A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (83 page)

By waiting in the mountains the Chinese accomplished the twin purposes of delaying war as long as possible in the hope that the Americans might heed their warnings and then of being certain that if war did come the opening battle would be fought on their terms. The mountains deprived the Americans of their mechanical advantage in tanks, artillery, and fighter-bombers. The “massive compression envelopment” that MacArthur envisioned his army as executing was actually a series of isolated, road-bound columns wending their way through the defiles. In the mountains the Chinese could bring to bear their advantage in superior numbers and in the fighting quality of their infantry. Their plan was to employ some of their assault elements to strike the heads of MacArthur’s columns and fix them in place while they launched the main body of their infantry down from the high ground and into the valleys to outflank the Americans and attack with greatest force deep in the rear. As the amateurs on this occasion, the Chinese generals were of the mindset of Eisenhower and Patton in North Africa in 1943. They played for keeps and arrayed their best army in front of Walker, who represented MacArthur’s main battle line. It was the Fourth Route Army under Gen. Lin Piao—eighteen divisions, 180,000 strong.

China had not fielded an army the equal of Lin Piao’s in centuries. It was a product of the talent and energy that a country pours out during a national revolution. Its like was not to be seen again, because this army was also to be sacrificed in the subsequent years of the war after the Chinese became exposed to American firepower. Yao Wei remembered the Fourth Route Army as it was in November 1950. He had joined it as a youth and served with it until detailed to the staff of Gen. Peng Teh-huai’s main headquarters just before the move to Korea. Most of the soldiers were older than he was, in their late twenties. They had fought in the civil war without a major defeat all the way from Manchuria, where the Fourth Route Army had been organized, down through China to the capture of Hainan Island off the southern coast in an amphibious landing in the spring of 1950. As North China troops they had adequate clothing for a winter campaign in Korea—heavy quilted cotton uniforms and fleece-lined caps with flaps to protect the ears from frostbite. When the soldiers were told they might have to fight the Americans they were not afraid, Yao Wei remembered. They knew that fighting the Americans would not be like fighting the Kuomintang, but they were veterans with the confidence of battles past.

Puckett and his Rangers got no warning on top of Hill 205. Fifteen minutes before midnight a shower of sparks flashed across the darkness
of the forward slope below. Grenades exploded among the foxholes. Chinese infantrymen had crawled silently up the slope close enough to toss their missiles. The sparks were from the arming devices on the grenades. Then mortar shells crashed on the Americans in a quick barrage. Then the Chinese rushed, hoping to crack the Americans with a headlong assault as they had become accustomed to overwhelming their Kuomintang opponents.

Ralph Puckett had trained his cooks and clerk-typists well. They did not fall for the Chinese trick and cower down in their foxholes from the blast of the grenades and the mortar shells. Instead they raised their heads, picked out the figures running up at them through the night, and killed them as they came. Puckett helped them to aim and to fling their own grenades down at the attackers by dispelling the darkness with a radio call to the artillery for flare shells. In the light of the flares, he could see more groups of Chinese soldiers running up the slope behind the lead squads. He dropped the next rounds of high explosive from the 105mm and 155mm howitzers right into them. Because Puckett was a conscientious lieutenant and because he had anticipated a fight farther up the road, his men did not have to stint on their fire. He had made sure that every man was carrying a basic load of ammunition and then some to spare, and lots of grenades. The hilltop was a bedlam of carbines, rifles, BARs, and machine guns savaging the Chinese, while the volleys from the howitzers ripped them with shrapnel and tossed bodies into the air.

The Chinese soldiers faltered. The combination of the artillery and the drumfire from Puckett’s men was too much for them. Soon there were fewer figures running up the slope to join those already dead or wounded there, and then there were none as the survivors withdrew into the darkness beyond the illumination flares. The Americans were left undisturbed except for an occasional shot. Puckett crawled around the perimeter from foxhole to foxhole to encourage his men and see how they had fared. The company had escaped lightly, with only half a dozen wounded, and they refused evacuation to the task force headquarters, insisting they could still fight. Puckett learned that this enemy was persistent. One of the Chinese survivors managed to sneak to the edge of the foxholes and throw a grenade. A fragment from it wounded Puckett in the arm. He could not yet know that the night was just beginning and that he and his classmate and their half a hundred Rangers were the target of a force that was later judged to be an entire Chinese battalion of approximately 600 men.

