by John McCain
World War II was raging, and like most boys his age Salter wanted to fight. At the end of his junior year he tried to join the Marine Corps. Since he was only seventeen, he needed his parents’ permission. His father agreed, and then quietly saw to it that his son shipped out as a sailor. Salter spent the last year of the war aboard a troop transport ship in the Pacific theater. He mustered out eighteen months later, an electrician’s mate third class.
Back in the States, he finished his last year of high school at a Catholic boys’ academy in his hometown and was nearing the end of his first year at Iowa State when an army recruiter offered him a chance for a more distinguished military career. With the prospect of an officer’s commission and the warning that a war with the Soviet Union could not be far off, Pete Salter joined the U.S. Army. Since he had reached his majority, he no longer needed his parents’ consent.
He started basic training at the end of April 1950. The North Koreans crossed the 38th parallel two months later. A month after that Salter was on his way to war with a lump on the back of his head and the promise of a commission forgotten. In deference to his previous service and his military-style education, the army had made him a corporal and sent him to E Company, 2nd Battalion, 19th Infantry Regiment. Easy had already had a hard war by the time Salter joined it, but its hardest time was yet to come.
THE PUSAN PERIMETER WAS a rectangular box of mountainous terrain one hundred miles long north to south along the Naktong’s east bank and fifty miles wide, with the highest mountains in the north and the Sea of Japan in the south. It gave the Americans a conventional front line behind a natural barrier they knew how to defend, unlike the constantly flanked, collapsing, shifting front and cross-country scrambling of the past few weeks. They also had for the first time a numerical advantage over the enemy. Walker believed his divisions, especially the 24th, were woefully in need of rehabilitation, but he had a combined troop strength within the perimeter of over 140,000 men. Combat troops numbered around ninety-two thousand. More than half the United Nations forces were ROKs, who had the hardest war of all thus far. They had inflicted more casualties than the Americans and suffered ten times more. The North Koreans had approximately seventy thousand combat troops at the front at the beginning of August. The American Fifth Air Force had complete air supremacy, and the U.S. Seventh Fleet completely secured supply lines to Japan. With men and matériel now flooding into Pusan, the U.S. Armed Forces rounding up able-bodied soldiers worldwide to throw into the fight, and the enemy’s heavy casualties and depleted supplies, time wasn’t on North Korea’s side. Nevertheless the six-week battle of the Pusan Perimeter would be a near-run thing.
Walker had eight divisions defending the perimeter at the beginning of August. Five depleted ROK divisions protected his northern flank. The 25th U.S. Infantry Division protected the extreme southwestern flank south of the river. The 1st Provisional Marine Brigade had arrived in country on August 3 and was sent to the 25th Division around Masan. Unlike most of the army divisions in Korea, the great majority of the marine brigade were combat veterans. The 1st Cavalry and the beat-up 24th Division protected the rest. The 24th’s sector ran along forty miles of riverfront that seriously stretched the understrength, exhausted division. Walker planned to bring newly arrived regiments of the 2nd Division to the front to relieve the 24th. The entire UN line was thinly stretched and had significant gaps. Much would rely on Walker’s being able to move his forces quickly to shore up the vulnerable places in his line when the enemy pressed them.
After its victory at Masan, the 19th Regiment had crossed the Naktong and was held in reserve while it rested and reequipped. Corporal Salter reported to Easy just after the 2nd Battalion arrived in the rear. That night, at a bend in the Naktong just north of its confluence with the Nam, soldiers from North Korea’s 4th Division, which had sent the 24th reeling at Taejon, stripped, hoisted their weapons and packs above their heads, and waded across the river to punch a sizable salient hole in the perimeter. It was the start of the Battle of the Naktong Bulge. The 34th was the first regiment hit. At midmorning General Church ordered the 19th into the fight.
