This Kind of War: The Classic Korean War History

In the stinking paddies, free once more from the destructive passage of armed men across the land, the peasants sloshed in muddy water, praying to their gods that the rice might grow. In the Orient, there are no bad crop years—there are simply good harvests or disaster.

The crops of 1953 were already mortgaged, for even the Inmun Gun had not been able to find all the moneylenders. The farmers, hungry now in spring, had no hope of ever being free from debt.

The physical scars of the war in the Orient, where man had not greatly changed the face of the earth, were not long in healing.

The other scars, in the minds of men, were more difficult to see, for the Koreans, over the centuries, have learned to keep their miseries to themselves.

There were other men, this spring, who said little: small, dark-eyed, hard-bodied men who wore the uniform of the Taehan Minkuk. Of peasant stock, they had been to battle, and in subtle ways changed; they had learned to command men, and with them, respect. They had fought alongside the brash and bewildering Americans, and these men had learned many things.

Many of these small, hard men in the American-style tunics of officers of the ROK Army had been to Mikuk, the Beautiful Land, which the hated Japanese had called Big Rice. They had not found Mikuk beautiful, but scandalously empty, while they had learned to employ infantry in Georgia, and to aim cannon in Oklahoma—but they had learned that all men did not live as did those in the Hermit Kingdom.

In Mikuk, the Beautiful Land, it was possible for a peasant to own his own land, and to live free of crushing debt. In Mikuk, men of high office lived little above the commonalty, nor was it ordained that some lived as the favored of the gods, while others starved.

There were troubles in the Beautiful Land, as their American friends never tired of admitting, but men had not as yet accepted them as everlasting.

These small, hard men in new colonels' and generals' uniforms, who had come to high command when the city folk, the merchants' and officials' sons who once commanded the armies died under the blazing guns of June, had never learned to drink the whiskey-soda; they had never jokingly adopted the patronizing Western nicknames of Fat or Joe or Tiger Kim.

In Mikuk they had not learned golf—but unfortunately, neither had they learned the principles by which free men live. They had learned only that life could and ought to be, different from the way it was lived in the Taehan Minkuk. Someday, these men, who had learned also to command men and guns and armies, and to expect obedience, might strike to make it so, in the only way they knew.

South of the Farm Line, the granaries were low, the new crops not planted, and the waiting hard.

To the north, the waiting was also hard. Here, there were only the twill-clad hosts of the Eighth Army, making the roads rutted and dusty with their thousands of trucks. Eighth Army was firmly implanted now, its tents walled and floored with wood against the harsh seasons, its larger HQ's solidly timbered with an air of permanence. Its bright flags flew from tall poles, and the stones of its company areas were painted white.

Eighth Army had little to do, except put out more flags, and paint more pathstones, as months went by.

Still, the waiting was hard.

Still farther north, where the vehicles did not go, and the hills grew bare and dark, the waiting was hardest of all.

Here the untilled ground was dug in long furrows, and there were wire and sandbagged earth, and thousands of men lay in deep trenches and revetted bunkers.

And still farther north, among the outposts thrusting into the sullen Chinese hills, far in front of the main line of resistance, with spring at hand, men lay in cold, sleeting rain, and talked of peace.

Now and then artillery rumbled, and fire splashed the hills. Men's eyes, even while they talked of peace, kept to the north. Over there, in the black hills and misty valleys, nothing moved. The observation posts saw nothing; friendly aircraft hurtling overhead reported nothing.

Now and again, gunners fired, and in their hearts felt they fired at nothing.

Yet everyone knew that he was there—Old Joe Chink, Luke the Gook, the enemy. Unseen, he was real, massing in his deep tunnels and hollowed-out mountains. He had come before, slipping out of the night behind shrieking shell bursts, pouring into trenches and bunkers, shooting, killing.

He would come again, even while they talked of peace at Panmunjom.

On 16 April, while the eyes of the world and most of the correspondents were at Panmunjom, where the Communist side had just agreed to exchange sick and wounded POW's, the CCF struck to destroy the 7th Division's outpost line. The Chinese hit Eerie, the Arsenal, and swamped Dale.

The men on Pork Chop, an understrength company, E of the 31st Infantry, heard from the heights of enemy- held Hasakkol the wailing minors of Mongol music, the chanting with which Chinese liked to begin concerted action.

The sound was muted, as from out of deep tunnels. Listening as they ate supper, Lieutenant Thomas V. Harrold's riflemen cracked unhappy jokes. Numbering only seventy-six, they were in an extremely vulnerable place to play king of the Mountain.

The Division G-2 had word from secret line crossers of an imminent attack, and had informed Harrold. But somehow, in the inevitable mishaps of war, the word had not passed down to the outposts beyond Pork Chop.

With dark, these men strolled down to their listening posts on the outcroppings, and crouched down amid the flowering wild plums and other greenery. The night was clear, and starlit.

After 2200, two companies of heavily armed Chinese slipped out of Hasakkol and crossed the wide valley. They came on catfeet, and were onto Pork Chop, before the alarm could be given.

They broke over Easy's 1st Platoon in a wave of gunfire. Of 1st Platoon's twenty-odd men, seven survived.

Harrold fired one red flare, signifying he was under serious attack; then a second, requesting the artillery to flash Pork Chop. At 2305, 7th Divarty joined Chinese guns in firing on the hill, putting a horseshoe-like band of steel around its base, and firing proximity-fuse projectiles on top of it.

But the CCF were in the trenches and bunkers now, and close-in, hand-to-hand fighting erupted across Pork Chop.

Regiment sent two platoons to reinforce Harrold, one from Fox Company and one from Love. The Fox platoon became lost in the dark, and did not arrive; the men from Love, misunderstanding the situation, walked up the hill and came under Chinese fire. They had not understood the Chinese were already on the crest, and under surprise and shock of being taken under fire, they ran back down into the valley.

Pork Chop was overrun, but it was a maze of trenches, bunkers, and fortified positions. Harrold, and a number of his men, piling sandbags, ammunition boxes, and sleeping bags against bunker entrances and embrasures, fought the scattered parties of searching CCF off. With dawn, they were still holding, but for all practical purposes the hill had been lost.

Deep in his own bunker, Lieutenant Harrold hardly understood what had happened; the very nature of the fight had allowed him to view very little of it. From him his battalion commander had no clear picture of the situation on Pork Chop. Battalion thought the sending of one company forward to reinforce would be more than ample.

At 0330 Lieutenant Joseph Clemons, Jr., commanding K Company, was ordered to move his outfit forward just behind Pork Chop. From there he was to assault the hill, while two platoons from Love Company went up Pork Chop from the right.

From Joe Clemons' assault point, it was only 170 yards up to the fortified positions on Pork Chop—but the slope was steep, cratered, and rocky, and strung with wire.

It took King almost thirty minutes to reach the top of the ridge.

And there King's work began. The Chinese had burrowed into Pork Chop like rats, and their own artillery kept dousing the hill in regular timed patterns. In two hours the attack was carried forward only some two hundred yards, and the Americans' legs were exhausted. The length of the hill had crumbled into tumbled rubble under artillery fire, and each piece of rubble provided shelter for riflemen and grenadiers.

Meanwhile, the Love platoons, coming up on a narrow front on the right, had been chopped to pieces by the entrenched defenders on the crest. Ten men out of sixty-two who had attacked under Lieutenant Forrest