Valleys of Death

by Bill Richardson

  We were all full of lice. The farm boys told us they were hog lice, growing larger every day on our blood. While the lice got fat, we starved. The guards brought us two small bowls of millet a day and one bowl of boiled water, which barely kept us alive. And even when we ate, dysentery kept us weak and dehydrated.

  Hunger can do some strange things to your mind. I was at the latrine—a slit trench—and I noticed that many of the soybeans were passed whole. I thought, Christ, if I picked them out of the feces and washed them off I could eat them. Then it dawned on me that I must be going crazy or turning into an animal. It would be a few days before I was able to get over the fact that I had let myself sink to a disgusting thought like that.

  Soon after taking over the camp, the Chinese came in and ordered all sergeants to come outside. They wanted to separate the leaders and they marched us over to a new cluster of houses. At the same time, they moved all the blacks to a different area of the village.

  As I got my stuff to move, I noticed the smart-ass from the battalion intelligence section who had led that noisy patrol near the bridge at Unsan. He was near the back and looked away when he saw me. Five of us got up and started to go outside. The battalion intelligence sergeant didn’t move.

  “Let’s go,” I barked at him. “Get off your ass and move outside.”

  “I’m not a sergeant,” he said.

  I shook my head. I knew battalion hadn’t taken my warnings seriously. For a second, I thought back to Unsan. What if they’d sent a competent sergeant who patrolled correctly? Would we have found the Chinese before the attack? It didn’t matter now.

  “You son of a bitch,” I said, glaring at him. “I was right about you all along.”

  Outside, I joined a group of about sixty senior sergeants. Without a doubt the best thing that happened to me was being put with sixty master sergeants and sergeants first class. I was the youngest of the group. As we walked, I struck up a conversation with a redheaded Irish sergeant. He had a prominent crooked nose and the weight loss made him look smaller than he was.

  I introduced myself.

  “Vincent Doyle,” he said as we shook hands.

  Doyle became the leader of our little group. An infantryman during World War II, he had a wife and a son in Fall River, Massachusetts. He’d received a battlefield commission in France and left the Army as a lieutenant. He opened up a frozen food store in Fall River, a little ahead of its time. Not many families had freezers. He went out of business and reenlisted as a master sergeant, not an officer. He was an inch too short to be an officer, the Army told him. We called him the “The Renaissance Man” because he seemed educated and wrote poetry. He carried a small red book with red Chinese characters printed on the top of the page. I’d catch him jotting down stanzas or quotes all the time. Sometimes, he’d read a few lines to me. One poem, “An Infantryman’s Troubled Dreams,” was a favorite. Written in staccato sentences and observations, it seemed to capture the jarring experience of war.

  The din. The sweat. The blood of day. The agony of night. The roar. The shell. The scream of pain, the warriors’ sad plight.

  An awesome tank. A sniper’s eye. The hovering pall of death. A sig. A sag. A sprint. A dive. He gains another breath.

  The wet. The snow. The heat. The cold. A leg hurtling through the air. The noise. The quiet. The hurry. The wait. A head with blood matted hair.

  The sleepless eye. The bloodshot eye. The feet so stiff with frost. The endless march. The blistered feet, the heart-ache of battle lost.

  A meal. A shave. Mail new from home and cool water in which to bathe. Clean and fed, he lays his head to rest in a peaceful shade.

  Machine guns stutter. Sun on blades and so back into the strife. Attack. Patrols. Grenades and mines and he must risk his life.

  Since we were a smaller group, I started to meet other guys in the house. We became sort of a family. On one of my first days in the house, I sat down next to Sergeant First Class Smoak. He’d been with the Thirty-fifth Infantry Regiment and was wounded early on.The bullet had ripped through his lower buttocks and taken out his right testicle. We all cringed when he told us. But he smiled and kept telling us his story. He was evacuated to a hospital in Japan, recuperated, and went on a few days’ leave. From his bed in Japan, he wrote to his girlfriend to tell her the bad news. But, as we’d come to learn, Smoak was always the optimist.

