Dad and I were never what you’d call close. Didn’t talk a lot, didn’t spend a lot of time together. He wasn’t much of a hands-on father, and I was either out with friends or reading in my room or using half the furniture in the house to support my wildly optimistic, rapidly-growing, 300-foot-long Hot Wheels racetrack. He was there for the important stuff. Taught me to drive, was there when I needed him, mostly shook his head at whatever new scheme his son was cooking up next. Virtually all of my memories of him include him sitting in his chair in the living room, smoking, petting the dog, and watching the world go by our window. One of the very few pictures I have of him is this one, from a posed group photo at his job at Coca Cola.
Dad was not very social either, not very talkative or open. But sometimes someone would call up and he’d answer the phone and his face would light up. Soon some other middle-aged guy would stop by and they’d talk for hours. Afterward he’d just say he knew the guy from “the service” and let it go at that.
He never told me war stories. I knew he’d been in the Korean War and I’d heard him mention Pork Chop Hill before, but he never brought the subject up around me. Until one day he heard from a buddy that there was a book on the subject and he was mentioned in it. By that time I was accomplished in hunting down wanted books for myself from the network of bookstores up and down the East Coast — this is very, very pre-Amazon — and we managed to get a copy. And he was, indeed, mentioned.
The Battle of Pork Chop Hill is actually two infantry battles fought while the various aggressors in the Korean War were negotiating an armistice. The U.N. won the first battle, but only after two days of heavy fighting with lots of casualties and an unbelievable amount of firepower thrown around. The Hill was near an outpost near the Main Line of Resistance, but didn’t actually have a lot of strategic value. On March 23, 1953, a Chinese battalion took the hill. U.N. forces fought to regain it but lost half their men before pulling back.
Dad was in Company F, 17th Infantry, under Captain Monroe D. King. King Company made it to the trenches on the hill but got shelled in ten-minute blasts off and off. When they got there, well…
From “Pork Chop Hill: The American Fighting Man In Action, Korea, Spring 1953” by S.L.A. Marshall:
First man to enter the Pork Chop works, Cpl. William H. Bridges, saw two Chinese rise from among the rocks beyond the parados and fire directly on First Platoon with submachine guns. He yelled, “Watch out!” and dove for the trench. The burst cut down five men close behind him.
Pvt Rudolph Gordon made the trench almost at the same moment. Turning leftward, he started for the second bunker down the line. Three grenades came at him from behind its far wall. They fell short. He and Bridges grenaded back. But protected by the bunker mass, the Chinese grenadiers played African dodger, revealing head and shoulder just long enough to heave their potato mashers.
Within the perimeter which the group formed on the knob were three small, partly collapsed bunkers. Eight or nine of the worst-spent men took shelter under their sandbag walls. The others moved into nearby shell craters. The holes were not deep enough for good cover. Using spoons, knives and bayonets for the work they lacked the strength to wield the small entrenching tool they tried to widen and deepen them. The only other activity was an endless cleaning of rifles and carbines, done with toothbrushes, the standby equipment of the soldier when nothing else will free his grimed rifle. Kuzmick set the example.
The others followed it, though their response was trancelike. Since early morning they had been without water. Faces caked, tongues thickened by the dust shower which plagued the hill, under lashing by the guns and mortars, they no longer talked to each other. Nor did they move from their places except when shaken loose by an exploding shell. From the foreground, an almost constant bullet fire rained upon the knob. Occasionally, a grenade came sailing in. Yet they saw not a single human target, and therefore made no attempt to return fire. In the end that perhaps mattered very little, since most of them no longer had sufficient strength to raise weapon to shoulder and aim. Than this, there is no more moving entry in the record of King, that young Americans too exhausted to fight may still obey such group discipline as their enfeebled resources permit. It was to be their portion for four hours.
“We lay there and took it,” said Corporal Bridges. “There was nothing else to do.” To the few who endured it, the earlier trials of the day seemed nothing compared with this final test. Hit and harassed, endlessly cleaning weapons with no valid hope of again using them, they still held ground. The earth and rock banks which they had raised above their small craters were creased and scattered by the bullet storm. The enemy artillery, which had ranged widely over Pork Chop, now concentrated against this one small area of defiance. The embankments caved in. The sandbag walls were flattened. Repeatedly, the men were buried under the dirt shower. Weapons freshly cleaned were refouled. Again the toothbrushes were plied. In this way continued the monotonously deadly round. At the end, fourteen had survived it, sick and shaken but relatively whole-bodied. Seven were Americans, the others ROKs.
The book reads like a love letter. Marshall wrote as if all soldiers were gods, using fiercely overblown prose that raises those men to unmatchable deities. And maybe, for that time, they were. Dad seemed quietly proud that we’d read it, even as he told us to forget about it. I think he was glad we knew, but was even gladder we found out from someone besides him, if that makes sense.
My dad acted bravely, both in actions and in endurance, fighting for his country. But 33 other men in King Company who acted just as bravely never came off the Hill.
To my knowledge, I have not lost any immediate family or friends in combat, and in that I know that I am extremely fortunate. Dad died of lung cancer decades after the war, long after seeing his grandchildren born. But today, for his sake, I honor the brave men who fought shoulder-to-shoulder with him those two days in 1953 and never made it home.
Wow… Thank you for posting this.