could take. He died in agony and froth less than a mile from camp as he prayed into their bent, striving faces with verses they couldn’t understand. His desperate attempt to communicate left Adams’s own mouth shrunken and dry. Hebert closed the bulged eyes and tagged the body, and they shrouded him, the B.A.R. man, and the other stretcher-borne man who had died on the ridge soon after the fight, in their own ponchos, which were brittle with cold.

At the end of the final mile, Adams watched Sutherland make his way through the Dog Company lines with their machine gun across his back like a yoke. The dawn air was light enough to reveal the gun’s seared and smoky vents and Sutherland’s ferocious, bitten weariness. Adams could see also the blackish blood of the dead B.A.R. man on the gloves of his own hands. The blood had soaked him to the wrists. He worked in his seized, upended mind to halt the impending belief that the blood somehow belonged to Devlin.

Hobbs was waiting near the squad tent, but not in it. His eyes and hands leaped when he saw Adams, though he said nothing that might embarrass Adams or embarrass them both. Pilcher took a long, flat look at Hobbs, then told him about Devlin, who was Missing In Action, and about Rocque, and about the two men from Third Platoon who had been killed. Pilcher wanted to talk about all of it, he wanted to get it out, but he was too steamrollered to make much sense. Some of the other men lay down on their cots instead of walking across the camp to eat or get hot coffee. Adams, too, wanted to lie down and squeeze his eyes shut. He wanted to get off his aching feet. But the blind confinement of the tent made the skin of his face feel like melting wax, so he came back out into the morning where the camp was a bright game board of vehicles and stacked supplies and men who looked smaller than they should.

He asked Hobbs for a cigarette. Hobbs gave him one and pulled a lighter from his dungarees, and they both began to smoke with their eyes shelved against the morning glare. Adams’s hands continued to tremble. He didn’t care if Hobbs saw his hands. He asked Hobbs about his visit with the captain. Hobbs shied to one side as if he didn’t want to talk about that business, not first, but he went on with it when he sensed how Adams needed him to lay out a series of events that could be readily understood. The captain was fine, he said. He was just looking for some help.

Adams smoked his cigarette to the pinch of his fingernails before he stripped the damp butt and threw its pieces to the ground. His lips were so split and sore he could taste his own juices. “Captain could use you. He’d be lucky to have you running wire or being on the radios. You could go for Pfc over there.” He talked in a neutral tone, which took great effort. He could taste the tears that flowed behind his teeth.

Hobbs shook his head. “I told him I wouldn’t leave Weapons Platoon unless he ordered me to. Told him I appreciated the offer, that I was flat scared of his appreciation. He asked why I didn’t want to come over, and I told him I only knew how to do things with the gunners, and he asked me why I didn’t want to learn more, and I said I wanted to be a better marine at my assigned job first. He liked that.”

“You could have asked him to put you on motor transport.” Adams looked at his fat, aching fingers. They had almost stopped shaking. He had thrown his gloves away to be burned. “You could be king mechanic of the motor pool.”

“So could you, and you’re here,” Hobbs said. His upper body went rigid with an emotion Adams didn’t recognize. He sipped at the cold morning air with gray lips. “I just said I’d stay with weapons if Sergeant Devlin and the lieutenant would have me. It’s the place I was put.”

“We don’t have Devlin now. We lost him.” Adams tried to smooth the screech out of his voice.

Hobbs removed his helmet. He held it in front of him like a dark, empty basket. The damp pupils of his eyes were strangely blank and still. “I’m not clear on that yet, why it had to happen,” he said. “But I knew you’d be all right, Fremont. I knew it all along. I did. Just like I know I wouldn’t have been.”

Devlin was found the next night by a team at a listening post. He had crawled within range of the post, then rolled himself onto an open stretch of road until the men assigned to the post got permission to investigate. He had taken one bullet in the calf, which left his leg swollen and oozing, and one through the jaw, which caped his field jacket with blood. He had come for miles somehow, bleeding and emptied by shock. He didn’t last another night.

Sutherland found a Chinese canteen on Devlin’s belt and Chinese uniform insignia, which had been cut free with a knife, in his pockets. Sutherland stayed as close to Devlin as the surgeons would allow, he even spoke a few words with the sergeant, but he didn’t share the details with a single soul. He became like an aimed spear around the lieutenant and everybody else. The other noncoms gathered with mugs of weak coffee to talk about Devlin and what he’d done and how he deserved to survive this puny-ass war after what he’d been through with the Japanese in the last. They told themselves that he had burrowed like a wolf during the day to avoid capture. Somebody had seen the shell of mud on his uniform that proved it.

Devlin’s loss was a bad one, though nobody said it was unexpected. There was no use talking about it for long—Devlin wouldn’t have stood for the nattering, and it was the way of the veterans to bury a man when he was buried. But the gunners took the news hard. They tried all manner of things to barricade themselves with luck. Pilcher visited the chaplain. Spoonhauer shuffled and reshuffled his red-backed deck of cards. Adams replayed versions of the patrol in his head that ended with triumph and relief. Even Sutherland was seen worrying the black beads of a rosary. Rumor had it that the rosary had belonged to Devlin.

