On Desperate Ground

by Hampton Sides

  When the action lagged for a moment, Yancey looked around and realized that the battle wasn’t raging only here on Hill 1282; it had broken out across North Ridge and beyond. The highlands around Yudam-ni had come alive with pyrotechnics. It looked as if the mountains were covered in fireflies.

  Yancey picked up the field phone and reached Ray Ball again, at Phillips’s command post. “Lay it on, Ray!” he said. “Lay it on!” Ball understood the request and had the mortar guys go to work, lobbing 60-millimeter shells up and over Yancey’s position. The message was relayed down to the valley, too, and soon the howitzers were pounding preregistered targets along the ridgelines beyond Hill 1282.

  When the shells hit, plumes of snow and clods of debris were ejected from the slopes. Yancey could hear a chorus of wails and moans as Chinese bodies were hurled skyward. Again and again, the incoming rounds whined overhead, and shrapnel sawed through the icy air.

  The next star shell revealed a horrific panorama: The snow was smeared with blood. Twisted corpses and shorn body parts had been flung in all directions.

  * * *

  From his command post, Captain Walt Phillips, the commander of Easy Company, was following the action on 1282 with increasing alarm. All three of his platoons were in serious trouble; the fighting along the ridgeline was more ferocious than anything he’d ever seen. The Marines were throwing everything they had at the enemy, but it wasn’t enough: The press of the Chinese numbers, the sheer weight of their onfall, was overwhelming. The CCF wanted that hill. Their commanders had decided it was of the utmost importance to seize it. Now the survival of an entire company of Marines hung in the balance.

  Phillips saw that it was the Second Platoon—Yancey’s—that was taking the brunt of the attack. Gun emplacements were being overrun, the dead were piling up, and medical corpsmen, who’d found they had to put ampoules of morphine in their mouths to keep them from freezing, were treating the wounded by the score.

  At about 1:00 a.m., Phillips broke away from his command post and trudged the forty yards up the steep hill to help bolster Yancey’s position.

  “Where’s Yancey, where’s Yancey?” he demanded as he roved Second Platoon’s line. Phillips finally located Lieutenant Yancey, covered in fresh blood: A grenade had exploded not far from him and blown him twenty feet across the hill. A fragment had lodged in the roof of Yancey’s mouth, and another one had sliced into the bridge of his nose—his second facial injury of the night, this one far more serious than the first. Yancey could hardly talk, and he struggled for air as blood trickled down the back of this throat. He kept gasping and snorting to clear his clogged airway, and he looked to be in excruciating pain. But he was still fighting alongside his men, grunting orders that were barely decipherable, firing his carbine from his hip.

  Phillips joined Yancey along the perimeter. “Doing well, men,” the captain tried to reassure them. “Stay loose, Marines, you’re doing fine.” Phillips soon suffered his own injuries: He was shot in the shoulder, then in the leg, but he kept with the men.

  The platoon was faltering. More than half the ranks were either dead or wounded. Yancey, brandishing a .45 revolver now, kept trying to rally the platoon. Repeatedly, the Chinese burst through the lines, only to be driven back in spasms of close-in fighting. The battlefield was all clamor and confusion, with random scrums of men locked in mortal combat. Yancey’s boys were using their bayonets and firing point-blank. They were fighting with fists and pistols, knives and entrenching tools. But the Chinese kept boring in.

  Staff Sergeant Robert Kennemore, a machine gun section leader, was scrambling across the hill. “Don’t go down there, you fool!” Phillips yelled after him. But Kennemore ignored the captain. He thought he had seen a group of Chinese dragging away one of his machine gunners by the legs, bludgeoning him, stabbing him with bayonets. Recognizing that he was too late to help, Kennemore crawled toward a gun position on the far right. He started searching through the bodies of the Marine dead, hunting for anything useful, when a Chinese grenade plopped beside him. He seized it and flung it just in time. But another one landed nearby, in a gun pit occupied by three Marines. Then a third grenade dropped beside the second one.

