This comment (story) was posted at the end of "Wounded Soldiers Maltreated

[lebkuchen]

The original piece is here:

http://www.interventionmag.com/cms/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=654

The commentary I'm referring to is here. Pretty sobering.

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I turned 17 years old on Feb. 22, 1948 and enlisted in the U.S. Naval reserve continuing High School. After making two cruises on a Destroyer Escort I decided I did not like Navy life and quit High School in my senior year in order to enlist in the Regular Army. I started my basic training on Dec 1 1948 at Camp Picket Virginia.

Korea 1950 -- The Not Forgotten War

I was nineteen years old, a corporal in the Regular Army, the date was early November 1950, snowing and cold. My division, the Third Infantry Division, had just made an amphibious landing at Wonsan, North Korea, from where we were to proceed north to end the war. Had there been enemy forces present on the beaches of Wonsan, we would probably have been wiped out. My half track refused to start, and had to be towed behind a deuce and a half (a two and a half ton truck). The enemy had long since vanished, absorbed by the civilian population. Carrying on in the best military manner we dug in on the high ground preparing for battle -- just in time to see Bob Hope and his entertainment troop arrive and leave in convoy, heading north to entertain MacArthur's troops. On that first night the only shots fired and the only casualties were of our own making, when nervous fingers squeezed off rounds into shadows. Up and down the line sergeants and lieutenants were screaming "cease fire" over and over. When dawn broke we loaded up and started off in convoy to the north, following not a general, not a colonel, but Bob Hope -- me again being towed behind a deuce and a half.

During our march north, rumors abounded. We heard that MacArthur had moved too fast and too far north and that we were cut off to the south by the regrouped North Korean armies. That rumor turned out to be true; we were indeed cut off from our supply line. Rumor also had it that MacArthur wanted to continue his push into China all the way to Russia. That rumor was also confirmed; he, MacArthur, would later be relieved of his command for that decision. Another rumor flew around that we had won the war and would be going home for Christmas. That rumor turned out to be false.

Our Marines had gone as far north as the Chosin Reservoir, a place where we never should have been, less than 100 miles from the Yalu River which separates North Korea and China. Chinese Army forces had entered the war on the side of North Korea, and the Marines had been badly pummeled at Chosin. Our outfit, the 3d AAA Battalion assigned to X Corp. began running convoys against a steady flow of refugees to the Chosin reservoir to help evacuate the Marines. Until that time we had only seen sporadic fighting, mostly sniper fire or mortar attacks, while on convoy. "Bed Check Charlie" apparently North Korea's last airplane, would fly over at night and drop a hand grenade or two just to let us know he was there. The old and noisy prop driven plane gave us plenty of warning and did no damage. We never even made an attempt to shoot it down.

I often wondered if the refugees thought of us as the bigger of the enemy. We used them as slave labor and treated them with scorn and disdain. We killed their animals, some for fun, some for food. We burned their homes to the ground; some raped their women.

I'll never forget the screams of a young Korean girl who after having given herself to some GI, for food, was then gang raped by three others. We were heading north up the east side of the peninsula. against the flow of the refugees going south. It was cold, dark and snowing and we sought shelter in a straw covered house which was amazingly warm. Our squad leader told us we would spend the night there and refugees as well as some of our infantrymen were wandering in out of the cold. There was very little light in this rather large smoke filled one room house, just candles and the occasional beam from some ones flashlight. In the corner of the room near where I had rolled out my blankets, a GI was bartering with a young girl for sex with C rations. She finally agreed and removed her not so white baggy trousers uncovering a not so clean body, a fecal smell permeated the room. The GI whose pants were open though was not deterred, being in a high state of arousal, and their frantic coupling was over in a matter of seconds. From another dark corner of the room I heard a GI saying to one of his buddies "shit man………lets us get some of that poooooon--tang" . The young girl tearfully took her can of C rations and started to get dressed but was grabbed from behind, thrown to the floor and mounted by at least three other GI's. She made no attempt to get them off of her, letting them finish, and sobbingly took the rations that they proffered, to me though it was rape. She only wanted to somehow survive another frigid night.

