The Last Stand of Fox Company: A True Story of U.S. Marines in Combat (9 page)

As Mao's threats intensified, however, some people rethought the Joint Chiefs' calculations. General Curtis LeMay of the Air Force, who had directed the firebombing of Tokyo in 1945, begged to unleash atom bombs on North Korea. And several members of Congress, led by Congressman Albert Gore Sr. of Tennessee, argued that "something cataclysmic" needed to be done to stop Korea from becoming a "meat grinder of American manhood." Gore suggested using atomic weapons on the 38th Parallel to make it a radiation belt separating the two Koreas. No one, however, argued for the atomic option more strenuously than General MacArthur.

MacArthur had disagreed with the Joint Chiefs' decision from the beginning of the war, and in mid-November he stepped up his attempts to push the atomic button. This, he said, would not only result in the complete capitulation of Kim 11-Sung within two weeks, but also end any possibility of a Chinese or Russian incursion into the country for three generations. No cordon sanitaire dividing North and South Korea would do for MacArthur. He wanted to separate the Korean peninsula from the rest of the Asian mainland "with a belt of radioactive cobalt strung along the neck of Manchuria." His plan was to saturate the strip of land just north of the Yalu River with thirty A-bombs. After that, 500,000 of Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist Chinese soldiers would be used to guard the border for the active life of the cobalt-then calculated to last between 60 and 120 years.

"I visualize a cul-de-sac," MacArthur wrote to the Joint Chiefs. "The only passages leading from Manchuria and [the Russian city of ] Vladivostok have many tunnels and bridges. I see here a unique use for the atomic bomb-to strike a blocking blow-which would ... sweeten up my B-29 force."

Although MacArthur insisted that his plan was "a cinch," American civilian leaders, wary of the Soviet Union's small, if growing, atomic stockpile, rejected it-for now.

Radiation strips and cobalt zones were the last thing on Private First Class Bob "Zeke" Ezell's mind as he hauled two heavy cans of ammo for the light machine guns up the east slope of the hill. He was freezing but trying his damnedest not to let the others see how miserable he was. Ezell, who had just turned nineteen, was a tall, skinny baseball star from Wilmington, California, near the Los Angeles harbor. In his hometown he was renowned for his reckless outfield play. Here in Korea he was nothing more than an assistant ammo carrier sick of hearing the northern boys, especially the squareheads from Minnesota, boast about adjusting to the cold. Corporal Harry Burke, a bazooka man from a small town in the southwest corner of Minnesota, had even taken it upon himself to lecture the company's "California queers" on foot care after one of Ezell's buddies was evacuated with frostbite. And just a few mornings ago, in Hagaru-ri, a couple of Marines who called themselves the "Minny Gang" had made Ezell the butt of their jokes when he'd poured milk on his cereal and found a stump to sit on outside the mess tent, only to discover the milk frozen solid.

"Gotta eat your Wheaties inside the tent, Zeke. Don't you pretty boys from California know anything about winter?"

Ezell learned fast that if you didn't come back at them quickly they'd ride you even harder, and he gave as good as he got. But he was at a natural disadvantage. He bore an eerie resemblance to the young Tyrone Power and was forever being kidded about his perpetual smile and his brilliant white teeth. Ezell was quick to remind his tormenters that Power had suspended his acting career to enlist in the Corps and had become a Marine pilot who'd taken wounded men off the islands of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. That shut them up for a while.

Like most of the kids in Fox, Ezell had spent his youth immersed in the movies of the World War II era, and he and his buddies had enlisted in the Marine Reserves to live out these fantasies. But his first love was baseball, and he was good. He'd been all-league in high school and he'd made the all-star team in his first season in the minor leagues, playing for an affiliate of the Boston Braves. He dreamed of following in the footsteps of a fellow graduate of Harbor High: George Witt, a minor leaguer who would eventually pitch for the Pittsburgh Pirates.

In the states, Ezell's recruiting officer had seen the marksmanship medal he'd won at a Marines summer camp and immediately assigned him to a rifle company in the Seventh Regiment. When Ezell asked about boot camp, the officer had grinned. "We need riflemen on the front line," he'd said. "You're an athlete. Pretend you went to boot camp."