Hobbs tried to relax the men in the gunner’s platoon by telling a few choice stories, but all his efforts seemed to go wrong. Because Sergeant Devlin had so obviously tried to have Hobbs transferred to another unit, most of the men thought it was out of line for Hobbs to participate in their grief. When Hobbs talked about the Green River mountain man who had once shot a bear for breakfast, Pilcher stopped him. Pilcher thought the story was disrespectful. When Hobbs worked up a good head of steam with a set of adventures that featured the cattle detective Nate Champion, he had to ease off as it became clear his restless audience would not tolerate the final episode that described Nate’s death during a fiery ambush. Nobody except Rocque wanted to hear Hobbs’s anxious, distracting rambles, and Rocque was soon shipped back to Hungnam because of his shoulder wound. Only the navy corpsmen, who labored in the now crowded aid tents, could stand to be around C.D. Hobbs. They didn’t care if he was an outcast or a nutcase or a shirker. They didn’t care what he said, or how he said it, as long as he was willing to handle bedpans and dirty bandages.

Hobbs still managed to ruin himself with Sutherland. The way Adams put it together later, Hobbs found a black-beaded rosary on the ground between the supply dump and the latrines. The rosary was caked with mud, and its beads were tied in an ungainly series of knots, but Hobbs was sure it was the one that had belonged to Sergeant Devlin. So he rushed to find Sutherland who was collecting on a wager with one of the mess-hall sergeants. Sutherland’s arms were full of cigarette cartons. And he was not happy to see C.D. Hobbs. When Hobbs offered him the rosary, he wouldn’t take it.

“Not mine,” he said. “Get the hell out of here.”

But Hobbs insisted. He tried to wipe mud off a saint’s medal because he thought the shined medal would prove to Sutherland that the rosary was his.

“Please, sir. You want this,” he said. “I know you do.” When Hobbs tried to lay the rosary across the lid of a cigarette carton, Sutherland detonated.

“That was in my pack, you little thief,” he shouted, dropping his cigarettes so he could ready his fists. “You lifted it from my pack. I never took it out of there. I never lost it. You stole it, you fucking coward thief.” It took Greenbaugh and two others to pull the former sergeant off Hobbs, who weathered one hard punch to the face before he flattened himself on the ground like a rug.

The rosary was Devlin’s. There was no doubt about that. Everybody agreed. Yet nobody was able to get Sutherland to admit he’d seen or touched the thing since the day Devlin died. He refused to accept Devlin’s absence. The old salts in the company knew what that meant. It meant Sutherland perceived the sergeant’s death the only way he was capable of perceiving it—as a bad omen. And Sutherland made it his business to burn Hobbs to the ground from that moment on. The only enemy who deserved worse was the Chinese. “You listen to me,” he told Adams, his face in a merciless twist. “MacArthur’s put us in a noose made of Chinks, thousands of the godless bastards. Thousands. They’ll take their toll before we get out of here. The way I see it, your buddy is part of the toll. He’s weak, he’ll pay, that’s the way it’s got to be with us and the Chinks. You better get used to the idea that your friend is the kind who slows you down and gets you captured. I saw it happen in Nanking. I had friends who were tortured into pieces, who were treated worse than hung meat, and I won’t let it happen again. If that scum gets close to a front line while I’m a marine, I’ll finish him myself.”

Over the next three weeks, winter set in. The marines continued to move toward the Yalu River, crawling along the hip of the reservoir that lay like an unmarked scroll of light to the east. There was sporadic fighting, but the Chinese tended to melt off the hills in front of them. Adams did not believe the Chinese were retreating because they were whipped or scared. Sutherland wouldn’t let him, or any of them, believe the Chinese were scared, although that was what the pogues who talked to the newspaper reporters liked to say.

Hill 1281 was just another anvil of Korean rock. Its crest was all ice and wind-shorn granite, but the men of Easy Company tried to dig in because they had been ordered to do so. Every jolt of the pick jarred Adams’s arm bones deep into his abused shoulder sockets. He was hungry but barely able to eat. And the Manchurian cold gnawed at his muscles until it took him twice as long as it should to accomplish the most meager tasks. Like digging a hole. Or taking a piss. He had to get his dick past more than four inches of layered clothing to take a piss, and it wasn’t easy when his dick shrank up to a nub in the frigid clutch of the air. Then he didn’t want to think about what was dripping out of him or look at it making a spoiled mark in the snow.

He tried to dig to the rhythm of sentences he’d read and reread in the latest letter he’d received from his family. We are praying for a wet winter, his mother wrote, though nothing too harsh for the yearlings. Charlotte does well at school, and with her music. She rides Jackson just as you asked. Gene is making plans to travel to the stock show in Denver after Christmas. He hopes to purchase a few Herefords for the meat. He tried to dig his hole and listen to the sentences from home in a way that made him strong, not weak. Please tell C.D. I saw his mother in Dixon when I visited with the Ladies’ Aid Society. She mentions she will be moving to Encampment come spring. I have asked her to join us for a holiday celebration, but she does not yet know her plans. She sends her proud love to her son, as do I.

Her son. Adams reckoned Posie Hobbs wouldn’t be so proud of her son now, if she ever had been, which he doubted. Hobbs was no longer welcome among the gunners. Sutherland wouldn’t have him in the unit. Only the cooks and the corpsmen would have him, which was maybe all right because, ever since Sergeant Devlin’s death, C.D. had remained a pariah, the kind of hexed, bad-luck soldier nobody wanted to admit he knew.

