The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (40 page)

The nature of this fight, Graham quickly realized, was going to be based less on courage than on ammunition: ammo was time. Graham had a seasoned feel for the sounds of battle, and he could tell at a certain point, when Lieutenant Tom Wilson’s neighboring platoon outpost went silent, that the North Koreans had overrun it. That meant the pressure on Graham’s men was going to increase. It was then that he decided to try to slip his men out. No matter what Battalion headquarters wanted, they could no longer slow down the enemy; they lacked the ammo for it. They were already down to one belt on the machine gun, some of the automatic rifles were completely out, and a number of his men were yelling for more bullets for their M-1s. There wasn’t much left but their bayonets. (He had already had his own bayonet either shot or knocked off his rifle; he was never sure which.) Bayonets were not going to do it, not against good soldiers with automatic rifles.

So he gathered his men. He had lost about twelve of them up on that hill. Maybe fifteen, who could tell in the madness of that fight? He never knew how many, because some men were lost and then made it back several days later. When it was all over, the one thing he was proud of was that their position had never been overrun. They moved back toward the Charley Company CP, where they found Captain Bartholdi, Lieutenant Wilson, and maybe seven men from Wilson’s platoon, and tried to consolidate their force. Their most desperate need, if they were going to fight their way out, was ammunition. They tried scrounging bullets from dead bodies, but there wasn’t very much—it was possible someone had already beaten them to it. By now, at the Company CP, time was running out. They had gathered a quad 50—that is, four 50-caliber machine guns fixed together, mounted on a half-track—and a dual 40, an antiaircraft weapon (twin 40-millimeter guns also mounted on a half-track structure). For a time these were effective against the enemy, but it was only a matter of time. The end was inevitable.

As the enemy fire got heavier, they barely managed to slip some of the wounded out on a supply jeep. Then, just before daylight, the Koreans managed to capture the quad 50 and the dual 40 and turn them against the American position at very close range. That was when they tried to make it out, while bullets and shells kicked up dirt around them. Somehow Graham and some of the remaining men made it to the top of a neighboring hill, only to find that North Koreans were already on a higher, abutting hill firing down on them. That was when Graham got hit for the first time, right in the ass. But somehow they managed to keep going. There weren’t many of them in the group now, maybe twenty-five including Captain Bartholdi, Lieutenant Wilson, Sergeant Robert Agnew, Corporal Jessie Wallace, Private First Class David Ormand, and Private First Class Arnold Lobo, the medic. Ormand was already living on borrowed time, some of the others thought. He was the captain’s radioman, and earlier his radio had been shot clean off his back. Bartholdi had had to crawl over and pull a badly shaken Ormand out of danger by his legs, then carry him to safety.

Graham remembered them trying to get off their hill, and finally taking cover in a ditch, the captain desperately going through his pockets attempting to find a few last rounds of ammo. That was when Graham was hit again—in the same general area but from a different direction. He was bleeding like a stuck pig, he thought. He lost any feeling in his leg almost immediately. So he took his undershorts off and had Ormand fold them and use them to stanch the bleeding, half-in and half-out of his belt—an instant battlefield bandage, for you made do as best you could in situations like this. The enemy fire was brutal by then. As far as Graham could tell, everybody had been hit. Only a few of them were still able to move. Maybe twenty Americans were now lying dead in the ditch next to him—he could barely tell the difference between the living and the dead anymore. A few of the men who were still functioning asked him what they should do—run, fight, or surrender? Surrendering in another war might have been an acceptable choice, but they had all heard stories—true ones, as it turned out—of American prisoners found with their hands wired behind them, shot through the head, and left in shallow graves. But how could they fight, he thought, when there wasn’t a clip of ammo among them?

