On Desperate Ground

by Hampton Sides

  Captain Barber came clomping in, wincing but pumped up with battle fervor. “We’re short of warm bodies,” he barked. “We need volunteers to plug the lines.” Several men who were not too seriously wounded answered the call—they struggled to their feet and marched outside. Others tried to stand but couldn’t. One of them, Private Harrison Pomers, complained about a wet, tacky sensation somewhere along his back. A corpsman peeled away his clothing and gasped: Pomers had a hole as big as a fist. The corpsman could see his spinal column.

  Now it was Cafferata’s turn to heed Barber’s call. He tried to pull himself off the ground. He yearned to join the battle. Earlier in the day, Benson had given him a Mauser machine pistol, and Cafferata intended to use it.

  But French, the corpsman, saw him struggling. He didn’t think Cafferata should go. “You lay down, Moose!” he said.

  Cafferata protested: “Frenchy, I should be out there.” He didn’t understand how a gunshot wound to the arm had sidelined him when so many other men out on the hill were fighting with far more serious injuries.

  But in truth, Cafferata couldn’t move. The pain in his chest had only grown more severe through the day, even with the morphine French had given him. Seeing how much distress he was in, French pulled back Cafferata’s clothes and studied his chest in the guttering light of a candle. Just below the sternum was a tiny red bullet hole. It was an almost immaculate wound, bloodless and clear. Somehow they’d missed it all day.

  “You damn fool!” French snapped. “Lie down!”

  This time, Cafferata relented. He could see by French’s eyes that this was serious. French didn’t have any way of treating it. He could only give Cafferata another shot of morphine. Cafferata settled back on the ground and, wrapping himself in a blanket, tried to digest the news. He’d been shot in the chest—that sounded like an honorable battle wound. It picked up his spirits. At least he no longer felt bashful about lying around in a medical tent.

  As the terrors of war blasted around him, Cafferata gripped his Mauser and stared into the darkness, alone with his thoughts.

  28

  KISSING A BUZZ SAW

  New York City

  Four days passed before the Chinese ambassador, Wu Xiuquan, was cleared to speak at the United Nations. But in those four days, the world had changed. Mao’s intentions in Korea had been fully revealed. Now the forces of the United States—and of the United Nations—were in a state of actual war with China, surrounded by hundreds of thousands of Communist Chinese soldiers in the field. Whatever slender hopes still existed that Wu might be willing to negotiate had shriveled.

  If anything, Mao’s early battlefield victories only emboldened him, and Wu was instructed to take an especially hard line in his dealings at the U.N. From their temporary offices in the Waldorf-Astoria, Wu and his fellow delegates stayed in nearly constant contact with Zhou Enlai and his ministers in Beijing. Zhou was euphoric over the news from Korea. It seemed the Chinese were on the verge of destroying the Americans—which, to Zhou, meant the Chinese could present their arguments to the world from a position of strength.

  Finally, on November 28, Ambassador Wu was slated to address the United Nations Security Council, a body that did not recognize him or his government but had invited him to speak just the same. The United Nations, its Manhattan headquarters under construction, was temporarily housed in a cavernous building formerly run by the Sperry Gyroscope Corporation, in a suburb of New York called Lake Success, on Long Island.

  The Chinese, wearing black, excited much interest and elicited stares as they marched into a committee session already in progress—some delegates thought they’d strutted in like gangsters. Coincidentally, the speaker holding the floor was Andrei Vyshinsky, chief of the Soviet delegation and the notorious prosecutor at many of Stalin’s purge trials. Vyshinsky paused to give the Chinese an effusive welcome. Wu took a seat at a desk beside a placard that read PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA. Two seats over sat the poker-faced John Foster Dulles, special counsel to the State Department. Though Dulles pretended not to notice the new arrivals, Wu glowered at him and held his gaze for several uncomfortable minutes.

