CHAPTER TWO

FORMING THE BATTALION

I entered the company headquarters and reported to Captain Filmore McAbee.

He and First Sergeant Brien sat behind a table. They were interviewing the corporals and sergeants and giving us our assignments. The platoon leaders and platoon sergeants sat in chairs nearby.

“This is the corporal who was on duty last night, he did a great job,” the first sergeant said.

McAbee, a well-built man who most likely was an athlete, was a World War II veteran. He looked up from my file and his stoic facial expression never changed.

“What experience do you have? What can you do?”

I had been a much better soldier than student. My academic career was cut short in one brief second in my eighth-grade shop class. I was cutting up in the back of the classroom when the teacher tossed a wooden mallet at me and some friends, trying to quiet us down. The mallet hit me in the chest and fell to the floor. I stood there stunned. I didn’t think. I just acted. And it cost me. I picked it up and tossed it back at the teacher. The mallet glanced off his shoulder and cracked the corner of the blackboard.

The next day, in the principal’s office, it was decided that I was neither studious nor disciplined enough for high school. So I was shipped off to vocational school. World War II was raging and I got a job at a factory that produced safety glass used in bombers. Since it was defense work, we were permitted to leave school at noon to work. I made good money but knew that I didn’t have a future, in school or on the factory floor.

When I wasn’t working, there was always the possibility of getting into trouble. Walking in the old neighborhood with my brother Tommy while on leave, we passed a building that used to be the Italian-American Club. Seeing the old club brought back memories of how I’d conned some money from Louie, some wannabe wiseguy who wanted us to steal some hubcaps for him.

We were hanging out down the street when he came out and called me over. He pointed to his car across the street and told me he needed two hubcaps. I went back and told my friends, who wanted to go see a movie. There was a lot of bullshit talk. The truth was nobody was very up to stealing hubcaps, but with the money we could all see a movie.

I thought it over and grabbed a friend.

“Let’s look at the other side of his car.”

I thought there were two hubcaps on his car and figured we could take them off and sell them to him.

“Goddamn, Bill, he will kill us when he finds out,” my friend said.

“Yeah, but we’ll all be at the movies by the time he finds out.”

I popped the hubcaps off and took them across the street to the club. Louie came out, took one look at the hubcaps, and smiled.

“Well, that’s fast work,” Louie said. “How about you put them on?”

I hotfooted it across the street, put the hubcaps on and headed to the movies. A few days later, I was walking down the street and Louie grabbed me. Luckily a bunch of guys from the club were there and they were laughing at him and told him to let me go.

“The kid outsmarted you, let him go.”

Louie shook me by my collar and then shoved me.

“You little son of a bitch, get out of here.”

That summer, I decided I needed to get out of Philadelphia. I was not quite sixteen years old when my uncle pulled some strings and got me into the War Department, with the North Atlantic Division of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. My mother agreed and I was signed on as a deckhand on a ship berthed out of Wilmington, Delaware. I was on the ship for a year. The war ended and the War Department was reducing its strength. My mother signed a waiver so that I could join the regular Army. A few days later, I was on a train headed south to Fort Belvoir, Virginia, for three weeks of training. I loved the military and quickly fell into the routine. The structure and discipline kept me in check, and since I was a good athlete—I’d made the varsity baseball team as a freshman in vocational school—I excelled during the long runs and dozens of push-ups. I learned quickly that keeping my head down, listening and refusing to give up were the secrets to success in the Army.

I didn’t realize that I had passed my entrance exam high enough that they had me take the Officer Candidate Test. I passed it but wasn’t old enough to be considered. Instead, I finished up my training and shipped out to Italy.

I had been an instructor for two years at a noncommissioned officers school in Austria and had trained and led a provisional Ranger platoon. I knew unit tactics and every weapon inside and out.

“Sir, I can do any job in this company.”

