The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War Read Online Free PDF Page A

the next day, the company had been reduced from about 160 men to 39. “We were damn near annihilated that very first night,” Miller said. There was not much talk about kicking Korean ass after that.
    It was not that the kids had fought badly. They just weren’t ready, not right off the boat, and there were so many North Koreans. No matter how well you fought, there were always more. Always. They would slip behind you, cut off your avenue of retreat, and then they would hit you on the flanks. They were superb at that, Miller thought. The first wave or two would come at you with rifles, and right behind them were soldiers without rifles ready to pick up the weapons of those who had fallen and keep coming. Against an army with that many men, everyone, he thought, needed an automatic weapon. And the American equipment was terrible. Their basic infantry gear was often junk. Back at Fort Devens, they had been given old training rifles in terrible shape,poorly cared for, not worth a damn, which seemed to indicate how the nation felt about its peacetime army.
    Once they got to Korea, there was never enough ammo. Miller remembered a bitter fight early in the war when someone had brought over an ammo box and it was all loose. They had to make their own clips. He had wondered what kind of army sent loose ammo to outnumbered infantrymen whose lives were hanging in the balance. It was amateur hour, he thought. The North Koreans were driving good tanks, Russian A-34s, and the sorry old World War II bazookas the Americans had couldn’t penetrate their skins. In World War II, you always knew what your objective was and who was fighting on your left and right. In Korea, you were always fighting blind and were never sure of your flanks, because, likely as not, the ROKs were there.
    On the day they reached Unsan, Miller took a patrol about five miles north of their base, and they came upon an old farmer, who told them that there were thousands of Chinese in the area, many of whom had arrived on horseback. There was a simplicity and a conviction to the old man that made Miller almost sure he was telling the truth. So he brought him back to his headquarters. But no one at Battalion headquarters seemed very interested. Chinese? Thousands and thousands of Chinese? No one had seen any Chinese. On horseback ? That was absurd. So nothing came of it. Well, Miller thought, they were the intelligence experts. They ought to know.
    Of the men in the Eighth Regiment, a young corporal named Lester Urban in Item Company, Third Battalion, was one of the first to sense the danger. He was a runner attached to Headquarters Company, which meant that he was around Battalion headquarters a lot and tended to pick up what the officers were saying. The seventeen-year-old Urban was only five-four, a mere one hundred pounds, too small for the football team at his high school back in the tiny town of Delbarton, West Virginia. His nickname in the Cav was Peanut, but he was tough and fast, and so he had been picked as runner. Given the sorry state of American wire and radio communications in Korea—the equipment rarely functioned properly—it was his job to deliver messages, oral and written, from Battalion to Company. It was exceptionally dangerous duty. Urban was proud of the fact that he knew how to do it and survive. If he made four or five trips to the same place in a day, he always varied his route and never got careless. Get predictable and get dead, he thought.
    Urban had a sense of unease, because there were no American units on either flank, which maximized your vulnerability. But they had been on such a roll and there had been so little opposition in the last few weeks that he wasn’t particularly worried, at least not until they reached Unsan. At Unsan, though, his regiment jutted out, in his words, like nothing so much as a sore thumb,and if you thought about it, then you realized that its three battalions were ill-placed and ill-spaced. The gaps between