The Last Stand of Fox Company: A True Story of U.S. Marines in Combat (14 page)

Gonzalez unjammed the firing pin on the MI and rose to shoot again. He saw a squad of Chinese soldiers, outlined by the moon, crossing the terrain laterally to his left. He fired and a man dropped -his first kill. He wanted to cheer, but something told him not to act like an idiot. He was aiming again when a grenade exploded near his BAR man and knocked him down. Gonzalez started to crawl on his belly and was halfway across the slit trench when the BAR man popped back up. He hollered, "I'm OK!" Gonzalez could see blood gushing down his face.

Again Gonzalez spotted a small cluster of Chinese moving laterally to his left. Again he sighted by the moonlight. He fired and watched another man fall. Out of the corner of his eye he saw flickering white sparks an instant before he heard the shots: a burp gun. The flashes reminded him, incongruously, of summer fireflies back in East Los Angeles. The bullets danced across the lip of his foxhole.

The Chinese sniper had camouflaged himself deep in the tangled thicket on the northeast crest of the hill. Crouching low in his hole, Gonzalez pulled the pin on a grenade, watched its spoon fly over the lip, silently counted to three Mississippi, and heaved it in a high arc. He was fired on no more from the corner of the thicket.

Within seconds two more Marines tumbled into the slit trench next to Gonzalez. One was bleeding profusely from his forehead and mouth. As the second tended to his buddy a potato masher landed between them, wounding them both. Gonzalez felt the shock wave of the concussion pass through his body, but he didn't go down. The two men crawled over the downhill side of the lip and staggered off.

Movement flashed to Gonzalez's right. Two Chinese soldiers charged the foxhole of his fire team leader, dropped grenades, and hit the ground. Following the explosions they jumped back to their feet and raced across the hill, leaving the American for dead. Gonzalez shot at their fleeing forms. He did not know if he hit either one. Now, again to his right, he saw a man crawling from behind a huge boulder not ten yards away. He raised his M 1, fired, and missed. The man-possibly an American; Gonzalez could not tellsprang from his knees and loped down the east slope of the hill.

4

The combined fire of the Second Platoon higher on the west grade and the re-formed Third Platoon line slowed the Chinese advance. Gunfire and grenade explosions slackened, and standing targets became scarce. Though the enemy held the crest of Fox Hill, there remained small islands of Marines scattered within the Chinese ranks. In one of these pockets, the slit trench on the left flank, Private First Class Pomers regained consciousness. He crawled the eight feet to the west end of the trench and found Hector Cafferata peering over the lip, searching for something to shoot.

"You know, Hec," said Pourers, "I was praying while I was shooting, praying to God that if I had to die, please don't let me shit in my skivvies."

Back down the hill, lost in the trees, Dick Bonelli had no idea where the aid station was. He figured it had to be close to one of those huts he'd seen by the road. As he crashed through the fir trees with Koone on his back he heard a thrashing sound on his right. A figure staggered out of the dark. Bonelli dropped Koone and wheeled, bayonet-first, stopping just short of gutting Private First Class Amos Fixico. Bonelli recognized Fixico as another one of the outfit's Indians, a Ute from Arizona. His left eyeball was hanging near his cheekbone, glistening like a peeled hard-boiled egg. He was one of the ammo carriers in Sergeant Keirn's light machine gun unit, and he told Bonelli about being overrun. He, too, asked for the aid station. Bonelli could only shrug and point his chin down the hill. The three took off, Bonelli and Fixico supporting the now unconscious Koone.

They had gone only a few yards when a challenge rang out. Bonelli answered. "I'm a Marine. With wounded. We need the aid station."

"Gooks down on the road," the voice said. "Better get your ass over here."

It was Private First Class Holt's heavy machine gun unit. Holt's water-cooled gun was still frozen solid. Bonelli was stunned to learn that the bottom of the hill was in Chinese hands. From up on the crest he had not even heard any gunshots. Several Marines from the headquarters unit pulled Koone and Fixico into the emplacement. Bonelli headed back up the hill.

