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

nothing to eat, and they had to scrounge to get water—one of the men could crawl, and he brought back a little foul-tasting water in a helmet. They got no medical care, not even a Band-Aid or iodine, Kies remembered, for sixteen days, and even then it was the most primitive kind of care. They moved slowly and at night. His memory was of the Chinese taking them north for about two weeks, and he believed after about two weeks he heard the sound of a river, and he was sure it was the Yalu. Then one night, to his surprise, they turned south and headed toward the American lines. Perhaps they were tired of carrying American prisoners, he later thought. They left their prisoners in a house a few miles north of American positions in late November, and one of Kies’s group, a newcomer who could walk, managed to go farther south to connect with the Americans, who finally sent vehicles to pick them up. All told, Kies had been a prisoner for just under a month. He was one of the lucky ones, he knew. The men who were ambulatory spent the rest of their time in Korea, more than two years, in brutal captivity, and manyof them died. He thought that his original group of thirty men had shrunk to about eight before they were rescued. His left leg was broken in four places and he had fifty-two wounds from a mortar round below his waist. “You look like shit,” one of the men who rescued him said. But he went through Army hospitals, got most of his health back, and eventually spent two years as an adviser in Vietnam.
     
     
    BACK AT THE small American perimeter, those who were going to try to break out made their move a little before 5 P.M . There were about sixty of them, and they made it to the riverbed before cutting south, but it was hard moving. They were behind the Chinese lines now, and the very size of their group made it more likely that they might be spotted. When they reached the main road, known as the MSR, or Main Supply Route, they had to cross it quickly, and Richardson managed to string them out so that they could all do so at once. At one point when they took a break, a sergeant from the intelligence section slipped over and whispered to Richardson that if the two of them took off and just slipped away, they would almost surely make it back to the American lines because they were pros and they would not be slowed down by all these others, some of whom were clearly amateurs. He was right, and probably one of the officers should have made them do just that, but Richardson knew that it was too late for that now, that he could not desert these men, not at this point, even if it cost him his life.
    On the morning of November 5, they stumbled into a Chinese outpost and there was an exchange of fire. Now that the Chinese knew where they were, they finally broke up. Richardson was the only soldier in his small group with a weapon, a burp gun. He told the others to take off, and just when he thought he had successfully slipped away himself, the Chinese found him and took him prisoner. He was not, as Tokyo had promised, going to be going home for Christmas. He would spend the next two and a half years instead in a series of brutal prison camps—as would Phil Peterson, who got picked up in a similar fashion.
     
     
    OF THE EIGHTH CAV when it was all over, there were some eight hundred casualties among the estimated twenty-four hundred men in the regiment; of the ill-fated men of the Third Battalion, eight hundred strong when the battle began, only an estimated two hundred made it out. It was the worst defeat of the Korean War thus far, doubly painful because it had taken place after four months of battle, when, it seemed, the tide had finally turned, when victory was in sight, and it had been inflicted on a much admired American unit. Suddenly, as if out of nowhere, the Chinese Communists had appeared in force and shattered an eliteregiment from an elite division. The Eighth Cav had lost half its authorized strength at Unsan, and a