The Last Stand of Fox Company: A True Story of U.S. Marines in Combat (4 page)

The gouged, dome-topped Toktong-san, eroded by time and Korea's bitter winters, is a southeastern spur of the ancient Taebaek mountain range. This stunted cordillera hugs the Sea of Japan from the Chinese border well into South Korea, and it reminded some of the Americans of the Appalachian range. The young Marine recruits from the East Coast on their way to Camp Pendleton in California had been particularly impressed when the troop trains had climbed the Appalachians-that is, until they glimpsed the Rockies from the flat plains of Colorado. After they crossed the Rockies, the puny Appalachians-like the scrubby piles of granite they gazed up at now in North Korea-had diminished in their memories. Compared with the Rockies, the Taebaeks seemed more hills than mountains. This impression changed when they had to climb one.

Recruiting posters showed the typical leatherneck as tall, squarejawed, powerful, and mature, but the majority of the "men" of Fox were baby-faced "boots" who had only recently started to shave. On leave they preferred malt shops to gin mills, and the opposite sex came in three flavors: Mom, Sis, and an exotic type that existed only to be lied about or ogled. Their train trips from towns and cities across the United States to Pendleton, near their debarkation point to Japan, had for most of them been their first time away from home. Now, in Korea, with their gaunt profiles reflecting the rigors of constant battle marches, they suggested not so much a picture of American samurai as a scraggly crew of teenage pirates.

The onset of the North Korean winter had been harsh; they were frozen and exhausted when it snowed, and they were frozen and exhausted when it didn't snow. An unremitting wet gale blew constantly-the Marines took to calling it the "Siberian Ex- press"-and glazed every rock with ice. Their knees, knuckles, and elbows were covered with bloody scabs from continually slipping on treacherous slopes, and their feet and hands were always numb. Hours during the day were hardly noted, as they set their body clocks only by daylight and darkness. And aside from a vague awareness that Thanksgiving had just passed and Christmas was coming, many had no idea what date it was, much less what day of the week.

Moreover, because canteen water had to be thawed over campfires, stateside notions of hygiene had been abandoned from almost the moment they had set foot on Korean soil. A twig often had to do for a toothbrush, and they could barely lay their heads down for the night in an abandoned hootch without waking up with a scalpful of lice. Most had given up trying to wipe their runny noses with anything other than the sleeves of their filthy uniforms, and anyone who grew a mustache soon had a revolting mass of frozen mucus layered across his upper lip.

They bitched and groused, but they never shirked a command, remaining true to the Latin motto above the eagle on the Marine emblem: Semper Fidelis, "always faithful." And so, just past noon, while Fox Company mustered in the village of Hagaru-ri, Lieutenant Colonel Randolph Lockwood, commanding officer of the Seventh Regiment's Second Battalion, summoned his subordinate Captain William Edward Barber, Fox Company's new CO, for a trip in the company Jeep to scout Toktong Pass.

Barber was a decorated World War II veteran who had assumed command of Fox three weeks earlier at Koto-ri, after his predecessor, Captain Zorn, was transferred to Division headquarters. Barber was a tall thirty-year-old with a broad, nondescript face, an odd round nose, and thinning brown hair. In mufti he might have been taken for an actuary rather than a commander of a Marine rifle company, and few encountering him could have guessed that he'd been a star college baseball and basketball player. Yet despite his unremarkable exterior-his physical appearance reminded a few men in Fox Company of a younger version of the irascible banker Henry F. Potter in the movie It's a Wonderful Life-the captain carried himself with the demeanor and bearing of a hussar. This may have been a result of the long bareback rides he had taken as a child through snow-packed Appalachian hollows when he ran errands on the family's one plow horse during winters.

Barber had grown up in the rural town of Dehart, Kentucky, near the Ohio River, in a homestead hit hard by the Depression. His father, Woodrow, was a subsistence farmer and sometime carpenter; his mother, Mabel, grew vegetables in a small garden behind their house. Young Billy, the eighth of ten children, was a shy, sensitive child who devoured every book he could borrow from the local library, particularly volumes on history and current events.

