The Last Stand of Fox Company: A True Story of U.S. Marines in Combat (36 page)

Listening to the roar from his men, Barber sensed a change in their mood. It was 12:30 p.m. and the blizzard had lightened to a few scattered flakes, but the temperature was dropping about one degree every hour. He called together his officers and platoon leaders; it was time, he said, to take the fight to the enemy. "Let's see how many the Love Dogs left standing," he said.

Barber knew that-more than by the miserable weather, more than by their hunger, more than by their untenable tactical situation -his men had been sapped by four straight days of defensive fighting. They were Marines, and they had been trained to attack. If he could get them out of their foxholes and on their feet, if he could make them see they were taking the fight to the Chinese, their morale would return.

He was not wrong. When his officers returned from spreading the word, they reported that this was the best news Fox Company had heard in five days.

The captain organized a patrol in force-a four-man fire team from the First Platoon headed by the squad leader Sergeant Daniel Slapinskas, augmented by eight mortarmen from one of the 81-mm crews. The thirteen-man recon detail would cross the saddle and poke around in the nooks and crannies at the base of the rocky knoll in search of any surviving, or regrouping, Chinese. Dick Kline's second 81-mm unit would cover them with suppressing fire from the hilltop. As word of this "offensive" spread, Fox Hill throbbed with energy.

It took Kline and his men ten minutes to lug their 81-mm tubes up to a slight depression near the crest of the hill. They began laying down covering fire soon after, walking shells at twenty-yard intervals the three hundred yards across the saddle to the bottom of the rocky knoll. Gouts of dark earth flecked with chunks of hardpacked white snow erupted like geysers. Into this maelstrom raced Slapinskas's patrol, the Marines leapfrogging over each other in a classic advance-and-cover maneuver.

The point fire team-corporals Charles North and Dan Montville and privates first class John Scott and Lee D. Wilson-met no resistance as they moved out fifty yards in front of the main body. Scott and Montville assumed covering positions just short of the rocky knoll while North and Wilson skirted the huge ledge. The four Marines were somewhat shocked. From Fox Hill you couldn't really tell how high this stone outcropping rose. Up close it looked about the size of the Capitol in Washington, D.C. North and Wilson cautiously worked their way around to its back.

The ground on either side and behind the knoll was crisscrossed with trenches, most leading back up to the rocky ridge. North and Wilson crept into one of these dugouts on their hands and knees. They had nearly circumvented the outcropping when they saw numerous dead soldiers in a half-dug ditch, most likely a work detail that had been deepening the trough. Then they heard snoring. Wilson nearly jumped out of his skin. These men weren't dead; they were asleep. How the hell had they slept through that Corsair bombardment?

The Marines leveled their M 1 s and emptied the clips, killing many of the Chinese and scattering the rest. As the survivors fled haphazardly, Scott and Montville picked them off. A Chinese officer jumped from behind a rock and tried to rally the panicked troops. Scott noticed, just before shooting him, that he was wearing a blue baseball cap.

The knoll was large, and its south side sloped gently to the saddle. Wilson and North climbed to the top, reloaded, and fired into another enemy platoon that was rushing down the ridgeline. With North and Wilson still on the knoll, Scott approached the half-dug trench. Someone threw a potato masher. Scott leaped backward, and as he fell his rifle clanked on a rock. He was uninjured, but when he aimed his M 1 it would not fire on automatic. He settled for one round at a time. Then he saw a squad break off from the platoon engaged by North and Wilson and begin moving toward him. Individual rifle rounds were not going to stop them.

He looked around. When the enemy work crew fled, they had abandoned their gear. Scott picked up a sack of hand grenades. He reached in-there were nearly a dozen-and started heaving them at the twenty or so Chinese soldiers closing on his position.

In a moment Scott was out of grenades and armed with only a rifle firing one bullet at a time. He turned to Montville, about twenty yards behind him. He was about to yell when a concussion grenade landed at Montville's feet, knocked him backward to the ground, and shattered his MI.

Now Scott did holler, "Fall back-I'll cover you." But Montville, still cradling his broken rifle in his arms, appeared stunned.

"Fall back!" Scott shouted again, this time with heat in his voice. Montville snapped to. He lurched off the saddle and into the west valley, ran a few yards, and instinctively took up a covering position, despite his useless rifle. Scott leaped past him down into the valley, eyeing Montville's smashed MI as he raced by. The two retreated in this manner until they neared the Second Platoon's lines on the west slope.

