The Wolfhound Raiders (continued)

Colonel Sloan had promised us a unit R&R after the tenth raid. Morale was high as we returned from yet another night assault on yet another small hill in front of the 3d Batt. We'd had no friendly casualties (for the dozen or so Chinese we'd killed) and in a few days we'd be in Japan. We carefully wove our way along King Company's patrol path, which cut through a triple strand of barbed wire and mines. No more than thirty yards from the fighting positions, an LMG let go a long, long burst-it must have been thirty rounds. I could see the tracers coming in one long, fiery flood; they skipped over my head by what seemed to be inches. I screamed, "Raider Raiders! Shut off that fire!" No one was hurt except the gunner--Chris jumped into his bunker and stomped him to a pulp. 'The gunner's platoon leader, NCOs, and fellow soldiers watched, silently condoning our on-the-spot Raider punishment. The guy had been asleep at his post. He must have awakened and panicked when he saw our dark figures coming at him. Fortunately, his firing was as accurate and reliable as his vigilance. The bastard could have killed a dozen good men.

Getting ready for R&R was almost as complex an operation as any raid. All we could leave in the camp was authorized stuff, which meant packing storing, and hiding just about everything we had. The last thing we needed was some inspector to find anything irregular about our special unit. We'd grown accustomed to the luxuries of life, and the stakes were too high to leave the place anything but perfect. The biggest problem was our vehicles, most of which we ended up hiding in a deep draw behind the camp. My new jeep went off to Ordnance for engine repair, and when everything was squared away, Barney K. Neil organized a few of his bakers to stay at the Raider camp for security. Barney K. himself came with us.

Rest and Recreation or Rape and Run-it all depended on what manual you wanted to believe. But the Rest was nonexistent and the Rape was paid for in advance, so to a guy fresh from the front, R&R was simply 120 precious hours, all of which would be accounted for and none of which would be wasted. Lovely little girl-sans floated between guys; every five days they honeymooned with a new husband. The stars of the group were passed through units like a good weapon, many of them as proud of "their" outfit as regulars. "Me Wolfhound girl-san ... never happen me stay with Cacti You want Cacti girl-san, go see Rosie."

If we could have just frozen time. Countdown Korea began the minute you touched down in Japan, even before the first sweet, cold sip of fresh milk you'd had for a year passed your lips in the R&R center in Osaka or Tokyo. The hardest thing during those wonderful five days was to stop the clock running in your head. Deep-six the clock, you'd tell yourself in a sea of booze, and drink some more to drown each tick, which brought you that much closer to the front.

Eat, drink, and be merry-finally the world of death and horror is far away. Danger, that constant cruel companion who haunts you every day, suddenly cut loose and left behind. The best clubs, the best steaks, the best girls are yours forever, until a car backfires, and you're hurtled back to the whole mad thing while frantically searching for cover in the middle of the Ginza strip.

I steered clear of the other Raiders in Tokyo. Basically, I didn't want to cramp their style, like a chaperone at a high-school dance whose mission in life is to take names and kick half-bared asses out of darkened hallways and janitors' closets. I joined forces instead with Barney K. (I didn't want the Raiders to cramp my style either), and though Barney stayed true to his stateside bride, Belle, the two of us still managed to take the city by storm.

Five days and a three-hour plane ride later, it was back to the front for most of us, and one mean shock. There were no smiling faces, no eagerness to pick up those Thompsons and go on a raid. Of course, this was probably for the best, given that it took almost a week before all the guys got back--about half of the Raiders who'd gone to Tokyo had ended up in jail. One group had smuggled in a Chinese submachine gun; on a drunken spree they'd shot out neon lights all over the Tokyo nightclub district. Another squad had infiltrated a nearby U.S. Navy club; they'd tried to drink all the rum, torpedo the ladies, and sink all the swabbies. All in all, the Raiders hitting Japan as a unit had led to a pretty rough five days for the old Land of the Rising Sun, leaving the natives only to shake their heads and rue the day they decided to bomb Pearl Harbor.

Colonel Sloan was not amused by the conduct of his elite creation. The Raiders had gotten into more trouble in five days than the whole regiment had in six months of R&R. We had sinned, but sinned good. No one suggested deactivating the force (in fact, Sloan's XO, Lieutenant Colonel Smith, a man so caring we called him "Mother," did wonders to prevent Sloan getting the full skinny on the Raiders' R&R escapades), but the good Colonel did lock my heels together. He told me there would be no more unit R&Rs, and it was highly doubtful there would even be individual Raider R&Rs for some time down the track. "Your boys are all volunteers, and they're taking on extremely dangerous assignments. I don't expect them to be Boy Scouts. On the other hand, I cannot overlook gross violations of discipline," he said, suggesting I return order to the ranks muy pronto.

Jack Speed, spokesman for the transgressors, explained their shit behavior the best: "You know, Hack ... you get over there and they give you a goddamn steak and a glass of milk and all that, and you finally realize what life is all about. I don't know … we just went goofy." I understood, but it wasn't going to wash with Sloan. So I took the boys on long runs especially close to the Wolfhound CP, all the while barking, "All right, you bastards, you think you're so bad," and the Colonel and staff could hear the Raiders chant their mournful repentance.

It took a different kind of leader to understand and handle the sort of animals I had on my hands. I was well suited for the job, mostly because I helped make them animals, and probably because I was one of the biggest animals of them all. So for me as their leader, the worst part of the R&R business was not the embarrassment with Sloan, but the fact that the only, difference between my boys and me was that I didn't get caught.

It was just a case of a unit with spirit. Uncontrolled, maybe, but still spirit, which is the essence of success in battle. Spirit makes all things possible. Spirit is what made the Raiders. And if, from the outside, it looked as if we had too much, that was something only I had to deal with. My boys didn't give a damn about rules and regulations, but neither did I. What was the point? Every day we lived with such danger, we kind of figured the next would be our last anyway. And if it wasn't, and we had to pay the price with higher command, what could they do? Put us back in the Raiders and send us behind enemy lines?

The Japan raid might well have been forgotten but for two incidents. First, two weeks after our return a couple dozen cases of clap appeared among the Raider ranks. The regimental surgeon congratulated me for having my unit equal the regimental VD record for the past month. Second, the jeep we hid in Ordnance was found by its owner. It seemed that a wise old motor sergeant from the Cacti Medical Company had recognized his missing chariot in my RAIDERS 1. He must have remembered some little dent or other odd scars or modifications; he'd pulled out his jackknife, and a few careful scrapes across two coats of paint revealed the Cacti insignias.

"Sir, that jeep is not a Wolfhound jeep," I explained to regimental XO "Mother" Smith. Unsmiling but sympathetic, Smith assured me he was well aware of this. But how, he wondered, did it come to have 27th Raider insignias? I couldn't exactly say, "Well, sir, the jeep was found on post, and some gumshoe artist was fiddling around and suddenly our numbers were on the vehicle, and what the hell, it belonged to that rotten 35th Regiment," but I did. Colonel Smith was not amused. The 35th wanted a head. Someone had to be court-martialed. But he said we could probably do a deal--hold the court-martial, satisfy the 35th's CO, lose the paperwork, and the matter would be forgotten.

The Raider mafia met before the sun set. "Why don't we tell the truth?" suggested Chris. "S'koshi got the jeep."

"What do you mean, I got the jeep? Crispino, you're a lying son of a bitch," little Johnny Watkins cried, as he grabbed his weapon and slammed a magazine into it. Chris belted him in the mouth. The blow sent S'koshi flying, but no one intervened; after all, Watkins had been about to blow Chris away.

"Shit, S'koshi, I'm just pulling your leg," Chris told him, as he helped the boy to his feet. "We wouldn't make you take the rap. Okay, look," he said, turning to the rest of us, all business. "We'll tell the truth. I got the jeep. I found it."

Another voice chimed in. "Yeah, it was abandoned over near the shower unit. It wasn't locked or anything. And it was getting dark. Thought a Korean would steal it."

"Yeah, so we brought it home for the night. Next morning one of the guys was just screwing around and painted on our markings."

"Right," said Chris, "and by the time I woke up, the new Raider jeep was on its way to Seoul for a scrounging trip. And when it came back . . . well, it was three days later, and nobody had been asking about no jeep. And then we'll tell 'em it belonged to the 35th anyway, and they're just a bunch of no-good sons of bitches, so we kept it. I'll take the blame."

Chris was court-martialed by one of the regimental staff officers the next afternoon. He was found guilty, admonished, and fined part of a month's pay. The two of us drove back from Regiment, pleased that the heat was off and "justice" had been done. We knew the guys had been worried. We hadn't told them about our back-room talks and that the court was fixed (some things had to remain sacred), but as long as they were still in the dark, we decided to play out just one more scene in the drama.