Adams fumbled the clods of dirt he’d hacked free into a burlap bag. He could see Greenbaugh trying to do the same fifteen yards away, but even the sight of Greenbaugh didn’t reduce his sense of solitude. Easy Company didn’t have enough men to lug supplies up Hill 1281. They didn’t have enough men to fill the holes and gun pits they were trying to dig. Illness and frostbite had shredded their ranks. When he stood to tighten the parka hood that failed to protect his numb chin, he thought of the legendary Scottish clansman that Blue Pete Tosh used to tell stories about, the mad, loyal McKinney who froze to death on a highlands hilltop overlooking the storm-killed bodies of his sheep. McKinney wouldnae leave his herd, Blue Pete said, not even when all were lost or dead.

A hill like 1281 would suit Mad McKinney, Adams thought. Empty. Weather-bled. It was the kind of place a man could lose everything he cared about.

Then he saw Pilcher—skinny, unsteady Ry Pilcher. Pilcher was carrying the gun. Since Sudong, nobody but Sutherland was allowed to carry the gun.

Adams dropped his pick and went to meet Pilcher near the jury-rigged command post where the captain’s men were splicing communications wire with their bare hands. They looked like children trying to tie shoelaces, the captain’s men did, their fingers were so awkward and stiff. Hobbs should have had that job, Adams told himself. Hobbs should have done what Devlin asked him to do. He’d have a place—and some dignity—if he’d listened to Devlin. Instead, Hobbs had fallen into a bad crack of his own creation. Shaking his head, Adams started to offer Pilcher a cigarette, but the continuous cold ruined cigarettes now; it fractured the paper and tobacco into fragments that had no taste. So he offered nothing.

Pilcher’s once-pink face was gray with malnutrition beneath the rind of his hood. But he still had a reckless, knowing smile framed by a pair of sharp canine teeth, and he was still able to laugh about the breaks that did or didn’t come his way. The machine gun was on his back, wrapped in its tarpaulin and cloths.

“God damn Hill number 1-2-kiss-my-ass. They get steeper every day.” Pilcher wheezed as he spoke, his words cornered and tight. Adams felt the whistle in his own lungs as he listened to what he knew would be bad news. “You ain’t gonna believe this. I wouldn’t if I hadn’t seen it myself. Suds is sent back. Lieutenant’s orders.” Pilcher loosened the muffler he wore over his mouth as he spoke. The muffler was bright gold and blue, the colors of his football team back home. It was so visible in the gray and green world in which they lived that Sutherland made him take it off whenever they were on the line.

“He give you the gun?” Adams couldn’t believe Sutherland hadn’t carried the gun uphill, lieutenant or no lieutenant. The gun was like a flag to Sutherland, a warning to the Chinese he hated, a sign that the struggling marines were nowhere near the end of their rope.

Pilcher’s body wavered into what looked like a shrug. “Lieutenant told me to haul it up here after they arm-wrestled if off Suds. His breathing’s real bad. He was going to his knees like a lung-shot hog.”

Sutherland had been sick for days, chilled, coughing, but he wouldn’t let the corpsmen touch him. Said he’d had the fucking malaria in the Philippines, the Japanese hadn’t stopped for that, and he wasn’t going to take some wounded son-of-a-bitching marine’s place on a cot.

“They done hung us on the buck pole this time,” Pilcher said, his smile in place but no feeling behind it. “Spoonhauer’s got the platoon, you got the squad. I got nary a problem with that, but this hill is too big for us. Battalion thinks the Chinks won’t do nothing, that we’re buffaloing them by squatting up here like we’re all high and mighty. Suds has got me thinking otherwise.”

“We don’t know what the Chinks will do.” Adams spoke with the vehemence that had been stalking him for days, ever since he’d seen that Sutherland was sick. “We just need to get the gun ready. Somebody will decide what comes next.”

Pilcher spat, or tried to. Adams knew they were both thinking the same thing: the time for sensible decisions was long past. He watched as the saliva that pooled on Pilcher’s parka sleeve began to freeze. “Too damn cold for me to worry about it,” Pilcher said. “Get shot up here, I won’t even bleed.”

“You won’t have time to bleed,” Adams said, thinking the Chinese were smart to let the weather do their job for them. “I’ll be kicking your nuts up your spine for being so stupid.”

Pilcher sniffed at the dry, frigid air as if there was a chance he’d smell something good, or at least important. “I didn’t think it could get worse.”

“It can always get worse.”

“You sound like my mama. And all I’d like from her right now—or you—is a mess of dumplings baked with a big, fat, corn-fed hen. I could eat that meal every day of my life. When I get back, I just might.”

They swung around, the gun anchored to Pilcher’s bowed back, and they walked to where Adams had begun to construct the gun emplacement he was supposed to share with Sutherland. Now the pit was his. He looked over at Greenbaugh who was still scratching at his hole, rhythmically, blankly. That’s how it was, he thought. Endurance was its own cruel victory. Every day they had less food, less shelter, less momentum. Soon, one side or the other would have nothing left to fight with or for.