The words shocked me as soon as I spit them out. McAbee smiled and glanced over to the first sergeant. McAbee was an experienced officer from World War II and knew what combat was like and knew he needed experienced sergeants to lead the way.

“Give me the characteristics of the M-1 rifle.”

I didn’t hesitate.

“Thirty-caliber rifle, gas-operated, bolt action, semiautomatic, clip-fed, muzzle velocity twenty-eight hundred feet per second, weight 9.5 pounds. Can be fitted with an M-7 grenade launcher placed into the barrel, with an M-15 sight mounted just forward of the trigger housing.”

Soon, I was under verbal fire. The faster I answered, the faster the next question came at me.

“What are the characteristics of the BAR?”

“Browning automatic rifle, weight twenty pounds, gas-operated, muzzle velocity 2,798 feet per second, effective range one hundred to fifteen hundred yards, max range forty-five hundred to five thousand yards, fed with a twenty-round magazine.”

It went on and on for ten minutes. They thought I was a smart-ass. Then all of a sudden the first sergeant stopped and looked at Captain McAbee.

“Goddamn it, I think he’s for real,” Brien said.

The captain nodded and asked the final question.

“How well do you know the 57 recoilless rifle?”

“Sir,” I said, “very well.”

McAbee knew the road ahead. He had a bunch of raw recruits it was his responsibility to prepare for battle.

“Well, you’re the 57 section leader, and you have very few days to train men that don’t know the front end of the weapon from the ass end,” McAbee said. “Lieutenant Winn, he’s yours.”

Winn, the weapons platoon leader, smiled and made a note on his roster. I didn’t see much of Lieutenant Winn after I took over. He was quiet and not very aggressive. I really didn’t know how much he knew about the 57 recoilless rifles or the 60 mortars, so it was easier for him to stay out of the way.

McAbee dismissed me, and Winn took me out and introduced me to Sergeant First Class Albert Vaillancourt, the weapons platoon sergeant, and Sergeant First Class Gordon Roberts, the mortar section leader. I already knew Roberts. He’d just been married and I’d taken his CQ shift.

Vaillancourt had seen combat in Burma with Merrill’s Marauders in World War II. He was married and had three children. One of the children was only two months old. Vaillancourt knew what to expect. He’d fought deep in the triple canopy jungles. They had to use machetes to cut through the bush, which was so thick, it would block out the sunlight. It was always hot and humid. It felt like hell, he said. But he heard the landscape in Korea was different. It could be extremely hot all day and then turn bitter cold. A different kind of hell, Vaillancourt told me.

He was reluctant to talk about combat and I didn’t press him.

A few nights later the sergeants were scheduled to go on a night compass course. Some of the men in the weapons platoon were headed to town. I told them to wait for me, I would be back in a couple of hours. This brought a chorus of laughter.

“You are full of crap, you’ll be out there for four or five hours,” said one of the men.

I was paired with Roberts. Since we were section leaders, we worked closely together. Roberts had limited World War II experience and wasn’t thrilled about heading off to war again. He knew he would miss his new wife. He wanted to be home right now with a regular life—a house, a good job and a few kids—not struggling through the woods looking for random points in the dark. I wanted to go out. As the other pairs prepared to hustle into the woods, I pulled Roberts aside.

“Do you want to get home to your wife quickly?”

“Sure, but how are we going to do that?” he asked.

”Get the map out on the ground and cover us with a poncho.”

We got under the poncho with a flashlight, and I told him we were not going to walk through the woods. We were going to shoot the azimuth on the map, get the distance, see where it intersected with a terrain feature, a road or creek, and take the quickest way to that point. To make this work, you had to know how to figure the change in the magnetic declination on the map.

I shot the azimuth, made the change and traced it with my finger along the map until I hit a trail or road intersection.

“There,” I said, getting up and folding the poncho and putting it over my pistol belt.

