The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (42 page)

Colonel Hill had immediately wanted to set up a defensive line right smack in the flat paddy land fronting Yongsan. Beahler was all too aware of his own limitations—he might be a good engineering officer, but he was hardly an expert in infantry warfare. Nonetheless, he knew immediately that Hill’s plan was a prescription for a disaster, which might cost him his entire company. He did not know who had taught John Hill about infantry tactics, but fighting from an open stretch of rice paddy, with no natural contours to help your individual defensive positions, was madness. What made it even worse was the fact that there would be no flanking American units on his right or left, against an enemy whose favorite tactic was first to flank and then to encircle a defensive
position. “If you wanted to pick the perfect place for the North Koreans to mow us down, this was it,” Sergeant Piazza said.

Beahler protested vigorously to Hill. He wanted to take his men up a hill behind the little village on the other, or south side of the road to Pusan, backing it rather than fronting it, an infinitely superior place for a defense against a numerically superior enemy. Holding Yongsan meant nothing, control of five or six little huts—it was the
road
leading out of it that was at stake here, and the hill blocked the road out of Yongsan. As he confronted Colonel Hill, Beahler’s thoughts went back to Custer at the Little Big Horn. Had anyone protested to Custer about the sheer madness of what he was doing? Had the ordinary soldiers known that their commander was crazed and putting them all at risk? Had anyone in the command understood how the vainglory of their commander undermined their chances of surviving? At that moment, Beahler did not know what was going on around him or what the larger strategy was. The one thing he knew was that he was not going to place his men out in any open paddy, naked to North Korean artillery and mortars and tanks, and the In Min Gun’s superior numbers. But there was Hill, a full colonel, telling him he was to fight in the flat land. Only if the North Koreans hit hard enough could he break off and pull back up the hill, he was told. That’s absolutely demented, Beahler thought. The North Koreans almost always struck at night, and disengagement from a superior enemy in the midst of battle, even in daylight, is an especially hard military move. To do it at night would be much worse.

The lives of all the men were at stake. What good would it do if Beahler lived to testify at a court-martial that he had opposed the decision that cost him his company? He decided there was no more time to waste arguing. He was on his own; the responsibility was his. Besides, Colonel Hill had just given him his excuse. “Sergeant Nations!” he yelled to his master sergeant, Kenneth Nations. “We’ve just been hit! Take the company up on the hill!” Colonel Hill said nothing.

A little later General Bradley himself showed up. “What outfit is this?” he asked.

“Dog Company, Second Engineers,” Nations answered.

“I thought you were supposed to be out in front of the village,” Bradley said.

“No, sir, the company commander said to take them up on the hill—it’s a much, much better position as you can see for yourself, General.”

“All right, Sergeant, carry on,” Bradley replied.

So it was that they had taken the natural protection offered by the hill and fashioned what was in effect a soft horseshoe defense facing the road. When the men finished digging their foxholes, Sergeant Nations came by, took one
look, and told them to dig deeper. “We grumbled a lot then, but a little later I would have kissed his ass for making us do it,” Butch Hammel, a private first class in Beahler’s company, remembered. Across the road was Able Company from the Second Engineer Battalion, which, during the day, had been joined by some stragglers from other companies, but remained, like Dog Company, still badly understrength.

IT WAS A
very foggy night, and long before they saw the North Koreans, they heard their whistles and their voices, every command somehow amplified in the darkness, the language seeming harsh and staccato, and then they heard the terrifying rumble of enemy tanks. Just before the battle started, Lieutenant Beahler came over and warned them not to fire until they actually saw the Koreans; otherwise they might be firing on their own men. The First Platoon, the one closest to Yongsan, was hit first. The men in Hammel’s platoon could hear the fighting long before they had anyone to open up on. At one point the fog lifted; suddenly they could see the part of the hill where the First Platoon was engaged, and they were able to open up, catching the North Koreans by surprise. Then the battle shifted to Hammel’s positions. If there was one great truth to combat like this, Hammel believed, it was the constancy of fear—any man who says that he’s not scared in combat is a liar. Every soldier in a situation like that faced a terrible choice. You want nothing more than to live another day, nothing more than to bug out, but you also don’t want to be seen by your buddies as a coward. Only the dishonor of running, of letting your buddies down, keeps you from trying to slip away—because of that, he thought, and only because of that, do you stay where you are and keep fighting. All that other stuff they taught you, about fighting for your country and against the Communists, disappeared in the first moments of battle.

