Voices from the Korean War - Douglas Rice [112]
With four men to a litter, we carried the wounded along a ridge line the 3rd BN rifle companies had taken less than an hour earlier. There was a parallel ridge, about three-hundred yards south of our ridge. We hadn’t traveled very far when we noticed a group of men, wearing OD rain gear, moving toward us on the parallel ridge. A short distance ahead, both ridges merged into a single trail. As we neared this point, these men began to yell as us. Thinking they were Americans, and happy to see friendly forces, we yelled back. Shortly afterwards, they opened fire up on us with burp guns, almost cutting one of our wounded soldiers in half. For the next two hours we engaged in a firefight. However, being outnumbered, cut-off, out of ammo, and badly shot up, our group of approximately fifty-six men surrendered. On May 18, 1951—I became a Prisoner of War.
A week later on the twenty-fifth, around 3:00 AM, as our group of about three-hundred POW’s marched north in two columns on either side of the road, an artillery shell exploded in the middle of the columns killing or wounding several POW’s, along with several Chinese guards. A piece of shrapnel hit me in the right shoulder knocking me to the ground. Another POW cried out, “Help, help. Someone give me a tourniquet, my leg is off.” Men were yelling, screaming, and crying out in pain. In the pitch black darkness, it was utter chaos.
Fearing more explosions, my main concern was to get the hell away from there as fast as I could. I yelled at a buddy, who was walking behind me, and told him what I was planning to do and for him to follow me. So, we took off running leaving the sounds of the wounded behind. In the process I also left men from Item Company behind; I never saw them again until the end of the war. My buddy and I were found the next morning by a Chinese artillery officer, who spoke broken English. He told us to walk north and we would not be killed. That night, around dark, we were recaptured by the Chinese infantry.
A piece of shrapnel from my right shoulder caused a steady stream of blood to run down my body and fill up my combat boot. A Chinese medic bandaged my wound with the shrapnel still sticking up through the top of my shoulder bone.
For the next few days we continued walking north and collected small groups of POW’s as we went, until we arrived at a POW collecting station—called the Pines. While here, another Chinese medic pulled the piece of shrapnel from my shoulder with a pair of pliers; shattering and splintering a lot of bone in the process. We were here only a few days and our numbers swelled to between two-hundred fifty and three-hundred men.
One morning, the Chinese singled out a small group of ten-to-twelve wounded men, placing the most serious ones on an ox-cart with the others walking behind. In this fashion, we moved from one primitive hospital to another—I was in this group. During this time we were turned over to the North Korean Army. We traveled through Wonson—on the east coast—west to Yong Dock, finally reaching the NKPA’s 39th Field Hospital in Pyongyang.
Within days of arriving, blow flies had worked their way underneath my bandages and maggots had begun to eat the infection. I was taken to surgery where two female North Korean doctors, under the supervision of Russian or Czech civilian doctors, operated on me—without the use of anesthetic. They removed shrapnel, and bone fragments, during two surgeries. For the next three months I carried my right arm between the second and third buttons of my fatigue jacket. Finally, the drainage stopped and the wound healed.
During this time frame, the group of wounded men who left the Pines with me died one-by-one. Those who became too weak to travel were left behind, in filthy hospital rooms, to die later. We were thrown out of the 39th Field Hospital, by a North Korean general, after a large U.S. bombing raid almost leveled the city of Pyongyang on August 20, 1951. We then had to walk twenty miles to