The Last Stand of Fox Company: A True Story of U.S. Marines in Combat (8 page)

Eventually, an enterprising Marine repaired the radio, and the survivors from Charlie Company were rescued at the last minute by the First Battalion's commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Raymond Davis, who would eventually lead two companies, including Baker, back from the reservoir through a screen of fire to flank the Chinese and allow Charlie to retreat from Turkey Hill. In the meantime, all Charlie could do was signal for help by mortaring off brace after brace of star shells and hope someone would come to its aid.

At the crest of their own hilltop, Corporal Pickett and Private First Class Williford of Fox Company were digging in. Aside from his knowledge of "fighting Chinamen," Wayne Pickett also knew a thing or two about cold weather.

Pickett came from the small town of Jenkins-population 225in northern Minnesota and would admit only to being somewhat taken aback by the speedy drop in temperature each night in Korea. Compared with the hardscrabble life he and his eight brothers and sisters had led at home, scratching out a frozen hole on a Korean hilltop was small beans. And it was nothing compared with ice fishing for dinner in the dead of a Minnesota winter. "Come home with no catch," he told Williford, "and you don't eat."

When Pickett was five years old, his mother died in childbirth delivering twins. His father, a fireman with the Northern Pacific Railroad, tried to keep the family together but found the financial burden impossible. A year after his mother's death, Wayne was sent to live in a state-run orphanage. He was subsequently farmed out to a dairy rancher in western Minnesota, where he worked for the next two years before returning to the orphanage. At age nine he was adopted by Allan and Clara Pickett of Duluth.

Like many of the Marines in Fox Company, while he was growing up Pickett had been mesmerized by newspaper and magazine articles, movies, and newsreels about World War II. He could quote entire scenes from Guadalcanal Diary, and he was dazzled by the glamour and glory of the fighting Marines. Upon graduation from Central High Duluth in 1946 he enlisted, and after boot camp he was assigned to the Corps' Sea School. He traveled to China aboard the heavy cruiser USS St. Paul as a seagoing Marine before taking an early discharge in 1948, when the Corps' manpower was reduced dramatically from its wartime height. Pickett remained in the active reserves while taking courses at Duluth Business College, and ten weeks after North Korea's invasion of South Korea he found himself on a crowded troopship bound for Kobe, Japan. He'd been fighting with Fox from Inchon to Seoul and had taken part in the voyage around the peninsula for the landing at Wonsan.

The names of the places where he'd fought, the places where he'd watched buddies die, were all a blur. Hungnam. Sudong. Hagaru-ri. And now here he was on a frigid hill above a place named Toktong Pass trying to crack the frozen crust of the earth with his spade. Finally, he and Williford gave up. There was a giant boulder, a nearly vertical slab of granite, a few paces from their position.

"See that rock?" Pickett said.

Williford nodded.

"That's our foxhole."

The two men gathered their kit, slid in behind the rock, and anchored one end of their pup tent to its base. They spoke of being home for Christmas.

One month earlier, on October 25, 1950-exactly four months after the North Korean armies had poured south across the 38th Parallel -advance elements of several South Korean ROK units reached the Yalu River. They had American air support, including napalm, a recent invention, which produced some of the most fearsome firebombing in history. At that point it seemed as if the North Koreans' plans to dominate northeast Asia-plans backed by the Soviet Union-were finished. A bottle of water from the Yalu was even sent to Syngman Rhee, the president of South Korea. Legend has it that after the bottle had been filled, ROK soldiers lined up on the banks of the river and urinated into it as an act of defiance toward the Chinese on the other side.

General Paek Sun Yap, possibly the ablest ROK commander, was not, however, in a mood to celebrate. A few Chinese soldiers had been captured on the Korean side of the border, and he insisted on interrogating them personally. "Are there many of you here?" he asked. They nodded and replied, "Many, many." But when he reported this to his American allies, the intelligence was dismissed as fantasy-and not merely by MacArthur.