  Later, in a packed hall before the Security Council, Ambassador Wu removed his earphones and began his formal speech. Standing over his notes, speaking in staccato bursts, his voice piercing and shrill, he wasted no time in skewering the host nation. “I am here in the name of the 475 million people of China to accuse the United States government of the unlawful and criminal act of armed aggression. It is an integral part of the overall plan of the United States to intensify its aggression, control, and enslavement of Asian countries, a further step in the development of interference by American imperialism in the affairs of Asia. The American imperialists have always in their relations with China been the cunning aggressor.”

  The speech went on in this vein for the better part of two hours—an extended harangue, twenty thousand words in length. The tension in the hall was palpable, and listeners squirmed restlessly in their seats. Wu did not seem to offer a single conciliatory note. He blurted his words faster than the U.N. linguists could translate. His demeanor was combative, and his facial scar seemed to glisten under the klieg lights.

  Every word of the speech, it was later revealed, had been written by Zhou Enlai’s ministers in Beijing, with direct consultation from Mao himself. The U.N. delegates could see that the Chinese were not disposed to seek a diplomatic solution at all. On the contrary, they seemed to wish only to escalate the conflict. They demanded that the United States immediately leave Taiwan, leave Korea—leave Asia altogether.

  Later in the speech, Wu began to give voice to a deep-seated animus that he said China had long felt toward the United States. It was as though a century’s storehouse of affronts and humiliations had come bursting forth from China’s collective memory and now poured through the headsets in a babble of languages. In Wu’s telling, the United States had always been at war with China. Sometimes it took the form of a cultural or trade war, sometimes a military one, but the United States had an incorrigible habit of insinuating itself into China’s domestic affairs. American interference during the Boxer Rebellion, the patronizing slights of American missionaries, the insults of Yankee gunboat diplomacy, Washington’s support of Chiang Kai-shek, and now the U.S. Navy in the Strait of Taiwan and American ground forces driving toward Manchuria—all of it was just more evidence of a sly and meddlesome aggressor. “The real intention of the U.S.,” Wu railed, “is to dominate every Asiatic port from Vladivostok to Singapore.”

  The crisis in Korea turned out to be a secondary complaint within Wu’s address. “The main burden of my speech,” he later said, “concerned all the wrongs China had suffered at the hands of the Americans. I was more anxious to display our country’s indignation.”

  Wu’s long rant, turgid with Marxist terminology, shocked many in the hall. It seemed to some listeners that Communist China, having been offered a world stage and a megaphone for the first time, was behaving like a churlish teenager. Wu expressed no remorse for the fact that his country’s armies had attacked the military forces of this body—in fact, he didn’t even mention it. He had come for the broader purpose of venting his nation’s pent-up rage, a complex of resentments that was generations in the making. It came out in a tremendous spew of invective. Mao’s regime, this new government from an ancient land, wanted recognition, yearned to assume its place on the world stage. But it also seemed to want an apology.

  As Wu later put it to an Australian journalist, “I had only felt that I was facing the imperialist state and its followers, and that they had invaded, bullied, and oppressed China for over a century. The memory of it was deep and bitter in my mind as well as in the minds of hundreds of millions of Chinese people. Now the Americans were deliberately scheming to subvert and annihilate New China. They had acted in such a reprehensible, such a vicious way, that there was no need for courtesy on o
ur part.”

  If the Chinese delegation had ever offered a tantalizing last chance for peace, that chance was long gone. Wu’s diatribe had only hardened American opinion. Appeasing Mao in any way, admonished Time magazine, would be akin to “kissing a buzz saw.” The United States immediately froze Chinese assets and, a few days later, led an effort in the U.N. General Assembly to enact a resolution condemning Mao’s aggression in Korea. In protest, Ambassador Wu stormed out of the hall. No mainland Chinese emissary would appear at the United Nations for more than twenty years.

  Soon Wu and his fellow delegates were on a plane bound for Beijing, where they would be given a hero’s welcome.

  29

  MORPHINE DREAMS

  Toktong Pass

  As the battle for Fox Hill smoked and chattered outside, Hector Cafferata, cooped up in the med tent, had become distraught. One of his buddies, a guy named James Iverson, was dying beside him. Iverson had been grievously wounded by a grenade that had torn into his rib cage. He’d lost far too much blood, and he was going fast. Iverson had told Cafferata, “Hey Moose, when I die I want you to take my boots.” Cafferata was still in his stocking feet—he’d never recovered his boots from the hill.

