On Desperate Ground

by Hampton Sides

  Bill Barber was a wily chess player. He loved and understood strategy. A crack marksman, he had fought bravely and resourcefully at Iwo Jima, where he won a Purple Heart and a Silver Star. Barber was thirty years old now, a tough, dough-faced, God-fearing man who spoke in a twangy eastern Kentucky drawl. He had grown up in a little place called Dehart, Kentucky, near the Licking River, the son of subsistence farmers. This place reminded Barber of the hardscrabble country around his home—the same hodgepodge of ridges and draws, the oddly amplified sounds that would carry down the hollows, the way the land rolled on and on. It possessed the random quality of a crumpled sheet of paper. The one feature that gave the country logic, that tied it together, was the road worming through it.

  Toktong Pass was the highest spot along the main supply route. At this place, the narrow road cut along the shoulders of Toktong-san—a domed mountain that, at 5,454 feet, was the highest point anywhere around the Chosin Reservoir. This pass was a funnel through which Smith’s mechanized forces would have to travel on their way north. Its strategic importance was inescapable. If the Chinese were out there somewhere, in large numbers, they could seize the pass and chop the First Marine Division in two. The regiments at Yudam-ni would then be cut off from the men down at Hagaru. The battle would practically be over before it had begun.

  If the Chinese chose to take this eminence, one company was a woefully insufficient force to hold them off. Barber would have to apportion his assets wisely. He would have to create a perimeter that could not only protect the road but also protect itself—for an attack could come from any direction of the compass. Now, as he walked the hill, a layout began to take shape in his mind: where he would emplace his 81-millimeter mortars and his water-cooled heavy machine guns; where his three rifle platoons would dig in; where he would put his own command post, the medical tent, the warming tent; where the communications wire would have to be strung.

  Most people back in Hagaru seemed to think that putting Fox Company out on this hill was probably an unnecessary precaution. The attitude, handed down from Almond and still permeating the ranks, despite Smith’s own circumspection, was that the few Chinese in the area had come simply to monitor, stall, and harass the Americans. They weren’t a serious fighting force.

  But Captain Barber thought otherwise. He had taken the time to read a tract that had been found on a captured Chinese soldier and reworked into English by Army translators. Military Lessons, as the pamphlet was titled, belittled American fighting abilities. “Their infantry is weak,” the tract declared. “These men are afraid to die, and will neither press home a bold attack nor defend to the death. If their source of supply is cut, their fighting suffers, and if you interdict their rear, they will withdraw.”

  Barber had also studied the military strategies of Sun Tzu, the legendary Chinese philosopher from the fourth century B.C. No one was a more diligent follower of Sun Tzu’s precepts than Mao, whose military treatises Barber had also read. During the civil war, Mao had often pursued a strategy of camouflaging his own forces in a way that would embolden the enemy, enticing him to come forward. Then, at an opportune moment, Mao would encircle his foe and destroy him.

  Barber wondered whether the Chinese at Chosin might be employing this same policy: hiding, luring, circling, pouncing. Straight out of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. Barber sensed that, even now, enemy soldiers were crawling over Toktong-san, watching him.

  * * *

  With a mashing of gears, Barber’s company appeared, grinding up the valley. The 245 men from Fox unloaded on the road and climbed the hill with their belongings and their tools. They brought with them quite an arsenal: M1 Garands, carbines, Browning Automatic Rifles, light machine guns, mortars, bazookas, .45 caliber sidearms, and countless bandoliers of ammunition. By the time the men had humped their stuff to the top, it was nearly five o’clock, and the light was failing. They didn’t have much time to dig themselves in. They gathered on the hill—which everyone was simply calling Fox Hill—and waited for instructions from Captain Barber.

