27th Wolfhound Raiders

[Mike Yared <mikeyared@yahoo.com>]

something about the 27th Wolfhound Raiders
Mike Yared

from
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David H. HackworthTHE WOLFHOUND RAIDERS
I've had scores of requests for information on the
Wolfhound Raiders
that were formed and fought in the Korean War.
Here is an extract from Gung Ho magazine and two
chapters from ABOUT
FACE that cover the Raiders during the Korean War. I
don't know Major
Jackson, the author of the Gung Ho magazine piece. He
wasn't a member
of the Raiders while I was in it. There are several
minor mistakes in
the piece which is to be expected from most war
stories written
decades after the fight. Overall it is pretty good and
will give the
reader a decent appreciation of the 27th Raiders and
the fine men that
made it up.
The two chapters extracted from ABOUT FACE are far
more accurate as my
cowriter, Julie Sherman, had the opportunity to
interview a number of
Raiders and other Wolfhounds who were familiar with
that fine unit.
Julie is also an incredibly detailed researcher and a
fanatic for
total accuracy.  The Raiders were formed by Infantry
Divisions across
the Korean front to replace the gallant Airborne
Ranger Companies
which had been deactivated because qualified
replacements couldn't be
obtained to replace the casualties and those rotating
home.
The Raiders were the forerunners of the LRRPs employed
in Vietnam. The
first battalion-level LRRP unit in Vietnam was the
1/327th Airborne
Infantry's Tiger Force. Their organization and
employment was modeled
on my Raider experience. I was the battalion XO and
the Tigers were my
brain-child. I merged the assets of the Bn. Recon and
Mortar platoons
and formed the Tigers who were later merged into the
101st LRRPs and
subsequently reflagged as 75th Rangers. 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 
Wolfhound Raiders In Korea 
By Major John S. Jackson, U.S. Army Ret.
In the predawn darkness of 4 November 1951, men of the
elite 27th
Wolfhound Raiders (Provisional) silently moved up the
forward slope of
CCF Hill 400 in an unsupported night raid to surprise
the entrenched
Chinese communist enemy and grab one or more prisoners
for
intelligence purposes. With vegetation completely
lacking from the
upper portion of Hill 400 due to weeks of shelling,
the alert enemy
spotted the climbing Americans. Bursts of automatic
fire and grenade
explosions shattered the stealthy approach of the
Wolfhound Raiders.
As the element of surprise vanished. the Wolfhounds
immediately
returned fire with Ml rifles, BARs, and carbines.
Shouting out to the
Chinese defenders, the Korean civilian interpreter
attached to the
Wolfhound Raiders was cut down by automatic fire and
died instantly.
Numerous Chinese" potato masher" stick grenades were
thrown from the
CCF trench-line at the advancing Americans. Two
Wolfhound Raiders were
blinded by grenades, and others received bullet and
fragment wounds.
There were no armored vests issued to the infantry in
those days.
Rapidly moving up the steep slope, the 27th Wolfhound
Raiders reached
and entered the CCF bunkered trench-line which
encircled the top of
Hill 400. The point-blank night fire-fight now evolved
into
hand-to-hand combat. One brave Wolfhound, upon
reaching the Chinese
trench, had his spinal cord severed by withering CCF
fire. Paralyzed,
he used his body as a human shield to protect another
wounded
Wolfhound and maintained deadly fire against the enemy
until killed.
Fanning out in both directions along the Hill 400
trench-line, the
Wolfhound Raiders found the going tough. On the
reverse slope, a CCP
tunnel bored deep into the hill, giving shelter and
complete cover to
the defending Reds. From this position, a
communications trench ran to
nearby CCF Hill 419, from which Chinese reinforcements
were hurrying
to battle the Yank raiders. With his small command
group, Lt. David H.
Hackworth knew his assault force was in for a hard
fight.
Committing his command group to combat, Lt. Hackworth
charged the
hostile trench-line. Fighting with him was SFC Fred
Crispino, a former
member of Mussolini's Blackshirts who deserted fascism
for democracy.
Crispino, twice awarded the Silver Star for gallantry
in action.
fought furiously against the Chinese until seriously
wounded for the
third time. Hackworth, wounded in the arm, kept on
fighting.
PFC Donald Neary. Hackworth's RTO, dropped his SCR-300
radio and
entered the enemy trench. Spotting a Chicom firing a
burp gun from a
trench bunker, Neary rushed into the bunker unarmed.
smashed his heavy
fist into the Chink's head, and yanked the SMG from
his hands. Pulling
the stunned Chinese from the bunker, Neary slung him
over his
shoulders and headed back down the hill with a live
POW from the CCF
Special Duty Regiment. Other Wolfhound Raiders hauled
10 dead Chinks
from the trench-line and rolled them down the forward
slope of Hill
400.  Neary's prisoner attempted to pull a grenade
from the
Wolfhound's web belt.  Neary tossed his POW on the
ground, stomped him
a few times, and reslung him over his shoulders. Once
again the Chicom
tried to get a grenade. The same process was repeated.
Unfortunately
for the Chinese POW, he was DOA when Donald Neary
dumped him on the
ground at the Wolfhound aid station set up for the
raid.  Despite his
wound. David Hackworth entered another communist
bunker and emerged
with a second Chink prisoner: this one survived for
interrogation
purposes.  Enemy fire was still intense, and stick
grenades continued
to explode about the portion of trench-line captured
by the Americans.
Chinese reinforcements from Hill 419 prevented the
complete capture of
Hill 400 by the Wolfhound Raiders.  Having
successfully completed the
mission of taking one or more prisoners, and with the
approach of
morning nautical twilight. Lt. Hackworth and his
Wolfhound Raiders
conducted a fighting withdrawal from the embattled
Korean lull.  The 4
November 1951 raid on Hill 400 was the most costly
operation of the
27th Wolfhound Raiders in Korea. Of the 33 Raiders
making the assault,
three were KIA and 24 were WIA, plus the dead Korean
interpreter. At
8l percent casualties, it was a costly affair.
Hackworth, Crispino,
and the other wounded Raiders were hospitalized. Some
would never
return to combat, but not so Crispino and Hackworth.
They would return
to further distinguished service in Korea and
elsewhere.
For the capture of two prisoners, even though one
died, the Raiders
were awarded two cases of beer in accordance with a
policy of one case
per POW as set forth by Colonel George B. Sloan, CO,
27th Infantry.
For his outstanding combat ability and superior
leadership traits, PFC
Donald Neary was named acting platoon sergeant of the
27th Raiders,
even though there were still five unwounded corporals
in the unit.
There were no complaints over Neary's appointment.
FORMATION OF THE WOLFHOUND RAIDERS
At the early phase of the Korean War, each U.S.
Infantry division had
an attached Ranger company. Due to costly fighting,
many Ranger units
were committed to line infantry combat where
casualties were high. In
many cases Ranger companies were broken down, with one
Ranger platoon
being assigned to an infantry regiment. Ranger
replacements couldn't
keep pace with losses. By the summer of 1951, the
Ranger units in
Korea were disbanded.  As a consequence, division and
regimental
commanders sadly missed the elite Rangers. In several
U.S. divisions,
provisional replacement units for the decimated
Rangers were organized
from gung-ho volunteers - many of whom were ex-Rangers
or
ex-paratroopers. In the 25th Infantry Division. a
volunteer raider
platoon was formed for each regiment. Having had the
dubious
distinction of serving as co-commander of the 24th
"Deuce Four"
Raiders and observing the 35th Raiders in action by my
Sniper's Ridge
sector, the honor of commanding the 27th Wolfhound
Raiders fell on my
shoulders, following the expensive 4 November raid.
WOLFHOUND RAIDER OPERATIONS
With the activation of the 27th Wolfhound Raiders
(Provisional) in the
summer of 1951, Lt. David Hackworth was carefully
chosen to organize,
train, and lead in combat this select group of gung-ho
fighters from
America's finest Infantry regiment. Organized as an
assault unit with
four squads and a command group, the Wolfhound Raiders
were armed with
an assortment of weapons. While not on operational
missions, the
Raiders were training-normally for the next
assignment. Operationally,
the 27th Raiders were directly under the regimental
commander and the
regimental S2 (intelligence officer). In many respects
they were the
forerunners of the LRRPs in Vietnam, except they
specialized in
Ranger-type raids rather than reconnaissance
missions-a task left to
the Regimental Intelligence & Reconnaissance Platoon.
Wearing their
own special Wolfhound Raider insignia patch on the
right shoulder, the
27th Raiders were granted five days R&R in Japan for
successful
completion of 10 missions. They were also granted
authority to wear
the Ranger flash for superior battlefield performance.
LIEUTENANT DAVID H. HACKWORTH
In Korea, the name of Lieutenant David H. Hackworth
became synonymous
with that of the Wolfhound Raiders. A born fighter and
adventurer.
Dave Hackworth joined the U.S. Merchant Marine at age
13 during World
War II. Two years later, he enlisted in the U.S. Army
after dropping
out of Santa Monica High School. When the Korean War
broke out in
1950, Corporal Hackworth volunteered for Korea to
serve with the famed
Wolfhounds. Rapidly promoted during the regiment's
bitterest fighting,
winning two Silver Stars and being twice wounded,
David Hackworth was
granted a battlefield commission in 1951.  As CO, 27th
Wolfhound
Raiders, Lt. Hackworth won a DSC and a third Purple
heart, plus two
Bronze Stars for valor. He stayed in Korea for the
war's duration and
returned to the USA in 1953 as a captain. In 1966.
Major Hackworth
went to Vietnam as a paratrooper with the 101St
Airborne Division.
After six year's of combat in 1972 as a Special Forces
colonel, having
won a total of 75 U.S.  decorations, including two
Distinguished
Service Crosses, nine Silver Star Medals, two Legion
of Merit Medals,
eight Bronze Star Medals for valor, eight Purple
Hearts and 46 Air
Medals-which makes Colonel Hackworth the most
decorated soldier in
U.S. Army history.
WOLFHOUND RAIDERS IN ACTION
Fighting along Korea's Iron Triangle base from Kumhwa
to Chorwon, and
often infiltrating CCF lines toward the northern apex
of Pyonggang,
the Wolfhound Raiders under Dave Hackworth gained an
excellent
reputation as highly proficient night fighters dealing
high losses to
the enemy with minimum casualties for themselves. Many
of their night
fire-fights were conducted at point-blank range, in
one of them.
Hackworth's M2 carbine stopped a bullet which would
have otherwise
ended his distinguished career.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 
ABOUT FACE
CHAPTER 6 
"THE ONLY GAME IN TOWN"
It's not a simple matter to get a company of infantry
and say, "You
guys are going out on a patrol tonight to capture some
Chinese
prisoners"; the average military unit doesn't have the
unique skills
necessary for the conduct of successful night
operations against an
entrenched enemy. We decided we needed a specialized
unit, for the
specific purpose of conducting patrols against enemy
positions all
along the regimental front, with the specific mission
of taking
prisoners as a means of gathering intelligence and
information. The
question of who would command this unit, which we
called the Wolfhound
Raiders, of course, received a lot of attention, and I
recall being
surprised that the name of this young lieutenant
percolated right up
and everybody said, "Yeah, that guy is something
else," and it was
Hackworth. 
Colonel George B. Sloan, USA, Ret. 
Regimental CO, 27th Infantry 
Korea, l95l
 
Raider volunteers came from every outfit in the
regiment, about four
hundred in all. Colonel Sloan had not set a strength
limit, but
-hundred we did not need-our requirement was more like
forty.
Other than the guys from G and E, the volunteers were
a mixed bag
super gung-ho types who did not like trench warfare,
eight balls a
cunning topkick was trying to unload, bored troops
just looking for
adventure. We had little time to cull through the herd
of would-be
warriors-we were on a short fuse to get ready, with
our first raid
scheduled within a month-so I relied on a few of the
former E and G
NCOs (who knew what we looking for) to conduct the
initial interviews.
They quickly sent the jerks and thrill seekers
marching; the best and
bravest they sent to me. Crispino whom I'd made Raider
platoon
sergeant, sat in on my sessions with these, "first
cut" candidates,
and between the two of us it was usually easy to asses
a man's mettle.
For the times when it wasn't, Chris had devised a
brilliant screening
technique that instantly separated the men from the
boys.
He'd taken the powder out of a frag grenade and fired
the primer cap
separately.  Then he'd reassembled the thing, and now,
as I
interviewed potential Raiders, Chris would sit there
playing with this
dummy grenade. Near the end of the session, if I still
wasn't sure
about a man, I'd give Chris a wink and he'd
"accidentally" drop the
grenade. The safety pin would fall out and we'd jump
back-horror and
shock on our faces-meanwhile studying the guy's
response to this
"live" grenade spinning around on the floor. If the
volunteer froze,
we knew we didn't want him. If he threw himself on the
grenade, we
thought he was nuts (or at least suicidal) and we
didn't want him
either. But if he grabbed the thing and threw it out
of the tent, or
if he cut a trail out of the place himself, we knew he
had good
sense-he was a cool hombre, and real Raider material.
We were faced with the same dilemma a high-school
football coach faces
each fall, when every freshman expects to make the
varsity squad.
Probably three hundred volunteers were weeded out with
our shotgun
approach-a lot of good men, too. Some, the persistent,
kept coming
back and finally made it as we needed replacements.
After Chris's and
my cut, we still had far too many people, but at least
it was a
manageable number, and I knew that, as with parachute
or Ranger
training, more than half of these men would fall by
the wayside over
the next few weeks.
Training started the minute an individual was
accepted. The first week
was all basic individual stuff-how to scoot and shoot.
My foundation
was solid: 
Crispino, Costello, and Wells from George and McLain,
Smalling,
Ropele, Lipka, Sovereign, Bill Hearn, and Jimmy
Mayamura from Easy
were all seasoned combat warriors. The Raider NCOs
taught most of the
classes-all hands-on, no classroom shit-and every hour
of every
twenty-hour training day became a test in which
someone was
eliminated. The weak fell out, the strong made it, and
by the end of
the week we were down to sixty guys.
