GETTING THE HANG OF IT –The First Day
A Story by Dave Freda
Based on my experiences during the first days
in combat in Korea
and my return home
fredadave@gmail.com
The conductor stopped and reached for my ticket. “You’re Joe Smiths boy. ” Just getting back from Korea?”
“Yup, it sure is good to be going home.”
He shook my hand and warmly embraced me around the shoulders.
“Yeah, been reading some stuff about you. That was nasty war over there. I read about some of your experiences in the local papers. You know like Baldy and Porkchop Hill.”
. He named those names like they were stops along the railroad.
“I hear that infantry lieutenants get killed pretty quickly when they first get into combat. Everyone was worried about you. I’m glad to see you coming home safe and sound.”
He was trying to be friendly but that wasn’t where I wanted to be. No sense reliving the war. The confusion, the horror, the violence, the grimness of people dying and knowing that in the next instant it could be you was still vivid in my mind. But right now I was just a kid eager to get home.
About half way there, the train stopped. No station. It just stopped. The lights of a nearby diner were flashing in the night. No artillery. No firefight here. Just folks enjoying a good old hamburger and a couple bottles of beer or some other late night snack. I can’t wait until I get back to a little of that. A few minutes later, the conductor returned with a large bag. The train started again.
“OK we have coffee, hamburgers and apple pie for everyone. Welcome back, son. We got some beer for you.”
“Hi Dave, you wanna’ ride or you gonna’ walk,” Clyde Multz, the only cab driver in town, said impassively. He treated me as if I was returning from a vacation in New York City, but I knew that old reprobate was experiencing feelings a lot deeper than that. He had always joked around with me while I was growing up, and had helped me get out of trouble more than once.
“ No. I think I’ll walk.”
I went past the bars and down the railroad track. A walk walked thousands of times. I went over the bridge, past the cemetery, still as scary as ever but feeling different now. Growing up, I had always imagined noises, fleeting images and had the feeling that someone was watching me when I walked by that cemetery late at night. But tonight the spooks were benevolent. The cemetery seemed to be sending good vibes. It seemed like my brother and sister who were buried there were saying — welcome home Dave.
It was two o’clock in the morning when I got home. The lights were out. Duke, our German Shepherd, didn’t even raise his head. After three years he’d probably recognized my footsteps when I got off the train. I went in the unlocked door, piled my stuff in the living room and went to my room. I stood at my bed and looked around. Dead quiet. No incoming artillery or mortars here. Nostalgia swept over me. All the denials through the past years caught up with me. I went back outside, sat down on the porch and wept. Duke came over, licked my face consoling me.
That’s enough of this foolish tough guy image The symbolic flak jacket came back on. I went upstairs to my room and fell asleep immediately.
“Give them a hot meal and dry socks.”
I was back in Control Post… The night combat patrol was getting home. Were there casualties? Food and dry socks may seem simplistic but they were important after a night in the freezing weather.
My sister poked her head in the door and called, “Welcome home! You need dry socks? Mom’s got breakfast ready for you?”
My father and mother were down in the kitchen. They both hugged me.
My mother said, “Why didn’t you write more? We worried a lot about you. Fred was home on leave. He told us about flying you from Korea to Tokyo for Rest and Recuperation. I hope you had a good time.”
“You better not ask him about R&R, Mom” my sister Peg laughed. She knew that whatever I did in Tokyo was probably pretty wild.
My father said, “You’d better think about getting back into college.”
I wondered how he really felt.
“How about some cold milk, coffee, pancakes and sausage,” my mother said.
Milk was something I dreamed about during those long nights in Korea, and never knew I would ever experience again. I was a farm boy, and powdered milk just did not cut the mustard. Sweet corn was second on the want list, but this was November. I would have to wait until summer for that.
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The train was headed north in Korea toward the front lines. It was a puffing old steam engine pulling rickety passenger cars, and flat cars carrying tanks, artillery, trucks, jeeps, tankers, everything imaginable, billowing black smoke as it chugged its way north. The passenger cars were stuffed full of GI’s from the United States and many other countries who were part of the United Nations mandate. South Korean soldiers and civilian workers were on the roofs and hanging onto every conceivable crevice, chewing on a red turnip-like vegetable as they went. The jumble of languages was very Tower of Babelish. We were getting close enough to see the flashes from artillery and air strikes in the night sky.