  These Marines had only become acquainted with Barber over the past two weeks. In truth, they didn’t much like him at first. Assigned to lead Fox Company after the Inchon landing and the attack on Seoul, Barber had come over fresh from Japan in mid-November. For their tastes, he had seemed too clean-cut, too spick-and-span. One Fox Company Marine thought Barber looked like a “candy ass.” Another thought he was “all dressed up like a well-kept grave.” The first day, he had gathered the company for a little speech in which he boasted how much he knew about tactics. “Frankly,” Barber had said, “I’m a hell of a good infantry officer.”

  The men of Fox Company didn’t know anything about Barber’s intrepid performance on Iwo Jima—how he’d come ashore as a twenty-five-year-old lieutenant and, within a few short weeks, had found himself leading not just a platoon but a rifle company, in some of the most horrendous fighting the Marines had ever faced. He was shot in the hand, then suffered a nearly catastrophic concussion, blood pouring from both ears. He was evacuated, but he recovered and returned to the battle, where he endangered his life crawling through enemy cross fire to rescue a couple of wounded men. Barber fought to the bitter end.

  Later, he spent several months in Japan with the occupation forces. During peacetime years, he stayed with the Marine Corps and bounced around the United States, serving, among other things, as an instructor, a recruiter, and a rifle company commander. He was what the Marines call a “mustang.” Mustangs are officers who began their careers as enlisted men and earned their commissions by working their way through the ranks and proving themselves in combat. They’re officers who, as a result of their grunt pedigree, often seem to have a comprehensive perspective that gives them a special confidence in the field.

  Certainly that seemed true of Barber. The day he met the men of his company, down near Hamhung, he had found much to be desired. He thought they looked raggedy and lackadaisical—like a bunch of Pancho Villa’s banditos, as he put it. Barber’s first order was to make his men shave. He made them clean their weapons, too, and then enforced a series of exercises in remedial marksmanship and basic physical conditioning. It was as though he were putting them through boot camp again—although, in truth, many of them had never been through boot camp the first time, or at least their original training had been improper and rushed.

  The men resented this new martinet in their midst who treated them like bumbling novices. But the weaknesses he saw in them were real, a fact that many in Fox Company would grudgingly come to admit.

  “Luck in combat is fickle,” Barber once said. “But I’ve noticed through the years that those who make the best preparations enjoy the best luck.” Making preparations was what Barber, always the stickler, remained focused on tonight. Now that the sun had dropped behind the mountains, the temperature had slipped well below zero. The men were stiff from their seven-mile, open-air truck journey up the valley, and they were looking forward to taking turns in the warming tent, sipping hot coffee and maybe enjoying some half-boiled C rations.

  But Barber’s first order scotched that possibility. He gathered his platoon leaders and, with some urgency, handed down the plan: The men were to form an oval-shaped perimeter along the hill and start digging foxholes—immediately. There would be no warming tent tonight, and no fires. Everyone would be sleeping on the ground, at alert, watching for the enemy. Many of the men cursed at this order—they’d seen no signs of the Chinese the whole way from Hagaru. This seemed yet another unnecessary precaution from their annoyingly scrupulous captain. People were likely to freeze to death on the exposed hill.

  An order was an order, though, and the men followed their platoon leaders, trudging over to their assigned positions. The members of Fox Company broke out their entrenching tools and started hacking into the frozen earth. From his command post, which was starting to take shape near the road, Barber was pleased to gaze up through the b
lue gloom and hear the concerted sound of many metal blades scraping the iron-hard ground.

  * * *

  Far up the hill, on the perimeter’s northwestern edge, the men of Barber’s Second Platoon were trying to chisel out their ring of foxholes near a scattering of granite boulders. Among the thirty members of the platoon were two friends from northern New Jersey—Hector Cafferata and Kenneth Benson. The two men had vaguely known each other back home, had competed against each other on the gridiron, but now they were close pals and foxhole buddies, halfway around the world. Cafferata and Benson spent an hour chipping at the ground, but their exertion produced only a pitiful divot a few inches deep. “Jesus Christ,” Cafferata said. “You’d need a goddamn stick of dynamite to make any progress here.”

