The Last Stand of Fox Company: A True Story of U.S. Marines in Combat (11 page)

On the way back to his bunker McCarthy lingered to talk with Edward Jones, the Navy corpsman assigned to his platoon. McCarthy liked Jones, and the two spoke long enough for Jones to wonder about the lieutenant's familiarity with medical terms. Jones thought that McCarthy-with his stocky torso, Celtic features, and short, brushy dark hair-actually looked like an emergency room doctor, or at least the Hollywood kind. Lew Ayres as Dr. Kildare, maybe.

McCarthy liked the analogy so much that he confided to Jones a personal irony. If he had uttered the word "yes" five years ago, he said, he just might be in that foxhole instead of Jones.

At twenty-eight, Bob McCarthy was one of the oldest Marines in the company. He had enlisted in 1940, after his sophomore year at Oklahoma A&M, where he'd studied to become a veterinarian. The son of a pipefitter in Tulsa, he'd been such a gifted childaccording to his score in a national intelligence test-that the princi pal of his grammar school recommended he skip second and third grades. His mother liked to boast about that. She was the only woman in her bridge club whose child had been jumped two classes. When McCarthy's father was laid off during the Depression, the family used their small savings to buy a farm on the outskirts of the city. The senior McCarthy explained to his family that growing their own food might well be the only way they would eat.

In high school and college McCarthy felt a natural affinity for the sciences, and he excelled in biology, chemistry, and psychology. His mother was still thinking of her son as a future veterinarian when she discovered by chance that Bob had dropped out of college to join the Marines. He explained to her that he felt he owed service to a nation that had allowed him to move so effortlessly up the educational ladder. Much like Captain Barber's family, McCarthy's parents were distraught. Nothing, however, could change his mind.

McCarthy became a seagoing Marine, and by a stroke of good fortune he sailed from Pearl Harbor one day before the Japanese sneak attack in 1941. He subsequently saw action across the Pacific theater from Midway to the Philippines. He was promoted to corporal in 1943 when his platoon leader-again, much like Barber -noticed something special in this intellectual young man and urged him to apply for a slot in an experimental Naval College program being taught at the University of Notre Dame. He scored so high on the entrance exam that he was only one of two enlisted men chosen for the course. After three semesters at Notre Dame he received his college degree and was selected to attend St. Louis University's medical school on a Navy scholarship.

This was where he made his fateful choice. There were-and are-no Marine corpsmen. The Marine Corps is technically a branch of the Department of the Navy, but it is as fiercely self-sufficient as possible. The Corps trains its own engineering units, attorneys, military police, and pilots, and even journalists, weather forecasters, and musicians. The two career options closed to Marines, however, are medicine and religious vocations, as the Navy serves these functions with its own doctors, nurses, medics, and chaplains.

When McCarthy learned that in order to attend medical school he would have to trade in his Marine blues for Navy whites, he politely declined and enrolled in Marine officer candidate school instead. Now, as he hunched next to Jones's foxhole and took in the scene around him, he was certain he had made the right decision. Although Marines bristled at the notion of being mere "adjuncts" to the U.S. Navy, not a leatherneck alive had anything but the highest regard for the Navy corpsmen who risked their lives on the battlefield. But Bob McCarthy knew, deep down, that he would rather lead a charge than clean up after one.

It was 2 a.m. when McCarthy returned to his bunker from his second inspection. He handed his field phone to Corporal Thomas Ashdale, the leader of the Third Squad-who had once studied for the Catholic priesthood-and told him to awaken Sergeant Audas for the 4 a.m. watch. He crawled into his bag in the back of the bunker and was asleep within seconds.

At the same time, near the base of the hill, the company's forward air controller noted faint flares, soft as starlight, bursting in the sky several miles to the northwest. The snow had stopped falling, the clouds were gone, and a bright moon had risen. Unknown to the air controller-unknown, in fact, to everyone else at the moment, including the regimental commander Colonel Litzenberg at Yudam-ni-the illumination shells he was watching were Charlie Company's desperate cry for help.