A grizzled old sergeant on his way back to the front after recovering from his wounds muttered “Jesus Christ, looka’ thar’, they knows wes’ comin’. Look at that thar’ celebration goin’ on. Jess’ laake the Fourth of Juuly. Lieutenant git ready for the real thing.”
We were two infantry Lieutenants and a Capt, a surgeon in the Medical Corps, sitting together. Donnie Doe and I were barely nineteen and acting edgy. There would be no more weekends in San Francisco for a while. Marching bands and pretty girls, parties, drinking, wild sex and carousing were a distant memory. This was war. The Captain, a surgeon and an amiable, humorous fellow with a huge handlebar mustache named Vimouz, was trying to take the edge off with some engaging dry humor.
Donnie and I had trained together through Officer Candidate School, Airborne and Ranger training. We were good friends. Comrades in arms.
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I was raised on a farm in small town in upstate New York, one of eight children. I liked sports, music, reading, hunting, fishing and riding. I did a lot of whitewater canoeing. I liked living on the edge from an early age
I could remember Pearl Harbor. The priest offered prayers at Mass on that Sunday morning, December 7th. As I came out of church situated on a hilltop, I was very young, and when I looked down the valley, I expected the Japanese to start coming over the hills any minute. As I was walking home along the railroad tracks, I was shocked and excited to see soldiers on the railroad bridge walking back and forth. How’d they get there that fast? I knew of no soldiers within 200 miles. And then I realized, they were probably dropped off by a troop train dispatching troops along the way to guard the critical points on the railroad. It was an important transportation route. Troop trains and freight trains with tanks, trucks, and jeeps were constantly moving from Chicago to the port at Jersey City on their way overseas.
The rapid change from a sleepy farm town to one in the middle of a war footing was mind boggling. It seemed like everything was happening at once and there seemed to be danger and excitement everywhere. I was trying to walk home along the railroad tracks. Crossing that narrow railroad trestle instead of following the road would save me about a mile’s walk. It was cold. I watched the sentry walk toward me, stop, and turn to walk back across the bridge.
I thought to myself, “Should I ask him if I could walk along with him?”
A second thought and I decided not to. He looked like he meant business and that rifle was at the ready. I jumped into the snow and slid down the precipitous embankment to the road.
My father volunteered to man the local observation towers that were immediately set up to watch for enemy planes. I went with him. At five years old that’s all I could do. There were no enemy planes within 3000 miles. People stood watch every day, 24 hours day, and reported everything that flew. (Except the crows –or maybe even a crow once in a while.). Emergency newscasts were constantly being broadcast over the radio. There was no television then. The smell of war stood in the air. It was blood-rushing excitement to me. My oldest brother Fred had been shot down flying supplies to the Chinese over the Himalayan hump. He walked through the jungles of Burma that were swarming with Japanese soldiers for thirty days. He managed to get to China, was rescued by the Nationalist Chinese and returned to his unit. I remember the worried look on my mother’s face during that time. The fact that he was shot down and walked out and was back with his unit made Fred a hero to me. I was jealous. I loved the patriotism and the heroics, the war fever as it came over the radio. It was my heritage. I had to be a part of it. My father was in the Army in WW I. My mother’s family, early Scotch-Irish colonists, fought in every war since the Revolution. I was ready to join up.
About year later, I decided to run away to Canada to join the Royal Air Force. I started hitchhiking. My first ride was with a truck driver headed for Montreal on the New York Thruway. I thought I had it made. When I told the driver what I was intending to do, he turned the truck around and brought me home. I never tried again. Perhaps, because I got a gurl friend. Her name was Mary Lou and she diverted my passion for quite a while.
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The train stopped at the replacement depot. The troops swarmed off the train like ants from an anthill. It was mid morning. There were hundreds of stretchers with wounded waiting to be loaded on the train for the trip south.
A sergeant passing by muttered, ”Old Baldy’s at it a’gin, suck up your gut Lieutenant wees’ in this up to our assholes”.
Not a great reception. Donnie was sent immediately to fill a replacement slot. I was sent up later that night.
Vimouz said goodbye to both of us with a wry, “See you soon.”
He was going to the regimental MASH, the front-line combat hospital. No way I wanted to see him again. Little did I know how soon it was going to be?
I got to my company at sunrise. The night combat patrol was just getting back. They had casualties, wounded and dead. Donnie was on a stretcher covered with a poncho. He was dead. I was assigned to the same platoon.
