On Desperate Ground

by Hampton Sides

  It was rough going from the outset, yet the men found a certain satisfaction, a sense of pent-up release, in the mere act of movement. For the past four days they’d been holding on at Yudam-ni, waiting and watching and fending off the enemy waves. Now they were attacking, a martial mindset that Marines tend to find much more to their liking.

  Their pathfinder, their focal point, was hard to miss: Chew-Een Lee had chosen to wear a weird, garish outfit that made him look like a court jester. He had procured two panels that the Marines used for marking ground targets during air supply drops. These strips, designed to be spotted from the sky, were colored electric pink. Lee fashioned them into an ungainly harlequin suit that screamed, “Shoot me!” The getup looked ridiculous and also made him vulnerable to attack, but his devotion to practical purpose overrode any sense of fashion or fear. “I wanted my men to be able to refer instantly to me,” Lee said. “I wanted to show my men that I wasn’t afraid of enemy fire—and that they shouldn’t be, either.”

  Apart from this, Lee also wore his clunky cast, still in a sling. He was in enormous pain, the unhealed bones of his right arm grinding with each footstep. Though Lee weighed only 120 pounds, he carried nearly eighty pounds in gear—including his various weapons and four grenades. He held a contour map and a compass in his left hand and picked his way forward, accompanied by three scouts arranged in a diamond pattern. It was especially exhausting for him and the others out front—they weren’t just hiking; they were breaking trail, floundering in drifts, punching through snow that was often knee-deep.

  Those in the middle section of the line found the trail nicely packed, while the men toward the rear encountered an icy chute, slick as a toboggan run. They scrabbled and slipped, sometimes reaching for the man in front and yanking him to the ground, too. In treacherous places, where the grade steepened to forty degrees or more, the men had to crouch on hands and knees and claw their way up, fumbling in the snow for anything to hold on to—stumps, roots, rocks, shrubs. They worked up a sweat while ascending the steeps, but when they headed down the rearward slope, their accumulated perspiration tended to freeze. Then they lurched like mummies, their ice-stiffened clothes crunching with every stride.

  Yet they kept moving, animated by a single thought: If they didn’t reach Toktong Pass by morning, there might not be a Fox Company left to rescue. By going overland, by divorcing themselves from the road that had dictated their movements, they started to see themselves in a different light. They were taking a page from the Chinese battle plan—abandoning their machines and vehicles, moving at night, blending with the high country. They acquired a new nickname, too. From that night on, the men of Davis’s First Battalion became known as the Ridgerunners.

  * * *

  Every five minutes or so, a star shell came sizzling overhead, lobbed from Yudam-ni. The shell would tint the slopes with a phantasmal glow as it streaked across the bowl of the sky. As the men headed into the mountains, they took comfort in knowing that they were still tethered to the regiment; comrades four miles away were thinking of them, lighting their way forward. Whenever Lee was high on a ridge, with an expansive view, he found the star shells helpful, but when he was down in a ravine, his vision closed in, the phosphorus rounds were nearly useless. With the mountain obscuring their trajectories, he could only consult his compass and guess his way forward.

  Still, the Ridgerunners kept slogging ahead, deeper into the night. They were stretched out over the mountain now, too far apart to allow communication from front to back, or vice versa, should the need arise. Like a trail of ants, their single job was to trust and to follow. As one Marine later wrote, they formed a “long wavering line of dark lumps creeping up this ridge, down into the next valley—sliding, staggering, digging their heels into the snow to break their momentum.” They slipped and fell, stood and fell again, “raising a chilling clatter in the darkness with helmets clanging against rifle muzzles.”

  In the lulls between gusting winds, an eerie silence fell over the high meadows. The only sound was the scuffing of boots through snow and the steady rustling of gear. The men lost themselves in their marching—some felt they’d slipped into a dream state. It seemed as though these mountain fastnesses had never been visited by man. They were uninhabited, perhaps uninhabitable. This world was made for deer and fox, for the Siberian tigers that preyed on them, but not for people. Sometimes the trees would explode from the severe cold, their trunks emitting a concussive snap. Other noises carried with stentorian force over long distances. A cough, said one Marine, sounded like a mortar shell.

