3rd Place – October 2022

That I Must Tread Alone

By George Bowden

East Hill exploded. The dark Goliath of steep slopes and narrow ridgelines that had watched the Marines since their arrival in Hagaru was afire. The Marines heard the rumble first – the blaring bugles and screeching horns, a heavy mortar barrage, rockets slashing the darkness, and then they saw the Chinese flow down the hill and over the railroad tracks.

The Chinese climbed toward the Marines, some close enough to lob hand grenades into their foxholes. Every Marine’s M-boomed eight times. Ping, the empty clip popped out. Reload – boom, boom, boom. They cut swaths through the never-ending field of Chinese with .30-caliber machine guns until their barrels became too hot to touch, even in the killer-frigid temperatures.

Nineteen-year-old Marine Corporal Woody Birckhead and the Marines in his Anti-Tank Company fired blindly into charging ghosts, Chinese soldiers flying down East Hill, across the railroad tracks toward their foxholes. They fired blindly at faceless creatures. Woody controlled his fear only by knowing that a Marine’s duty is to protect the Marine next to him.

The scene became a frozen hell. Coal-mine darkness splattered with blinding bursts from the machine guns, from mortar shells lighting up foxholes as if they welcomed the angel of death. The air unbreathable, painful at 25 degrees below zero, agonizing when burned by phosphorous and gunpowder, blackened by smoke and dirt, tainted by blood. Noise tornadic in its intensity, as if a maniacal conductor was leading a symphony of terrified musicians playing M-1s and machine guns. Artillery and mortars deafening in their applause. The wounded begged for life — “Corpsman!” — the dying letting it go. Officers’ orders shouted as if it was Babel, their language muddled by God; their soldiers and Marines roaring like demons. All wrapped in a bizarre soundtrack of the Chinese’ shrieking bugles and piercing whistles and clattering pans.  

Dead and wounded Chinese soldiers became stacked so high that Marines scrambled to shove them aside to open their machine guns’ fields of fire. Perimeters and lines on maps dissolved. Marines and Chinese mixed as if they were the smeared watercolors of a child’s drawing. Hagaru looked as if generals kicked over an anthill and its furious residents attacked each other with fire.

***

“We’d just stand there and shoot … shoot … shoot. You really didn’t even have to aim,” Birckhead said as he told his story sixty years later. “I could hear Fox and Dog Companies on my radio: ‘Send help! We don’t know how much longer we can hold out! We’re running out of ammunition! They keep coming! We don’t know if we can withstand another assault!’”

In his 80s, tanned with thinning, snow-white hair and sparkling blue eyes, he leaned back and tapped the Queen Anne tabletop in the dining room of his suburban Baltimore townhome. Frostbite scars marred his hands. His index finger ticked each second with the grandfather clock near the front door. For six decades, Woody Birckhead had locked the winter of 1950’s secrets in a personal Pandora’s Box, and now he opened it for a college student’s history-class project.

“I never told anyone about it. I didn’t think they would believe me,” he said. “I wasn’t even sure it was true myself.”

***

Hagaru is at the southern tip of the Chosin Reservoir, near the Yalu River, which forms the border between China and North Korea. The Chinese had warned General Douglas MacArthur, leader of the United Nations forces, that if he crossed the 38th parallel, which separated North and South Korea, they would attack; and, according to Chinese prisoners captured later, their orders were “Kill the Marines as you would snakes in your homes.”

Fresh from a World War II victory over Japan and with an eye on the U.S. presidency, MacArthur pushed his forces straight for the Yalu River. In the weeks preceding the battle at Hagaru, an estimated 200,000 Chinese soldiers traveled at night to sneak into North Korea and surrounded about 20,000 United Nations forces scattered from the Chosin Reservoir along a single road to the Sea of Japan. Within a few days after the attack at Hagaru and other points along the road, the Marines began a thirteen-day fight for survival along the seventy-eight miles to the coast. Corporal Birckhead’s 7th Marine Regiment would lead the column. He drove a Jeep, towing an anti-tank gun with the bodies of friends slung across its barrel.