The next day the company was sent to retake an outpost called Old Baldy. The company commander, a tall lanky soft-spoken Texan named Cox, with a number of citations for bravery, spoke to me. “We have to cross a minefield to get there. You stay right behind me and step exactly in my footprints. Your platoon will follow the same way”.
Old Baldy loomed in the distance, just a mass of debris and churned-up dirt and body parts. It was a jungle of trenches with the enemy covering the approach area with fields of fire from machine guns…
It had changed hands a number of times. The strategic or tactical reasoning was lost in the frustrating actions that were the Korean War. The hill would have to be taken in the trenches with close hand to hand-to-hand fighting, eyeball-to-eyeball. There was very little room to maneuver. No way to use the superior firepower or the technology of the Americans. And the Chinese soldiers were veterans of years of war. They knew how to fight with the bare-knuckle essentials. Cox started to move out amidst heavy artillery and mortar going both ways. Enemy machine gun fire was coming directly on us as we were advancing. The minefield left no room for fire and maneuver. It had to be crossed. Tanks and heavy armor had been used to clear a path but the danger of mines was still there. The Chinese artillery, mortar fire and heavy machine-gun fire, was very effective. The Chinese were waiting in the trenches. They were catching hell from American artillery and air strikes in combat but they were not exposed. They would kill as many of the Americans as possible on the way in and then, as we got into the trenches, they would let a group through, cut them off from the main force and try to slaughter the trapped element.
Just as Capt Cox got through the minefield he was hit directly with an artillery shell. He seemed to disintegrate with a splash of body parts. After 24 hours in combat for the first time in my life I was now leading the company until the other officers got through. The incoming rounds were relentless. The screech, the explosions, the wail of the aircraft in their bombing runs, the screams and cries of agony from wounded and dying soldiers amid the confusion and fog of violence stung me. I had a split-second of fear and indecision.
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A clear four-warble whistle. My mother was calling me. Hanging by four fingers on a sheer rocky cliff I looked back. My mother was standing in front of the house waving. It was dinner time. The smell of apple pie drifted through my mind. I started back down. Getting to the top could wait.
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The advance elements moved from the valley to the hill and rushed the trenches. I was filled with an adrenalin rush. I talked to my platoon sergeant, a rough gruff ex-boxer named Grole. He was a Master Sergeant and a respected, almost revered guy in combat situations, but a private in and out of the guardhouse in peacetime back in the US.
Grole’s face was a caricature of a punchy boxer. When he showed emotion he would cock his head, his cauliflower ear would show, and his face would twist in a demonic grin. His flattened nose looked like a clam. His eyes were beady and they were focused on the tip of his nose. When he spoke you were never sure what part of the face the sound was coming from. But, he had a shrewd intuitive mind, and was a natural leader with warrior instincts. He could be both charming and disarming. He could kill in a heartbeat and would react in a heartbeat to save his men at the risk of his own life, and they knew it.
Grole said, “-Just move out. You are our leader. I’ll be right in back of you. When we engage them we will figure out what to do next. And Lieutenant, it will be eyeball-to-eyeball in those trenches.”
I crouched along the trench and just before I started to turn the first corner an enemy soldier leapt at me with rifle and bayonet fixed. I froze. Sgt. Grole jumped ahead, firing directly into the man’s face and then bayoneted him. A second enemy soldier appeared. Grole hit him with a rifle butt.
He leaned against the trench and mumbled to me. “Ya’ gettin’ the idea? You take the next one.”
A head appeared just over the edge of the trench looking straight at me. I raised my carbine and fired the magazine into the head. It instantly dissolved into blood, bone and brains, splattering both Grole and I. Another head appeared. I grabbed it and pulled the soldier into the trench and, with my gun empty, beat his head until he was motionless.
The bottoms of the trenches were covered with bodies and body parts. Some American, some Chinese, some dead, some wounded, writhing in agony, moaning and crying for help.
As the young troops moved up, I could see their faces, their eyes wild, searching, glazed, the language of fear amidst enemy mortars shells and grenades, with heavy artillery falling like an avalanche of explosive rocks and boulders. Machine gun and rifle fire screeched like swarms of angry hornets. The deafening noise, confusion, the chaotic violence and agony, was the backdrop to a living hell.
