Battle Field Angels (25 page)

Korean War

T
he mailman’s boots crushed the sidewalk grit, remnants of a Massachusetts winter warming into a 1953 spring of budding maple trees and resurgent daffodils in matted flower beds. As he climbed the stoop, Claire Keenan opened the front door.

“Here you are, ma’am,” said the mailman. The ragged envelope he handed her had traveled a third of the way around the world. She stepped inside and read the letter.

Claire opened a bureau drawer in which she kept letters. She reread another from the boy everyone called Joey:

Corpsman Joe Keenan had arrived in Korea on Friday, February 13, 1953, and joked it was a good thing he wasn’t superstitious. He had joined a war that had begun when communist North Korea invaded South Korea, an American ally, on June 25, 1950, in an attempt to reunify the Korean peninsula. The North Koreans had gained control of a major portion of South Korea by the time the Americans had reinforced their military presence there and halted the advance. When Keenan arrived, the Korean War resembled World War I.

Early-war invasions and counterattacks across Korea had settled into stagnant battles of attrition. American forces faced troops from North Korea and its ally, communist China, along largely stationary front lines called Main Lines of Resistance. As far as a mile in front of the lines, the Americans established hilltop outposts that provided advance warning of attacks. Each was usually manned by forty Marines and a corpsman. Duty in an isolated outpost almost completely surrounded by the enemy was exhausting. Marines and corpsmen rotated between outpost duty, a few days’ respite in the rear as part of a reserve force, and going out on patrols from the MLR.

For reasons unexplained to Keenan and most Marines, each type of patrol was named after an automobile. “Chevrolet” was code for combat patrol. These patrols in the middle of the night, sometimes to scout enemy positions and on other occasions to attack, were grueling, especially for the corpsmen who accompanied every patrol. The Marines typically went out on combat patrols every other night. Corpsmen, though, frequently strung together several night patrols in a row.

Within a month of his arrival in Korea, Keenan completed five consecutive night patrols. He prepared for patrols into enemy territory by piling his personal belongings on an open poncho. If he was killed, that would make it easier to ship his personal effects home to Dorchester, Massachusetts. His unit reviewed the expected engagement with the enemy before heading out shortly after midnight. Some patrols were intended to engage the enemy; others were reconnaissance missions. They typically returned to the MLR just before sunrise. In between patrols, Keenan made sure there were adequate medical supplies. The nightly series of raids added to the war’s daytime casualty rate. On average in 1953, corpsmen treated seventy-one wounded soldiers each day, of whom seventeen would die.

Joe Keenan was a handsome, dark-haired Irish boy who had grown up in a Boston neighborhood of small houses, community parks, narrow streets, and clapboard “three deckers” with a different family on each floor. It was a working-class area rooted in family life.

As a boy, Joe Keenan’s easygoing manner had sparked many friendships and quickly put strangers at ease. His heavy-lidded, wide-set eyes nearly disappeared when he broke into his characteristic wide, dimpled grin. He was as quick to ride his bike with its handlebar wicker basket to the drugstore to pick up medicine for a sick brother as he was to jump into a scuffle.

Joe had worked as a boy, first carrying groceries home for neighbors and later stocking shelves at Kennedy’s Department Store. Occasionally, he brought clothes home for his brothers and sister. On Saturdays, Joe and a brother sometimes explored the backwaters of Boston Harbor, using a well-worn fishing line wrapped around a stick smoothed by use.

In Dorchester, sons followed in the footsteps of their grandfathers, fathers, and older brothers: finish high school and go to work or enlist in the military. Joe upheld the Keenan family tradition and joined the Navy in June 1951, leaving behind his sweetheart, Anne Grayken. When he enlisted, Joe had hoped to become an aerial tail gunner. Instead, the Navy sent him to corpsman school.

In the years following World War II, the Navy had closed 47 of 83 hospitals, and its medical ranks had shrunk from 170,000 to only 21,000. The military was in such drastic need of doctors that the Doctor Draft Law was enacted in 1950. It targeted physicians who had been educated at government expense during World War II but who had not served in the military.

The military medical corps also recognized the need for more qualified and better-trained frontline corpsmen and medics. The corps assigned men based on aptitude test scores. Some had been premed students, male nurses, or chiropractors. Training for Korea’s corpsmen and medics was more comprehensive than it had been during World War II. Most completed a four-month premed curriculum that included anatomy, physiology, pharmacology, laboratory testing, and X-ray training. Classroom study was followed by two months of field training with the Marines and then a naval hospital internship. Keenan and others had nearly a year’s worth of combat medical training before they landed in Korea.

Although training had gotten better, the life of corpsmen and medics had improved little from the previous war. Water was always in short supply. Clean clothes were available about once a month. When a corpsman changed his underwear each week, a thorough spray of DDT killed ever-present body lice. Early in the Korean War, winter battles had produced thousands of cases of frostbite in conditions so brutal that aid stations’ plasma bottles froze solid and shattered. Hunkering down inside a bunker only six feet long and three feet wide was dry but claustrophobic.

Forward aid stations often struggled to maintain adequate morphine and plasma supplies. Ingenuity became a corpsman’s most effective tool. One corpsman treated a soldier whose shattered bone and teeth blocked his airway by using a scalpel and the hollow bottom half of a ballpoint pen to perform a tracheotomy, saving the soldier’s life. The same corpsman devised a way to seal a sucking chest wound using the cellophane wrapper from a pack of cigarettes.