Montville, still somewhat in shock, had to be tackled by Gray Davis as he stumbled back through the perimeter. He had nearly walked into the field of booby-trap grenades that Davis and Luke Johnson had strung through the low tree branches. Scott stuck closer to the edge of the saddle. He had almost made the tree line when a bullet tore through his shoulder. He crawled the rest of the way.

Across the saddle, North and Wilson were pinned down on the rocky knoll. Sergeant Slapinskas led the rest of his detail to cover their escape. Chinese soldiers streamed out of foxholes, caves, and rock crevices behind the knoll. More were surging down the rocky ridge. North and Wilson backed their way down the knoll, jumped the final fifteen feet, and landed amid Slapinskas's men. The entire patrol began zigzagging back across the saddle, counting on covering fire from Kline's 81-mms and the forward foxholes of the Third Platoon. Again plumes of dirt, snow, and smoke erupted across the land bridge, this time behind the retreating patrol.

A mortarman was shot in the gut and went down. Two Marines running past grabbed him under each arm and dragged him away. A Navy corpsman raced to meet them. He, too, was hit. Two Marines from the Third Platoon ran out to retrieve him. Directing covering fire, the XO, Clark Wright, stood up in his hole and was shot twice in the side.

When Slapinskas's detail finally reached the safety of the perimeter, two Marines carried Captain Barber up the hill on a stretcher. His wound had worsened, and his improvised crutch would no longer suffice. The bullet he'd taken had glanced off his thighbone and lodged in his hip. The shattered bone was causing an infection to creep down his entire leg, and there was no penicillin for it. Even crawling in and out of his sleeping bag had become torturous, and after forty-eight hours of bearing the pain he had relented and allowed a corpsman to dose him with a morphine syrette. Before he'd taken it, however, he summoned his XO and first sergeant to his tent and told them to keep an eye on him.

"I want you to analyze every decision I make, everything I say. If you find me befuddled or irrational, I want you to tell me. And if you think I can't understand . . ." Barber paused to let his instructions sink in. "Do whatever you think is necessary."

But the captain showed no signs of incoherence as Sergeant Slapinskas delivered his recon report. One Marine was dead, four more were wounded, and at least a company of Chinese were still holding the rocky knoll. Slapinskas thought about the plastering the rocky knoll had taken from the Marine fighter-bombers. "The Corsair jockeys will not be happy," he said.

Barber gazed across the saddle. No Chinese were following. He could already sense that the adrenaline was ebbing in his tired troops. He decided that if his men were not going to have to fight, he was not going to let their minds go slack. "OK, let's get this hill cleaned up," he said. He wanted trash buried, the remaining C-rations counted, and every spare weapon stacked near the command post. The rest of the afternoon passed uneventfully.

On the banks of the Chosin it was late morning by the time Lieutenant Colonel Davis ordered his relief column to mount up. Factoring in the wind chill, he estimated that the temperature was close to minus-twenty-five and falling. When the Marines reached the hills the gale would make it feel more like minus-fifty. Each of his weary men carried nearly fifty pounds of equipment; the battalion groaned under all this weight.

Davis tramped in among the men, reminding them that although they were surrounded by the enemy, this was not a retreat. He pointed toward the barren heights. "Fox Company is just over those ridges," he said. "They're surrounded and need our help. They held the road open for us, and now it's our turn to return the favor."

Semper fidelis.

As the column inched forward, Lieutenant Peter Arioli of the Navy appeared out of the snowy mist and introduced himself to Davis. Arioli, a regimental surgeon, had heard that Davis's medic had been wounded and volunteered to join the rescue mission. The battalion commander extended a hand. "Glad to have you with us," he said.

Lieutenant Chew-Een Lee looked at the new doc with a jaundiced eye. Arioli was too thin and seemed soft, as if he had never raised a callus in his life. Lee thought, Good intentions, but he'll never make it.

Although no Marine was daft enough to mention it, much less josh him about it, Chew-Een Lee realized he looked like a court jester: he was wearing bright pink supply-drop air panels, which he had draped over his shoulders like a cape. He didn't care how he looked. The idea was that his men would be able to find him in a tight spot. As usual, he would be out front. This was typical of Chew-Een Lee's military career. He didn't like following, and he didn't like followers.