  A few hours later, Iverson passed. Cafferata slipped the boots from Iverson’s feet. He tried to put them on, but they didn’t fit—Cafferata’s feet were “canal-boats,” as he liked to say, size 14. So he got a knife and cut holes in the ends. Now, staring at his own frostbitten toes wiggling out the ends of Iverson’s boots, Cafferata wept like a baby. A pair of guys came and collected Iverson’s corpse. They threw it on the stack outside the tent.

  As the hours drained away, Cafferata drifted in and out of consciousness. The morphine had a powerful effect on him. He kept having dreams, fevered and fluid and weird. Maybe they weren’t really dreams, because he often wasn’t asleep, but riding the ebb and flow of the injections. He dreamed about his father, who had been a paper engineer. Hector Cafferata Sr. had traveled the world building paper mills. Though he wasn’t rich, he knew how to make the paper that money was printed on. He was of Italian origin, but he’d grown up in Argentina and Peru before immigrating to the United States. He’d taught Hector how to shoot, how to hunt. He had much kindness in him, but he could also be abusive—“a nasty little bastard,” as Cafferata put it. Hector Sr. had grown up playing soccer and had a habit of kicking Hector when the boy crossed him, which was often. “I probably would have been a Rhodes scholar if I hadn’t spent so much time taking his shoe outta my ass.”

  Sometimes Cafferata dreamed of football games. He’d be back on some gridiron in New Jersey, knocking people down, clobbering them. Though he wasn’t particularly coordinated, he was so big and so strong that he intimidated the opposing players. But Big Hec didn’t want to hurt anyone—he just loved the brawl and the bluster of the game.

  He dreamed of the Chinese, too, especially the ones he had captured. He couldn’t get those three kids out of his mind. He kept reliving the moment they first came to him, the moment they surrendered on the hill. He didn’t see where they had come from. It was as if they had popped out of a hole in the ground. In the dream he kept having, he would hear Chinese voices, and then they would emerge from a thick cloud, like angels. He looked at them, studied them. Their faces were frozen, covered in snow. Icicles clung to their noses and chins. They were scared, probably freezing to death. They had their hands up, and they begged him to spare their lives.

  But in the dream, Cafferata didn’t take pity on them. In the dream, he swung his weapon around and shot them—pow-pow-pow. He didn’t have to aim; he put a front sight on them and down they went.

  The three Chinese soldiers kept reappearing in Cafferata’s thoughts and reveries. “It was as though they were haunting me,” he said. “It was like somebody was trying to tell me something.”

  * * *

  Captain Bill Barber was losing hope for Fox Company. The siege was unrelenting. The enemy understood how vulnerable the Marines were on this cheerless hill, how close they were to the end. The Chinese could nearly taste victory. Over the past few nights, Barber’s company had been cut in half. He was down to 159 “effectives.” He could hold out another night, he thought—maybe. After that, it was doubtful.

  But Barber didn’t show his despair. He was a stirring spectacle on the hill, hobbling around like a mad prophet, using a gnarled stick as a crutch. He did his damnedest to ignore the pain in his shattered pelvis. The corpsmen had treated the wound with sulfa powder, had bandaged it as best they could, then improvised a splint out of a pair of pine limbs. At one point he barged into the medical tent and was heard to say, “All right, men, here it is. Things are pretty bad. But I’ve seen ’em worse. We’re not pulling off this hill unless we all go together.”

  That night, the Chinese brought out their amplifier once again, and a voice reverberated over Fox Hill. But this time it wasn’t a Chinese voice—it was American. His name was Robert Messman, a lieutenant from an artillery unit based at Yudam-ni. He’d been captured a few days earlier. The jeep he’d been driving was found on the road a few miles south of Yudam-ni, without bullet holes or blood smears, no sign of a struggle. The Chinese had marched him into the hills to a tiny farmhouse. Now they were using Messman for propaganda purposes.

  “Men of Fox Company, this is First Lieutenant Robert C. Messman of King Battery,” the voice said. “I was captured two days ago by Chinese Communist Forces.”