He was a precocious student, the valedictorian of his high school class when he graduated at age fifteen, and early on he determined that his four brothers and five sisters needed his assistance, both educationally and financially. He always managed to find time to take his siblings aside and help them with their reading and writ ing, and even when he moved on to the nearby Morehead State Teachers College he relished returning on school breaks to join his father and brothers plowing and harvesting the family's small cornfield. When the Barbers killed a hog for special occasions, such as Thanksgiving or Christmas, it was always Billy who volunteered to dress the carcass.

In the late 1930s, Barber sensed a world war approaching, and while studying at Morehead State he joined the Marine reservespointedly without informing his parents, who considered the military as a second-class career for such a smart young man and would have preferred him to become an educator. In 1940, following his sophomore year, he further distressed his mother and father by quitting college and shipping out to boot camp at the Marine Corps' recruiting depot on Parris Island in South Carolina. He was generous to a fault, and his brothers and sisters looked forward to his numerous letters, as he never forgot to include a few dollarsoften doubling the amount when he sent birthday cards. When he returned home on leaves, he made sure to bring small mementos from his travels for everyone.

Barber was what the Marines called a "mustang," an enlisted man promoted to officer whose leadership skills had been honed in the ranks as opposed to the saddle. He proved to be a crack shot, and after boot camp he was retained at Parris Island as a marksmanship instructor. A year later, in 1941, feeling confined on the tiny basethe Marine Corps was only a small force of 18,000 men when he enlisted-he volunteered for the Corps' new paratroop service. He proved so adept at falling from airplanes that he was again ordered to stay on as an instructor, now at the Naval Air Station in Lakewood, New Jersey. From early on his superiors recognized something special in his character and marked him as a candidate for promotion.

After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Barber was transferred to the Marines' First Parachute Regiment in San Diego. It was there, at a USO canteen, that he met and fell in love with his future wife, lone. They were married in October 1942, the same year he was promoted to sergeant. Officer candidate school soon followed, and in February 1945, having received his commission, he landed with the Fifth Marines on Iwo Jima as a twenty-five-year-old lieutenant leading a rifle platoon. Through the awful attrition of the campaign, he wound up a company commander. On Iwo he was shot in the hand and was briefly evacuated when he began bleeding from both ears. He was diagnosed with a severe concussion, but he recovered and returned to the atoll, where he rescued two wounded Marines pinned down by enemy fire. For this he added the Silver Star for Gallantry to his Purple Heart.

He remained a company commander during the postwar occupation of Japan, and in early 1946 he was posted to Camp Lejeune in North Carolina as a recruiting officer. Then he was promoted to captain and transferred to Altoona, Pennsylvania. He was living at the Marine barracks there, training reservists, when on June 25, 1950, Kim 11 Sung's 90,000-man army, led by 150 Soviet-made tanks, swarmed across the 38th Parallel. Kim's forces routed the South Koreans and their American protectors and captured the capital of Seoul in three days. Halfway around the world, Bill Barber followed early news accounts of the war with a mixture of fascination, disgust, and sadness.

His fascination stemmed from a Marine officer's professional appreciation of the fighting spirit of Kim's ill-equipped but courageous and tenacious forces. The Koreans, geographically isolated, hemmed in by Russians, Mongols, and Japanese, had for centuries accepted their role as "shrimps among whales." It had actually made them tougher. They reminded Barber of the imperial Japanese forces he had fought in the Pacific. On the other hand, he was disgusted by the disorganized retreat of the unprepared U.S. Army down the peninsula. And he was saddened by the unusually high number of Marine company commanders, most of them fellow veterans of World War II, who were killed as the North Korea People's Army swiftly occupied 95 percent of the country.

By the time of MacArthur's audacious counterattack-the amphibious landing at Inchon, just southwest of Seoul, on September 15-Barber had received his orders to report to the front. He was en route as Fox Company embarked on the long sail around the peninsula and landed at Wonsan. He caught up with them just south of the secured village of Koto-ri.