The mayhem all around Ernest Gonzalez's slit trench suddenly eased. Each side seemed to be catching its breath and, as one Marine noted, "waiting for the other to start something."

Gonzalez scanned the horizon for darting figures. He saw none. The gunfire, in fact, had abated to the point where Gonzalez was able to hear snoring-snoring!-coming from a foxhole several yards away on his right flank. He hollered, "Wake up, man? Wake the fuck up!" The snoring continued.

A moment later a bullet slammed into Gonzalez's helmet. He felt light-headed, as if he'd smashed his head on a curb playing street football back home. He drifted into unconsciousness.

Bob McCarthy's re-formed defensive perimeter had held. At 2:25 a.m. his dazed Marines listened as a Chinese bugler far up on the saddle blew a signal to regroup.

By now, at the base of the hill, the Chinese point company's attack had also been thoroughly repulsed. White-clad corpses were strewn across the MSR and the area around the two huts. To the bazooka man Harry Burke they resembled white birch trees turned up by their roots. The occasional moan or whimper from a wounded man, a hideous sound, was the only noise to puncture the crisp night air.

Throughout the fight Captain Barber had been a ghostly whirlwind, roaming the front lines from the road to the hilltop, firing his carbine, rallying his fire teams, hollering instructions. Two of his runners had been wounded following him up and down the hill. He was now back at his temporary command post just below the upper tree line, checking on their condition, when he was handed a partial casualty list.

Most of the scattered wounded were still being identified, but Barber saw the names of the two Marines on either side of Lieutenant Brady who had been killed instantly in the fight at the bottom of the hill: Sergeant Glen Stanley and Private First Class Ronald Strommen. Of the thirty-five Marines in the Third Platoon's forward foxholes on the hilltop, fifteen were dead, nine were wounded, and three were missing. Barber knew the list would lengthen greatly when Lieutenant McCarthy could account for his entire platoon.

Because of the extraordinary acoustical barriers across Fox Hillthe many gullies, depressions, and boulders and the two ridges bisecting the granite hulk (three, including the six-foot-high erosion fold)-practically all of the First Platoon strung out down the eastern grade had no idea that a battle had even been fought. The platoon leader Lieutenant Dunne and Master Sergeant Arthur Gruenberg had established their command post slightly behind their forward squads in a small depression near the top of the tree line. The batteries in Dunne's field phone had gone dead, and he was at a loss regarding the source of the muffled echoes emanating from the other side of the hill.

Farther up the east slope, however, Sergeant Charles Pearson and Corporal Kenneth Mertz of the First Platoon knew something nasty was up when several stray bullets punctured their makeshift pup tent. But where the shots had come from, or who had fired them, neither could tell. The two men had been delighted the previous evening when they had stumbled across a rare level patch of turf just above the tree line on the upper third of the slope. They had shoveled snow to form a small "fort" and tied their large shelterhalf tents together to make a flimsy roof. Watching the Marines digging in around them, Pearson had remarked to Mertz that he had "the luck," and said to stick close by if things got hot. Now, peering through the bullet holes in their canvas shelter, Mertz was certain that things were hot. He just didn't know where.

Similarly, the First Platoon's light machine gun ammo carrier Bob Ezell, dug in just above Pearson and Mertz-only one hundred yards away from the right flank of the Third Platoon-had been screened from the pandemonium by Fox Hill's tall central ridgeline. Ezell had heard muffled sounds that might have been gunshots, and he had seen plenty of tracers arcing over the hilltop. Even though he didn't know exactly what was happening he was fairly sure that, whatever it was, it was heading his way.