Sgt. Grole and I were talking to two of the squad leaders, Corporals Draff and Meff.
I spoke directly to Draff. “Draff, take your squad and rush the trenches as far as the chopper pad at the next trench intersection.” The company had used the pad when it held the hill last week. “We need that for a perimeter that will hold back the chinks until the rest of the company can get up here where they can do some good. That’s a massacre back there. Meff, go over the trench, take the machine gun squad with you and try to get some return fire on those Chinese machine gun emplacements. Meet up with Draff at the chopper pad out and maybe we can secure a perimeter. I’ll go with you. Sgt. Grolle will go with Draff.”
Turning to my radio operator, I said, “Get a message to the battalion and tell them we are engaging the enemy close up and moving out, but the trenches are not secure.”
Draff and Meff were young.. Draff had spent his teen years fighting in the French underground during WWII. Meff had been doing the same thing in Belgium. They both joined the US Army after the war and ended up in Korea. Grole nodded in approval of what I was saying. He knew these two men and they were good. He also knew that if they didn’t clear an area – especially the chopper pad – to work in, everyone could die. He told them that our mortar and heavy weapons would be concentrated on the pad.
“Draff get yo’ ass in gear. When you get close to the pad we will stop or mortars and artillery. Trap the Chinese in the trenches between you and Meff. Keep the machine gun over the trench. Keep more Chinese from rushing you and cut down the ones who will flee the trenches if they git trapped.”
I looked at those guys again. I wanted to see aggressiveness. It was there. Everyone knew there was no way out but to take it to the Chinks.
After a fierce but brief fight, the CP bunker at the helicopter pad was secured, a small, fragile perimeter. With the main force rushing through to move up the hill, Lt Col Jarvanian, the Battalion Commander, appeared and talked to Grole and me.
“Nice work, Lt Smith, we have a chance to move out a little now.”
“Thanks you, Sir” I said.
Jarvanian knew Sgt. Groler well and liked him.
He put his arm on Grole’ shoulder in a fatherly gesture and said. “God, you’re ugly Sgt Grole.”
It was the last thing he ever said. In that instant two enemy soldiers jumped out of a hole. One bayoneted Jarvanian in the stomach and the other emptied his burp gun into Jarvanian‘s face. Grole fired his weapon at one, killing him instantly, and hit the other’s head with his rifle butt repeatedly until it was a pool of blood, skin and bone. What was left of an eye floated on the surface.
Sgt Grole said, “Lieutenant, we were lucky — that could have been you or me.”
It was getting dark. Grole and I searched for a bunker that could provide some protection for a night command post and serve as a last-ditch stand. Survivors might be able hold out until relief showed up. In the darkness I sat in a corner trying to make radio contact. It was now pitch black. Grole went out to check the perimeter.
Searing flashes and angry staccato of an automatic weapon shattered the darkness and silence. The smell of cordite permeated the air, grated painfully on the senses, tormented the brain like an open raw wound. The instantaneous sensation was deafening, blinding, and an excruciating sensitivity of the skin. Balls and asshole puckering painfully, my cock hardened into an immense erection in a masochistic metaphor. Primal fear, excruciating pain and impending death – the ultimate erotic. My heart was racing, lungs gasping fluids, filling the lungs as if drowning. My belly erupting like a volcano of acidic bile, forcing it through the sphincter, into my esophagus, flooding my mouth with a vile taste and burning, suffocating as it poured into my nostrils. My mind was racing at lightning speed – its life or death right now. I hugged the floor in a corner, against the side of the bunker, shaking my head, blinking, clearing my eyes and ears from the dirt that splattered from the sandbags inches above me where the bullets hit. I don’t want to die. .I won’t die. I’m better than whatever is in this bunker with me. Clear the body. Clear the mind. The sound, the blinding flashes had disoriented me. I couldn’t think. I was very frightened. I was unable to orient myself. Then gut-level survival instincts took over. Lightning-fast thoughts, I can’t see them. Can they see me? I took refuge in the deafening quiet and deep sheltering, threatening darkness.