  “Though there is one motor gone I can still carry on,” he wrote.

  For the rest of my time in that house, Smoak was the sunshine that kept our spirits up. Quick with a joke, he always seemed to be humming a few bars of “On Top of Old Smoky,” his favorite tune. Smoak’s mental outlook kept him strong.

  O’Keefe was another World War II guy who got out and started a local truck business in and around Boston. He got tired of the trucking business and reenlisted. We’d been around each other off and on since the first night. It was O’Keefe who prayed that first night and said psalms during the death march.

  Next to him sat an old Filipino sergeant. He was dressed in a hodgepodge of uniforms. He didn’t say anything and just sat all day rocking back and forth and murmuring a lot of mumbo jumbo. As if he were a human metronome, you could keep the beat off his rocking. That and the mumbling used to drive some of the guys crazy.

  O’Keefe used to blow his top at the Filipino. It always started with O’Keefe telling him to shut up and ended with O’Keefe screaming it and stomping out. The old guy got on all of our nerves, and O’Keefe was just saying what the rest of us were thinking. O’Keefe was quick to apologize when he returned.

  Our biggest problem was our physical condition brought on by the march. Men with open wounds, many with gangrene, didn’t survive long. Some were saved from gangrene by maggots eating their dead flesh, which only meant they suffered longer.

  Some of the soldiers had black feet from frostbite and trench foot. I watched while one man pulled rotted fresh off his toe bones. The soldiers from the Second Infantry Division had it the worst. They’d been issued shoe-packs, rubber boots with felt liners and insoles. Their feet would sweat and were continuously wet while marching, and they would freeze when they stopped marching. Since they never took the shoe-packs off, the soldiers got trench foot.

  It is easily understood when men die of wounds or pneumonia. It was more difficult to understand when men just lie down and quit. I have seen strong men seemingly just give up and die. First, they would stop eating and stare with blank eyes at the mud walls of the hut. Their minds were gone, and life just slipped away. Then, after a few days, you heard an all too familiar death rattle.

  We were dying at a rate of about thirty a day. Each morning, we took the dead out of the houses, stripped them of their clothes, and stacked them like cordwood in a pile. At first, we tried to take the uniforms and coats and give them to other prisoners, but the Chinese guards wouldn’t allow it. What they did with the uniforms is still a mystery. For the most part, they sat in a pile.

  We were required to provide men for a burial detail. The detail carried the bodies on makeshift stretchers made out of burlap bags stretched between two poles. It took four walking skeletons to carry each dead man across the ice. The ground was frozen solid. The detail would try to scrape a shallow hole and cover up the body with some dirt and rocks. At night, we could hear the wild dogs growling and fighting over the bodies.

  I hated being put on burial detail. The physical part was bad enough, but the mental part was much worse. Thoughts about the families of the dead men and if they left children behind who might never know what happened to them. I knew from listening to men talk that what bothered most of them was the thought that they might be next. That’s the one thing I never let my mind think about.

  In a little more than three and a half months, sixteen to eighteen hundred men made the trip across the ice. One morning Doyle and I watched a burial detail. The dead were hanging off both ends of the jerry-rigged stretchers, heads and legs banging on the ground. Doyle turned and looked
at me.

  “Rich, if I go, promise me you won’t let me drag along the ground like that.”

  “I promise you I’ll make sure,” I said.

  How the hell could I do that? I wondered as I watched the ghostly parade pass by. I couldn’t, because in my own mind I knew that within four or five days half of the men on the detail would be carried to their graves. We were all beginning to look more dead than alive.

  Four or five days after the Chinese separated us from the others, I saw two political officers taking fifteen prisoners into a hut close to ours. I asked Doyle what he thought was going on.

  “They’re trying to get some men to write home and tell their folks how good they are being treated and that their families should tell our government to stop the war.”

