The Last Stand of Fox Company: A True Story of U.S. Marines in Combat (15 page)

The two crept out in front of the Second Platoon's perimeter and crawled for twenty-five yards before settling in behind a large rock that, if they knelt, provided cover enough for both. The West Hill now loomed less than two hundred yards away. Peering straight down over the rock, they could spit into the sinkhole, McClure's "deep dip." But they still could not see its bottom. Beyond the hole was the narrow valley with the ravine running up to the saddle.

Voices unobstructed by ridges and folds carried well in the still night air, and as McClure and Gonzales sighted their weapons and rechecked their spare clips they heard their fire team leader, Private First Class Robert Schmidt, request permission to toss a precautionary grenade out in front of his position. McClure did not hear Sergeant Reitz's response, but a few seconds later an explosion rocked a small shelf of rock perhaps twenty yards to the right of their listening post. Shrapnel skittered off their covering rock, and McClure turned and hollered. He said that if Schmidt threw another goddamn hand grenade it would most certainly be the last goddamn hand grenade he ever threw. Schmidt did not reply.

At 2:35 a.m. McClure spotted a Chinese squad of nine men crawling out of the ravine and making for the sinkhole directly below him. The point man, creeping crablike, rose to his knees just as he reached the far lip of the sinkhole. McClure lined him up in the sights of his BAR. He squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened. His firing pin was frozen. He grabbed Gonzales's M 1 and fired. The Chinese point man, hit in the chest, toppled backward. The rest dived into the hole.

Next McClure saw two more enemy soldiers, hunched over and loping down from the saddle. As they neared the deep dip he shot both with Gonzales's rifle and watched them drop over the lip. He handed the M l back to Gonzales, removed his gloves, and untied the five hand grenades he'd fastened with spare shoelaces to his BAR belt harness. The grenades were freezing, like dry ice to the touch. He laid them out on the ground in front of him, put one glove back on his right hand, and shoved his bare left hand into his field jacket for warmth.

A moment later the remaining eight soldiers from the enemy squad crawled over the far edge of the sinkhole. They took off toward the West Hill, loping low to the ground in single file, each man gripping the coattails of the man in front of him. McClure pulled the pin on a grenade, counted to four by thousands, and let it fly. It exploded among them at knee height. As the few survivors scattered, Gonzales popped up from behind the rock and picked them off one by one. Every Chinese soldier they had seen to this point was now down, dead or wounded. McClure studied the large swath of his skin that had stuck to the metal pin of the grenade. It was that cold.

The two Marines decided to let Sergeant Reitz know what the hell was going on out here. McClure turned and "covered" Gonzales with his inoperative BAR, watching him all the way as he crawled back and dropped into the foxhole occupied by Reitz and the fire team leader, Schmidt. He wheeled to look out again over the western valley and barely caught the heels of four canvas sneakers slithering over the far lip of the sinkhole. Although the bottom of the hole remained obscured, he was in a position to see the upper chest, shoulders, and head of any man who stood up. Incredibly, this is what both Chinese did.

McClure pulled another grenade pin-losing more skin in the process-counted slowly to four, and rolled it down into the hole. Seconds before it exploded he saw the Chinese bend over as if they had dropped something. Now he reached for his left glove-enough flesh had been lost to these frozen grenades-and, stretching out to grasp it, accidentally kicked his BAR down into the sinkhole. Jesus, what an idiot. He spotted yet another enemy soldier staggering over the far edge of the deep dip. The man looked as if he had been wounded-his hands were hanging at his side and balled up into the sleeves of his padded jacket. But McClure's gaze quickly moved from his hands to the Thompson submachine gun strapped across his chest.

This time he used his teeth to pull the pin on a grenade, tossed it, and hit the Red in the chest. The grenade bounced off him and failed to explode. The soldier lunged forward as if he had not even felt the impact. McClure tossed another, again using his teeth to pull the pin. He hit the man on his padded earflap. Another dud. The Chinese climbed out of the hole and charged him.

McClure's thighs were as thick as tree trunks, and in Missouri he had been a defensive lineman on the Bigger Diggers, a local semipro team. Now he squatted in his meanest football stance, preparing to tackle this lunatic. But suddenly the man snapped out of whatever trance had swept over him. His eyes met McClure's, and he turned and ran, scrabbling back through the sinkhole and across the ravine.