We arrived back at camp, our faces grim. Chris went into our tent and began to pack his gear. "How did it go?" the guys yelled in unison. "What's he doing?" asked Johnny Watkins. I told them that Chris was getting his no-good ass right out of the outfit, that in order to save himself from jail he had squealed on us and all of our unauthorized activities--the Raiderettes, the other stolen vehicles, the rations, everything. A couple of the guys got so pissed off they grabbed their Thompson submachine guns and started for our tent, as if to finish off the job S'koshi had tried to start the night before. I hadn't expected that. Our script called for a happy ending, not Chris's brains splattered all over the camp.

I took the weapons away. "Look, let me handle this." Mercifully, on cue, Chris came out of the tent. As per script, we went to an open field about three hundred yards from where the Raiders were sitting. There, I proceeded to stomp the hell out of my friend. Then Chris started to stomp the hell out of me--a kick in the face, a fierce blow to the head, a thundering flip on the back. But it was all stuntman stuff like buddies faking it on the back lot: every boot and every blow was stopped before it sank home. Finally we both got bored. It was time to wind the thing up. The finale came when Chris, the villain, kneed me. I rolled into a ball, and he started to finish me off with Vicious kicks to the face. But like the true, clean-cut, all-American boy I was, I pulled myself up on his tattered uniform, coldcocked him, and walked away, victorious.

"That'll take care of that squealing son of a bitch," I said, slapping my hands together, as the rest of the Raiders looked on in horror. "Let's have a beer." When Chris got up, dusted himself off, and joined the party, everyone had a good laugh, but it'd be fair to say the two of us had a hard time making the Raiders believe much of anything after that.

A few more good raids made Regiment forget all our transgressions, and by late October there was not one hill or valley throughout the regimental sector that the Raiders had not ventured across. It was indeed difficult to find an objective where we had not been before. Battlefield circumstances and Chinamen in depth had phased out our original Raider role; our mission assignments now came from Operations. We had become the de facto regimental assault force.

I was always on guard against higher headquarters playing games with my unit. I well remembered how the 8th Rangers had been misused and virtually destroyed in November, and most of the other specially trained Airborne Ranger companies in Korea met the same fate. Historically, special units have always been thrown into the breach to stem the tide. Everyone knows that ten spirited fighters are far better than a herd of a thousand listless drag asses. But many commanders on the Korean battlefield were beginning to behave like desperate gamblers, ignoring the reality that it was far easier for the planners to draw a circle on a map and claim it as a critical objective than it was for mortal men to seize it. So, with morale in the trenches already lower than whaleshit, COs across the front were calling for well-trained, well-motivated cannon fodder--Ranger/Raider specialists--to do the jobs their own dough-foots would, or could, not do themselves.

It took great command wisdom not to ruin a fine thoroughbred by having it pull the plow when the mule was down. Colonel Sloan exercised this wisdom, and the Regimental S-3, Major Robert Glaser, backed him up to the best of his ability. Glaser was a seasoned combat man with two wars under his belt. Until his recent promotion, he'd commanded a 3d Batt rifle company, so he knew well how to keep his planners in tight rein, and make certain the grease-pencil warriors did not promote schemes that would put the Raiders in serious jeopardy. Still, our missions were no longer based on stealth and skill but rather on shock and firepower. It didn't help that little by little, through battle casualties and normal rotation, we were losing some of the original Raiders. Fortunately, the replacements adopted our what-the-hell attitude, and we accepted each mission as we had all to date--fatalistically. Even when it meant retaking a position in broad daylight.

For three days we'd sat in foxholes behind the 1st Batt, to whom we were temporarily attached. Indications had been that the Chinese would attack in force right down the center of the regiment. The Raider role was to block an enemy penetration. If the guys ever thought they were prima donnas, this duty quickly dispelled the idea: our position should have been held by a two-hundred-man rifle company. We had less than a fourth of that number and were armed with only assault weapons, great for close-in stuff but not red-hot in the defense. We did not have mortars, entrenching gear, or even steel pots. We were David waiting for Goliath, minus the slingshot.

The Chinese threw a fair amount of artillery and mortar fire around but did not launch the expected attack. It was when they overran an outpost in front of A Company that 1st Batt decided to send "their" Raiders to get it back in daylight. Why not? I guessed the rationale was that we were attached to them for the moment, so why get any of their own killed when someone else will go for free?

The OP was located on a little knob about six hundred yards from the main line. We moved up before dawn. I would have preferred making a night attack, but Lieutenant George Creamer of A Company had said that at night there was no way to crawl through the barbed wire and mines that previous U.S. defenders had laid on the slopes. We clobbered the hill with artillery and kept it pouring while we worked our way to the top in single file, disarming mines along the OP patrol path. The position did not have any tactical value to the enemy; the attack had either been a feint or a psychological exercise--a demonstration by kamikaze troops that the Chinks were the baddest guys in the valley. In any event, the Chinese raiders had flown the coop by the time we reached the top. I called the main line to tell them the goddamned position had been retaken courtesy of the Raiders and they could come out and relieve us any time they wanted. Now it was just a case of tidying up before they arrived.

We stacked up the U.S. dead (it looked as if they'd been asleep at the switch; the Chinese must have slipped through their defenses and knocked them off all at once) and started cleaning up the position. Down below, a few of my guys began opening a wider path through the minefield for the relieving force; I went down to have a look. I moseyed around the position a bit, and when the boys yelled, "All clear," I started back to the top, only then noticing that one of my boots had trip wire wrapped all around it--normal debris from defused mines. I gave my leg a mighty kick to get rid of the stuff. My troops hit the ground--instantly. Before I could figure out why, a Bouncing Betty exploded about four feet away from me, sending Scores of ball bearings into the air. When the dust settled I was still standing up, untouched. "What the hell are you guys doing down there?" I asked, as the boys slowly got up and looked at me in amazement. The fact was, my hearing had deteriorated a lot after I got hit in the head on 6 February. The only difference between the mine clearers and me was that I hadn't heard the "click" when the firing mechanism went. "Thought you fuckers had cleared this area," I barked, and hotfooted it back to the top of the knob--so I could go into shock in private.

It would just become part of the legend: Let me tell you about our Old Man . . . our CO doesn't give a damn about anything. You know how he clears a path through minefields? He just walks out and stomps and kicks. He blows the shit out of mines and isn't even touched! Or the time when Chris was chopping wood in front of our tent, standing there in his shorts, legs apart. His pistol lay on top of his rack; I picked up the weapon and squint through the sights right between Chris's legs. What a tempting shot. I took careful aim at the log he was splitting no more than six feet away, and squeezed the trigger, figuring the pistol wasn't loaded. BANG! The slug went between Crispino's legs, missed the log, and cut the ax handle in two as Chris followed through on a downward chop. It scared the shit out of both of us, but I pretended I'd hit my target: "Bull's-eye."

I never squeezed rounds off an "unloaded" weapon again; it was a lesson I should have learned years before, when I overheard old Sergeant Wall in Italy counseling a young kid who'd playfully pointed his weapon at him. ("Don't ever point a weapon at someone unless you intend to kill him," said Walker, who'd seen combat in Africa, Sicily, and Italy. "I know, because some damned fool killed me that way. But when I got up to the Pearly Gates, Saint Peter said, 'You're too young and too handsome to be here now. I want you to go back and teach all those careless young fools who point their weapons at their friends.' ") Even so, the legend only grew with stories like that: And yeah, says another one of my guys in the rear, not only is the son of a bitch scared of nothing, but he can shoot an ax handle off an ax between a guy's legs!

I knew the minefield incident was built on bad hearing, and the ax-handle shot was just sheer stupidity canceled out by good luck. But that's the stuff a legend has to keep to himself. Soldiers need legends. It's a way to deal with the madness of war. Like the legend of Rodger Young, a quiet, shy man who won the Medal of Honor in the Solomon Islands in WW II for leading a daring attack against strongly defended Jap positions. He'd died in the attempt, courageously ignoring his buddies' calls to stay down, and was immortalized in a number-one hit song among the boys in olive drab: "For the everlasting glory of the infantry/Shines the name/Shines the name/of Rodger Young." Only after the war was it revealed that Rodger Young was almost totally deaf. He'd faked his hearing test to get into the fighting, and his bravery on the day he died was most likely a result of not hearing the warning shouts of his friends. But it didn't matter by then. Rodger Young was a legend, and his very name got many soldiers through the night.

"Living legends" serve a similar purpose. If the troops can go into battle secretly knowing that among them lurks a Scooter Burke--a Superman in Clark Kent's ODs--they'll fight better, they'll fight harder, and they'll somehow believe that immortality is theirs, too. But this presents a problem for a leader "legend," because you reach a point where you can't let your men know you make mistakes. You just can't, even when it means you become trapped somewhere between who you really are and what they want you to be.