The second week was squad training. "Your squad," I'd
say to an NCO,
"train it." The men practiced ambush and counterambush
techniques
until they could do them in their sleep. The
volunteers progressed
from the basics to the more specific skills needed
when operating
behind enemy lines: how to cut throats, use a garrote,
and toss a
razor-sharp hand ax with pinpoint accuracy. Attitude,
motivation,
discipline, intelligence and common sense, Physical
fitness, and the
ability to think under pressure were harshly measured:
more men fell
out, and we were down to fifty.
The final week we trained as a unit, repeating,
repeating, repeating
until everything was second nature. Well-planned raids
on U.S. and
South Korean installations served as the final exam. I
figured if
novices could infiltrate friendly positions protected
by armed and
shaky clerks who'd shoot to kill, then operating
behind enemy lines
would be a piece of cake. When one Raider "patrol"
managed to uproot
and abscond with a thirty-foot flagpole from a South
Korean Corps HQ
while guards goose-stepped around the joint, I knew we
were ready.
We'd bottomed out at forty-seven lean, mean, and damn
proud
Raiders-the graduation exercise was a ten-mile run
with full gear.
Colonel Sloan had given us a blank check. His word
alone was the magic
key to all the fat supply depots, and what could not
be obtained
legally we bartered, scrounged, or stole. The training
had already
paid off: stealth, plenty of it, made the Raiders the
best hand of
thieves ever assembled in U.S. Army. We knocked off
tents, trucks,
jeeps, beds, and even a complete operational field
kitchen; we had
enough rations and other goodies in our larder to keep
a regiment
going for a few days, including a bunch epicurean
rations from the
General's kitchen, which we scrounged while making off
with two
stoves. Nothing was safe and nothing was sacred; we
sharpened our
skills while improving our life-style. Life at our
camp was good, and
promised to get even better-and our Raider flag (a
skull and crossed
bones) flew high.  The Raiders' initial organization
was four
eleven-man squads, all identical in organization and
equipment. Later,
based on lessons learned and mission change, we would
add a scout
squad and beef up the assault force with a couple of
LMGs.  I decided
that every guy could carry the weapon of choice, as
long as it was
automatic. The M-3 submachine "grease" gun was easy to
get and,
despite its weight and the weight of its ammo, was a
favorite, but
better still (if you could get one) was the snazzy,
more reliable
Thompson, which was in short supply.
The Thompson had been phased out of the U.S. Army
after WW II.
Chiang's Nationalist Chinese Army had had them for a
while (before the
Red Chinese kicked Chiang's ass in 1949 and took them
away); now we
were getting them back from dead Reds in Korea.
Musical Thompsons. And
since both sides were dug in and the war was no longer
one of
movement, the game continued, with combat soldiers
swapping the
weapons for firewater with noncombat types who wanted
to play out the
role of a tommy-gun-toting warrior. MPs confiscated
the Thompsons from
the rear-echelon commandos as unauthorized weapons,
and because
automatic weapons could not be sent back to the States
as war
souvenirs, piles of them were ending up on the floors
of Ordnance
depots. To the Raider way of thinking, this was a real
waste, and
Chris took it upon himself to make a deal with an
Ordnance sergeant in
Seoul: one jeep for his Thompsons. The 25th Signal
Company graciously
provided the jeep (when the driver failed to
chain-lock the vehicle
and pull the distributor), and the next morning two
Raider jeeps
bumped down the main road to Seoul to make the swap
The
ex-signal-Company jeep's paint job wasn't totally dry,
but with its
new Raider markings, it had no problem clearing the
checkpoints where
MPs were always on alert for hot vehicles.  Our little
convoy
consisted of Chris and me and Bobby and Johnny two
Korean kids whose
last names we never knew. Bobby was about twelve, an
orphan, his
parents having been killed in the winter of l950. He'd
adopted me and
the 3d of Easy when we were at Uijongbu; now he was
the Raider mascot
and had come along today to find out what was left of
his family
outside Kimpo. Johnny was a sixteen-year-old Korean
chogi bearer who'd
been with us in George. He'd followed Chris to the
Raiders and was in
his own words, Chris's "number-one fix-it man." Chris
was virtually
the Buddha incarnate to young Johnny, and the boy
tagged along
everywhere including raids, wearing a constant,
lopsided grin.  The
weapon swap went well, netting us eighteen Thompsons
and several
hundred magazines. Bobby's family turned out to be two
very lovely
sisters about seventeen or eighteen years old, who
wanted to be
Raiderettes. Chris and I figured they'd be great in
the kitchen and
even better with other housekeeping functions, so we
quickly scrounged
fatigues and headgear for our new recruits. I
remembered the time in
Trieste when the I&R had relieved a unit on the Jug
border. We'd
gotten there before the guys in the outfit had
awakened, and we'd been
amazed because, zipped up in their fart sacks, all the
men looked as
big as Paul Bunyan. As the camp came to life we'd
discovered (and had
been even more amazed) the reason the soldiers
appeared so gigantic:
as each sack was unzipped, out crawled not just a
trooper but a
Yugoslav girl who'd kept him warm all night. The
platoon sergeant of
the outfit explained that the girls were just part of
the hill
property" and now they were ours. Prazenka had said,
"You can't break
up a good thing, can you?" and let them stay, for a
few days at least.
Like the Jug girls, Bobby's sisters couldn't speak
English, but they
giggled and jabbered with their brother as they pushed
long, black
hair inside helmet liners and slipped lovely bodies
into baggy green
fatigues. Glancing at the girls hunched down in the
back of our jeep
(they looked like two green Korean soldiers on the way
to the front),
I inwardly thanked Prazenka for setting such a
considerate precedent
on that hill in Italy. In every way now, the Raiders
were ready to go.
* * *
Our first mission, kind of a crawl-before-you-walk
thing, was chosen
our immediate boss on Colonel Sloan's staff, Major
Willard Stambaugh
the regimental Intelligence officer. Chink snipers
were coming down
from the hills before dawn and setting up in the flat
ground facing B
Company the 27th. By first light they'd be in position
and masterfully
concealed; they used smokeless, flashless ammunition,
making them
impossible to spot. The men of B Company were afraid
to stick their
heads up, and rightfully so. Our job was to eliminate
the snipers, and
try to snag a prisoner.
The role we were about to perform was one previously
fulfilled by
Ranger companies across the front, whose very raison
d'être was this
sort of mission.  But as of 1 August, all Ranger
outfits in Korea had
been inactivated. One of the Pentagon-stated reasons
for this move was
that if there's only one guy in a regular unit squad
who wants to
fight, he's needed there to influence the other men;
this same guy,
went the logic, was the one who would join a Ranger
unit, thus leaving
the squad "bare of inspiration."1 It sounded
reasonable from
Washington, but it seemed like a big mistake for the
war as it was. If
nothing else, Colonel Sloan's urgency in getting his
ad hoc Raider
unit up and running within a month of the Rangers'
shutdown attested
that.  Our shakedown cruise began at dusk on 28
August. We assembled
behind B Company, where I had a chance to talk to
Lieutenant Jerome
"Jim" Sudut, whose platoon we'd go through at dark.
Good man,
Sudut-World War II vet, twenty-six years old, a
battlefield
commission-really a stud a guy. Sudut's platoon was
dug in along a
raised railroad line that ran east-west along the
Kumhwa Valley.
Fortunately, the position's rear slopes provided good
cover from the
sniper fire, and relative ease of movement as long as
you kept your
tail down and moved fast. Unfortunately, there was
patrol path going
out. Earlier another U.S. unit had seeded the area
knee-deep in
antipersonnel mines without keeping a record of where
they were
buried. Their short-term protection meant only
long-term agony for
subsequent units, who had to find uncharted mines the
hard way. It was
a problem that had confronted infantry since the
introduction of
mines, and now it was ours.
When it was dark Sudut guided us to the edge of his
wire and wished us
good luck. "I'll have you know, Hackworth, I
volunteered for your
job," he said. It had turned cold; I hadn't brought my
field jacket
and Sudut took off his, insisting that I wear it.
"There'll be coffee
waiting for you in the morning," he added. I
gratefully slipped on the
jacket and eased out into the darkness.  Crispino and
I swapped turns
at the lead. It was good to work with him again. I
hadn't realized how
much I'd missed him since I'd gone to Easy three
months before. Chris
had come to George in March, when the 8th Rangers
(which is where I'd
first met him) broke up. He was about five years older
than I, but we
had a great affinity. Destined to win two DSCs, two
Silver Stars, and
five Purple Hearts over two tours of Korea ("I don't
fuck around with
the small change," he'd say, years later, when asked
why he'd never
won a Bronze Star, too), Chris was a first-class
fighter and, from our
experience in the 3d of G, one of the finest point men
I'd ever seen.
He was also the unit's lead singer around those
inspiring "Closer Walk
with Thee campfires. He was a really talented musician
who could play
anything-beer bottles, spoons, whatever was available,
but mostly it
was his guitar. Chris also liked to gamble, fight,
screw, and
generally raise hell, which suited me right down to
the ground. He was
a great guy to have for a friend but not the sort
you'd take home to
Mother-or to an Officers' Club, for that matter.
A few days before this first raid we'd gone back to
Kimpo for supplies
We had a little time to kill, so we thought we'd get a
drink and some
decent food while we waited. But Chris, an NCO,
couldn't get into the
Officers Club; the only way around it was to give him
a phony
commission. I took an extra insignia out of my pocket
and pinned it on
him. "Just do what I do, Chris" I said. "They'll never
know." That got
us into the club. We had a few drinks at the bar and
then sat down to
eat.
Now, when a waitress asks, "Would you like mushrooms
on your steak?"
the average guy might say, "Yeah, that sounds great."
But not Chris.
He was working overtime to be a proper officer. His
response was:
"Mushrooms [rolling his eyes to the ceiling] . . . ah,
yes . . .
mushrooms. Yes I do believe mushrooms would be just
fine. Thank you so
very much, miss... and would you mind terribly
bringing us another
bottle of that most delightful red?" I could not
believe my ears (nor
could the Korean waitress who probably spoke ten words
of English),
and I couldn't wait to get him out of that club so I
could bust his
ass back to sergeant.
Well, neither of us is a proper officer now, I
thought, creeping along
through the dark. After almost a year of combat each
and a big chunk
of it together, here we were still leading patrols,
still playing
point man still probing through minefields. We had
little choice about
the minefields. Few Raiders as yet were trained for
this kind of work
(let alone when it was black as a coal digger's ass),
and it was not a
job to delegate to green guys. Even combat engineers
got spooked by
the task, and that was after training, and in daylight
conditions.
The first mine disarmed was a Bouncing Betty on a trip
wire, but there
were others to contend with, too-pressure types, which
were the worst,
those mean little bastards with small pins barely
sticking out of the
ground. We crawled on hands and knees, clearing the
area to our direct
front, then carefully sweeping one hand in a long,
slow arc. If a wire
was found it would be followed to the mine; the mine
would be disarmed
and set aside. If no wire was found, then we'd probe
with trench
knives. Anything solid would be dug up; sometimes we'd
sweat out a
rock and sometimes it was real thing. After "all
clear," we would
crawl another yard and repeat the process. I didn't
need Sudut's
jacket now. I was soaking wet.
The day before, I'd conducted my first aerial recon.
We'd overflown
the patrol route just once, and the path I'd seen
coming off one
particular hill confirmed Sudut's suspicions that the
snipers were
operating from a knob to the west of Hill 1062. To a
groundpounder,
seeing the battlefield from the air had added a
tremendous new
perspective, but the whole time up there I couldn't
help thinking
there must be better ways of spending an afternoon
than flying over
enemy lines in a canvas-and-aluminum shell with a
lawn-mower motor. I
didn't like it. At least on the ground I could always
find a hole. Up
there I felt altogether too vulnerable.
But there must be better ways of spending a night,
too, I thought,
when we finally finished clearing the minefield. It
had taken three
hours to cut through that uncharted maze of death.
We'd cleared ten
mines and my gut ached as if I'd done a thousand
sit-ups. It wasn't
work to keep you young.  We high-stepped through tall
grass-a silent,
single file of ghostly night marauders, now a mile
behind Chinese
lines-toward the ambush site; a spot where the path
I'd seen from the
air intersected a well-used north-south trail. As we
set up our
killing zone we found horseshit, no more than
twenty-four hours old.
When the Chinese first came into the war, they'd used
horses in
Genghis Khan-like, sword-swinging cavalry attacks.
Since then, many of
their horses had gone wild (in George Company we'd
captured a few
riderless beasts ourselves, but with nothing for them
to eat on the
bare winter's ground, after a few days we'd let them
go); the ones the
Chinese had managed to hold on to (or had infiltrated
throughout the
year) were for the sole purpose of resupply. So the
horseshit on the
trail was a good sign: most likely, we were going to
have visitors.
We waited-forty-seven men, including rear and flank
security-lying
prone in a killing zone about one hundred yards long.
Our weapons were
on full automatic with safeties off; grenade pins were
straightened,
too. All the Raiders were connected to one another by
way of a thin
wire running from hand to hand. Three quick pulls on
the wire meant
ENEMY, then one pull for each joker entering the
gauntlet. I was in
the center of the ambush. I'd trigger it with a blast
from my
submachine gun only when the fish were well into the
net, with Don
Neary, my RTO, simultaneously firing a hand flare. Our
SOP then called
for each Raider to fire one mag, toss two grenades,
and pour in
another mag.  After three hours of waiting, the only
blood drawn was
our own: the ambush site was in mosquito country-big
mosquito country.
None of us used repellent (Chinks could smell it as
easily as
after-shave, soap, tobacco, and toothpaste); we
couldn't slap at them
(noises traveled loud and far at night). So we waited
and reluctantly
contributed our blood. I was well protected. Jim Sudut
was a giant of
a man, and his jacket was like a tent. I could almost
crawl up into
it. A lot of the guys who, like me, hadn't thought
they'd need their
field jackets were not so lucky, but just as they'd
set up the ambush,
now they were maintaining it like pros, despite the
thousands of
little stinging bites on hands, faces, and necks. We
made no contact.
The mosquitoes finally won by a TKO-we had to get home
by daybreak.
We saddled up and took a different route back to avoid
the possibility
of a Chink ambush along the path we had taken out. We
had about four
hundred yards to go when the sun started to peek its
nose out of the
eastern sky. Chris was leading and I told him to pick
up the pace.
Suddenly he stopped dead in his tracks. He slowly
turned and whispered
in my ear, "I smell gooks." I took a long sniff.
