The Last Stand of Fox Company: A True Story of U.S. Marines in Combat (21 page)

4

Warren McClure was lost and in pain when he nearly tripped over a wounded Chinese soldier. The man was half buried in the snow, and there were bullet holes all across his bare stomach. He seemed to be an officer. Now, he groped with his left arm and hand as if searching for a weapon. McClure could see none.

He half-circled the man, giving him a wide berth, and their eyes met. Something unsaid passed between them, a silent commiseration, an acknowledgment of the misfortunes of war. If he had had a weapon, McClure would have put the dying soldier out of his misery. But he didn't, and he left without looking back.

McClure stumbled through the trees before eventually finding the old command post tent at the bottom of the gully. He ripped back the flap, and the first person he saw was Lieutenant Joe Brady, the CO of the mortar section. Brady was the son of Irish immigrants and still carried the whiff of peat bog about him. He was sitting on an empty crate-he could not lie down because of grenade fragments in his back-and his left hand was bandaged. With his good right hand he reached into his field jacket and produced a fifth of White Horse scotch whisky. "Here," Brady said, "you look like you need a swig."

McClure took the bottle and swallowed a large portion. He teetered toward the back of the tent and found an open space on the floor. He collapsed onto his back and passed out.

It was just past noon, and Gray Davis was fed up with two particularly annoying snipers on the ridgeline of the West Hill. What bothered him most, he supposed, was how good they were. He and Luke Johnson had been ducking and diving all morning. Davis had always heard that the Belgians made the best damn guns in the world, even better than the Czechs, and he was itching to find out.

He loaded a full magazine into the automatic rifle he had recovered from the valley, took a deep breath, and stood up in his foxhole. He raked the ridgeline with the full clip. As he flopped back down beneath the lip of his hole, a light machine gunner farther up the west slope hollered down to offer his compliments. Davis had knocked one of the snipers off the crest.

At 1 p.m., Captain Barber ordered the corpsmen who were using the old mortarmen's tents at the bottom of the hill as an aid station to relocate. He had no doubt that there would be another attack after nightfall, and the wounded would be safer farther east, up and over the main central ridgeline. This would also put them out of harm's way with regard to the snipers on the West Hill and the rocky knoll.

A squad of Marines broke out the two eighteen-by-sixteen med tents that had never been erected and set them up in the trees behind the First Platoon's defensive line on the east slope. Fifteen minutes later corpsmen began carrying the most seriously wounded over the ridge on stretchers. The others limped and hobbled behind them. The tents were soon filled, and holes were dug in the snow beside them to accommodate the overflow. The more seriously wounded remained inside. The less seriously injured, swathed in sleeping bags, were rotated between the tents and the dugouts so that they would not freeze to death.

As the mortarmen's tent was being taken down, Warren McClure came to. He stared up at a gunmetal gray sky. He wondered for a moment where he was. Then he felt the stabbing pain in his chest. He and one other Marine-a man who seemed to be dying, although McClure could not see his injury-were the only two of the wounded who had not been evacuated to the new med tents. McClure listened as the other man asked to be left at the bottom of the hill with a sidearm.

A squad of Marines assisting the corpsmen, including the bazooka man Harry Burke, huddled to ponder this request. Then they wordlessly propped the man up against a tree facing the road. One of them handed him a forty-five-caliber pistol. The rest turned and lifted McClure. Then they put him back down, hard, at the sound of a plane.

At 3 p.m., a Marine R4FD cargo plane, number 785, piloted by First Lieutenant Bobby Carter, swooped low over Fox Hill and waggled its wings. Around this time, Captain Barber decided to tell his XO, Clark Wright, that an hour earlier he'd heard from Litzenberg regarding Lieutenant Colonel Lockwood's reinforcement company. That company would not be coming. Under covering fire from their own reinforcements from the Third Battalion, First Marines, Lockwood had extracted his cooks and bakers and limped back to Hagaru-ri.