All I ever wanted was to be a good soldier, and I was. But to myself, I was certainly not a hero. Inside I was an embarrassingly uneducated, insecure kid of twenty with a terrible temper and lots of luck (both traits more than likely inherited from my Irish mother). Fury accounted for most of the heroic acts chalked up to my name. Going after that sniper on 6 February, where the whole legend began, was more than anything the work of a hungry Irishman temporarily off his nut. Still, on the outside I played the role, and even encouraged the hero business. After all, showmanship is vital to being a good troop commander. The only problem was that my audience kept demanding encore after encore. Many, many times in a firefight--when the slugs were really snapping--I'd find myself snugged up close to a solid dirt wall or behind a tree enjoying perfect cover, and just as I'd begin thinking how comfortable I was, I'd start feeling the eyes of my command boring in, saying, We're in a real tough spot here, baby. Just what trick are you going to pull out of the old hat to save our sweet asses? And I always pulled out something, with one more wild or brazen stunt, confirming to my troops (and maybe to myself, too) that I was the bravest dude on the block.

Before Napoleon promoted a general to field marshal, he would ask one question: "Are you lucky?" And only if the answer was yes, would Napoleon pass on the baton. I was lucky. That little bit of magic followed me as closely throughout my career as the smell of battle. And it followed the Raiders, too, in the fall of l95l, through dozens of raids (behind enemy lines and within our own), irrefutable cases of insubordinate and wild behavior, and enough 190-proof to keep a hospital going for a year. Yes, the Raiders--my own little army, composed solely of field marshals--were lucky. And we were going to live forever.

CHAPTER 7
"HILL 400"

"What made a guy right for the Raiders? You had to be someone who just didn't give a shit. It isn't a big deal to die, you know--"Live with honor, die with dignity," that was the Raiders' slogan. See, Hackworth had pride in people. And for a twenty-year-old man to he able to make a person want to fight and die and be happy about it--shit, we were happy to die for our county. That's the kind of spirit we had in the Raiders.

Master Sergeant Jack Speed,
USA Squad Leader/Platoon Sergeant
27th Raider Platoon,
Korea, 1951

We few, we happy few, we hand of brothers; For he to-day that sheds his blood with me Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile, This day shall gentle his condition; And gentlemen in England now abed Shall think themselves accursed they were not here, And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

Williams Shakespeare
Henry V, Act IV.

I never wanted to die, but I never feared death either. I guess I always knew that the price of admission to life was one owed death; my father and mother both paid it before I was a year old, and Uncle Roy just eight years later, his a lingering death from the mustard gas and other wounds he sustained in WW I. With me, I figured when it came it would be with the roll of the dice. It was really a matter of luck and probability: the more missions, the more point duty, the more hot engagements, the higher the probability of getting zeroed out. And if you had to go, sure, you wanted to do it heroically, but real heroism, I believed, was just returning to the front--when you knew the score and how the game was played, and when you knew what it was like to have hot steel ripping through your body, and your wounds healed in a ward full of kids your age who might never walk, see, and think the same again.

On the occasions (and there were a good few) when death and I stood eyeball-to-eyeball, when I knew I'd used up my odds and in the next few moments I would be dead, I was always perfectly calm. There was no fighting, no raging to hang on. I was always perfectly at peace, and almost invariably I'd think to myself, So this is the way it is; what an uninspiring way to go. In its way, it was a good feeling, because then I'd settle back and rock into whatever was going, just as cool as ice. Men had been dying in battle for ages--what else was new? "Live fast, die young, and have a good-looking corpse" was how I and the rest of the Raiders saw it (along with John Derek, who said it first in the 1949 movie Knock on Any Door); the only thing to do was not worry about it at all, and have the best damn time you could while you were around. Of course, being a leader helped. You were always too busy bringing in air and artillery, moving your people and shepherding your herd, to take time to focus in on yourself, on where you might be in a moment's time.

On the battlefield you become very superstitious. You're always looking for something that's going to protect you from being killed. It might be a photo of the girl next door. It might be a rabbit's foot, or a blanket (yes, a security blanket), which you huddled under in the night. Phil Gilchrist's was a white T-shirt with a blue band around the collar. He never went into battle without it. My Chink Waltham watch might have become a lucky charm for me, if it hadn't been knocked off in the hospital after 6 February. But as it was, I didn't need it or any other. Because I had an inside thing with God.

I prayed all the time. But early on, I'd made a pact with myself: it was never Dear God, please look after me; it was always Dear God, please look after my men and make sure that no one gets killed. I suppose if I could have been objective about it, I would have realized that to lose men was just the breaks of the game. But I had built my little house of hope and God dwelled therein: since I'd returned from the hospital after the 6 February wound, which meant all of March until now, 1 November, we'd been in some really heavy combat, taken stacks of WIA, but among my men we'd never taken any dead. The Man and I were tight.

"We've got a tough job for you. It will be the hardest one your outfit's had," Colonel Sloan explained to me quietly. "How many men have you got and how soon will you be able to jump off?"

Colonel Sloan's "tough job" was a Raider assault on Hill 400, what the Infantry School would have called key terrain. It was a rocky, volcano-shaped hill that sat astride the left boundary of the Wolfhound Regiment, dominating the battlefield like a Spanish hilltop fortress. The enemy had occupied it for a long time. According to Intelligence there were no more than fifty Chinamen up there, but the enemy had burrowed deep into the hill's rocky slopes, and despite all tactics used or vast firepower employed, the Wolfhounds could not secure that piece of ground.

We were assured it was not a kamikaze attack. Instead, Sloan said that it was critical, and an operation perfectly tailored for our fleet-footed band of hill runners. Though I might have mentioned that this perfectly tailored operation had only been designed for the Raiders after two or three different units of infantry had assaulted the hill (taking extreme casualties in the process), I accepted the mission without comment. But my gut started to churn; 400 was that Jake Able feeling all over again.

We'd jump off in three days. On the morning of the first day, key Raider leaders and I conducted a visual reconnaissance of Hill 400 from Item Company's forward outpost position on Hill 275. The OP was set on a gray knob a mile from the front, with our objective about one-half mile farther north along the ridgeline. "Shit," said Speed. "This one won t be so goddamn tough." I wasn't sure I agreed. For one thing, there were the ubiquitous mines and booby traps to be disarmed before we even got near. For another, our objective was a formidable piece of real estate, with steep sides and a rear anchored securely by the Chinese main battle positions on Hill 419 to the north. And the third thing was there was only one avenue of approach: it would be hi-diddle-diddle, right up the middle.

Item Company's grim-faced soldiers didn't help the foreboding feeling. They had a fugitive, hunted look about them. They all kept their heads down, moved fast, and didn't smile much. Everything about their hill reminded me of Uncle Roy's 1918 stories about Chateau-Thierry and the Marne: the dugouts, the muddy slopes, the shell-ravaged trenches where brooding men just waited to be overcome by rolling yellow clouds of mustard gas, or to be ordered to hurl themselves into machine-gun fire.

Tooling around in RAIDERS 1 had already shown me the sharp contrast between the life-styles of the frontline troops and those located behind Battalion Forward: bleak, endless trenches versus all the comforts (under canvas) of a stateside billet. The Raiders were unusual--as a rule the Army kept infantry "have-nots" far from the rear-echelon "haves"--and though none of us felt guilty about the good life we led behind the lines, I often wondered what fighters like these guys up in Item thought when rotation came and they saw all they'd been missing.

That night Jimmie, Chris, and I left Item's outpost for a closer look at the Chinese defensive positions on Hill 400. We'd been all around that fortress on previous operations and never had been able to find a weak point; now we were up there on it for almost six hours. Item Company guys who'd previously attacked the hill warned of accurate 82-mm and 120-mm mortar fire and a damn tight defensive system. We disarmed a few mines (but nothing to get too excited about), found three outposts on the hill's southern nose, and behind that a trench bunker system. But that was all. We still couldn't find Hill 400's Achilles' heel.

We returned to our camp and worked out the plans. On request, the artillery people had been punching the shit out of 400 with heavy eight-inch delay stuff since we'd gotten the warning order (causing big sections of the enemy's breastworks to crumble in), but on the night itself there would be no artillery preparation or illumination. Our initial attack would be by stealth: we'd knock off the OPs, move to our deployment position, and, after forming a line of skirmishers, hit the trenchworks. Only when the shooting started would supporting fires be brought in to clobber the Chinese reverse slopes, reinforcement routes, and likely mortar and artillery positions.

Sloan approved the plan. He also told me he'd have a regimental forward aid station set up behind Item's outpost, a comforting thought, but one that did little to assuage my concern about the operation. Then, reminding me that I was long overdue to go home, he added, "I don't want any heroics up there, Dave." No heroics, I thought. Right-like telling Johnny Reb not to click his heels together when "Dixie" was played. Besides, just going up that hill was worth a double Blue Max--for all of us.

We briefed the troops. Every man knew exactly where he was to go and what he was to do when he got there. I guess Chris and I were snapping out orders and carrying on like real badass Regulars--in the hospital, a thousand years later, Sprinkler told me that's how the guys had known we were in for some deep shit. So while Forte made satchel charges and Scaglion played fireman with his scrounged portable flame-thrower, the rest of the Raiders rehearsed the operation and readied their gear. The boys looked good. I was pleased.