He helped Pilcher ease the machine gun and its waxed garments to the ground. The sun was burning toward the end of its wick. There was too much left to do—a perimeter to clear, tripwire flares to string along the edge of their defenses. Adams stared at the bipod that was lashed to the back of his deflated field pack.

“You know what’s got to happen, don’t you? Now that you’re practically a corporal.”

Adams looked at Pilcher who was rewinding his hand-knit muffler. The mouth he covered was so skewed it looked mean.

“Get every marine you can. Don’t stay in Suds’s asshole and feel sorry for yourself. Don’t wait for the captain to forget us again. Get Hobbs and Begnini on up here.”

“He’s no good for this,” Adams said, thinking of Hobbs, his jaws locking around the words. “I don’t want him here.”

“He don’t got to be good. He’s just got to hold a gun and be on our side. That’s all you can ask for.”

“No. He’s more trouble than he’s worth.” It was easy for him, simple, to shape the words that Sutherland would have shaped.

Pilcher’s yellowed eyes went shrewd with pity. “Well, damn it all then. Whatever you say. But I wouldn’t have picked you as one who didn’t give a man his second chance.”

Adams thought of the last time he’d actually spoken to Hobbs. C.D. didn’t even pretend to muster with the squad anymore. They no longer ate or slept in the same tent. But they’d both been in one of the warming tents the evening before. The medical officers wanted the men to spend at least ten minutes of every two hours in a tent to reduce the effects of frostbite. The heat from the roaring stoves had felt like a salve to Adams, a thick blanket of comfort, even though his feet throbbed so hard with thawing pains that it was all he could do not to cry out. Then C.D. had ruined everything by approaching him and talking to him in jokes. “How you doing, Fremont? What about it?” His voice sounded clownish and shrill in the baked confines of the tent. “You think Old Etch would say it’s cold enough for us out there? Or Gene? I can hear Uncle Gene telling how this is pussy work for men from Wyoming. Bad weather is what we own. We’re used to this kind of cold.”

“Nobody is used to this.” Adams kept his eyes on his wooden feet because they made him feel hard-hearted. He didn’t want to hear from Hobbs. He hated that Hobbs was saying things about the two of them in front of other men. He hated that his body was acknowledging pain. “Nobody should be used to this. Why don’t you shut your mouth.”

“But, Fremont, it’s me talking. You don’t….” He never heard the end of Hobbs’s sentence. C.D.’s voice was drowned out by the puling cough of the flu-ridden marine who sat between them. When Adams next raised his eyes in the murk of the tent, his friend was gone.

“I don’t think C.D. would do us any good,” he said to Pilcher, almost pleading. “He’s used up.”

“Ain’t we all,” Pilcher wheezed. “I just hope the same is true for the Chinks.”

Sutherland had known how to do it. Sutherland had sampled them and raged at them and even blindsided them because Sutherland believed that hatreds were the only glues that held in the end. Hatred for the Communist Chinese. Hatred for niggling officers and the Tokyo command that served up marines like fodder. Hatred for the lack of supplies and ammunition. Sutherland believed all of those things had to smolder and burn within a man in order to make him fight. At his best, Sutherland reminded Adams of the ranch cook Basilio who had run so fierce and scorched at his job. Basilio had lasted at the Trumpet Bell for more than fifteen years until he suddenly began to steal things—belt buckles, spare socks, harmonicas—from the younger herders, Mexicans and Basques far beneath him in responsibility and age. Basilio had been sent away. Nobody offered an explanation for his sudden dishonesty except Old Etchepare who said that disgrace eventually came from heaven to all men.

Adams tried to fill another burlap bag with snow and dirt. The gun pit wasn’t going to be finished before dark. And he was so tired. The news that Sutherland had been taken from them had brought on a dense, pressing need for sleep.

The wavering notes of a child’s song echoed through his weariness.

“I’m working … on the railroad … just to pass … the time away.”

The voice. The tune. They were so weirdly familiar. Adams spun to his left, then to his right, turning fast amid the freshly falling snowflakes that swept across the unfinished marine defenses like scraps of shredded paper.

“… working on the railroad….”

The constant, clawing wind brought tears to his eyes. His feet felt as if they belonged to another creature, something with thick and distant hooves. But he knew what he had heard. He knew that song from long, long ago. Hobbs was out there.

He found the man about one hundred yards to the north. Hobbs was chopping at the frozen earth with a dented entrenching tool as if he couldn’t be stopped. Pilcher was nearby, admiring Hobbs’s handiwork. It was clear to Adams that Pilcher had made it his business to reassign Hobbs to the squad. Greenbaugh had also joined the group, taking a break from his own futile digging. Greenbaugh was staring—half in worry, half in awe—at the machine-like consistency of Hobbs’s digging.

“Be so cold tonight, we’re gonna have to piss on the guns to keep ‘em thawed. I thought we could use an extra pisser.” Pilcher tried to wink one of his swollen eyes at Adams.

“Jesus,” said Greenbaugh.

Hobbs halted his entrenching tool midswing and muttered a few words.

“Huh? What?” Just hearing the soft voice, especially its out-of-place yearning, upset Adams.

“Check your feet?”

He hadn’t checked his feet, despite the captain’s orders. He hadn’t had time. None of them had. But he slid his mittens off for Hobbs, and his latest pair of gloves. His fingers were badly torn around the nails despite the application of gun grease. But they weren’t blue. The sight of them cracked Hobbs’s face with a strange smile.

