The Last Stand of Fox Company: A True Story of U.S. Marines in Combat (35 page)

The more Warren McClure discussed their circumstances the more frustrated and angry he became-at himself, at his useless right arm, at his shot-up lung, at the Chinese, at MacArthur, at the goddamn Korean War. He stood up and wheezed his way back to his stretcher in the med tent. His fury dissipated at the sight of the paralyzed Marine. He opened another can of peaches and began spoon-feeding the wounded boy.

Harry Burke crouched behind the smaller hut among a dozen exhausted, thirsty Marines. It was 8:15 a.m. The spring at the bottom of the hill was exactly thirty-five paces away-across open terrain. A couple of the men had already made the dash to fill their canteens cups, drawing the attention of a sniper in the woods at the base of the South Hill. To call this enemy soldier a sharpshooter would be to overstate the case. In fact, he was a lousy shot, and as more Marines took their turn at the spring he had barely nicked a couple in the legs. Still.

Now it was Burke's turn, and he ran for all he was worth. When he reached the spring he danced from side to side, a moving target, as the fresh water splashed into his canteen. A few rifle slugs cracked the ice around him, but that was as close as they came. His canteen full, Burke took off. But instead of heading back for the cover of the small hut, he made a beeline to the larger hut, which was closer to the spring and closer to the road. He doubted that anyone had ventured very near this shack since he had returned for his sleeping bag the first morning and taken a souvenir whistle and some pamphlets from a dead Chinese officer.

With the sniper's bullets at his feet, Burke dived behind the hut and nearly banged heads with a wounded Red sitting with his back to the wall. The kid, another conscript barely into his teens, was conscious, if evidently dying. His head was encrusted with a thin layer of ice, and blood-red icicles hung from his bullet-pocked uniform. The only signs of life were small white puffs of condensation escaping his mouth. Burke couldn't believe the boy wasn't dead yet.

During basic training, before shipping out to Korea, Burke had made friends with a couple of old China hands, and he'd picked up a little of the lingo. Now he tried to communicate, but the boy was unresponsive. Too far gone, Burke thought. He unholstered his sidearm, paused, and slid the pistol back into its leather harness. What's the point?

Picking his way back up to his foxhole, Burke passed Sergeant Kipp and Corporal Gaines coming down the hill. They asked if he had seen anything, or anybody, inside the large hut. Burke said he hadn't looked in. Kipp and Gaines continued on down, and a moment later Burke heard rifle reports from inside. Kipp and Gaines had run across several wounded Chinese. Burke didn't wait around to ask if they had shot the dying kid.

About forty-five minutes later, at just past 9 a.m., Staff Sergeant John Henry saw two North Korean officers in full field uniforms walking up the MSR from the east. This was a rare occurrence. Henry couldn't remember the last time he'd seen hostile North Koreans. Even more unusual was the fact that the machine gunner Jack Page wasn't around to shoot them; the aroma of brewing coffee had lured him up to the med tents. When the North Koreans turned the corner of the road near the southeast base of the hill, Henry and one of his ammunition carriers were waiting for them behind a growth of tall brush.

Henry had no compunction about shooting oblivious enemy combatants, even two soldiers bughouse enough to mistakenly wander into an active battlefield. But these officers might be of value. At the very least, unlike the Chinese prisoners, they would be able to communicate with the civilian Korean interpreter, Mr. Chung. Perhaps they could serve as intermediaries, linguistic bridges, between Mr. Chung and the Chinese captives. Might know where all the rest of the gooks are. Might help us figure out a way to get off this goddamn hill.

These notions raced through John Henry's mind as the ammunition carrier, his face unclouded by thought, shot one man dead. Henry was so startled by the rifle report next to his ear that he instinctively squeezed the trigger on his Thompson. The second officer fell to the ground, his chest caved in.

Seven miles to the north, not far from the western bank of the Chosin Reservoir, a collection of some 350 Marines-the tattered remnants of the First Battalion's Abel, Baker, and Charlie rifle companiesshuffled into uneven rows. As they tried to keep warm, Lieutenant Colonel Ray Davis emerged from his command post tent with his officers and strode to and fro before them.

