Valleys of Death (5 page)

“Make sure I don't do something stupid.”

He was an awfully big guy, so I alerted three guys I thought could handle him. I told them when we got near his hometown I wanted them to be prepared to stop him if I gave them the signal. In the meantime, I kept a cold beer in his hand at all times. He only made it through a few hands of poker that night before he was snoring at the back of the car. When he woke up the next morning, we were well past his home.

After three days, we pulled into Camp Stoneman, California. Located forty miles northeast of San Francisco, the camp was named after a cavalry commander during the Civil War. Activated in 1942, during World War II it became the primary jumping off point for more than one million American soldiers destined for the Pacific. Now it was the first stop on the way to Korea.

As I looked out over the camp, it was stark and barren and probably hadn't changed since 1942. At the railhead, we got on trucks that took us to us to a row of khaki-colored World War II transit barracks. As in the barracks at Fort Devens, we settled into rows of double-decked cots. We were crammed in like sardines because there were two more infantry battalions, a couple of artillery battalions and an anti-aircraft battalion also at the camp. All of us were headed for Korea on the same ship.

After chow that night, we started looking for something to do. The camp boasted three movie theaters and eight small post exchanges, which stocked stationery, toilet articles, tobacco, candy, ice cream and beer. There was one USO building. King, Walsh, Hall, Heaggley and I found a large club. By nine o'clock, the club was packed. We found a table, and the waitress was busy and happy to see us in good spirits.

“The last guys through here were depressed and sad. You boys have spirit, like you're off to save the world,” she said.

The club wasn't prepared for this many men and soon ran out of beer. So ended the night.

The next morning, Colonel Johnson had the whole battalion up and in full field gear for a forced march in the blazing hot California sun.

“Lets go, men,” I said as I policed up my section.

King did the same with the mortar section.

“You look like shit, Rich,” he said.

“I look like you feel,” I said.

There were a lot of asses dragging on the march. I did my best to keep my men moving. It was easy for me to keep up. I didn't have a choice. I had to set the example. But I felt like dragging ass too.

We were only there for three days. Boredom was the biggest enemy, and soon some of the guys started to talk about going into town. The only problem was we were restricted to the post.

“How about we do a night training exercise,” I said.

“What, like a patrol or something?” King asked.

I smiled. “Right. We'll go on patrol and break out of camp.”

King jumped on the idea and started to egg me on. By that evening, I'd told Walsh and Heaggley to cover for me. If they were asked, I was somewhere on post but they didn't know where. Shortly after dark I was leading a patrol formation across an open field toward the camp fence. We made our way through the fence and moved down a side road to an intersection, where we found a cabstand.

We got into three cabs and headed for Vallejo. We called it Valley Jo. After several rounds in the local bars, King and some of the guys from the mortar section wanted to go over to the whorehouse. Most had never been and wanted to take advantage before we shipped out.

The cabbie knew exactly where to go.

We pulled up to a large, well-kept three-story Victorian house in the middle of town. Inside, the parlor had a bar and a piano player just like the movies. The girls, all nice-looking, were dressed in lacy underwear and silky robes. They were mingling with a few civilians when we arrived. Our uniforms immediately attracted their attention and they moved toward us like bees toward honey.

Two or three of the guys got hooked up with girls and went upstairs. I wasn't interested from the beginning, but I didn't want the guys to think that I didn't like women. I just had a girlfriend waiting in Austria.

I took a seat and got a beer. One of the girls that didn't get picked came over and sat on the chair. She was nice-looking, but had hard eyes. She rubbed my arm and smiled.

“So, you going to Korea?”

I smiled. “I'm sorry. I'm not interested.”

She laughed and kept stroking my arm. “That's okay. I just want to talk. Are you worried about dying?”

At this point I didn't really want to discuss it with a stranger. Before I could answer, I heard a crash upstairs and a lot of yelling. Then one of the mortar men came banging down the stairs. He was mad and kept screaming about how he wanted his money back.

I got up and met King at the stairs. His shirt was open and his hair a mess, but he couldn't stop laughing.

“Seems he is hung like a donkey and the ladies don't want none,” King said.

“Get him out of here before he does something stupid,” I said, trying to shepherd donkey boy to the door.

King dragged him out. I rounded up the others, none too pleased to leave before they got the full service. We jumped in the cabs and headed back to camp. I saw King behind the wheel of one and got the cabs to stop. I threw open the door to King's cab.

“Get your big ass out of there. What the hell do you think you are doing?” I asked.

“Shit, Rich, I'm only having a little fun,” he said.

“Your fun is going to get us all in trouble. Get out now!” I barked.

“Okay, I'm sorry Rich, you don't have to get mad,” he said as he fell out of the cab.

We arrived outside the camp and slipped through the fence and across the field. It was our last night of fun. A final taste of America.

The next day we boarded a ferry that took us over to where the U.S. troop transport
Pope
was docked. The
Pope
had just been taken out of mothballs, and the ventilation system on board was not working. It was a miserably hot day. Everybody was wringing wet with sweat, which got worse the deeper we climbed into the ship.

The troop compartment space was a cavernous room with bunks four high, accommodating forty to eighty men. We stowed our gear and had started to go up to the deck, when the sailors chased us back down. We had to stay belowdecks until everyone was aboard. I began to worry about the men dehydrating and possible heatstroke. This was my third voyage on a troop ship, and I figured we would start getting some air when we got under way.

No such luck.

That night we tried to sleep up on deck. My section carved out a space near the stern. The wind whipped around the deck and felt good after being in the bowels of the ship for so long. When the captain saw all of us on deck, he ordered the crew to chase us back down to our troop compartment. Sleeping on the deck was too dangerous, the captain said. A rogue wave could sweep us overboard or we could get fouled up on the equipment on the deck.