  Acting on an impulse of pure selflessness, Kennemore stepped on one grenade and squashed it into the snow, while at the same time crouching on a knee to absorb the blow of the other grenade. How, in those fleeting moments, he saw the angles of the situation, no one could understand. The two grenades exploded almost simultaneously, and tore into him. The three crewmen in the gun pit, though temporarily deafened by the blast, were spared.

  All of North Ridge was in peril. Captain Phillips was sure the dike was about to break. He knew he had to do something. As corpsmen tended to his wounds, he got on the phone and called for reinforcements from battalion headquarters in Yudam-ni. Phillips asked if there was enough time to scramble a few platoons and march them up the slippery hill to save the company, but he couldn’t get a clear answer. Easy would have to stay firm and hope for a miracle. But the captain was determined not to budge from the crest.

  As if to make his point, he took a bayoneted rifle and planted it into the hard soil of 1282. “This is Easy Company!” Phillips cried out. “Easy holds here!”

  A few moments later, a stitch of enemy bullets rang out, and Captain Phillips dropped dead. Beside him, the rifle creaked as it swayed in the wind.

  21

  WHERE THE BULLET BELONGS

  Toktong Pass

  “Hey, Bense! The fuck is that?” At around 1:00 a.m., Cafferata thought he heard the crackle of gunfire down the hill, maybe on the road. “Jesus Christ. Somethin’s happening.” Benson tried to pull himself awake.

  Then Cafferata heard something closer, a crunching sound on the snow. He popped out of his bag, standing in his stocking feet, and spied six Chinese soldiers walking up the hill right in front of him. He could see them in the moonlight and by the eerie glow of the flares. He leveled his M1 on the first one and aimed for his chest. He fired; the soldier dropped. Then Cafferata shot the five others. Benson, through all this, was still struggling to get his boots on. “What the hell you doing, Bense? Fuck the boots. You better start shooting!”

  Benson got to his BAR and started firing at the moving shapes in the distance. Cafferata could see more of the enemy marching uphill. “We can’t hold ’em,” Cafferata said. “We gotta fall back. We don’t have no time to fiddle.”

  Cafferata and Benson were more than two hundred yards from the company’s main line of resistance. They got on all fours and started to crawl through the snow. As they were scrabbling along, an object hit Cafferata squarely in the back. It rolled down his jacket, down his right leg. He turned around and saw Benson staring, saucer-eyed, at a Chinese grenade. It was a small explosive, encased in bamboo, with a glowing fuse made of cloth.

  “Throw it, Bense! Throw it!”

  Benson grabbed the offending missile, but when he hurled it, it caught on the lip of a little berm in front of them. The grenade detonated and sent up a cloud of ice shards, frozen dirt, and splinters of bamboo. Benson’s ruined glasses were thrown into the air as the ejected debris lodged in his eyes. His face was burned, cut, and bloodied.

  “God damn, Hec. I can’t see a fucking thing.”

  Cafferata looked around to learn where the grenade had come from. He could see scores of Chinese soldiers, shadowy forms moving over the snow. “We got to get outta here!” Cafferata whispered. “Hold on t’me, Bense.” They crawled along for ten yards or so, with the now blinded Benson clutching one of Cafferata’s big feet. They reached the next set of foxholes and realized that the three Marines inside them weren’t moving. The Chinese had come along and shot them in their bags.

  The two men continued until they reached a little draw, where some wounded Marines had taken cover. Cafferata decided they would stay here—this was where they would make their stand. The enemy ke
pt coming, only now they were tooting bugles, crashing cymbals, blowing whistles. Cafferata smashed two of them with his entrenching shovel. He scooped up a Thompson submachine gun one of them had dropped and sputtered at the next line of attackers.

  Then he grabbed his M1 and began to shoot in earnest. While Cafferata fired away, Benson sat in the snow beside an ammunition box and fumblingly loaded spare M1s and carbines taken from the dead and wounded Marines in the draw. Cafferata found that the carbines didn’t perform well at all; their firing mechanisms couldn’t stand the cold. But the M1, the widely revered semiautomatic rifle with a clip housing eight .30 caliber rounds, proved reliably lethal.