  “Are you shitting me?”

  “No, I’m not, Rich,” Doyle snapped at me, and then he smiled and said, “Believe me, Rich, that’s what’s going on.”

  “Goddamn, we’re stacking our dead bodies about fifty feet from that building. How the hell can anyone write that shit?” I said.

  The next day, when the Chinese headed the prisoners toward the building, a bunch of us started shouting at them and telling them not to write letters. We repeated the same scene later when they left the building. This was one of the earliest attempts to use us for propaganda.

  When I could, I went looking for Vaillancourt or Roberts. I’d been told that they were prisoners too. I was asking around a group of soldiers when I heard someone call my name. It was one of my guys, Elliott. He’d shown up just before Unsan. I’d sent him across the bridge before the Chinese attack and figured he’d been killed when they swept over the bridge.

  “What happened Elliott? How did you get away from the bridge?”

  He gave me a sheepish grin.

  “I started to run back to the other side and about halfway I realized I would never make it and jumped off the bridge,” he said. “I went up the riverbed to get away from the bridge and I ran right into the Chinese and that was that.”

  “Goddamn, that was thirty feet to the ground, you’re lucky you could walk, let alone run.”

  “Yeah, Sarge,” Elliot said.

  I asked if he’d seen Roberts or Vaillancourt. Since he was a brand-new replacement, I should have known that he wouldn’t know either of them.

  I had started to walk back to my house, when I heard Roberts call my name.

  “Rich,” he said. “Rich. Is that you?”

  He didn’t look like the man I’d watched kiss his beautiful wife good-bye. His face was thin and his eyes dark. He gave an awkward smile, but I could tell he hadn’t had a lot to smile about. I could tell he was looking at me and thinking the same things. I no longer looked like the cocksure corporal who knew how to cut corners at the Fort Devens map course. We’d walked through hell and came out changed men.

  “Boy am I happy to see you,” Roberts said. “Val and I were both wounded and captured the first night the Chinese hit us. We were wondering what happened to you.”

  “Well it’s a long story. I was just asking about you two. How’s Vaillancourt?”

  “Not too good, Rich,” Roberts said. His shoulders sagged when he said it. Almost as if admitting it hurt.

  “He’s in bad shape. Hit in both legs. They both probably need to be amputated.”

  “What about you?” I asked.

  “I got hit in my left arm and left leg,” he said, rubbing his arm. “The arm is okay, but my leg is infected. But I’ll be all right.”

  Roberts pointed out a cluster of houses down the valley where he and Vaillancourt were staying. He’d come up with some others to get water out of a well.

  “Goddamn, you don’t want to drink out of that well, it’s contaminated,” I said.

  “It’s okay, Rich,” Roberts said.

  “Bullshit. I’m telling you don’t drink it,” I said.

  He laughed and waved me off.The others had the water in a few buckets and called Roberts over to carry a pair. They had been gone a long time and they needed to get back to their house.

  “Well tell Val I was asking for him. I’ll try to get to see you both later,” I said.

  It amazed me how fast our clothing deteriorated. Our boots just seemed to be falling apart. The seam on my rear belt line split down to my crotch, and the guys would laugh about my ass hanging out in the breeze.

  Smoak pulled me aside one afternoon. “Rich, do you think you could get a couple of the boots before the Chinese get them?”

  “What for? Most of them are no better than what we are wearing,” as I looked at his boots.

  “Just get a couple and I’ll show you.”

  I worked my way around to where the Chinese had piled the clothing. I realized there was no use in thinking too much about how to do it; I just walked up, grabbed two of the boots and kept right on moving.

  I headed right back to our hut and told Smoak.

  “Goddamn, that was almost too easy. We need to think about stealing some of the clothes.”

  “Yeah,” Smoak said as he grabbed the boots.