Without his BAR, and "not knowing just how dead" the Chinese in the deep dip might be, McClure pulled the pin on his last grenade, held the spoon down, and zigzagged back through the American lines in search of another weapon. Working his way up the hillside, scavenging for a working rifle, he ran into his platoon leader, Lieutenant Elmo Peterson. Aside from several perfunctory inspections McClure had never engaged in any conversation with him.

"Where you heading, son?" Even in the heat of battle Peterson resembled a recruiting poster.

"Find a weapon, sir."

"Should be plenty lying around."

McClure's search took him up the west slope and nearly to the top of Fox Hill. About thirty yards away he could make out the two tall, flat-faced rocks that demarcated the northwestern crest. Star shells popped and squeaked overhead, their artificial light throwing the shadowed scene into horror movie relief. Somewhere beyond the rocks a red flare was burning on the ground, covering the terrain where the hilltop met the saddle in an eerie orange glow. The smell of cordite hung in the air, and ten yards beyond the flare McClure spotted a dead Chinese soldier, frozen in a sitting position. He asked Peterson's permission to run out and grab the slain man's gun. He couldn't see a weapon but one had to be there. Before Peterson could answer a bugle call shrieked across the saddle, and the Chinese attacked.

"Here they come again!" Peterson yelled. It was 2:45 a.m.

The Chinese battalion commander had thrown his last reserve company of more than 100 men into the fight, mixed in with the survivors from the first attack. With much whistling, bugling, and beating of drums, about 250 Chinese soldiers again streamed across the saddle in rows, albeit this time, as one Marine noted, "with much less elan."

Peterson snaked on his belly up the hill and hollered over his shoulder for McClure to run down to the company's mortar positions and tell the commanding officer-"whoever the hell's in charge now"-to begin lobbing rounds up onto the saddle. Peterson turned back from McClure and saw a Chinese soldier leveling a Thompson submachine gun at him. Then he pulled the trigger.

Peterson felt a bullet go through his left shoulder and also felt a rush of adrenaline. He lifted his carbine and drilled the Red through the eye.

McClure hesitated when he saw Peterson hit. The handsome "Prof" waved him on. "You hear me, son?" he urged McClure. "Get a move on."

Private First Class Fidel Gomez and the corpsman Bill McLean dropped into the snow on either side of Peterson. Both had M 1 s, and Gomez had picked up a Thompson submachine gun from a dead enemy soldier. Gomez was wide, powerful, and compact, built like a fullback, a position that had earned him all-county honors in San Antonio, Texas. As the three lay prone, awaiting the second attack, Peterson informed them that the left flank of the Third Platoon had been overrun during the first firefight. They needed to hold fast, right here, and plug this gap in the American line.

McLean smiled and pulled a small bottle of brandy from his field jacket. "Well, in that case," he said.

Gomez, who was nineteen, had never tasted brandy. Before enlisting he had tried only beer. In fact, his older brother Anacleto, a veteran of World War II who had fought with the Third Marines through Bougainville, Guadalcanal, and Iwo Jima, had attempted to bribe Fidel with beer into giving up the Corps and going to college. Anacleto, who had been Fidel's father figure since their real father abandoned the family when Fidel was four years old, couldn't stand the thought of his kid brother, the youngest in the family, being killed in Korea. Fidel had ignored him, but he sure had enjoyed the beer.

He took a small swig of McLean's brandy. "Man," he said, "I like this stuff."

Meanwhile, McClure double-timed it through the trees and found the mortar unit at the top of the shallow gulley. He noticed an 81-mm's bipod set atop two industrial-strength C-ration bean cans, its tubes pointed nearly straight up for short-distance bombardment. He relayed Peterson's orders to an 81-mm gunner, pointing toward the saddle for effect, only to be met with a sorrowful stare. "We've only got three rounds left," the gunner said.

McClure pondered this answer-Where the hell had all the mortar rounds gone?-before deciding he had done his job and it would be best to return to his position on the hill's western slope. He turned to take off and nearly ran over Captain Barber and Barber's runner.

"What's your name?" The commanding officer's voice could have scoured a stove. If it was physically possible, McClure thought it sounded octaves lower than on the afternoon of his coming-aboard speech. McClure had never been face-to-face with Barber before. The captain's uniform was no longer starched and pressed-it was tattered. Barber had been out fighting with the men.