The sequence was repeated three times over the next two hours—the shower of sparks, the grenades, the mortars, the rush—and each time
the Rangers dreaded it more than they had the last. They always managed to break the Chinese with the help of the artillery, but a few of them were wounded every time, or killed after the first assault, and they were gradually expending their ammunition.

The fifth assault at 2:45
A.M.
was worse than the previous four. There were more grenades. The mortar barrage was longer and more intense. When Puckett called for help from the howitzers the officer at the artillery fire-direction center said that he couldn’t give it to the Rangers right away. “We’re firing another mission,” he told Puckett. “We’ll give it to you as soon as we can.” Puckett was on his knees facing one end of a two-man foxhole he was sharing with his classmate, bent over with the radiophone against one ear under his helmet and his free hand cupping the mouthpiece so that he could hear and speak amid the din. Even with the wounded who could still prop themselves up continuing to resist, there were gaps in the foxhole line. Puckett’s men were also nearly out of ammunition. He had only one clip of eight bullets for his own carbine. “We really need it now,” he said to the artillery officer. “We’ve just got to have it.”

At that moment two mortar shells, one followed a fraction of a second by another, exploded behind Puckett in the foxhole. His classmate was killed instantly, and by the odds Puckett should have died too. He had Vann’s odds that night and was instead wounded severely in both feet and in the left shoulder and arm by the shrapnel. His right foot was slashed so badly that he later had difficulty persuading the surgeons not to amputate it.

As soon as he recovered enough of his senses to talk again on the radio, Puckett started to laugh. Things were so bad there wasn’t anything else to do. The Chinese were coming from two directions this time, he told the artillery officer, and there seemed to be more of them than ever before and he had to have the barrage right away if they were going to hold. When the officer said the guns were still busy helping somebody else who was also under attack, Puckett looked up out of the foxhole and saw that it was too late anyway. Chinese soldiers were running into the perimeter. He told the officer to pass the word to Colonel Dolvin that his company was being overwhelmed.

Those of his Rangers who could still do so jumped out of their foxholes and ran past Puckett down the hill. Partway down, three of them, all privates first class, had second thoughts about leaving their lieutenant behind. They went back up the hill to get him. “Lieutenant, how are you?” one of them asked, crouching on the edge of Puckett’s foxhole.

There were Chinese all around. Puckett saw one Chinese soldier about
fifteen yards away fire a burst from a submachine gun into a foxhole to finish off another of his Rangers. Only the confusion and the darkness were keeping him and his would-be rescuers from being killed too. “I’m hurt bad,” he said. “Let’s get off this hill.” The man asked if Puckett could walk with help. “No, drag me,” he said. He was getting groggy from the loss of blood and shock.

Two of the men pulled him out of the foxhole and carried him down the hill and across the frozen rice paddies while the third trailed behind ready to cover them with the few bullets he had left. The two men carrying Puckett heard him muttering to himself: “I’m a Ranger. I’m a Ranger.”

MacArthur’s overreaching and the failure of his civilian and military superiors in Washington to restrain him precipitated the longest retreat in the history of American arms. Walker was stunned by the onslaught. Before he could recover and maneuver, the Chinese crushed the entire right flank of his army. The main Chinese flanking drive first scattered a South Korean corps of three divisions and then struck the U.S. 2nd Infantry Division. Its general decided to withdraw the bulk of his division directly south in a single column of tanks and vehicles down a road through a mountain gorge. He was in such a hurry that he neglected to first take the heights above the road. This was the rash decision his Chinese opponents had hoped he would make. They were waiting on the heights when the Americans started down the road. The 2nd Division retreated into a massive ambush.

Walker fell back down the peninsula through Pyongyang 155 miles before he dared attempt to hold along the original 38th Parallel line above Seoul. After he was killed there in a jeep accident on an icy road in late December, the Eighth Army was driven another fifty-five miles down the peninsula and Seoul was lost for the second time in the war, until his successor, Matthew Ridgway, could reorganize and begin a series of counteroffensives.

The independent corps that MacArthur had sent up the east side of North Korea under his chief of staff, Almond, was evacuated by sea, but not before it too lost several of its South Korean divisions and much of the U.S. 7th Infantry Division to the 120,000 troops of the Chinese Third Route Army who fell on it. Almond, as recklessly imperious as his mentor, had ordered the 7th Division to rush all the way to the Yalu by itself. The Chinese let the 7th reach the border and then appeared. Those soldiers who survived the new enemy and the cold did so by
breaking out of the encirclement and retreating back south fast enough to join up with the Marines.