Rolling up into a ball she wrapped her body around her C ration treasures, sobbing to herself. I wanted to somehow comfort her, trying to give her my chocolate ration from my food, but she looked at me through tear filled eyes with revulsion, thinking I guess, he only wants sex, and shrinking back into the little ball of herself sobbing. I shoved my chocolate ration under her meager blanket, I couldn't though stand hearing her cries of anguish and I went back out side to sleep sitting in the cab of the half track. I knew in my own heart that what had just occurred in that mud straw covered hut was wrong but after all, this was war and those GI's in there were the conquering heroes exercising the rights of soldiers since the beginning of warfare! I knew also that I could say nothing about what had taken place because my life depended on them at that moment in time.

Days later, on some unknown road, we set up a line of fire covering a crossroad to aid the Marines who were retreating from the “Frozen Chosin”. It was bitter, bitter cold, with the wind moaning through the blown off stumps of scrub pine. Someone said that it was -45 degrees that night, and with the wind chill factor it was -70 to -80. Lacking winter gear, day and night we were huddled in our sleeping bags fully dressed, in violation of Army regulations. How could you effectively fight hand to hand in a sleeping bag was the logic behind that regulation. At that time though we were more afraid of freezing to death than of having to fight. We were three months out of the States and still had only our summer uniforms and gear. I was one of the lucky ones with a down filled mountain bag. I had to pull a dead marine out of it and exchange it for my summer bag, but as it was all over for him, he didn't mind.

I was in the cab of my half-track, which was a desert-designed vehicle with no heater in it. The muffler was under the seat and provided a 2-degree source of heat if that. The rest of the enclosed space was surrounded with 1/4 inch armor plate, open on top, and if you were sitting at home in a walk-in freezer it would have been warmer than where we were. One of my ammo bearers, Number 39, had dismounted from the gun bucket and squatted down next to the tail pipe where he got a slight bit of warmth from the exhaust. He was a Korean from the ROK Army of conscripts, which had been given to us as fill-in personnel. I can see him to this day, wiry built, about my size -- 5’ 6" tall, broad shoulders, wonderful almond shaped eyes and three gold capped teeth. He could speak no English and I could speak no Korean, but we learned to communicate with each other via good old pidgin English. Korean names were unpronounceable to us, which is why we used numbers. I had two Koreans in my squad, 39 and 41. What happened that night bonded 39 and me for the rest of our time together in Korea.

As I said it was bitter cold, and 39 had huddled next to the exhaust attempting to keep warm. He had a blanket wrapped around his head, and the fumes coming from the exhaust finally put him under and he became unconscious. Eventually the other Korean member of the team, thinking he was merely asleep, attempted to wake him up. But when he pushed him, he just rolled over, frozen in the squatting position he had been found in. 41 came forward and dragged me out of the cab for he thought his friend was dead. I ran back to 39 and, fearing the same thing, radioed the platoon sergeant, a career sergeant left over from WWII. He said he would be there ASAP. I went back to 39, and with his partner and another member of the squad we managed to get his body straightened out and rolled over so that I could administer artificial respiration in the old fashioned boy scout tradition. As I was working on him, Platoon Sgt. Red Evans appeared, looked at me with contempt and said, “for Christ sake, I thought you said one of your ***** crew was hurt, he’s only a ***** gook, let the shithead die,” turned on his heels and went back to the CP which had heat in it. I continued working on 39 and finally saw that he was breathing. He was still as cold as ice so I stuck him in my down bag and made him as comfortable as possible. The bitter cold night reluctantly gave way to a colder snowy morning, and we watched with anxiety as the gray of land and sky acceded to a pale pink in the East. Fingers were tense on cold triggers, for that is the time of night when you start seeing gray ghosts and every bush or snow mound is the enemy with his weapon aimed at you.

The morning wore on. No enemy troops appeared, and we went forward another few miles hoping to meet up with the Marines. Before we got to them though we came under a mortar attack by the North Koreans who had cut us off. We did an about face and headed south again. Not being able to get off the roads in our vehicles made us sitting targets for a sharp mortar team, and only speed saved us. As we tore down the road leap-frogging the mortar rounds, Sgt. Red Evans ripped past me in his jeep, saw 39 in the half-track, and never showed any emotion. I swore to myself that Red would get his some day when the time was right.

