Warned by the sixth sense old hands develop in battle, Long kept his eye on the approaching men. They closed to within three hundred yards, and suddenly Long yelled, 'Chinks! They're Chinks!'
Quickly, men holding rifles and BAR's swiveled toward the visitors. Long let them come within two hundred yards; then he leveled his own carbine, and let fly.
The first burst of fire knocked down nearly half the Chinese. The remaining jumped behind rocks of the creek bed or plunged into the half-frozen rice paddies. There was a small village nearby, and a few Chinese raced for cover among the huts.
Quickly, a furious fire fight built up.
Munoz tapped his runner. He sent the man scurrying to First Lieutenant Kavanaugh of Fox, dug in farther along the hill, to get Fox to hit the Chinese in the flank.
Kavanaugh sent one of his supporting tanks rumbling down toward the village. The tank opened fire, killing at least ten Chinese. Others came out with hands up.
Meanwhile, Sergeant Long led his platoon around the ambushed men and struck them in the rear. In a brief, sharp fire fight, Long wiped out the enemy column: seventy-odd killed, and twenty captured.
Frank Munoz and Long looked over the dead Chinese carefully; they were the first they had seen. The corpses were clean-looking, solid, muscular. Each soldier had carried a pack complete with entrenching tool, blankets, and extra ammunition; they had had a miscellany of weapons—American, Japanese, Russian—and plenty of stick grenades. Some of them had carried a pot and a great quantity of rice—their rations.
Because they had thought all the American line companies had been wiped out during the night, the Chinese had walked blithely into a trap.
Munoz and Long had no time to celebrate their easy victory. Now, bloody, exhausted survivors of K and L companies straggled in, and learning what had happened to his front, regimental commander Colonel Sloane moved his remaining companies from the east to the west side of the Ch'ongch'on, to reinforce his intact 2nd Battalion. Then Sloane ordered all his units, including 2nd Battalion, westward down the river, forming them again approximately two miles downstream.
They held the west side of the river; across from them the 23rd Infantry held the eastern bank.
The day passed swiftly with the moving about, but without significant action. No one knew what was happening elsewhere in the division zone.
Then, not long after dark, a strong enemy column from the north burst into the 23rd's perimeter. The regiment's CP was overrun and the Headquarters Company shattered. Its 2nd and 3rd battalions retreated several hundred yards downriver before they were able to get hold of themselves once again.
Sloane, learning this, immediately realized the Chinese might wade the Ch'ongch'on from the east and take Fox and George in the rear. He called Major Barberis, the 2nd Battalion C.O., and told him to move his battalion to the east side of the river, onto the ground where the 23rd had been.
The river was not deep, but it was swift, and Sloane ordered Barberis to move his men across on all available vehicles.
Barberis relayed the message on to Fox and George, dug in on high ground about six hundred yards west of the river. Fox left its holes, beginning to trail down to the river, while George remained on the high ground, covering, and How, the Weapons Company, kept its mortars emplaced to support in case of trouble.
Precisely at this moment, from three sides, rifle fire blazed up at George's hill. Unseen in the dark, Chinese skirmishers had crawled less than fifty yards from George's foxholes.
Munoz had positioned the company for all-around defense. His 1st Platoon faced toward the Ch'ongch'on; his 2nd was on the crest of the rise, looking north. The 3rd Platoon, Sergeant Long, was on line with the 2nd, to its right. On a slightly lower rise, some hundred yards distant, a platoon of Easy Company had been stationed to protect the company's west, or left, flank.
The first fire fell on the left, on Easy's platoon, then bounced all along the line, around the hill. A blaze of gunfire and sound came from F Company, nearing the river. They had been hit, too. The Chinese seemed to know the location of each of George's strongpoints.
Then, weirdly, the bugles began to blow. Having pinned the enemy, the Chinese were talking to each other. The shrill sounds, riding the cold night wind, puckered Munoz's boys a bit. Second Lieutenant Danny Hernandez, his 2nd Platoon leader, ran over to where Munoz stood.
'Captain, the Chinese are all over us!'
Coolly, the short, dark Munoz said to him, 'Let's see what happens.'
Suddenly a red flare soared high over the ridge, rising from the west.
'Well,' Munoz said, as calmly as he could, 'here they come!'
He was right. The Chinese attack, perfectly planned, coordinated, and executed, burst against George's hill. The hill slopes flamed and roared with the sounds of firing.
'Notify Battalion we're under attack—' Munoz said. But his radio operator could no longer raise Battalion; they were across the river and out of range.
The firing slackened momentarily, and Munoz got to one of Lieutenant Haywood's supporting tanks. He contacted Regiment, and ruined whatever peace of mind Colonel Sloane had briefly enjoyed, over the tank radio.
Then the enemy brought their small 57mm mortars up on the fingers of the ridge, firing into George's positions. With a mighty rush forward, Chinese burst over the lower parts of the hill and leaped into the holes of the 1st and Easy's platoon. In a wild melee, the two American platoons disappeared.
George's rear was now unprotected.
Meanwhile, George's 2nd and 3rd platoons had not yet been engaged. Up on the crest, they could see and hear the uproar in the other platoon areas, but could not tell what was happening.
Then men ran toward Long's 3rd Platoon, shouting, 'GI's! GI's! Don't shoot, GI's!'
Long figured that stragglers from the overrun platoons were trying to join the men on the crest. He shouted, 'Don't shoot—don't shoot!'
His men couldn't have shot anyway, because so far they had seen nothing in the dark to shoot at. But now, oddly, Long thought he heard the same voices that yelled not to fire yammering in unmistakable Chinese.
While Long strained his eyes into the night, a bugle rapped sharply.
One of Long's men yelped: 'I can see 'em! I can see 'em! Here they come!'
He hadn't told William Long anything—Long could see them, too. Hunched over, moving up the hills with their centers of gravity low to the sloping ground, the Chinese were coming silently through the night.
Long and his men opened up. Immediately, grenades burst among his holes. Under heavy pressure, Long remembered what Captain Munoz had told him—if he got in heavy trouble, to join up with the 2nd Platoon, because in the final extreme the 2nd Platoon's area was better for last-ditch defense.
Under Long's shouted command, his men dashed to their left, along the ridge toward Danny Hernandez's platoon. Just as they joined, fire from a machine gun tore through 3rd Platoon's line, knocking many of Long's men down.
Now all Munoz's men were together, what was left of them, but the Chinese kept coming. Three big waves of Chinese boiled up out of the dark, hammering at George's men with rifles and submachine guns, hurling dozens of grenades. Munoz's men needed grenades now, badly, but they didn't have them. As the Chinese poured up the fingers and fell into their holes, they needed bayonets—but they didn't have these, either.
Captain Munoz, meanwhile, was on the phone, talking to Kavanaugh of Fox Company. 'I'm being hit heavily— I'm in danger of losing the hill—can you help?'
'God, Frank, I need help, too!'
Fox was waist-deep in Chinese, trying to fight its way to the river.
The mortars of How, the Heavy Weapons Company, had been throwing up a continuous curtain of fire in support of the beleaguered riflemen. Now the tubes ran out of ammunition. The mortarmen dropped thermite grenades into their tubes, and ran for the protecting tank platoon that was covering by the river.
Munoz, down in the ravine beside his CP, could see the action on the hill in silhouette. He could see the dark shadows of hunched-over Chinese coming over the ridge, only to be chopped down. But others jumped the crest and tumbled into the foxholes of his men. He could hear screams and shouts, punctuated by the occasional blast of a grenade.
