The Last Stand of Fox Company: A True Story of U.S. Marines in Combat (27 page)

This photo of Walt Hiskett was taken in August 1965 when he served as the chaplain with Fox Company in Vietnam. Courtesy of Walt Hiskett

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DAY THREE

NOVEMBER 29, 1950, 3 A.M.-IO P.M.

1

The Chinese offensive was over. The corpsmen were still working on Captain Barber's wound in the med tent when he sent word that what was left of Lieutenant Peterson's Second Platoon was to take back the hilltop. Peterson, with two bullets in him, told Sergeant Audas to take one man from each foxhole on the west slope and organize a detail to clear out all of the enemy still remaining inside the company perimeter. They swept the hill from the road and prepared to counterattack toward the crest. Marines ran among the "dead" and wounded administering the coup de grace. No more Chinese came down the saddle, but the steady enemy fire from the hilltop combined with sniping from the rocky knoll and rocky ridge to keep things lively.

Audas gave the order to charge. Private First Class Harrison Pomers jumped from the snow and emptied his eight-round clip as he tore up the hill. Fifty feet from the crest he saw an enemy rifleman aiming into the flank of Audas's detail. He ran at him with his bayonet. The man shot him. The bullet went through Pomers's neck and lodged in his spine. He felt as if a train had run him over. He couldn't hear a sound, and for the first time in days he felt warm. He lay on his back, staring up at the night sky, and said a prayer. Dear God, forgive me all my sins and please take me quick. I have no fear. Thank you.

Pomers was unconscious when the two corpsmen reached him. One dragged him into a gun pit while the other cupped a handful of snow and scrubbed the blood from his face and neck. When he was injected with a syrette of morphine, the pricking stab awakened him. He couldn't feel anything on his right side. His right leg and arm were useless. Private First Class Gerald Smith, who had been considered a new boot just a few days ago, watched the corpsmen carry Pomers down to the med tents. He pondered an irony: he was the only man left standing from the "last stand" fire team that had once consisted of the veterans Hector Cafferata, Kenny Benson, Pourers, and himself.

Smith was a gung-ho Marine, but this was not an inspiring thought.

Up between the two tall rocks Private First Class Bob Ezell had regained most of his senses, but not his mobility-his legs had been chewed up by the grenade. He tried to crawl but hadn't moved far when he heard Private First Class Gleason's voice down the slope.

"Get some mortar fire up by those rocks-there might be some Chinamen still up there."

Ezell hollered for all he was worth. "Jesus, no? There are Marines up here?"

Ezell turned to Triggs, who was unconscious-his chest heaved like a bellows. Ezell "kicked" off the crest with his elbows and tobogganed fifty yards down the slope on his stomach. He landed at the feet of the "Big Polack"-Sergeant Joe Komorowski, six-footthree, 250 pounds-who picked him up as if he were a child and carried him to the aid station. Before Ezell passed out, he mumbled that Triggs was still alive up by the rocks. "No mortars," he said.

"Don't worry, we'll get him," Komorowski said.

Over the next several hours Ezell drifted into and out of consciousness. At one point he awoke outside a med tent and saw Triggs sprawled on the ground cover beside him.

Inside the tent, Walt Hiskett and others had stopped praying and were instead listening intently. Hour after hour, those still conscious waited for the flap to be thrown open by a squad of enemy soldiers. Would they shoot the unarmed wounded, most of whom were barely clinging to life? Hiskett guessed they would. But as it gradually grew quiet outside, his hopes rose. If we could just get through 'til dawn.

Then, a sign. One by one, from top to bottom, narrow streams of sunlight poured through the bullet holes in the canvas. Hiskett let out a deep breath. He needed no more confirmation that God had saved his life.

Amid the chaos of the firefight on the eastern slope, Private First Class Garza had managed to drag Corporal Belmarez close to the aid station. He had been rough, and the effort had caused the frozen scabs of coagulated blood on Belmarez's legs to crack open. His wounds were now leaking like water mains. It had still been dark when Garza had stopped and used his hands as makeshift tourniquets. He screamed for help and squeezed Belmarez's thighs and buttocks to keep the pressure on.

No one came. Garza spent the next four hours holding his friend's chopped and sliced legs and buttocks together to prevent him from bleeding out. Now, as dawn broke, two Marines appeared. Together they managed to deliver Belmarez to the med tents alive.

"Hell you think you were doing out there in the middle of a firefight?" one of them asked Garza.

"He's my friend," Garza said. In fact, Belmarez was the only man who knew that Garza had lied about his age on his enlistment form. Garza, the human tourniquet, had just turned sixteen.

Around 6 a.m., as the sun appeared over the mountains, the gunfire and explosions subsided, and Ernest Gonzalez and Freddy Gonzales could make out a muffled Chinese conversation a little way off and to the west of their hole. Ernest, who had cleared the blood, dirt, and broken shards of eyeglasses from his eyes, tossed a grenade. It didn't explode. He heard more talking. He pulled the pin on their last grenade, pried off the frozen spoon, and threw it again, high. This one detonated, and the conversation ceased.

The explosion, however, stirred up a Chinese soldier who had been playing possum some yards to their east. He charged and leaped for their hole. Freddy shot him in the head, sending his cap, with its earflaps, skittering across the snow. The man had been carrying an American-made forty-five-caliber Grease Gun, but when Ernest slithered out to recover it he found it empty.