The trip was hot and boring. We got two meals a day, which was normal for a troop ship. Because the ship was so crowded, by the time everybody got breakfast it was almost noontime, so the galley immediately started to work on dinner. The old joke was to hurry up and eat so you could get back in line for the next meal.

Standing on deck one night after chow, I stared out into the dark Pacific. I was leaning on the rail, drifting into my own little world. The girl from Vallejo's questions had me thinking. Since I'd become section leader, my goal was to make sure my men were ready. But was I? It wouldn't be long and I would be facing the test of my life. I was staring down at the water thinking about fear. Yes, I was scared, I was really scared that I might not be able to provide my men the leadership they deserved once we got into combat.

My thoughts wandered to my first voyage.

I'd left New Jersey in 1946 heading for Italy. Sailing through the Strait of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean Sea, I could see the Rock of Gibraltar in the distance. It was exciting; however, I was apprehensive not knowing what I had to face. I'd never been this far from home.

We docked in Naples and drove cross-country in a truck. Seeing the devastation of Cassino shocked me. The entire town was nothing but rubble. This was my first real look at war. It's one thing to see it in photos but shocking to see it in person.

Late in the afternoon we arrived in Foggia on the Adriatic side of Italy. We drove up to a bombed out factory where three hundred German prisoners were being held in winterized tents. Most of them had been captured in North Africa and belonged to one company. We joined an Italian Army company just outside of the factory area. The Italians and the Americans combined to provide security for the area.

That first night I was taken out to one of the warehouses and put on a guard post. Supposedly, there was an Italian guard on the post with me, but I didn't see him anywhere. I was in the dark, didn't know where I was, and didn't know where the Italian was. I began to see something in every shadow and over the chattering of my teeth heard unexplained noises in every direction. All of a sudden I heard the crunching of gravel and someone came out of the darkness. My hand shook from fear as much as the cold.

“Halt,” I shouted.

The shadow said something in Italian and kept coming.

“Fraido? Fraido?” he said.

I figured the son of a bitch was asking me if I was afraid. I shook my head no. He smiled, turned around and walked off back into the darkness. I watched him leave and walk toward some fires. I shifted from foot to foot trying to stay warm. All of a sudden out of the shadows came my Italian partner, walking along as calmly as when he left. He handed me his canteen cup and it was full of coffee. He gestured to me to drink.

The next morning I went to the old factory washroom. When I went to the sink to wash my hands, I noticed that the faucets were labeled
caldo
and
f raido
.
Caldo
was warm and
fraido
was cold. The guy last night was asking me if I was cold.

I realized that fear comes from the unknown, and the unknown was never as bad as I initially thought. Overcoming fear needed to become second nature.

After eight days onboard the ship, word spread that we were getting close to Japan. We'd do another month of training before landing in Korea. We crowded along the rail looking at the shore lights in the distance. The water made the lights from the city look like stars.

“It's Yokohama and we're headed right for it,” I heard a soldier say.

Suddenly the ship started slowly turning to the starboard and running south, parallel to the shore. I didn't think much of it. But the next morning we were informed that we were going straight to Korea.

CHAPTER FOUR

PUSAN

The smell was unbearable.

The water around the dock at Pusan was black and slick with oil and sewage. Two docks up from where we were was a cattle holding area, and when they cleaned the pens they just hosed everything into the water.

The pungent odor hit us as we approached the pier. Most of the guys stayed below, out of the smell, but I stayed on the deck mesmerized by the port.

Tucked into the southeastern tip of the Korean Peninsula, Pusan was Korea's largest port. Thousands of U.N. soldiers were moving through this port. Everywhere you looked there were cranes, trucks and trains, all in constant motion. The piers were clogged with green Army trucks and crates of ammunition and food. Cranes lifted the supplies to the dock and forklifts zigzagged around bringing them to waiting trains. It was a complex, modern ballet of engines and men, and we'd arrived right in the middle of it. The docks and railroads reminded me of Philadelphia.

Before we got off the ship, I pulled my section aside.

“A lot of you men have never seen a harbor. This one is busy and dangerous. Keep your heads up and make sure you stay out of the way of the cranes.”

The men nodded and we marched down the ramp to the dock. My company was quartered in a huge shed right on the dock. Winn told us that we'd be there a few days, until the ship was downloaded. The shed was dark and we were given a small spot to sleep. We used our shelter halves and blankets and slept on the floor. The grumbling started almost immediately.

Walsh took his shelter half and laid it close to me. “What a shit hole,” he said. That about summed up everybody's attitude. And after two hot meals a day on the ship, we were now stuck eating C rations.

One daily ration had six twelve-ounce cans. Three of either meat and beans, meat and potato hash, or meat and vegetable stew, and three bread and dessert cans with crackers. We used a key, soldered to the bottom of one can, to open the rest of the three-and-a-half-inch-tall tinplate cans. The ration also came with a packet of gum, toilet paper, matches and a nine-pack of cigarettes. Everyone carried an opener on his dog tag chain.

During the first night, Vaillancourt came to me and asked if I could give a couple of thirty-round magazines to an old friend of his. On the trip over, I'd scrounged the magazines from the anti-aircraft unit to replace the fifteen-round magazines we had been issued. I then had my guys tape the bigger magazines together so that all they had to do was flip them to reload.

“Sure,” I said. “If he is a friend.”

“We fought together during the last one,” Vaillancourt said.

As we walked down the dock, I could see similar sheds crammed with men. Some stood outside smoking. Others just stood outside trying to get a little fresh air. After a few hours, the smell didn't really bother us anymore. Now, it was just the waiting.

The lieutenant was sitting on his cot writing a letter. He smiled when Vaillancourt came in.