The Last Stand of Fox Company: A True Story of U.S. Marines in Combat (52 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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group of Chinese had been swallowed up by the ravine. Just as they disappeared, a lone enemy rifleman bolted out of the mouth of the ravine and began tearing back toward the West Hill. McClure fired and missed. The man ducked behind a tree at the base of the hill. McClure could see his left arm and part of his ass sticking out from behind the scrawny sapling. He knelt, lifted the carbine to his shoulder-and felt a god-awful burning sensation in his back and under his right shoulder blade. He flopped like a fish and turned faceup.McClure stared back at his own men, one of whom must have shot him in the back. Jesus! He was furious, searching the tree line for the asshole. Then he looked down and noticed a dark crimson circle about the size of a half-dollar on his fatigue jacket, just over his sternum. A through-and-through wound. He guessed the sniper had used an armor-piercing 7.62 round. He shook off his right glove and covered the puncture. With his bare palm he could feel the air rushing into and out of his chest with each breath.Sergeant Harold Bean crawled out on the ledge. As he reached McClure he, too, keeled over, shot in the side. Oblivious of the sniper, the corpsman William McLean rushed onto the outcropping. McClure had raised himself to a half-sitting position, with his back to the small rock. Sergeant Bean was moaning on the ground next to him. Words came out of McClure's mouth in a gurgle: "Take care of Bean first." He didn't recognize his own voice.The corpsman slipped a morphine syrette into McClure's jacket pocket and turned to bend over the sergeant. Then a strange thing happened.McClure found himself looking down at himself. He was hovering perhaps ten feet over the outcropping. His gaze moved from his own inert body, to McLean working on Bean, to the Chinese moving in and out of the folds of the West Hill. He turned in the air, floating, and saw Lieutenant Elmo Peterson and Lieutenant Clark Wright several yards back in the tree line, ducking behind a large flat rock. Peterson was yelling something to the corpsmanMcClure couldn't make out what. Wright, the company XO, was not saying anything. That suited McClure just fine. This was the same officer who had given his platoon a "blood and guts" speech, in the manner of General Patton, on the USS Bradley before the landing at Inchon. But now he wasn't making one move to assist the ballsy corpsman.Just as suddenly as he had floated above this scene, McClure was back in his pain-racked body. At home in the Ozarks he'd wounded many a deer, and he now realized he had to move, immediately, before his body stiffened up. He sat up and asked the corpsman for directions to the aid station. McLean turned from Sergeant Bean and pointed to the bottom of the hill. McClure noticed that he was warming a morphine syrette in his mouth.McClure struggled to his feet and lunged back into the trees. Neither Peterson nor Wright made a move to help him. He would have spat at their feet as he passed them, if he had had any spit.By 11:30 a.m., Lieutenant Colonel Lockwood's column was still pinned down near the old gold mines, barely more than a mile up the MSR from Hagaru-ri. Lockwood radioed to Colonel Alpha Bowser, the commander of the Marine contingent in the village, and requested reinforcements for his reinforcement company. Bowser directed the First Marine Division's Able Company, Third Battalion-the last of the last of the rear guard-to get ready. Before the company could go beyond the perimeter, however, the orders were canceled. Lockwood had managed to deliver a situation report to Colonel Litzenberg in Yudam-ni, and Litzenberg counterordered Lockwood's "cooks and bakers" unit to return to Hagaru-ri."We'll pick up Fox on our way south," Litzenberg had told Bowser before signing off. At least Litzenberg knew what was coming.At about the same time, eight miles east across the reservoir, General Edward Almond, commander in chief of X Corps, choppered into the perimeter held by the army's battered task force. The elements from his Fifth and Seventh regiments as well as their supporting artillery units, close to three thousand soldiers in all, had taken nearly 35 percent casualties. When it was explained to Almond that parts of at least two Chinese divisions had hit them the previous night, and that even more Reds were swarming toward the Marines at Yudam-ni, Turkey Hill, and Fox Hill, Almond was skeptical."That's impossible," he said. "There aren't two Chinese divisions in the whole of North Korea. The enemy delaying you is nothing more than remnants fleeing north. We're still attacking, and we're going all the way to the Yalu. Don't let a bunch of goddamn Chinese laundrymen stop you."Remnants fleeing north. Chinese laundrymen. Almond's battle commanders could only shake their heads at his dreadnaught pretensions.As Almond's helicopter flew him south