We moved up behind Item under the cover of darkness the night before the raid. I didn't want to tip our hand, but I wanted my guys on the hill in the morning so they could get a good look at 400 during daylight, then be rested and set to go at first dark. They had their look and then, spread out among Item's reverse slope bunkers, caught some shut-eye. A number of the guys wrote letters--some in earnest, some in jest, the latter group wrinkling them up and rubbing them in the dirt, so that if they got zapped, whoever was on the receiving end would know that life in the trenches was tough and war was hell. After a last look at foreboding 400,I sacked out for the rest of the day. Unlike Jake Able, I slept like a bear.

The sun dropped out of the sky like an incoming round. Suddenly it was pitch-black--the perfect night to attack--no moon and a thick blanket of fog that settled over the battlefield. Jimmie moved first; his scout section was through the wire and gone without a sound. Jack Speed's squad was next, followed by me and Don Neary with his radio. Next were Bill Smith's and Tex Carvin's people. All was going just like rehearsals. For once everyone seemed to have gotten the word. No one fired at us from Item; no flares were sent up to make us sitting ducks in no-man's-land.

The inevitable first hitch occurred just as I'd cleared Item's wire. Word was passed up that a Raider in Smith's squad was refusing to go a step farther. I had Neary halt the infiltrating column, and I went back to find this guy hunkered down in the patrol path like a mule. Until now, he'd been a good man--he had at least a dozen raids under his belt--but now he wouldn't budge. He said he'd had it; he couldn't go on. I told him that his timing was off--he should have turned in his quit slip before we left home--and that his ass was going up that hill. Sobbing, he told me to get screwed. I hit him on both sides of his face with my pistol and said that there wasn't a Raider out there who wanted to go, but they'd all made the commitment when they'd gone through the wire. The boy wouldn't be moved. I pulled my trench knife out of my boot and laid it against his throat. "I'd just as soon cut your throat as fuck with you," I said. "You either go on this raid or die. If I kill you I'll report that you bought the farm in a big burst of glory. Make up your mind." After a few seconds, between muffled sobs, he said he'd go.

The crews of the three enemy OPs must have forgotten the old soldiers' creed: Stay alert and stay alive; Jimmie and his gang knocked them off with ease. We moved up to the deployment line, then crept forward, one slow, quiet step after another: toe down, then heel; crush, not snap--taking more care than in a minefield.

All the Raiders around me were now in, or entering, the trench. A short way down, Tex Carvin made the first kill. He'd just finished putting his men into their attack positions and was standing just above the trench when an enemy soldier came strolling by. Carvin reached down, splattered the Chinaman's head with the butt of his weapon, and rolled him into an empty bunker. Meanwhile, I checked with Speed to see how his guys were doing-everything was okay. Neary and I started creeping down the enemy trench line to where Speed's and Smith's squads were tying in. Then I saw a Chink not more than four feet away. I froze. The guy was standing in the trench, looking downhill with only his head sticking out, a difficult target for a knife or a garrote, and I didn't want to shoot him until we were really ready to go. But I couldn't see how I could get at him, or past him, silently. Neary covered me. I slipped my pistol out of its holster, laid my Thompson down, and started bellying along the top of the trench line. Definite heart-in-mouth stuff. I was about a foot away from him when I came to the interesting realization that Chinese sentries were no different from a lot of Americans I knew. He was fast asleep.

He never knew what happened. I grabbed him with one arm, covered his mouth, snapped his head back, and cut his throat. Neary, who was at least six feet four and built like a fullback, moved up behind me and pulled the sentry out of the trench as if he were a feather pillow. He dragged him down the hill and stuffed him into a shell crater.

Everyone was in place, and Forte's satchel charges were ready and waiting at sleeping bunker doors. "Let's get this show on the road" was the word from Jack Speed. Jimmie Mayamura appeared in front of me. He whispered, "Hack, I think we're going to have to change the plan." He reported that there were some additional, heavily fortified positions between the trench we were in and the top of the hill. We hadn't found them on our reconnaissance (it would have been too risky to have gone beyond the trench; we could have blown the operation). Now Jimmie, roaming around as if he were on a Sunday picnic, had stumbled across them. They were unoccupied, but another scout, Bobby Evans, had gone into one large bunker and estimated at least ten men in there. He'd set a trip-wire grenade booby trap to nail them when they came out.

Before I could reassess my battle plan, Hill 400 exploded. Evans dispatched four Chinamen who were moving down a connecting trench into the one we occupied. His BAR had barely started singing when every weapon on the line started hammering away. Forte ignited his satchel charges and an earth-shattering roar shook the trench line as bunkers blew across the position. The remaining Chinks in the immediate area didn't have a chance. If they were not trapped underground, then Raider grenades blew them sky-high. Farther up the hill, the enemy were wide-awake now and frantically firing in every direction. They hit nothing. We'd cracked their main line and not a casualty reported so far. I was beginning to count on my Jake Able premonition. This time, like the other, it was a false alarm: this hill was going to be a piece of cake.

I told the boys to use regular daylight assault procedures; we'd fire and maneuver and blast our way up. Cordite hung heavily in the air as Chris formed a reserve of Forte's and Mayamura's people and took over our positions with the mission of guarding our ass. The prearranged artillery fire blistered the top of the ridge as Scaglion kicked off our attack with two fiery blasts of his flame-thrower. The Raiders started slugging, but then the world fell in.

The Chinks always relied heavily on potato-masher grenades. Already we'd policed up what looked like enough to give each enemy soldier on 400 his own monogrammed case. But even when they threw them at us in bunches (as they had on Objective Logan, ringing the pins of each around their fingers or on little sticks), potato mashers didn't pack much punch in the open. They were virtually harmless firecrackers we'd learned to dance around and (more or less) ignore. The problem on Hill 400, though, was that the defenders weren't just throwing potato mashers. They were also hurling frags. We hadn't counted on that, and the sky was black with them.

Many rolled down the hill and exploded out of range behind us (proving one of Captain Michaely's pet theories over in George: it was actually safer up front doing the fighting than hiding behind where you became a sitting duck for grenades and incoming), but many found a Raider target. Smith's guys had a hard time; they took a number of casualties and couldn't gain an inch of ground until Speed's fighters thundered forward in a wild attack. These men overwhelmed one of the unexpected positions, and now Speed's complete force was in there, mopping up. The price filtered back to me: we'd taken three dead and more than twenty wounded. It's just a nightmare, the words bubbled up in my brain.

Almost to a man, the wounded Raiders refused to leave the hill. Doc Brakeman was performing miracles in his ever-growing "field hospital" in a shell hole behind the trench below us; the kids determinedly returned to the fighting the minute they got patched up. Some, like Jimmie (who'd already gotten shot in the ass and the arm), didn't even bother with the patching--everyone knew we were a lean outfit and that every gun counted. It was that family bonding again: no one was going to let his brothers down, especially in a fight like this. Even at the cost of his life.

I called for Chris and Forte to bring up their people. We needed everybody on line. Fuck a lot of rear security--if you're losing the fight, a strong rear won't do you any good. We were running low on ammo and grenades so we took all we could from enemy dead. I told the leaders to let me know when they were rearmed, reorganized, and set to go. We had to banzai the shit out of the hilltop in a hurry. It was the only way we'd take it, and if we didn't jump off soon we'd be nickeled and dimed to death by what seemed like ever-increasing scores of frags bouncing down from above.

Green tracers from a machine gun raked our position. It was set up in a rocky outcrop near the top of the hill, firing right down Speed's throat. No way could he get his people through that. The way it stood now, they couldn't even return fire. The gun had to go.

Brave Raiders Smith and Salazar, on the left, took on the deadly challenge. There was little cover and no concealed approaches to the gun, just a fold in the ground in the center of Smith's front, which the machine gun could not depress low enough to cover. Raider weapons laid down good covering fire as the two volunteers crawled up the hill. I liked these men. Especially Smith, an Alabamian who I initially hadn't been sure was Raider material, because he'd gotten his stripes the National Guard "weekend warrior" way. The funny thing was that Smith didn't think he deserved those stripes either. He was embarrassed about them, and always seemed to go out of his way to prove himself, even when it was no longer necessary. Maybe it still riled him a bit when we called him "NG" (due to his National Guard origins); still, by now he did know it was just a loving nickname for a brave and trusted comrade-in-arms.

Now, under our fire, he and Salazar snaked through the dead space toward the gun. About twenty yards from their objective, Salazar blasted with his weapon and Smith rushed forward, screaming as he unleashed two large Chinese antitank grenades. Both hit home, exploding on impact. The machine gun and crew were blown to a million pieces. The two Raiders turned and started back toward us. Then a Chinaman jumped up on the outcrop and fired a long, long burst. Both men fell, their momentum sending them tumbling into our position. Smith died in my arms. I cried as I held him; It's just a nightmare, I thought. And then I swore we'd take that fucking hill.

