This, he felt, he could not do. He could not fire on his own people. He prayed it would never come to that.
* * *
A few days later, Lee, posted at the bridge, worked up his courage and asked his American superior if he could take an hour’s break. To his surprise, the officer said, “Sure, go ahead.” Lee thanked him and vanished into the crowded streets. He knew he had to make haste. The layout of Hamhung’s inner city was hardwired in his mind—he knew every alley, every shortcut. His army boots clomped on the pavement as he burrowed into the old neighborhoods and worked his way toward the compound where his family and his uncle’s family had lived. With every footstep, his excitement grew. A left turn, a right, and then he arrived. He exhaled in relief: The house was still standing. It had not changed much in four years, but it seemed quiet and darkened inside, as though it had been abandoned.
He approached the door with apprehension and knocked. A few moments passed, but no one answered. He knocked again. “Papa!” he yelled. “Mama! It’s me—Bae-suk!” When no one answered, he opened the door himself. After all, it was his house.
He ducked his head inside and peeked into the shadowy anteroom. The place seemed in disarray, furniture stacked up, belongings scattered about. He peered deeper into the house and heard a gasp.
“Bae-suk! Is that you?”
All at once, his family came rushing toward him—his mother and father, his brothers and sisters. They smothered him with hugs and kisses. His father stepped back and regarded him in astonishment: Who was this grown man, in an army uniform, wearing a helmet, looking so responsible, so serious? Tears welled in his parents’ eyes, but they hid most of their feelings inside. They were stoic people, not given to displays of emotion. But Lee could tell something was wrong. Worry lined their faces, worry that hung like a sickness in the room, blackening everything, canceling whatever joy his parents felt at his surprise homecoming.
Then Lee realized that his baby sister was missing. He looked around the house. “Where is Sun-ja?” he asked. She had been only three when he left for the South. She would be seven now.
His father shook his head and looked away. By the mood that fell over the room, Lee decided she must have died.
“No, no,” his father said. “Sun-ja is fine. But we are afraid we’ll never see her again.”
“Why, Papa? What is wrong?”
His father gestured at the stuff stacked around the house. “We are taking passage to the South. We’re leaving tomorrow. All the arrangements have been made.” He explained that a truck would be taking them to Hungnam, where a ship awaited. They were leaving this country for good. They would take a few things with them, but most of their belongings would be dispersed to friends and distant relatives. They were going to make a new life for themselves in the South. “We had planned to go to Seoul,” his father said, “in hopes of reuniting with you.”
“And Sun-ja?”
“She is on the other side of the river.” Lee’s father explained that she had been visiting their cousins when the Americans issued the order: No one was to cross back into the city. The bridges were closed. He had beseeched the police, he had tried to explain the situation to the Americans, but to no avail. Sun-ja was trapped on the other side, and they could not reach her. They faced a predicament: Would they leave behind their youngest daughter forever? Or would they scrap their plan for escape, stay at home, and take their chances in a city that was about to be convulsed by unimaginable violence and possibly destroyed?
Lee had heard all he needed to hear. “I must go,” he said. “I will try to find Sun-ja.” He had been at the house no more than five minutes. He turned and stomped out the door.
* * *
As Lee trotted back toward the bridge, a strange feeling swirled inside him. Why was he here? It was as though fate had guided him to this precise place, at this precise moment. He thought about the situation and decided there was no other way to understand it. He was a humble and earnest young man, but now he was impressed with a sense of mission: Only he could save his sister; only he could make his family whole. Someone who knew this city, someone who spoke English, someone connected to the U.S. Army, someone the authorities could trust—and someone assigned to guard the very checkpoint his sister could not pass through.
He knew he had to risk everything. He returned to the bridge and went straight to his American supervisor. “There is something I must tell you,” Lee said. “I was not born in Seoul. This is my home. This is where I was raised. My family is here. They are leaving tomorrow on a ship. But my little sister is over there.” He pointed across the river. “She cannot get across.”