“You’re doing a good job there, C.D.” Adams didn’t know what else to say.

“Help you in the pit?” Hobbs asked. His irises were as mottled as storm clouds.

Adams stalled. Hobbs couldn’t have asked a worse question. “I’ll detail assignments after the flares are laid.”

“What?” Greenbaugh straightened up. “You’re going to keep him with you, aren’t you?”

But Adams wasn’t going to keep C.D. in the gun pit as his assistant. He couldn’t risk it. He had to have somebody with glue.

“I said I’ll square the assignments later.”

“You just squared them.” Greenbaugh showed Adams the underbelly of his eyes. “You’re going to take Ry and stick me with your friend.”

“Come on, Greenie. We’re all in this together.”

“Sure,” said Greenbaugh. “And I’m in it with that.” He pointed his shovel blade at Hobbs who had removed his own gloves and was using his fingers to harvest the snot icicles that hung above his lip. He was eating them.

“Knock it off, C.D.”

Hobbs gave some quick yips, almost like a collie’s.

“Fuck,” said Greenbaugh.

“I’ll work on it,” Adams said.

Hobbs whispered something into the palm of his bare hand.

“What?” hissed Adams, feeling bewildered and besieged.

Hobbs bit into his hand, then he took a hard, immobile look at each of the three men. He pointed over their aligned shoulders. “Somebody wants a ride on the railroad.”

“Jesus. He’s a complete loon.” Greenbaugh dropped his shovel.

“Just to pass the time of day.”

Adams was still trying to decipher the words that had come from the dry sieve of Hobbs’s vocal chords when Pilcher stopped him. Pilcher was staring east, toward Chosin Reservoir. The weather had cleared for a moment. The falling sun bathed the neighboring array of hills in a warm, golden light. Basking in that light was rank upon rank of neatly assembled soldiers. Every hill they could now see was thatched with waiting Chinese.

Adams looked at his watch dial. The captain had put the company on 50 percent alert, so Pilcher lay curled behind him in an arrested state that might be called sleep. It was Adams’s first rotation on watch, and all he knew for certain was that the sky had become a wide-mouthed kettle filled with an endless, purifying cold. The moisture in his breath froze and fell upon the flanges of the gun like the chaff of stars. There was fighting to the west. He could hear the battle sounds and see the toylike flash of distant mortars and the tiny pendants of the flares. The Chinese were no longer hiding in their caves or wherever it was they hid when the spotter planes looked for them during the day. They’d revealed themselves before sunset. They appeared prepared to attack. He remembered what Devlin—prowling, questing Devlin—had told them just before they’d chivvied up to march toward the Yalu. Devlin said, “There’s only one road to this Chosin and the river. If I’m the gook general, I use every night I got trying to cut that road.”

It was time to rouse Pilcher. They both needed to change their socks. He peered across the patchwork of rock and dirt and snow toward Hobbs and Greenbaugh’s hole. Hobbs liked to have help with his shoe pacs. He’d told Greenbaugh that, how Hobbs might need a little help with his feet. Greenbaugh was a good squad member, but Adams suspected it would be a long time before Greenbaugh did anything extra to take care of C.D. Hobbs.

He shook Pilcher awake. Once sleep overtook a man on Hill 1281, if it did, it was difficult to convince that man to come back into his suffering body. He unzipped Pilcher’s sleeping bag and shoved it from his shoulders. Then he whispered to Pilcher to grab onto his rifle. He couldn’t see anything except a pale medallion of skin above the light and dark stripes of Pilcher’s knotted muffler, but his assistant was moving.

He crawled out of his own bag, which had been zipped to the waist, and began to unlace his knee-high shoe pacs. The pacs were warm, but not ventilated. This meant they had to keep changing their socks or their feet might freeze solid in their own moisture. He drew his extra socks from the front of his wool overpants, cursing how awkward he felt. He was so cold he couldn’t coordinate his arms with his legs. When he yanked his shoe pacs off, his teeth began to chatter until his jaw rang with their tune.

Pilcher wasn’t doing so well, either. He’d slept with his pacs off, which was good for reducing moisture but bad if a fight started in a hurry. Guys had lived through firefights like that, bootless, only to hear a surgeon tell them they were going to lose their feet. That’s what Hebert, the corpsman, said. Hebert was always bugging them about their feet. Adams signaled to Pilcher, with his teeth ground together, that he’d help him with his laces when he needed it.

Pilcher nodded. He was still groggy, but he pulled his feet clear of his bag. He fished a pair of socks from beneath the coil of his muffler and handed them to Adams. Adams tried to work fast, priding himself on any remnant of dexterity. He pulled off Pilcher’s socks, one by one, as he cradled both bony heels in his lap. He was about to massage Pilcher’s toes—captain’s orders—when he realized strips of skin had peeled away from Pilcher’s feet with his socks. There was a smell, too, one he recognized above the shared rankness of sweat and smeared shit. The sweetness of rot. He did what he could with Pilcher’s toes, drew on the fresh socks, then shoved the feet into the cold, dry shoe pacs. He worked the stiff laces through the eyelets and up the length of Pilcher’s ankles and calves. Pilcher needed to go to the aid tent at first light. But Adams wasn’t going to tell him that now.

