The Last Stand of Fox Company: A True Story of U.S. Marines in Combat (33 page)

Private First Class Warren McClure had slept for twenty-four hours. It must have been a healing sleep because when he awoke at 10 a.m. he found he could not only sit up but stand without too much painfor a moment, anyway. He sat down again. His throbbing right hand and right arm were useless; he could live with that. He was alive.

C-rations were being passed around the med tents, and though he was still wary of "chunking up" his innards, his hunger drove him to palm two cans of peaches from one of the boxes. With difficulty he used his left hand to open one tin with a can opener. He shared the peaches with the paralyzed Marine lying next to him, spooning them into the kid's mouth. His next order of business, he decided, would be to recover his gear.

On the northeast corner of the hill Private First Class Lee D. Wilson of the First Platoon was cold and thirsty. There were fewer boulders to crouch behind here, and the icy gale funneling through the pass swept the area with particular ferocity. Wilson thought about making a small fire to melt snow, but the snow around his hole was a grimy mixture of blood, human excrement, and fouled earth. At any rate, he assumed that the cleared perimeter was safe enough to traverse to the spring near the road. He laid his M I across his foxhole, stuffed a grenade in a pocket of his field jacket, and took off down the slope, along and behind the American firing line. Midway down the hill, as he neared one of his platoon's light machine-gun emplacements, a squad of Chinese snipers in the woods at the base of the South Hill opened up. Wilson ate dirt.

At a lull in the sniping he rolled over and crawled into the machine-gun nest. The crew told him that the sharpshooters had been firing at anyone near their emplacement all morning in an attempt to draw return fire and expose the gun. Wilson was a veteran of World War II whose steel nerves were held in awe by the new boots. And right now he was livid. Jesus Christ, and nobody thought to warn me when I came strolling down the hill? The laughter from the machine-gun unit pissed him off even more. He asked what the fuck was more important, the life of a Marine or a hidden machine-gun emplacement. The machine gunners' silence was an answer he did not care for one bit.

Wilson crawled from the nest and zigzagged back up to his hole at the top of the hill. He grabbed his M I and a Thompson sub machine gun he had liberated from a dead Chinese and inched his way on his belly down the east slope. He slithered about midway to the East Hill, made a hard right turn, and reached the MSR. He dashed across the road and threw himself into a snowbank. With pantherish grace he darted from one snow mound to another until he reached the tree line at the bottom of the South Hill. He slipped from tree to tree. He was perhaps twenty yards to the right of the snipers. He stood and emptied his M 1 at them. To make sure, he also emptied the Thompson.

Lee D. Wilson walked back across the level ground and crossed the MSR as if he were ambling to chow. He stopped at the spring, filled his canteen, and resumed his walk up the east slope. When he passed the light machine-gun emplacement he stopped and stared without saying a word.

7

Captain Barber wore a scowl as he limped in a circle in front of the command post. It was 2 p.m. and he had been promised an airdrop three hours earlier. His men, he knew, might make it through another night without food. But they badly needed ammunition. He had sent out a detail to scavenge among the dead Chinese in the road, but the men had not recovered nearly enough. If the enemy came down the saddle again tonight the Marines would have to beat them back with snowballs.

Half an hour later another helicopter braved the hilltop to deliver fresh batteries for the company's radio and field phones. Like its predecessors the chopper was sniped at so heavily there was no possibility of evacuating any of the wounded. When Barber loaded the new batteries into the SCR-300 and radioed about the supply drop, he was told that a cargo plane was on its way. By 5:30 p.m., another three hours later, it had yet to arrive.

At the same time, on the northeast crest of the hill, Walt Klein and Frank Valtierra were engaged in a spirited gunfight with a Chinese rifleman positioned on top of the rocky knoll. In the exchange both sides barely missed each other several times. From his machine-gun nest twenty paces away, Dick Bonelli peered over a rock and watched this ruckus in disgust and annoyance. Can't anybody around here shoot straight?

Since he had settled into what he called his rock "fort," not a single officer or NCO had come around to check on his machinegun emplacement. He hadn't even been assigned an assistant. He liked it that way. It left him to his thoughts. The sky had partially cleared, and from his position on the hill he could look down through the clouds blowing in and see the fading sunlight glinting off the ice of the Chosin Reservoir.

Down through the clouds! He had never been on an airplane in his life, and he figured this was as close as he would ever get. He gazed toward Toktong-san in the silvery half-light and realized for the first time that the big, bald mountain didn't so much rise from the reservoir as rear from it, like some great startled bear. He muttered to himself, "I'm nineteen years old and I wouldn't give you two cents for my life right now."

He said a prayer and went back to squaring away his ammunition belts.

A thick cloud cover settled over Toktong Pass, making this the darkest night yet. Captain Barber ordered what was left of his trip flares set out across the saddle and hoped for the best. There was nothing much else to hope for. His company was down to surviving, more or less, on guts and nerve. And though he had no doubt that the men still had both, neither would amount to much against a fourth night of attacks. If he knew this, he was certain, the Chinese knew it as well. But he was mistaken.

The Battle for Toktong-san, as well as the stiff resistance shown by the Marines up and down the MSR, had forced General Sung Shih-lun and his staff to reappraise their strategy. The Chinese Communist offensive had fared well on the east side of the reservoir against the U.S. Army troops, but not as well in the west. They had underestimated the grit of the U.S. Marines, not least the stubborn stand by Fox Company. It had gone on too long, and Toktong Pass was still open.