Now he was thousands of miles from home, trying to scrape out a machine-gun nest on a windswept hill. Boy, would he like to pretend this away. Although Ezell was merely an ammo carrier, each man in his unit-one of the First Platoon's two light machine gun emplacements-had been trained to take over the gun in an emergency. They constituted the right flank of Captain Barber's "horseshoe," and the first thing Ezell did when he dropped his ammo cans in the snow was study the terrain.

The gun's field of fire would cover a seventy-five-yard arc across the treeless valley that separated this more gradual slope from what the Marines were calling the East Hill, two hundred yards away. In the fading light Ezell could just make out the top of the loop of the MSR, about 150 yards beyond the East Hill, where the road bent south to Hagaru-ri. At this fork in the turnpike a trampled path-what passed for a spur road in North Korea-broke off and veered northwest toward the hamlet of Chinghung-ni. A little beyond this crossroad the MSR intersected with a dry creek bed that ran parallel to, and below, Ezell's position. Where the creek bed met the road it ran under a small culvert. Ezell noted that the depression was large enough to hide perhaps four men if they squeezed in tight. Bet that'd be pretty toasty, he thought.

Winter war in North Korea was like fighting inside a snow globe. Prior to the Marine landings at Wonsan, American military physicians specializing in cold-weather warfare had studied winter campaigns such as the Russo-Finnish War, Hitler's march on Moscow, and the Battle of the Bulge, one of the coldest engagements on record. The idea of outfitting U.S. military personnel in layers, as opposed to a single piece of heavier outer clothing, was one result of these analyses. Another consequence was the ill-conceived decision to issue perspiration-absorbing, wool-felt shoe pads fitted into clunky shoepacs, whose rubberized shell did not allow air to circulate.

In fairness, given the limitations of cold-weather science at that time, no medical study could have prepared the Marines for Toktong Pass, where a sleeping man could freeze to death in his own sweat. Over the past few weeks frostbite had taken more American soldiers out of action than the North Koreans, and no matter how often or how loudly corpsmen and officers warned about it, men wouldn't listen. The first way to avoid frostbite was to keep your extremities from perspiring-easier said than done in a firefight. Once a man stopped moving, his sweat would freeze into a film of ice, usually between his hands and his gloves and between his feet and the felt insole of his shoepacs. Damage to the hands could be contained. But if he didn't periodically remove his shoepacs and wool pads, massage his feet, and change his socks, frostbite would set in within hours. Needless to say, there was little opportunity for such regular salubriousness on the hill, and men and shoepacs simultaneously seemed to lose the will to stay dry.

Moreover, the temperature and the constant gale drastically affected the men's appetite. As a rule human beings are genetically programmed to eat more as the temperature drops. But just as these Marines had little or no time to care for their feet, they had few opportunities to build fires, boil snow, and melt their rock-hard C-rations. The chow tasted like dog food to start with, and everyone in Fox recalled the result of eating the frozen Thanksgiving feast. Now, with those stomach disorders fresh in their minds, the Marines limited themselves to the dry items in their C-rations. The icy beef stew, beans, and congealed hash were all avoided in favor of a steady diet of crackers, biscuits, and candy. This diet made the men miserable and weak, and the more miserable a man was, the less he would eat. The less he would eat, the less he could eat. As a result of this cycle, the stomach shrank. Many Marines were losing four to eight pounds a day. Captain Barber worried that if he had to spend too many days on this hill he would end up commanding a company of scarecrows.

Barber and his officers, most conspicuously the Second Platoon's Lieutenant Peterson, constantly impressed on the Marines the necessity of changing their socks as often as possible. Peterson had carried only two pairs of socks with him up to the pass, yet on his inspection rounds he made a point of demonstrating how he kept his spare pair hanging from his belt and down the inseam of his pants leg. It was the best-in fact the only-place to dry them out, he said.

When Peterson had trudged up the hill he discovered a small cave no more than ten yards behind the juncture of his First and Second squads on the western slope. He could hardly believe his good fortune. He directed his platoon sergeant, Richard Danford, to convert the snow-free grotto into his platoon command post, and he ordered William McLean, the corpsman attached to his platoon, to dig in nearby. Both kept a watchful eye on their new platoon commander as they complied.