Earlier, the air controller had managed to raise a weak signal on his own radio, and after watching a second barrage of flares burst in the same area in the northwest sky he contacted the howitzer battery at Hagaru-ri and requested several precautionary rounds, to be dropped on the little West Hill, the knoll two hundred yards opposite the Second Platoon's dug-in positions on the west slope. Captain Benjamin Read, the artillery outfit's commanding officer, replied that because ammunition was scarce he was under orders to fire his six big guns only if Fox Company came under direct attack.

The air controller replaced the radio receiver, uttered a mild oath, and kept his eyes fixed on the night sky for the next five minutes. At 2:05 a.m. he was startled by the rumble of a Jeep climbing the road from Hagaru-ri. This was the second Jeep to break the moonlit hush that had fallen over the pass. The first, a bit after midnight, had rolled down from the north with a five-man wire crew stringing a communications line between Colonel Litzenberg's regimental command post and Captain Barber's tent. The noisy unspooling of the wire had awakened several Marines on the lower slopes, but most of the men stationed above never heard it.

An enlisted man jumped from this second Jeep, threw a large bag of mail over his shoulder, and disappeared into the smaller of the two huts, where the mortarmen and corpsmen were sleeping on the dirt floor. After a few seconds the enlisted man returned to the Jeep and began grappling with one of the other canvas mailbags on the backseat. Twice more the Marine returned to the vehicle to tote bags into the small hut. He was about to enter the hut for the third time when he spun around at the sound of a voice issuing a challenge.

Above him, on the secondary ridgeline about forty yards west of the hut, a Marine from the Second Platoon, his outline partially hidden by a thicket of trees, was yelling at something, or somebody, coming down the road from Yudam-ni. Simultaneously, Staff Sergeant William Groenewald, standing watch in Captain Barber's company command post tent, picked up his buzzing field phone. Lieutenant Elmo Peterson of the Second Platoon informed him that in the bright moonlight he could clearly make out a large group of "natives" emerging from the shadows behind the West Hill and marching down the MSR. Groenewald shook Captain Barber awake.

"Captain, Second Platoon says there's natives coming down the road."

"What time is it?"

"Just past oh-two-hundred, sir."

"Hold 'em until we can question them."

Barber sent his staff sergeant to find Mr. Chung, the Korean interpreter, who was sleeping in one of the huts. Barber's first thought was that this was a stray South Korean unit, or perhaps a group of civilian refugees. He recalled the deserted road on the trip up to the pass. So that's where they all went.

Like Barber, the Americans on the western grade of the hill had no way of knowing that the line of soldiers moving toward them, four men to a row, belonged to the first of five companies in a Chinese battalion of the Fifty-ninth CCF Division. As this point column emerged from behind the West Hill and approached Fox's southwest perimeter, the Marines on the lower west slope could hear them chattering among themselves and their white canvas sneakers shuffling on the dirt road. Seconds later they were surprised to also hear bolts racking on automatic weapons and the tapping of potato mashers on the frozen ground to activate their fuses.

2

At precisely 2:07 a.m., an anonymous Marine from Fox Company's Second Platoon, his password challenge unreturned, emptied the twenty-round clip of his BAR into the forward ranks of the approaching soldiers. The Chinese returned fire at the same instant.

Corporal Ashdale, on watch near Lieutenant McCarthy's command post bunker, wheeled and shouted, "Here they come!"

The next four hours were a hellbroth of bugles, gunfire, whistles, explosions, clanging cymbals, acrid smoke, and frantic war cries, destined to be recorded in Marine Corps annals as the onset of the Battle for Fox Hill.

Corporal Jack Page, the gunner manning the most westerly heavy machine gun, opened up with several long bursts into the enemy point company, elevating and lowering his aim for maximum effect. Chinese soldiers fell across the road as if scythed. Page guessed that his sweeping gunfire had wiped out nearly two dozen men. The rest scattered to either side of the MSR in small groups, and kept coming.