again, however, General MacArthur, seven hundred miles away in Tokyo, had been forced to officially swallow his premature declaration of victory. His situation report to the United Nations made that clear. "Enemy reactions developed in the course of our assault operations of the past four days disclose that a major segment of the Chinese continental forces in Army, Corps, and Divisional organization of an aggregate strength of 200,000 men is now arrayed against the United Nations forces in North Korea," he wrote. "Consequently, we face an entirely new war."4Warren McClure was lost and in pain when he nearly tripped over a wounded Chinese soldier. The man was half buried in the snow, and there were bullet holes all across his bare stomach. He seemed to be an officer. Now, he groped with his left arm and hand as if searching for a weapon. McClure could see none.He half-circled the man, giving him a wide berth, and their eyes met. Something unsaid passed between them, a silent commiseration, an acknowledgment of the misfortunes of war. If he had had a weapon, McClure would have put the dying soldier out of his misery. But he didn't, and he left without looking back.McClure stumbled through the trees before eventually finding the old command post tent at the bottom of the gully. He ripped back the flap, and the first person he saw was Lieutenant Joe Brady, the CO of the mortar section. Brady was the son of Irish immigrants and still carried the whiff of peat bog about him. He was sitting on an empty crate-he could not lie down because of grenade fragments in his back-and his left hand was bandaged. With his good right hand he reached into his field jacket and produced a fifth of White Horse scotch whisky. "Here," Brady said, "you look like you need a swig."McClure took the bottle and swallowed a large portion. He teetered toward the back of the tent and found an open space on the floor. He collapsed onto his back and passed out.It was just past noon, and Gray Davis was fed up with two particularly annoying snipers on the ridgeline of the West Hill. What bothered him most, he supposed, was how good they were. He and Luke Johnson had been ducking and diving all morning. Davis had always heard that the Belgians made the best damn guns in the world, even better than the Czechs, and he was itching to find out.He loaded a full magazine into the automatic rifle he had recovered from the valley, took a deep breath, and stood up in his foxhole. He raked the ridgeline with the full clip. As he flopped back down beneath the lip of his hole, a light machine gunner farther up the west slope hollered down to offer his compliments. Davis had knocked one of the snipers off the crest.At 1 p.m., Captain Barber ordered the corpsmen who were using the old mortarmen's tents at the bottom of the hill as an aid station to relocate. He had no doubt that there would be another attack after nightfall, and the wounded would be safer farther east, up and over the main central ridgeline. This would also put them out of harm's way with regard to the snipers on the West Hill and the rocky knoll.A squad of Marines broke out the two eighteen-by-sixteen med tents that had never been erected and set them up in the trees behind the First Platoon's defensive line on the east slope. Fifteen minutes later corpsmen began carrying the most seriously wounded over the ridge on stretchers. The others limped and hobbled behind them. The tents were soon filled, and holes were dug in the snow beside them to accommodate the overflow. The more seriously wounded remained inside. The less seriously injured, swathed in sleeping bags, were rotated between the tents and the dugouts so that they would not freeze to death.As the mortarmen's tent was being taken down, Warren McClure came to. He stared up at a gunmetal gray sky. He wondered for a moment where he was. Then he felt the stabbing pain in his chest. He and one other Marine-a man who seemed to be dying, although McClure could not see his injury-were the only two of the wounded who had not been evacuated to the new med tents. McClure listened as the other man asked to be left at the bottom of the hill with a sidearm.A squad of Marines assisting the corpsmen, including the bazooka man Harry Burke, huddled to ponder this request. Then they wordlessly propped the man up against a tree facing the road. One of them handed him a forty-five-caliber pistol. The rest turned and lifted McClure. Then they put him back down, hard, at the sound of a plane.At 3 p.m., a Marine R4FD cargo plane, number 785, piloted by First Lieutenant Bobby Carter, swooped low over Fox Hill and waggled its wings. Around this time, Captain Barber decided to tell his XO, Clark Wright, that an hour earlier he'd heard from Litzenberg regarding Lieutenant Colonel Lockwood's reinforcement company. That company would not be coming. Under covering fire from their own reinforcements from the Third Battalion, First Marines, Lockwood had extracted his cooks and bakers and limped back to Hagaru-ri."We're on our own," Barber said, gazing