The Last Stand of Fox Company: A True Story of U.S. Marines in Combat (12 page)

When the mortar teams reached the bottom of the culvert their section leader, Staff Sergeant Robert Kohls, directed them to move all mortar tubes and ammo to the top of the little draw where it ended just above the tree line. Although greatly exposed, the mortars had to be set up with unimpeded fields of fire. This meant there could be no tree branches hanging overhead. As soon as Kohls turned to cover his unit's retreat, a potato masher exploded between him and Private First Class Richard Kline, one of the 81-mm gunners. Kohls's throat was slashed by grenade fragments; Kline suffered wounds in his right arm and both legs. Kohls dropped to the ground; Kline picked him up; and together they limped up the culvert.

The mail carrier, Billy French, firing his carbine from beneath his Jeep, heard voices above him. He rolled out from under the vehicle, jumped to his feet, and shot two Chinese soldiers who had crawled into the backseat. He turned, emptied the remaining bullets in his clip at the charging white-clad figures across the road, and ran up the hill. Somewhere near the tree line he found an empty foxhole and fell into it face-first.

The bazooka gunner Corporal Harry Burke stayed low in the larger hut while he hurried to get into his winter gear and shoepacs. He noticed that the Navy corpsman Mervyn "Red" Maurath was already dressing the wounds of two Marines. Automatic weapons fire punched holes in the flimsy walls of the building. This so concentrated Burke's attention that he realized only belatedly that he had jammed the wrong feet into his shoepacs. He didn't stop to change them, and after stuffing his sleeping bag into the large cooking pot in the kitchen area of the hut, he grabbed his bazooka and ran through the easternmost door. The Chinese were no more than eight feet away. He emptied his .45-caliber pistol.

Six hours earlier Burke had thought it pretty fortunate that he had managed to secure a sleeping space in a warm hut while the rest of the company went away, cold and griping, to dig in among the rocks. Out in the field you didn't get a roof over your head every day. Now Burke, the heavy machine gunner Jack Page, and several Marines who had also sacked out in the large hut laid down covering fire as Maurath and three more Marines carried the two wounded men up the hill and into the trees. Burke followed them.

When he'd climbed perhaps thirty yards he stopped to look back. A Chinese soldier was peeking out of the hut Burke had just abandoned. The bastard was taunting him, daring the Marines, in English, to come back and retrieve their warm winter gear. With a laugh he assured them that they would not be shot. Burke and the men around him emptied their weapons at him.

Below and to Burke's left corporals Robert Gaines and Rollin Hutchinson scooped up their weapons and stray pieces of gear and scampered up the hill. They were from the First Platoon's Third Squad, and they had arrived on the last truck with Rapp and Knowles. It had been so dark that instead of digging in they had merely chucked their sleeping bags to the ground on the lower, southeast corner of the hill between the erosion ridgeline and a jumbled column of rocks the size of large headstones. They had wordlessly agreed to dig foxholes in the morning, spread their canvas ground cover on the snow, and fallen asleep.

Now they were stumbling blindly through the pine trees when they heard someone yell, "Get the hell over here?" They moved right and took up positions behind Private First Class Jim Holt's heavy machine gun. When Page on the other heavy gun had begun raking the Chinese, Holt also had a clear field of fire. But his water-cooled gun jammed, the water frozen to ice, and it remained jammed. Gaines and Hutchinson dropped in behind Holt and racked the bolts of their M 1 s.

Private First Class Phil Bavaro, a cook with Fox Company, jumped up from the grain storage bin in the small hut where he'd been sleeping. He caught a glimpse of his fellow cook, Private First Class John Bledsoe, hotfooting it out the northern entranceway and up the hill. Bavaro, still in his skivvies, snatched up his parka and his M I.

He and Bledsoe had been among the last Marines to arrive on the hill, and upon spotting the smaller of the abandoned huts, Bavaro had made a beeline for it, with Bledsoe behind him. Inside, Bavaro had stripped off his outer clothing, spread his sleeping bag inside the large wooden grain storage bin at the downhill end of the structure, crawled into the bag in his long johns, and nodded off. He was used to sleeping in confined places. His bunk on the troopship had been a gun tub.

Now, as bullets cracked past his head, Bavaro barely reached the door when somebody yelled, "Grenade, Cookie!" Bavaro dropped facedown in the doorway. A potato masher exploded to his left. The shrapnel opened a deep cut on his right thumb and peppered his rifle.

