Free The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War by David Halberstam

and to trust his instincts. Peterson remembered a terrible moment before they left. As he crawled past his radio operator, who was lying there, badly wounded, the man had said, “Lieutenant Peterson, where are you going?” Peterson answered that they were looking for a way out, so they could get help. “Lieutenant Peterson,” the man began to plead, “please don’t leave me! Please don’t leave me! You can’t leave me here to them!” A glance at the man and Peterson knew it was only a matter of hours before he would be dead. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, but we have to go and get help,” he said, and crawled off to join the search party.
    Richardson was sure that there was a way out to the east because the Chinese assaults were all coming from the other three directions; and, moving very slowly, they eventually found a riverbed littered with wounded Chinese, and knowing how close so many of their own men, especially the wounded, were to becoming prisoners, Richardson told the men with him: Don’t even look like you’re thinking of pointing a weapon at them, let alone shooting one. Don’t think about it. Those are the truest orders you’ll ever get. They stopped at one house where American supplies had briefly been stored. Now it was crowded with wounded Chinese. The wounded Chinese in the house kept whispering something eerie that sounded like “Shwee, shwee.” The word was shui, Richardson was later told, their word for water. They finally reached a riverbed, only to find even more Chinese, perhaps four to five hundred bombing victims, most of them dead but some alive or barely alive, holding out cups and begging for water. The Americans were now convinced that they could get through by heading east, and they slipped back to join the other men at the perimeter.
    For Bill Richardson, the decisions they made after he returned to the perimeter proved the most painful he ever experienced. Nothing that happened in the next few days, or for that matter in the rest of his life, measured up to it. There were perhaps 150 wounded men there by then, and there was noway any of them could take the dangerous trip out at night under enemy fire in mountainous terrain, at least not without compromising the able-bodied men. All of the wounded in the perimeter knew what was up. None of them wanted to be left behind for the Chinese. Soon after his return, some of them who were still partially ambulatory, started coming up to Richardson, crying, telling him not to leave them, please, dear God, not to leave them, not for the Chinese, please dear God take them, don’t leave them there to die. Was it possible, he wondered, to do your duty, to follow the orders of your superiors, orders you agreed with in the end, and get as many men out as best you could, and yet feel worse about yourself as a human being? Do you ever forgive yourself for some of the things you do in life? It was a question he would still be asking himself a half century later. He was abandoning so many men he knew—who had fought so well.
    Giroux had been very good in those first few days, helping create some kind of order, taking care of the more seriously wounded, but he would die in a prison camp. Kies had waited with the other wounded for the Chinese to arrive, sure that it was all over. When the Chinese finally showed up, and one of their men ordered him to stand up, he had tried and fallen over. His legs were useless. He had already cut off his combat boots because his feet were swelling up so badly. He remembered that the Chinese separated the prisoners, putting men like Dr. Anderson and Father Kapaun, who were ambulatory, in one group and the others, men like him who could not walk and needed to be carried—he estimated that there were about thirty such men—in the group to be borne on litters. Five of the men in his group died from their wounds the first night. Over the next few weeks they kept moving the group from house to house. There was almost