He looked again across the ransacked fifteen yards to the other hole. No shadows. No stirring. But they couldn’t be doing well. Nobody could be, not a Chink peasant or an American marine. He watched Pilcher work himself onto his knees. The other man was sobbing under the layers of his shirts and coats. That’s what it took, weeping. The machine gun rested above them, its barrel pointing into emptiness. The damn thing might not even work at twenty degrees below zero. Sutherland had, just that morning, lubricated the gun with powder because no version of oil or grease or even hair tonic was trustworthy in these temperatures. But Sutherland hadn’t said what to do if the gun wouldn’t fire. He hadn’t acted like it was a possibility.

Adams wasn’t sure it mattered. The gun was the base of fire for their scraggly segment of the line. If the gun went down, they would all surely go down with it.

Two a.m. He was back on watch after an hour when his mind had squatted in a gray and murky place without moving. When Pilcher slapped him into consciousness, the first thing he recognized was a swollen tongue that tasted of bloody rags. His tongue. He sucked some chlorinated water from the ice block of his canteen and gave the high sign to the lieutenant who was making his rounds. Pilcher crawled back into his bag. So Adams was among the first to hear them, the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of footsteps that ground the crusted snow to powder.

Footsteps. He squinted into the killing wind that blew down the barrel of the gun. His eyes shed solid tears. Footsteps, marching. Then came the sound of a Chinese officer singing cadence. His voice was a ghost voice, alone and echoing, and it soared toward Adams’s ears like a dark and ravenous bird. “Nobody live forever. You die! Nobody live forever. You die!” A ghost voice in English. Adams felt himself shrink into the close harbor of his clothes.

Ten divisions of seasoned soldiers. That’s what the prisoners at Sudong had promised. And Easy Company was defending Hill 1281 with fewer than two hundred men.

Here they come.

Here they come.

Here they come.

Warnings rose from hole to hole, then throttled themselves to whispers. Adams took one hand off the gun and pressed his helmet down onto his head as Pilcher kicked clear of his bag. Adams made himself swivel and move, made himself force moisture down his mistreated throat. The ammunition belts were ready. He had a pistol, a few grenades. He couldn’t see a god damn thing yet, only hear them, god damn the Chinese for being so ready for this terrain and temperature. Was Pilcher ready? He elbowed Pilcher in the thickness of his upper arm. He felt the solid brace of Pilcher’s feet and the full flex of his tendons as if they were his own.

Then he heard something else, a thin thread of music spinning itself below the Chinese officer’s taunt. “No-bo-dy-live-you-die. No-bo-dy-live-you-die!” There was another song in the air. “Dinah, won’t you blow? Dinah, won’t you blow? Dinah, won’t you blow your h-h-horn?” Adams’s chest went as numb as his face. He knew exactly where the song was coming from.

He didn’t even think about it. He just left Pilcher and the gun. He rolled up and over the pitiful sandbags not filled with sand, then crawled left on the blunt points of his elbows and knees. The jitters, the shakes—they all had them. But he couldn’t let Hobbs go full shatter now. He couldn’t. He was the one responsible. Don’t do it, he shouted into the endless cavern of his own head, Don’t sing so they can find us. Don’t make that god damn noise. He knew if Sutherland had been there, he would have slit C.D. Hobbs’s throat without a thought.

He jackknifed into the hole where Greenbaugh was crouched at the front rim, a still life of watchfulness and horror. Hobbs was cross-legged in the black bottom of the hole, invisible except for the bobbing white root of his head. He’d taken off his helmet and hats. Adams grabbed for the handle of Hobbs’s parka hood. As they touched, he was filled with a roaring, insatiable anger that seemed to come from a deep, craving place far below his wished-for discipline. You are not worth it. Those were the words that came to him as he blindly struck out at Hobbs again and again and again. Anger. Sutherland’s glue. He struck at Hobbs’s mouth because it was so unprotected and moving. You’ll get us killed. He felt the notches of Hobbs’s teeth. He felt the puniness of Hobbs’s wagging neck.

That puniness so infuriated him that he reached into the pocket that held the honed Baker knife he’d kept since he was a boy. He would do it if he had to, he really would. He would make Hobbs be quiet. He whispered savagely to Hobbs that he had to stop singing, but Hobbs didn’t stop. It was as though he wanted to be saved from his own uselessness. The wish was right there in the quivering nakedness of his eyes. It was in the tuneless chime of his voice. Adams clamped a hand over Hobbs’s moving mouth, but Hobbs kept singing. As Adams opened the blade of the Baker knife, something black and smooth brushed across his vision, and he believed he saw Hobbs tilt his jaw upward to give him and his blade a better angle.

The thunk, thunk, thunk of the marine mortars surprised him. The illumination rounds went up first, and they backlit the human warp and weft that was about to blanket Easy Company: thousands of Chinese soldiers in perfect ranks, more than Adams had imagined in his worst, elastic nightmares. “You die! You die!” The Chinese officer exhorted his men while Adams watched the knife waver in his enraged hand. He backed away from Hobbs. But his intentions slipped slender and sharp into his blood like an inoculation. He should have felt fear as he lay exposed beneath the fading flares of the battlefield, but he didn’t. He was not afraid. What he felt was a greedy resilience, a hurtling desire to stand straight up so the Chinese could see him. Come at me, you bastards. I’m here. It was as if everything that had once thrived within Hobbs and within himself had blended into a tensile, mocking anger. Hobbs became invisible to him. Hobbs was forgotten. He recognized nothing inside himself except Sutherland’s admonition: Don’t let them take you alive.