"Chris, you're
hallucinating. There are no gooks here."
He insisted, "No, I smell them. They're around here
somewhere." The
sun was really starting to make its move now. I had
the monkey on my
back-we had to return to our lines in a hurry or we'd
get the shit
chopped out of us in the middle of no-man's-land. No
one had told me
the Raiders' maiden voyage was code-named "Titanic."
"Let's get the
hell out of here," I whispered.  Good soldier Crispino
started off
again with me breathing fire down his neck. He took
one more step.
"Look, Hack, they're here. I smell 'em... no shit."
"Chris, get behind
me, I'll take the point."
I had taken no more than five steps when I heard a
metallic click. I
knew the sound: a bolt going back on a weapon. A
fraction of a second
later little red flames licked out of the darkness
from a distance of
five feet-slugs leaving a Chinese burp gun. I felt the
slugs smashing
into my stomach even before I heard the report. I
hosed down the
flames with a long burst of .45-caliber slugs,
simultaneously jumping
to the right and hitting the deck. The Raiders took up
their
antiambush positions automatically, as I tossed two
grenades while
spraying another mag. After one more grenade I charged
the ambush,
blasting away. Steve Prazenka, look out-you taught me
well. Moments
later, six dead Chinamen were stretched out in the
tall grass. But
Chris was also down, and very still, about five feet
away. It was
light enough now that I could see his head was covered
with blood.
I felt sick as I slowly turned him over. Chris looked
up at me with
vacant eyes.  Then, slowly, a sly, mischievous grin
crossed his face.
"See, Hack told you I smelled 'em," he said.
And the enemy did smell. "Having a nose" for trouble
on the
battlefield, for contact, was not just an instinctive
thing.
Particularly at night: smells seemed to carry as far
as sound in the
darkness. The Chinese had a smell of rice and garlic,
a putrid,
unmistakable odor that started the adrenaline flowing
with the first
whiff. Curiously, the intelligence value of the
enemy's smell seemed
apparent only to the troops on the ground; the
rear-echelon commandos
took little stock in it, as evidenced by a story Phil
Gilchrist told
me some time later.
After Phil won his DSC, he'd been moved to Division as
the assistant
Operations officer. He was in the division tactical
operations center
(TOC) when I once reported-through Regiment-that my
Raider patrol was
close to the enemy because we could smell them.
According to
Gilchrist, the boys at Division thought this was funny
and asked one
another, "Just how many can he smell?" Phil (who was
the only one
there who had smelled the enemy on a night patrol)
kept his mouth
shut, having learned long before, in his own words,
that "the last
thing a combat officer can do is intrude up the
ruminations of the
nonfighting elite of the Army." Was it any wonder
then, that the
average U.S. fighting man in Korea was sent into the
field smelling
like the corner drugstore? Of course, I wouldn't let
the Raiders that
way; we went as natural as Tarzan in the jungle. It
didn't bother me
if our aroma wouldn't have set well with the folks
back home; I was
concerned about the Chinese. After all, their enemy
smelled, too.
When I realized Chris wasn't dead and there was no
chance of him dying
I had another look at the dead Chinks. They looked
like an FO team,
but a number of them were armed with SKSs. They had
not set up yet,
but looked as though they were just going into
position when we
surprised them by coming up from behind.  Their
mission had probably
been to put a little heat on the main line with some
well-directed H&I
fire and selective sniping. Well, not this time, I
thought. It was
broad daylight by the time we scooped up their radio,
weapons, and
papers and made tracks to the cut in B Company's wire.
When we
arrived, Sergeant Costello, another G Company stud
who'd also served
in the 8th Rangers, loaded the Raiders on our waiting
trucks and took
them home. Sudut took Chris and me to his CP so the
doc could go to
work.
I felt no pain. Hell, I should be dying with multiple
slugs in the
gut, I thought, but except for my hands, which were
covered with small
wounds and swelling to the size of mini baseball
gloves, there was no
blood gushing from anywhere. Doe Brakeman said, "Lie
down here,
Lieutenant, and let me have a look."
I glanced over at Chris. He was kneeling a few feet
away, drinking the
steaming hot coffee Jim had promised (and which I
wasn't allowed to
have with my gut wound). He was a casting director's
dream, old
Crispino-the wounded warrior, blood still dripping
down the side of
his face. "No, no, doc, don't worry about me. Take
care of Crispino.
Take care of the enlisted swine. The doc went over to
Crispino. Chris
said, "Oh, no, doc! I'm just a lowly enlisted man.
Take care of the
officer. The officer is far more important. We EM can
always be
replaced." We continued playing the game, ricocheting
poor, confused
Doc Brakeman back and forth. The doc didn't really
know us yet and
couldn't understand our warped sense of humor. Finally
he gave up
trying, and took care of Chris.  It turned out his
wounds were not
serious-they just bled like hell. One slug had clipped
his earlobe and
the other had grazed his skull like a razor slash.  By
the looks of
things, the Chinese gunner must have panicked. He
hadn't held his
weapon down, and the recoil had lifted the fire from
my gut to Chris's
head to the stars. But we were just damn lucky the
Chinaman wasn't a
pro. He could have cut both of us in half and done
some serious damage
to the Raider column, too.
Then it was my turn. But when the doc laid me down and
cut open the
side of my jacket, he found no wound. He unbuttoned
the jacket and
pulled back the other clothes. There was no blood, no
nothing. I had
small cuts and lots of steel splinters all over my
face, neck, chest,
and the backs of my hands, but no bullet holes. But
I'd been hit in
the gut-I knew it-unless I was the one who'd been
hallucinating.
It was time to call it a night. We said good-bye to
Sudut and his
gang, and gave 
them a couple of SKS rifles for their hospitality.
Between my blood
and Doc 
Brakeman's knife, the jacket Sudut had loaned me was
pretty well done
for; I 
promised to send him a new one with something fluid in
the pocket. But
I never 
saw him again. He was killed two weeks later leading a
platoon attack
against a 
firmly entrenched enemy position. When his body was
found, there were
half a 
dozen or so enemy dead scattered all around him in the
trench. The
lieutenant 
had run out of ammo but not out of fight: the last of
the enemy
defenders had 
been killed with Sudut's trench knife.*
* Sudut was awarded the Medal of honor, posthumously,
for this action.
The doc at the regimental aid station patched us up
properly. Chris
would be down for a few weeks, but my wounds were
superficial, nothing
that couldn't be fixed with a few shots of penicillin,
Tennessee
whiskey, and some deft strokes with a scalpel to get
the steel out. An
easy Purple Heart, but I still couldn't understand it.
My next stop was Regimental S-2. Major Stambaugh had
set up his
Intelligence shop in a large, sandbagged
general-purpose (GP) tent
surrounded by concertina wire in the Regimental
Headquarters complex.
I placed my weapon on the table out front, following
SOP: magazine
out, bolt back, weapon on safety (too many well-armed
clerks had
blasted each other with "unloaded" firearms inside
tents), and went
inside. With Stambaugh I covered everything that
happened after we
crossed the LD: the minefield, the terrain, the
vegetation, the
horseshit, the smells, the noises, the contact. At the
end, in
passing, I told the Major how certain I was about
getting in the gut.
He jokingly suggested that I'd "gone Asiatic,"
whatever that meant,
and I left, picking up my weapon on the way out.  But
when I flipped
the grease gun over to close the bolt and insert the
magazine, there,
staring up at me, was a jagged hole the size of a
fifty-cent piece. So
I wasn't crazy; I had been hit, and the steel
splinters were bits and
pieces from my all-metal M-3. I couldn't resist
running back into
Major Stambaugh's tent so he could have a look at it.
He told me to go
home and get some sleep.
Dell Evans heard I'd been hit, and he came to visit
the Raider camp
later that morning, to check on friends and get the
full scoop. He
disassembled my damaged weapon, and upon examination
we saw that three
slugs had ripped through the trigger housing assembly.
The slugs had
gone through the oil thong case, then through the bolt
retracting
mechanism, and smashed into, but not penetrated, the
other wall-the
wall that was against my gut. My weapon was an M-3 Al,
modified with a
recess in the bolt to draw it back; the retracting
mechanism had been
made redundant by this modification, and shouldn't
even have been
there. So it was almost though some thoughtful
Ordnance man had left
it in, somehow knowing that it would be perfect to
slow down three
9-mm Communist slugs, and thus save my life.
Chris managed to get out of the hospital early. I
think he was worried
that I, of all people, would take advantage of living
alone in our
tent with the two lovely Raiderettes (who'd gotten
tired of the
full-time Army life, but who visited on occasion). The
thought had not
crossed my mind, because Costello had moved in with me
as acting
platoon sergeant while Chris away.  Costello was
actually on his way
home, through normal rotation. Because his days were
numbered, I
wanted to be sure he experienced the best of Raider
life, and on one
particularly hot day between the early raids, I was
dismayed to find
him stretched out on his rack, sleeping. I woke him
up. "Costello,
let's go for a swim."
"Fuck that," he mumbled. "I want to sleep." He was
wearing only a pair
of GI shorts, and his cock was hanging out his fly and
down between
his legs. I couldn't resist. I grabbed my little
patrol pistol, a 9-mm
Beretta, off the top of a nearby field desk and
pointed it at his
cock.  "Costello, I'll blow your cock off if you don't
get out of that
sack and come with me."
Costello knew I'd pulled the clip and emptied the
thing upon returning
from the previous raid, so he told me to get fucked. I
took careful
aim and squeezed.  BANG. The son of a bitch was
loaded. The slug
missed Costello's dick by an inch and blew a hole in
his air mattress.
I don't know who was more shocked as we both watched
his bed slowly
deflate-but he did go swimming. I doubt I've ever seen
anyone happier
to rotate home. Jack Speed-my favorite Tennessee
wheeler-dealer and,
at twenty-three, the oldest Raider besides Chris-took
Costello's
place, and watched me like a hawk.
By the time Chris got back, the Raiders had completed
six successful
missions with no casualties, save on the first one.
The tasks had been
varied and chosen by Major Stambaugh according to
Intelligence needs;
all required stealth and skill, but not every one
required the full
Raider force. We only took as many men as needed to do
the job, be it
taking a prisoner for interrogation, getting enemy
uniforms for line
crossers, raiding an outpost-whatever the S-2 assigned
to us-and from
each raid we learned more and got better. The missions
gradually
became more difficult, taking us farther and farther
behind enemy
lines, or into territory so hot it might take five
hours to crawl a
hundred yards. Advanced training was dictated by
mission requirements,
and anyone with experience shared in the teaching
(like Costello and
Crispino, who'd both been Ranger-trained at Benning,
and McLain-who,
in some hard Pacific fighting, had taken shrapnel from
a Jap round
right in the face-and his fellow Texan, "Tex" Carvin,
who were both WW
II ex-Marines). My own "snooping and pooping" I&R
experience was
invaluable, too, and we'd all sit around and discuss
techniques, the
old pros adding much to the ever-growing repertoire of
Raider tricks.
With Chris's return came a mission to destroy four
caves burrowed into
the side of a hill deep behind enemy line-what aerial
photos and the
Intelligence "experts" suspected to be a supply depot.
Artillery had
already tried to close the place down, with zero
effect; tac air
couldn't get in there at all, because the Chinese had
too many
automatic weapons on Hill 1062, which fired on the
aircraft. Our
mission was simply to blow the caves and return. It
sounded easy, but
it wasn't-few of them were. We had to slip through the
main Chinese
defensive line, make it through real bad country
before we even got to
the caves, then blow them up and get out as if nothing
had
happened-all in exactly ten hours. It was not much
time.
During an aerial recon (the uneasiness I'd felt during
the first one
had passed, and now I requested them whenever
possible), I found the
simplest" way to make the raid. Many trails and
secondary roads
crisscrossed the area around the objective, and a
large creek ran
almost to the caves. We'd wade up the center of that
creek; it would
cover any noise and simplify navigation. I would take
only two squads
into the objective area: Mayamura's scouts to get us
there, and David
Forte's demolitions people. We took lethal packages of
plastic
explosives (C-4) and, in addition, each Raider carried
two thermite
grenades. I figured if we didn't blow them up, we'd
burn them out.
We registered artillery concentrations along our
route, and for two
nights before the raid, the gunners hammered away.
We'd use them
during the raid, too.  The noise would help cover our
movement, and
the flying steel might encourage the enemy to stay in
their holes.
Another benefit was that the guns would be warm and
gunners ready in
case we needed their magic punch to get our asses out
of a crack.
At 1600 hours, Raid Day, everyone was standing tall.
The Raiders'
standard uniform was fatigues or coveralls, and black
knit caps and
sneakers. Black was the order of the day as much as
possible-our faces
and hands, too, smeared liberally with the end of a
burned cork. Loose
clothes, dog tags, and anything that made noise were
tied down with OD
tape or held tight with rubber strips cut from inner
tubes. Chris
conducted the inspection, which by now was SOP: each
Raider had to run
in place, hit the ground, and roll without making one
sound before he
could board the truck.
We slipped through friendly lines at dark, and by 2000
hours we were
behind the main enemy line. We moved fast, with
Mayamura and two of
his scouts far to our front. About a hundred yards
from our objective
we halted and formed a tight defensive perimeter.
Jimmie insisted that
he alone for a look at the caves.  There was no point
in debating the
issue; Jimmie Mayamura was like a cat at night-totally
unafraid. We'd
been together for four months in Easy and by now I was
well used to
his little midnight walks through enemy lines. I loved
Jimmie.  We all
did. He was a no-bullshit gunfighter, a samurai
warrior who preferred
operating by himself. But he was also a quiet
unassuming
first-generation Japanese-American, and he had this
strange thing
about rank. Jimmie was a PFC when he joined the
Raiders, and every
time I tried to promote him he wouldn't accept it. He
was ready and
willing to do any job (as it was, his role as squad
leader called for
the rank of E-6),but he just didn't want to be an NCO.
It didn't
matter to me, but somehow I really felt that after he
went home (which
was in only a couple of months) and got out of the
Army, the time
would come when he'd regret his attitude about not
wanting rank. So
without telling him, I decided to promote him anyway,
one stripe at a
time, and little did he know, but PFC Jimmie Mayamura
was already a
staff sergeant.  An hour after he had gone, Jimmie
returned with the
word that there was nothing in the caves, that they
hadn't been used
in a long time. There was also no sign of Chinese, but
the main track
was well used (with horseshit all over it), and north
of the caves
there was a rough wooden bridge that spanned the creek
we had come up.
