The Last Stand of Fox Company: A True Story of U.S. Marines in Combat (51 page)

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Authors: Bob Drury,Tom Clavin

BOOK: The Last Stand of Fox Company: A True Story of U.S. Marines in Combat
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that he and the other Marines had been moved to a temporary enemy battalion command post.Their wristwatches had been stripped off them, but the three Americans could tell from the sun's position that it was still early morning. Before long a guard flung open the shed door and pointed with his rifle barrel toward a small grove of trees one hundred yards away. Firing squad was Pickett's first thought. Instead they were led to a slit trench latrine. The Marines were relieving themselves there when a squadron of Australian Mustangs flew in low and rocketed the farmhouse and the shed, obliterating both buildings.Their captors were furious, and Pickett was certain that this time they would be executed. But again they were merely marched, unbound and carrying Yesko, four miles to another farmhouse. There they were led into an adjoining corral where seven or eight more Americans were huddled. The prisoners were all Marines captured at Yudam-ni. One had been shot in the shoulder.The Americans did what they could to treat their wounded comrades until sometime late in the afternoon, when a North Korean ambulance arrived. Yesko and the second wounded Marine were loaded inside and driven away. Pickett would have preferred to see Chinese markings on the ambulance; the North Koreans were known to be less gentle with captives. He steeled himself to enter the rice culture as a prisoner of war, and he wondered if that would include ever seeing Dan Yesko again.3By midmorning Fox Company was again a bustling hive, gearing up with an intensity, born of combat, that would have been all but unimaginable the day before. The bright sunshine provided some needed warmth, though the Marines guessed that the temperature had risen to only ten below zero. The lubricating oil on all weapons had been turned to sludge by the cold, so every carbine, M 1, BAR, sidearm, and light and heavy machine gun was wiped of excess oil and test-fired. Every bullet of every clip of every gun was also removed, wiped down, and replaced.The machine gunners, remembering the Chinese suicide charges on their emplacements, laid out their belts and substituted standard cartridges for the red tracers on every fifth round.The forward artillery officer contacted How Company's 105-mm howitzer unit, using the dying gasps of the SCR-300's frozen radio batteries, and requested that they register their shells for distance on the East Hill, South Hill, West Hill, and rocky ridge surrounding Fox Hill. Within moments, explosions ringed the company's position. The artillery observer marked them on his topographic maps. When new batteries were air-dropped, he would contact Captain Ben Read, How's commander, to tell him where the rounds landed.Barber ordered a detail to be formed to take the company Jeep as well as the mail carrier's Jeep back to Hagaru-ri for supplies. But the vehicles' batteries were dead, and at any rate the Jeeps themselves were so badly shot up that nobody believed they would start, or run, even with fresh batteries. The same detail, led by Sergeant Kenneth Kipp, the NCO whose fire team had rescued Lee Knowles and Robert Rapp from a Jeep trailer, set off on a recon patrol east and south-the two directions from which the Chinese had not yet attacked.Kipp returned an hour later with news Barber had anticipated: Fox Hill was surrounded. Kipp had encountered enemy snipers from both directions. Fox Company was completely cut off from any other units of the First Marine Division. Thousands of Chinese were out there, perhaps tens of thousands, and Barber's company was down to two-thirds of its strength.There may have been a lull, but the Chinese let Fox Company know they were still watching. At 9:40 a.m., Private First Class Alvin Haney, out collecting abandoned weapons near the eastern edge of the hilltop, was knocked over by a sniper's bullet fired from the rocky knoll. Private First Class Billy French, the mail carrier, saw the shooting and bolted from his foxhole. He reached Haney and began dragging him back to cover.But Haney was a big man and the rescue was slow. Halfway to the tree line Haney was hit again, by a bullet that lodged in his back. French persevered and had nearly made it to safety when he, too, was shot, in the foot. Corporal Gaines and Private First Class Hutchinson, the two Marines who had arrived late and had dug in near the erosion ridge, managed to pull both Haney and French to safety.Farther northwest, near the saddle, the four Marines manning the light machine-gun unit were using the two tall rocks as an improvised fort. Crouching behind the forward rock were Bob Ezell and Private First Class Ray Valek. They had been joined by two other privates first class: Charles Parker and David Goodrich of the Second Platoon. A sniper on the rocky knoll-Ezell was certain it was the