Davis was freshly shaved, but his face was creased with deep lines of strain and exhaustion. Most of his men were baffled. All around them fellow leathernecks from the Fifth, Seventh, and Eleventh regiments were making frantic final preparations to quit the Chosin -in General Oliver Smith's euphemistic words, to "attack in another direction." But Davis's men, the survivors of his First Rifle Battalion, did not seem to be a part of this evacuation plan. They wondered why.

The "breakout" strategy was not complicated. Units from Colonel Murray's Fifth Regiment would lead the attack out of Yudam-ni, fighting for and seizing the high ground on both sides of the MSR, while Colonel Litzenberg's Seventh Regiment disengaged the main column from the village-a thorny undertaking. It wasn't just a matter of marching south. There were scores of vehicles, wounded, and dead involved. The three Chinese divisions surrounding them would not simply sit back and wave good-bye. Therefore, a rear guard from the Fifth Regiment, with assistance from several guns of the Eleventh Regiment, would be asked to hold off the enemy troops who were sure to flow into the abandoned hamlet. But with luck-a lot of luck-most of the Marines in the rear guard would be at Hagaru-ri for chow by the following day.

Davis's men knew nothing of this as their commander paced in front of them. Finally he halted, swiveled toward them, and stood still. Enlisted men in battle usually receive small-bore intelligence, faulty or incomplete. But on this occasion Davis believed his Marines had the right to know what they would be soon up against. After several uncomfortable minutes he swept his arm to encompass the controlled chaos of more than two Marine regiments breaking camp and turning themselves around to head the fourteen miles south.

"They are going down the road," he said. "We are not. Fellow Marines are in trouble, and we are going to rescue them. Nothing is going to stand in our way."

The First Battalion, he continued, would march southeast down the MSR, leading Litzenberg's main column for just a little over two miles to Hill 1419-Turkey Hill. This information drew a sardonic laugh. Davis allowed it to die down. At Turkey Hill, he said, they would jump off the road under cover of darkness to begin an overland trek to Toktong Pass while Litzenberg's main column continued down the MSR.

"Surprise will be our essential weapon," Davis told the men. "Marines don't usually attack at night, so the Chinese won't be expecting us."

He had already explained to his officers that their tiny detachment would break off the road in single file, traverse the hill, and set off cross-country in a northeast direction for the back door to the pass. The distance was four and a half miles as the crow flies, and their slog would take them over three mountain ridges before they reached the fourth, final, and highest one-the rocky ridgeline snaking down from Toktong-san. On the other side of it lay Fox Hill. Davis knew that, taking ascents and descents into consideration, the march would be more than nine miles-if they managed to stay on course.

He did not mention this to his enlisted men. He did tell them that elements of the howitzer battery at Yudam-ni had agreed to guide at least the early leg of their night march with intermittent star shells. "They're staying here so we can get there," he said.

He reemphasized that once they punched through the Chinese line at Turkey Hill, which was about a hundred yards off the east side of the road, the success of their mission would depend on stealth and speed. No cook fires would be lit to heat meals, and each man was to carry only one full canteen. He also suggested that his men discard everything in their C-rations except the canned fruit, crackers, and chocolate. The entire battalion, he said, was to jettison all superfluous equipment and lug only essential weapons, extra ammunition, and sleeping bags (for all the good the sleeping bags would do; most men still carried summer-weight bags issued months ago). Crews for the heavy and light machine guns were doubled, and each rifleman was handed an 81-mm mortar shell to lug in his mummy bag. A squad had already been assigned to haul two 81-mm mortar tubes, six heavy machine guns, and spare ammo on litters and stretchers.