Hammel remembered one of his sergeants being hit in the neck that night. It was not that bad a wound, but the sergeant panicked and started running right behind their positions. Someone in the next foxhole started shooting at him, and they had to scream at their buddies, “Friendly! Friendly!” The sergeant was lucky; he lived. They were all pretty lucky, Hammel thought, because they managed to hold off the North Koreans. Well, not all of them were lucky—twelve of them died and eighteen were wounded. Maybe three hours of pure, close, raw combat, he thought, and the price had been very high. But Lieutenant Beahler had placed the men perfectly, and never once during the entire battle had he taken cover himself. The lieutenant just moved calmly from position to position, making sure the men were okay and that they had enough ammo. “I never saw a braver man in my life; I never saw a man so cool under fire,” Hammel said more than fifty years later.

When they first took their places on the hill that night, some Korean bearers had helped them settle in, and Gino Piazza was furious about that. He was twenty-three at the time, and if he had not done well in school, he was shrewd about some things—in particular that you could not get something for nothing in a war zone. He did not trust the Koreans in situations like this when no one had really vouched for them. As far as he was concerned, American soldiers should carry their own damned gear up the hill. There were too many instances he knew of where the In Min Gun had infiltrated its men behind American lines, disguising them as civilians. It would be all too easy to turn them into bearers who might slip back across the lines with the exact coordinates of the American positions. Piazza had gotten into a shouting match with one of the junior officers, telling him to keep the goddamn Koreans away, and the officer saying it was all right, these were good guys, friendlies. Friendlies, my ass, Piazza thought. You know nothing about them,
nothing!
If one of them smiles at you and says two words in English, and does your lifting for you, you think he’s a good guy.
Goddamn American innocents who go through life only wanting someone to do the heavy lifting for them
. Piazza had chased some of them out, but the next day, despite the worst fog cover Piazza had seen in Korea, the enemy had been able to lob mortar shells with remarkable precision onto their position. A furious Piazza was convinced that those nice helpful Korean bearers had been spotters for the enemy, damned talented ones, and five of the men in his twelve-man squad were now dead.

The battle itself had been hard on his platoon, and Piazza had fought in a rage, as if wanting to avenge any of his men who had been killed by the North Korean mortars. There had been a young man named Ronnie Taylor, barely eighteen, an enlistee from Oakland, Mississippi, whom Piazza felt it was his sacred duty to protect because he was so young, and here he was with a gaping wound in his chest, pleading with Piazza, “Don’t let me die! Don’t let me die! You’ve got to get me out of here!” Piazza had assured him they were trying, but he knew that no one was going to make it off the hill during that fight, and so Piazza had fired and fired while cradling Taylor in his arms, listening to his last gasps of life. In his own words, he snapped at that point, grabbed his M-1 and charged down at some advancing North Koreans, screaming out the name of one of the men in his squad who had died with each burst of fire. How men—himself included—reacted to combat like this, how some were overwhelmed by it and some could handle it, fascinated him. One of his men had received what to Piazza’s eye seemed like a rather minor wound, only a flesh wound really, but he had unraveled and kept insisting, “I’m going to die”—and he did. Such was the strange psychology of war, Piazza thought. The soldier had talked himself into dying.

It was fortunate that they were on the high ground where Beahler had placed them, because at least two battalions of the Communist troops made three separate assaults starting in very early and continuing into the morning. “They came, and they came, and they kept coming. We laid down a lot of fire on them. It rained down on them,” said Corporal Jesse Haskins. “We kept killing them and I began to wonder if we could kill them fast enough. There seemed to be so many of them and they just kept coming, nothing stopped them, there were always more of them and it was as if we might as well not have been there, that what we did just didn’t matter.” If the engineers had not been perfectly positioned, Haskins was sure, they all would have died.