same bastard who had gotten Haney just missed Goodrich's head. The slug struck the rock an inch from his ear, and the impact of the rock fragments knocked Goodrich into the open. Valek, lunging to pull him back in, was grazed in the head just below the helmet.Gushing blood, Valek took off for the aid station, trying to keep the two rocks between him and the rocky knoll until he reached the tree line. Goodrich, meanwhile, was semiconscious and had a nasty-looking gouge in his neck from the ricochet. While Ezell treated the wound with sulfa powder and bandaged it, Parker leaned out from behind the forward rock. "I'm gonna find that son of a bitch," he said.Earlier, in Hagaru-ri, Lieutenant Peterson had tried to confine Parker to sick bay with a bad case of the flu, but Parker refused. He truly believed Fox Company was going to be home by Christmas and was terrified of being stranded in a military hospital in Japan while his buddies left. Now, as he scrutinized the rocky knoll for the sniper who'd nailed Goodrich and Valek, he suddenly grunted. Bob Ezell turned and Parker fell into his lap, a hole in his stomach. Ezell hollered for a corpsman. Two arrived, with a stretcher. The medic examining Parker told Ezell he wouldn't need it. Parker was dead.Ezell and the three medics carried Goodrich down the hill, intending to come back for Parker's body. Outside the med tents Ezell ran into a friend, Sergeant Clarence Tallbull, a Blackfoot Indian who served as the company's unofficial barber. Tallbull hated the North Koreans, and his buddies surmised that this was because he looked just like one. He was small and wiry and had Asian facial features; whenever he walked near a POW enclosure, the prisoners would rush to the wire to talk to him. That pissed Tallbull off. Now he had a thick, bloody bandage wrapped around his neck and shoulders."What happened, Chief?""Hit in the back of the neck. Take a look, willya, tell me how bad it is?"Ezell bent over Tallbull and removed the dressing. He gently skinned off a glob of frozen blood the size of a small snowball. He could see the Indian's exposed shoulder bone. A day or two earlier he would have been horrified. Hell, a couple of hours ago he had been afraid to mess with Kenny Benson's crusted eyes. Not now."Aw, that's OK," Ezell said. "You're gonna be fine."Tallbull smiled and gave him a thumbs-up.When Ezell returned to the two tall rocks, Private First Class Jerry Triggs was waiting for him. Triggs, who was only seventeen, was another ammo carrier with the First Platoon's light machine-gun unit. Several paces to the east, Corporal Alvin Dytkiewicz and Private First Class William Gleason had taken over the gun and emplaced it in the same broad notch that Corporal Ladner had previously occupied, between the Second and Third Platoons. Ezell told Triggs that on his way back up he had passed close enough to the company command post to hear Captain Barber chewing out Mr. Chung, the Korean interpreter. Barber was incensed because Mr. Chung couldn't speak Chinese."Guess all those smart guys back at Division really didn't have any idea they were crossing the Yalu," Ezell said."Home for Christmas, my ass," Triggs said.Unknown to Ezell, the interpreter had nonetheless found out, through a combination of sign language and linguistically related Korean and Chinese words, that the prisoners were from a regiment of the Fifty-ninth CCF Division, and that several of them had fought against Mao in Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist Army before being conscripted by the Chinese Communists.Barber had stood over the prisoners listening to the interpreter's report and noted that their uniforms reeked of garlic. To Barber they were a pathetic bunch, rocking on their haunches with their backs to the wind, shivering, frostbitten. Even the few tough, battlehardened fighters were tiny and looked beaten, and their skin seemed to have been cured by the wind, like beef jerky. He wondered what the hell was happening up at the Chosin Reservoir.The unflappable Lieutenant Colonel Randolph Lockwood was in his usual good mood when, at 9:45 a.m., his composite "cooks and bakers" company started up the MSR from Hagaru-ri. In the van were three tanks from Company D's First Tank Battalion; several hundred Marines followed on foot. Lockwood wore a 35-mm camera attached to a strap around his neck.The relief detail had reached the top of the first rise, barely a mile beyond the northern perimeter of Hagaru-ri, when Lockwood saw a burning Sherman tank lying on its side ahead. The disabled tank was in a small vale where the road dipped before again rising toward the pass through a series of steep gorges. These gateway hills were studded with a string of abandoned gold mines.Lockwood halted the column and swept the heights with binoculars. He was encircled. On hilltops in every direction he saw rows of enemy soldiers. No sooner had he moved his men off the road than they began taking rifle and mortar fire. He ordered several flanking maneuvers, but the Chinese mirrored his movements. It would be impossible to get around