  The Marines in their foxholes squinted at one another. Was this a hoax? No, they decided, the man was definitely an American—though it sounded like he was reading a script. “Men of Fox Company,” the voice continued, “if you surrender now the Chinese will treat you according to the Geneva Convention. They will feed you. They will provide warm clothing. They will treat your wounds.” Over and over, Messman urged the Marines of Fox Hill to give up the fight.

  When his voice trailed off, the machine gunners shot off a few rounds, as if to tell the Chinese, in a language they would understand: Fuck you.

  Captain Barber, meanwhile, had been stewing over what to do with his own prisoners. By this point, Fox Company had captured more than thirty Chinese soldiers, including the three frightened kids Cafferata had collected on the hill. The prisoners were nearly freezing to death, they were hungry, they were lame with frostbite. Many of them had serious battle wounds. Some of them had already died of exposure.

  The ones who were left sat on their haunches in a pitiful cluster, shielding one another from the wind. Barber could let them go, but who knew what would become of them? The Chinese officers might not take them back. Fox Company had seen commissars shooting Red deserters, and these prisoners—the uninjured ones, at least—might be perceived as such. But if their superiors did take them back, they’d put weapons in their hands and send them up the hill to kill more Marines.

  Captain Barber had been avoiding the obvious, but he knew what he had to do. It was the hardest decision he would make in his entire life—harder than anything he’d been forced to do on Iwo Jima. He was a God-fearing man, a Christian, a churchgoer. But he thought he had no choice.

  He called for a private from Georgia and told him to get a few other Marines and take care of the problem. And so they went around back, behind the command post and the med tent, back where the prisoners squatted in the snow. Then they shot every one of them in the head.

  When Cafferata found out about it, he lost it. “Man, I was wild,” he said. “I was hot. I told Barber, ‘I’d be a son of a bitch if I’d shoot ’em. If you’d told me to do that, I would have given you my rifle.’ ”

  30

  NO SOFT OPTIONS

  Hellfire Valley

  Through the night of November 28 and into the next morning, General Smith’s stronghold at Hagaru had tenuously held. His army of cooks and clerks and mechanics had done their best to repulse the Chinese attacks. But East Hill was now largely un
der enemy control, scores of Marines had been killed, and casualties were numbering in the hundreds. Worst of all, the airstrip project, which had only a few days to go before completion, was in jeopardy. General Song had well grasped the strategic significance of what the Marines were attempting to do at Hagaru, and he had dedicated more and more resources to overrunning this American bastion before it could become an American airport.

  Smith understood that if Hagaru fell, the whole division could be wiped out. Smith had to have help, but he knew he could not look for it from his regiments to the north. Litzenberg and Murray were still tied down in Yudam-ni. And Litzenberg’s Fox Company, at Toktong Pass, was facing destruction. Any relief would therefore have to come from the south, from the direction of Koto-ri. The unit based in Koto-ri was the First Regiment, under the command of a legendary officer. He was the most decorated and possibly the most famous Marine then alive. His name was Lewis Puller, better known as “Chesty.”

  Colonel Chesty Puller was a truculent little man, with a crabbed face, a ramrod physique, and an irrepressible spirit. He seemed to have been born curmudgeonly. He spoke in a thick Virginia Tidewater drawl. Reporters loved him, because nearly every word that came out of his mouth was quotable. He was famous for the blunt, off-the-cuff declarations he uttered in the field—“Pullerisms,” they were called. In the Pacific, when he saw his first flamethrower, he was said to have barked, “Where do you put the bayonet?” He reportedly once exhorted, in the heat of battle: “This is a shitty war—but it’s better than no war at all!” In Koto-ri, that very week, upon learning that a big airdrop of supplies, packed in Tokyo, contained condoms, Puller had been heard to growl, “What the hell do they think we’re doing to these Chinese?” A few days earlier, when he learned that his regiment had become surrounded at Koto-ri, he had minted a new Pullerism: “So the Chinese are to our east. They’re to our west. They’re to our north. And to our south. Well, that simplifies things. They can’t get away from us now!”