Sgt. Red gave me the opportunity one day but I couldn’t carry through on it. He was in a jeep about two hundred yards from me popping away with his carbine at an old lame Korean woman who was running along the ridge line hauling a load of fire wood and trying to get out of his line of fire. I cranked up the ANGR9 radio and asked him what the hell he was shooting at. His reply was, "just a little target practice." I called him a scum bag, and he jumped out of his jeep and came towards me with his rifle in his hand. I sighted my quad fifties on him and thought to myself that no one would ever know if a round or two cooked off and blew him away. I couldn't do it! He called me a Yankee ***** sucker and swore he would get me busted to private. I told him to make sure he kept looking over his red neck shoulder.

At this time we still had not seen the enemy face to face, and most of us were, aside from the brutal cold, living in a kind of dream world. For me, it was almost like a Boy Scout camping trip into the Adirondack Mountains of New York in winter, and I was still fascinated with the aspect of war.

Then all hell broke loose. The Chinese made a frontal attack pushing us south, and the North Koreans made an attack from the rear pushing us north. With mountains to the west and the Sea of Japan to the east, we were completely cut off. Now the fascination with war came to a screeching halt with the first corpse that I had to search for intelligence purposes, and how shocked I was to uncover a young Oriental soldier with the top of his head blown away, crawling with maggots, looking like an opened can of C ration Chef Boyardee Spaghetti, a treat I could never again eat, then to find in his breast pocket a picture of his wife and a little boy with beautiful laughing eyes, soaked in his blood, his loving family. I thought," but he's only a young man and he had so much more than me!" This then was the enemy? This was who I was supposed to hate? I was only 19, not even married, and yet I had destroyed a family forever. Was it my 50 caliber bullet that took off the top of his head? Did I do that to another human being? I had been raised to respect life and to love my fellow man. I sat and cried, as I am crying now 50 years later.

This all took place in North Korea in the first three months of my entry into the killing zone. There were nine more months to go, and from that time on I despised killing but reluctantly continued to carry out my orders. Sgt. Red Evans, the platoon sergeant who left my ROK ammunition bearer to die, and Lt. Alpine, the platoon leader who was later to leave me to die, both Americans, were the only two people I really wanted to kill.

As things worked out, we were soon involved in running for our lives, retreating to Hungnam, North Korea, debarkation site of Americas largest amphibious evacuation, where we again provided covering fire for the retreating Army and Marines. We spent 13 days firing and under fire in typical trench warfare conditions, outgoing heavy artillery screaming and rumbling over our heads, incoming not reaching us for the most part. Never raising our heads above the trenches, for the air was thick with small arms fire. We were out of food and water by the third or fourth day and lived on whatever we could scrounge. The days were fairly quiet, but the nights were filled with bullets and White Phosphorus artillery rounds from both sides. We slept standing up or in position at our guns, when we slept.

Finally we pulled out of our trenches under heavy Navy covering fire, driving the last few miles to the beaches where LSTs were waiting for us. Never was I so happy to see an LST and to smell again the acrid odor of diesel fuel. Behind us the Army Corps of Engineers burned and dynamited all bridges and standing buildings. That was Christmas Eve 1950. To our rear lay Hungnam, a once thriving city, totally burned out and devoid of any habitable building.

We landed north of Pusan, and I never saw Red Evans again as shortly I left for R&R in Japan and, when I got back, my battery (Battery D) was on the other side of the peninsula. I was placed in a "repple depple" (replacement depot) and reassigned to another battery where we started another trek north on the west side of the peninsula. For the next nine months we made many trips north, south, east, and west, sometimes riding shotgun for convoys, sometimes holding positions for retreating forces, sometimes guarding air base perimeters, and sometimes acting as bait in order to get the enemy to reveal his position.