At the far end of the saddle, behind the rocky knoll, the captured Marines Wayne Pickett, Troy Williford, and the wounded Daniel Yesko were held in a small cave. For Yesko, this was ironic. One week earlier he had been granted a hardship discharge-"marital problems" was all he would say-and he had been scheduled to fly home to the States via Japan that morning. He had, in fact, been offered an opportunity to remain at Hagaru-ri when Fox Company had left for Toktong Pass. At the last minute he'd opted to spend his last night in Korea with his buddies Pickett and Williford on the hill. He figured he'd catch a ride down to the airfield when the supply trucks arrived in the morning. Now Pickett looked him in the eye, placed a finger to his lips, and thought of his own fiancee in Duluth.

None of the Americans could speak Chinese, but from the tumult about them they sensed the general drift of the rapid-fire conversations. The Chinese regulars wanted to shoot them. They were dissuaded by a tall, elegant captain menacingly waving a Thompson submachine gun. Their shouts echoed off the rock walls of the small cave.

Pickett's mind reeled. It was a given that in any war a soldier might "catch" a wound. He had even calculated the smaller likelihood of being killed. But taken prisoner? The thought had never entered his mind. He was, however, one of the few Marines in Fox Company who'd had prior contact with hostile Chinese. In 1947, when he'd been berthed off China's east coast aboard the cruiser USS St. Paul for four months as a seagoing Marine, the war between Chiang Kai-shek's nationalists and Mao's Communists was still raging. One day during war games two of the fleet's Marine Corsair fighter-bombers had run out of fuel and crash-landed miles from the American airfield at Tsingtao, at the time still held by the Nationalists. Both pilots had bailed out, and one was able to make his way back to the base on foot.

Pickett's thirty-man Marine detail had been sent out to rescue the other. A brief firefight with the Communists had ensued, though no one was killed. The American pilot was eventually recovered through diplomatic negotiations, but not before Pickett's unit found itself on a strand with its back against the East China Sea, facing an overwhelming Chinese force.

"Believe it or not," he now whispered to Williford and Yesko as the arguing continued around them, "they warned us to get out of there or we'd be flooded when the tide came in. And they were right. So we got out of there, no questions asked. You never know with these people. Sometimes they can be friendly, and sometimes they'll just cut your throat."

As if to prove Pickett's point, the Chinese officer who had prevented their execution suddenly ordered a squad of his men to march the confused Marines back across the saddle toward the American lines. Halfway there a light machine gun on the west slope opened up on the little group. The squad retreated, dragging Pickett, Williford, and Yesko back to the cave with them.

5

Stationed halfway up the western slope, near the center of Second Platoon's line, Warren McClure and Roger Gonzales had been cut off from the Chinese assaults not only by the hill's secondary ridgeline, but also by a wall of large boulders that ran parallel behind their position to the tree line. They could only guess at the cause of the muted ruckus taking place seventy-five yards above them. Nor had they any clue that there had been a fight down on the road.

Before settling into their depression they had fretted for some time over the probability that enemy troopers might use the sinkhole in front of them as cover. But they had finally shrugged off their apprehensions and constructed a shelter by lacing three half pup tents together. When McClure squirmed into his mummy bag he put on a knee-length, alpaca-lined vest that he'd "secured" at the Hungnam supply depot by means he preferred not discuss with Gonzales. McClure suspected that the vest may have been intended to warm the imposing torso of Colonel Litzenberg.

McClure left his bag unzipped and dragged his BAR in after him, the muzzle wedged between his untied shoepacs, the stock resting on his chest. He had adopted this sleeping position since seeing the four Marines bayoneted on the hillside overlooking the Sudong gorge, their sleeping bags turned into body bags when their moist last breaths froze the zippers closed. The new man Gonzales, studying McClure, did the same with his MI. Every so often he would grasp the slide of the rifle and work the action back and forth to keep it from freezing up. Neither man could sleep.

It was just past 2:30 a.m. when word spread among the Marines who had not been involved in the firefights that the Chinese had already attacked Fox Hill from two directions, and were probably coming back for more. McClure and Gonzales were feeding rounds into the chambers of their weapons when they were summoned by their squad leader, Sergeant George Reitz. Reitz ordered them to establish a forward listening post overlooking the western valley.