up at the cargo plane. "Form up a recovery detail and let's see what they sent us."On his dry run, Bobby Carter flew in over the rocky knoll, down the west valley, and banked left in front of the South Hill across the road. Now he was soaring directly over Fox Hill, following its main ridgeline, throttling back to eighty-five miles per hour perhaps three hundred feet above the treetops. The cargo doors on the left side of the aircraft slid open and bundles fell from them. The parachutes barely had time to open before the pallets smashed to the ground in the east valley about seventy-five yards in front of the First Platoon's perimeter.Smith, the supply sergeant, was the first to reach them. Contrails from the plane disappeared in the southeast sky as he knelt over the parachutes, slashing at the tangled ropes. A bullet hit his right leg and he heard his tibia snap. Smith fell into a ditch.The communications officer, Lieutenant Schmitt, grabbed a stretcher. A fire team from the First Platoon laid down covering fire and three more Marines joined Schmitt as he hustled out to the wounded man. Schmitt was rolling Smith onto the litter when the same sniper hit him in virtually the same place, shattering his shinbone. The three uninjured Marines were joined by two corpsmen. Together, dodging sniper fire, they dragged Smith and Schmitt back to the tree line. When they got to the med tent, Lieutenant Brady offered Smith and Schmitt slugs of White Horse scotch whisky. They threw them back as corpsmen broke and shaved pine tree branches to form into splints.The First Platoon's commanding officer, Lieutenant John Dunne, dispatched a four-man detail to smoke out the sniper. They found him easily, and as they buried him in a barrage of automatic weapons fire, a recovery team jumped from the tree line and began hauling the supplies back to the perimeter.Boxes and bandoliers of thirty-caliber ammo, hand grenades, and 60-mm and 81-mm mortar rounds were handed out across the hill. Lieutenant McCarthy of the Third Platoon confiscated the several rolls of barbed wire to stretch across the mouth of the saddle, and ordered trip-wire grenades strung across the crest. The silk parachutes were cut into strips to be used as blankets for the wounded. Several hungry men noted that there were no C-rations in the air drop.After the ammunition had been dragged in from the valley, eight unarmed Chinese soldiers jumped from the culvert where the MSR met the dry creek bed. Bob Ezell had been wrong; the Chinese were even smaller-or more supple-than he'd guessed. They took off in the direction of the woods that encircled the bottom of the South Hill like an apron. A burst from one of the First Platoon's light machine guns halted them. They fell to their knees, raised their hands above their heads, and were frog-marched back into the perimeter.Forty minutes later the Americans were astonished to see a small helicopter approach the hill. Weeks earlier, as the Korean winter began, the Marine chopper fleet had been grounded when the oil in the gearboxes that controlled the rotors had frozen up. Since then the gearboxes had been drained and the standard lubricant had been replaced by thinner oil. Nonetheless it remained a dangerous adventure to take these little craft up into the windswept mountains. Apparently this particular chopper pilot, Captain George Farish, had been willing to take the risk.Farish's little two-seater darted in like a mosquito over the east valley. When it reached treetop level over the First Platoon's position it hovered to drop fresh batteries for the SCR-300 radio and field phones. For an instant Farish appeared to be looking for a place to land. Several wounded men, including Warren McClure and Walt Hiskett, began to think of a medevac.Their hope died when the helicopter took a sniper's bullet in its rotor transmission case and began leaking oil. Master Sergeant Charles Dana considered forcing the pilot down at gunpoint. Barber stopped him: "Do that and none will ever come back."It was an academic point-Farish's machine was mortally wounded. As he struggled to control his little chopper, he clipped several treetops with his rotor blades. Finally he gave a halfhearted salute and coaxed the damaged chopper toward the temporary airstrip at Hagaru-ri. (The Marines at Fox Hill would learn later that the chopper never made it; the transmission locked up and Farish crash-landed at the edge of the village. He walked away from the wreck unhurt.)5With sunset approaching a sense of grim urgency settled over Fox Hill. The temperature dropped to the minus twenties; the less seriously wounded drifted, unbidden, from the med tents back to their foxholes; and Marines across the hill prepared for what many suspected might be their last night alive.Corporal Hiskett was heartsick. He had seen the corpsmen carry Private First Class Parker's body down from the two tall rocks. First Johnny Farley, he thought, and now Charlie Parker-his two best friends. He realized

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