Sung decided to change tactics. He would continue his probes into Yudam-ni from the west, but at the same time further concentrate additional forces to destroy the U.S. Army units on the east, and sweep down overland into Hagaru-ri behind what was left of the survivors, avoiding the pass. Once Hagaru-ri was in Chinese hands, he could pick off, at his leisure, whatever Marine units remained at Yudam-ni. As for the small contingent at Toktong Pass, if his snipers didn't finish them, they would be dead from the cold, or starvation, or both, before long.

On Fox Hill, the morning's sensation of relief had given way to anxiety. Captain Barber, still hobbling on his improvised crutch, made rounds just after nightfall in an attempt to tighten the lines anywhere possible. It was futile. There was too much ground to defend, and there were not enough men to defend it. The best he could do was to direct the Second Platoon Marines closest to the road on the southwest corner to pull back from their holes in the brush near the pile of five rocks and position themselves within the stand of fir trees. Fat lot of good that would do without more ammo. Where the hell was the supply plane?

Barber had just completed his perimeter inspection when he heard the low rumble of an Air Force C-119 approaching from the south. He ordered a detail of men up to the crest, where they surrounded the drop zone, turned on their flashlights, and pointed them to the sky.

The pilot's first observation pass appeared textbook-perfect. But-perhaps because of the gunfire that erupted from the rocky knoll and the rocky ridge-on his second pass he seemed to want no part of the hilltop. He dropped the supplies in the valley about three hundred yards southeast of the hill. Chickenshit Air Force.

It was a long walk in the dark, but at least Fox Hill itself provided cover from the snipers to the west. Clark Wright's recovery detail reached the supplies without trouble. As the Marines tore open the bundles, searching for C-rations, a feather-light snow began to fall. Again, no food had been dropped. By the time Wright's grumbling men returned with stretchers loaded with ammunition, the snow showed no sign of letting up, and the new snow cover was already an inch deep.

The Marines did not mind this. The snow clouds seemed to trap at least some of the day's heat-they guessed it was no colder than ten-below. The new snow on the ground also hid the contorted faces of the Chinese dead.

At 6 p.m., Gray Davis, still sharing a hole with Luke Johnson down on the southwest corner facing the West Hill, shook the snow from his M 1 and test-fired it. He aimed at a brazen squad of Chinese assembling in the drizzle of flakes behind the pile of five rocks, not thirty yards away. He did not hit any of them. Damn mountains, playing tricks with his eyes again. The Chinese popped up from behind the rocks and began marching, single file, directly in front of him. Davis wondered if these drones were given drugs by their officers before a fight, or perhaps were even brainwashed. This was just too easy.

The BAR man in the next foxhole opened up first, dropping two or three men. Davis stood, sighted, squeezed-click. Misfire. He racked the bolt and squeezed the trigger again. Click. Jesus! He threw down his gun and yanked the pins and spoons on two hand grenades. They exploded in the middle of the clustered enemy. Five Chinese turned tail and ran. Another six to eight lay dead in the snow. He picked up a carbine and began firing at the retreating men. He was certain he hit a couple but none of them fell. Damn carbines.

After the brief firefight Davis peered into the chamber of his M 1. A wedge of ice blocked the bullets from entering the chamber from the clip, and the blot face had just enough snow on it to prevent the firing pin from hitting the primer. He cleaned it out. Loose snow, he figured, must have fallen in there from the recoil when he had test-fired the rifle. Damned if you do and damned if you don't.

By the time Captain Barber made his final inspection of the perimeter at 10 p.m., four to five inches of new snow had accumulated on the hill.

THE RIDGERUNNERS

DAY FIVE

DECEMBER 1, 1950

1

In all his years as a Marine, Sergeant Clyde Pitts had never seen anything like it. Eleven minutes earlier, at precisely 1 a.m., Captain Barber had gotten through to Hagaru-ri and requested a shelling of the four new enemy machine guns that were stitching Fox Hill from the rocky knoll. The moon had long since disappeared behind the snow clouds; the Chinese had wised up and removed their tracers; and though the Americans could vaguely make out the emplacements, no one could get a clear shot at them. Barber instructed Lieutenant Campbell to maintain radio contact with How Company's artillery battery in order to synchronize their howitzer salvo with a brace of star shells from his own 81-mm mortars. He had then ordered Sergeant Pitts to carry a field phone to the crest of the hill and register the barrage.

When Pitts reached the hilltop he waved to Barber at the command post, who in turn nodded to Campbell. Captain Benjamin Read's scratchy voice came over the radio from Hagaru-ri. "Four guns at your command."

"Fire," Campbell said.

"Four rounds on the way." The distant crack of the field guns echoing off the mountains was sharp enough to cut falling silk.

Barber turned to the mortarman Private First Class O'Leary. "Fire."

Two illumination rounds lit up the knoll. Seconds later Pitts watched, with awe verging on disbelief, as four 105-mm shells landed directly on the machine-gun nests. Bodies and gun barrelsincluding one that appeared to be from a British-made Lewis gun, with its drum mounted horizontally above the breech-soared through the night sky. Pitts was nearly speechless when he phoned the information to Lieutenant Campbell. Campbell also had doubts about the pinpoint accuracy of the artillery gunners.

Barber grabbed the phone. "Are you positive?"

"I'm watchin' it with my own eyes, Cap'n." For once Barber understood Pitts's syrupy drawl. "Wonderful, lovely, beautiful."