The Last Stand of Fox Company: A True Story of U.S. Marines in Combat (19 page)

Burke had mixed feelings. The parkas were long and bulky, and their hoods impaired your vision and hearing; they were more suitable for standing watch aboard ship than for long mountain hikes. But they sure kept you warm. As for the shoepacs-well, don't get Harry Burke started on shoepacs. Nothing more than glorified rubber duck hunter's boots, an invitation to frostbite. But now that they were gone he felt a chill run through his entire body. He looked to his left. The three mailbags had been torn open, and the floor was littered with empty food and candy wrappers, presents from home that the Marines would never see.

When Burke stepped outside he nearly tripped over a dead Chinese sergeant lying in a red puddle of ice between the two huts. He took the man's whistle from around his neck and found several pamphlets in his jacket pocket. One had a photograph of Mao Tsetung printed on the cover. He pocketed them and climbed back up to the foxhole he had found on the southeast slope. When he blew the whistle it made a sound like a platoon sergeant's on the parade ground.

A bit lower down the east slope the assistant company cook John Bledsoe wondered aloud if his partner, Phil Bavaro, planned to dig to China. Their hole was less than two feet deep. "Can't dig to China," Bavaro replied. "That's right over there." He lifted his chin toward the north without pausing in his shoveling. "I guess I'd be digging to ..."

As Bavaro tried to imagine what country was on the other side of the globe from North Korea, Bledsoe hopped out of the hole and walked over to the sixteen-by-eighteen tent erected by the mortarmen the afternoon before. It had been taken over by the corpsmen and turned into the med tent. The entire canvas floor, corner to corner, was covered with wounded Marines. He spotted his buddy Howard Koone, with whom he had served in China before the war. A corpsman was cutting the boot off Koone's left ankle while another jabbed a morphine syrette into his thigh.

Bledsoe brewed a pot of coffee, mixed water from his canteen with orange juice powder, and gave Koone a swig of each. Koone vomited it back up on Bledsoe's boots and passed out. Bledsoe limited the remainder of his juice and joe to the corpsmen.

Now feeling guilty, Bledsoe walked back to their foxhole and told Bavaro that he would take a turn with the spade. Bavaro headed down to the small hut, hoping to find his clothes (he was still wearing his skivvies under his parka). No such luck. His pack with its spare socks, thermal insoles, and spare underwear was gone. Worse, so was his dungaree jacket with the small flask of whiskey hidden in its pocket. To add insult to injury, in the corner of the hut he saw the box from a birthday cake his mother had sent him. He had carried that cake since Thanksgiving. Nothing was left but a few crumbs trailing across the dirt floor.

On his trek back up the hill Bavaro passed by the med tent and was dragooned by a corpsman into assisting in a field operation. He held a Marine down as the corpsman tried to dig a bullet out of his chest. Soon Bavaro's gloves were soaked with blood and frozen stiff.

Sometime after dawn, with the sun well up and the sniping well down, Barber's executive officer, Lieutenant Clark Wright, ordered the 81-mm mortar gunner Private First Class Richard Kline and the heavy machine gunner Corporal Jack Page to recon the road and take a body count. Below the cut bank, in the middle of the MSR, they came upon two Chinese soldiers sitting back to back. One was dead, the other mortally wounded. Page could tell from the dying man's white armband that he was a noncom. As Page and Kline approached him he lifted a finger to his temple and made a triggerpulling motion. Page obliged him with his sidearm. Kline found two pearl-handled 9-mm Luger pistols on his body.

Page and Kline, not straying too far past the cut-bank, figured they could count about 100 enemy dead up and down and on either side of the road. Remarkably, most of the corpses seemed to be officers and NCOs. They carried large flashlights powered by five battery cells, with a canvas cover over the globe-like bulb. A red star was cut out of the canvas, and an officer's or NCO's insignia was etched into the metal casing. One man was apparently a paymaster; his pack was crammed with paper yuans and what looked like Chinese bonds.

Kline looked to Page. "Sure can't accuse them of hiding behind their enlisted men," he said.

