The Last Stand of Fox Company: A True Story of U.S. Marines in Combat by Bob Drury, Tom Clavin Read Free Book Online Page B

a man's hands and up his arms and cause him to yelp. Gradually the outline of an inverted horseshoe took shape across the heights while emotional, psychological, and physical dramas played out.
    Private First Class Graydon "Gray" Davis was bone tired. Every part of his body hurt. He lagged behind his squad mates, who were scrambling over the sheer cut bank near the road and up the western slope. He had spent the first seventeen years of his life in hot, humid southern Florida, and in the two years since he'd enlisted he had never encountered such cold. He was certain he would never grow accustomed to the tricks it played. The water in his canteen, for instance, was frozen solid. Alternately blowing into his gloves and swinging his arms to regain circulation, Davis reflected on the juxtaposition of the surreal and the quotidian in this crazy land.
    On the one hand, he hated most things about the country: the freezing winter, the harrowing mountain paths, the fleas and lice, and not least the North Koreans themselves. Davis was a history buff and knew well that Korea was a country forged in war. Fighting had been a way of life here for centuries, and when the various clans, tribes, and provincial armies were not trying to kill each other they were trying to kill outside aggressors, who now, apparently, included Gray Davis.
    On the other hand, only a few days earlier Davis and some buddies had commandeered a heated "gook hootch" near Hagaru-ri in order to clean, oil, and wipe dry their weapons and heat their little cans of C-rats-meatballs and string beans, hash, beef stew, ham and lima beans. Inside they found a mama-san and her two kids. As in most Korean homes, the chimneys were ducted under the kitchen floor to provide radiant heat, and during those rare few hours of God-sent warmth Davis's antagonism toward the natives had relaxed.
    In fact, while the Marines were chowing down one of them had begun whistling a couple of bars of the Christian hymn "Amazing Grace." Suddenly the woman and her two children were smiling. She sent one of the kids outside to fetch her husband, who returned, headed straight for a corner of the hut, and stuck his arm into a sack of old potatoes. The Americans leaped up and leveled their rifles. But then the man retrieved a tattered hymnal left behind long ago by a missionary. The entire family then lined up and sang the hymn for them in Korean. Davis was floored. Maybe these people were human after all.
    As he recalled this incident at the side of the MSR, Davis's reverie was broken when the company's gunnery master sergeant got up in his face and demanded to know what the hell his problem was.
    "Sarge, it's just too cold to move," he said. This took stones, for the gunny was rumored to have a right hook that could stun a brick.
    The master sergeant wore a lion tamer's expression as he briefly pondered this response. He then inquired if a shoepac directed up Davis's butt might possibly help to warm him. Davis double-timed it, clawing over the cut, seeking a place to dig in.
    If Gray Davis had known what awaited him on this icy hill in the middle of nowhere, he might well have opted for that shoepac up his butt. Though officially the South Koreans were being assisted in their "defensive struggle" by the United Nations, in reality the war was being waged nearly exclusively by Americans like Davis. Unlike World War II, this fight was viewed by the rest of the "free world"-still emerging from the rubble of the previous war-as limited in scope. It was a problem for the United States to handle. Worse, even in the United States there was little enthusiasm for what was being officially described as a mere "conflict" or "police action."
    Although Great Britain, Australia, and a few other nations dutifully sent a limited number of troops to Korea, their governments were not necessarily supportive; none wanted to see the war expanded to China. Even the usually bellicose Winston Churchill warned, "The United