Then. Trip flares fountained all along their front. There were bugle blasts. Torrents of cursing. Shouting. There were Chinese whistle shrieks that became blue flames inside his ears. He never remembered crawling back to his position, though he remembered Pilcher’s face, how Pilcher’s eyes were blistered with the acid wash of betrayal. He had to shove Pilcher out of the gunner’s position where he’d settled himself in sacrifice. He had to make them both believe that he was rock solid again. They began to fire, late, and the gun was sluggish in the cold, but they reaped the shadows that moved toward them, rank by rank. Their muzzle belched its bright orange flame of invitation. The grenadiers would come for them very soon. That was how the Chinese targeted a machine gun.

Mortars began to plummet into their lines, sizzling dirt and ice, and there was flash after flash from the poorly made Chinese concussion grenades that blinded them for a second or two but inevitably fell short. Pilcher linked belt after belt of ammunition as they swept the field, pivoting from stake to stake, cross-stitching their tracers with the red lines from Spoonhauer’s faraway gun. There were so many Chinese. Marine mortars shoveled the parading men into waist-high piles, and still they came, the men from the rear picking up the weapons of the fallen. When Pilcher unpinned a grenade, Adams knew some of the Chinese were finally getting through, getting closer. Which was why neither of them saw Hobbs fish-flopping out of his hole.

Then the gun stopped. It stuttered only once, its barrel steaming like the back of an exhausted animal, before it coughed up a last licking tongue of flame. Pilcher released the belt and cleared the firing mechanism, but the gun wasn’t jammed, and they both knew it. There was still covering fire from Spoonhauer’s squad, so they tried again, but the gun was down—too hot, too cold, or both.

He set Pilcher above him with an M1 and several clips. He was supposed to keep his hands covered, but he had no choice. He took the trigger housing off before he removed his gloves because he didn’t want to touch the gun’s cooked metal until he had to. Then he stripped off his gloves and put the flashlight he kept in his pants pocket between his teeth. Except the flashlight, too, had frozen. With nerveless fingers he felt blindly for the pin he suspected had been bent by the torque of the firing mechanism. He found it. If the ruined pin burned his fingertips, he couldn’t feel it.

The air above them was torn with riptides of light, and there was more noise than his ears could hear. Pilcher hovered over him, saying something with his blackened face.

Okay, Adams signed. He understood. The line was fraying, and they needed more covering fire to give them time to put a new pin in the gun. Pilcher would go get more men. He mouthed three words to Adams. Wait for me.

Adams nodded. And he drew the German pistol he’d bought in Wonsan.

Pilcher rose from his rabbit hunter’s crouch, his M1 jumping like a compass needle. But, after just a few steps, he stumbled. He seemed to leap in the direction of Greenbaugh’s hole as if he meant to leap, then he collapsed into a scrap of shadow. His frozen feet, that’s what Adams wanted it to be. He wanted Pilcher to stand up after tripping on his frozen feet. But Pilcher never moved. Adams felt Pilcher’s rise and fall in the parabola of his own pulse. He swung his unholstered pistol and shot into the blunt muzzle fire of a Chinese burp gunner. He fired until his clip was empty. When he hunkered to reload, he realized the long, toneless screech in his ears was his own.

He wasn’t going to last long by himself, so he began to feel it again—the greed for living he’d felt when he’d beaten Hobbs, when he’d begun to sense it was his own brutal clarity of purpose that had summoned the Chinese. Some men were weak, some were strong. Some men were meant to be outnumbered. He was counting his grenades by touch when a dark shape tried to lizard itself into the back of his hole. He cocked his pistol even as his bones filled with a venomous thrill. It would be Sutherland. That was only right. Sutherland had risen from the aid tent and yanked the needles out of his arms and thundered up that godforsaken hill to help him, to tell him what to do.

But it wasn’t Sutherland. It was Hobbs.

Bald, bloody-mouthed, twitching like a broken-backed dog that’s found its ditch: it was Hobbs. His uniform was plastered with substances that were moist and clumped. His mouth hung wide open. Adams kept his pistol raised. He wasn’t sure he recognized the man in his sights.

Hobbs was sledding a fat Browning Automatic behind him, dragging it like it was a piece of salvaged timber. Adams knew the B.A.R was a precious opportunity; it was a weapon he could use, yet he kept himself from snatching at the gun. He didn’t want to be rushed by hope, not ever again. And he didn’t want responsibility for Hobbs. He turned and fired an unconsidered clip from his pistol into the area his machine gun was supposed to cover. The Chinese had, for the moment, backed out of range.

“He, he, he, he.” Hobbs stiff-armed the B.A.R., trying to angle it against his legs like a crutch. And he was saying something, or trying to. A close mortar drop blew pulverized rock into the air, and while Adams swiped a hand across his face, tasting blood and cinder, he saw that Hobbs had barely flinched. His eyes were melted wide open.