On the northeast corner of the hilltop, Corporal Belmarez was the first to hear the thrum of the planes. He looked up and saw several formations of camouflaged, gull-winged Marine Corsairs heading north. As the aircraft and their payloads of rockets and napalm canisters passed overhead, all sniping from the Chinese ceased. To reduce its risk of facing better-trained American and Australian pilots, the People's Air Force of China had played no part in the war to this point. But in the short time since the Red armies had crossed the Yalu River, their soldiers had developed excellent discipline under American air attacks. Troops in foxholes learned to stifle their natural instinct to flee and instead remained hunkered down, and any caught out in the open would often freeze in their tracks and stand stock-still with arms outstretched or squat into a ball for long periods of time in an attempt to resemble a tree or a bush.

But evasion techniques that may have worked in warmer months proved futile in winter. For one thing, any attempt to remain motionless for any length of time could be just as deadly as gunfire or bombs in the subzero temperatures. And though the white quilted Chinese uniforms afforded some camouflage against the snow, Marine pilots had become adept at swooping in low and following broken trails leading to enemy emplacements, even to the point of zeroing in on a single set of footprints.

Watching the planes come into range, the Americans on Fox Hill anticipated a slaughter. But the cheer that rose across the hill died quickly when the planes overflew them and continued on toward Yudam-ni.

2

The enlisted men of Fox Company had no idea that six enemy divisions-more than 40,000 Chinese soldiers-were now encircling the bulk of the First Marine Division. Nor did they know of the dire circumstances facing Litzenberg's and Murray's men at Yudamni as another 100,000 Reds approached; nor of Charlie Company's near annihilation on Turkey Hill; nor of the Army's calamitous situation on the east side of the reservoir, where the GI forces were being cut down. Nor did Barber and his officers know that two days earlier, across the Taebacks, the panicked Eighth Army had been routed and was fleeing south following a disastrous defeat north of Pyongyang. The situation, however, was certainly becoming clear in Tokyo, where Vice Admiral C. Turner Joy, commanding officer of all U.S. naval forces in the Far East, summoned the commander of his amphibious forces and directed him to begin making plans for a large-scale evacuation of Marines from North Korea.

However, as soldiers have always done, the men of Fox Company somehow intuited their fate, though without speaking of it. They also knew there was not a thing they could do about it. The wind was blowing from the north, and the reverberations of distant Corsair cannons and rocket fire carried on it were audible up at the frozen Chosin.

At 7:45 a.m., shortly after the Corsairs disappeared over the northern horizon, Lieutenant McCarthy edged up to the saddle to attempt a body count. He could barely move without stepping over an enemy corpse. He estimated the total as close to 350, with at least 150 dead between the site of Corporal Ladner's light machine gun emplacement and the slit trench from which Cafferata, Benson, Pourers, and Smith had fought. Most of the rest lay piled before the original site for the two forward squads of the Third Platoon, particularly where Sergeant Keirn had set up his nest. McCarthy, like Page and Kline down on the MSR, was struck by the disproportional number of officers and NCOs among the dead. He figured that was why most of the prisoners were so young: the veterans were fighting to the end.

Upon his return to the company command post tent McCarthy handed Barber his own casualty report. Of the fifty-four Marines and corpsmen of the Third Rifle Platoon, sixteen were dead, nine wounded, and three missing. Fox Company in total had twentyfour dead, fifty-four wounded, and three missing. Almost a third of the company had become casualties in one night. In addition, men who were still effective were running out of ammunition. Barber turned to the huge stacks of enemy weapons and ammo the Marines had collected, cleaned, and test-fired. There was a similar stack at the bottom of the hill.

"See what we've got here," he told his communications officer Lieutenant Schmitt. "And start handing them out."

Sometime during the night Corporal Wayne Pickett and Private First Class Troy Williford had been roused from their cave and forced by their captors to carry Private First Class Daniel Yesko up over the rocky ridge and down to a dilapidated farmhouse beneath the opposite slope of Toktong-san. As they were shoved into a cattle shed behind the house, Pickett saw several Chinese and North Korean officers assembling near the main building's front door. He guessed 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.

3

By 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.