ditch on my hands and knees, then the Chinese corrected their angle of fire and marched the barrage right down the center of our line.
Somehow I had believed that if I ever bought one it would come as a result of some choice I had made; that I would be killed after some positive act of my own — no matter how unconscious or reckless — but there would still be a type of control in my death. However, now I knew that I was going to die in the middle of a firestorm. I had no more chance of resisting my death than if God crashed His fist down on top of me. The shells burst in jagged intervals along the ditch, blowing men and weapons in every direction. The corporal was suddenly frozen in an explosion of light and dirt behind him. His mouth and eyes were wide, his helmet pitted and torn with shrapnel. He seemed to pirouette in slow motion, the weight of his tall body resting inside one boot, then he fell backward across me. The blood ran from his stocking cap like pieces of string over his face. He opened and closed his mouth with a wet, sucking sound, the saliva thick on his tongue. He coughed once, quietly and deep in his throat; then his eyes fixed on a phosphorescent flare burning above us.
Moments later the firestorm ended, almost too quickly, because it seemed that nothing that intense and murderous could ever end, that it would perpetuate itself indefinitely with its own cataclysmic force. I pushed the corporal off me, my ears ringing in the silence (or what seemed like silence, since automatic weapons had begun firing again on both sides of us). The corporal’s helmet rolled off his head, and I saw a long incision, like a scalpel cut, across the crown of his skull. The dead were strewn in unnatural positions along the ditch, some of them half- buried in mounds of dirt from the caved-in walls, their bodies twisted and broken as though they had been dropped from airplanes. The faces of the wounded were white with shock and concussion. Down the line a man was screaming.
“Are you hit, Doc?” It was the first lieutenant. He carried his carbine in one hand. His left arm hung limply by his side.
“I’m all right.” Our voices sounded far away from me.
“Get ready to move the wounded out of here. The right flank is getting their ass knocked off. We’re supposed to get artillery in five minutes and pull.”
“You’re bleeding pretty heavy, Lieutenant.”
“Get every man moving you can. We’re going to have gooks coming up our ass.”
However, the artillery cover never came, and we were overrun fifteen minutes later. Our automatic weapons men killed Chinese by the hundreds as they advanced across the rice fields. We packed snow on the barrels of the.30-caliber machine guns to keep them from melting, and the bottom of the ditch was littered with spent shell casings and empty ammunition boxes. The dead lay in quilted rows as far as I could see. They moved forward and died, then another wave took their place. The bugles began blowing again, potato mashers exploded in our wire, and every time a weapon locked empty or a Marine was hit they moved closer to the ditch. Our only tank was burning behind us, the lieutenant was shot through the mouth, and all of our N.C.O.’s were dead. We fired our last rounds, fixed bayonets in a silly Alamo gesture, and then the Chinese swarmed over us.
They ran along the edge of the ditch, firing point-blank into us with their burp guns. They shot the dead and the living alike, in the hysterical relief that comes with the victory of living through an attack. Their weapons weren’t designed for accuracy, but they could dump almost a full pan into a man who was closer than twenty feet. For the first time in my life I ran from an enemy. I dropped the handles of a stretcher with a wounded Marine on it and ran across the bodies, the ammunition boxes, the bent bazookas, the knocked-out machine guns, the lieutenant spitting blood and parts of teeth on his coat, and suddenly I saw a young Chinese boy, not over seventeen, his thin, yellow face pinched with cold, standing above me in tennis shoes and quilted clothes. I guess (as I remember it) that I threw my arms out in front of me to prevent that spray of flame and bullets from entering my face and chest, but the gesture was unnecessary because he was a poor marksman and he never got above my knees. I felt a pain like a shaft of ice through both legs, and I toppled over as though a bad comic had just kicked me deftly across the shins.
My Korean recall, born out of Jack Daniel’s and sexual exhaustion, ended here. I awoke at six-thirty, sweating, my head thick with afternoon whiskey. For a half hour I sat on the shower tile under the cold water, chewing an unlit cigar. The white indentions in my calves felt like rubber under my thumb.