  The hours themselves seemed to congeal. Addled by the cold, stupefied by the monochromatic wastes of ice and rock, the battalion progressed in a blur. “Time had no meaning for us,” wrote Joe Owen, of Baker Company. “We labored through infinite darkness in ghostly clouds of snow over an icy path that rose and fell but seemed to lead nowhere. We saw only the back of the man ahead, a hunched figure in a long, shapeless parka, whose every tortured step was an act of will.”

  The night sky constantly rearranged itself. Scarves of clouds and fog whirled overhead, and in the gaps, a bright moon seeped through. The mountain air danced with tiny ice crystals that shimmered in the moonlight—diamond dust, the phenomenon was called. On the ridges, the winds were especially keen, biting into the Marines, curing their faces, turning their lips raw. The temperature had dropped to twenty-five below zero, but with the windchill, it was later estimated at seventy below.

  When the winds died down, Lee could hear the voices of enemy soldiers in the brittle air. Then he could see them—or at least the crests of their fur caps, peeking out of little holes. They looked like prairie dogs, he thought, nervously popping their heads up and down. They were no more than twenty-five yards away, yet they couldn’t see the Marines. Lee could make out their alarmed conversation.

  “Ching du ma?” (Do you hear something?)

  “Tara da?” (Should we attack?)

  At this early stage of the march, Lee sought to avoid a firefight at all costs. He skirted the Chinese and led the column out of harm’s way. But hearing them talking had quickened the Marines’ blood and pulled them out of their half-frozen apathy. “The voices had an adrenaline effect on us,” said Owen. “Now we were charged with energy, our minds cleared.”

  * * *

  It was imperceptible at first, but as the march unfolded, Lieutenant Lee started to veer off course. Some tiny miscalculation or series of miscalculations must have compounded through the night. Maybe, in part, it was because Lee’s compass was misbehaving, the needle floating erratically in its housing. He wondered if the cold temperatures were affecting the instrument, or perhaps a nearby vein of iron ore, which had once been mined from the surrounding mountains, was distorting the magnetic field. Lee finally decided that the compass was responding to the heavy concentrations of metal—weapons, mortar shells, ammunition—the Ridgerunners were carrying. Whatever the case, he couldn’t get a good reading. He seemed to be slipping off toward the west, dropping downslope in the direction of the road.

  Davis, who was marching nearly a half mile back and had a better perspective on the column’s direction, could see this trend taking shape. He grew alarmed: Lee was slowly swerving toward a no-man’s-land that, Davis happened to know, was scheduled to be bombarded with heavy artillery from Yudam-ni later that night. If Lee didn’t correct his course, the front of the column could be ripped apart by friendly fire. His mistake, however slight, was imperiling the mission.

  Davis tried to convey the message to Lee by radio, but the cold had already sapped the batteries. Then Davis tried to send word up the line, to be whispered from man to man to man. But in the lashing wind, with everyone so snugly bundled they could hardly hear a thing, this proved impractical. What began as a clear and urgent message degraded into a babble of caveman grunts.

  When the westward drift became more pronounced, Davis decided to leapfrog ahea
d in hopes of reaching Lieutenant Lee. He kept bumping into his men as he marched past the long line, knocking some of them down in his haste. They cursed at this rude and impatient man, not knowing he was their commanding officer, bent on completing a crucial errand.

  An hour later, Davis, gasping for breath, finally overtook Lee. The lieutenant was instantly recognizable, even through the snow flurries, by his harlequin suit of bright-pink panels. At first, the exhausted colonel forgot why he had come. The two men stood in the cold, bewildered, regarding each other like a pair of drunks. Finally, Davis was able to summon the message from the frozen banks of his memory: The march was dangerously off course. They had to readjust, toward the east. The howitzers from Yudam-ni would soon be raining fire upon this slope.