Graham answered that he was dying and could not tell them what to do. They were on their own. The last he saw of them, they were moving out to surrender. He listened carefully and, hearing no more firing, no telltale sound of bullets, he was relieved that at least they had not been executed immediately. Later, he learned that Wilson and Lobo had been killed; Wallace, Ormand, and Agnew were eventually recaptured by American forces. Graham lay there, bleeding badly, waiting for his death. The gooks got me, he thought. The first
two groups of North Koreans who came by left him for dead. The third group discovered he was still alive, stripped him of everything—boots, socks, cigarette lighter, watch, even his much feared little black book with his company shit list, everyone who had pissed him off and the trivial offenses they had committed. No need for that anymore; most of the names belonged to dead men anyway, and he was about to join them. “You officer?” one of the Koreans asked. “No, me GI,” he answered. Then what little luck he had seemed to run out. The group had what he called a Smart John in it, an officer who seemed smarter and meaner than the rest of them. He tapped Graham between the eyes with the butt of his rifle, trying to make him get up. Graham tried to signal that he couldn’t rise because of his legs. The Korean aimed his bayonet and mocked stabbing Graham in the genitals. Graham shook his head—can’t get up, he gestured again. Graham’s uniform was soaked in blood below the waist. The officer left him momentarily to check out the other American bodies. Some of the Korean soldiers started teasing Graham—asking in primitive English how old he was and whether he was thirsty. He tried to get a drink from them, but they refused, though they seemed friendlier than the officer. Then the Smart John came back. This is it, Graham thought, my farewell moment. But the Korean, evidently deciding Graham was too far gone to bother with, just grabbed his dog tags and left.

Miraculously, in about twelve hours Graham felt strong enough to begin to crawl off. For the next twelve nights he crawled and limped toward what he thought might be American positions, hiding during the day, moving painfully and slowly and cautiously at night. In the first twenty-four hours, he figured he crawled only about a hundred yards. Eventually, he found a stick and used it as a crutch. He got water where he could find it—even licking the dew off the grass. By the time he made it back to his battalion headquarters, he had a heavy beard and, he swore, his mustache was so long it was curling up at the end. He looked gaunt as hell, having lost some fifty pounds. For a small group of officers sitting there when he crawled in, including Lieutenant Colonel Claire Hutchin, it was as if a ghost had appeared. Major Butch Barberis had just opened a beer. He looked at the apparition, took the beer, and handed it to him. “Best thing I ever tasted,” Graham told Barberis. His Korean War was over. Charley Company had, of course, been devastated. Perhaps fifteen to twenty of them made it back to headquarters the next day. A company in a situation like that normally had six officers, but Charley Company had already been down to three, and two of them were killed in the first twenty-four hours.

Captain Bartholdi did not fare as well. He had been with a group of men who were eventually taken prisoner by the North Koreans. They were marched every night for about two weeks, the prisoners bound to one another by wire,
making a couple of miles each night. The North Koreans tried to separate the Americans by class and rank, determined to be much harder on the officers, who were, they believed, true representatives of the capitalist class. During the day, while they were waiting, they often did interrogations: Are you from a rich or poor family? they would ask. If you said rich, they would hit you, so soon everyone said poor. Do you like MacArthur? they asked. No, the prisoners answered. Do you like Truman? No, they would answer. Bartholdi had always been known to the men as Captain Bart, and now to protect him they simply called him Bart, but finally after about two weeks of captivity, the North Koreans threatened to kill all the men if their officer did not step forward. Bartholdi did, and they beat him terribly in the next days, and eventually murdered him, placing him in a mass grave along with the bodies of a large number of local Koreans. Most of the other American prisoners were rescued the next day by an American tank unit. Bartholdi was posthumously awarded the Silver Star.

Charley Company had taken the full force of the North Korean attack in those few days and suffered accordingly. Though it was rebuilt, it always seemed to be just a little less lucky than other companies, the casualties it suffered always a little higher. Soon, there were officers in the regiment who would threaten men by saying, “Fuck up here, and you’ll be in Charley Company.”

