Voices from the Korean War - Douglas Rice [4]
I kept going all night and before daylight, I caught a slug that had glanced off the frozen road. It struck me in the middle of my forehead, knocking me to the ground. I don’t know how long I laid there, but it was getting light when I came to. After I was able to get to my feet, I continued moving down the road until I came across some soldiers under a bombed out bridge. We soon decided to head for a road that was on the opposite side of an open field. A sergeant, who I didn’t know, told me to cover them until they reached the road, then they would cover me. I fired until I ran out of ammo, but I noticed they weren’t firing to cover for me. As I looked around I saw them all running down the road, because they were being fired at from another hill.
I quickly jumped to my feet and ran to the road. There lying in ditch were roughly ten trucks that had been shot up. I crawled underneath one of them to get out of sight, and to get warm. Around noon, a flight of jets came soaring across the sky strafing the hill where we had been receiving fire. However, before they could get their fingers off the triggers, they were strafing the trucks—talk about something getting your attention.
The Chinese never came down to the trucks, so after dark I moved up into the hills. Wandering lost, sometime in the night, I came across a house set apart from a small village. Cautiously entering the house, I came upon four GI’s that were asleep. I had gone two days and nights without sleep, or food, so I laid down with them. Suddenly, I was rudely awakened by a “Chink” with a burp gun. After rounding us all up, we were put in a small compartment where the home owners kept their bedding. They must have been a rear echelon unit, because they didn’t know what to do with us. All day long our planes worked over the village and we were afraid they would eventually hit us, but they didn’t.
We were kept there for several days with only one ball of rice, which was about the size of a softball, for us and two ROK soldiers they had captured earlier. I believe it was the second night when they took us outside, where they pointed south and told us to go. Having beaten all of us, and my head bleeding all down my front, they probably thought we would die anyway. However, they kept the two ROK soldiers.
Having walked all night, the following morning we laid under a large rock on a ridge line. After dark we started walking again, and at one point we were paralleling the road when we heard the patter of tennis shoes on the frozen road. Quickly, we laid behind a bank along a rice paddy and watched what looked to be a battalion of Chinese trotting up the road. When they passed, we crossed a frozen river and found a burned out house just before daylight. We laid up there for the night. After daybreak, we looked out across a rice paddy and noticed a bombed out bridge. Under the bridge, fixing rice was an entire company of Chinese. We must have walked within a hundred yards of them.
Weak, and hungry, we decided it was time to move again. It started to snow. As we crossed over a hill in front of us we picked up the road into the valley. As we were walking along the road, the snow stopped. We looked to our left, and noticed up the hill about fifty yards were a bunch of Chinese digging in; they just stopped and watched as we walked by.
About a half-mile down the road we saw a welcomed sight—a unit of the 187th Airborne. We were evacuated to a Swedish Red Cross hospital back in Pusan and there to the 361st Army Hospital in Tokyo.
* * * * * *
Eventually, I was sent back home and then to Camp Gordon, Georgia. Eight months later I volunteered to go back. I would spend another year in Korea with a self-propelled 105 unit.
~~Four~~
Joseph Marlett
27th Infantry Regiment
25th Infantry Division
U.S. Army
With my mother signing for me, I enlisted in the U.S. Army on February 17, 1948—ten days after my seventeenth birthday.