  The two Jersey boys worked as a team, almost as a single organism. Benson got faster at loading, more efficient. He summoned the muscle memory in his fingers; he didn’t need to see what he was doing. When Cafferata spent his eight rounds, Benson would be ready with the next freshly loaded M1.

  Though Benson couldn’t see it, the scene around them was surreal, spectral. Tracers snapped through the air, flares arced across the night sky. It seemed that an entire Chinese regiment had descended on them. All of Fox Hill was lit up, but Cafferata could only focus on his piece of terrain. He kept shooting, and the Chinese kept dropping. At one point he had to leave Benson to repulse an attack on the other side of the draw. His M1 grew hotter, accumulating carbon, sometimes blurting off two shots instead of one. Smoke curled from the weapon, until finally the barrel guard caught on fire. He smothered it with snow, and it ticked and steamed as it cooled.

  In back of his fury, Cafferata felt sorry for the Chinese. He couldn’t understand why they kept running headlong to their deaths, as though they wanted to get it over with as soon as possible. Some of them charged at him with quaintly crude weapons, almost archaic in some cases. One enemy soldier had a long pole at the end of which a knife had been attached with string. In other cases, they charged with no weapons at all. He wondered where that kind of bravery and fanaticism came from. Did they do it for love of country? To defend an ideology they held dear? To assert some principle held deeper within their society? Or did they do it because their officers compelled them to?

  He couldn’t understand why their rounds didn’t find him—him especially, a big, lumbering form silhouetted in the moonlight. Over and over again, he had made a target of himself. He could see their muzzle flashes, could see their blood spattered on the snow. He could hear their moans on the slope below him. He could feel their bullets slicing by his head, winging around, ricocheting. Yet it was mystifying—he wasn’t touched.

  Benson, still loading weapons on the ground, thought that his blindness had accentuated his other senses. For him, the battlefield swirled with queer sounds and pungent smells. He listened intently to the rising and falling of the Chinese war cries, their pealing bugles and shepherds’ horns, the drums pounding in the distance. The whole hill seemed to quake. On the shifting winds, Benson could smell the sour stink of phosphorus and cordite. He swore he caught the reek of garlic permeating the clothing on the bodies of the enemy dead. Even their gunpowder had a strange odor, he thought—some said the Chinese lubricated their weapons with whale oil.

  The grenades started coming in clusters, and Cafferata surmised that a bunch of Chinese soldiers were downslope, just out of view behind some rocks. They had to be lying on their backs, he figured, and hurling the grenades backwards up the hill. As the projectiles sailed in, Cafferata picked up his entrenching shovel with both hands and swatted them back upon their throwers. He had never been much of a hitter in baseball, but now, manic with adrenaline, he swung with surprising accuracy, whacking away the grenades, one after another.

  * * *

  With Benson at his side, Cafferata kept fighting through the predawn hours. He had never killed a man until this night; now he had killed dozens. Shooting the Chinese at a distance wasn’t a problem for him—it didn’t seem much different from duck hunting. But when he could make out their faces and see the fear in their eyes, that was another thing. They were kids, like him. They didn’t want to be here any more than he did. But what could he do? He had to shoot them.

  The bodies piled around him—he was using them as a screen. It seemed ghastly, in a way, protecting himself from the enemy with the enemy’s own corpses, but it was the only cover he had. (Other Marines throughout the Chosin battlefield would do the same thing—they came to call the corpses “chop suey sandbags.”) The Chinese bullets would thud into the stiff flesh. A grenade would land in their midst, and frozen bits of sinew and bone would fly through the air, scattering over Cafferata and the wounded Marines.

  During a lull in the fighting, Cafferata began to think what a waste it was. He had no reason to hate these people. It occurred to him that if they could pool the money and the resources it had taken both nations to assemble all these kids out on this hill, they could have signed on for a terrific pleasure cruise instead, Americans and Chinese alike, somewhere in warm tropical waters, and they would have had a ball.

  Then another grenade hissed overhead and landed beside Benson. Cafferata stooped to pick it up, but it detonated as it left his grip. The blast mangled some of the fingers of Cafferata’s right hand, peeling tissue off the bone. In the moonlight, he thought the exposed flesh looked like meat straight from the freezer. Enraged, he cursed and yowled and spat. His fingers were shredded. He’d have to pull the trigger with his thumb.