We would drive along known roads behind enemy lines hoping to be fired upon, at which point the Air Force would take over and look for the mortar or artillery positions who were firing on us and wipe them out. I recall a day in early spring having just been promoted to Sergeant, when we passed through a little village and surprised a squad of North Korean infantry who were resting by the side of the road. We knew that we shouldn't be where we were. We were outnumbered and lost, but they didn't know what we were doing and must have been so surprised and in shock to see us in their territory that they watched us drive through in a cloud of dust never lifting a weapon. My Koreans went ballistic, beating on the top of my helmet and screaming " Sargee Sargee, No Hucking Good Ho hucking good ---NK----shoot ! shoot"!! We got to the other side of the village, looped around it through a dry rice paddy, got back on the main road, put the pedal to the metal and watched the mortar rounds follow us down the road. The NK had finally woken up.

It was when we were advancing and retreating and again advancing that I had my run-in with our platoon leader Second Lieutenant Alpine. While heading down a winding one lane mountain road I lost my brakes in my half track. Ten to fifteen tons of iron on wheels rolling down a mountain with no way of stopping it can be an awesome sight. I was somewhere in the middle of the convoy and in order to keep from crashing into the track or tank ahead of me I would swerve past them. This continued until finally I passed Lieutenant Alpine in the lead jeep. He was screaming at me to pull over, thinking that I was trying to bug out on him. At the bottom of the mountain I finally found a soft spot off the road where I could ditch the half track without killing everyone on board. Only to have this cowardly, crazy, bastard lieutenant screaming at me with tears streaming down his face, that I had left him vulnerable and he was going to bring me up on charges of attempted desertion etc. etc. I went before the battalion commander who didn’t much like Alpine anyway, and he, understanding what I had done, dropped all charges.

Soon after that episode we found ourselves once again holding a line on the Imjin River while our 15th Infantry Regiment passed through on yet another retreat south across the 38th parallel. I was dug in at the edge of the river and had been given orders by Lieutenant Alpine to hold that position, firing over the heads of the 15th regiment until he gave me the word to pull out. I had a couple of new crew members from the States who were pretty green and under fire for the first time. One of them, a young guy by the name of Charlie, was pretty scared, and I was trying to keep an eye on him. As the afternoon wore on and it started to get dark we were firing in short bursts to keep the barrels from overheating when Charlie just kind of vanished. One minute he was there and the next -- gone! I thought to myself, "I hope he isn't running scared in the wrong direction".

It was now pitch dark and I waited and waited for the word to pull out but it never came. I raised the Lieutenant on the radio; he ordered me to maintain radio silence and signed off. The platoon sergeant was nowhere to be found. I was on my own. The word to pull out never came. I was sure that Alpine had left me there to die. As soon as what was left of the 15th went by I got my crew together. Charlie was still missing. As the last of the 15th Regiment light tanks were passing I gave my driver the order to go. Charlie would have to fend for himself. I was in my seat with the door open as John, my driver, started to pull out. I was looking behind the track, when a dark shape with a gun came out of the darkness towards me. "Oh shit" I said, "a ***** gook," grabbing my carbine from behind the seat, cocking it and sliding out of the track in one smooth motion with my carbine at waist level. The dark shape ran right into the end of the barrel as I pulled the trigger. Click it went. The clip had fallen out when I grabbed it, and there was thankfully an empty chamber, for the dark shape turned out to be a "shit scared" Charlie. He had been hiding under the track. There was no time to chew his ass out as we were once again dodging mortar rounds from the north as we fell in line behind the 15th and made it back to our next redoubt where Alpine couldn’t look me in the eye. I knew for sure then that he had tried to get rid of me.

We were sent from there to guard an Air Force base, really good duty as we got to eat in the Air Force mess hall. Fresh food and booze was flown in daily from Japan, and we fraternized with some of the fly boys who didn’t treat us like shit. They even brought back stateside movies. We got back to regular four on, eight off shifts with nothing to do but maintain our equipment and rest. There was a river near by where we went swimming, as it was now summer. Even though it seemed like a vacation and we weren’t getting shot at, there were still losses. The L19 observation planes were nothing more than canvas covered Piper Cubs and would frequently come back full of holes with non functioning gear and crash on the landing strip. Sometimes the pilots would walk away from a wreck and other times would be transported out in a body bag. It was all a matter of luck, a mere toss of the dice. One never knew when it was going to be all over.