  Declaring the excavation project pointless, they decided to build a windbreak instead. They cut some brush and pine saplings and then piled the limbs in a semicircle around their sleeping bags. They anchored the makeshift screen with a few well-chosen rocks—and called it good enough. This was home for the night. They unrolled their mummy bags and cussed Captain Barber for making them freeze their asses off out here, when it probably wasn’t necessary at all.

  Private Hector Cafferata, twenty-one years old, was a strapping guy of six foot three. He had big hands, clompy feet, a bulbous nose, and the foulest mouth in the company. People called him “Moose” or “Big Hec.” He grumbled a lot, making a rheumy, gravelly sound deep in his throat. He was goofy, stubborn, maybe a little boneheaded, and he often got himself into trouble. He had a reputation for being the biggest fuckup in Fox Company. People loved him just the same, because he was full of bumptious energy, and he always had a good story to tell.

  No one could gainsay his marksmanship. Big Hec was an incredible shot. He had grown up with a gun in his hands. An outdoorsman from age twelve, he especially loved duck hunting, rising before dawn and heading to the wetlands. Gray weather, freezing water, dark skies overhead—it didn’t seem to bother him. He’d shoot a duck and it would fall through the shell ice. He’d remove his clothes and wade out naked, busting through the frozen skim to retrieve his quarry, then wade back to shore, wipe off the freezing water, climb back into his clothes, and head for school—where, by agreement, the administrators had him store his gun, his birds, and his sometimes bloody jacket in a custodial closet. “The outdoors, that was home,” Cafferata said. “And I could shoot. Pfft. Pfft. I knew how to put the bullet where it belongs.”

  When he was growing up, Cafferata had two heroes: the heavyweight fighter Joe Louis and the U.S. Marines. “I was one Marine-happy kid,” he said. “The Marine thing, I wanted it. Whatever that is. The idea that you’d give your life for him, and he’d give his for you. It was a mystery to me. I was always gonna be a Marine.”

  Ken Benson, on the other hand, had never been much of a hunter, had never been particularly drawn to guns. Mainly, he was a sports nut, and quite a gifted athlete—basketball, baseball, football. You wouldn’t know it by looking at him. He wore a pair of thick glasses that made him look like a nerd. Private Benson—Bense, as he was known—was only nineteen years old. He had grown up in Newton, New Jersey, in the Kittatinny Valley, about fifty miles from New York City. He was a funny guy, orderly in his thoughts, a font of sports trivia. Something about him calmed Cafferata down. He understood Big Hec, looked after him, knew how to let the excesses of Cafferata’s sometimes outrageous personality roll off his back. The two New Jersey kids were always giving each other hell, joshing and cursing and shooting the breeze. But they were inseparable friends, boon companions.

  They removed their boots and squirmed into their mummy bags. The temperature was twenty below zero. The mountain air tingled in their nostrils. Their barrier of pine saplings helped only a little to buffer the biting wind. Still, Fox Hill had a kind of haunting splendor in the bright moonlight, everything suffused in a cyan haze. Looming above the scene was Toktong-san, a stark citadel of granite. The two men could hear the brittle clinks and shuffling sounds of the company hunkering down for the night. As he dozed off to sleep, Hector Cafferata could feel his M1 resting on his chest.

  20

  EASY COMPANY HOLDS HERE

  Yudam-ni

  A few anxious hours passed, but all remained calm on Hill 1282. Maybe Yancey and his men had been spared? Maybe the Chinese, faced with the Marines’ stout firepower, had had second thoughts? Maybe the weather was just too much? In olden days, when it got this cold, warriors laid down their arms and said, “See you in the spring.” A gentleman’s agreement.

  The men of Easy Company relaxed. Some of them began to doze off. Then it started. Shortly after midnight, Yancey heard a mashing noise, a queer and disconcerting sound that was both delicate and huge. It sounded, he thought, like thousands of feet walking across a carpet of cornflakes. It took him a while to grasp what it was: The Chinese, hundreds of them, were stamping on snow, in a brisk cadence, moving into place beneath Hill 1282. Alarmed, Yancey cranked the handle of his field set and reached Ray Ball, the company executive, who was somewhere on the rearward slope, near Captain Phillips.