He wasn’t sure the American understood him. He was still uncertain how proficient his English was. He feared he’d said too much, and his fear was legitimate: Here in Hamhung, over the past week, Lee had seen young North Korean men, their covers blown, their identities revealed, brutally beaten and dragged off to jail.
“My family,” Lee blurted out. “They are not Communists. They have never been Communists. They want to live in the South.”
The American officer stood in silence for a few long moments, processing what he’d heard. Then he nodded and said, matter-of-factly, “Okay.” He motioned toward a nearby jeep. “Let’s go.”
He cranked the engine, and they slipped through the checkpoint barricades and sped across the Bridge of Long Life, toward the western outskirts of the city. Lee sat in the passenger seat and gave directions as best he could. He wasn’t absolutely sure where his cousins lived, but his memory guided him to the right place—a small tile-roofed house in the suburbs, not far from where the neighborhoods gave way to open rice fields. When the jeep pulled to a stop, he hopped out and ran up the stairs. “Sun-ja!” he yelled. “Sun-ja!”
She came to the door, but she was confused and uneasy. Why was a soldier barging into the house? “Sun-ja—it is Bae-suk,” he said. “Your brother.” She didn’t recognize him in his helmet and military garb. But then a smile creased her face. Though she did not remember much about him, she knew him through photographs and family lore. He was a legend, the big brother who’d escaped to the South. She had grown up wondering if she would ever see him again or if he would remain merely a fading image in a photo album. “Big brother!” she cried, wrapping her arms around his legs.
But he was short with her. “Sun-ja,” he said, pointing to the street, where the jeep sat idling. “We must go right now.”
“Go where?” She did not understand what was happening in the city, or why her brother had appeared out of nowhere, like a phantom.
“There’s no time to explain. We must go to the house. To Mama and Papa.”
Sun-ja accepted this, but she wondered about her cousins. Could they come, too?
“No,” Lee said. “You must say goodbye now.”
One of her cousins, Kyeong-ok, was her age—her best friend and playmate. The two girls were inseparable. Kyeong-ok begged to tag along. Wherever Sun-ja was going, Kyeong-ok wanted to follow. Whether they understood that Sun-ja’s family was embarking on a ship, probably never to return, was unclear. But both girls began to sense that this might be a final goodbye.
Kyeong-ok was crying now, wailing, shrieking. Sun-ja was crying, too. Kyeong-ok clutched Sun-ja and wouldn’t let go. Finally, Lee had to step in and physically separate the two hysterical girls. He gathered Sun-ja in his arms and hustled to the jeep.
Lee held his crying sister. He had succeeded in accomplishing his errand, but he did not feel successful. All he could think, as the jeep rattled toward the river, was how much he hated this war and the choices it forced people to make.
* * *
At the entrance to the Bridge of Long Life, the MPs waved them on and they eased through the crowds of refugees waiting on the west side. Lee could see the bitterness and dejection on the refugees’ faces, and he felt a claw of guilt at the ease with which he
could pass over what was, to his fellow countrymen, an impermeable barrier. The jeep crossed the river and paused at the checkpoint on the east side. Again, the MPs waved them on through. Lee indicated that he and Sun-ja could walk from here, but his supervisor said with a grin that he wasn’t stopping here, that he wanted to see this project through to its proper end. They eased through the crowds and worked their way into the inner city.
Soon they pulled up to the house, and Lee and Sun-ja climbed out. Their parents were waiting at the door, overcome with emotion. Once the tears subsided, the whole family fell into titters of relieved laughter. They were beaming, brimming with joy. Even Sun-ja.
“I must go,” Lee interrupted. They could hear the jeep’s engine rumbling outside.
His father gave him a searching look. “We will see you again,” he said. “In the South.”
The next day, when Lee went back to visit his boyhood compound, it was deserted. Apparently, everyone in his family had left for the Hungnam docks.
In a few more days, American demolitions specialists would strap dynamite to the Bridge of Long Life, and blow it to bits.