March 26, 1953, was a pleasantly warm day. Keenan was a member of Fox Company of the 1st Marine Division, assigned to thirty-three miles of the MLR that spanned the main enemy invasion route to Seoul, the South Korean capital. Three combat outposts had been established on separate hills within enemy territory. They were named Carson, Reno, and Vegas. Reno was in the middle, about a mile forward of the nearest American reinforcements. Carson and Vegas were on either side, about a half mile in front of the MLR. The Marines assigned to them joked about how surviving duty in any of the “Nevada Cities” was a crapshoot. Fighting on the side of their fellow Communists, the Chinese had established similar outposts near each in elevated locations with superior firing positions.

At 1900 hours, explosions rocked the three outposts as the Chinese launched a massive attack. Detonations, cracking timbers, and screams fractured the elevated voices of radiomen choking on dust as they reported the unexpected assault. Artillery and mortar shells pounded the outposts at the rate of almost three shells per second. This was followed fifteen minutes later by small arms fire. A group of 120 Marines and three corpsmen at Carson, Reno, and Vegas faced an onslaught of more than 3,500 Chinese soldiers. The Americans defended themselves by calling for “box-me-in” artillery aimed at the enemy on all four sides of each outpost. Over the next eight hours, the Chinese launched 14,000 artillery rounds into three bands of exposed Marines. It was impossible to know whose shells were falling on which troops.

Fox Company was ordered to reinforce the outposts under attack. Keenan opened his green canvas medicine kit and counted the morphine Syrettes and small battle dressings. He mentally inventoried the rest of the contents: scissors, wire cutter, hemostats, needle holders, needles, and thread, plus a wide assortment of bandages and antiseptic. He cinched the kit around his waist before hiking into combat.

His unit moved out from the MLR toward an unfortified position fifteen hundred yards ahead of the front line. Their destination was the Reno outpost at the center of the Chinese attack.

The Chinese had reached Carson on one flank. The Marines who had survived the original artillery barrage engaged the Chinese in handto-hand combat, but the attackers prevailed and took control of Carson. Minutes later, Vegas fell to the enemy as well.

Reno was next. The relentless bombardment battered the outpost as hundreds of enemy soldiers moved in. Shrapnel and debris rained down on the remaining Marines who had sought shelter in trenches. When Chinese soldiers jumped into the trenches, the Americans fought with everything close to hand: rifle butts, knives, and shovels. Pistol shots reverberated. As more Chinese closed in, the few Marines still alive retreated into the Reno bunker. Explosive satchels collapsed the bunker, trapping the men inside.

The overwhelming Chinese forces devastated the first group of reinforcements sent to Reno. Several hundred yards behind them, Keenan’s unit moved up the hill toward multiple casualties. As Keenan neared Reno he heard the hollow “thunking” of Chinese mortars firing. He guessed how far the enemy mortar was from him, counted a few seconds, and then hit the ground an instant before the shell’s impact nearby.

At midnight, Joe Keenan entered the battlefield. Men writhed on the ground screaming in pain. Others lay at impossible angles. Blood soaked the ground, and body parts lay scattered among the corpses. They glowed ghostly white from the exploding phosphorus rounds.

Keenan sprinted from one wounded Marine to the next as the night sky brightened with exploding shells. A piece of shrapnel shredded his right wrist. “Don’t worry about me!” Keenan yelled to another corpsman, William Jones, who had begun moving toward him. As Jones turned away to help other Marines, he died in the sudden cloud of a mortar shell.

Ignoring his bleeding wrist, Keenan kept treating wounded Marines who lay exposed to enemy fire. The artillery barrage seemed endless. Explosions were followed by the whrrrrr of shrapnel spinning through the air, and slicing through stomachs, legs, and faces. Another piece found Keenan, this time wounding him in the head. Corpsman Everett Jones was less than ten feet away.

“Here, take my supplies,” Keenan yelled over the explosions. “I’ve got an awful headache. I’m going down to the aid station.”
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He tossed his medical bags to Jones and headed down the hill. Jones lost sight of Keenan in the exploding dirt and billowing dust.

By 0100 hours, Keenan’s head and wrist wounds had been dressed at the aid station, and he headed back up the hill into the heart of the battle. Meanwhile, fellow corpsmen near Reno treated horrific casualties. Paul Polley and Francis Hammond established an aid station in the middle of the artillery barrage. Polley continued treating the wounded after he had been injured in the chest and blinded. Not far away, Hammond, who had arrived in Korea within days of Keenan, dragged his badly injured leg across open terrain to treat as many wounded men as he could. Keenan joined them at about 0130, moving under enemy fire from one casualty to the next.

Joe Keenan was wounded a third time when a shell exploded next to him, driving dirt and debris into his eyes and partially blinding him. He refused care and would not retreat to the safety of the battalion aid station in the rear. Wounded Marines looked up at two partially blind corpsmen treating them under withering fire as another soldier acted as their eyes.

“Boy, this is a bad night for corpsmen!” said one of the wounded.
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Once Keenan finished treating an injured man, four stretcher bearers loaded him onto a stretcher, hunched over, and ran down the hill from Reno, trying to keep from dropping the stretcher or getting knocked off their feet by artillery blasts. Unarmed, sometimes they stopped to pick up a dead man’s rifle or canteen if it had water left in it. Exhaustion threatened many who repeatedly climbed into enemy fire and then clambered down the hill, carrying one of Keenan’s patients. They were the first link in battlefield evacuation that had undergone significant changes since the end of World War II.

Korea’s rugged terrain posed daunting challenges to evacuating the wounded from the battlefield. The first documented use of a helicopter in combat was in 1944, when the Army rescued four aviators who had crashed in Burma. Two years later, the U.S. Navy tested the viability of helicopters for at-sea rescue. During Operation Frostbite off the coast of Greenland, a helicopter rescued USS
Midway
pilots who had crashed in the midwinter sub-Arctic. Sometimes the rescued aviators were dropped accidentally several feet onto the flight deck as helicopter pilots and the flight deck crew fine-tuned new search-and-rescue procedures.