"Private First Class Warren McClure, sir. First Fire Team, Second Squad, Second Platoon." Nearly under his breath he added, "BAR man, sir."

He thought he saw a flicker of confusion in Barber's eyes, as if the captain were seeking this lonesome BAR man's missing weapon. But the captain merely said, "Keep it up, son. Keep it up. Get back to your people."

Barber nonchalantly turned up the hill, yelling for his artillery forward spotter Lieutenant Donald Campbell. He planned to radio How Company in Hagaru-ri to ask for a howitzer bombardment of the rocky knoll. That's where the Chinese seemed to be gathering for these attacks.

McClure took off to rejoin the Second Platoon.

6

The Chinese raced across the saddle with the intention of hitting Fox Company just as they had done thirty minutes earlier. This time the Marines were ready. The Chinese hadn't reached the halfway point before Private First Class O'Leary was directing the company's 60-mm mortars, which still had plenty of shells, to tear into their ranks. Marines liked to joke that the 60-mms were the ultimate "weapons of opportunity"-a play on the wording of tactics in the Corps manual-and was this ever an opportunity. There is no defilade from a 60-mm, and the notes from a lone bugle sounding the charge were cut off abruptly as its owner was blown to pieces.

In the slit trench at the top northwest corner of the hill-still thirty yards beyond Lieutenant McCarthy's new, re-formed defensive perimeter-Hector Cafferata, Ken Benson, Harrison Pourers, and Gerald Smith were again standing shoulder to shoulder, emptying clip after clip into the Chinese right flank with murderous effect. Twice Cafferata caught potato mashers in midair and tossed them back into the advancing throng. At one point he heard a spang-the sound of his M 1 emptying-so the self-proclaimed "world's worst baseball player" grabbed his entrenching shovel with two hands and swung it like a baseball bat, knocking an incoming grenade back into the enemy ranks.

Another grenade landed on the lip of the foxhole connected to the trench. Cafferata lunged backward for it and heaved, but it exploded as it left his hand. The big man cursed. His left hand was bloody and gashed, the fingers shredded. His reaction was simply to reload and continue firing.

Now the night sky seemed to be blotted out by hundreds of hand grenades. Pourers turned to Cafferata. "Where the fuck do they carry them all?" he said.

A flash grenade dropped with a thud on the lip of the trench. Benson reached out and flicked it way. It exploded a few feet from his face, shattering his glasses. He rubbed his eyes with his gloves. He could feel small pieces of bamboo shrapnel in his face. A dull red glow veiled his vision. "Hec, I can't see," he said.

Blind or not, he'd been trained well, and now he squatted in the bottom of the trench and with the efficiency of an assembly-line worker proceeded to reload rifles. Cafferata would empty a clip and drop the M 1 down to Benson, who would have a fully loaded rifle at the ready. With each new clip Cafferata would repeat the same question.

"Can you see yet, Bense?"

"Nope, not yet."

Cafferata, Benson, Pourers, and Smith were all that prevented the Chinese from again splitting the defensive line of the two Marine platoons at the northwest peak of the hill. They held, and Cafferata alone was credited with killing almost forty enemy soldiers during the night. The rest of his fire team, as well as the Marines below him, took care of the rest. The second Chinese charge was turned back. Scattered fighting continued among Americans and stragglers, but the major offensive was over.

Twenty minutes later a runner appeared at Lieutenant Bob McCarthy's dugout command post carrying orders from Captain Barber. The lieutenant was to form a detail to clear the crest of the hill. A dozen men were assembled under the command of Sergeant Audas and ordered to "drop their cocks, grab their socks, and go kick some Chinese ass." Among them was Dick Bonelli.

"What we got going here, Sarge?" Bonelli ducked automatic weapons fire coming from the top of the hill. Several squads of Chinese had dug in along the boulders and brush at the crest, and they would need to be rooted out like weeds.

Audas was a professional Marine, a street fighter from Chicago who had experienced his first military action as a rear gunner aboard a dive-bomber over Guadalcanal. The sergeant looked at Bonelli as if he were mental. "We're taking back the goddamn hill, whattaya think?"

Bonelli spotted Captain Barber trudging up the slope, with McCarthy and his aide Sergeant Pitts. Pitts had a through-andthrough bullet hole in his helmet. The three were completely exposed to the gunfire from the crest.