  Lee tried to process this. He halted his scouts while Davis dropped into a nearby pit that had been gouged from the ground, apparently by Chinese soldiers. There, Davis covered himself with a poncho to escape the roiling snow. He snapped on a flashlight and studied his smudgy Japanese-issue contour map, which, at a scale of 1:50,000, could not have offered much help. But somehow Davis decided on a new course—“He must have had a crystal ball down in there,” Lieutenant Lee marveled.

  Davis confidently stood up to issue his new orders. But in those few seconds, he had already forgotten what he’d decided while deliberating in the hole—his brain was addled by the cold. So Davis returned to the pit, draped himself with the poncho again, and started over. A few minutes later, he stood up once more. This time having retained his fragile tissue of thought, he proclaimed the new route. He instructed Lee and the other officers to repeat what he’d said, because now that he’d uttered it, the information had escaped his recall.

  Davis’s mind seemed to be working at one-eighth speed. The neurological circuitry wouldn’t fire. As Davis later phrased it, “It was too cold for government work.” Definitely too cold for a southerner like himself, Davis thought. He wondered whether, had he hailed from Minnesota instead of Georgia, it would have made a difference.

  Lee grudgingly accepted that his line of march had perhaps drifted on account of his fitful compass. But he was too proud to admit anything more. He insisted that he wasn’t lost—and that he never had been.

  A platoon of Marines, waiting for the new orders from Davis, had been resting in the snow nearby. The cold had descended upon them, and now they were virtually in a coma. They looked, said one account, like “frozen Buddhas” and seemed to have slipped into “that seductive, mindless mist” that accompanies advanced hypothermia. Davis, genuinely fearing that he might lose them, marched around the perimeter and slapped the prostrate Marines to get their blood going again. He tried to shake them into a state of alertness and haul them to their feet.

  “What unit are you in?” he barked at one young man, but the kid looked at him blankly. He didn’t know the answer.

  The Chinese, too, were succumbing to the murderous cold. Not far away, a dozen hummocks studded the snow. When one of them seemed to twitch, a Marine sergeant bolted over to investigate. He dusted off the snow and found that it was a Chinese soldier crammed into a foxhole. The sergeant grabbed the man by the scruff of his neck and snatched him out. He was nearly dead. His eyes moved in their sockets but registered nothing. He wore sneakers but no socks. The sergeant examined the other humps and discovered that they were all Chinese soldiers, frozen stiff. The Marines could only look on them with pity. They had wedged themselves into their holes and died. The men of Davis’s battalion knew that if they weren’t careful, the same fate would await them.

  It was nearly midnight. With the new orientation fixed in his mind, and on his map, Lieutenant Lee again took his place at the point of the column and resumed the march, aiming for a cathedral of rock that rose through the dervishes of snow.

  * * *

  At the top of the next ridge, Lieutenant Lee debouched into a snowy meadow that was strewn with boulders and fingers of granite. He and his point team tracked warily through this labyrinth of rock, for it seemed a perfect place for an ambush. Sure enough, a few minutes later, the Chinese opened up. The hills above flickered with muzzle flashes. Bullets spanged off the rocks and kicked up snow but did little damage. The Chinese must have thought this was merely a Marine platoon out on a midnight patrol; they had no idea that an entire battalion was coiling into their midst.

  Lee signaled his squads to form into skirmish lines. They got on their knees and crawled up the slope. Lee and his men reached the top and poured across the enemy position, catching the Chinese off guard. Many of them were in their sleeping bags. The Marines ran among them, bayoneting them, smashing them with rifle butts, clubbing them with entrenching tools, firing at point-blank range. Some of the Chinese got away, dodging bullets as they darted among the boulders. Others hid in crevices and alcoves.

  The Chinese who remained fought bravely—some hurled stones; one of them wielded a large tree limb—but they were no match for the well-armed Marines. Wrote Joe Owen: “The night was against them. We had the advantage of surprise and momentum. We fought with fierce energy, now released from the hours of cold and misery. The Chinese could do little more than try to escape.”

  Lee, as usual, was at the center of the fray. Encountering three Chinese soldiers ten feet away, he held his carbine with his left arm and fired. Two fell dead, but the third enemy soldier leveled his weapon at Lee, who must have presented a tantalizing target in his Day-Glo vest. A Marine sergeant standing nearby perceived the threat just in time and dropped the man with a round from his M1.