  They were falling apart, and Smoak tore into them and pulled out two pieces of spring steel. Each one was about one inch wide by seven inches long. Eventually some of the steel was honed sharp enough to shave with and trim our hair. My hair had grown long and hung over my neck. It, like my beard, was matted with lice. Shaving off the filthy hair made me feel human again.

  Letter dated March 9, 1951, reaffirming my missing in action status. Author’s collection

  It amazed me where I found and cherished little pieces of humanity in the camp.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  THE MORGUE

  In early spring of 1951, the Chinese were building small docks on the river and I was unlucky enough to get put on the work crew.

  The guards would march us out of town and up the surrounding hills to pick up huge timbers cut out of the forest. The timbers were used as pilings. In our physical condition it took twelve men to carry the thick logs back to the river. When we got them down from the hill, we had to move them three to four miles back to the camp. The work was hard, but it was better than the burial detail.

  We’d been at it for about ten days. One afternoon, a group of us were carrying one of these timbers up a hill when someone in the center stumbled and the timber fell, pinning me to the ground. I screamed out in agony as the others tried to get the timber off me. The guards were raising hell, yelling and thrashing about. They seemed to think that I had caused the accident. The other prisoners managed to get the timber off me, and as soon as I stood, a guard struck me in the small of my back with his rifle butt, dropping me to my knees. The other prisoners quickly surrounded me, trying to protect me from other blows, but the damage was done.

  I struggled to my feet and took my place under the timber, but my back was screaming in pain. I could feel the muscles tightening, and the shrapnel wounds across the small of my back were bleeding again. With every step, my back got more stiff. Soon, I couldn’t turn or stand up straight. By the time we got back to camp, it was almost impossible for me to walk.

  During the night, my legs from the waist down were hard as a rock and my lower legs were drawn up until my calves were touching the back of my thighs. My Achilles tendons swelled up as big as my thumbs and turned black, then blue and finally a sickening green color. The guys from my room carried me back and forth to the formations, and it was not long before the Chinese realized I could not walk. The guards came late in the afternoon a fews days after the accident. They marched into our house and hooked me under my arms and carried me out the door.

  They were taking me to the hospital. We called it the morgue. We had never seen anyone return from there.

  I wanted to fight back, but I couldn’t. The guards opened the door to one of the rooms in the cluster of houses that served as the hospital and threw me in. It was dark and I could not see anyone. I landed on top of the wounded and sick lying on the dirt floor. They immediate
ly started kicking and cursing me. The stench from the wounds and the human feces was unimaginable. I started to gag.

  There was not enough room for the men who were already there, let alone me. As I wiggled around trying to find a space on the floor, a loud voice from the rear of the room boomed.

  “Let him in, give him some room. Do you all hear what I said? Leave him alone.”

  The others made room and I finally sat down.

  “What’s your name?” the loud voice said again.

  “Richardson,” I said.

  “I’m King.”

  King of the room or what? I wondered.

  I was trying to cope with the odor and wondering if I was going to get enough space to lie down, when my diarrhea kicked in. But I was determined that I would not relieve myself right there.

  “Where can I find somewhere to take a crap?” I said in King’s direction.

  “Out the door, go left to the end of the building, left again, and twenty-five yards on a knoll you’ll find the latrine.”

  The temperature was freezing, but I welcomed the fresh air. I dragged myself out on my buttocks, pushing myself along with my hands. I reached the latrine, a trench a foot and a half wide and ten feet long. The trench sat just outside a strand of wire that separated our camp from the black prisoners.

  The human waste was like pudding and almost reached to the top of the trench. I managed to get my pants down and had worked my way to the edge, when the side caved in. I fell into the trench, finally catching my shoulders on the edge. The waste was at my chin as I clawed at the dirt trying to pull myself free. My paralyzed legs, like an anchor, pulled me toward the bottom. I yelled out and kept clawing, but every second I slipped deeper and deeper into the trench.

  Two black prisoners on the other side heard me. They crawled through the barbed wire, grabbed me by my arms and pulled me out. A second later, and I would have slipped under the surface.