Jimmie suggested we blow the bridge. It seemed like a
good idea (we
had enough demo to blow up the Golden Gate anyway, and
it was crazy
taking the stuff back), and besides, it was good
training. Jimmie
provided security while Forte wired the bridge to
explode when we were
sixty minutes down the track; we hustled out of there,
and an hour
later the bridge blew with a thundering roar.  Whether
or not we made
contact with the enemy, it was near impossible to
relax, much less
sleep after a raid. It took a long time for the
adrenaline to stop
pumping; you couldn't just flop down and switch off.
Most of us would
go for a good swim in the river that flowed right by
our little camp;
we'd play on the beach and in the water, just to let
off some steam,
and slowly, slowly unwind.  Afterwards, we'd pick the
raid
apart-lessons learned, screw-ups, and who should get
his walking
papers-over a mighty breakfast of steak and eggs
washed down with
beer. Then we might play some softball, and only
around noon would we
crap out and sleep for ten or twelve hours. By
midnight, most guys
were up again and a party would be rocking the Raider
camp, complete
with open kitchen, 190-proof on the rocks, and,
weather permitting,
midnight swims. It wasn't bad duty. We raided one
night and had the
next three off. It sure beat the hell out of hiding in
the bottom of a
hole on the front and having HE dumped on you
twenty-four hours a day.
One evening, for some reason I wasn't in the mood for
the usual "first
night after the raid" roaring party, and hit the sack
early. The rest
of the guys got drunker and drunker and, deciding I
was a party
pooper, marched into my tent to tell me so. I was
asleep; I woke up to
find myself weaving in midair in the pitch-black night
as six Raiders
held my cot over their heads and congo-lined through
the darkness. I
told them to leave me alone, but the more I protested,
the more
convinced the troops were that I had to come to the
party. Then one
guy got the idea to toss me, cot and all, into the
river. This course
of action was hotly disputed (there seemed to be two
knee-knocking-drunk schools of thought on the issue:
"Leave the Old
Man alone" versus "Drown the bastard"); meanwhile I
just swayed in the
air, listening to all this and contemplating my fate.
I was about to
do a parachute landing (PLF) off the thing when the
conflict
accelerated with the introduction of firepower: one of
the troopers
pulled out a pistol and started shooting into the sky.
Scratch the
PLF, I thought, lying as flat and thin as I could in
my little cot,
looking at the stars and wondering if I would soon be
among them.
The water was cold. But everyone jumped in to salvage
my bed, my
blankets, and me. And the boys had their wish-I warmed
up by the fire
and joined in the fun, as the Raiders continued to
party on through
the night. War stories flew, and we were just a bunch
of kids having a
big old time.  At dawn on our second day off, we'd
suit up and head
down the road for an eight-to-ten-mile run. Our
singing, counting, and
shouting woke up the regimental rear-echelon
commandos, and sweated
out all the poison we'd inflicted on ourselves the
night before. The
run would be followed by two days' and one night's
hard training, and
then another raid. By the beginning of October our
tactical
proficiency became so sharp that I cut out all
training except for
replacements and rehearsals. To me, there was no sense
fixing
something that's already fixed, and there's nothing
worse than an
anxious overtrained unit.  Besides, it gave us more
time to improve
our life-style. Since the Raiders were formed,
logistical units in our
vicinity had begun chaining everything down. It was,
of course, to no
avail-we had bolt cutters-but no one ever came to our
camp to look for
things. Maybe they assumed that the Raiders, the
darlings of the
regiment, were above all that. How very wrong they
were.  One night
the Raiders set up an ambush on a track in front of
the Battalion,
about a mile and a half behind enemy lines. My guys
set up a small,
four-foot-high ledge that paralleled and overlooked
the track, on
other side of which was an orchard enclosed by a long,
rectangular
rock wall. It was a perfect ambush site, and with
Jimmie covering our
rear with his element (on a small knob to the south
overlooking the
track), anyone coming down the track or through the
orchard would have
nowhere to run.
As soon as we were in position, we saw a Chinese squad
carefully
picking its way through the orchard. A larger force
was following this
point element and another enemy squad, much closer to
us, was moving
in single file down the track as flank security for
them all. The
Chinese were careful, and well spread out.  We let the
complete group
enter the orchard. Just before their point cleared the
southern rock
wall, thirty automatic Raider weapons began to blast
as our ambush
force poured magazine after magazine of lethal fire
throughout the
orchard area.  Chris called in artillery and we had
some harvest; the
Chinks had no cover other than behind the small trees,
and we
splintered them with grenades.  Suddenly, we started
taking
machine-gun fire from behind the northern rock wall. 
It peppered
along the ridge but snapped far over our heads. At the
same time,
Jimmie radioed: "Got an enemy force, size unknown,
moving between us
and your rear. What's happening over there?" I gave
him the details of
the ambush and directed him to take the force under
fire-we were about
to be outflanked. I told him we were going to head
down the track and
into his position as soon as we could shut down the
machine-gun fire;
Chris adjusted the artillery, and when it was on
target we moved. We
joined Jimmie's perimeter and waited. The force he'd
engaged took off
to the northwest (which was fortunate, because Raider
enthusiasm and
all automatic weapons had just about gobbled up our
basic load of
ammo). We took no casualties, but I made a mental
note: in future,
Raider SOP would be, per man, an additional two boxes
of .45-caliber
slugs, taped to prevent them from falling apart and
carried in the
jacket pockets. We'd never know when we'd need the
ammo, and in the
meantime it would provide an excellent armored plate
over each lung.
Chris scattered artillery along the enemy's probable
routes of
withdrawal. We kept it crashing down around us, a warm
(if somewhat
noisy) security blanket, while Jimmie went to have a
look at our own
withdrawal route to make sure it wasn't blocked.
Meanwhile Chris,
Speed, a few other guys, and I snuck back to the
ambush site to see if
anything of interest could be scrounged from the enemy
dead. Not even
Superman could have escaped the amount of fire we'd
poured into the
ambush area, and we figured we'd net a couple of
Thompsons, if nothing
else.  The battlefield was dead quiet except for the
friendly
incoming. Only a couple of hours had passed since we'd
sprung the
ambush, but now, to look at the orchard, it might have
been days.
There was not one dead Chinaman to be seen.  Not one.
There were
plenty of pools of blood, a lot of spent brass, but no
fallen
warriors. Shit, I thought to myself, maybe it didn't
happen. The
Chinese had responded that quickly to the task of
pulling out their
dead, wounded, and weapons. Our final report: one
bloodstained,
well-Pruned orchard. No corpus delicti. The Chinese
were pretty slick.
A new outfit set up across the river from the Raider
camp. I did not
like such close neighbors. That's why I'd selected
such an isolated
position in the first place, far away from any other
unit so the guys
could let their hair down without complaints from
sleepless
rear-echelon folk in the wee hours of the morning.
>From the start, I'd
also decided we'd have no hangers-on in the camp-no
fat logistics tail
to cut down on our fighting strength. Raider personnel
performed such
secondary jobs as cooking, driving, and administration
(like Jack
Sprinkler, the Raiders' clerk, who got the job because
he was the only
one who would admit he could type), but every swinging
Richard in the
outfit was a warrior first. Now, suddenly our lean,
mean crew was
being crowded out, and I wanted to know by whom. Chris
made a quick
recon and reported back that the intruder unit was the
regimental
bakery. 'The regimental bakery officer, he went on to
say, was none
other than Lieutenant Barney K. Neil, who'd saved our
platoon's ass
back in April when G Company was overrun.  What the
hell is Barney K.
doing as the regimental bakery officer?" I wondered. 
I didn't believe
it, I refused to, until an hour later when Barn
himself arrived at the
Raider camp. And was he down. Just one look at him
told me how badly
he was hurting, but it wasn't until we sat down with a
bottle of hooch
that I found out why.
Simply put, he'd cracked on the battlefield, in the
same attack that
killed Jerome Sudut. But no story is that simple, and
the one that
Barney K. related told me plenty. Only days before the
operation, the
stated purpose which was to straighten up the lines
around Hill 1062
(Papasan-that huge thorn in the United Nations forces'
side, destined
never to be removed), the newest battalion CO
apparently decided that
Barney K. was too familiar with his platoon. The night
before the
attack, the CO transferred him to George (which was
spearheading the
operation in the morning) as replacement platoon
leader.  At the best
of times taking over a unit isn't easy. Before a big
attack, it can be
a horror story. No one knows you, no one trusts you,
and it'd be fair
to say the reverse is true as well. The one thing
Barney K. had going
for him was Master Sergeant Moore, one of the few
black soldiers to
serve in G Company besides Jerry Boyd. Moore had come
to George as an
AWG volunteer from some rear-echelon quartermaster
outfit, and had
worked his way up from rifleman to platoon sergeant in
an all-white
outfit-remarkable feat in a unit heavy with Johnny
Rebs. Moore was a
damned good man, but it was no consolation to Barney
K., who, until
that moment had been the longest-serving platoon
leader in the
battalion. In Korean combat so far, the average
platoon leader lasted
no longer than a month. Barney K. must have had nine
lives. In ten
months straight of heavy, heavy combat with Fox, he'd
never once been
hit, though he'd seen his platoon turn over, through
bullets, at least
five times. It was almost as if he was now being
punished for living
so long. The new battalion commander had used his eyes
but not his
head: he'd seen overfamiliarity, but had not taken
time to think, to
realize that Barney K.'s easygoing attitude with his
guys came from
the platoon's and its leader's mutual understanding,
respect, and
trust. With one order, the CO had destroyed it all,
and my friend was
heartbroken.  At first light the following morning,
just as they were
about to jump off, Barney K.'s new unit started
getting the shit
blasted out of it with Chink mortar fire. A 120-mm
round landed
nearby, a little too close for comfort, but Barney K.
wasn't touched.
Scared, yes, and ears ringing, but
otherwise-physically-intact. But he
couldn't take it. He told Sergeant Moore to take
command and walked
down off the hill.
Shoot him, court-martial him, or give him a medal-no
one seemed to
know what to do. Probably the powers that be thought
he'd gotten a bad
deal (which he had, like a jockey whose horse had been
pulled out from
under him and another thrust in its place just moments
before a big
race), so they gave him the job of bakery officer.
Barney K. stayed at the Raider camp more than he did
at his place of
business.  All the Raiders loved this infinitely
lovable Oklahoman.
They knew what he'd been through, and that he was a
good man. So they
jollied him out of his depression and gave him back
his dignity.
Meanwhile I got the straight skinny on the Army I
could expect to find
stateside: Barney K. told me all about protocol in the
officers'
world. I tried to put him back on his horse, too;
again and again I
invited him along on our raids. But while again and
again he promised
to be there, on the night itself he never was. Barney
K.'s bottle had
filled, and only time would empty it.
The regiment was changing; the old warriors were
fading out and new
leaders straight from the stateside Army took
informality and
comradeship as signs of a loose, sloppy, undisciplined
outfit. The
irony of it all was that while General Van Fleet was
telling the world
that the reason for his Eighth Army's limited,
large-scale attacks was
that "a sit-down Army is subject to collapse at the
first sign of an
enemy effort," and that he "couldn't allow [his]
forces to become soft
and dormant . . . and slip into a condition that
eventually would
cause horrible casualties," his new COs seemed to be
hurrying the
negative process along by punching huge holes in
morale.2 One captain,
for example, introduced himself as the new CO of proud
George Company
by telling that unit that if he saw one man from the
company run
(probably referring to the bullshit "bugout" tales of
the past April),
he'd shoot him in the back.  Fortunately, we Raiders
had a patron
saint in Colonel Sloan-nobody, but nobody, messed with
us. We had no
visits from higher headquarters, no staff inspections,
no checks to
see if we were following regulations right to the
letter. We'd get a
mission order that said "Do it" and we trained and
planned as we saw
fit. We wrote the book for the sorts of things we were
doing, instead
of blindly following field manuals that didn't always
apply.  Sloan
trusted me, so I had total freedom to get the job
done. I trusted my
NCOs to help me do it. My guys trusted me to stand up
and fight if
someone tried to screw us over, and I trusted Sloan
not to use us as a
kamikaze force.  And it worked. The Raiders were the
cockiest, most
gung-ho sons of bitches on the block. The men
approached each raid
with superhuman confidence, knowing just as well that
it could be
their final journey. Last-minute wills would be drawn
up ("If you get
killed, I want your jump boots." "Oh, yeah? If you get
killed, I want
your knife and watch."), but the wills weren't signed
or even sealed
with a handshake, and since no one was getting killed,
it was a big,
fun game. Sure, you'd have gotten those boots if the
guy who was
wearing them bought the farm.  But trust was what made
the guy with
the boots risk his life on the battlefield when you
said, "I'll cover
you"-he knew you'd keep him alive because you wanted
him alive far
more than you wanted his goddamn boots. Trust meant
you'd risk your
life for your buddies, because you knew they would do
the same for
you, and they'd never leave you dead or dying on any
hill, for any
reason.  "Trust" was a magic word with the Wolfhounds,
but it was
falling out of use a little more as each new boatload
of senior
stateside officers unload. Something was happening to
the combat army
of the past year, but I couldn't put my finger on it.
The new people
knew all the cosmetic stuff: how to shine your shoes
until they
gleamed, how to stand ramrod straight and click your
heels at
appropriate moments. I'd learned all that peacetime
discipline in
Trieste-good stuff, at times, but it just didn't go
well on the
battlefield. The yes, sir, no, sir bootlicking
business had gotten
into our Army through the influence of the British,
the French, and
the Germans, way back in the von Steuben days of 1776.
 We'd modeled
our system after theirs, and the incoming commanders
knew the routine
cold. They' learned everything, except that combat is
no place for
martinets. The Raiders were a damned disciplined unit,
no less so
because no one called me "sir." I treated the guys as
I wanted to be
treated-fair, square, and honest; we operated on
mutual respect. They
knew I loved them, and they knew I'd never ask a man
to do anything
that I had not done on the battlefield, or wouldn't do
again. So we
called one another by our nicknames; there was rarely
any pulling
rank; and even when guys had a little too much sauce,
there was no
breakdown of Raider authority, or submerged hang-ups
ticking away like
bombs, waiting to explode when sufficient booze had
been slurped up.