The same voice yelled, "Now, Cookie!" Bavaro dodged to his left, tripped over a fallen tree trunk, and backflipped down behind it. Beside him the supply sergeant, David Smith, whose warning he had heard, was firing his M 1 into a dozen Chinese coming toward them. Automatic weapons fire split the tree trunk, and Bavaro and Smith scrambled farther up the hill. But they were caught between the crossfire of the advancing Chinese and Jack Page's heavy machine gun behind them. They rolled and flopped into a slight depression, so narrow and shallow Bavaro wished he didn't have to share it, even with the man who had just saved his life. A second later the corpsman Red Maurath and three Marines carrying two wounded men squeezed in beside them.

Near the center of the base of the hill the shot-up remains of two Chinese squads regrouped with the intention of taking out Page's heavy machine gun. They knew exactly where it was-the red-phosphorous-coated tracers it fired every fifth round gave away the gun's position.

The enemy infantrymen climbed to within yards of the emplacement before the Marines surrounding Page decimated them with M 1 and BAR fire. Staff Sergeant John Henry shot three men point-blank with his.45-caliber pistol, then picked up a Thompson submachine gun from one of the dead and shot three or four more. Killing people this close, he realized, was a lot more intimate than spraying them from the top turret of a B-24.

The mail carrier, Billy French, thought something was wrong with his carbine. It wasn't knocking anyone down. Despite its smaller round, the lighter carbine was the preferred weapon of officers and platoon leaders, and French had counted himself lucky to have scavenged one back in Hagaru-ri and not to be lugging an MI. But now he and other Marines firing the carbines noticed, to their amazement and chagrin, that their bullets barely penetrated the white quilted uniforms of the advancing Chinese. They just kept coming. Word spread among the Americans on the hill, not for the last time, "Men with carbines, aim for the head."

The Chinese point column on the MSR had once consisted of nearly 150 soldiers. Now, perhaps half still stood. Their number continued to shrink as Marines from the Second Platoon on the lower west slope poured rifle and light machine-gun fire into their rear. Gray Davis and his BAR man, Private First Class Maurice "Luke" Johnson, were among these. Davis was fascinated by tracers. He felt they should be issued to riflemen as well as to machine gunners to help sight the enemy at night. To that end he'd scrounged a clip to save until the time was right. His foxhole mate, Johnson, thought this idea insane. Why don't you just put up a billboard showing them where we are?

Nonetheless, to Davis the time was now right. He had left the tracer clip perched on the parapet of their hole before the fighting started. But now he couldn't find it. He turned to Johnson and stared.

"Damn right," Johnson said. "Threw 'em away when you weren't looking. Get killed on your own time."

A few Chinese tried to avoid the murderous enfilade by taking shelter under the base of the cut bank-the sheer ten-foot wall where the hill met the road. Lieutenant Peterson, running up and down behind his platoon's lines, ordered the Marines closest to the road to roll hand grenades over the precipice. The Chinese were being beaten back, but the Americans were running low on ammunition. Peterson ordered all men to fix bayonets.

Farther east of the cut bank a dozen or so Chinese ducked behind a pile of five large rocks a short distance up the slope from the southwest juncture of the hill and the road. Using the rocks and surrounding brush as cover they maneuvered up the hill toward the tree line. It was an obvious attempt to take out the lower of the Second Platoon's light machine guns. They, too, were zeroing in on the gun's tracers. Finally the Chinese burst into the open. They were met-and cut down to a man-by fire from the machine gun as well as the rifles and BARs on either side of it.

By 2:15 a.m., eight minutes after the first, unidentified Marine from Fox Company had issued his password challenge, the wounded mortarman Richard Kline and his assistant gunner had set up their 81-mm tube above the tree line at the top of the shallow culvert. The company's second 81-mm team hacked out an emplacement a few yards behind them. Captain Barber, his runner, and most of the headquarters unit had also made it up the gully by now. Barber set up a temporary command post in the top row of trees just below the mortar emplacements. The communications officer, Lieutenant Schmitt, joined him. Schmitt and his assistant dumped the company 610 field phone and the SCR300 radio on the ground next to Barber and began cranking the handles in desperation.