45
WE WALK IN THE HAND OF GOD
Hamhung
For two days, they threaded down the mountains, toward the alluvial plains and the sea beyond. Their boots clomped on the frozen road, beside the murmuring trucks. Along the way, at certain switchbacks, the enemy still presented himself—an ambush here, sniper fire there. But the Chinese, it seemed, had largely given up. These Americans were coming out, and nothing could halt them now.
An Associated Press reporter flying over the procession found it strangely beautiful. “Seen from the air,” he said, the march “held both magnificence and pathos. There was a Biblical pageantry about it.” The men limped on makeshift splints and canes. Their arms dangled in slings. Their bloody clothing was tattered and ripped by shrapnel. Many had draped themselves in cowls of parachute silk. They were gaunt and greasy and chewed up. They had scales on their flesh. They were hairy, soot-smudged wretches, and they stank like herds of wildebeest.
But they were proud. As they marched toward the sea, a peculiar mood settled over the ranks. It was not sadness, nor triumph, nor relief, though all these emotions were present. The overriding feeling might more accurately be described as insolence, a kind of contempt for the whole wide world. They had seen things, they’d been part of something, that they sensed would live forever. They had lost their innocence on a battlefield that had forced them to locate strengths they didn’t know they had. It was a cliché often uttered by participants in great battles, but it was true: They formed their own brotherhood now. The Frozen Chosin, they started to call themselves. The Chosin Few. This fraternal spirit welled up in the form of a war chant that rippled down the line of men:
Bless ’em all, bless ’em all,
The Commies, the U.N., and all
Them Red soldiers hit Hagaru-ri
And now know the meaning of the “U.S.M.C.”
So, we’re saying good-bye to them all
As home through the mountains we crawl
The snow is ass-deep to a man in a jeep
But who’s got a jeep?
Bless ’em all!
They had marched into the mountains, and now that they were marching out, they were different men. “They had been there and back,” Marine historian Robert Leckie wrote. “They had been through a hell that blazed and froze by turns, and they were singing their splendid disdain for all those pallid paltry souls who did not go.”
David Douglas Duncan, the Time-Life photographer, who walked with the Marines on their way out, wrote that the “shuffle of their feet follow[ed] the rising and falling beat of a tragic rhythm.” He found a young Marine from Indiana named Robert Henry, who was sitting by the side of the road, spooning at a C ration of half-frozen beans. Henry had vacant eyes, Duncan said, and “the cold had cut into his face” until “even the look of animal survival was gone.” Duncan asked the young man, “If you could be granted any wish, what would it be?” Henry thought about the question for a while. Then, prodding his beans again and adopting an idiom reminiscent of the last war, he said, “Give me tomorrow.”
* * *
The vanguard of the Marines passed through a cleft in the hills and suddenly a panoramic vista opened up: the coastal flats below, extending toward the twin cities of Hamhung and Hungnam, and, beyond that, an armada of ships anchored in the glittering port. The Marines wept tears of joy. They had a soft spot for the sea—it was their natural habitat. Down there were hot meals and envelopes from home, hospitals and airfields and tent cities snapping in the salt air. The sight of it seemed to bolster their motivation, and the column moved a little faster.
As they descended, the mercury nudged upward. They began to emerge from a white world of ice into a brown world of mud. By the time they reached Sudong, the Marines found the weather almost balmy. Said one corporal: “When we hit the valley it was like going from Minnesota to Florida. Boom, it wasn’t cold anymore.” This was a most welcome thing—except for those men whose wounds had effectively been sutured by the freezing cold, wounds that now leaked blood again and in some cases showed signs of infection.
Along the Marines’ flanks, refugees also jostled down the road. Many thousands of civilians had emerged from the mountains. They were stooped old men, mothers with infants, children whose stony eyes had already seen lifetimes of grief. Some of the refugees had a few belongings strapped to rickety A-frames on their backs, maybe a duck or a chicken, a photograph or some piece of furniture. Some had lost their homes, perhaps their whole villages, to the war. Others were starving and didn’t know where else to turn. They followed the Marines out, hoping that a few morsels would come their way—and that if they reached the coast, they might prevail upon the American authorities and hitch a ride out of this war-torn land to settle somewhere in the South.