CHAPTER 2
The Shamrock Hilton Hotel in Houston was crowded that night with Democrats from all over Texas. They came in party loyalty almost seven hundred strong — the daughters of forgotten wars, the state committee from Austin, the A.F.L.-C.I.O. fat boys, the oil-depletion wheelers, manicured newspaper publishers, slick public relations men, millionaire women dressed in Neiman Marcus clothes with Piney Woods accents, young lawyers on their way up in state politics (each of them with a clear eye, hard grip, and a square, cologned jaw like Fearless Fosdick), the ten-percenters, the new rich who bought their children’s way into Randolph-Macon, the ranchers with a bright eye on the agriculture subsidy, a few semi-acceptable Mafia characters from Galveston, several ex-hacks, doormen, flunkies, and baggage carriers from Lyndon’s entourage, three Hollywood movie stars who had been born in Texas, an astronaut, one crippled commander of the Veterans of the Spanish-American War who sat in a wheelchair, an alcoholic baseball player who used to pitch for the Houston Buffaloes before he went up to the Cardinals, some highly paid prostitutes, an Air Force general who has probably won a footnote in military history for his dedication in the firebombing of Dresden, and United States Senator Allen B. Dowling.
I had driven from San Antonio in two and a half hours, highballing wide-open like a blue shot through small towns and farm communities, while drunken cowboys drinking beer in front of saloons stared at me in disbelief. I pulled into the white circular drive of the Shamrock and waited in the line of cars for the band of uniformed Negro porters to take over my luggage, my Cadillac, and even my attempt to open a door by myself. They moved about with the quick, electric motion of rubber bands snapping, their teeth white, their faces black and cordial, obsequious and yet confidently efficient. I imagined that they could have cut all our throats with pleasure. They reminded me of Negro troops in Korea when they were dealing with Mr. Skins, a white officer. They could go about a job in a way that deserved group citations, and at the same time insult an officer and laugh in his face without doing anything for which they could be reprimanded unless the officer wanted to appear a public fool.
I idled the car up to the glass doors at the entrance; one Negro pulled open the car door for me, another got behind the wheel, and a third took my suitcase from the trunk. I handed out one-dollar tips to each of them (with the stupid feeling of an artificial situation that you have when you pay a shoeshine boy), and followed the third porter into the hotel. And I wondered, looking at his gray, uniformed back, the muscles stiff and flat under the cloth, Would you really like to tick a razor across my jugular, you uprooted descendant of Ham, divested of your heritage, dropped clumsily and illiterate into a south Texas cotton patch, where you could labor and exhaust yourself and kind through the next several generations on tenant shares? Yes, I guess you could, with a neat, sharp corner of the blade that you would draw gingerly along the vein.
But I still had a fair edge on from the Jack Daniel’s, the Mexican girl, and the dream, and I imagine that is why I suddenly had such strange insights into that black mind walking before me.
I gave my name at the desk and was told that my wife had taken a suite of rooms on the tenth floor. She and my brother Bailey had come to Houston yesterday when the convention had started, and I was supposed to join them today at noon for lunch on the terrace with several of the oil-depletion boys who had all types of money to sink into a young congressman’s career. However, I didn’t have to speak before the convention until ten that night, and I didn’t think that I could take a full day of laughing conversation, racial jokes, polite gin by the swimming pool, and powdered, middle-aged oil wives who whispered banal remarks like slivers of glass in my ear. I had met all of them before in Dallas, Austin, Fort Worth, and El Paso, and they were always true to themselves, regardless of the place or occasion. The men wore their same Oshman western suits and low-topped boots, the diamond rings from Zale’s that looked out of place on their fat hands, the string ties or open-neck sports shirts that directed attention away from the swift eyes and the broken veins in the cheeks. They spoke of huge finance with indifference, but I knew that their groins tingled with pleasure at the same time. Their women liked me because I was young and good-looking, successful as a lawyer, tanned from playing in fashionable tennis courts, and with an inner steeled effort I could clink the ice in my glass and look pleasant and easy while they told about all the trivial problems in their insipid lives (in this respect I was very self-disciplined, because I always knew when to excuse myself and