The Marines alone wrought glory from the disaster, because their commander, Maj. Gen. Oliver Smith, was the one general in Korea to perceive the madness of MacArthur’s scheme and to have the moral courage to act on his conviction to save his men. Smith had apparently become suspicious of MacArthur during the argument over the landing at Inchon. He decided that the risk MacArthur was taking in North Korea amounted to military insanity. He therefore prepared his retreat as he advanced. Smith slowed the movement of his 1st Marine Division to a mile a day during November, despite the anger of Almond, while he had the Marine engineers improve the road back through the mountains to the coast and build a base and an airstrip at Hagaruri on the southern end of the Changjin Reservoir. (The reservoir is also known as the Chosin Reservoir from its Japanese name.) When the Chinese struck and swung behind the Marines to block a withdrawal, Smith was ready to turn and literally attack in the opposite direction. The retreat of the 1st Marine Division from the Changjin Reservoir became another epic in the roll call of the exploits of the Corps.

The perspicacity and moral courage of Smith and the disciplined gallantry of his Marines could not alter the fact that MacArthur had provoked and lost the decisive battle of the Korean War. The United States was to settle for half, rather than four-fifths, of Korea, and at five times the cost in American dead. Of the 54,246 Americans who died in Korea, the battle of the Pusan Perimeter and the pursuit of the remnants of the North Korean Army cost the lives of approximately 10,000 men. The other 44,000 perished in the catastrophe in the mountains below the Yalu and during the two and a half years of seesaw fighting that followed until the conflict ended in July 1953, at a truce line roughly along the 38th Parallel where the war had begun.

Of the fifty-two men who climbed Hill 205, Puckett and nineteen others came back. Many of the other nineteen survivors were also wounded, but they had been able to walk or stumble down the hill by themselves. Puckett was the only seriously wounded man to live. The rest of the wounded Rangers who could not walk died on the hill. Those who were not finished off by the Chinese—as Puckett saw one of his Rangers die—were probably killed by the barrages of white phosphorus shells and the air strikes that Colonel Dolvin laid on the crest to prevent the Chinese from exploiting this dominant terrain against the rest of his task force. Dolvin changed direction the next morning on orders from General Kean and began withdrawing down the road.

Puckett was to spend a year in Army hospitals in Japan and the United States undergoing surgery to repair his feet and shoulder. When he first woke up at one of the forward casualty centers in Korea he noticed an Asian working as an orderly and wondered if he really had been saved.

“Is that guy Chinese or Korean?” Puckett asked a nurse.

“He’s Korean,” the nurse said.

As soon as Vann heard what had happened to the Rangers he asked Gassett’s permission to see Kean and said, as insistently as a captain could to his general, that he thought he had earned an opportunity to rebuild the company around the survivors with new volunteers. This was not the first time Vann had come to Kean in quest of a company. He had never stopped pestering Gassett to release him, and to silence him on an earlier occasion Gassett had let him see Kean to ask for a company in the 24th Infantry Regiment. Garland Hopkins and Ferrum had freed Vann of racism toward blacks. He was convinced that black soldiers would fight as well as whites if someone showed them that they could. The general had disappointed Vann then by telling him that he was making the most valuable contribution he could on the division staff. At the moment, Kean was preoccupied with saving the 25th Division, but he did not have the heart to say no a second time. Gassett also felt it was no longer fair of him to stand in Vann’s way. Vann got the Rangers. He had to recruit and organize amid the turbulence of the retreat, but Kean also gave him a haven within which to work by extricating the 25th relatively intact and conducting a withdrawal that was orderly, given the circumstances. While Kean did not have Oliver Smith’s independence of mind, he had been more cautious than his fellow Army generals. Instead of aligning most of the division forward on a thin front for Mac Arthur’s offensive, he had disposed his units in considerable depth. The Chinese maneuver to rush around the end of the 25th and envelop the division therefore encountered resistance. Kean used the time the resistance bought to pull back Task Force Dolvin and other lead elements before they were too badly hurt. He thus consolidated strength as he withdrew and kept the division balanced and able to fight its way free of the attackers.