Speed had jumped off as soon as the machine gun blew. Garvin, picking up the reins from Smith, attacked on the left. Item Company put 60-mm mortar fire all over the top of the hill; we came up right under it. Speed's people hit the top like a bulldozer, closely followed by Garvin's squad. The die-hard Chinks were making a determined last stand as Raiders fanned out; savage close-in fighting and hand-to-hand combat were the bloody order of the day

"Shift the mortar fire to the back of the hill!" I yelled to Neary.

"Grenade!" shouted Raider Mendoza, who was kneeling about three feet away from me. We went for cover. Mendoza and Neary hit the ground. I spun, but tripped and rolled down the slope. I stopped rolling about the same time as the grenade. The same place as the grenade. It was under me

when it exploded, the blast propelled me into the air like a rocket. Moments later a 160-pound rag doll fell to the ground with a heavy thud.

I could not get any air. I was choking and gasping. Horrible sucking sounds were coming out of my chest. Fire, I thought, my chest and left side were on fire. I groaned and tried to breathe. I figured my lungs had burst. Then I stopped moaning. It took too much energy. "Hackworth's done for…the words floated down. "The Old Man's dead." No, Speed, no. I'm not dead.

I moaned again, louder, but Jack was gone. Fuck you, Jack Speed, I'm not dead, and I ain't gonna die, not on this goddamn hill.

I dragged myself to my feet and headed for the doc. He checked me out and got me breathing while I sent word to Chris to take command and get a prisoner. My left arm was broken and hanging from my shoulder by ripped flesh and torn muscle; scores of shrapnel wounds covered my burned chest. But I would live, and for the second time, a submachine gun had saved my life. A submachine gun, and good TRUST training. When I'd rolled down that hill, I'd tucked my Thompson into my gut as I'd been trained, and rolled with it under me; the weapon, not I, had taken the full impact of the explosion.

Johnny Watkins drifted in. A grenade had blown the shit out of him. He said things were heating up, that Chris had been hit in the leg and Speed had assumed command. I could hear the increased fire above, and after a shot of morphine and a little Brakeman bedside manner (he wrapped my arm in a heavy Carlisle bandage and made a sling out of an empty M-l bandolier), I headed back to the fight. It was almost dawn.

The Chinese had been counterattacking since I'd been hit. Only now was the assault beginning to falter. Raiders, all wounded, had been pushed back; they lay near the crest of the hill and cut the enemy down as they came over the top. I picked up a little M-2 carbine. It was nothing like my Thompson (now a black and twisted mess), but I could fire it like a pistol with my one good hand, and I joined in the fray.

It was getting light enough to see now. To my right lay Chief Denny and ex-Easy trooper Hearn. Both had been hit: Denny in both arms, and Hearn down from a head wound. Hearn couldn't see and Denny couldn't shoot, so the Oklahoma cowboy and the Arizona Indian brave had formed a posse of one: Denny gave directions while Hearn fired the weapon. Red man, white man, kill 'em yellow man. Tex Garvin was over to the left, both legs badly blasted by shot. He couldn't move, but he put down effective fire as calmly and deliberately as if he were at the KD range at Camp Pendleton, striking for a USMC Expert's Badge.

Neary crawled over to me with a message from Colonel Sloan: Put Crispino in command and get yourself down to Item. "You never got that message, Neary," I snapped.

"But, Hack, he was serious.

"Shut off the radio."

All colonels are serious. But there was nothing Sloan or anyone could have done for us right now. We needed to know what the hell was happening. It seemed as if we'd already wiped out the whole Chinese Army and the bastards were still coming. I asked Neary if the guys had gotten a prisoner yet. He replied in the negative and slipped into the cordite dawn, while I backed off from the top of the hill to take a moment to examine the situation. All but a handful of Raiders had been bit. Most, twice and more. More than twenty-five wounded and, at last count, five dead, including the boy who'd tried to quit at the LD. Had he known something I hadn't? Most of our leaders were down. Speed had taken a shot in the belly and was shooting with one hand, holding his guts in with the other. We were totally dependent on captured weapons. Our ammo supply was gone. We'd reached a fish-or-cut-bait situation.

There is seldom a Mexican standoff in battle; you either win or lose. And in many fights, a commander reaches a point where he thinks he's lost. He sees only his losses, and knows only his own situation, not the enemy's. The carnage surrounding him erodes his confidence. Wellington at Waterloo thought he'd lost; so did Easy Company under Desideno, in the fight on the hill up north. Grant summed up the feeling best, at Fort Donelson during the Civil War: "Either side was ready to give way if the other showed a bold front." Well, we'd certainly shown a bold front, but so had the men from China.

Neary appeared again, this time carrying an unconscious little Chinaman. I found out later that after I'd told him we needed a prisoner, he'd taken it as a personal assignment. He'd charged up the hill and stormed the top unarmed. Once in the enemy position, he'd smashed this Chink on the head with his fist and hotfooted it back to me. Unfortunately, the POW died before we got the skinny--he'd kept trying to pull one of the grenades off Neary's belt on the way back, and Neary had stomped him, obviously a little too hard. So we got another prisoner, but then, just when we needed him most, our interpreter, Kim Upsu, decided to bug out. Speed saw him running down the hill. He stopped him. "I go, I go," said Kim, and edged away. Jack didn't know what to do. He was good and ready to waste him; instead, he leveled his weapon and shot off Kim's hand. This persuasive little tactic worked, and as we bandaged him up, Kim decided he liked our company after all.

The word from the POW was just what we wanted to hear: our artillery had clobbered the enemy reinforcing unit (Intelligence had been off by about three hundred men in terms of enemy strength on Hill 400; the Chinks were reinforcing through a tunnel-trench network on the reverse Slope, which ran through to Hill 419 behind), and no one on the hill had any fight left in him. I told Jimmie and the others to round up every gun that could walk, limp, or crawl. We were going to storm the top.

Twenty bloodied and battered Raiders soon crested the hill. Its surface was covered with enemy dead. The Chinese defenders who hadn't been killed on position had chanced running the gauntlet of artillery shot (which continued to blast the back of the hill); judging from the carnage on the reverse slope, few had made it. But an intact Bren-gun crew was still raising hell among our tired band. There were more casualties, until Jimmie and Evans went on the attack. They killed the crew, but paid the price.

Jimmie lay like a broken reed next to the gun. He'd taken a shot in the face that ripped through his right eye and lower jaw. Evans lay nearby, staring at Jimmy with wide, lifeless eyes and a satisfied look on his heavily-mustached face. It was the look of a winner. He'd probably just said to Jimmie, "Well, we got the son of a bitch," before a burst of enemy fire, most likely the last of the fight, hit him full in the chest and ripped the life out of him.

Neary switched on his radio to report the capture of Hill 400. Relief was en route, he was told, dispatched by a worried Colonel Sloan when we went off the air. "Oh, say can you see," I thought, as in the dull light of morning we collected our scattered and broken fighters from the blood-soaked, American-held hill. The inexhaustible Brakeman was kneeling over Jimmie, pumping life into him with a container of albumin. Some piece of cake: we had seven KIA, twenty-nine WIA, and one Raider, Salazar, missing. The only two Raiders who were not hit were Lipka and Sovereign, the two gunners. Their machine guns had been out of range of the frags that had depleted our ranks. It was a strange turnabout--normally the gunners ride in the death seat.

We turned the hill over to the relieving Wolfhound unit and continued looking for Salazar. We wouldn't leave the hill without him, and any man who could walk joined in the search. He'd been patched up after he and Smith had knocked out the machine gun, but no one had seen him since he'd returned to the fight. A faint moan was heard in a draw on the steep left-hand side of 400. It was Salazar, more dead than alive; he'd been blown off the hill by a grenade, and somehow, with twenty-nine slugs or shrapnel wounds in his body, that tough Texan hombre was still sucking in air. The doc got some blood into him, and we started down the hill.

We carried all our dead and the wounded who could not make it under their own steam. Speed and I brought Jimmie's broken body down in a poncho while Brakeman kept the albumin going. Regimental medics took over, and carried the litter cases down by stretcher. There had been no free rides on that terrible hill-Chris's boy, Johnny, bled, too, as he accompanied Chris through the low-lying fog. Chink 82-mm and 120-mm mortar fire continued to smash in around us, but it was ignored by all. After what we'd been through, it didn't mean a thing.

Colonel Sloan had walked alone to meet us on Hill 400's forward slopes. He, too, ignored the incoming as he went from Raider to Raider, helping, comforting, praising. Tears streamed from his eyes in that early-morning light as he helped us down. He led us to the aid station, and there I saw seven figures, all lined up, each covered with a poncho. It's just a nightmare, I thought, but I didn't believe myself at all. I went to each body, and pulled the sheet back off the face. One by one I cradled those men and rocked them in my arms, crying and mumbling and damning God because he had let me down.