As Davis went among his Marines for a final culling of the sick and wounded, Baker Company's mortar officer Lieutenant Joe Owen sidled up to his company commander, First Lieutenant Joseph Kurcaba. Kurcaba was the son of Polish immigrants who had settled in Brooklyn, New York; Owen's wife, in upstate New York, was also of Polish descent. The two officers had been together under Davis since Pendleton, when he had stood up the First Battalion, and over the next months they had bonded, trading friendly banter in the few Polish words and phrases Owen had picked up from his in-laws. Though at six-foot-five Owen towered over the stocky Kurcaba, he had come to consider Kurcaba his big brother, and some Marines referred to them as the Warsaw version of Mutt and Jeff. This morning, however, their conversation included no jokes about kielbasa or potato wodka.

Owen was not worried so much about finding and reaching Fox Hill as he was about getting past Turkey Hill. He and Kurcaba had both been there, under precarious circumstances, and they remembered the tangle of deep gullies and thick woods on its steep, slippery slopes. If the Chinese still maintained a stronghold on Turkey Hill, as Owen was certain they did, this little side trip would be getting off to a dodgy start.

Kurcaba shrugged. He had fought through World War II and had seen worse. There was nothing to be done, he told Owen, except to put one foot in front of the other.

When Davis finished his inspection, he formed up the Marines he had tapped for the march. As if he had read Owen's mind, he knew they felt this was a suicide mission. He needed to give them some little hope. "With any luck," he said, "by the time we relieve Fox Company and get the hill squared away, we should be in a position to meet up with the main column on the MSR."

If Davis felt any apprehension about relying on outdated topographic maps to guide him around sheer slopes and unexpected cliffs-or about leading hungry, spent men miles across uncharted enemy-held terrain, or about further splitting the undermanned Marine breakout forces abandoning the Chosin Reservoir-he did not betray it.

After the assembly broke up, Kurcaba sought out his Second Platoon leader, First Lieutenant Chew-Een Lee. "Battalion wants you as the lead platoon," he said.

Kurcaba had enlisted in 1935, and he figured that in his fifteen years as a Marine he'd seen everything the Corps had to throw at him. But he was taken aback when Lee-a slight Chinese-American officer-smiled. This was rare. Lee had a chip on his shoulder and was known throughout the Seventh Regiment as a blister of a man. His arrogance, however, was matched by his competence as a leader and fighter.

For his part, Lee knew that by battalion, Kurcaba meant Davis. He thought, Well, of course he does. Who else would he want? Still, the directive rankled-not in itself but because of how it had been delivered. It should have been Lieutenant Kurcaba, not "battalion," who ordered him to take the point. That was the Marine Corps way; orders were passed down through the hierarchy, by the book. And if Chew-Een Lee went by anything, he went by the book.

3

On their fourth day on Fox Hill the Marines watched as the Corsairs returned, eight fighter-bombers riding the air currents above the mountains like great green metallic hawks. The Marines could make out the letters L and D on the tails, for the Love Dog Squadron. There was a competition brewing, a game of one-upmanship. The Love Dogs were trying to top yesterday's performance by the Checkerboards.

They flew in so low that men near the crest ducked. They strafed both sides of the same ridge that the machine gunners Page and Holt had blasted two hours before. They regrouped and swooped again, scraping off bombs, rockets, and napalm canisters in a perfectly straight line from the rocky knoll and up the rocky ridges to the base of Toktong-san.

They were re-forming for a third run when Captain Barber called them off by way of their air controller. Two Flying Boxcars had appeared over the southern horizon, and Barber requested that the Corsair squadron flight leader keep his pilots in the area as the cargo planes made their drop. While the fighter-bombers flew low in the sky, no Chinese sniper would dare show his face. The Boxcars vectored leisurely over the "X" in the center of the parachute circle and delivered nearly all their bundles on target. A few overshot the mark, landing in the east valley just beyond the First Platoon's perimeter.

Barber asked the Corsairs to machine-gun the East Hill and South Hill while a small detail moved to recover the wayward pallets. The pilots complied, and after every crate had been dragged behind the lines the aircraft took one more run at the rocky knoll and the rocky ridges, discharging their last bullets and bombs. Then they waggled their wings and were gone, accompanied by another exuberant cheer from the Americans on the hill.