In Washington, D.C., the Joint Chiefs of Staff and President Truman's other military advisers continued to believe that the Chinese had sent only a small number of troops into North Korea, purely as a gesture to save political face, and that Mao was unwilling and unprepared to take on the United Nations on behalf of such an ally as weak as North Korea. Still, the American brass seriously considered a suggestion forwarded from MacArthur's Tokyo war room: to bomb the Yalu River bridges and keep even the face-saving forces in China. The proposal was rejected by the Joint Chiefs when they decided that such an attack could have the effect of goading the Chinese leadership into action to save face yet again.

The Americans also believed that the CCF armies would never enter the Korean peninsula because the Soviet Union did not want to see the war extended. American intelligence, however, did not yet see that political and ideological cracks were opening between Stalin in Moscow and Mao in Peking. The Truman administration had no idea that China was bristling at being a "puppet state" of the Soviet Union. The administration also chose to overlook the fact that, in October, Chou En-lai had summoned the Indian ambassador to his ministry and told him that if MacArthur's United Nations forces crossed the 38th Parallel, China would intervene.

In the last week of November, no American official-military or civilian-had any idea that some 300,000 Chinese troops were already inside Korea, and an equal number were on alert in Manchuria. MacArthur in particular was unaware that his forces were significantly outnumbered in an unfamiliar and increasingly brutal territory centered on Fox Hill.

Private Hector Cafferata and Private First Class Kenny Benson, First Fire Team, First Squad, Second Platoon-two kids from New Jersey who had enlisted together and traveled cross-country by train to Pendleton-crawled out on the left flank of the saddle beyond the two tall "domino" rocks demarcating the northwest corner of the hill. They were about thirty yards in front of their platoon's defensive perimeter; the rocky knoll loomed above them, looking like some sinister medieval castle. The two constituted one of Fox Company's several forward listening posts. Like Pickett and Williford on the peak of the hill, they had the front lines just on the other side of their rifle sights.

Benson was shivering so much he was afraid the enemy would hear his bones rattling. "Christ," he said, "what this weather wouldn't do to a brass monkey."

Cafferata did not answer. It had stopped snowing, but the temperature had fallen to about twenty-five degrees below zero. That did not concern Cafferata as much as the wind, a strong whistling airstream blowing from their backs that lifted the snow into blinding squalls and white eddies. His parka, completely buttoned up, nonetheless whipped and fluttered like a sail. When the enemy charged down that knoll and across the saddle-a highly likely event, in Cafferata's estimation-the noise of the wind would surely cover their approach.

Cafferata did not utter a word as he and Benson shared a meager supper of frozen Tootsie Rolls. He'd been studying their situation. But finally, he turned to his foxhole buddy.

"Look at the bright side, Bense," he said. "At least we'll be the first to get a crack at 'em."

Benson shrugged. Sometimes he had a hard time figuring Cafferata out.

The two men, from neighboring small towns in northern Jersey, had first met playing for a semipro football team. Benson was a blond, six-foot, 200-pound all-around athlete who could recite all the statistics from his favorite publication, The Sporting News. By contrast, Cafferata had no love for organized sports. He'd signed up to play football only when the coach, impressed by his six-footfour, 230-pound frame, had offered him ten dollars a game.

"How could you not like baseball?" an incredulous Benson had asked Cafferata during one of their Marine reservist weekends at the Picatinny Arsenal in Jefferson, New Jersey. "It's the all-American pastime, for Chrissake."

"If I carry a stick in my hand it's got to have bullets in it for shooting turkey and duck, maybe some vermin for practice," Cafferata said. "Besides, I could never hit the damn ball anyway. I'm the world's worst baseball player."