There was one moment, with ammo running short, when they thought they were going to be overrun. But a kid from another platoon rushed over with a whole box of grenades, the perfect weapon just to roll down the hill. The Americans, without mortars or artillery, had used their bazookas as rockets and relied on their heavy machine guns, as well as their quad 50, which would turn out to be one of the most effective weapons of the war. It was essentially an antiaircraft weapon, capable of truly lethal firepower, and it would be used in this war to neutralize the superior manpower of the enemy; not just to kill, which it did handily, but to create fear. The meat chopper, the GIs called it. Later, when the battle was over, the hillside littered with North Koreans, Beahler thought the quad 50 had turned the battle in his favor. They had been lucky to have it, because they had gotten nothing in the way of artillery fire from headquarters. At one point Beahler had asked for artillery support, and a single shell had come in, far off the mark. Beahler had tried to telephone in some corrections, but word came back that the artillery men were just too green and didn’t yet know the fire-direction system.

Among those in Dog Company who had reason to be grateful for Beahler’s experience was a young company clerk named Vaughn West, who had been pressed into service that night as a combat infantryman. West had dug his first foxhole, and been reasonably pleased, for the digging had been hard on such a rocky hill. Then a sergeant told him to dig a lot deeper. (After that night, he never had to be told to dig deeper again.) Clerk though he was, he was the best shot in the company and had once won a weekend pass at the rifle range. On occasion, at an officer’s club, Beahler would hustle a little competition by casually suggesting his men were such good shots that even his company clerk could outshoot the best rifleman of any other company. Then West would be produced, and he almost always won the bet for Beahler. What stayed in West’s memory were the terrible cries in the night. There had been one young enlisted man on a slightly higher part of the ridge who had been hit in the face. In the middle of the battle, West heard him screaming, and then, in the mo
mentary illumination of some tracers, he saw him, his face shot off, crawling and yelling out for his mother. West had known immediately that there was no way to save him.

THEIR CASUALTIES WERE
high, but they could easily have been worse. Someone later told Vaughn West that when Beahler saw the list of names, he wept, and later someone back at Battalion, filled with a dumb macho spirit, made a condescending remark about what kind of company commander broke down and cried, but West thought when you lost that many men in battle, maybe you should cry. The men of Dog Company, Second Engineers, had come off the hill late that morning, gotten the briefest of rests, and then been ordered right back up for the second night in a row. Beahler was not happy about it, but orders were orders. His men were exhausted. No one had slept for days—or at least it felt like that. But if the hill was so important the first night, it was probably just as important the second night, or so Beahler figured, and the word was already out that the Marines were on their way. Nonetheless when they headed back, they were dragging a bit. Just then, a Marine tank drove up with four Marines aboard looking very fresh. By contrast the engineers looked, Piazza remembered, like very old men with no taste for battle, which was just what the Marines expected of Army doggies anyway. A young Marine lieutenant, obviously displeased by the sloppy way the engineers were moving up, shouted, “Pick it up, goddamn it! Pick it up! Start looking like soldiers!” As if to shame them, the lieutenant continued, “Do you know who held this hill and stopped the North Koreans this morning? It was the
engineers
!” Piazza looked at him hard and said, “Who the fuck do you think we are? We’re the guys who did it.” And then they straightened up a bit, picked up the pace, and went on up the hill.

Fortunately for them, the North Koreans did not strike that second night, and in time, with the Marines and other units leading the counterattack, they were driven back. Colonel Hill, however, remained furious with Beahler for disregarding his orders and tried to have him court-martialed. Instead, he was given the Distinguished Service Cross, the Army’s second-highest medal. Hearing that Hill still wanted to press charges, General Bradley told him to drop the idea; court-martialing a man who had saved most of his company and won the DSC would only make a fool of Hill. Beahler himself never took much pride in his medal, in part because they had awarded Sladen Bradley a DSC for that night, and his citation said that he had taken a badly disorganized Engineer unit, pulled it together, and sent its men up the hill. Medal givers, Beahler decided, often spoke with forked tongues.