"We're on our own," Barber said, gazing up at the cargo plane. "Form up a recovery detail and let's see what they sent us."

On his dry run, Bobby Carter flew in over the rocky knoll, down the west valley, and banked left in front of the South Hill across the road. Now he was soaring directly over Fox Hill, following its main ridgeline, throttling back to eighty-five miles per hour perhaps three hundred feet above the treetops. The cargo doors on the left side of the aircraft slid open and bundles fell from them. The parachutes barely had time to open before the pallets smashed to the ground in the east valley about seventy-five yards in front of the First Platoon's perimeter.

Smith, the supply sergeant, was the first to reach them. Contrails from the plane disappeared in the southeast sky as he knelt over the parachutes, slashing at the tangled ropes. A bullet hit his right leg and he heard his tibia snap. Smith fell into a ditch.

The communications officer, Lieutenant Schmitt, grabbed a stretcher. A fire team from the First Platoon laid down covering fire and three more Marines joined Schmitt as he hustled out to the wounded man. Schmitt was rolling Smith onto the litter when the same sniper hit him in virtually the same place, shattering his shinbone. The three uninjured Marines were joined by two corpsmen. Together, dodging sniper fire, they dragged Smith and Schmitt back to the tree line. When they got to the med tent, Lieutenant Brady offered Smith and Schmitt slugs of White Horse scotch whisky. They threw them back as corpsmen broke and shaved pine tree branches to form into splints.

The First Platoon's commanding officer, Lieutenant John Dunne, dispatched a four-man detail to smoke out the sniper. They found him easily, and as they buried him in a barrage of automatic weapons fire, a recovery team jumped from the tree line and began hauling the supplies back to the perimeter.

Boxes and bandoliers of thirty-caliber ammo, hand grenades, and 60-mm and 81-mm mortar rounds were handed out across the hill. Lieutenant McCarthy of the Third Platoon confiscated the several rolls of barbed wire to stretch across the mouth of the saddle, and ordered trip-wire grenades strung across the crest. The silk parachutes were cut into strips to be used as blankets for the wounded. Several hungry men noted that there were no C-rations in the air drop.

After the ammunition had been dragged in from the valley, eight unarmed Chinese soldiers jumped from the culvert where the MSR met the dry creek bed. Bob Ezell had been wrong; the Chinese were even smaller-or more supple-than he'd guessed. They took off in the direction of the woods that encircled the bottom of the South Hill like an apron. A burst from one of the First Platoon's light machine guns halted them. They fell to their knees, raised their hands above their heads, and were frog-marched back into the perimeter.

Forty minutes later the Americans were astonished to see a small helicopter approach the hill. Weeks earlier, as the Korean winter began, the Marine chopper fleet had been grounded when the oil in the gearboxes that controlled the rotors had frozen up. Since then the gearboxes had been drained and the standard lubricant had been replaced by thinner oil. Nonetheless it remained a dangerous adventure to take these little craft up into the windswept mountains. Apparently this particular chopper pilot, Captain George Farish, had been willing to take the risk.

Farish's little two-seater darted in like a mosquito over the east valley. When it reached treetop level over the First Platoon's position it hovered to drop fresh batteries for the SCR-300 radio and field phones. For an instant Farish appeared to be looking for a place to land. Several wounded men, including Warren McClure and Walt Hiskett, began to think of a medevac.

Their hope died when the helicopter took a sniper's bullet in its rotor transmission case and began leaking oil. Master Sergeant Charles Dana considered forcing the pilot down at gunpoint. Barber stopped him: "Do that and none will ever come back."

It was an academic point-Farish's machine was mortally wounded. As he struggled to control his little chopper, he clipped several treetops with his rotor blades. Finally he gave a halfhearted salute and coaxed the damaged chopper toward the temporary airstrip at Hagaru-ri. (The Marines at Fox Hill would learn later that the chopper never made it; the transmission locked up and Farish crash-landed at the edge of the village. He walked away from the wreck unhurt.)