The tide was with the attackers, who had caught the defenders by surprise and would move many more men, artillery, and tanks across the river over the next two days. Americans put up a pretty stout defense and counterpunched effectively. The 34th managed briefly to keep the North Koreans from taking a critical road junction, but they were only slowing and not repulsing the attack. On Salter’s first day in combat Easy helped trap hundreds of enemy soldiers in a village a mile east of the river. He killed men for the first time. Years later he would still marvel at how the North Koreans and then the Chinese would expose themselves in the front ranks of wave attacks as if they wanted to die.
The next day, August 7, the counterattacks started to run out of gas. The full-strength 9th Infantry, 2nd Division was rushed to the front and recovered some of the lost ground. The North Koreans took it back the next day, and by nightfall the entire North Korean division was across the river. On August 10 the 19th’s 2nd battalion was hit so hard, its casualties so heavy, that there were only one hundred men still capable of fighting in all three rifle companies. Twenty-three men were killed in action, and many more were wounded. Four of the dead were from Easy, which was the most intact of the three companies. Salter was still alive and physically unharmed his fifth day in Korea. He wasn’t as young as most recruits; he was twenty-three and a veteran of World War II. Still he must have been stunned by the ferocity and confusion of his first experience in ground combat. He kept his head, though. He watched how Easy’s veterans behaved and tried to act like them. They were getting used to days like this.
The very next day General Church ordered a counterattack by four regiments: the 9th, 19th, 34th, and 21st. It failed completely, and losses continued to be heavy. Successive counterattacks were launched over the next week, but none succeeded in driving the North Koreans back across the river. The Americans were putting up a stubborn defense and inflicting heavier casualties on the enemy than they were suffering. But the fresh, full-strength 9th Regiment was now as battered and bleeding as the gasping, weary, shot-up regiments of the 24th Division. Finally the marines were pulled from the southern flank and brought into the fight. On August 17, following an artillery barrage and air strike, they attacked the North Koreans at the strongest point of the salient and by the middle of the next day had them in full flight.
That was hardly the end of the Battle for the Pusan Perimeter. There was a second Battle of the Naktong Bulge, and fighting in various sectors of the front continued uninterrupted for six weeks. Though it would be bled white at the perimeter, the Inmin’gun stayed the aggressor. Its numerical disadvantage worsened daily, although it conscripted thousands of South Koreans and threw them into the meat grinder. Its supply lines stretched for hundreds of miles.
The defense of the perimeter was aided considerably by American airpower, but Walker had also proven to be a master of improvised defense; his North Korean counterparts were inept tacticians in comparison. They probed the perimeter in uncoordinated, relatively small assaults. With acute timing Walker shuffled his units wherever they were most needed to plug gaps in the line, inflicting heavy casualties on the enemy and draining the vitality out of the offensive while his army grew stronger every day. The ROK divisions had regrouped. Great Britain had committed the 27th Commonwealth Brigade. A regimental combat team from Hawaii had arrived, as had four tank battalions.
By September the tide of war was poised to turn, waiting for just one bold move to throw the North off the initiative and onto the defensive. MacArthur made that move on September 15, when he launched Operation Chromite. In one of the most daring amphibious landings in history, X Corps, consisting of the storied 1st Marine Division and the 7th Infantry Division, stormed ashore at Inchon, the Yellow Sea port southwest of Seoul, and easily overran its North Korean defenders. Racing east it cut all the North’s major supply lines before turning s
outh. Walker waited twenty-four hours for word of the landing to reach the North Koreans besieging the Pusan Perimeter before giving the order for the Eighth Army to break out and advance north. After six weeks of bloody stalemate, Easy was on the march again, and this time the odds were on its side. Salter was a veteran now, accepted by the company’s surviving original members. As they reached the outskirts of the city they had been forced to abandon, he would have laughed along with them as they sang a ditty written for the occasion.
The last time we saw Taejon, it was not bright and gay,
Now we’re going back to Taejon, to blow the goddamn place away!