them.Soon, more Chinese riflemen poured out of the gold mines. A squadron of Corsairs passed overhead, but Lockwood didn't carry a radio with the frequency to contact them. He may have had tanks, but without mortars and heavy machine guns this was suicide.He lit his pipe and told his radioman to contact Litzenberg.Warren McClure gave up on the idea of retrieving his BAR from the "deep dip." There were too many snipers. He had just learned of Roger Gonzales's death from Bob Kirchner. He couldn't believe the new boot had been killed in the short time he'd been gone. Christ, he barely knew the kid, but nevertheless this death hit him hard. A foxhole buddy was, after all, a foxhole buddy. However, before he had time to think, much less grieve, his squad leader, Sergeant Reitz, again asked him to establish a forward listening post, this time by himself.McClure surveyed the entire west slope of the hill before deciding on a small, rocky outcropping farther up the grade that jutted out, nearly hanging, over the ravine that ran up the west valley. Finding some sparse scrub for cover, he shoved the vegetation into his BAR belt, crawled out onto the ledge, and settled into a prone position behind a little rock knob that reminded him of a wart on a witch's nose. He knew that an enemy sniper would find his scrub camouflage laughable and prayed that his filthy uniform blended into the granite.Marines behind him passed him a carbine and an M1. He was about 150 yards distant from the top of the West Hill, and at eye level with it. He was also 250 or so yards away from, and well below, the snipers on the rocky knoll. At 10:15 a.m. he heard the drone of the planes.McClure looked up to see eight Australian Mustangs barreling down toward the west valley. He hollered for the Second Platoon's multicolored air panels. They were passed out to his little ledge, and he laid them out in the snow about ten yards to his right, pointing them toward the rocky knoll. Sniper slugs ricocheted off the rocks around the panels as he dived back behind the witch's wart.The Royal Australian Air Force was based at the snow-covered airstrip in Yonpo, just north of Wonsan, and was famous for its officers' club, which sold beer and whiskey. Everybody said that those Aussies knew how to fight a war. For days the pilots had been peering down from their cramped cockpits while supporting the retreating Eighth Army in the west. Now they were watching the same thing happening to the U.S. Marines in the east.In a moment the planes were directly in front of McClure over the west valley, flying so low that their propellers could have chopped kindling. He was at eye level with the pilots, and he gave one a thumbs-up. One Aussie, who had a full blond mustache, returned the signal. Half a dozen Chinese stood up on the rocky knoll and actually shot down at the incoming aircraft with automatic weapons. They did no damage. The P-51 s plastered the rocky knoll with bombs, rockets, and 20-mm cannon rounds.One Mustang loosed a napalm canister from its cradle near the top of the east side of the knoll, but it failed to ignite. McClure watched the twenty-two remaining Marines of the Third Platoon near the hilltop stand in their holes and fire like madmen. He knew they were aiming for the napalm. Another Mustang pounded the hill with more cannon fire and simultaneously dropped a second napalm cylinder. The two exploded at the same time, sucking the oxygen out of the air and turning the knoll into a vaporizing orange inferno. Flaming quilted uniforms toppled from it like melting candle wax. Ezell's light machine-gun crew up at the two tall rocks felt the hot wind wash over them as they burrowed into the snow.It was over in a minute. Before heading home, for good measure, the Mustangs strafed a roadblock the Chinese had set up between the West Hill and Yudam-ni. Then the Aussies pulled up, backtracked over Fox Hill, and waggled their wings. A cheer rose to meet them. Bob Ezell felt so good about life that he broke out crackers, frozen jelly, and a roll of Charms hard candies from his C-rats and handed the snacks around. His companions took the crackers and jelly but passed up the Charms. Marines considered (and still consider) eating Charms bad luck.McClure's smile evaporated. He could still hear the fading whine of the P-51 propellers when he saw five Chinese soldiers rise from a fold in the West Hill directly across the valley. They jogged down the slope, performed a left oblique as if they were walking paradeground duty, and raced toward the ravine. McClure lifted his carbine, aimed for the head, and took two of them out. The others disappeared into the deep gash in the valley.Now four more Chinese jumped up and followed their exact trail. McClure sighted his carbine but it jammed. He lifted his M 1, sighted, and picked off another Chinese. He squeezed again but then the M1 also jammed. Goddamn rifles frozen at ten-thirty in the morning.He yelled for another weapon and a second carbine was passed out to him. By then, however, the second

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