Except, I think, the night when Chief decided to kill
me.
All Indians in an Army unit seemed to be called Chief.
In Italy, in
the 752d, it had been Chief Robert Ventura, from
Texas. This "Chief"
had been my Indian Al Hewitt. Ventura was an old man
of at least
twenty-three when I was sixteen; he'd fought through
Europe and the
Pacific during the war, and I was in awe of him.  With
or without
firewater he was a powerful guy. He could lift a
Sherman tank's heavy
engine compartment door single-handedly, or shoot all
the bottles off
a wall in a village bar (like in some Western movie)
and not get
caught only because the barkeep was afraid to even
look at him. With
his friend Polk, from Georgia, Ventura taught me
old-soldier tricks,
among them two vital uses for gasoline: one, to kill
crabs (you take a
shower with it), and two, to wash tank engines (you
pour a
fifty-five-gallon drum into the engine compartment
while the tank is
revving up). They taught me the first of these
outdoors in the dead of
winter; I'd never forget watching Polk hold a
five-gallon drum of
80-octane gasoline over Ventura's head, while the
Chief stood under
it, rubbing and scrubbing the crabs away in the
subfreezing
temperatures. It would have killed an ordinary man.
The
engine-cleaning shortcut was not nearly as memorable,
except in its
potential: one stray spark would have blown the tank,
its basic load
of HE ammo,* and all of us to kingdom come. But Polk
and Chief weren't
afraid of that or anything (and besides, that's how
they'd done it the
whole way from Africa to Germany), and if I was going
to emulate them,
I couldn't be afraid either. So I wasn't.
In the Raiders our Chief was Chief Denny from Arizona.
Denny was a
great, powerful stud of a guy. He was a super soldier,
an original
Raider who'd come from 3d Batt; he was also the silent
type, who never
seemed to say a word about anything. One night, we
were all sitting
around in a GP medium tent having yet another
after-the-raid party
when out of nowhere Chief decided he was going to kill
me, and the
only reason I could think of for him wanting to kill
me was that I was
an officer. All I knew for certain was that I was
sitting on the
ground in the center of the tent, drinking and
bullshitting and
leaning against the tent pole with a canteen cup of
Raider booze in my
hand, when suddenly I looked up to see Chief swinging
a pick mattock
down on my head.  Luckily, the 190-proof had not
zeroed me out
completely. I rolled to one side, and the pick plunged
into the ground
exactly where I'd been sitting. It took half a dozen
Raiders to
wrestle the Chief onto a nearby cot; they tied him
down with commo
wire and left him alone until the next morning. When
we cut him loose,
he didn't remember anything about the night before. I
certainly wasn't
going to mention it, and even though we did lock up
all the picks (to
be on the safe side), nothing like it ever happened
again.  Every
weekend I sent a few Raiders back to Seoul for a
little unofficial
R&R.  Besides the readily available pussy there (which
kept the guys
happy and out of trouble), Seoul was a scrounger's
paradise. On one
such journey, the boys brought back a full generator
and lighting set
in exchange for a few captured weapons; on another,
one Raider
returned with a large refrigerator, which he told me
fell into his
truck as he was driving past a Seoul Officers' Club in
the early hours
of the morning.
* Seventy-one rounds of 76-mm shells and thousands of
rounds of .30
and .50 caliber. 
But even with the essential items that kept finding
their way into our
camp, I was always bellyaching that we didn't have
enough vehicles. We
had three jeeps (one authorized and two hot), but more
times than not
they were out with some joyriding Raider, and never
there when I
needed one. The final straw came when I had to report
to Regiment-a
ten-minute jeep ride-and had to drive a
two-and-a-half-ton GMC truck
(of which we had two-one authorized and one hot-but
that was not the
point). What, I asked myself is the leader of the
Raiders driving a
truck for? Would Lieutenant Patton drive a truck?
Would Lieu tenant
Rommel? I was very pissed off. I tore Chris's ass:
"Three fucking
jeeps and I've got to take a truck. I want one jeep
here at all times!
My own personal jeep that no one-but no one-will even
look at. Do you
understand?" I immediately regretted blowing up at
him, but of course
would not apologize. None too popular that night, I
went to bed early
to do some hardcore sulking.  I woke up about midnight
to the blinding
headlights of a jeep, which was sitting in the middle
of Chris's and
my tent. On the hood and all over the damn thing were
very mellow
Raiders who'd rolled up the side of the tent and
pushed the vehicle
through. Chris stood nearby; I knew he was still
pissed over the ass
chewing I'd given him, because he smartly saluted and
said with the
utmost correctness, "Here is your own fucking personal
quarter-ton,
Lieutenant." He stormed out of the tent, the other
Raiders in tow. It
was all quite humbling. I had to get up, reverse the
jeep out of the
tent, roll down the side, and wait for Chris to come
home to thank
him. So much for pulling rank.  In the morning, all
was forgotten as
the Raiders' shared mission became to make this jeep
our own. Chris
had stolen it early the night before from the 35th
Regiment's Medical
Company; all 35th markings (bumper number and Cacti
insignias) had to
be painted over and our markings and Wolfhound heads
painted on
instead. Each military vehicle had a War Department
number on it as
well, and we assigned the same number (RAIDERS 1) to
all four of ours,
so if a jeep was stopped we'd just produce the trip
ticket and no one
would be the wiser. The only problem was we could
never park them all
in one place at the same time In the Raider camp it
wasn't too much of
a problem, though, because we allowed few visitors.
Besides Barney K.
Neil, the only people who saw the inside were Raider
volunteers,
buddies from the trenches (like Phil Gilchrist, whom
I'd invite to
watch the Raiders train-I was so proud of my boys), or
poker players.
Poker was still big on my list; our games were
frequent, with
good-sized pots and big-league pro players brought in
for the
challenge. I won a lot, so I always had a big bundle
to donate to Dell
Evans whenever he came to collect. The consensus of
Raider opinion was
that Dell must have been a Mississippi gambler in
another life-I could
never beat him. Once I had him for a few hundred
bucks, but given that
he'd taken thousands from me over the last year, it
just wasn't
enough. So I persuaded him to shoot craps. Dell wasn't
too interested
("Just two guys shooting craps, Hack?"), but he took
me on. A short
time later I was completely wiped out, and, according
to Dell, still
mumbling to myself when he pulled away in his jeep.
But my brand-new RAIDERS 1 was compensation enough for
any other
losses. The only other person who was allowed to touch
it was Bobby,
who loved it as much as I did. The two of us were like
little kids
with a new toy; Bobby washed it, polished it, and kept
it shiny for
his combat "dad," and in return, whenever I went for a
drive I took
him along. One afternoon we decided to pay Dell a
visit at the 2d
Battalion Forward CP. We picked him up and spun down
the main supply
route (MSR) through the 2d Batt positions and on
toward the U.S. main
line.  The battlefield was deadly quiet, as if the war
had been shut
off. It was a lovely sunny day, perfect for Dell to
see and feel my
new set of wheels, and he was suitably impressed. Then
out of nowhere
roared a P-51 fighter. It was in trouble; smoke was
pouring out its
rear, making a trail across the sky as the plane
headed right into
enemy lines. We gave chase as the fighter powered to
gain altitude.
Right in the middle of no-man's-land the pilot bailed
out. "Let's get
him!" Dell shouted, and we zoomed down the road.
Within moments we
passed a big sign that read "You are now leaving the
Wolfhounds' Lair.
Northbound traffic should be able to speak Chinese,"
or something like
that, but we could see the chute opening and the pilot
coming down,
and we were so caught up in the excitement of this
adventure that we
figured we could scoop him up and make it back to our
lines before the
Chinese were any the wiser.  The first round smacked
in front of the
jeep-a Chink SP gun was firing straight up the road. I
slammed on the
brakes. We unassed the thing, and by the time the next
round hit
(behind the jeep), Dell, Bobby, and I were lying in a
ditch on the
side of the road in the middle of no-man's-land. Dell
gave Bobby his
steel pot; the kid looked incredibly silly as he sat
there beaming out
from under it.  The helmet had enough room for two
little Bobby-sized
heads.  We had to get that jeep turned around before
the Chink gunner
got its range, but the road was very narrow, so it
wasn't a matter of
a quick U-turn. I ran to the jeep, and in the short
lull between
incoming rounds, went forward, then backed up, and
then went forward
again before jumping clear of the vehicle and hitting
the ground as
the Chinese gun blasted away. Forward, back, forward.
Over.  Forward,
back, forward. Short. He was having as much trouble
getting our range
as I was getting the jeep to head south. Finally Dell
and Bobby piled
in and we got out of there. I don't know what happened
to the
pilot-the word was the 35th got him out-but I know my
hot little jeep
did very well on a very hot road, and one little
orphan boy had not
had so much fun in a long time. I can't say the same
though, for me
and Dell.
Night attack. We fell out, checked gear, loaded
trucks, and moved-the
Raiders were about to take their first hill.
Ironically, it was the
same ridge I'd raided with Easy on 8 August, which had
brought me to
the Raiders to begin with.  The big attack, which had
killed Sudut and
knocked the fight out of Barney K.  Neil, had pushed
the main line
forward as it tidied up the lines, and now the 8
August ridge was the
U.S. front. It was strange riding down that road in
perfect safety,
seeing again the familiar landmarks-the bombed-out
bridge that had
saved our asses, now rebuilt; the S-turn in the road,
where once stood
a lone Chinese sentry illuminated by a flare; the hill
itself, jutting
up from the ground. The front line was still far to
our front.  Since
September the raiding business had gotten very
serious. It was no
longer easy to slip through the front lines and
disappear behind enemy
positions. The Chinese had wised up to Raider
activity, and were
countering with raiders of their own, and with damn
good ambushing and
observation teams. Meanwhile, regular units were
slowly atrophying-as
Van Fleet had predicted-in long, windy trenches that
snaked from one
side of the Korean peninsula to the other.  Barriers,
booby traps, and
alert listening posts (LPs) now filled the little
holes that in the
past we'd virtually meandered through. The enemy
hugged the Allied
positions with their own siegelike trenches (they had
to in order to
avoid U.S. superior firepower); in some places the
lines were within
hand-grenade range. The war had become a contest
between a modern
industrial state and a regime of fast-digging
primitives who had
little but numbers on their side. Limited major
attacks by both sides
"to keep the pressure on" seemed to be the politics of
the peace table
at Panmunjom far more so than practice for the troops:
special units
like the Raiders were springing up all over the front
to take up the
slack and carry the day-to-day fighting.  So while
Truman sent the
word to keep casualties at a minimum and the Chairman
of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, Omar Bradley, visited the Korean
front, and while the
Pentagon recommended the use of nuclear weapons if a
large Chinese
attack threatened our forces with military disaster
and the USAF
conducted simulated tactical nuclear strikes on North
Korean targets,3
the Eighth Army's I Corps' 25th Division's 27th
Infantry Regiment's 3d
Battalion's K Company's position had become untenable
in the daytime,
and the Raiders were on the road again.  But then came
the sneer.
"There go those big, badassed, motherfucking Raiders."
Chris slammed
on the brakes, whipped the jeep into reverse, and came
to a screeching
halt next to the loudmouthed trooper. It was chow time
for members of
the 3d Batt on the side of the road. The Raiders were
going to work
and we weren't in the mood for eating shit, especially
the shit of
someone from the battalion whose asses we'd come to
save. The Chinese
had dug a virtual siege line only a couple of hundred
yards from K
Company. Their manned spider holes made it impossible
for anyone in
King to stick his head up during the day without
drawing a sniper shot
between the horns. Our mission was to get rid of the
whole shebang.
I grabbed my trench knife out of my boot and held it
next to the
wisecracker's throat. "Alright, joker! If you're so
big and bad you
can come with us." Under great protest the guy was
pulled into the
back of my jeep. I smiled; we'd just see who was big
and who was bad.
Jimmie and crew slipped through King's wire at first
dark. It was more
like an ominous twilight, really-the full moon was so
bright I would
have canceled the raid except for the fog. McLain went
with them. He'd
be trying out our newest acquisition, an infrared
night device, to
knock off the Chink OP. The scope was mounted on a
carbine, and McLain
assured me (with the confidence only an ex-Marine
Corps Expert
Marksman can) that it was accurate to at least forty
yards. We needed
it; artillery would cover the noise of the shots, and
we'd be
hard-pressed to get past the OP otherwise on a bright
night like this.
Next, I pushed our captive out of the trenches and
told him he was
going to lead the way. The guy became totally unglued.
He cried, he
begged, but I wasn't having any of it. I thumped him
with my weapon
and shoved him up toward the enemy hill. More Raiders
slipped through
the wire.  By this time Jimmie and Mac were far ahead,
all set up. I
was getting nowhere with the kidnapped, sniveling
wiseass, and he was
so damned noisy I could see he was about to become
more of a liability
than the lesson was worth. I handed him over to Neary,
with the
instruction to let the bastard go after the elements
had reached their
probable line of deployment. Still, I figured the kid
had learned his
lesson. It would be a long time before the old
green-eyed monster got
the best of him again. Might even make him president
of the Raider fan
club, I thought.
Three rounds of artillery smashed into the top of the
hill; I didn't
hear the carbine fire even though I was only fifty
yards away. Sure
enough, Mac had neutralized the two-man OP with two
clean shots
between the eyes. We'd hold on to that infrared
device.
The hill was steep and void of all vegetation. We
inched our way
forward, slithering along like snakes, carefully
shifting loose rocks
out of our path.  One careless move, one tumbling rock
down this
artillery-battered hill could mean serious trouble; it
would alert the
defenders to forty very exposed and vulnerable Raiders
right in their
killing zone.  When we got to the first Chinese
trench, no one was in
sight. Our artillery had driven the defenders
underground. I covered
"Red" Smalling, my old friend from 3d/Easy, as he
poked his head into
a bunker. At the same time, two Chinks came down the
trench. Smalling
gave both a short burst from his stripped-down BAR,
and the battle was
in full swing. But the Chinks had been had-Raiders
were all over their
positions-and the fighting was almost over by the time
the enemy at
the top of the hill began their usual barrage of
potato-masher
grenades.  While we were mopping up, Smalling got into
a
jack-in-the-box duel with one die-hard,
burp-gun-toting Chinaman. They
went at it for a while-one popping up, firing, and
going down, and
then the other-until finely, both of them popped up at
the same time.