SOMEHOW, IN ALL
that brutal fighting, they had managed to slow down the North Koreans, who had broken through but failed completely to maximize their success. An entire North Korean division had been waiting in reserve near the Naktong Bulge and, inexplicably, had not been thrown into the battle. Instead, they had paused and regrouped, and that had been just enough time to give Walker’s forces a second chance. For there had been Charley Companies all along the Naktong River that night. No one knew better than Walker how little he had in the way of reinforcements and how long it took even the best troops now arriving in country to become accustomed to battle conditions. An elite unit, the Second Division, with an exceptionally proud history, would still not be an elite combat
-tested
unit, not in Korea, until it had served some time on the line. Of the officers now arriving in country as platoon leaders and company commanders, it would be impossible to tell who had the requisite talent and instinct for battle until they were under fire, for that could not be taught, not at West Point or VMI, or in ROTC. Mostly it was about instinct, and that was something only learned in the doing. That sooner or later these new divisions would fight well Walker had no doubt, but it was all about time, and time was the thing he had the least of. He was, Mike Lynch said, like a man with all his fingers in the dike all the time, and there were still never enough fingers.

Later, the military judgment would be that the In Min Gun commanders had failed in that last great assault on the Pusan Perimeter largely because they had used their troops so poorly. If they had concentrated their forces and struck in greater numbers at fewer points, they might have been far more successful. (Of course, if they had done that, they might also have been better targets for American artillery and airpower.) But there would be little satisfaction for Walker in that ex post facto judgment; at the time, he had felt overwhelmed by the relentless nature of the North Korean attacks. September 1, Mike Lynch recalled, had been one of the worst days. They had been flying low over the sector occupied by the Ninth Regiment (of the Second Division) and had seen a company of Americans retreating along a creekbed, even though no enemy force was pressing on them. Worse, in Walker’s opinion, they were bypassing perfect defensive positions from which they could slow down the North Koreans. So he told Lynch to take him in as low as he could. Lynch dropped the plane down to three hundred feet, pulled back the flaps, cut the throttle, and glided in just fifty feet above the Americans (hoping, as always, that the engine would start up again). There was the three-star commander of the Eighth Army, leaning so far out the door, he was essentially no longer in the plane, screaming over his bullhorn, “Stop! Go back, you yellow sons of bitches! You are not under attack! Go back, you had great positions!” The troops paid no attention, leaving Walker in a rage. It was one more bugout at a crucial moment, and among troops from a supposedly elite division just in from the States. He told Lynch to fly on to the headquarters of Major General Laurence (Dutch) Keiser, the Second Division commander. Based on his treetop observations and other scattered bits of intelligence, he decided that the Communists had hit the Second Division and driven a hole right in the middle of its sector—about six miles wide and eight miles deep, he later concluded. At that moment, he believed, the Second Division was perilously close to being cut in half.

Like others in the command, he already had serious doubts about Dutch Keiser, fifty-five at the time, a little old for such a demanding command and believed to be an old fifty-five at that. There was a growing feeling that this war had come too late for him. He seemed reluctant to leave his division headquarters, depending far too much on his subordinates to get around. He was in those difficult hours, as Clay Blair rather delicately put it, “operating from his well guarded command post.” Sometimes men who are exceptionally brave in one war, when they are young, do not age well as soldiers. So it was with Keiser. He was West Point, class of 1917, had commanded a battalion and won a Silver Star in World War I, where everything had gone right for him and he had been young and brave. But the ensuing thirty-three years had seen a changed officer. He had been away from combat for more than three decades—had not com
manded troops in World War II. In the fall of 1948, he had joined the Second Division as the assistant division commander, and in February 1950 had gotten his second star and command of the division, helped along, no one doubted, by his close friendship with his former classmate, Joe Collins, the Army chief of staff. Mike Lynch, who often expressed bluntly what Walker thought privately, believed that Keiser had turned into a coward as he aged, that the demands of this war were simply too much for him. That morning he seemed to be completely overwhelmed by circumstances. Walker’s arrival at his headquarters precipitated a brutal scene, one that plays out only in the worst moments of combat, when two men are perched at the abyss, and when there is no more room for failure. Walker was already in a rage when he walked in, and then he saw Keiser’s map—a dreamer’s map that had nothing to do with the collapsing front he had just flown over. Here was a general, part of whose division was being overrun, and he did not even seem to know it.