Peterson was the Second Platoon's third CO since it had arrived in Korea five months earlier, and he was by far the most handsome man in the outfit-"prettier" even than Bob Ezell. A twenty-eightyear-old North Dakotan with a square jaw, broad shoulders, and wavy black hair, Peterson was the one Marine in the outfit who could have been on recruiting posters. He had enlisted at eighteen after finishing high school, had seen action on Guam and in China during World War II, and had cashed out at the end of that war. Like most of his contemporaries, he'd remained in the reserves while he went back to school-in his case, to earn a BS in civil engineering from the State University of Montana and a master's degree from the University of Iowa. He was teaching at Oklahoma State University when war broke out in Korea. Called back to active duty, he breezed through officer candidate school and was posted to Fox. Naturally, the men called him "Prof " behind his back.

Peterson had caught up with the company in Hagaru-ri, and he barely knew the names on his platoon roster when they left for the Toktong Pass. But his experience as an enlisted man in World War II lent him more authority, particularly among the veterans, than a shiny new second lieutenant might normally have received. His credibility increased when, leaving his sergeants to stand up his platoon command post in the cave, he made his inspection rounds.

Peterson was one of the few Marines who had any kind of experience with cold weather-he recalled several weeks during one winter in Montana when the temperature never rose above twenty below. So as he stopped by each foxhole he not only demonstrated his socks trick, but also imparted whatever other ideas he knew to ensure that his men were squared away as well as possible. He instructed them, for instance, to tuck in only alternate layers of their multiple shirts and jackets, as the circulating air warmed by body heat would act similarly to the insulating sheen of water trapped in a wet suit. He also showed them how to buddy up by combining their mummy bags so one man's free foot rested in the warmth of his partner's crotch.

Similarly, he knew that the best way to keep water in a canteen from freezing was to add a few drops of rubbing alcohol or, in a pinch, a dollop or two of hair tonic. And he advised his Marines to periodically take as many deep, diaphragmatic breaths as possible to keep the body flooded with oxygen at this elevation. Finallyand this was a surprise-he told them to try to wash their hair as often as possible.

"Clean hair retains heat," he said, "dirty hair doesn't." His men wondered where the lieutenant expected them to find even tepid water for shampooing. But they knew Peterson's heart was in the right place, and that he cared about their survival. This went a long way with them-whether or not a shampoo was feasible.

The rifleman Private First Class Bob Kirchner of the Second Platoon was certain he was burrowing into an old cemetery. He was near the top of the west slope, settled into an eerie, grave-like depression, and those were surely not rocks his entrenching shovel was crunching. He wondered whose bones he was disturbing.

The twenty-one-year-old Kirchner was used to mountainous terrain, but he'd never seen anything so desolate as North Korea. The steep, pointed peaks, tiers and tiers rising as far as the eye could see, reminded him of inverted ice cream cones. At home in Pittsburgh, the hills and hollows had at least some color, even in winter, with strong, thick stands of conifers and spruce shining green and verdant even during blizzards. But these were the barest damned mountains he'd ever seen, like a moonscape. He wondered what the Korean words for "Old Baldy" were.

Kirchner had dug no more than a few inches when Lieutenant Pet. rson, making his rounds, dropped by his hole. "Remember that kid I caught you wrestling with back in the village?" he said.

Kirchner nodded.

Peterson made a dramatic show of taking in the rolling heights in every direction. The sun was low in the sky and he thought the view was, in a way, soothing-the rolling swell of the mountains kissed by a bluish haze the color of cigarette smoke. "I'm thinking he's probably somewhere up there, and you might have to shoot him tonight."

When he'd first arrived in Hagaru-ri, Kirchner had spent a night in an impromptu warming station, a house his squad had confiscated from a North Korean family. They hadn't thrown the locals out into the cold, and the old mother, her teenage son and daughter, and a young girl of about three or four had huddled in a corner against the glaring white light of a Coleman lantern as the Marines had warmed themselves and rested. The little girl reminded Kirchner of his own baby daughter at home, and as the hours wore on he began playing with the Korean girl, cooing silly little songs and tickling her under the chin. This seemed to lighten the family's mood, and by daybreak you would have thought everyone had known everyone else for years. The woman had even pulled out a frying pan to beat with a stick, and the little girl did a few step dances to the tune.