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MY YEAR IN KOREA 1950 - 1951 I grew up in Southwest Roanoke VA and attended Jefferson High School. I along with two others went downtown to join the Marine Reserve unit. One of the guys was 18 and they signed him up, the other was only 17, but had a letter from his parents giving him permission to join. The Sergeant then looked at me and asked if I wanted to join and I said "I might as well". I was 16 but when asked said 18. Next, it was raise your hand, take the oath, and sign right here. Am still listed with the Marines as two years older than I am. Sixteen Months later, the war in Korea broke out and our Reserve unit was activated. The following morning we marched down through town to the railroad station, and boarded the troop train for California. I remember five days of poker games, beer drinking, joke telling and veterans telling us how rough it was in the "old Corp". When we got to Oceanside, California, they split us all up and I was sent into an accelerated training program. It was eight weeks boot camp (September and October), four weeks advanced training then shipped out the 6th of Dec.1950 from San Diego. We arrived in Korea before Christmas and I was assigned to the First Shore Party Battalion. They were mainly moving all type of supplies everywhere, and I ended up running a "Gook Train". No offense intended, but that was life then, and that is what we called our 15 to 20 South Korean employees who had their "A-frame" packs and were willing to haul water, C-rations and ammo up to the lines. I never knew exactly what we paid them, but in addition to the hard, heavy work of carrying all that weight up some very steep and frozen hills, it was also dangerous due to mines and mortars. In my four months with them, I know of six that we lost. One day after a real bastard climb, we finally got to the outfit we were looking for with their supplies at about 4:00 in the afternoon. With darkness approaching, the Company Commander suggested that we spend the night next to his C. P. and leave early the next morning. About midnight all hell broke loose with a full-scale counterattack by the Chinese. I climbed over the ridgeline into the platoon Sergeant's bunker and fought with him all night. They kept the valley lit with flares all night and it was my first experience at seeing so many people die. By dawn the attack was over, so I went back over the hill to get my train, but they were all gone. It seems that when the firing started, they were so afraid that they took off running back. A joke got started, that I forgot to set my brakes correctly, and my "train" rolled down the mountain. In the spring of '51, a truck I was riding in hit a land mine. I ended up spending five weeks on the hospital ship USS Repose, which was docked in Pusan. The Chinese spring offensive had caused such heavy casualties, that they were asking for volunteers for the rifle companies that were short of men. So in May '51, was transferred to "C" Company, First Battalion Seventh Marines, and stayed with them the rest of my tour. My enlistment was up in February, but it was extended for a year by an act of Congress, and I spent most of it in Korea. I also had my 19th birthday there. If you were in a rifle company at that time, and were on the lines, you were either trying to take new high ground or sending out daily probing patrols. The company would send out a patrol everyday and since there were three platoons per company, you caught a patrol every third day. You did not volunteer, you just went. I later estimated that I had been on over 40 such patrols. An awful lot happened in the fall and summer of 1951. Both sides started their psychological warfare. I heard "Glenn Miller" music coming from their side, with loud speakers in good English, trying to get us to surrender. Also had to endure Chinese music and our loud speakers trying to entice them to give up. We dropped millions of leaflets trying to get them to surrender. The ones that floated to our side, we used as toilet paper. They brought up dozens of big searchlights and trained them off the clouds and the valley between us was lit up as if you were at the State Fair. We had Chinese coming to the foot of our hill and shouting up in good English, "Hey Marine, you die tonight, we kill you, you Fu_ _ _ _ _Marine. When you could not see them, you just threw grenades. I threw an awful lot of them. It was really rare, when we were on the line, that they didn't hit you sometime during the night, even if it was just probing for a weak spot. One morning, just before dawn, I saw a movement and turned to get a better look (we were in a bunker) and saw a Chinese with a burp gun, no more than ten feet away. I brought my rifle around to fire and he dropped his burp gun and raised his hands. To this day, I do not know where he came from or how he got through the barbed wire, without us knowing. I probably had at least six grenades that I had pulled out the pins and straightened them, so that they would fall out easy with a string attached to the wire for a booby trap. In addition, we had taken empty c-ration cans and bent the top backwards so that it would hang on the wire, and with a rock in it, would rattle