Barber did not endear himself to Fox's careworn veterans when he arrived from Japan. His uniform was starched and spotless; even his dungarees were pressed; and one Marine noted that "he was all dressed up like a well-kept grave." But he believed that a Marine's appearance should reflect combat-readiness, and he was appalled at his new outfit's slovenly demeanor; he told several fellow officers that they reminded him of one of Pancho Villa's bandit gangs. He introduced himself by directing his platoon leaders to order all the Marines in Fox to field-shave with cold water, clean their filthy weapons, and prepare for a conditioning hike at 0600 the next morning. He also spread word to knock off the fairy-tale talk about being home for Christmas.

"Just what we need," said the veteran private first class Graydon Davis, "some candy-ass captain who wants us to troop and stomp. What in hell is this war coming to?"

Nor did Barber's official introductory remarks the next morning before the hike go over well. He told his assembled company that there was a lot of war left to fight, and Fox was damn well going to be prepared to fight it. He spoke in a tangy drawl. "I may not know about strategy," he said, "but I know a lot about tactics. And frankly, I'm a hell of a good infantry officer."

As the "Old Man's" coming-aboard speech ended and the assembly broke up, Dick Bonelli remarked to a group of buddies, "Somebody ought to tell this guy that Marines are more show-me than tell-me."

Barber overheard him but said nothing. He liked grumbling Marines. The more they bitched, the harder they fought. Plus, as an enlisted man he'd been a griper himself. Fox would learn soon enough that behind the new CO's prickly and fastidious exterior was a saltiness earned on the black sand beaches of the South Pacific.

3

Although Barber had only just met his superior Lieutenant Colonel Randolph Lockwood, he already admired Lockwood's moxie. The story of how the pudgy, pink-cheeked, pipe-smoking officer had held his own during his first meeting with "Blitzen Litzen" three weeks earlier had circulated swiftly throughout the Seventh Regiment. When Lockwood, a genial graduate of the Naval Academy and Harvard, arrived at Koto-ri to assume command of the Second Battalion, Litzenberg had taken in his preppy demeanor with a thunderous stare from his big coal eyes.

"I see you're overweight," Litzenberg said by way of introduction.

"Nothing like a mountain campaign to get a man into shape," Lockwood replied. His voice was a little too cheerful.

"I'm a hard taskmaster," Litzenberg said, glaring at him.

Lockwood smiled. "That's what I've heard, Colonel."

No one else dared talk to Litzenberg like this, and the exchange immediately elevated Lockwood's status among Litzenberg's underlings, if not with the colonel himself.

Now, as Barber and Lockwood's Jeep ascended the road to Toktong Pass, the weak sun burned the haze off mountain meadows dotted with thatched-roof huts and empty oxcarts standing nearby. This was a sudden new world-big, muscular, and edged at its margins by brooding storm clouds. It was not lost on either Marine that mountain warfare was alien territory for an amphibious force trained and accustomed to fighting on beaches. Both men had received sketchy reports of enemy contact earlier that day at the Chosin, probably involving Chinese units that had forded the Yalu, and this gave their seven-mile drive an uneasy tone.

In fact, as they snaked farther away from Hagaru-ri and up the steep slopes toward Toktong-san, two things struck them with foreboding. The first was their topographical maps. These were outdated, adapted from old Japanese documents, and nothing on the charts seemed to match the contours of the terrain. Peaks loomed high on the wrong side of the road, valleys opened where there should have been hills, and snow-covered foot trails meandered next to streams-frozen solid and marbled with blue ice-that should not have existed. More ominous was the absence of refugees. Since the landings at Wonsan the Americans had encountered emaciated North Korean civilians on nearly every road and donkey path. But this morning the MSR was deserted even by the small groups of bedraggled boys who usually begged for candy and chewing gum.

Barber had done his homework, which included reading a translated copy of Military Lessons, the propaganda tract the communist high command had disseminated among its troops. This pamphlet had been found in the pocket of a dead Chinese NCO at Sudong. After grudgingly noting the tactical superiority of U.S. tanks, planes, and artillery, it declared, "Their infantry is weak. 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 scanned intelligence files prepared by the South Korean army interpreters at HQ in Hagaru-ri. Several local farmers had been interviewed, and they reported that the area's abundant game had lately been spooked out of the narrow mountain vales around the Toktong Pass. It was as if something was moving around in there. He suspected it was a shitload of Reds.