Now that the curtain had fallen, the shock of it all came on. Suddenly I felt empty. Every part of me ached. My mouth was dry as a beachful of sand. Sloan helped me to my feet. He was a fine, caring man and a great commander. A medic came up, looked at my wounds, and hit me with another Syrette of morphine. It dulled the pain but not enough; he told me to lie down in a litter so I could be evacuated. But I was not about to go anywhere. The welfare of my men was not a responsibility that could be delegated. Until everyone had been cared for, I'd stay right there.

I walked into the small tent that had been set up to act as a temporary surgery. Jimmie was on the table. He was bad--ashen white, almost no blood pressure, and little sign of breathing. He was about to check out. The medical officer could not get blood into him. He kept saying that Jimmie had lost too much, that all his veins were deflated. But Doc Brakeman had gotten a needle into Jimmie's arm up there on top of the hill, in the dark, and he was being shot at. I couldn't understand why this surgeon was jabbing everywhere but where it counted. Then I realized he was drunk, or that he'd been on a big binge the night before. He smelled like a barroom rag and his hands were shaking as he frantically stabbed that needle into Jimmie's arm. I pulled my pistol out and put it against his head. "Man, if you don't get that thing in the next time, you're one dead doctor." The needle went in next round, and the grim death mask Jimmie wore slowly began to fade.

Steady, brave Doc Brakeman gently led me outside the tent. He said everyone was fine and he wanted me to rest on a stretcher. Combat medics are mountains of courage and wisdom; Brakeman stood out as the ultimate among these fine men.

I lay down. The shot was taking effect--I was so sleepy. There were faces:

Colonel Sloan, Major Stambaugh, Dell Evans from 2d Batt, and then Phil Gilchrist, who'd come the whole way down from Division Forward to lend a hand to his old George and Easy buddies. Then I was being lifted, and swung in the air. And then a motor and hard bumps, like knives, sending sharp pains throughout my body. And God hadn't yet explained why he'd forgotten us.

I woke up thinking I was in the Raider camp. Eyes closed, familiar voices were all around. Laughing. Bullshitting. Talking about 400, talking about the fight. The fight. I opened my eyes. I was in a long tent ward at a MASH. The bed next to mine was occupied by Chris, and then as far as I could see were Raiders, carrying on as though they were at a Boy Scout jamboree. I turned to Chris. "What is the status of the unit, Master Sergeant Crispino?"

"Raiders! Listen up!" Chris shouted down the row of beds, and the roll call began: Beasey, Denny, Evans, Hearn-the wounded and the dead, all present and accounted for.

Jimmie and Jack fell into the heading of "accounted for." Neither was in our wing; they were down in intensive care. Chris cornered a medic and asked him for a status report on our friends. "They're in a bad way," the medic said flippantly upon his return, "I wouldn't take any bets on their making it."

Chris lashed out. "You better watch your mouth and get some respect, motherfucker, or I'll get out of this bed and kick your ass all over this tent." Chris was always so diplomatic. But if he hadn't said it, one of us would have. It was not because of the news the medic brought; something like it had been in the cards for months. But they were cards we'd dealt. Yes, we'd lived on the edge of death. Yes, we'd made the choice to gamble recklessly with our young lives, the only thing that could not be replaced. But who was this rear-echelon callous bastard to see our fate, and the fate of all his charges, as potential stakes in his own floating crap game?

"Where are they?" Chris snapped. A contrite and more than a little worried medic gave him the layout of the MASH.

We found Speed first. He was as white as his sheet and filled with tubes. His belly was swollen and painted a bright, ugly orange color. His spleen had been removed. He'd lost a massive amount of blood and there was a good chance of infection. But Jack was a gambler--he dug the challenge of long odds--and I knew he was going to make it. He was talking now, and in my mind's eye he was already sitting on the edge of my bed in the morning with a bottle of Jack Daniel's. "Now, son," he'd be saying in that slow Tennessee drawl, "take a slug of this, 'cuz ah'm 'bout to taecll you the goddamnedest story 'bout a leetle heel called 400."

Except for his mouth and one eye, Jimmie's face and head were completely covered in bandages. So was the rest of his body. In addition to any other wounds, it seemed that a grenade must have exploded on top of him and filled him with shrapnel. He lapsed in and out of consciousness; he twisted and tried to turn, and muttered in Japanese. Chris and I tried to talk to him, but he was far away. We talked to him anyway, and somehow our voices brought him back for a moment. "The Chinks…he said. "Evans, get down." Then he came off 400 and moved back in tune. "I got pineapple, man." Poor, crushed Jimmie was back with Easy, where the practice was to carry your C-ration cans inside your fatigue jacket over your belly. Fruit was a C-ration prize. It could slow or stop a slug with the best of them, and tasted far better than most.

"Jimmie I said. Then I stopped. What do you say to your friend when he's dying? I loved him. I wanted him to make it. I wanted him to fight harder. Maybe if we could bring him around he'd zero in and concentrate on staying alive. "Jimmie," I said, "you're a sergeant . . . a sergeant first class!"

His good eye fluttered and slowly opened. He seemed to focus in on me for a second. "Aw, shit, man... why'd you do that?" Then he slipped back into his deep, dark coma. A gentle nurse chased us back to our beds, assuring us that Jimmie looked far worse off than he really was. She said he was getting stronger, and that, in fact, it was Jack who was not out of the woods.

Over the next few days, one, two, and three at a time, medics wheeled us into surgery. "If you don't make it, I'll have your watch"…If you don't make it, I'll be on top of your woman before you hit the slab"-the same, great Raider spirit followed Chris and me as we went down that long hall together. The injected pre-op cocktail had stung, but it took away most of the pain, and some of the fright.

An arm that was somehow familiar was strapped to a board under the watchful eyes of masked people in green clothes. A glaring spotlight beamed overhead. It seemed even brighter with the second needle, as if someone had brought the sun inside. A gloved hand holding a forceps skillfully probed around the ripped flesh of the restrained arm. The instrument went in empty and came out holding shards of steel. Like pulling a rabbit out of a hat, I thought. A scalpel went in next and carved a doughnut around the jagged hole. Debridement, it's called, I found out later. The chunk of meat was extracted. The gloved hand balanced it deftly on the end of the scalpel. With a flip of the wrist, the meat sailed through the air into a bucket of blood and other discarded chunks of damaged government property. They should empty that thing, I thought, as blood slopped out of the brimming pail and slowly dripped down the white surgery wall.

A voice behind a green mask said there were no complications and to leave it open to drain. "Lieutenant Hackworth," the same voice said, "do you want the shrapnel as a souvenir?" I climbed back through the looking glass. The arm was my arm. The bucket held my blood. And Jimmie's, and Jack's, and all that flowed down 400. And now this man with gloved hands was asking me if I wanted a souvenir. As if I were a tourist, as if in my old age I'd want something--need something--to remind me of that terrible hill, this stinking tent hospital, all the wounded and all the dead. I tried to tell the skillful hand what he could do with his fucking souvenir, and for that matter the whole fucking war, when another gloved hand administered another needle and I drifted away. They cleaned up my chest. But I didn't watch.

I awoke next on a hospital train. I'd come this way in the summertime and now it was cold--my semiannual vacation south. Hey, mister conductor, I thought, let me off at Taijon. My friend lives there by the railroad track …. and then I fell back into a heavy, drugged sleep. We were unloaded at the Pusan train station. I asked the medic to put my litter next to that of Raider Charles Beasey, who'd lost his right hand on 400. Beasey was from a farming family in Indiana; he'd been destined to take over the business and now he was worrying how he'd manage. He was down, really down. I'd kind of been looking forward to the old officers' ward, but it didn't seem like a good time to leave him alone.

As the medics sorted through the sea of litters on the platform, I disappeared my medical tag. A sergeant assigned Beasey to the Swedish Hospital. Then he knelt by my litter. "Where's your tag?"

"Don't know," I said. "Just woke up." He said he'd make me a new one; I told him I was Sergeant Hackworth and gave him my old enlisted serial number. "Can I go with my friend?"

"Sure," he replied, and Beasey and I rode off in an ambulance, side by side.

I fell off again and awoke with an Ingrid Bergman look-alike in hospital white standing over me. "Who stole the tea?" she asked, or at least that's what it sounded like.* I just got here, I thought, haven't been here long enough to steal anything. She wanted to know my name and where my medical card was. I told her I was a Wolfhound Raider, which for some reason she thought was quite funny, and then I went through my sergeant, U.S. Army, EM serial-number routine while a grateful Beasey in the next bed bit his lip to keep from laughing. I thought of my brother Roy, in L. A., who was now on a first-name basis with Western Union. This would be the fourth telegram: THE SECRETARY OF THE ARMY HAS ASKED ME TO EXPRESS HIS DEEP REGRET THAT YOUR BROTHER SGT HACKWORTH DAVID H WAS SERIOUSLY WOUNDED IN ACTION … and I hoped he wouldn't read it carefully--last round I'd been a lieutenant. I knew Roy would handle the wound part, but I wasn't sure about the bust. On the other hand, having a brother who's a sergeant was probably better than one who was an inmate at San Quentin, which as kids is where I'm sure he thought I'd end up.