if moved. We had seen and heard nothing until he appeared. On Oct. 16th, our Company, along with a platoon of engineers, jumped off to take a small hill that the Chinese were using to stage night attacks. Our intention was to take the hill, let the engineer's plant mines all over it and return back to our lines. We started out by passing through an opening in the wire, where we had a roadblock with two of our tanks sitting there. About 200 yards into Chinese territory we triggered a mine, which actually lifted my whole body off the ground and slammed me back down. When my head cleared, I realized that the man behind me had gotten the full blast and that both of his legs were gone. I crawled back to help about the same time a corpsman arrived, so I took off to catch up with the rest of my fire team. The whole company was now at the base of the hill and we were spread out about the length of a football field when we started up. Not a shot had been fired until we got about two-thirds of the way up and then the Chinese opened up with mortars. I had been under mortar attack many times but nothing like this. We tried to dig in but the ground was hard shale rock and we got nowhere. They had the range down perfect and literally blew us to bits. I tried checking on my other fire team members and I did not get any response back from the boy from Richmond named Dave Munson, so I crawled over to check and found him dead. My fourth fire team member was now calling for help so I went to assist him and found that he had a nasty but minor head wound. Our company was trapped on the side of that hill, getting incoming rounds for over five hours. We wouldn't leave our dead and wounded, so we had to wait until someone else located where the mortars were coming from and silence them. Finally, four Air Force P-51s came in with napalm and burned them out. When all the shelling stopped, we were able to get a gook train in to help with our dead and wounded. Everybody was either helping with the wounded or dead or carrying their rifles, and when we got to approximately one-fourth mile from the roadblock, the two Marine tanks came flying down the road to support us. I found out later that a Roanoke reservist, Garland Wright, drove one of them. Of course, at that time he did not know that I was in that rag-tag group. It really was ironic, but the first person I saw at the roadblock when we crossed back into our lines, was Woodrow Wright (no kin to Garland) who was with me at the Viaud School in Roanoke. Our platoon had 41 men that morning when we jumped off, but there were only 16 of us standing when we get back. I had lost my whole fire team and we had not fired a shot. We came off the lines for a few weeks recuperation and to get replacements for the guys lost and went back up the first part of November. On the Marine Corp. birthday (Nov. 10, 1951), we heard a lot of noise and climbed out of our bunkers to see a Marine Observation plane dragging a streamer at least 100 feet long, which read "Happy Birthday Marines". He could not have been more than 200 feet above our lines and one of the two Marines aboard was hanging out of the plane hollering "Happy Birthday". About one-half mile down the line from us, he turned left across a Chinese hill and they shot him down. We never heard whether they survived or not. We came off the lines for the last time about Dec. 10 and on Christmas Eve, they told me I was going home. I left Korea the 2nd of Jan. 1952, after riding for nine hours in the back of a truck, in zero degree weather, to get to the coast. When we got to San Diego, I bought a 1940 Ford to use during the three weeks that I had to wait for my discharge. On Feb.13, 1952, I was discharged in San Diego. I was 19 years old, with three years of reserve and active duty time in the Marines. I drove the Ford back to the same car lot and sold it for $25.00 less than I had paid three weeks before. We all left Roanoke together, but we came back one at a time. I got a hop on a Navy plane to Chicago and took a train from there home. This was the middle of February and my mother had left the Christmas tree up for me. Within 30 minutes after arriving home, Frank Whorley, a veteran of the Chosin Reservoir campaign, came by and the party started. I brought with me the names of five Marines that I was with when they died, as I thought perhaps it might ease their parent's pain, if they talked to someone who was with them when they died. The first visit was to the parents of Dave Munson from Richmond. This was about a week after I returned home that I drove to Richmond, went to the newspaper office for his address and located his house. He was an only child and his parents were two of the finest people that I had ever met, but there were so many questions, and so many tears, that when I left their house, I threw the remaining list away. It was just too emotional. Started the making use of the GI Bill, got married, raised a family and got on with my life. I have been so fortunate, and life has been so good to me, that I would never want to change anything. However, not a day has gone by in the last 50 years that I have not thought about my time in Korea. - William T. Dunn
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