  Cafferata resumed his position and took aim. Benson was beside him, attentive to the noises around him, his fingers growing ever more dexterous. Though he still couldn’t see a thing through the blood and shards and grit in his eyes, he remained poised, and this had a soothing effect on Cafferata. Through the fighting, Cafferata perceived that everything was happening in rapid succession, almost too fast to process—and yet it all seemed slowed down, dreamlike. A wave of panic would wash over him, and he would summon every nerve to conquer it. He was terrified, but at the same time, he was functioning automatically, without thought. Every bird he’d ever killed, every deer, every varmint in the pine barrens, in the marshes, every day he’d spent shooting at some stupid target—all of it was embedded in his experience, in his reflexes. Aim straight, and put the bullet where it belongs—that was what mattered now.

  He felt, surging within him, a frantic debate between his feet and his consciousness. His feet kept telling him to run, but his mind kept telling him there was nowhere to go, that he had to stay here, that he had to keep shooting or else he and Benson and the others would surely die. “There’s no place to hide,” he said. “You’ve got a choice: Kill or be killed.” He was hyperalert, consumed in a battle frenzy. True to his name—Hector—he had become a warrior. “I was hopped up,” he said. “The adrenaline was flowing.” He dropped thirty, forty, maybe fifty Chinese soldiers, yet he remained unscathed by their bullets. The first tinting of dawn seeped into the night sky, and still they kept coming.

  22

  GUNG-HO, YOU COWARDLY BASTARDS

  Yudam-ni

  Through the early-morning hours, Private Stan Robinson lounged comfortably on a stretcher in a cozy medical tent lit by Coleman lanterns and bathed in the steady heat of a kerosene stove. But he was feeling restless, useless, and blue. Frostbite? It seemed such a pathetic excuse. Robinson knew he should be in the hills with Yancey and the platoon. He could hear the distant booms of battle, and he wondered how Easy was faring.

  Then an ambulance jeep pulled up and a bunch of bloodied men, fresh from the ridge, were hauled into the infirmary. “What unit you in?” Robinson asked one of them.

  “Easy Seventh.”

  Robinson’s ears perked up. “We get hit?”

  “Creamed,” the injured man said. The situation was bad up there, and Easy was in serious trouble. “Yancey’s wounded,” he added. “Everybody is, I guess.”

  That spurred Robinson to action. He climbed into his soiled clothes and field parka and gingerly slipp
ed some boots onto his hideous, swollen feet. He parted the tent flaps and hobbled out into the cold night. He grabbed the first spare rifle and cartridge belt he could find and was exiting the compound when a medical corpsman accosted him.

  “Hey, Robinson—back inside!”

  Robinson glowered. “Get the fuck outta my way.” He limped from Yudam-ni and started toward North Ridge. It took him an hour or more. He slipped and crawled up the slope like an old wino, crying out in pain when his blisters burst. It felt as though he were going against the current: On the way up, he kept encountering litter bearers, hauling serious battle casualties, who were headed for the same medical tent from which he’d just absconded.

  But finally Robinson reached 1282. This was where he belonged. The battlefield, his platoon mates liked to say, was Robinson’s one true home. He found Yancey standing beside a machine gunner. The Chinese, at the plaintive blare of a bugle, had pulled back into the night, but everyone knew they would return.

  Robinson, with a shit-eating grin, tapped Yancey on the boot.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Yancey said, admiringly. He spat a gobbet of dried blood onto the snow.

  Robinson said he was looking for a job.

  “Over there,” Yancey said, and put Robbie to work.

  * * *

  The next assault began around 3:00 a.m. The Chinese must have sensed that Yancey’s platoon—indeed, all of Easy Company—was at the breaking point. They attacked with ferocity. One wave struck, then another, then another still. Private James Gallagher hammered away with his machine gun, and Robinson proved lethal with his BAR. Yancey made a perfect target, stomping around in the garish light of the flares, barking orders. The corpsmen kept trying to stop him and treat his wounds, but he wouldn’t rest long enough to submit to their ministrations.