We hustled down the road and ducked down a trail and made it to the stake well before the others. We did the same thing at each stake we found. An hour and a half later we made it to the last stake. The captain waiting to certify all the teams was shocked to see us. Some teams were just getting to the first and second point. But we had all the stake numbers correct.

“I don’t know how the shit you did it, but you are finished.”

We just smiled and punched each other in the arm. I joined the guys and went to town; Roberts went home.

Since I was the ranking weapons platoon noncommissioned officer living in the barracks, I was responsible for keeping the barracks clean and orderly. It was a typical World War II- era barracks. An aisle ran down the middle, with folding cots on both sides. Each of us had a small shelf and clothes rack on the wall at the head of the cot and a footlocker at the foot. We had plenty of room for equipment and uniforms. In those days, civilian clothing wasn’t authorized.

During my first few days with the company, I realized why I’d been put in a senior position. Our army was hollow. The Army was in bad shape, including divisions with only two battalions in their regiments instead of three. We had reduced the size of the Army so much since the end of World War II that we didn’t have enough troops, equipment or leaders to go to war again.

My fifteen-man section were mostly raw recruits. When I asked how many had any experience beyond basic training, only four hands went up. The entire force was moving sergeants from one unit to another trying to get them to the units as they were being deployed. The initial rush to bring a few divisions to strength left the follow-on divisions and units basically with all new sergeants and men.

Looking at my roster, I assigned Corporal James Walsh to lead one squad. He was about five feet, eleven inches tall and about 150 pounds, a wiry guy from New York; his father owned a bar in Brooklyn and he spoke with a thick accent. Being city boys from the East Coast, we bonded quickly. We were both brash and had that quiet cockiness about us. I guess that’s why we were so close right from the start.

A Yankees fan, Walsh used to listen to games on the radio with me in the barracks. The Phillies were a young team and I had a good feeling that they’d meet the Yanks in the series. Or at least that is what I kept telling Walsh.

“If you guys make it, you ain’t got a chance,” he told me. “The Phillies? How they gonna beat the Yankees?”

He talked for hours about Brooklyn, how he would play stickball in the streets late into the summer nights. Much like we did in Philadelphia.

My other squad leader, Corporal Walter Gray, was a little older and quieter, a good guy.

Corporal Robert Hall had been around a little and seemed like he was going to be good. I made him the gunner in Walsh’s squad.

Scanning the rest of my roster, I stopped on Private First Class William Heaggley. He was also from Philadelphia. His parents owned a small neighborhood bakery.

But looking at his awards, I saw he’d recently won the Expert Infantryman’s Badge. No small feat. The test is a very comprehensive look at every facet of what a top-notch infantryman should know, ranging from first aid and weapons to tactics. Out of a seven hundred-man battalion, only about ten to fifteen passed. Right off the bat, I knew Heaggley would be one of my best men.

He was the quiet type—a yes-or-no kind of guy. He was real shy, which made him even more valuable. It was good to bullshit when you were in the barracks, but in the field you had to be all business. Heaggley was all business with an eagle eye.

I would have liked to have made Heaggley a squad leader, but rank prevented that.

I had two young kids, Greenlowe and Jones. I didn’t think either one of them was seventeen. Greenlowe was a nice young guy who listened to what he was told. Jones on the other hand was a smart-ass I knew I was going to have to watch.

Corporal Charles King from the mortar section was also in the barracks. King was a big Midwestern boy from Indiana with whom not too many people would want to tangle. You could tell he worked out—he had big muscular forearms like steel beams and a perfect back for carrying equipment in the field. And he was outgoing. He had a deep, infectious laugh.

He and I became good friends along with Walsh, Hall and Heaggley. Looking back, I realize we were a great crew. We were so optimistic and full of life. We talked about how this would be a short war and how we would all hang out when we returned.

“One day I’m going to take you-all down to New Orleans,” King told us.

“Mardi gras, you haven’t lived until you’ve seen Mardi gras.”

“Yeah, well, you ain’t lived until you see Yankee Stadium,” Walsh said.