  The guns rattled and blazed for a half hour, while the mortarmen set up their tubes and lobbed shells on enemy positions higher in the hills. Lee skulked among the rocks, yelling in Chinese, trying to convince the last holdouts to surrender. Some emerged with their hands raised. Others, taking cover behind boulders in ones and twos, put up a stout fight. In the shadows, one Chinese soldier who knew a little English tried to masquerade as an American. He kept yelling, “No shoot, no shoot! I am Marine!” But it was only a trick to buy time. A moment later, he appeared from behind a rock, firing his weapon. The man immediately fell in a hail of Marine bullets.

  It was past one o’clock when the firefight dissipated and the column was able to resume its forward movement through untrammeled snow. The men were spent, and yet they still had more than two miles to go. “We were like a chain gang of zombies,” said one. “Exhaustion was telling on us,” wrote Joe Owen. “Our falls became heavier, and it took longer for us to pull ourselves up from the snow.” Even Lieutenant Lee had to concede that he had come to the end of his endurance. “I had to will myself forward,” he said. “My thighs were like pillars of lead. How easy it would have been for an enemy soldier to have toppled me backward merely by tapping me on the chest.”

  The Ridgerunners stumbled forward through the early-morning hours, angling toward a massif that loomed in the distance. If Lee was reading his map correctly, this mountain was the final obstacle—just beyond it lay Fox Hill.

  34

  THIS PLACE OF SUFFERING

  North of Fox Hill

  In the gelid hours before dawn on December 2, the Ridgerunners tramped along the shoulders of Toktong-san, steadily advancing despite constant harassing fire from the Chinese. Colonel Davis hoped to reach the pass by first light, but he had not been able to establish radio contact with Fox Company—Davis wasn’t even sure whether Captain Barber had been told that relief was on the way.

  Then a sniper’s bullet snapped through the morning gloom. It struck Colonel Davis in the head, knocking him flat on his back. Corpsmen bounded over to help, but Davis rose to his feet. He insisted he was fine. Upon examination, it was learned that the bullet had ripped through his parka hood and left a divot in his helmet. A scrap of shorn metal had grazed his forehead, but, miraculously, this was the full extent of his wounds. Davis brushed it off with his typical stoicism: Other than being shot in the head, he
said, “all seemed relatively well.”

  Next it was Chew-Een Lee’s turn. High on the flanks of Toktong-san, Lieutenant Lee encountered the same Chinese forces that had been attacking Fox Company since the night of the twenty-eighth. In the ensuing fight, a bullet found Lee. It struck the flesh of his already crippled right arm, near the shoulder. Lee crumpled to his knees. Though not seriously injured, he was in excruciating pain. He hissed invectives at the Chinese who had hit him, mocking them in their own language. A few Chinese soldiers emerged from their holes for a closer look, but Lee’s men promptly mowed them down.

  Davis was grateful that Lee hadn’t been grievously wounded. The battalion had already suffered too many losses on the long night’s trek. More than a dozen Marines had been injured seriously enough to require litters. At least three men had been killed in combat. Davis had ordered them to be buried in the snow. He would later rue this decision, but he felt he had no choice.

  Then Davis was presented with a very different sort of casualty: One of his Marines had cracked. He was a strapping eighteen-year-old private from Texas, a kid who’d seen far too much. He was skittish, nearly paralyzed with anxiety. “Not going any farther” was all he said. At first people thought he was joking. The older men tried to buck him up. One Marine offered him chocolate. “We’ll be back in Japan soon,” another reassured him. But the kid was inconsolable. Nothing could break through his despondency. Refusing all overtures, he dug in his heels. “Not going any farther,” he repeated. The battalion surgeon, Dr. Peter Arioli, examined him and could find nothing wrong. He babbled and shook, but he didn’t appear to be wounded. He wasn’t frostbitten and didn’t seem to be shell-shocked. It was as though he had given up. Said one Marine in his squad: “The spirit had gone out of him.”