Beasey was still down. I tried to cheer him up with stories about my father, who had lost most of his right hand in a mining accident in Colorado, but from everything I'd heard, he'd managed quite well. Besides, I said, the VA would give him a special tractor each year and plow his South 40 on request. He'd find a blue VA check on the first of every month, and really, I told him, he had it made--a grateful America would never forget him.

The patter didn't help much. Beasey's "good fortune" would only hit home when he started to look at the other wounds on our ward: down a few beds, the kid with no legs and only a little stump for an arm; across from him, a guy whose guts were sitting outside his stomach; next to him, a Chinese soldier who'd lost both forearms. The Chinese boy had been brought in by two tall, chrome-plated MPs. They'd dropped his litter a foot from the floor--I guess they thought we'd be pleased. But we'd booed, cursed, and hissed them out of the room. Had there been a gun around, someone would have shot them. There was no "enemy" on our ward. Hospital clothes had no patches or flags. Away from the battlefield, there was instead an unspoken bond, camaraderie based not on a uniform but in a barely hatched notion we shared: that one and all we were just battered pawns in a larger game that had nothing to do with us at all.

But after lights-out, the game went on. Boys in their sleep fought battles over and over again. Our moans, often tortured screams, punctuated each others' dreams--a horrific, endless war movie, playing on through the night.

I spent my twenty-first birthday in the Swedish Hospital, one week to the day after Hill 400. My birthday present was a rash--the worst rash, I thought, ever experienced in the history of mankind. I scratched myself to pieces; the rash got worse. Few of the doctors and nurses spoke English, so even if I'd known, I couldn't have explained what was wrong. They thought it was from the antibiotics, so they changed them; that didn't help, so when I started to scratch until I bled, they tied my hands and feet to the bed. Modern medicine. I wiggled and squirmed night and day, until finally an American doctor stopped by for his weekly visit. "Man, I'm dying," I told him. "I'm going crazy!"

* In Swedish, Huru mar ni?" ("How are you?").

"You should be," he said. "That's the worst case of lice I've ever seen. Hill 400,I thought; it'll never go away. I must have picked them up crawling through enemy positions--Mao Tse-tung's revenge. The nurses trundled me off into the shower, and then they bathed a sheet in calamine or some such lotion and wrapped me up in it. Joy.

The civilian doctor in charge at the hospital had told me my arm and chest were healing well. On the fourth day there (fortunately before the lice reared their itchy little heads), the drain was pulled and I was stitched up with wire. After my short glimpse of heaven in a pink sheet, the American doctor returned to tell me they'd take the stitches out in the morning. But then he dropped the bomb. He said he wasn't sure I'd ever be able to straighten my arm again. I'd lost too much bicep muscle, and so much flesh.

Now it was my turn to worry. Much as I joked with Beasey, there was nothing too glorious about being a twenty-one-year-old cripple. When the doctor was two beds down, I flopped out of mine, went to the floor, and did a push-up. It hurt like hell, but I straightened my arm until the elbow locked. The doctor and his assistants came running up, thinking I'd fallen out of bed. I told them I hadn't fallen, I'd rolled, and that if I was going to have a stiff arm for the rest of my life, no way was it going to be hanging there like a crab claw. A dozen or so stitches had ripped out, but I didn't care--my goddamn arm was parade-ground straight.

A young boy across from us had been shot in the dick. The docs had sewed it up as best they could, but its owner said it had an odd twist to it. He talked about it all the time, really worried that it wouldn't work. There was only one way to test the damage, though, so the ward's old-timers organized a ladder for our second-floor window--Destination Whorehouse, just down the road. A pussy patrol climbed through almost as soon as the lights went off, to give young Twisted Dick an operational checkout. When (hours later) they returned, all concerned hit the sack, and some bragged awhile to the nonmobile. Soon the ward was quiet. I couldn't sleep--lying in bed day after day, napping all the time, makes normal sleep almost impossible--and after a while I heard muffled sobs. They were coming from the bed of Twisted Dick. What a shame. I thought. What a shame.

Beasey was shipped to Japan and from there he'd go stateside. My own wound was still raw and leaking fluid; the word was I'd be discharged in a few weeks. I was getting regular mail from the Raider camp and had an idea what was happening: light wounds were drifting back … the unit had been re-formed … Lieutenant John Arvidson, a gung-ho Californian who'd participated in the 1948 Mideast war, had been assigned as new skipper, and he'd filled the Raiders up. But he did not seem to have an eye for quality or was being rushed by the higher-ups; the outfit seemed full of guys we'd rejected. It didn't matter now that Chris was back, and that the lieutenant and RTO Neary had gotten shot up helping out a George Company operation on 400 (that jinxed hill, which, totally beyond my belief, had been abandoned soon after the Raiders took it). Now there was talk that we might be disbanded. Raids had been canceled, Chris was going to see Colonel Sloan, and when was I coming home?

I was bored without Beasey and had no reason to stay in this hospital. I figured Doc Brakeman could look after my arm, and besides, it was somehow discovered that I was an officer impersonating an NCO and all along had been the ringleader of much of the havoc on the ward. They told me that if I didn't shape myself up they'd ship me right out to an officers' ward. But I didn't want to go to another ward, officers' or not. I wanted to go back to the Raiders. So I got myself some gear and said good-bye to my wardmates and lovely Nurse Bergman. I caught a midnight train back to Seoul and hitchhiked up to our camp.

A truck driver let me off on the MSR. I ran down the little side road; it was cold, but I was too excited to notice. The Raider camp was covered in snow. Our flag was gone, skull and crossed bones replaced by the Stars and Stripes, which flapped majestically in the wind. Newly whitewashed rocks in perfect formation around the camp made our renegade outfit look like the 25th Quartermaster Company, but I didn't care--smoking stovepipes said someone was home, and so was I. I ran past the Raider gate and burst through the tent flaps of the mess.

The guys around the stove jumped up, and in an instant the old Raiders were all over me like a welcome rash. One and all they tried their best to break my back with giant bear hugs. Our yelling and carrying-on brought everyone else to the tent, and it was more of the same. The new guys in the outfit stood on the outside looking in--So this is Hackworth, their expressions seemed to say. God, it was good to be back.

Chris limped in. "What the hell took you so long?" he said, but his hug was that of a long-lost brother. "Good to see you, man. Good to see you. Then we caught up. Each Raider was accounted for, including Jimmie and Jack. They'd made it--Chris had checked with the nurse before he left MASH; both were strong and would soon be shipped to Japan.

We unlimbered some well-stashed hooch and the reunion got serious, just like the old days. The new guys drifted out, as unwelcome as an ex-husband at his former wife's wedding reception--this homecoming party was exclusive to the brotherhood of 400. We refought the battle, and as the story unraveled, we knew it had been one mean, bloody fight, but what the hell, we'd won, we'd kicked their stinking asses. And as the booze flowed, our glorious achievements and heroic acts became even more so. No one got sentimental or teary, but no one pulled out the Raider photo either, the one we'd had taken with all of us in all our gear, which by SOP after previous raids we'd laughingly update by crossing out the faces of our lucky comrades evacuated because of wounds. And no one talked about the dead. There was no way we could understand why they had died and we had lived, so we just pretended they had not gone. It was the only way. The pain would otherwise have been too great, the loss too traumatic. So they were as alive to us as they'd been in the battle, and any moment now they, too, would come bursting through that tent flap and join in the fun.

Next came the ritual parade of scars. Everyone bared their wounds--favorites, of course, were the ones that could be seen on the beach. When I was a kid I'd had Death Before Dishonor tattooed on my arm; the shrapnel that had ripped right through it on 400 made me candidate for "Mr. American Legion." But the booby prize went to one poor hero who had a long, wicked, red-stitched welt across one cheek of his ass; it wasn't at all good beach material to prove he'd been gored by a fierce Chinese bull.

"But what's with the white rocks?" I asked. "And where is the Raider flag, and Bobby and the girls?"

"There's been a lot of housecleaning … think someone figured we'd fight better if we were strictly GI," replied a drunken Raider. It didn't sound promising to me. I shot Chris a glance. He nodded. We'd have to take a long jeep ride.

Colonel Sloan hadn't thought he'd see me back. When I told him he couldn't get rid of me that easily, he said I was wrong--he was sending me home. He thought I should go to the Infantry School and get some formal military education, that I'd used up all my chances on the battlefield. I reminded him I had not seen combat compared to those guys who had fought through Africa and Europe or during that long island-hopping campaign in the Pacific, but the Colonel (who'd fought in both theaters) would not be moved. "What about the Raiders?" I asked. Sloan wasn't sure. He hadn't been able to find the right man for a Raider leader. He needed a fighter, and apparently they were becoming a rare breed. I suggested he commission Crispino, who knew the score better than anyone. Sloan said he'd think about it, and in the meantime, I was to shape the Raiders up. They'd go on operations with Chris as the skipper while I, banished from the front line, conducted training and played liaison officer between them and Sloan. Yes, sir.

