The Last Stand of Fox Company: A True Story of U.S. Marines in Combat (38 page)

The climb to the first ridgeline was brutal. Lee's point detail formed up as a small arrowhead with Lee on the point-his scouts were so close he could touch them. As they trudged through kneedeep, and sometimes waist-deep, snow, Lee sometimes had to jab his drowsy scouts with the butt of his carbine in order to keep them alert. The remainder of Baker Company, led by Lieutenant Kurcaba, followed in single file; behind them, a path as slick and icy as a toboggan run developed.

A number of Marines-drained from nearly twenty-four hours with no sleep, and coming off the firefight at Turkey Hill-faltered and fell. The wind whipped their faces as they crawled up the slope on their hands and knees, grunting, grumbling, and moaning softly. The occasional report from a Chinese sniper carried like the sound of a howitzer shell through the brittle night air. After the snow clouds moved in, blotting out the moon and stars, it became so dark each Marine had to grab hold of the parka of the one in front of him. There were deep defiles and crevasses in several places so that the column had to take a detour, and twice Lee had to dogleg around insurmountable granite walls rising from the snow.

He sensed he was drifting off course. He checked his maps, but that was a waste of time. The scale on the old Japanese charts was 1 to 50,000-a real world of mountains, ridges, valleys, and steep gorges ludicrously compressed to the size of a pinkie nail. The contour lines would have been barely legible in the bright sunlight, much less in the pitch blackness on a snowy night. It's like shadow boxing in a black box, Lee thought.

He plodded forward, but he hadn't moved more than a mile before he concluded that he was lost. He pulled out his compass but it spun wildly. Was that because of the cold? Belatedly he realized that the men in the battalion trailing him were carrying enough metal to throw the compass off.

With the column stalled, Davis ran up to the point. Lee explained the problem. Davis decided to risk asking for white phosphorous shells to guide them-the element of surprise meant nothing if they didn't know where they were going. He radioed to the artillery command in Yudam-ni and asked for several rounds of Willie Peter; then he returned to the center of the line. But the shells were blown off course by mountain winds so fierce that they made breathing difficult. Lee began drifting farther to the right, down the slope, the path of least resistance.

A moment later he picked up a whiff of garlic, followed by the sound of Chinese voices not twenty-five yards away. Lee spoke some pidgin Mandarin that he had picked up as a boy but was not at all familiar with China's ten other major dialects, or with its hundreds of regional accents. Still, he understood this:

"Ching du ma?" Do you hear something?

"Tara da?" We attack?

He had come dangerously close to an enemy mortar emplacement overlooking the MSR. He realized that the Chinese could not see him in the snow and darkness, and he sensed that they were as cold and miserable as he was. From his postwar deployment in China, Lee knew that CCF regulars, especially the NCOs and officers, had little respect for the American Army. The Marines, on the other hand, they considered "highly competent criminals." Lee instinctively felt that these Chinese mortarmen wanted no part of a firelight tonight and would be content to pretend that the column of soldiers passing so close by were actually their own. The way their fur caps popped up and down from their gun pits suggested that the men were searching but not wanting to see-they reminded Lee of prairie dogs. He took a hard left and passed them by.

Near the center of the line, Lieutenant Colonel Davis grew increasingly frustrated with the sluggish pace. Each of Lee's halts had an accordion effect on the column. Davis also worried that Lee's scouts were swerving too far off course, heading back toward the road and toward the known enemy positions that had been targeted for an artillery barrage from Yudam-ni during the breakout.

He tried and failed to contact Lieutenant Kurcaba, who was following close behind Chew-Een Lee. The batteries in Kurcaba's radio had died. Davis tried to pass word along the column up to Baker's point. That did not work, either. The Marines were muffled up to the ears with ragged towels and tightly wrapped parka hoods, so they could scarcely hear an order and repeated it as nonsense.

When these voice commands did not work, Davis again stepped out of the long file, grabbed his radioman and his runner, and sprinted toward the front. Where the trail bent left he ran into one of Lee's scouts. He held a finger to his mouth and with his other hand pointed to enemy mortar emplacements. Davis was tempted to order a platoon to take these emplacements out. But who knew what other Chinese units lurked nearby? A full-scale gunfight would mean the end of his mission to relieve Fox.

Davis sent his swift runner Private First Class Bob "Red" Watson, a Minnesotan, back with a nine-word warning for the bulk of the column: "No noise. Gooks ahead. No firing unless fired upon." He made Watson repeat the message back to him twice. Thereafter a procession of dark shadows whispered past the enemy emplacements.

Nearly simultaneously, two hundred yards up the line, ChewEen Lee halted and turned back to Joe Owen. "Joe, better get back to Lieutenant Kurcaba," he said. "Tell him that without a Willie Peter starburst I can't go any farther unless they want me to lead everyone over a cliff."

Lee did not like many men, but he respected "Long" Joe Owen. When they had first met at Pendleton, Lee considered Owen just another wiseacre slacker. Owen's men had no discipline: they failed to stand at attention properly, they rarely saluted him, and several even had the audacity to call Owen by his first name. Lee, as a first lieutenant, outranked Owen. One day Owen had addressed him as merely "Lee," a common practice among junior officers in the Marines. Lee had shot back, "It's Lieutenant Lee to you, Second Lieutenant."

Lee thought that Owen's priorities were skewed. Lee himself hewed more to iron rule than to the Golden Rule, and according to Lee's Marine Corps sensibility the amiable Owen cared too much about the physical comfort of his men and too little about the bigger picture of war. In war, soldiers died. These deaths were honorable and were to be expected-but Lee felt that Owen did not respect this truth. Lee had also been disgusted in Hamhung, when Owen nonchalantly allowed his right-hand man in the mortar unit to commandeer a captured North Korean steam locomotive for a joyride. Owen had actually cheered the man on as he chuffed around the sooty industrial port town. Lee would have thrown him into the brig.