The two men hollered down the hill in the direction of Lieutenant McCarthy's old bunker command post, no more than seventyfive yards away. No one answered. Thinking themselves surrounded, they pooled their ammo for a last stand. They had between them no grenades, two bayonets, and five rounds. Again a Chinese bugler played taps from somewhere near the saddle. They sat in their hole listening to the mournful tune, awaiting the final rush that-inexplicably-never came.

The sky was clear and the frozen moisture in the air sparkled like diamonds refracting in the sky. Dappled shadows flickered across the folds of Fox Hill. Ernest Gonzalez and Freddy Gonzales locked eyes and together said an Act of Contrition. They slid over the downhill lip of their foxhole. They had monkey-run no more than a few steps before a machine gun from below tore up the snow in front of them. They turned and dived back into the hole.

"Gooks definitely got the hill," Ernest said. Freddy picked up a cartridge and nervously passed it from one hand to the other.

One hundred yards below them Dick Bonelli cursed. "Jesus Christ almighty, I didn't mean to do that. My hand is just kind of palsied out, stuck on the trigger from firing all night."

Sergeant Audas nodded.

"Think those were Marines I just shot at?" Bonelli said.

Captain William Barber had been at Iwo Jima, so he understood the cruel trade-off of men for territory. More than 6,800 Ameri cans had been killed securing that tiny, eight-square-mile atoll. When Barber landed there on February 19, 1945, there had been 212 Marines in his company. When he was ordered to leave Iwo on March 26, he commanded ninety-two men. It was the way of warfare. He did not have to like it.

Sergeant Audas reported a new body count of about 150 Chinese dead at the top of the hill and another dozen or so down near the road. The company had lost five men, including the sniper's victim, Haney, whom the mail carrier Billy French had tried to rescue. Twenty-nine more Marines had been wounded, including Lieutenant Peterson for the second time.

After two nights of repulsing Chinese assaults, the 246 ablebodied Marines and corpsmen had been reduced to 159 "effectives," most of them frostbitten. Barber knew better than to show it, but doubt crossed his mind. He wondered if Fox Company had one more day-or night-of fight left in it.

After receiving Audas's casualty report Barber stumped across the hill to inspect his survivors. His cracked pelvis had been dressed with sulfa powder, bandaged, and splinted with two pine boughs. He used a large tree limb as a crutch. As difficult as it may be to believe in this more cynical age, the dramatic sight of their bloody, shambling CO making his way along the company perimeter, barking out orders while leaning on a goddamn tree branch, breathed a new spirit into the Marines of Fox.

It was another cold morning, with the temperature hovering in the minus-twenties. Near the lower northeast corner of the hill, Barber directed Lieutenant Dunne of the First Platoon to round up a four-man scout team. The captain wanted them to reconnoiter the East Hill, two hundred yards down the MSR. The Marines had yet to be attacked from that direction-which was the only direction from which no attack had come-and Barber needed a feel for the Chinese presence there. Two of the volunteers were the cooks Phil Bavaro and John Bledsoe. They'd do anything to get their blood flowing.

Bledsoe and Bavaro followed a blood trail that led east from the road. About fifty yards out they came upon two wounded Chinese huddled on the lee side of a snowbank, in an icy pool of their own congealing blood. The Chinese soldiers were terribly shot up, and the two cooks suspected they were the ones who had done it. The wounded men's quilted uniforms were pocked with bullet holes, and their hands were swollen to the size of catcher's mitts. Both had lost their caps, and their ears, lips, and noses were cobalt blue. One of the men's feet had burst from frostbite. Even in the frigid open air, the little depression smelled foul. Bavaro was reminded of a story he'd once read in National Geographic about how a mortally wounded lion draws a circle around itself with its own blood, waiting for a hyena to catch the scent.

Bavaro unhitched the canteen from his belt and jerked his arm forward. The universal signal: Want water? Neither man changed his expression. Then Bledsoe waved his MI in their faces. Their cracked lips parted and their watery eyes seemed to plead. Bledsoe mimicked the firing of the gun. Their mouths turned up again. Bledsoe shot them both.

The recon patrol crept as far as the base of the East Hill, where they saw several Chinese scampering up the slope. Upon their return Bavaro reported to Lieutenant Dunne that they had taken no enemy fire and had seen only a few enemy soldiers. Dunne passed the word up to Barber. The captain trained his binoculars on the East Hill. There was no sign of movement. He was perplexed. He knew that Lieutenant Colonel Lockwood had been pinned down trying to reinforce him from that direction. The Reds had to be there. Why hadn't they fired on his patrol?

Down near the road, Jack Page noticed Harry Burke sitting off by himself on a tree stump. Page, as a heavy machine gunner, and Burke as a bazooka man shared an awareness of being a part of the Marine rifle company team without being particularly of it. And in Burke's case, two of his best friends from Minneapolis-the ammo carrier for the machine-gun unit, Charlie Parker, and Corporal Johnny Farley-were now among the growing number of American dead. The "Minny Gang" was shrinking fast.

Page asked Burke to join him. He wanted to check out the site on the road from where the Japanese Nambu had opened up on them last night. The two crept out to just west of the large hut and found the machine gun set up in the middle of the MSR. There were no bodies or blood trails. The Chinese crew must have abandoned the gun when Page had given them a good burst. The Nambu was still in fine working order and they hefted it back into the perimeter.

In their hole on the east slope Corporal Gaines and Private First Class Hutchinson had again rearranged their parapet defenses, laying out their spare rifles, grenades, and extra clips. Gaines plucked the spade stuck into the lip of the foxhole and held it in front of his face like a Halloween mask. He grinned at Hutchinson, his eyes crinkling through two bullet holes. He guessed the holes had come from the persistent Thompson submachine gunner.