As I was leaving, I was stopped by the Regimental Adjutant. Colonel Sloan, he said, had directed that every deserving Raider be decorated for the operation on 400. The Adjutant had tried to get it moving while I was in the hospital, but the few remaining NCOs wouldn't help; it was as though there was some conspiracy not to put in for any decorations.

Good men, my Raiders. Back in August, when we'd formed the unit, the NCOs and I had decided not to play the medals game. It was honor enough, we thought, just to be a Raider. About decorations Napoleon had said, "Some people call them baubles; well, it is by such baubles that one leads men," but in our judgment the RAIDER tab the guys wore over their 25th Division patch was just as good, maybe even better. And besides, we did not want the Raiders to become a watering hole for glory hunters. Hill 400 wasn't the first time I'd been asked to get recommendations together; always in the past I'd say, "We're working on them, "and let it go until the fast turnover of combat clerks through rotation made the boys at the top lose track. Now I told the Adjutant about our policy. He said it wouldn't wash, but that he'd provide specialists from his Awards Section to facilitate the paperwork.

It was time to rebuild the Raiders. I sent most of the new replacements packing, and started recruiting all over again. But few people wanted to join up these days. It wasn't like last August, when we had a line a mile long waiting outside the Raider camp. Still, we managed to scratch together a unit, and immediately started to train. But none of the old guys really had their hearts in it anymore, and neither did I.

The Awards team came down. They stayed with us, interviewed the guys, and then typed up all the necessary supporting papers. It was a snap. All we had to do was tell a few war stories and sign our names. Bill Smith was put in for the Medal of Honor, and Jimmie, Chris, and Jack Speed went in for the DSC. All the rest were for Silver Stars. Then, at Division, a few of these recommendations were knocked down to the next lower awards. To me, that was wrong, like James Aguda's Medal of Honor being knocked back to a Silver Star was wrong. It was only much later that I realized my own idealistic policy regarding decorations for the Raiders had been wrong, too. For myself, especially after Aguda, decorations had lost most of their meaning. But for the others, my prejudice meant that so many deserving fighters would grow old with nothing to show for their extraordinary gallantry with the Raiders--or just one tin medal for the last hurrah.

They should have had one for every damn time they suited up.

There were a few more raids with Chris as leader, but everyone was jittery. Sometimes the words were spoken, sometimes they were not, but no one wanted another 400.

A week before Christmas, Jimmie's sister wrote to ask for the circumstances of his death. His death. I refused to believe it. None of us would. We got knee-knocking drunk and argued about it until midnight, at which point Chris and I and two other guys decided to go to the horse's mouth. We drove by open jeep in a bitching snowstorm (a sobering experience itself) to get to the MASH where we'd last seen him. We woke up the doc. He remembered our mass unit visit but could not recall Jimmie. He pulled all the records, and starting from 4 November he worked forward through the papers. When he hit the eighth, I could tell by his face before he spoke that our brother was gone. Strong, soon-on-the-way-to-Japan Jimmie Mayamura had died on the operating table. They'd gone in to take a sliver of shrapnel out of his brain; when it was pulled, his clock had stopped running.

The news about Jimmie was the death knell for the Raiders. It would have been, even if Sloan had commissioned Crispino, but even that was impossible because some thorough clerk had not disappeared the paperwork from Chris's court-martial over the hot jeep, and a guy couldn't be commissioned if he'd had trouble with the law. And although, years later, Colonel Sloan would say of his decision to disband the Raiders, "Even though they were volunteers, and they'd volunteered for this specific sort of thing, I didn't think it was reasonable for these people to carry the combat load for the whole regiment," among ourselves we knew there was still another reason. The Raiders were burned out. We were all used up.

We turned in our gear and folded up our tents to the strains of Chris's favorite campfire tune, That Old Gang of Mine. It was the saddest duty I had ever performed. Colonel Sloan organized good jobs for those not eligible for rotation (not on the battlefield, though; putting a Raider in the trenches would be like locking up a panther in the East Podunk Zoo). We exchanged permanent addresses and swore we'd keep in touch, maybe even have a reunion every ten years or so. Chris still had another year and a half on his hitch; he didn't know where he was to be assigned back in the States, so he gave me his mother's address in Connecticut. We made a pact: if either of us was crazy enough to come back to Korea, we'd grab the other and take him along.

Just as I was about to leave for the division's Replacement Depot (repo-depot) to start outprocessing, I was again hospitalized and evacuated to Pusan. My arm was wildly infected; another operation revealed that the souvenir-touting doc had left a large chunk of steel in there. This time they cut in from the other side and cleaned it out properly. Too bad the boys won't get to see this, I thought, because along with the old scar, it was a humdinger.

* * *

By the time I got out of the hospital, the Wolfhounds had been shifted from the front lines to the small island of Koje, off the southern tip of Korea. I couldn't imagine why the best regiment in Korea had been pulled off the line and sent back to this place. Rumors were flying in every direction: the Wolfhounds were returning to the States to lead some parade down Pennsylvania Avenue; the regiment was to be trained in amphibious operations for another invasion of North Korea. I got the real story before we tied up at the docks. It seemed that Koje had become a huge stockade for enemy POWs. Of late the little mothers had been rioting, embarrassing Uncle Sam and disrupting the peace talks. The Wolfhounds were there to bring order. Not one to miss a good firefight, even Jack Speed was back for the battle in Compound 62, a bloody affair that saw one Wolfhound killed by friendly fire at the height of the madness. But all these happenings didn't matter much to me. The Wolfhounds had changed so much that besides the surviving Raiders scattered throughout the regiment, I hardly knew any of the people. Friends from '50 and '51 were long gone. I'd be there only long enough to have my points tallied up and get processed to go home.

I checked in and was assigned a cot in the regimental transient officers' tent. That night I sacked out and had a wild nightmare. The Chinks were yelling and screaming in a mass attack--we were surrounded. I forced myself awake inside that dark, unfamiliar tent, scared shitless, with cold sweat dripping down. But the dream wouldn't go away; the screaming continued. I pulled up a corner of the tent and peered into the early-morning half-light. There were thousands of Chinese out there, on the road right next to my tent, all in formation, running, singing, and counting cadence like sheep. But I was safe--Wolfhounds with fixed bayonets were shepherding them along. Strangely, the POWs were wearing brand-new U.S. Army officers' gear--pinks and greens (the current, classy officers' dress uniform) as well as Ike jackets, OD trousers, and WW II officers' greens--but on the back of each was neatly stenciled POW. Apparently the U.S. Army Quartermaster had found these surplus uniforms unsuitable, either through obsolescence or slight wear and tear; most of the Wolfhounds were picking the eyes out of the best stuff and sending it home. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em, I thought, as I headed over to the POW supply center later in the morning to get a complete (and free) issue of new officers' gear myself.

Jack Sprinkler had gotten the top ex-Raider job. He roamed around the island with ease as a driver/secretary for the regimental Red Cross man, Charles Delmonico. We got together my first day there and had a few drinks from Mr. D. 's bountiful Red Cross grog larder. As the drinking went on I commented on the island beauties I'd been noticing. Jack informed me solemnly that pussy was off-limits. What else is new? I thought. Pussy is always off-limits. But as Jack went on, the Army's policy against fraternization suddenly became most appealing. It turned out that before it became a POW camp, the island of Koje had been a leper colony.

Kind of makes you lose your interest. We decided on the next best thing. Jack put the word out and all former Raiders on the island got together the afternoon before I was to leave. We had to meet at the NCO Club, so I plucked off my insignia; the Army's fraternization rules dealt not only with the opposite sex but also between officers and enlisted. In other words, it was okay for an EM to die in your arms but most unbecoming for you to drink with one in his club.

It was the first time we'd partied together outside the Raider camp. We pushed tables together and covered their tops end to end with the only thing going, whiskey and Coke. So many faces were missing, but we still had a merry time--fueled by the booze, the war stories, and our love and respect for each other--until some sergeant from one of the battalions recognized my face. "Hey! You're a lieutenant. Hackworth ... from the Raiders. What are you doing in our club?"

The sergeant started to heavy me, but then my boys stood up, and by the end of the brawl about the only thing left of the NCO Club was the concrete floor and roof. The Raiders may have been low on numbers, and it was certainly not our most professional fight, but there was no doubt at all that we'd won.

The following morning, hung over and with a bashed-up face, I packed my bags. The boys saw me off at the coastal steamer that would take me to Pusan, then Sasebo, Japan, and then home. And as I looked at all the black eyes and split lips around me, I knew the NCO Club incident was the only fitting end for the Raiders. We'd been born in battle, and that's how we finished up, too.

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