While we were there some replacements came in from the States, scared and on edge, but it was a good place to be introduced into warfare, that is if there is such a thing. In reading the roster of a group of draftees who had just arrived I spotted the name of a Private Williams from Peekskill NY, the very city where I had enlisted in the Army. I pulled a few strings and got him placed in my platoon as we were the only Yankees in the outfit. We soon became friends and talked about places we had been before the war as well as mutual acquaintances. One morning on the way to the mess tent, on a path which we had walked every day for weeks, Williams went without me I don’t remember why, maybe I was hung over and late getting up, maybe since it was the rainy season I was looking for dry socks or boots, maybe I just didn’t feel like eating that morning, but whatever the reason was, it saved my life. Williams stepped on a “Bouncing Betty” land mine, a cute little device which pops out of the ground and explodes at waist level assuring a kill. On this day it caught Williams between the legs and blew him in half. He bled to death in a matter of minutes.

On another occasion while I was setting up a perimeter of trip flares since there had been attempted guerilla infiltration, fate again stepped in and took me by the hand out of harm’s way. A trip mine is nothing more than a small fixed mortar tube, a pipe exactly like what I had made as a kid to shoot pears with. Instead of pears though it had a quarter pound of dynamite in its base and a flare with a parachute attached on top. A simple device like the trigger on a hand grenade, spring loaded, was activated when the cotter pin was removed, and if anyone as much as brushed up against the wire connecting these devices they would go off, illuminating the darkest of nights for miles. I had just gotten the last tube in place and was bent over the tube easing the cotter pin out of its slot when I suddenly realized that this thing was going to go off. I don’t know how I knew that, I just did. Some voice in my mind said get your ***** head out of the way as I was looking directly down the tube. I leaned back on my knees as it went off. One of my men saw the whole thing and thought for sure that my head had been blown off as my helmet went flying in the air -- luckily my head wasn’t in it. My whole body was lifted off of the ground though and did two complete somersaults, landing about fifteen feet from the smoking tube, unconscious. They got me to the medic’s tent with nothing more than a blown eardrum and removed flecks of paper, gunpowder, and metal from my eyes and face. Once again fate had stepped in and warned me of impending danger.

Our mini vacation lasted about a month until finally one day we were back on the road running convoys, when my final episode with Lt. Alpine came about. One night after digging in, he short handed me, taking three of my crew to set up a walking post around his CP when he heard there was expected to be enemy infiltration, leaving me with only one man. I knew that we were a long way from the enemy and that it was just his paranoia kicking in. I had squirreled away a bottle of booze one of my Air Force buddies had gotten for me and decided it would be a good night to just get wasted. I passed out at around midnight and the next thing I remember was stumbling over a mess gear wire in front of Alpine’s tent in pitch blackness. I was dressed in a tee shirt and shorts and had my trench knife with brass knuckles in my hand. I landed on the ground face down, stunned, and one of the sentries who heard me called out, “halt, who’s there?" Drunk as I was I couldn’t answer him. He then approached me and put a 45 caliber sub machine gun barrel up against my ear and pulled the trigger. It went click. He cocked it and tried again. It went clunk, click. He tried a third time and again nothing happened. Just then another of the sentries came forward with a flashlight, looked and screamed, “oh God, it's Sgt. Naar.” Realizing that I was still half in the bag they dragged me back to my half-track and let me sleep it off without making a report of the incident. They knew my feelings towards Alpine, who had slept through it all never knowing how close he came to death. The sentry who had tried to shoot me brought the three rounds over to me the next day; all of percussion caps had been hit but none had gone off. I still have one of those spent rounds on a key chain. I found out much later that the very next day that same gun went off by accident in the mess line.

I shortly thereafter started walking in my sleep and the Battery CO sent me to a field hospital for rest and evaluation, then to Headquarters battery, since by then I had nearly enough points for rotation back to the States. I never saw Alpine again. As much as I hated him I couldn't kill him, nor could I kill the enemy whoever they might be, for by this time I wasn’t sure anymore who I was or who they were, and I had found the wonderful elixir called booze, which allowed me to forget the stink and the grunts and screams of death and the emptiness of being.