5

With sunset approaching a sense of grim urgency settled over Fox Hill. The temperature dropped to the minus twenties; the less seriously wounded drifted, unbidden, from the med tents back to their foxholes; and Marines across the hill prepared for what many suspected might be their last night alive.

Corporal Hiskett was heartsick. He had seen the corpsmen carry Private First Class Parker's body down from the two tall rocks. First Johnny Farley, he thought, and now Charlie Parker-his two best friends. He realized that no one was getting off the hill this day, and he resolved that his shoulder wound would still allow him to toss grenades. He stumbled from the med tent back to the Second Platoon lines. But the corpsman McLean saw him and talked him into returning to the aid station. It was not hard to persuade him. Hiskett was barely conscious.

Except for the Marines who had moved up from the road and the remnants of the badly hit Third Rifle Platoon-about twenty Marines in all who now fortified a new, smaller defensive line thirty yards below the crest of the hill-Fox Company's perimeter remained similar to the horseshoe shape it had taken the previous night. However, it now had gaps.

Lieutenant Peterson, ignoring his own shoulder wound, paced up and down behind the Second Platoon lines on the west slope with a grim message: "If we should be overrun tonight, don't-I repeat, don't-leave your foxholes." He knew that How Company's howitzer men had been given orders to shell the entire hill if Fox Company was overrun. "We're going to take some Chinese with us if we go," he told his men.

Individual men prepared for battle in their own ways. Up on the Third Platoon's front line, Ernest Gonzalez was hungry. While there was still light he snaked down through the trees, back to the position his fire team had originally occupied before being ordered to the hilltop. He found several of his squad's sleeping bags pierced with bullet holes. He also dug up two boxes of C-rations and popped a couple of frozen gumdrops into his mouth. Then nature called.

Gonzalez walked over to a stand of trees. The blowing snow had built up against their trunks, forming a small, three-sided embankment. One joke in the company was how you could get only half an inch of peter out of three inches of clothing in order to take a leak. But defecating was an entirely different story. The trick, everyone knew, was to move your bowels before your balls turned blue and broke off.

He squatted, encased in his tentlike parka, and dropped his dungarees, wool pants, long johns, and shorts. He did his business, cleaned up, and was buttoning up when a sniper's bullet snapped a pine branch over his head. Gonzalez's feet went out from under him and he plopped down on top of his deposit. He scrambled deeper into the trees, wondering how he would clean himself. But there was no need. His crap had frozen between the time he'd dropped it and the time it had taken to get his layers of pants on again. It hadn't even dented when he'd sat on it.

Gonzalez removed his helmet, found a stick, and lifted the steel pot out from behind a tree-just like what he'd seen in war movies. Nothing happened. He swung the helmet to the other side of the tree. Still no sniper. Feeling safe, he skittered back toward the road. He snatched several enemy rifles and clips of ammo from the stack that had been piled up earlier and began scrounging among the dead Chinese in the shadow of the small hut. He discovered a camera with two rolls of film, and a Chinese backpack.

He was about to rip open the backpack when his eyes were drawn to a strangely discolored spot in the snow. It wasn't bright red with new blood; nor was it dirt. He kicked at it and then bent down to probe with his hand. Jesus! He jumped backward, realizing that it was a corpse, burned black by napalm. The Chinese must have held this hill before being burned out by the flyboys. So that's who had dug the foxholes and trenches.

Backing away, he turned and dragged his booty up the hill to share with his new foxhole buddy, Freddy Gonzales from San Pedro. What would our aunts say if they could see us now?

The two Marines went to work situating their six rifles, clips of ammo, and hand grenades within easy reach around the lip of the hole. Their gun pit fortified, they tore into the C-rations, but the food was frozen solid. They might as well have tried to eat concrete. The best they could manage was to melt the top quarter-inch layer of beef hash and beans over a small fire, drag their bayonets over that top layer, and scrape the tepid shavings into their mouths.