Smalling cut the guy in half, but the Chinaman's last
burst stitched
Red right up his left side with half a dozen slugs.
"Hack," he said
(with Arkansan understatement), "ah'm hit." His left
leg was virtually
shattered, but he was still mobile, so I told him to
go down the hill
and Doc Brakeman would patch him up. "What about my
weapon?" he asked.
SOP in Easy was if you were hit you passed your
automatic rifle on to
some able-bodied guy (you don't want to lose that kind
of firepower on
a hill). But we Raiders had plenty, and besides, we
were almost
through up there. I told him to keep it.  The cleanup
continued. We
had a few casualties, mostly from grenades being
thrown by a couple of
hardcore jokers in a bunker on the reverse slope of
the hill. Johnny
"S'koshi"* Watkins, a young kid of about seventeen who
was the size of
a jockey with the heart of a lion, got a chunk of his
ass blown away,
and dear old Ropele had the tip of his generous Roman
nose sliced off
by a shard of grenade steel. I was especially sorry
about Ropele's
wound. He owed me about five hundred bucks from
jawbone poker, and it
was a Raider rule that if you got hit you were cleared
of local
gambling debts. I always hated to see good money
bleeding off a hill.
Suddenly Smalling reappeared. "I thought you'd gotten
the bell out of
here, Red."
* Sukoshi is Japanese for little. 
"Yeah, Hack," he drawled in his lazy kind of way, "but
I bumped into
some gooks on the way out. I thought you should know."
He went on to
tell me that after Brakeman patched him up, he'd been
heading back
toward King Company's position when he'd run into six
Chinese setting
up a machine gun to our rear, along our withdrawal
route. He'd killed
them all, but then, despite the fact his left side was
almost
paralyzed, had felt he should come hack to tell me.
What a good man.
After I sent Chris to deal with the threat (his force
knocked off
another dozen enemy and left a squad behind to secure
our withdrawal
route), I turned my attention back to the
reverse-slope bunker where
those potato mashers were coming from.
We couldn't use artillery because we were too close.
Our own grenades,
thrown blind, seemed to be having little effect. The
only answer was
one of Forte's bunker busters *. We'd just have to
keep the enemy down
and stop the incoming grenades long enough for the
charge man to toss
the thing in. McLain, that tall, brave Semper Fi
Texan, volunteered
for the job. Just before he walked up the hill, he
hung his patrol cap
over the end of his weapon and thrust it far out in
front of him. The
cap dangled down like a Lone Star flag. Mac turned to
me.  "Right out
of The Sands of Iwo Jima, huh, Hack? Sit down, John
Wayne!"
Grenades-ours and theirs-popped all around him as
McLain made his way
up the hill. He set his weapon down, armed the charge,
and spun it
around his head like a lasso. Yahoo. He flung it over
the top.
Good-bye, bunker. Good-bye Chinamen with your
piss-weak grenades.
An infantry platoon from King replaced us before dawn.
It had been
another good 
Raider show-mission accomplished, four friendly
wounded and no dead.
Statistics 
say that for every three Purple Hearts there's one
dead. God was
keeping his eye 
on us crazy young fools. A satchel charge, composed of
C-4 explosive
and a short-fuse detonation cord. David H.
HackworthColonel Sloan had
promised us a unit R&R after the tenth raid. Morale
was high as we
returned from yet another night assault on yet another
small hill in
front of the 3d Batt. We'd had no friendly casualties
(for the dozen
or so Chinese we'd killed) and in a few days we'd be
in Japan. We
carefully wove our way along King Company's patrol
path, which cut
through a triple strand of barbed wire and mines. No
more than thirty
yards from the fighting positions, an LMG let go a
long, long burst-it
must have been thirty rounds. I could see the tracers
coming in one
long, fiery flood; they skipped over my head by what
seemed to be
inches. I screamed, "Raider Raiders! Shut off that
fire!" No one was
hurt except the gunner-Chris jumped into his bunker
and stomped him to
a pulp. 'The gunner's platoon leader, NCOs, and fellow
soldiers
watched, silently condoning our on-the-spot Raider
punishment. The guy
had been asleep at his post. He must have awakened and
panicked when
he saw our dark figures coming at him. Fortunately,
his firing was as
accurate and reliable as his vigilance. The bastard
could have killed
a dozen good men.  Getting ready for R&R was almost as
complex an
operation as any raid. All we could leave in the camp
was authorized
stuff, which meant packing storing, and hiding just
about everything
we had. The last thing we needed was some inspector to
find anything
irregular about our special unit. We'd grown
accustomed to the
luxuries of life, and the stakes were too high to
leave the place
anything but perfect. The biggest problem was our
vehicles, most of
which we ended up hiding in a deep draw behind the
camp. My new jeep
went off to Ordnance for engine repair, and when
everything was
squared away, Barney K. Neil organized a few of his
bakers to stay at
the Raider camp for security. Barney K. himself came
with us.
Rest and Recreation or Rape and Run-it all depended on
what manual you
wanted to believe. But the Rest was nonexistent and
the Rape was paid
for in advance, so to a guy fresh from the front, R&R
was simply 120
precious hours, all of which would be accounted for
and none of which
would be wasted. Lovely little girl-sans floated
between guys; every
five days they honeymooned with a new husband. The
stars of the group
were passed through units like a good weapon, many of
them as proud of
"their" outfit as regulars. "Me Wolfhound girl-san ...
 never happen
me stay with Cacti You want Cacti girl-san, go see
Rosie." If we could
have just frozen time. Countdown Korea began the
minute you touched
down in Japan, even before the first sweet, cold sip
of fresh milk
you'd had for a year passed your lips in the R&R
center in Osaka or
Tokyo. The hardest thing during those wonderful five
days was to stop
the clock running in your head.  Deep-six the clock,
you'd tell
yourself in a sea of booze, and drink some more to
drown each tick,
which brought you that much closer to the front.  Eat,
drink, and be
merry-finally the world of death and horror is far
away.  Danger, that
constant cruel companion who haunts you every day,
suddenly cut loose
and left behind. The best clubs, the best steaks, the
best girls are
yours forever, until a car backfires, and you're
hurtled back to the
whole mad thing while frantically searching for cover
in the middle of
the Ginza strip.  I steered clear of the other Raiders
in Tokyo.
Basically, I didn't want to cramp their style, like a
chaperone at a
high-school dance whose mission in life is to take
names and kick
half-bared asses out of darkened hallways and
janitors' closets. I
joined forces instead with Barney K. (I didn't want
the Raiders to
cramp my style either), and though Barney stayed true
to his stateside
bride, Belle, the two of us still managed to take the
city by storm.
Five days and a three-hour plane ride later, it was
back to the front
for most of us, and one mean shock. There were no
smiling faces, no
eagerness to pick up those Thompsons and go on a raid.
Of course, this
was probably for the best, given that it took almost a
week before all
the guys got back-about half of the Raiders who'd gone
to Tokyo had
ended up in jail. One group had smuggled in a Chinese
submachine gun;
on a drunken spree they'd shot out neon lights all
over the Tokyo
nightclub district. Another squad had infiltrated a
nearby U.S. Navy
club; they'd tried to drink all the rum, torpedo the
ladies, and sink
all the swabbies. All in all, the Raiders hitting
Japan as a unit had
led to a pretty rough five days for the old Land of
the Rising Sun,
leaving the natives only to shake their heads and rue
the day they
decided to bomb Pearl Harbor.  Colonel Sloan was not
amused by the
conduct of his elite creation. The Raiders had gotten
into more
trouble in five days than the whole regiment had in
six months of R&R.
We had sinned, but sinned good. No one suggested
deactivating the
force (in fact, Sloan's XO, Lieutenant Colonel Smith,
a man so caring
we called him "Mother," did wonders to prevent Sloan
getting the full
skinny on the Raiders' R&R escapades), but the good
Colonel did lock
my heels together. He told me there would be no more
unit R&Rs, and it
was highly doubtful there would even be individual
Raider R&Rs for
some time down the track. "Your boys are all
volunteers, and they're
taking on extremely dangerous assignments. I don't
expect them to be
Boy Scouts. On the other hand, I cannot overlook gross
violations of
discipline," he said, suggesting I return order to the
ranks muy
pronto. 
Jack Speed, spokesman for the transgressors, explained
their shit
behavior the best: "You know, Hack ... you get over
there and they
give you a goddamn steak and a glass of milk and all
that, and you
finally realize what life is all about. I don't know
... we just went
goofy." I understood, but it wasn't going to wash with
Sloan. So I
took the boys on long runs especially close to the
Wolfhound CP, all
the while barking, "All right, you bastards, you think
you're so bad,"
and the Colonel and staff could hear the Raiders chant
their mournful
repentance. 
It took a different kind of leader to understand and
handle the sort
of animals I had on my hands. I was well suited for
the job, mostly
because I helped make them animals, and probably
because I was one of
the biggest animals of them all.  So for me as their
leader, the worst
part of the R&R business was not the embarrassment
with Sloan, but the
fact that the only, difference between my boys and me
was that I
didn't get caught. 
It was just a case of a unit with spirit.
Uncontrolled, maybe, but
still spirit, which is the essence of success in
battle. Spirit makes
all things possible.  Spirit is what made the Raiders.
And if, from
the outside, it looked as if we had too much, that was
something only
I had to deal with. My boys didn't give a damn about
rules and
regulations, but neither did I. What was the point?
Every day we lived
with such danger, we kind of figured the next would be
our last
anyway. And if it wasn't, and we had to pay the price
with higher
command, what could they do? Put us back in the
Raiders and send us
behind enemy lines?  The Japan raid might well have
been forgotten but
for two incidents. First, two weeks after our return a
couple dozen
cases of clap appeared among the Raider ranks. The
regimental surgeon
congratulated me for having my unit equal the
regimental VD record for
the past month. Second, the jeep we hid in Ordnance
was found by its
owner. It seemed that a wise old motor sergeant from
the Cacti Medical
Company had recognized his missing chariot in my
RAIDERS 1. He must
have remembered some little dent or other odd scars or
modifications;
he'd pulled out his jackknife, and a few careful
scrapes across two
coats of paint revealed the Cacti insignias. 
"Sir, that jeep is not a Wolfhound jeep," I explained
to regimental XO
"Mother" Smith. Unsmiling but sympathetic, Smith
assured me he was
well aware of this.  But how, he wondered, did it come
to have 27th
Raider insignias? I couldn't exactly say, "Well, sir,
the jeep was
found on post, and some gumshoe artist was fiddling
around and
suddenly our numbers were on the vehicle, and what the
hell, it
belonged to that rotten 35th Regiment," but I did.
Colonel Smith was
not amused. The 35th wanted a head. Someone had to be
court-martialed.
But he said we could probably do a deal-hold the
court-martial,
satisfy the 35th's CO, lose the paperwork, and the
matter would be
forgotten.  The Raider mafia met before the sun set.
"Why don't we
tell the truth?" suggested Chris. "S'koshi got the
jeep." 
"What do you mean, I got the jeep? Crispino, you're a
lying son of a
bitch," little Johnny Watkins cried, as he grabbed his
weapon and
slammed a magazine into it. Chris belted him in the
mouth. The blow
sent S'koshi flying, but no one intervened; after all,
Watkins had
been about to blow Chris away.  "Shit, S'koshi, I'm
just pulling your
leg," Chris told him, as he helped the boy to his
feet. "We wouldn't
make you take the rap. Okay, look," he said, turning
to the rest of
us, all business. "We'll tell the truth. I got the
jeep. I found it." 
Another voice chimed in. "Yeah, it was abandoned over
near the shower
unit. It wasn't locked or anything. And it was getting
dark. Thought a
Korean would steal it." 
"Yeah, so we brought it home for the night. Next
morning one of the
guys was just screwing around and painted on our
markings." "Right,"
said Chris, "and by the time I woke up, the new Raider
jeep was on its
way to Seoul for a scrounging trip. And when it came
back . . . well,
it was three days later, and nobody had been asking
about no jeep. And
then we'll tell 'em it belonged to the 35th anyway,
and they're just a
bunch of no-good sons of bitches, so we kept it. I'll
take the blame."
Chris was court-martialed by one of the regimental
staff officers the
next afternoon. He was found guilty, admonished, and
fined part of a
month's pay. The two of us drove back from Regiment,
pleased that the
heat was off and "justice" had been done. We knew the
guys had been
worried. We hadn't told them about our back-room talks
and that the
court was fixed (some things had to remain sacred),
but as long as
they were still in the dark, we decided to play out
just one more
scene in the drama. 
We arrived back at camp, our faces grim. Chris went
into our tent and
began to pack his gear. "How did it go?" the guys
yelled in unison.
"What's he doing?" asked Johnny Watkins. I told them
that Chris was
getting his no-good ass right out of the outfit, that
in order to save
himself from jail he had squealed on us and all of our
unauthorized
activities-the Raiderettes, the other stolen vehicles,
the rations,
everything. A couple of the guys got so pissed off
they grabbed their
Thompson submachine guns and started for our tent, as
if to finish off
the job S'koshi had tried to start the night before. I
hadn't expected
that.  Our script called for a happy ending, not
Chris's brains
splattered all over the camp. 
I took the weapons away. "Look, let me handle this."
Mercifully, on
cue, Chris came out of the tent. As per script, we
went to an open
field about three hundred yards from where the Raiders
were sitting.
There, I proceeded to stomp the hell out of my friend.
Then Chris
started to stomp the hell out of me-a kick in the
face, a fierce blow
to the head, a thundering flip on the back. But it was
all stuntman
stuff like buddies faking it on the back lot: every
boot and every
blow was stopped before it sank home. Finally we both
got bored. It
was time to wind the thing up. The finale came when
Chris, the
villain, kneed me. I rolled into a ball, and he
started to finish me
off with Vicious kicks to the face. But like the true,
clean-cut,
all-American boy I was, I pulled myself up on his
tattered uniform,
coldcocked him, and walked away, victorious.  "That'll
take care of
that squealing son of a bitch," I said, slapping my
hands together, as
the rest of the Raiders looked on in horror. "Let's
have a beer." When
Chris got up, dusted himself off, and joined the
party, everyone had a
good laugh, but it'd be fair to say the two of us had
a hard time
making the Raiders believe much of anything after
that. 