In conclusion, after eleven and a half months of combat, I was on my way home to a land that I perceived would be a kinder gentler land. Little did I know at the time that the United States is not a peace loving nation as is promoted, but rather a nation dictated by greed, money, politics and power. It took many years, plus the murders of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King, to say nothing of the millions of innocent military people who have been killed in our "justified wars" along with the millions of innocent civilians who have been sucked into the maelstrom of war for me to realize that wars are fought for one and only one reason, money and power.

It has also taken fifty years for me to finally put together the reason for an event which took place in Korea. I remember the incident with photographic clarity. Our unit, along with an Infantry Regiment, was putting on a show for a group of visiting congressmen and senators who were trying to prove why and what their military expenditures were for and why they would need more money to keep the war going. We were positioned at the base of Hill 101, one of the many numbered hills in Korea. It was occupied at that time by North Korean troops, but had no significant military value other than being high ground. While the infantry advanced up the side of the hill, flushing out the North Korean enemy much as you would on a rabbit hunt, the NKs started running in front of the infantry. We picked them off with our 50 caliber machine guns and 40 mm cannons while the big wigs got their jollies off in their limos at the base of the hill. As I said this was a show, a show of strength, a show of our military superiority.

“Hi there Senator, how did you like that? Did you see how we blew that gook in half with a hit that was 20 feet off the target. Did you see the five gooks who were killed with only one round of armor-piercing 50 caliber bullets? “ That one round went through five people tearing their guts out, a little bit more with each passing. “Hey Congressman, did you see the group of six we got with only one mortar round? I guess you couldn't see the real details from your limo. I guess you couldn't see the body parts flung over the side of the hill like so many pounds of bloody meat. I guess you also couldn't see one of our boys who was laying on his stomach, cheek resting on his rifle as if asleep in the early warm spring weather. When we turned him over we could see that one of our own rounds had penetrated his anus and came out of his chest, taking his rib cage, heart, and vital organs along with it! But he looked so peaceful lying there in the warm sun, right arm extended, dead eyes staring out over the valley. Oh well, he was only a farm boy from Tennessee (expendable). Were you the one who presented his family with the notification of his death? Did you convince them that he died a hero's death? Wasn't that a great show? Now you can go home and tell your constituents about the glory of war. What I'm sure won’t be told though was that some of our GIs were killed putting on this great show, this wonderful "fund raising event".

Before the big wigs got back to Japan, the battlefield of Hill 101 was cleaned up, our boys, the lucky ones, were put in body bags and sent home to a hero's ceremony, the unlucky ones ended up in hospitals being put back together again, forever altered physically and emotionally. Hill 101 was given back to the North Koreans, and the "Show" was over.

epilogue

I was discharged honorably from Camp Stewart Georgia as a Sergeant First Class, in the spring of 1952 at which time I pushed to the back of my mind with a lot of help from booze, my military experiences.

Realizing now what I had been through I want to emphasize the fact that even though my heart was not into killing, I followed my orders and did what was expected of me as a good soldier. I refused to kill for the fun of it , man or beast. I refused to kill civilians even though we were ordered to kill anything that moved , “man woman or child” (in what I now know was a violation of the Geneva Convention) unless that person was shooting at me. My own sense of morality would not allow me to destroy indiscriminately. In later years, having seen the kind of wholesale killing that went on under the guise of (collateral damage) during the Nam, the Gulf war, as well as Kosovo, Panama, Columbia, San Salvador to name a few, it has made me ashamed to admit that I served in the US Army. It almost makes me ashamed to admit that I am American for we have certainly left a bloody path behind us.

I have made numerous attempts to have this story published….no one wants it, it must strike a raw nerve, maybe you will be the one to have the courage to do it. I am not ashamed of these events nor do I , contrary to some , consider myself a coward in any way, I was a good soldier but so very young.

Although these memories were pushed to the back of my mind our past has a way of coming to the surface in later years and at age 69, I started putting down on paper what I had been through. The story that you just read is by no means the whole story as I will, if I live long enough, someday make it into a book to pass on to my grandaughter in the hopes that maybe in the future there will be no more war. All names of the persons entered herein have been changed with the exception of mine.

http://www.interventionmag.com/cms/modules.php?op=modload&name=NS-Comments&file=index&sid=654&tid=1108&mode=&order=&thold=

[bobbieinok]

1. What can one say after reading this??????

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