Retreat, Hell! by W. E. B. Griffin

Author:W. E. B. Griffin
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: War stories, Historical, Action & Adventure, 1950-1953, Fiction, United States, Suspense, Historical fiction, War & Military, Korean War, Military, History
ISBN: 9780515138610
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2004-12-28T03:47:22.447000+00:00

[TWO]

NEAR JAEUN-RI, SOUTH KOREA 1145 14 OCTOBER 1950

Major Malcolm S. Pickering, USMCR, who had at first known to the minute how many days and hours and minutes it had been since he had had to set his Corsair down— how long he had been on the run—now didn’t have any idea at all.

He wasn’t even sure if he had eaten his last rice ball yesterday or the day before yesterday.

All he was sure about was that deciding to move north-eastward was probably the worst fucking mistake he had made in his life. And might well be the last major mistake of his life.

There was nothing in this part of Korea but steep hills and more steep hills. No rice paddies. Damned few roads, and from what he’d seen of the traffic on them, it was mostly long lines of retreating North Korean soldiers, most of them on foot.

North American F-51 fighters, carrying the insignia of the South Korean Air Force, regularly flew over the roads, strafing anything they saw moving. They flew so low that there was no question in Pickering’s mind that if he just stood in the middle of one of the roads he would be seen by one of the F-51 pilots, who would then stand the airplane on its wing, do a quick one-eighty, and then come back and let him have a burst from the eight .50-caliber Brownings in its wings.

The F-51 pilot would logically presume that anyone on these roads was a North Korean. The South Koreans were holed up someplace out of sight. He’d also come across, making his way over the mountains, a dozen or more rock formations that by stretching the term could be called caves. They didn’t go deep into the mountains, but far enough so that a family of five or six could go into one of them and not be visible from either the ground or the air.

When one of the South Korean F-51s, or a section of them, caught a platoon, or a company, of North Koreans in the open and strafed them, the dead and wounded were left where they had been hit. There were very few North Korean vehicles of any kind, and the few trucks he had seen— some of them captured 6 × 6s and weapons carriers—were jammed with the walking wounded. They had kept their arms and used them to guarantee their positions on the trucks.

There was therefore the smell of rotting bodies that seemed to be getting worse, not better, even though it was getting chilly all the time, and freezing cold at night.

There was no question that the tide of war had changed. The North Koreans were not only retreating but bore little resemblance to an organized military force.

So obviously all he had to do was . . .

Make himself invisible to the F-51 pilots, so they wouldn’t blow him away. To that end, he had plastered his face and hands with mud, so they would not be a bright spot on the ground to be investigated and strafed.

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