A few more good raids made Regiment forget all our
transgressions, and
by late October there was not one hill or valley
throughout the
regimental sector that the Raiders had not ventured
across. It was
indeed difficult to find an objective where we had not
been before.
Battlefield circumstances and Chinamen in depth had
phased out our
original Raider role; our mission assignments now came
from
Operations. We had become the de facto regimental
assault force.  I
was always on guard against higher headquarters
playing games with my
unit. I well remembered how the 8th Rangers had been
misused and
virtually destroyed in November, and most of the other
specially
trained Airborne Ranger companies in Korea met the
same fate.
Historically, special units have always been thrown
into the breach to
stem the tide. Everyone knows that ten spirited
fighters are far
better than a herd of a thousand listless drag asses.
But many
commanders on the Korean battlefield were beginning to
behave like
desperate gamblers, ignoring the reality that it was
far easier for
the planners to draw a circle on a map and claim it as
a critical
objective than it was for mortal men to seize it. So,
with morale in
the trenches already lower than whaleshit, COs across
the front were
calling for well-trained, well-motivated cannon
fodder-Ranger/Raider
specialists-to do the jobs their own dough-foots
would, or could, not
do themselves. 
It took great command wisdom not to ruin a fine
thoroughbred by having
it pull the plow when the mule was down. Colonel Sloan
exercised this
wisdom, and the Regimental S-3, Major Robert Glaser,
backed him up to
the best of his ability.  Glaser was a seasoned combat
man with two
wars under his belt. Until his recent promotion, he'd
commanded a 3d
Batt rifle company, so he knew well how to keep his
planners in tight
rein, and make certain the grease-pencil warriors did
not promote
schemes that would put the Raiders in serious
jeopardy. Still, our
missions were no longer based on stealth and skill but
rather on shock
and firepower. It didn't help that little by little,
through battle
casualties and normal rotation, we were losing some of
the original
Raiders. Fortunately, the replacements adopted our
what-the-hell
attitude, and we accepted each mission as we had all
to
date-fatalistically. Even when it meant retaking a
position in broad
daylight. 
For three days we'd sat in foxholes behind the 1st
Batt, to whom we
were temporarily attached. Indications had been that
the Chinese would
attack in force right down the center of the regiment.
The Raider role
was to block an enemy penetration. If the guys ever
thought they were
prima donnas, this duty quickly dispelled the idea:
our position
should have been held by a two-hundred-man rifle
company. We had less
than a fourth of that number and were armed with only
assault weapons,
great for close-in stuff but not red-hot in the
defense. We did not
have mortars, entrenching gear, or even steel pots. We
were David
waiting for Goliath, minus the slingshot.  The Chinese
threw a fair
amount of artillery and mortar fire around but did not
launch the
expected attack. It was when they overran an outpost
in front of A
Company that 1st Batt decided to send "their" Raiders
to get it back
in daylight. Why not? I guessed the rationale was that
we were
attached to them for the moment, so why get any of
their own killed
when someone else will go for free? 
The OP was located on a little knob about six hundred
yards from the
main line.  We moved up before dawn. I would have
preferred making a
night attack, but Lieutenant George Creamer of A
Company had said that
at night there was no way to crawl through the barbed
wire and mines
that previous U.S. defenders had laid on the slopes.
We clobbered the
hill with artillery and kept it pouring while we
worked our way to the
top in single file, disarming mines along the OP
patrol path. The
position did not have any tactical value to the enemy;
the attack had
either been a feint or a psychological exercise-a
demonstration by
kamikaze troops that the Chinks were the baddest guys
in the valley.
In any event, the Chinese raiders had flown the coop
by the time we
reached the top. I called the main line to tell them
the goddamned
position had been retaken courtesy of the Raiders and
they could come
out and relieve us any time they wanted. Now it was
just a case of
tidying up before they arrived.  We stacked up the
U.S. dead (it
looked as if they'd been asleep at the switch; the
Chinese must have
slipped through their defenses and knocked them off
all at once) and
started cleaning up the position. Down below, a few of
my guys began
opening a wider path through the minefield for the
relieving force; I
went down to have a look. I moseyed around the
position a bit, and
when the boys yelled, "All clear," I started back to
the top, only
then noticing that one of my boots had trip wire
wrapped all around
it-normal debris from defused mines. I gave my leg a
mighty kick to
get rid of the stuff. My troops hit the
ground-instantly.  Before I
could figure out why, a Bouncing Betty exploded about
four feet away
from me, sending Scores of ball bearings into the air.
When the dust
settled I was still standing up, untouched. "What the
hell are you
guys doing down there?" I asked, as the boys slowly
got up and looked
at me in amazement. The fact was, my hearing had
deteriorated a lot
after I got hit in the head on 6 February. The only
difference between
the mine clearers and me was that I hadn't heard the
"click" when the
firing mechanism went. "Thought you fuckers had
cleared this area," I
barked, and hotfooted it back to the top of the
knob-so I could go
into shock in private. 
It would just become part of the legend: Let me tell
you about our Old
Man . . .  our CO doesn't give a damn about anything.
You know how he
clears a path through minefields? He just walks out
and stomps and
kicks. He blows the shit out of mines and isn't even
touched! Or the
time when Chris was chopping wood in front of our
tent, standing there
in his shorts, legs apart. His pistol lay on top of
his rack; I picked
up the weapon and squint through the sights right
between Chris's
legs. What a tempting shot. I took careful aim at the
log he was
splitting no more than six feet away, and squeezed the
trigger,
figuring the pistol wasn't loaded. BANG! The slug went
between
Crispino's legs, missed the log, and cut the ax handle
in two as Chris
followed through on a downward chop. 
It scared the shit out of both of us, but I pretended
I'd hit my
target: 
"Bull's-eye." 
I never squeezed rounds off an "unloaded" weapon
again; it was a
lesson I should have learned years before, when I
overheard old
Sergeant Wall in Italy counseling a young kid who'd
playfully pointed
his weapon at him. ("Don't ever point a weapon at
someone unless you
intend to kill him," said Walker, who'd seen combat in
Africa, Sicily,
and Italy. "I know, because some damned fool killed me
that way. But
when I got up to the Pearly Gates, Saint Peter said,
'You're too young
and too handsome to be here now. I want you to go back
and teach all
those careless young fools who point their weapons at
their friends.'
") Even so, the legend only grew with stories like
that: And yeah,
says another one of my guys in the rear, not only is
the son of a
bitch scared of nothing, but he can shoot an ax handle
off an ax
between a guy's legs!  I knew the minefield incident
was built on bad
hearing, and the ax-handle shot was just sheer
stupidity canceled out
by good luck. But that's the stuff a legend has to
keep to himself.
Soldiers need legends. It's a way to deal with the
madness of war.
Like the legend of Rodger Young, a quiet, shy man who
won the Medal of
Honor in the Solomon Islands in WW II for leading a
daring attack
against strongly defended Jap positions. He'd died in
the attempt,
courageously ignoring his buddies' calls to stay down,
and was
immortalized in a number-one hit song among the boys
in olive drab:
"For the everlasting glory of the infantry/Shines the
name/Shines the
name/of Rodger Young." Only after the war was it
revealed that Rodger
Young was almost totally deaf. He'd faked his hearing
test to get into
the fighting, and his bravery on the day he died was
most likely a
result of not hearing the warning shouts of his
friends. But it didn't
matter by then. Rodger Young was a legend, and his
very name got many
soldiers through the night. 
"Living legends" serve a similar purpose. If the
troops can go into
battle secretly knowing that among them lurks a
Scooter Burke-a
Superman in Clark Kent's ODs-they'll fight better,
they'll fight
harder, and they'll somehow believe that immortality
is theirs, too.
But this presents a problem for a leader "legend,"
because you reach a
point where you can't let your men know you make
mistakes. You just
can't, even when it means you become trapped somewhere
between who you
really are and what they want you to be.  All I ever
wanted was to be
a good soldier, and I was. But to myself, I was
certainly not a hero.
Inside I was an embarrassingly uneducated, insecure
kid of twenty with
a terrible temper and lots of luck (both traits more
than likely
inherited from my Irish mother). Fury accounted for
most of the heroic
acts chalked up to my name. Going after that sniper on
6 February,
where the whole legend began, was more than anything
the work of a
hungry Irishman temporarily off his nut. Still, on the
outside I
played the role, and even encouraged the hero
business. After all,
showmanship is vital to being a good troop commander. 
The only
problem was that my audience kept demanding encore
after encore. Many,
many times in a firefight-when the slugs were really
snapping-I'd find
myself snugged up close to a solid dirt wall or behind
a tree enjoying
perfect cover, and just as I'd begin thinking how
comfortable I was,
I'd start feeling the eyes of my command boring in,
saying, We're in a
real tough spot here, baby. Just what trick are you
going to pull out
of the old hat to save our sweet asses? And I always
pulled out
something, with one more wild or brazen stunt,
confirming to my troops
(and maybe to myself, too) that I was the bravest dude
on the block. 
Before Napoleon promoted a general to field marshal,
he would ask one
question: 
"Are you lucky?" And only if the answer was yes, would
Napoleon pass
on the baton. I was lucky. That little bit of magic
followed me as
closely throughout my career as the smell of battle.
And it followed
the Raiders, too, in the fall of l95l, through dozens
of raids (behind
enemy lines and within our own), irrefutable cases of
insubordinate
and wild behavior, and enough 190-proof to keep a
hospital going for a
year. Yes, the Raiders-my own little army, composed
solely of field
marshals-were lucky. And we were going to live
forever. 
CHAPTER 7 
"HILL 400" 
"What made a guy right for the Raiders? You had to be
someone who just
didn't give a shit. It isn't a big deal to die, you
know-"Live with
honor, die with dignity," that was the Raiders'
slogan. See, Hackworth
had pride in people. And for a twenty-year-old man to
he able to make
a person want to fight and die and be happy about
it-shit, we were
happy to die for our county. That's the kind of spirit
we had in the
Raiders. 
Master Sergeant Jack Speed, 
USA Squad Leader/Platoon Sergeant 
27th Raider Platoon, 
Korea, 1951 
We few, we happy few, we hand of brothers; For he
to-day that sheds
his blood with me Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so
vile, This day
shall gentle his condition; And gentlemen in England
now abed Shall
think themselves accursed they were not here, And hold
their manhoods
cheap whiles any speaks That fought with us upon Saint
Crispin's day. 
Williams Shakespeare 
Henry V, Act IV. 
I never wanted to die, but I never feared death
either. I guess I
always knew that the price of admission to life was
one owed death; my
father and mother both paid it before I was a year
old, and Uncle Roy
just eight years later, his a lingering death from the
mustard gas and
other wounds he sustained in WW I.  With me, I figured
when it came it
would be with the roll of the dice. It was really a
matter of luck and
probability: the more missions, the more point duty,
the more hot
engagements, the higher the probability of getting
zeroed out. And if
you had to go, sure, you wanted to do it heroically,
but real heroism,
I believed, was just returning to the front-when you
knew the score
and how the game was played, and when you knew what it
was like to
have hot steel ripping through your body, and your
wounds healed in a
ward full of kids your age who might never walk, see,
and think the
same again.  On the occasions (and there were a good
few) when death
and I stood eyeball-to-eyeball, when I knew I'd used
up my odds and in
the next few moments I would be dead, I was always
perfectly calm.
There was no fighting, no raging to hang on. I was
always perfectly at
peace, and almost invariably I'd think to myself, So
this is the way
it is; what an uninspiring way to go. In its way, it
was a good
feeling, because then I'd settle back and rock into
whatever was
going, just as cool as ice. Men had been dying in
battle for ages-what
else was new? "Live fast, die young, and have a
good-looking corpse"
was how I and the rest of the Raiders saw it (along
with John Derek,
who said it first in the 1949 movie Knock on Any
Door); the only thing
to do was not worry about it at all, and have the best
damn time you
could while you were around. Of course, being a leader
helped. You
were always too busy bringing in air and artillery,
moving your people
and shepherding your herd, to take time to focus in on
yourself, on
where you might be in a moment's time. 
On the battlefield you become very superstitious.
You're always
looking for something that's going to protect you from
being killed.
It might be a photo of the girl next door. It might be
a rabbit's
foot, or a blanket (yes, a security blanket), which
you huddled under
in the night. Phil Gilchrist's was a white T-shirt
with a blue band
around the collar. He never went into battle without
it. My Chink
Waltham watch might have become a lucky charm for me,
if it hadn't
been knocked off in the hospital after 6 February. But
as it was, I
didn't need it or any other. Because I had an inside
thing with God.
I prayed all the time. But early on, I'd made a pact
with myself: it
was never Dear God, please look after me; it was
always Dear God,
please look after my men and make sure that no one
gets killed. I
suppose if I could have been objective about it, I
would have realized
that to lose men was just the breaks of the game. But
I had built my
little house of hope and God dwelled therein: since
I'd returned from
the hospital after the 6 February wound, which meant
all of March
until now, 1 November, we'd been in some really heavy
combat, taken
stacks of WIA, but among my men we'd never taken any
dead. The Man and
I were tight.  "We've got a tough job for you. It will
be the hardest
one your outfit's had," Colonel Sloan explained to me
quietly. "How
many men have you got and how soon will you be able to
jump off?" 
Colonel Sloan's "tough job" was a Raider assault on
Hill 400, what the
Infantry School would have called key terrain. It was
a rocky,
volcano-shaped hill that sat astride the left boundary
of the
Wolfhound Regiment, dominating the battlefield like a
Spanish hilltop
fortress. The enemy had occupied it for a long time.
According to
Intelligence there were no more than fifty Chinamen up
there, but the
enemy had burrowed deep into the hill's rocky slopes,
and despite all
tactics used or vast firepower employed, the
Wolfhounds could not
secure that piece of ground. 
We were assured it was not a kamikaze attack. Instead,
Sloan said that
it was critical, and an operation perfectly tailored
for our
fleet-footed band of hill runners. Though I might have
mentioned that
this perfectly tailored operation had only been
designed for the
Raiders after two or three different units of infantry
had assaulted
the hill (taking extreme casualties in the process), I
accepted the
mission without comment. But my gut started to churn;
400 was that
Jake Able feeling all over again. 