Private First Class Billy French, the Marine who had delivered the mail from Hagaru-ri, dropped the third mailbag and ran to his Jeep. He grabbed his carbine and ducked under the vehicle as the red tracer bullets of Page's heavy machine gun arced over him, over the two huts, and over Captain Barber's tent command post. French fired at anything that moved on the road while bullets thudded off the frozen ground and grenades exploded around him. He watched one particular tracer from Page's machine gun ricochet off a rock and head straight for him. He pulled his head into his parka like a turtle. The bullet winged over his head and snapped into the backseat of the Jeep. He wondered if you ever saw the round that killed you.

Two privates first class-Lee Knowles and Bob Rapp-sleeping in the trailer hitched to the company Jeep, woke to an unnerving cacophony of shepherds' horns, whistles, rhythmic war chants, and Page's screaming machine gun. These two First Platoon Marines had arrived on the last truck that had chugged up to the pass from Hagaru-ri, and the first thing they spotted, on dismounting, was the empty trailer pulled to the side of the road. They trudged past it toward the hill, searching for a place to dig in, but when Rapp spat and his saliva froze as soon as it hit the road, they had glanced at each other, turned in place, stowed their gear, and climbed in to bed down.

Now, as bullets cracked past their ears, Rapp yelled to Knowles that they had to get out. Knowles threw a bear hug around him and whispered, "Lie doggo, they're all over us." He could see their faces across the road, not ten feet away. An instant later, the First Platoon's Sergeant Kenneth Kipp popped his head up behind Knowles and Rapp on the Fox Hill side of the trailer. From his position on the east slope, Kipp had seen their predicament and led his four-man fire team down to cover their escape.

As Kipp's team poured bullets down the road, Rapp and Knowles grabbed their rifles, heaved themselves over the side of the trailer, and ran fifty feet up the hill. They fell into two empty foxholes, stood up, and turned to fire. Kipp was leading his men back up to their original position when Rapp was shot through both forearms.

As the first slugs ripped through his canvas tent, Captain Barber pushed himself out of his sleeping bag and ordered Lieutenant Schmitt to contact Colonel Litzenberg at Yudam-ni, using the landline laid by the wire team two hours earlier. Barber and the other nine men in the tent scrambled for their weapons and shoepacs-Barber and his executive officer, Lieutenant Clark Wright, put each other's on in the confusion. The captain sensed that the Chinese knew exactly where his CP was situated. Barber was the last man to bolt through the rear flap, and as he clawed his way to higher ground he turned and saw enemy infantrymen pouring down the MSR, already climbing over the cut and beginning to surround the two huts. He heard Schmitt yell that the wire to Yudam-ni had been severed.

The Chinese reached the smaller hut first. Lieutenant Brady, the mortar unit's commanding officer, leaped from his bag and tackled the first enemy soldier through the front door while his mortarmen and Marines from the headquarters unit grabbed whatever weapons and gear were close at hand. They all ducked out the back doorway leading up the hill. At a spot about thirty feet from the hut they gathered with the other mortarmen who had been billeted in the mortar section tent.

Lieutenant Brady was the last out of the hut, and as he joined the group their position was hit by a fusillade of hand grenades. Brady tried to concentrate his men in a defensive perimeter. A grenade exploded, and he was wounded in the hand and back. He dropped to his knees, stunned by the fragments. The two Marines on either side of him were killed, and one of the 60-mm tubes was damaged.

The mortarmen regrouped behind and above the smaller hut. Lieutenant Schmitt and his radioman ran by carrying Captain Barber's SCR-300 radio and a 610 field phone. Schmitt stopped and ordered the surviving mortarmen to haul their tubes, shells, and wounded up to the shallow culvert, no more than few feet wide, that climbed two-thirds of the way up the center of Fox Hill. One crew had difficulty loosening the baseplate of an 81-mm mortar from the frozen ground. Covering them with a BAR, Sergeant Robert Jones, the 81-mm unit's forward observer, emptied a full twenty-round clip into a squad of Reds running at them from the southeast corner of the larger hut. Schmitt finally pried the baseplate from the ground with an entrenching tool and carried it away.