through earlier. It was a blazing fight for most of the way. Some batteries were forced to deploy and man their guns; some were overrun. All were badly shot up.
On the night march, under fire, the road became clogged with blazing vehicles. Swerving to avoid the blocks, other vehicles overturned. The first artillery battalions in the column came through best. The 17th leading, came out in good shape. The 37th, following, lost ten guns. The 503rd fought most of the night to save its 155's, finally losing them. The 38th Field, at the end of the column, lost every gun and truck, and its men came out as stragglers over the hills, if they came out at all.
Because the guns were undeniably lost, there were men who cried discredit upon the artillerymen. But the men who came through with them, of whatever arm or service, are firm in the belief that the guns were served with honor until the last.
The last men of the division to come through, arriving within the British lines of the moring of 1 December, could remember very little of what they had experienced. There comes a time when the conscious mind accepts no more; as with women experiencing childbirth, even the memory of pain is blotted out.
On that morning, thousands of allied wounded filled every field aid station and hospital even beyond Sunch'on. British and American surgeons worked until they dropped, then got up and worked again. Men lay on the frozen ground for hours, waiting for treatment.
But aside from the dead, there were still men more unfortunate than these.
All of 2nd Division did not come out.
One of the persistent myths of American arms in the middle of this century is that technicians somehow are not and should not be soldiers. But when a man dons the uniform whether he wears crossed muskets, the wheel, of the caduceus, events are apt to prove the falseness of such belief. For any man who wears his country's uniform, of whatever service, should be prepared to Suffer, and if need be, to fight.
Sergeant Charles B. Schlichter, 2nd Medical Battalion, 2nd Infantry Division, had been soldiering most of his life. At eighteen, in 1939, tall, slim, and green-eyed, he had enlisted in the Pennsylvania National Guard. Later, during the war, he had served forty-three months overseas with the Coast Guard, as part of a beach party with the Fleet Marine Force. He had seen Kwajelein, Eniwetok, Saipan, and Tinian, among others.
But, somehow, after the big war, he found himself married and selling furniture for a living. The service, he figured, was nothing to inflict upon a new wife. But some men are fortunate in their choice of mate—Elizabeth Schlichter had been raised in the Army, and day by day, month by month, she knew what ailed her man.
One night, while Charles was sitting in the bathtub, washing his long brown hair, Elizabeth lay on their bed, reacting the evening paper. Suddenly she said: 'I see here the Army needs men. Why don't you go back into the service?'
Schlichter washed soap from his ears. 'What?'
She repeated her question.
He said, 'I'd love to—but it's not fair to you—'
'I like to travel, anyway.'
The next morning, Schlichter called at an Army recruiting office. Looking at his records, the Army gave him sergeant's stripes on enlistment. In June, 1950, he was a surgical technician at Madigan General Hospital. When the news of the outbreak in Korea came over the air, Charles Schlichter had a premonition. In the middle of the night he told Elizabeth: 'Something is going to happen to me—I don't know what, but something is going to happen. No matter what, stay where I leave you—because I'll be back.' Neither he nor Elizabeth slept much that night.
In a few days, something did happen. He was diverted to the 2nd Division on 16 July, and restricted to post. He asked about a chance to make arrangements for his wife, and was told, 'After you leave for Korea, she can find a place to live.'
The 9th Infantry, his new unit, went aboard ship for the Far East. It was a ship diverted from civilian trade, and N.C.O.'s had staterooms, with bath and clean linen. But at sea, Schlichter and the medics of his unit received no real briefing on the Korean situation. Korea was described to them as a minor police action, which might be cleared up before they arrived. But listening to the radio, Schlichter visualized the vanishing American Perimeter.
When the regiment debarked at Pusan, the medics were issued rifles. As Schlichter put it later, this caused a certain amount of consternation in the ranks. For here they were told that the North Korean enemy considered any man in uniform fair game, whether he wore medic's armband or the chaplain's silver cross, and they should govern themselves accordingly.
Soon, in the fighting that followed along the broiling Naktong, Schlichter went to the division collecting company. He followed the division from the Naktong to the Ch'ongch'on. And here, on Thanksgiving Day he wrote his wife, like many others, that he would be back in time to buy Christmas presents in the States.
Then, suddenly, the medical collecting company was busy along the Ch'ongch'on. And just as suddenly, Major Bert N. Coers, the C.O., told the men: 'We're withdrawing south. This is not a retreat, but an organized withdrawal.'
In the confusion that was overwhelming the division on 30 November, Schlichter figured the medics were lucky to be told anything.
In a serial of some twenty vehicles, the company formed up on the Sunch'on road south of Kunu-ri. It was the last element of the regimental convoy, and here there was some argument. The vehicles already held 180 wounded men. Should the medics be last, so as to aid future wounded, or should they proceed out early, to take care of those they already had?
It was finally resolved that the medics would go last. After all, Coers had been told it was to be an orderly withdrawal, and no one expected trouble.
At dusk on 30 November, the medical convoy was still stopped on the road miles north of the pass. Sitting in a truck with Kenneth Beadke, the company field first sergeant, and Sergeant Wright, Schlichter could hear heavy firing ahead, see the pink and red tracers bouncing off the hills. All three wondered what was happening, and why they were stopped, but they were not really worried. They felt that the combat units ahead of them would fight through and clear the way.
It grew darker, and the thermometer fell. The firing reverberated among the hills, and in the convoy men became tired and cold and scared.
'What's the matter? Why don't we move out?'
There were many young men in the company who had come to Korea with no concept of war. Panic began to sprout.
Then an officer—for there were young men wearing bars among this convoy who were never soldiers, either—ran along the stalled line of trucks, shouting: 'It's every man for himself! We're trapped! Get out any way you can!'
Men got down from the trucks and began to run for the circling hills—and the officers and sergeants followed. Here, thought Sergeant Schlichter later,
There were 180 wounded men in the trucks, and no one said anything to these men as they were abandoned.
The two hundred-odd men of the company spread all over the hills. Schlichter and Ken Beadke were in one small group. All knew they had to move south to reach safety—but now none of them knew where south was, in the dark. No one had any idea of how to move, or how to orient themselves. Men ran into the hills until they dropped from exhaustion; they ran as long as the panic held them and their legs would carry them.
Others climbed hills, to try to see about them. Some saw moving men in the dark, and opened fire with their rifles and carbines. Sometimes agonized voices answered the shots in English.
All night the medics, none of whom possessed any infantry training, wandered aimlessly through the hills fringing the road.
At dawn of 1 December, Schlichter's small group of fifteen men rested on a cold plateau three hundred yards in length. Looking over the lip of the ridge, Schlichter could see Chinese on horseback riding through the valley. Hugging the ground, Schlichter and the men with him realized the Chinese were all around them in these hills.
To Schlichter's hill came an infantry officer named Hill; he was a major or lieutenant colonel from the 9th Infantry. This officer tried to organize a defense of the ground, positioning the half-frozen men about. He had an air