Adams made himself reach out for the other man, his friend. He waited for the electric hatred to spark again between them, but he didn’t feel it this time, he felt something watery and dwindling instead. Hobbs’s body tilted into his own, and it became as shapeless as a wool sack, the great canvas kind they’d filled at the Cow Creek shearing sheds when they were young. He probed Hobbs’s neck for a pulse, his belt and pockets for ammunition. Hobbs was alive, but he carried nothing with him, not even a bandage. It was as if he’d been picked clean.

Rifle fire increased along the line. The Chinese, Adams guessed, had finally found a weak point. They would gush through it like oil. He touched his last two grenades, then rubbed the Browning as if to give it some life. One more genie, one last bottle. The words came to him in Sutherland’s blunt, currentless voice. He rested the gun across his thighs and reached forward to slip the hood of Hobbs’s parka over his shaved and naked head. Hobbs had come back to him, the saboteur, the fool. He’d nearly ruined everything, and then he’d tried to bring some kind of salvation to Adams, as if there was anything left on that damnable hill that might save either one of them.

“He, he, he, he.” Hobbs’s gashed mouth continued to gulp around a single syllable. Adams tried to prop him in the deepest portion of the pit. It was, he thought, the same as being alone.

He swung the B.A.R. over the pale crown of burlap bags. As soon as he sighted movement, he pulled the Browning’s trigger and fired a short burst. That marked him, by damn. He could see white-clad figures duckwalking toward Greenbaugh’s position, which now lay quiet and smoldering. The Chinese would get to him next. He felt a sifted desire to say something final to C.D., something clear and practical formed from the boyhood lives that were all that would ever give their disposable bodies a name. But he didn’t know what the right words might be. As he scanned the landscape in front of him, he saw the first flowers of a white phosphorus barrage bloom their way uphill. The barrage was on a line with their gun pit. Adams thought about the white fire of the winter sun over Bell Butte. He thought about the red petals of his guts blossoming on a slab of Korean ice. He fired the last few bullets in the Browning, then dropped it. Come and get me, then. There was no reason to hide anymore. Thousands of the bastards. They needed to know who he was before they killed him, who he’d tried to be. Not taken alive. But when he tried to stand tall in the gun pit, when he tried to make himself into a target they’d remember, he got snagged. Tripped. Thwarted. He was flattened onto the cartridge-covered bottom of the pit. Let me go, damn it, you need to let me go. Those were the only words he could scream into his mouth as the coward C.D. Hobbs grappled the two of them together, and the world they knew went flat and scorched and bright.

Adams pried himself out of the ground. His eyes and lungs were seared shut from smoke. He didn’t know who he was, where he was. Blind, deaf, spinning in an inferno. He would never know the name of the marine who dragged him to the aid station. The man did not have a face, only the steady, out-of-place strength of a plow horse. The same man carried Hobbs, peeled and burning, off the line and left him with the overwhelmed corpsman who was manning a makeshift aid station on the backside of the hill. The corpsman, whose name was Wade, shed tears as he worked. Adams remembered this. The corpsman was sheltered from the wind by a wall of dead marines, his forearms were jellied with frozen blood, the Chinese were shelling the hilltop, and he was down to his last ampule of morphine. He wept tears of terrible frustration. But when he saw that Hobbs’s stomach hadn’t been ripped open by the blast, he stuck that final ampule into his own blackened mouth so the painkiller inside it would thaw.

“Hold him hard,” he ordered Adams as he struggled with Hobbs’s clothes looking for an unfried patch of skin. Adams held Hobbs hard. He gave Wade the Baker knife. The blade was slim and sharp, and the corpsman slashed an opening in Hobbs’s smoking parka. Adams watched plummeting flakes of snow melt against Hobbs’s melted skin while Hobbs bucked and writhed until the morphine made his pain unreal. “Get him out of here,” the corpsman shouted, “while you’ve got a chance.” And Adams tried to get them out of there. But his numbed feet would not allow him to walk upright. He dragged himself and Hobbs to the base of a thorny bush. It was as far as he could go. He curled under the branches of the bush like a wounded pup and waited for his own tears.

Here they come.

Here they come.

But no one came for him.

Nobody walked or crawled off Hill 1281 until the next morning. That’s the story the marines would tell. The whole damn position had been surrounded. The Americans, outnumbered a dozen to one, fought with their rifle butts and fists until dawn.

But a stretcher bearer somehow came for Hobbs, creeping through the smoke and the night, a stretcher bearer who looked familiar and who worked alone. Adams asked the corpsman, Wade, if he knew the marine with the reddish beard and the rosary wrapped in his bandolier, but the corpsman was dead from a shrapnel wound to the neck. He could not answer Adams’s questions. Neither could the reinforcements from Able Company, the ones who poked at him with their frosted bayonets because they assumed he was dead and rigged with booby traps. It was a new day then, an hour of bloodless silence in the cold. The first slow spill of sunlight chastened itself behind the scrim of winter. The dead were laid out in rows. Adams hobbled off Hill 1281 on the arms of marines who looked older than any men he’d even seen. He had been spared. His friend was gone, no one knew how or when. He and Hobbs, all of Easy Company, all of America’s army, had been severed by the jaws of Chosin.