But Lee's opinion of Owen had changed in the hospital after the battle for Sudong Gorge. Lee had been wounded early in the fighting, and as more casualties from the Seventh Regiment poured into the temporary medical center, he had pulled up a chair and interrogated each Marine about the ongoing firefight. He heard the same story over and again: after his old Second Platoon had encountered its first Soviet tank of the war, the men had broken and fled in panic. Most disgracefully, to Lee, the retreat had been led by the officer, a veteran of World War II, who replaced him as platoon commander. But then the stories became interesting. As the Americans had taken flight, Lee was told over and again, Owen appeared in the middle of the road and stopped them.

"Stand and fight like Marines!" Owen had roared, physically lifting some men off their feet and throwing them back toward the enemy lines. Owen then led the counterattack that disabled the tank. From that moment on Chew-Een Lee had felt differently toward Joe Owen. There was probably not another Marine in the outfit to whom Lee could admit that he was human, that he needed assistance, that he was lost.

Now, no sooner had Owen turned back down the trail to find Lieutenant Kurcaba than he collided with a smaller man rushing up the path. It took him a moment to realize that he had knocked over Lieutenant Colonel Davis. The CO was exhausted, and even with Owen's aid he had to struggle to regain his footing. Nearby was a small depression, an abandoned Chinese dugout, and Davis dropped into it. Owen went back to get Lee, and then the two lieutenants squeezed in on either side of Davis.

They pulled their parkas over the hole, lit flashlights, and checked their compasses and maps. Through a process of comparison and synchronization, with occasional peeks at the stars appearing between snow clouds, they managed to reorient the column. But their minds were so benumbed that by the time they got up, they had forgotten which direction they'd decided on. They dropped down again, and this time Davis kept his finger pointed toward a second ridgeline several hundred yards to the northeast. They doused their lights. Incredibly, as they stood for the second time a word from Owen again made Davis forget exactly why he was pointing in that direction. The three Marines had to confer one more time.

Davis returned to the center of the column as Lee and his scouts, squinting in the churning snowflakes, broke trail up the slope toward the ridge. Even the hardy Lee was so weak he was certain that an enemy soldier could topple him with a gentle stab of a finger. He felt like an old man, as if his legs were stone, as if time had no meaning. Still, he pressed on. He had not gone far when he again stopped and sent a scout back to find Davis. When Davis arrived, Lee was standing with a semicircle of Marines, staring down at a lump in the snow.

Before Davis could say a word a brawny sergeant punched his fist through the crust and lifted an ice-covered figure by the neck of his quilted uniform. "Gook's still alive, Captain," he said. The soldier was wearing tennis shoes but no socks.

Davis peered at the man's eyes. They were indeed moving, albeit very slowly. Davis looked to either side of the trail. The white terrain showed half a dozen similar bulges. The big sergeant moved from one mound to another, pulling a frozen Chinese body from each one. All but the first man were dead.

Davis thought of Fox Hill. Would he find the same scene there, but with dead Marines buried in snowy graves? He passed up and down the line, reminding his men that the fate of Fox Company depended on them. Then he ran back to the point and urged Lee to move faster.

Following Lee, the relief column crested the next ridge and came on a small mountain meadow-level ground that stretched several hundred yards. It was pocked with huge boulders. Davis held the men back as Lee's point team picked its way through the rocks. The men on the team were halfway across the snowfield when the eastern and western slopes above them erupted in muzzle flashes. The Americans were shocked out of their frozen lethargy. At the first rifle report, Lee formed the Second Platoon into a skirmish line and charged. Davis and his main body followed.

Davis estimated that he was under siege from at least two enemy platoons, and he ordered his heavy machine gunners and mortar unit deployed between two attack columns. As the riflemen passed the mortar crews, they reached into their mummy bags and threw off 81-mm shells. Owen's tubes hit the Chinese hard. The attack columns following Lee-with Davis in the fore, firing his carbinefinished the job.

Lee's initial assault was so rapid that many Chinese were caught in their sleeping bags. Some fought back by throwing rocks. Lee shot two of them with his carbine, but neither went down. Much of the fighting was hand-to-hand, and several of Owen's ammunition carriers used entrenching tools to club enemy soldiers to death.

After the fight Davis called a ten-minute rest and re-formed his platoons. Lieutenant Kurcaba's men were so numbed from the wind and cold that he made them jog in place. Davis, meanwhile, met with his officers. Fox Hill was no more than two miles over the next ridgeline-a ridgeline occupied by at least one Chinese battalion and probably two. The Marines needed a plan of attack.

Davis was worried. His subordinates could barely stand, and their numbed minds were drifting. When he spoke, he made his officers repeat the words back to him three times to ensure they understood. But he himself was no better off-his saliva began to harden every time he opened his mouth, and he had a hard time forming words. For the first time in his life he wished he had been born and bred in a colder environment. Perhaps, he thought, if he had grown up sledding, skiing, and skating in Minnesota like Watson, he would have adapted better to this debilitating cold. There weren't many ski runs or frozen ponds in Georgia. He had everyone take a knee as he pondered assignments for the assault.

At 10 p.m. the Marines of Fox Company heard gunfire and mortar rounds echo off the heights behind the rocky ridge. Weary men looked at each other and shrugged. This was somebody else's problem.

They had no idea that the shots emanated from the guns of Lieutenant Colonel Ray Davis's First Rifle Battalion, which was trying to open the back door to Fox Hill.

DAY SIX