Because the mortar team leaders, including Lieutenant Brady and Sergeant Kohls, had been wounded, Barber directed Private First Class Lloyd O'Leary, the most senior member of the 60-mm team remaining, to take command of the combined mortar units. Barber had had his eye on O'Leary since the company's first night bombardment on the road from Koto-ri. The kid had exhibited a natural ability to acquire targets in a hurry, account for his ammunition, and calculate advance firing zones. Barber had also noticed that O'Leary possessed a streak of leadership.

Now O'Leary ordered the three 60-mm teams to dig in about thirty yards east of Kline's position while Kline scrambled around the emplacement putting out luminous aiming stakes at different compass points.

3

While the Chinese point company was being slaughtered down on the road, the four remaining companies of the enemy battalion broke off the MSR and began a flanking maneuver. This was what CCF military training manuals called "assembly on the objective"the apparent ability to materialize on enemy positions from different directions at the same time. A flying buttress of 500 to 600 soldiers raced up the valley separating Fox Hill from the West Hill. The Americans never saw them reach the saddle. In fact, because of Fox Hill's rugged contours and multiple ridgelines, most of the Marines on the upper slopes and across the eastern grade had not even heard the sounds of the firelight below.

The Chinese assembled at the far end of the land bridge beneath the rocky knoll. A column of grenadiers formed into a skirmish line and began creeping toward the crest of the hill, where the right flank of the Second Platoon met the left flank of the Third Platoon. Behind these 100 or so close-combat breachers were about 400 regulars armed with assorted rifles and automatic weapons. They moved out in silence in rows of forty, spaced ten yards apart. Just as Captain Barber had anticipated, their immediate objectives were the two light machine-gun emplacements covering this corner of the heights.

At 2:20 a.m., at the pinnacle of the hill, the grenadiers sprang from the ground, stumbling into the holes occupied by the Third Platoon's forward fire team. Sergeant Johnson McAfee was bayoneted in his sleeping bag. Corporal Wayne Pickett and Private First Class Troy Williford, off watch and asleep in their bags behind their rock, were dragged like squirrels in a sack back across the saddle toward the rocky knoll. Private First Class Daniel Yesko, on watch in an adjacent hole, leaped to his feet and emptied his M1 clip. He was shot in the hip and crumpled to the ground. Five Chinese soldiers jumped him, clubbed him into submission, and carried him off as well. As he was being dragged away Pickett heard Yesko's muffled screams, "I've been hit! I've been hit!"

Yesko's firing and cries also reached the corpsman Edward Jones. Jones leaped from his hole and began running toward the commotion. He was shot and killed before he was halfway there.

Private Hector Cafferata caught the scent of garlic before he saw them. He and Private First Class Ken Benson were hunkered down in their listening post well out in front of the American defensive perimeter. Cafferata was on watch, his stocking feet stuffed into his sleeping bag, while Benson dozed. He was trying to melt frozen peanut butter in his mouth when he thought he heard gunfire down by the road. Or was it just the wind playing tricks? He was about to wake his foxhole buddy when he saw scores of white-clad figures flashing past their foxhole about thirty yards to his right.

"Bense," he whispered, "they're coming. Wake up. Get your boots on."

Benson had barely gotten to his knees and was struggling with his shoepacs when a satchel charge landed in their hole. He picked it up and heaved. The explosion shook them both. His eyes still ice-crusted from sleep, Benson exchanged a quizzical look with Cafferata. They were kids, albeit tough kids, and this was the first action either one of them had seen. It struck them as a game of some kind. It certainly couldn't be real.

Benson shouted, "Home by Christmas, Hec?"

Benson emptied his BAR clip and Cafferata let loose a salvo with his M 1. It was like being back in the woods in New Jersey, picking crows off a tree limb. The Reds were so close he didn't even have to aim. Within moments he had taken down more than a dozen.

The firing alerted Sergeant Meredith Keirn, the crew leader of one of the Third Platoon's two light machine guns near the crest. He opened up at the same time as Corporal Hobart Ladner, who manned another light machine gun twenty paces to his left. They lit up the saddle, the guns' red tracer rounds casting a crimson tint on the faces of the charging enemy.

Having lost the element of surprise, the remaining Chinese rushed forward with a series of heart-stopping bugle blasts, chants, and whistles. They were on top of Keirn in an instant. His machine gun dropped them so close that the dead began to pile up before his emplacement, face-first, like sandbags, impeding his field of fire. His four ammo cans held 250 rounds each. Within moments he was down to his third, the last few rounds inching toward the loading breech.