Lee, who was twenty-four, had joined the Marine Corps six years earlier. One reason was to obliterate the stereotype of ChineseAmericans as just laundrymen and waiters. His height had been recorded (perhaps overgenerously) as five feet six, and he weighed only about 130 pounds, so he was one of the smallest men in the First Division. But he was also a hard man, and a hard taskmaster.

During the fourteen-day voyage from San Diego to Japan, other platoon leaders had scoffed when Lee "held school" for his enlisted men day and night on the deck of the troopship. Even Lee had suspected he was drilling his men so hard that half would have gone over the hill had they been on land. But he had a point to make, and he believed he had made it. If Red China entered the war, as Lee privately believed it would, he would be leading men with no experience and virtually no training against a numerically superior and ideologically committed force. The result of his harsh regimen on the troopship, Lee was certain, was that his raw Marines were now more terrified of him than they ever could be of the enemy.

A month earlier Baker Company had caught the brunt of the first fight against the Chinese in the Sudong Gorge. An enemy squad, perhaps twenty men, had held one of the smaller hills overlooking the gorge, and Lee single-handedly charged them and wiped them out, an act for which he was awarded the Navy Cross. As he was on his way down to the road, a sniper's bullet had shattered his right elbow, and he was evacuated against his wishes to a temporary Army hospital in Hamhung.

He was about to be flown to Japan when he and another wounded Marine went AWOL, stole a Jeep from the motor pool, and began making their way north, back to their units. When the Jeep ran out of gas, Lee-who was surely wanted by the MPs for stealing a vehicle, and whose arm was still bound in a cast and sling-walked the final ten miles back to the First Battalion. As he passed through American positions he was aware that even though he didn't carry a weapon, he might be shot for looking so "gooky."

Lieutenant Kurcaba had nearly fallen over when he saw Lee limp into Baker Company's bivouac to resume his command. (Lee did not tell Kurcaba or anyone else that in escaping from the hospital he had also been fleeing probable charges for assaulting a soldier. In sick bay, Lee had encountered a man suffering from battle fatigue. When Lee demanded to see a physical wound, the soldier merely shrank away. Enraged at what he considered cowardice, Lee slapped him.)

Lee had worn the sling and the cast on his arm ever sincethrough Hagaru-ri and up the MSR to the Chosin-always taking the point on patrols, never once complaining as he hefted his carbine in his good left hand and used his hip to balance the rifle when he fired. His knee was also badly injured-it wouldn't lock and kept buckling-and he had a cold that was getting worse by the day. He told no one. But now, as the First Battalion began its overland march, he discarded the sling, which was reduced to a bloody rag. He thought that the sling could be seen as a sign of weakness, and he could not abide that. Inside the cast his elbow still felt as if a sledgehammer had smashed it, but he would will himself to overcome the pain. His father would have been proud of him.

In California members of the Lee family were known throughout the Sacramento Valley's Chinese-American community as the "golden ones." Sometime after World War I-no one was sure of the exact year-Lee's father had emigrated from Guangzhou (Canton), the provincial capital of Guangdon Province. The elder Lee, whose Chinese name meant "Brilliant Scholar," had a knack for languages and picked up English quickly. He fast rose from farmworker to owner of a small farm to labor contractor, allocating fruit and vegetable pickers to the valley's white farmers.

After establishing himself in his adoptive country, Lee's father returned to Guangdon for an arranged marriage with a beautiful woman named Gold Jade. The two returned to the United States, and in the first five years of their marriage they had five of their seven children-four boys and three girls. Chew-Een was the eldest son.

The Lee farmstead failed early in the Great Depression, and the senior Lee moved his family to Sacramento itself, where he started a grocery business that evolved into a wholesale produce company supplying local restaurants and hotels. A point of pride for the Lees was that they came from the same Central Mountain district of Guangdon as the Chinese revolutionary and political leader Dr. Sun Yat-sen, often regarded as the father of modern China. Although not wealthy, the Lees considered themselves a sort of local aristocracy ruling over the Chinese migrant version of Okies. Throughout the 1930s, during the Sino-Japanese War, Lee's father was an influential political activist and fund-raiser for Sun Yat-sen's government.