The best soldier in the company, the one they all looked up to, veterans and new guys, enlisted and officer alike, was Corporal Mitchell Red Cloud Jr. Like Salter, he was a veteran of the previous war in a different service. He too had dropped out of high school to enlist in the marines. But his father had given his consent, and Red Cloud had served with distinction with Evan Carlson’s Raiders during their legendary “long patrol” on Guadalcanal. A qualified sharpshooter, he saw action in dozens of battles before a bout of malaria sent him back to the States. He returned to the Pacific in time to fight on Okinawa, where a Japanese bullet earned him an honorable discharge.
He had returned home to the Winnebago (now Ho-Chunk) reservation in Jackson County, Wisconsin, the latest in a long line of family warriors. Both his parents claimed descent from famous chiefs. His mother’s ancestor had been decorated for bravery by George Washington. His father had served in the army in World War I. They raised Mitchell, their oldest child, in the traditions of his people. He learned to hunt with a bow and arrow as well as a shotgun. He was taught the value of hard work, to respect his elders, to be honest and brave, and to help others. He was a quiet boy growing up, but after the excitement of war, life back home seemed too quiet and familiar. In 1948 his brother was killed in an accident while serving in the peacetime army. Mitchell decided to keep the family name on the army’s roster. He enlisted and was soon on his way back to Okinawa.
He was an easygoing fellow, quick with a joke, well liked and respected. He didn’t treat new guys with the disdain other veterans showed them; he was friendly and free with advice. Everyone called him “Chief,” naturally. Salter, like everyone else, looked up to Red Cloud. He observed how he behaved under fire and tried to follow his example.
Caught between the anvil of X Corps and the Eighth Army’s hammer, the Inmin’gun was nearly finished as an effective fighting force a week after the breakout at the perimeter. Elements of the Eighth Army linked up with X Corps on September 26. Seoul was liberated the next day. Only twenty-five thousand North Koreans escaped envelopment and managed to straggle back to their country. MacArthur initially ordered his armies to halt their advance at the 38th parallel, but with total victory in sight and on the principle of hot pursuit, Truman gave MacArthur permission to continue his advance into the enemy’s country with two conditions: that no significant Chinese or Soviet presence was discovered in the North, and that only ROK troops advance to the far north, where the Yalu River formed the border between Korea and China.
The first ROK units entered North Korea on October 1. The 19th Infantry crossed the parallel eight days later and helped capture Pyongyang, the North Korean capital. Between the breakout at the perimeter and its entry into North Korea, the regiment had not lost a single soldier killed in action. They had been the easiest three weeks of the war, and it was hard to suppress the feeling among the men that the whole damn thing would soon be over. In the last week of October the regiment was spread out in the hills north of the Chongchon River, just fifty miles south of the Yalu, where it started picking up signs that there may be more trouble coming than anticipated.
China had issued vague warnings not to cross the parallel, but in their conference on Wake Island, MacArthur convinced Truman that Chairman Mao Zedong was bluffing. The supreme commander wanted to bring his armies home in time for Christmas, and on October 24 he instructed his commanders to advance north as rapidly as possible. The next day, as the first ROK troops reached the Yalu and X Corps began withdrawing from the front to prepare for another amphibious landing on the peninsula’s east coast, an advance unit of the Eighth Army captured a Chinese prisoner. Over the next week ROK and Eighth Army soldiers reported stiffening resistance in the northern extremes of the allied advance from what appeared to be Chinese soldiers reinforcing the beleaguered North Koreans. Just north of the Yalu, undetected by American reconnaissance flights, the Chinese had positioned a quarter of a million soldiers. Over the next ten days five divisions would slip into the mountains of North Korea. Easy Company would be among the first to fight them.
Salter had been in Korea less than three months. His swift introduction to combat had been a trial, and he had now been in enough fights to be proud of the combat infantry badge he wore. He hadn’t panicked even in those first desperate hours of fighting. He had done his job as well as the next guy. Now the enemy was in disarray. The army’s breakneck advance north had been pretty damn exciting, and casualties had been few. All the talk was that they would be home for Christmas, and Salter had come through it without a scratch. For Easy’s oldest veterans, the ones who had survived Kum River and Taejon, Christmas couldn’t come soon enough. They were running a little short of ammunition. C rations were running low too. They were constantly hungry and had grown to hate rice. “You would, too,” Salter later insisted, “if you had to mix it with coffee grounds to give it some flavor.”