The refugees, wrote one Marine, “moved like a sullen, brown river, moiling toward the sea.” The Americans pitied them but could not let them mix with their own advancing columns. Not only did they slow the procession, but the Marines had already experienced instances of Chinese soldiers, dressed in peasant clothing, melting into crowds of marching refugees, only to hurl a grenade or brandish a hidden weapon.
When the column reached the village of Chinhung-ni, the Marines came into the protective embrace of the Army’s Third Infantry Division, elements of which General Almond had sent to meet them. The reservoir country was behind them; their trial was over—everyone could feel it. Now it was a straight shot to Hamhung. Some went by truck, others by train, though, as a matter of pride, many insisted on walking the final fifteen miles.
Many Marines seemed to know that the transports assembled in Hungnam Harbor were intended for them, that the ships had come to evacuate all of X Corps from North Korea, in a sealift that promised to rival Dunkirk in its scale. But perhaps just as many Marines marched toward the coast with the assumption that they would merely be wintering within the safety of Hamhung, that they would establish a stout enclave and resume the offensive in the spring.
For the most ardent of the Marines, this was not only an assumption—it was a distinct desire. After all they’d been through, they couldn’t bear the idea of packing up now. They preferred to think of Hamhung as an interlude, not an ending. They still had more fight left in them and remained eager to hear Oliver Smith’s next orders. Said one Marine: “I’d follow him to hell because I know he’d get me out.”
* * *
The possibility that this might be a march to a temporary safe haven, from which Smith’s Marines would launch another attack, took some of the sting out of the word retreat. Were they, in fact, retreating? Without question, the Chinese had driven them from the field of battle. But most of Smith’s men preferred to think of themselves as the victors. “We kicked the shit out of the Chinese the first time
we met them, which was at Sudong,” boasted Lieutenant Joe Owen, “and we were still kicking the shit out of them when we crossed the treadway bridge. They were surrendering to us, not the other way around. Retreat, you say?”
The way most Marines would come to view it, the decision to push to the Chosin Reservoir had been strategically disastrous. But the battle, once set in motion, had unfolded as an impressive succession of tactical victories. Whether one called it a fighting retreat or an attack in another direction, the First Marine Division had sliced its way through seven Chinese divisions and parts of three others. General Song’s Ninth Army Group had been rendered ineffective as a fighting force. Two of his divisions were entirely destroyed, never to be seen on a battlefield again.
The Marines had inflicted astonishing casualties: Song’s forces had suffered an estimated 30,000 killed in action and more than 12,500 wounded. The Marines, on the other hand, had lost 750 dead, with 3,000 wounded and just under 200 missing. Though Mao could technically claim a victory in the Chosin engagement—and he loudly did—it was a Pyrrhic one at best. Mao, said one account, had “committed the unforgivable sin, of defeating an enemy army while failing to destroy it.”
Back home, the story of the Marine breakout was already widely being described as an “epic.” The public thrilled to the news of Smith’s smashing his way out of the Red trap. “The running fight of the Marines,” said Time, “was a battle unparalleled in U.S. military history. It had some aspects of Bataan, some of Anzio, some of Dunkirk, some of Valley Forge, some of the ‘Retreat of the 10,000’ as described in Xenophon’s Anabasis.” In a week of catastrophically bad news from Korea, virtually everyone in America seemed to rally around this one stirring headline. In Washington, President Truman extolled the Chosin campaign as “one of the greatest fighting retreats that ever was. Those Marines have old Xenophon beat by a mile.” Truman’s liaison in Korea, General Frank Lowe, agreed, and went so far as to call the First Marine Division “the most efficient and courageous combat unit I have ever seen or heard of.”
On Desperate Ground Page 33