As close as you become with one another—a brotherlike bond—I really knew very little about the others’ pasts. In my case, the men of the section were together a very short time. Some were gone within days; others lasted a little longer. I knew Walsh the longest, but that was only four months. If you’d asked me how well I knew Walsh then, I’d have told you I knew him like a brother. But as the years pass, I realize I knew very little of his life before our friendship.

The 57 was a fairly new weapon to the Army’s inventory, so we had a good supply of guns, ammo and parts. But few soldiers knew how to use it. Luckily, I’d taught it in Austria. Essentially, it was a lightweight breech-loaded gun developed after World War II to punch holes in tanks, bunkers and buildings. Capable of firing artillery-type shells without recoil, the weapon was effective in killing Soviet-style T-34 tanks and light enough that it could be fired from the shoulder, on a tripod, or in a jeep.

The colonel had us run wearing our field gear, helmet, pack and ammo belt everywhere we went. In Korea, we’d have gun jeeps and ammo trailers, but my men all needed strong legs and backs. The 57 recoilless rifle weighed forty-five pounds and the ammo weighed six pounds per round. We also needed to carry .30-caliber ammo for our rifles and grenades. If we needed to hump the guns and ammo up and down hills, we had to be ready.

We had a very limited time to train, so Colonel Johnson had us concentrate on battle drills. We found out that Johnson had been captured on Bataan during World War II and remained a prisoner for over three years before being released. Because of Bataan, he was less trusting and understood the harshness of war.

The battalion spent time on the range shooting every rifle and machine gun in the arsenal. On the grenade range, instead of the normal sandbag pit, we ran up, threw the grenades and hit the prone position to mimic real-life combat conditions.

Johnson knew that in Korea we wouldn’t have the protection of the pit. One man, I’m not sure from which company, didn’t get down fast enough and shrapnel caught him in the leg. We could see the blood as he rolled on the ground moaning. The medics put him on a litter and carried him over to a waiting ambulance. Everybody was hollering at him as they put him in the ambulance.

“Million-dollar wound,” they all chanted.

When we weren’t shooting, we spent time getting shot at. And in retrospect, it was great training for the hell we would face on the battlefield.

Colonel Johnson marched us out on the range and had the 3.5 mortars and artillery fire five hundred yards down-range. Then he walked the battalion to within a hundred yards of the exploding shells. Everything I’d heard about the colonel proved to be true. He was tough and knew what it was going to take to put a green unit together so it had a chance of survival in combat. I could feel the earth shake. The force of the explosions was like punches to the chest. Afterward, we staggered off a little dazed. Johnson was certainly doing everything he could to get us ready.

One day we were practicing crew drills in the company area. It is similar to practicing football plays. The squad leader identifies a target, direction, distance and what type of round to be fired, while the crew prepares the weapon to fire. Quick, sharp and concise. We’d gotten it down to several seconds between rounds, but the goal was to repeat it to the point that it became muscle memory. It had to be that way because in combat, we’d have to do it under fire.

During a short smoke break, a runner came and told me that the colonel was walking through the company and checking barracks. Shit. I had two cases of beer and a case of soda in the shower, with the cold water running on them so they would be cool when we finished training. Alcohol was not permitted in the barracks and I was wasting water. I ran to the barracks and arrived just in time.

“Sir, Corporal Richardson, weapons platoon. I’m the barracks noncommissioned officer, follow me, sir.”

He nodded and followed me through the door and into the barracks. As we walked, Johnson scanned the room and asked me about the platoon.

“Your men ready for Korea?”

“They’re training hard and we’ll be ready, sir.”

We turned the corner and I could hear the shower running over the cans. I was prepared to take my ass-chewing like a man.

“Sir, I’ve got some drinks in the shower trying to keep them cool for the men.”

He looked at the shower and turned to me.

“That’s good, Corporal, the barracks look good,” Johnson said. “Use every minute you can to get your men ready.”