Most of all, “the goddamn cold” was starting to get them, Salter remembered. An early winter was coming, with its sharp blasts of Siberian winds. Although Salter came from the upper Midwest and had experienced harsh winters before, the cold in Korea seemed of a different magnitude. Much of his discomfort was attributable to the summer uniform and unlined boots he still wore. Even his sleeping bag was made for summer. For the rest of his life he would remember that cold as if it were the most malevolent force in the universe.
By November 4 Salter and the rest of Easy Company had become good and tired of the war. That night the regiment ran into Chinese soldiers, sizable numbers of them, and had a rough time of it, 1st Battalion especially. War is always chaotic, even when it’s going well. Now things were getting seriously confused. They didn’t know how many Chinese were hiding in the hills they patrolled. They never saw them during the day, after they had gone to ground, pulling white tarps over themselves to melt into the snow cover.
MacArthur and Walker still didn’t believe China was in the fight to stay, mistaking these first engagements for volunteers coming to aid their exhausted fellow communists or as just an elaborate bluff by Mao to spook the Americans into backing off the border. A huge Chinese force had kicked the hell out of a 1st Cavalry regiment near Usan on November 1. The next day, on the other side of the Taebaek Mountains from the Eighth Army, the 7th Marines, 1st Marine Division encountered an entire Chinese division, including tanks, and whipped it. Still MacArthur and Walker weren’t convinced China had really committed to the war. The thing was nearly over. Why would they want to jump into the losing end of it? Nevertheless they thought it wise to pull the Eighth Army back across the Chongchon River to regroup and prepare for a new offensive planned for Thanksgiving. Their supply lines were stretched thin, and the forces north of the river were becoming disorganized. Walker gave the order to fall back and directed the 19th Infantry to remain in the north to protect the bridgeheads around Anju.
That’s where Easy was the night of November 4, when a Chinese force hit the 1st Battalion and knocked it back to the river. The 3rd Battalion had tried and failed to retake the ground. Easy too ran into some Chinese that night and engaged in a pretty hot firefight, their second in as many days, but they didn’t lose anyone. They were all tired and on edge the next day as 2nd Battalion tried to restore their lines. Companies were scattered and communications had deteriorated. Easy patrolled the hills, trying to make contact with Fox Company, but
with no success before it bedded down for the night.
Something about the unusual quiet the night of November 5 spooked Easy’s commanding officer, Captain Walter Conway, and he ordered the men to dig in to the left of G Company on a little hill five miles north of the river, designated Hill 123. Normally Conway would have chosen a higher elevation, but he didn’t know how close the Chinese were or how many of them were out there. His men could run into them any minute. The last two nights the Chinese “were in, on the flanks of, and behind the company position,” he reported. A full moon illuminated the darkness that night. He told the men to dig in quietly: “We don’t want to draw any more mortar fire.” “And stay on the lookout,” he warned. “They’re here, somewhere.”
As usual Conway had Red Cloud guard the perimeter. The guy had a sixth sense for enemy movement and could be counted on to give the alert in time and hold his position while the rest of the men got into theirs. Private Svach remembered how his friend claimed he always knew when an attack was imminent. “It’s like hunting those Wisconsin deer,” Red Cloud told him. “I can smell ’em coming.” He knew the enemy. He knew they liked to swing around and attack from behind after first staging a noisy assault on the front. He didn’t sleep. He was ready for them.
Salter didn’t sleep either, and not just because he liked to keep an eye on Red Cloud for reassurance. He was too cold to sleep. Most of the men just scraped out a shallow depression in the frozen earth and tried to get what rest they could. Salter decided to dig the biggest hole he could, all night long, just to stay warm. They were all low on ammunition. The company sergeants circulated among them, asking, “How much you got?,” and the answers were disappointing: “I got two clips and a bandolier.” “I got three clips and a couple grenades.” “I got one bandolier, no clips.” They could already hear shooting in the distance.