We'd jump off in three days. On the morning of the
first day, key
Raider leaders and I conducted a visual reconnaissance
of Hill 400
from Item Company's forward outpost position on Hill
275. The OP was
set on a gray knob a mile from the front, with our
objective about
one-half mile farther north along the ridgeline. 
"Shit," said Speed.
"This one won t be so goddamn tough." I wasn't sure I
agreed. For one
thing, there were the ubiquitous mines and booby traps
to be disarmed
before we even got near. For another, our objective
was a formidable
piece of real estate, with steep sides and a rear
anchored securely by
the Chinese main battle positions on Hill 419 to the
north. And the
third thing was there was only one avenue of approach:
it would be
hi-diddle-diddle, right up the middle. 
Item Company's grim-faced soldiers didn't help the
foreboding feeling.
They had a fugitive, hunted look about them. They all
kept their heads
down, moved fast, and didn't smile much. Everything
about their hill
reminded me of Uncle Roy's 1918 stories about
Chateau-Thierry and the
Marne: the dugouts, the muddy slopes, the
shell-ravaged trenches where
brooding men just waited to be overcome by rolling
yellow clouds of
mustard gas, or to be ordered to hurl themselves into
machine-gun
fire. 
Tooling around in RAIDERS 1 had already shown me the
sharp contrast
between the life-styles of the frontline troops and
those located
behind Battalion Forward: bleak, endless trenches
versus all the
comforts (under canvas) of a stateside billet. The
Raiders were
unusual-as a rule the Army kept infantry "have-nots"
far from the
rear-echelon "haves"-and though none of us felt guilty
about the good
life we led behind the lines, I often wondered what
fighters like
these guys up in Item thought when rotation came and
they saw all
they'd been missing. 
That night Jimmie, Chris, and I left Item's outpost
for a closer look
at the Chinese defensive positions on Hill 400. We'd
been all around
that fortress on previous operations and never had
been able to find a
weak point; now we were up there on it for almost six
hours. Item
Company guys who'd previously attacked the hill warned
of accurate
82-mm and 120-mm mortar fire and a damn tight
defensive system. We
disarmed a few mines (but nothing to get too excited
about), found
three outposts on the hill's southern nose, and behind
that a trench
bunker system. But that was all. We still couldn't
find Hill 400's
Achilles' heel. 
We returned to our camp and worked out the plans. On
request, the
artillery people had been punching the shit out of 400
with heavy
eight-inch delay stuff since we'd gotten the warning
order (causing
big sections of the enemy's breastworks to crumble
in), but on the
night itself there would be no artillery preparation
or illumination.
Our initial attack would be by stealth: we'd knock off
the OPs, move
to our deployment position, and, after forming a line
of skirmishers,
hit the trenchworks. Only when the shooting started
would supporting
fires be brought in to clobber the Chinese reverse
slopes,
reinforcement routes, and likely mortar and artillery
positions.
Sloan approved the plan. He also told me he'd have a
regimental
forward aid station set up behind Item's outpost, a
comforting
thought, but one that did little to assuage my concern
about the
operation. Then, reminding me that I was long overdue
to go home, he
added, "I don't want any heroics up there, Dave." No
heroics, I
thought. Right-like telling Johnny Reb not to click
his heels together
when "Dixie" was played. Besides, just going up that
hill was worth a
double Blue Max-for all of us. 
We briefed the troops. Every man knew exactly where he
was to go and
what he was to do when he got there. I guess Chris and
I were snapping
out orders and carrying on like real badass
Regulars-in the hospital,
a thousand years later, Sprinkler told me that's how
the guys had
known we were in for some deep shit.  So while Forte
made satchel
charges and Scaglion played fireman with his scrounged
portable
flame-thrower, the rest of the Raiders rehearsed the
operation and
readied their gear. The boys looked good. I was
pleased.  We moved up
behind Item under the cover of darkness the night
before the raid. I
didn't want to tip our hand, but I wanted my guys on
the hill in the
morning so they could get a good look at 400 during
daylight, then be
rested and set to go at first dark. They had their
look and then,
spread out among Item's reverse slope bunkers, caught
some shut-eye. A
number of the guys wrote letters-some in earnest, some
in jest, the
latter group wrinkling them up and rubbing them in the
dirt, so that
if they got zapped, whoever was on the receiving end
would know that
life in the trenches was tough and war was hell. After
a last look at
foreboding 400,I sacked out for the rest of the day.
Unlike Jake Able,
I slept like a bear. 
The sun dropped out of the sky like an incoming round.
Suddenly it was
pitch-black-the perfect night to attack-no moon and a
thick blanket of
fog that settled over the battlefield. Jimmie moved
first; his scout
section was through the wire and gone without a sound.
Jack Speed's
squad was next, followed by me and Don Neary with his
radio. Next were
Bill Smith's and Tex Carvin's people. All was going
just like
rehearsals. For once everyone seemed to have gotten
the word. No one
fired at us from Item; no flares were sent up to make
us sitting ducks
in no-man's-land. 
The inevitable first hitch occurred just as I'd
cleared Item's wire.
Word was passed up that a Raider in Smith's squad was
refusing to go a
step farther. I had Neary halt the infiltrating
column, and I went
back to find this guy hunkered down in the patrol path
like a mule.
Until now, he'd been a good man-he had at least a
dozen raids under
his belt-but now he wouldn't budge. He said he'd had
it; he couldn't
go on. I told him that his timing was off-he should
have turned in his
quit slip before we left home-and that his ass was
going up that hill.
Sobbing, he told me to get screwed. I hit him on both
sides of his
face with my pistol and said that there wasn't a
Raider out there who
wanted to go, but they'd all made the commitment when
they'd gone
through the wire. The boy wouldn't be moved. I pulled
my trench knife
out of my boot and laid it against his throat. "I'd
just as soon cut
your throat as fuck with you," I said. "You either go
on this raid or
die. If I kill you I'll report that you bought the
farm in a big burst
of glory. Make up your mind." After a few seconds,
between muffled
sobs, he said he'd go. 
The crews of the three enemy OPs must have forgotten
the old soldiers'
creed: 
Stay alert and stay alive; Jimmie and his gang knocked
them off with
ease. We moved up to the deployment line, then crept
forward, one
slow, quiet step after another: toe down, then heel;
crush, not
snap-taking more care than in a minefield. 
All the Raiders around me were now in, or entering,
the trench. A
short way down, Tex Carvin made the first kill. He'd
just finished
putting his men into their attack positions and was
standing just
above the trench when an enemy soldier came strolling
by. Carvin
reached down, splattered the Chinaman's head with the
butt of his
weapon, and rolled him into an empty bunker.
Meanwhile, I checked with
Speed to see how his guys were doing-everything was
okay. Neary and I
started creeping down the enemy trench line to where
Speed's and
Smith's squads were tying in. Then I saw a Chink not
more than four
feet away. I froze.  The guy was standing in the
trench, looking
downhill with only his head sticking out, a difficult
target for a
knife or a garrote, and I didn't want to shoot him
until we were
really ready to go. But I couldn't see how I could get
at him, or past
him, silently. Neary covered me. I slipped my pistol
out of its
holster, laid my Thompson down, and started bellying
along the top of
the trench line.  Definite heart-in-mouth stuff. I was
about a foot
away from him when I came to the interesting
realization that Chinese
sentries were no different from a lot of Americans I
knew. He was fast
asleep. 
He never knew what happened. I grabbed him with one
arm, covered his
mouth, snapped his head back, and cut his throat.
Neary, who was at
least six feet four and built like a fullback, moved
up behind me and
pulled the sentry out of the trench as if he were a
feather pillow. He
dragged him down the hill and stuffed him into a shell
crater. 
Everyone was in place, and Forte's satchel charges
were ready and
waiting at sleeping bunker doors. "Let's get this show
on the road"
was the word from Jack Speed. Jimmie Mayamura appeared
in front of me.
He whispered, "Hack, I think we're going to have to
change the plan."
He reported that there were some additional, heavily
fortified
positions between the trench we were in and the top of
the hill. We
hadn't found them on our reconnaissance (it would have
been too risky
to have gone beyond the trench; we could have blown
the operation).
Now Jimmie, roaming around as if he were on a Sunday
picnic, had
stumbled across them. They were unoccupied, but
another scout, Bobby
Evans, had gone into one large bunker and estimated at
least ten men
in there. He'd set a trip-wire grenade booby trap to
nail them when
they came out.  Before I could reassess my battle
plan, Hill 400
exploded. Evans dispatched four Chinamen who were
moving down a
connecting trench into the one we occupied. His BAR
had barely started
singing when every weapon on the line started
hammering away. Forte
ignited his satchel charges and an earth-shattering
roar shook the
trench line as bunkers blew across the position. The
remaining Chinks
in the immediate area didn't have a chance. If they
were not trapped
underground, then Raider grenades blew them sky-high.
Farther up the
hill, the enemy were wide-awake now and frantically
firing in every
direction. They hit nothing. We'd cracked their main
line and not a
casualty reported so far. I was beginning to count on
my Jake Able
premonition. This time, like the other, it was a false
alarm: this
hill was going to be a piece of cake.  I told the boys
to use regular
daylight assault procedures; we'd fire and maneuver
and blast our way
up. Cordite hung heavily in the air as Chris formed a
reserve of
Forte's and Mayamura's people and took over our
positions with the
mission of guarding our ass. The prearranged artillery
fire blistered
the top of the ridge as Scaglion kicked off our attack
with two fiery
blasts of his flame-thrower. The Raiders started
slugging, but then
the world fell in.  The Chinks always relied heavily
on potato-masher
grenades. Already we'd policed up what looked like
enough to give each
enemy soldier on 400 his own monogrammed case. But
even when they
threw them at us in bunches (as they had on Objective
Logan, ringing
the pins of each around their fingers or on little
sticks), potato
mashers didn't pack much punch in the open. They were
virtually
harmless firecrackers we'd learned to dance around and
(more or less)
ignore. The problem on Hill 400, though, was that the
defenders
weren't just throwing potato mashers. They were also
hurling frags. We
hadn't counted on that, and the sky was black with
them. 
Many rolled down the hill and exploded out of range
behind us (proving
one of Captain Michaely's pet theories over in George:
it was actually
safer up front doing the fighting than hiding behind
where you became
a sitting duck for grenades and incoming), but many
found a Raider
target. Smith's guys had a hard time; they took a
number of casualties
and couldn't gain an inch of ground until Speed's
fighters thundered
forward in a wild attack. These men overwhelmed one of
the unexpected
positions, and now Speed's complete force was in
there, mopping up.
The price filtered back to me: we'd taken three dead
and more than
twenty wounded. It's just a nightmare, the words
bubbled up in my
brain.  Almost to a man, the wounded Raiders refused
to leave the
hill. Doc Brakeman was performing miracles in his
ever-growing "field
hospital" in a shell hole behind the trench below us;
the kids
determinedly returned to the fighting the minute they
got patched up.
Some, like Jimmie (who'd already gotten shot in the
ass and the arm),
didn't even bother with the patching-everyone knew we
were a lean
outfit and that every gun counted. It was that family
bonding again:
no one was going to let his brothers down, especially
in a fight like
this. Even at the cost of his life. 
I called for Chris and Forte to bring up their people.
We needed
everybody on line. Fuck a lot of rear security-if
you're losing the
fight, a strong rear won't do you any good. We were
running low on
ammo and grenades so we took all we could from enemy
dead. I told the
leaders to let me know when they were rearmed,
reorganized, and set to
go. We had to banzai the shit out of the hilltop in a
hurry. It was
the only way we'd take it, and if we didn't jump off
soon we'd be
nickeled and dimed to death by what seemed like
ever-increasing scores
of frags bouncing down from above. 
Green tracers from a machine gun raked our position.
It was set up in
a rocky outcrop near the top of the hill, firing right
down Speed's
throat. No way could he get his people through that.
The way it stood
now, they couldn't even return fire. The gun had to
go. 
Brave Raiders Smith and Salazar, on the left, took on
the deadly
challenge.  There was little cover and no concealed
approaches to the
gun, just a fold in the ground in the center of
Smith's front, which
the machine gun could not depress low enough to cover.
Raider weapons
laid down good covering fire as the two volunteers
crawled up the
hill. I liked these men. Especially Smith, an
Alabamian who I
initially hadn't been sure was Raider material,
because he'd gotten
his stripes the National Guard "weekend warrior" way.
The funny thing
was that Smith didn't think he deserved those stripes
either. He was
embarrassed about them, and always seemed to go out of
his way to
prove himself, even when it was no longer necessary.
Maybe it still
riled him a bit when we called him "NG" (due to his
National Guard
origins); still, by now he did know it was just a
loving nickname for
a brave and trusted comrade-in-arms.  Now, under our
fire, he and
Salazar snaked through the dead space toward the gun.
About twenty
yards from their objective, Salazar blasted with his
weapon and Smith
rushed forward, screaming as he unleashed two large
Chinese antitank
grenades. Both hit home, exploding on impact. The
machine gun and crew
were blown to a million pieces. The two Raiders turned
and started
back toward us.  Then a Chinaman jumped up on the
outcrop and fired a
long, long burst. Both men fell, their momentum
sending them tumbling
into our position. Smith died in my arms. I cried as I
held him; It's
just a nightmare, I thought. And then I swore we'd
take that fucking
hill. 
Speed had jumped off as soon as the machine gun blew.
Garvin, picking
up the reins from Smith, attacked on the left. Item
Company put 60-mm
mortar fire all over the top of the hill; we came up
right under it.
Speed's people hit the top like a bulldozer, closely
followed by
Garvin's squad. The die-hard Chinks were making a
determined last
stand as Raiders fanned out; savage close-in fighting
and hand-to-hand
combat were the bloody order of the day "Shift the
mortar fire to the
back of the hill!" I yelled to Neary.  "Grenade!"
shouted Raider
Mendoza, who was kneeling about three feet away from
me. We went for
cover. Mendoza and Neary hit the ground. I spun, but
tripped and
rolled down the slope. I stopped rolling about the
same time as the
grenade. The same place as the grenade. It was under
me when it
exploded, the blast propelled me into the air like a
rocket. Moments
later a 160-pound rag doll fell to the ground with a
heavy