Although Cafferata, at nineteen, was only a year older than Benson, he was physically a man among boys. Nicknamed "Moose," he had a large, clomping physique topped by a face that looked like a hard winter breaking up. His eyebrows resembled thick caterpillars crawling toward his mop of wavy black hair, and with his flattened nose, creased cheeks, and jutting ears he could have been cast as a heavyweight in the classic black-and-white boxing movies he had watched as a kid.

Cafferata had been a socially awkward boy who didn't drink or date girls in high school. He preferred to spend his free time hunting, fishing, and trapping in the forests and wetlands near his parents' house in New Jersey. On his long walks home from school he would set muskrat and raccoon traps, and the next morning he'd check them on the way to class. He also carried his shotgun every day in case he spotted something edible while visiting the traps, and the high school custodian grew accustomed to the sight of "Big Hec" changing out of his waders and filthy hunting vest and storing his gun in the janitor's closet before the first bell rang. By the age of thirteen he was also earning money after school and on weekends by cutting oak and hickory trees for firewood. Although his father worked at various part-time jobs, the family often depended on Hector's catch to feed the four voracious Cafferata brothers. Anything extra Hector would sell to the neighborhood butcher or a local Jewish fishmonger, who turned the carp into gefilte fish.

Although most of Fox Company took Cafferata for an ItalianAmerican, his father was a Peruvian immigrant who had enlisted in the U.S. Marines between the wars. When Hector was seventeen, he did the same, more out of a feeling that he had missed something important by being too young to fight the Nazis and the Japanese than from any sense of familial duty. But he described himself as a loner, and he'd hated the reservist summer camps and weekend meetings-"Nothing but drinking and card playing"-and when he quit attending he was dropped from his unit's roster. When the war in Korea broke out, he begged his way back into the Corps, pleading with his platoon sergeant to be allowed to jump on the troop train that was pulling away for Camp Pendleton. At literally the last minute Cafferata was allowed to rejoin his old unit; more than a few of his superior officers subsequently wondered over the wisdom of that decision.

On Cafferata and Benson's first night in Korea, they had both gone to sleep after shoving their shoepacs outside their tent without wiping them down. At reveille their squad leader could only shake his head in wonder and disgust as he watched the two confused reservists puzzling over their boots, which had frozen into blocks of ice. There was another legendary yarn about them in Fox Company. One night outside Hagaru-ri, Benson had decided to widen their foxhole while Cafferata went for coffee. He was still shoveling furiously upon Cafferata's return and failed to heed his buddy's warning that Colonel Litzenberg was standing above him.

"Yeah, sure, Hec," he'd said, refusing to look up and purposely heaping dirt over what he assumed were Cafferata's shoepacs. "I don't give a fuck if it's Santa Claus. I'm tired of you sleeping on my face."

"Ten-hut."

Now Benson did look up at the man whose boots he had fouled. He swore he saw steam blowing from Blitzen Litzen's ears. To make matters worse, both men were cited for having a round in their rifle chambers and their safeties off in a secure rear area.

In short, Cafferata was considered a first-class screwup, with Benson not far behind. Perhaps, Benson thought, they were indeed better off up here on the front line, where they could stay out of trouble-if only the earth were as soft as it had been down at Hagaruri. He swung his entrenching tool again to no avail and turned to Cafferata in frustration.

"We'd need goddamn dynamite to make a hole here," he said. "Forget about the gooks for a minute, Hec. What say while it's still light we go chop down some of them trees and build ourselves a little nest?"

In Washington, D.C., President Truman was busy fending off calls for much more than the use of dynamite in Korea. In late June, when North Korea initially invaded South Korea, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had immediately ruled out the use of atomic weapons in this new war zone. North Korea, with the possible exception of the capital, Pyongyang, did not offer the large targets of opportunity that Japan had in World War II. Moreover, American generals and admirals advised the president that conventional weapons were more than adequate to deal with Kim's ragged army. Why destroy a gnat with a shotgun? This came as something of a relief to Truman. Only five years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he knew that the United States still faced the world's opprobrium for dropping the two A-bombs.