Faint sound of breathing, the smell of garlic, the tell-tale sign of a Chinese soldier, real close. Something brushed my boot. Searing pain as a knife pierced my calf. I lashed out with my knife and caught my assailant’s flesh somewhere. Neither of us made a sound. I quickly rolled away trying desperately to hold my breath, remain silent and try to hear sounds, anything from the enemy. Another stab grazed my throat. I lashed out and caught firm flesh. It was followed by a loud moan and then silence again. I reached my arm out tentatively, groping in the darkness. It fell directly on the quilted jacket of the Chinese soldier. I pulled him close and wrestled with him, trying to deal a death-blow with my knife. The Chinese soldier was desperately doing the same. After a few minutes, exhausted, we broke away. I lay face down on the dirt floor in my own feces and blood. I vomited and heard my assailant vomiting. I kept my head on the floor in the shit, blood and vomit. I wondered when I would die.
Light started trickling in. It was dawn. I was on one side of a wall of sandbags. I slowly moved up to look over the wall. Just as I got to the top, the head of my Chinese adversary appeared. We looked at each other. .For a brief second, we seemed to share a feeling of camaraderie. He looked like a young kid. Then his head disappeared in a splash. Grole had burst in the door and emptied his carbine into the man’s face. “Let’s get going Lt; they’re crawling all over the place out here.”
In that split second, I caught a glimpse of a Chinese soldier swinging his rifle butt at my head. Then an instant of intense pain and a kaleidoscopic explosion of colors.
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Huge trees, monstrous chunks of ice, boards, dead cattle and parts of buildings were caught up in the surge of water. The spring thaw had come. The ice jams had broken. The Delaware River was raging. A red canoe with two young boys was caught in the flow, riding the white water with wild abandon.
My mother answered the phone. “Hello Mabel. My goodness the river is rampaging isn’t it? I can see it right out my window.”
It was a close friend, Mildred Ogle, who lived down river about five miles on the side of a hill with a direct view of the river. “Grace, I don’t believe what I just saw. I saw that wild son of yours and Ross Grabber in the middle of the river in a canoe moving downstream at a hundred miles an hour. Huge trees, houses, everything roaring down stream with them.”
My mother replied, “I think David has too much sense for that.”
After she hung up a worried look passed her over her face. One of her daughters had drowned in the river.
This was a hardened woman, but “not another one,” she thought
Roaring through the whitewater Ross shouted, “Bet we’re the only people on the river!”
Pretty safe bet. Downstream 25 miles or so, we paddled the canoe over to shore for the trip back home. We pulled the canoe up a steep rocky bank to the railroad tracks and waited for the next freight train. A couple passed us, and then the way freight came by. This was the freight train that dropped off freight at local stops along the way, and the local people got to know them. The engineer saw us and slowed the train to a stop. We threw the canoe into an empty boxcar and climbed in. The train started moving again. My grandfather and father, immigrants from Italy, had worked on the tracks. Our relationship with the railroad engineers was almost family.
The engineer stopped the train at my house, just a hundred yards away, waited until we got the canoe off, and then moved on.
“Where have you been and why are you bringing that canoe from the tracks instead of the river?” asked my mother.
“Aw, Mom we just got the canoe off the river bank and out of the flood and walked it up the tracks. River’s too wild to do anything,”
She seemed relieved and didn’t want to know any more. This would have been trouble if my father knew.
Several weeks later, the engineers stopped by my home with wine and some ice cream. They knew that it was meatballs and spaghetti night at our household. My mother was sort of famous for that dish.
They greeted my mother,. “Just taking the chance that you might have some spaghetti and meatballs on the stove.”
My mother laughed, she knew it was payback time. “Yes we would love to have you for dinner. My husband will be back soon. He will like some of that wine. And so would I.”.
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I woke up in a MASH unit. Capt Vimouz was leaning over me.
I said: “What happened? Am I going home?”
“No, you’re going back to your unit.. You were hit with a rifle butt and got carved up a little. You were covered with dried shit, blood and vomit. What the hell were you doing up there? You’re OK. By the way, what happened to Donnie?”
“He was killed on his first night patrol’..
Vimouz shrugged and turned away. The hospital was full of wounded, with barrels of arms and legs in full view. I rested a while, and then I started to notice the pretty nurses who were caring for me. Thank god, I thought, that blow to my head didn’t slow me down when it came to flirting with a pretty girl. I dressed and was taken to the replacement depot and boarded a train that would take me back to the front. Still a puffy black old steam engine with the cars packed full of people and war equipment, but this was a much different train ride. I knew where I was going. I had started my first day as a cocky invincible warrior. I was going back to my unit, back into that chaotic, violent hell, a much wiser man.