***

Less than six months earlier, Woody had just completed his junior year of high school and celebrated his nineteenth birthday, Woody and his friends had joined the Marine Corps Reserve — Easy Company — a couple of years before to make some extra money and play on the Marines’ city-league basketball team

When North Korean tanks and infantry poured into South Korea in June 1950 and pushed U.S. Army and South Korean forces to the southern tip of the Korean peninsula, the Joint Chiefs of Staff called up local Marine Corps reserve units, including Woody’s Easy Company.  

On July 29, Woody’s father drove him to the Marine Reserves Center on the corner of Main Street and Ridge Street. He pulled into the parking lot and set the brake on the family’s Nash Rambler. Woody stepped out of the car and looked over at his father, who was brushing a hand that looked like hammered steel across his eye. Woody had never seen his father cry before, but he knew that his father lost one brother in World War I and had two brothers serve in World War II.”

Woody joined his friends in Easy Company, and they marched through town in World War II-issue, olive drab uniforms, carrying full packs and M-1 rifles. The afternoon temperature reached 96 degrees. A Southern Railway train stood by at the red-brick station on West Main Street, waiting to carry the Marines to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. The Marines — a mixture of teens and married World War II vets — marched in three drill-perfected columns, every left foot striking the deck in unison. Click. Click. Click. The Lane High School Band, in the Black Knights’ orange and black, led the parade; John Phillips Sousa marches echoed off the downtown storefronts.

Friends and family members surrounded the Marines at the train depot. Mothers and fathers prayed their Marines would soon be back in the hallways of Lane High School. Boys stretched stork-necked for a glimpse of their buddies, now warriors looking like John Wayne in “The Sands of Iwo Jima.” His mother in her flowered dress and straw hat, leaned forward to kiss and hug him, swaddled in his billowy khakis and an oversized cap, as a hand tugged on his arm to pull him toward the train.

Vice Mayor Strother F. Hamm, a partner in Charlottesville’s Gilmore, Hamm and Snyder furniture business since 1925 and a member of Charlottesville’s World War II draft board, said, “Young men, your community is proud of you. You have been good citizens; you will be good soldiers. God speed you on your mission.”

***

Birckhead paused and listened to the grandfather clock tick. He placed a pocket-sized Bible on the table that a high school girlfriend gave him to carry in Korea. Its pages were now partially pulled from the spine. Its front cover torn on the inner edge, askew from the back. Brown water stains were deep around the edge; its page corners torn and folded. A frayed cotton cord bound it all together. Inside the front cover, while in Korea, Birckhead wrote a verse from “Thanatopsis” by William Cullen Bryant, a poem he learned in high school and could still recite from memory.

So live, that when thy summons comes … Thou go not like the quarry slave at night … as one who wraps the drapery of his couch about him and lies down to pleasant dreams.

And then he began to recite Bryant’s “To a Waterfowl” — written on the Bible’s opposite page, blurred and nearly erased by the snowmelt of the Chosin Reservoir — as if he’s explaining those 60 years of silence.

He, who, from zone to zone, guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight in the long way that I must tread alone…

Birckhead remembered “taking aim” on a Chinese soldier who had charged down East Hill and was crossing the railroad tracks. He remembered squeezing the trigger on his M-1.

“He went down. I waited.” Birckhead paused, “And waited.”

He exhaled as if he were ready to end a prayer, “And waited.”

He said, “I didn’t see him get up.,” then he finished the scene, “Finally, I think he got back up again.”

Birckhead reassured himself, “I don’t know whether I hit him. The kind of fighting we were doing; you didn’t have to aim. Just point the gun in the general direction. If somebody asked me if I killed one, I wouldn’t know for sure. I hit some? Yeah.”

The grandfather clock’s Westminster chime paused the battle with a deep dong … dong … dong.

Birckhead reflected, “It’s a blessing in some ways, because you can save your soul by saying, ‘I don’t know if I killed anyone or not.’”

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