  “They’re coming up the hill, Ray,” Yancey reported.

  “You sure?”

  “I can hear the fuckers crunching through the snow. How about some illumination?” Yancey wanted the mortar guys to lob some star shells overhead so he could see what he was dealing with. The moonlight, bright as it was, did only so much.

  Ball said they were running low on illumination rounds, but he’d do what he could. By now Yancey could hear an even more bizarre sound. Some Chinese drill sergeant was down there, crying out in the night, and his chant spread among hundreds of approaching enemy soldiers. The words were uttered in heavily accented English:

  Son of a bitch, Marines.

  We kill!

  Son of a bitch, Marines,

  You die!

  Nobody lives forever.

  The chant, uttered over and over, carried eerily on the wind. But it was drowned out by a louder sound: a ghoulish din of cymbals, drums, bugles, whistles, and bleating shepherds’ horns. This was how the Chinese units, lacking radios, signaled to one another across distances. The strange bedlam sounded, said one account, like “a witches’ conference.” It was, said another, a “terrible moonlit serenade, a nightmare scene, a lunatic’s delight.”

  Finally the requested star shells boomed in the sky and lit the hillside in the harsh blue glare of phosphorus. The scene was terrifying. It looked like a whole battalion of Chinese, swarming up the slope toward Yancey’s platoon. Off to the left, another enemy contingent screamed down from the ridge and bounded straight for Gallagher’s machine gun. “They came in a rush,” said one Easy Company rifleman, “like a pack of mad dogs.” Another said it was as though the snow had “come to life.”

  The men crouched a little deeper in their holes and looked to Yancey for cues. “Lieutenant Yancey,” one of them said nervously. “How many Chinese’re in a horde?”

  Yancey directed the platoon to hold fire until the enemy drew closer. “All stand steady!” In their foxholes, the men began to take aim. Their adrenaline was surging, and their fingers fidgeted on the triggers. The Chinese were almost within range. Along the line, the trip flares started popping off, illuminating individual pockets of attackers. The chanting droned on:

  Nobody lives forever

  Marines, you die!

  By this point, Yancey had had enough. “That’s right,” he snarled back. “No one lives forever, you bastards!” He leveled his carbine and fired a full clip. Then the whole platoon opened up. From the foxholes came a deafening fusillade of BAR and M1 fire. Tracers zinged over the slope, throwing off a red gleam. Then it was the machine gunners’ turn. “Let ’em have it!” Gallagher screamed. He mashed the trigger on his .30 caliber, and the others did the same. The barrels of their weapons glowed orange from the heat of constant firing.

 
The Chinese fell in long rows, but new waves of soldiers were rushing right behind. They blasted away with their burp guns and Thompsons, kicking up the snow in stutters. When one phalanx was cut down, the next would crawl over the bodies, sometimes grabbing a dead comrade’s weapon. Yancey’s Marines couldn’t comprehend them: Either they were inordinately brave, inordinately stupid, or inordinately fearful of their own superiors, for they kept advancing, with no apparent regard for their staggering casualties. “There was just so many of ’em you could kill,” said Easy Company private Robert Arias, who was part of a machine-gun crew. “If you had a conscience it was hard, because you knew they had a family back home. But you had to kill them—sometimes at point-blank range. Just as soon as you mowed them down, they’d come back in another wave.”

  So wild-eyed and manic were their sorties that many a Marine came to believe that the Chinese must have been hopped up on some powerful stimulant. As they crept closer, the Chinese began to hurl concussion grenades at Yancey’s platoon. The sharp smell of picric, the acid used in their crude explosives, wafted down the line. The platoon was taking a beating now. In several places, the Chinese were starting to penetrate the perimeter. Yancey raced toward a weak spot to encourage his men. “Keep firing!” he urged them. “Don’t let ’em through!”