Valleys of Death

Grabbing me under my arms, they picked me off the floor and shoved me out of the door. One of them barked an order in Chinese, but I had no idea what he was saying. I pulled on my uniform pants and shirt. My body ached and my back was stiff. I had to mentally force myself to take a step. I wandered out to the road. Five other Americans were standing on the road, flanked by three Chinese guards. I was put with the others. We didn’t make eye contact. We’d lost our freedom and it hurt.

Before long, we met up with another group of prisoners. It was a much larger group, about a hundred, and guarded by North Korean soldiers. The Chinese turned our small group over to their allies and left. Soon we were again moving north up the road. The guards circled us like sharks, pushing stragglers with their rifles, hitting and kicking anyone who stopped. Many in the group were wounded. One man had a massive chest wound. It was covered by bloodstained bandages. He wheezed as he shuffled down the road. My shoulder was a little stiff, and the shrapnel in my back was wet and sticky. But I felt lucky. It was nothing in comparison.

Bromser was walking nearby. He looked weaker and I didn’t know how long he’d last. I wondered if Bromser had the strength to make it. Giroux said they’d been picked up soon after the mortar attack and marched north. As with me, the Chinese had kept them off the roads during the day. They’d been fed some corn and water. Yesterday, the Chinese turned the whole group over to the North Koreans.

Before I could say more, a North Korean guard shoved me forward. I looked back over my shoulder. It would be the last time I’d see them. Fifty-five years later, I’d finally track down Bromser at his home in in Brownsville, Texas. We talked by phone and he told me Giroux died in the spring of 1951. The officer that was so strong and led us to safety just quit. He stopped eating. He wouldn’t talk to anyone. Bromser talked to him about his children, but couldn’t break him out of his funk. Giroux’s life just slipped away. Bromser died a few years after my conversation with him.

Just before daylight, the North Korean soldiers shepherded us off the road and into a field. Waving their bayonet fixed rifles at us, they had us lie down on the frozen ground. The ground was so cold that it hit me in waves. I couldn’t stop my teeth from chattering, and my legs and fingers turned numb. Staring up at the sky, I saw the last glimmer of some faint stars. I figured they were going to shoot us. But then North Korean soldiers carrying armfuls of cornstalks came out and started throwing them over us. The cornstalks were so that we could not easily be seen from the air. Lucky for us, they also trapped our body heat.

Many of us fell asleep. We were all exhausted. Huddled together, many of us spooning, we stayed relatively warm despite the freezing temperatures. By mid-afternoon, the cornstalks were frozen solid. I could hear the ice cracking around me as I crawled out of the cocoon. A few soldiers couldn’t get up. Those of us who were stronger managed to get most of them on their feet. I grabbed one man, frozen in the fetal position, but he didn’t move. He had died from the cold and his wounds. He looked peaceful. Farther down the row I saw them removing another dead man. My hatred for the North Koreans was growing greater by the hour.

While we waited to march north, two North Korean soldiers holding a basket moved between the ranks. When they got to me, they opened the basket and pressed a handful of boiled field corn into my hand. I slid the corn into my pocket, saving two large kernels. I tossed them into my mouth as we walked. I sucked on them until they were mush before getting two more. On my second two kernels, I screwed up and bit down on one of them, snapping a filling and breaking one of my molars in three places.

Pain shot through my head. My legs, back and shoulder were already hurting, but the pain in my jaw seemed worse. Probing the break with my tongue, I tried to keep the pieces of tooth together. But that only brought tears to my eyes. The pain was so sharp that I barely heard the English-speaking officer barking orders at us.

Guards started pushing us toward the back of the formation. On the ground were about twenty soldiers on jerry-rigged litters made out of burlap bags stretched between poles. Ten more soldiers stood around them.

It took four of us to carry one litter. I grabbed the closest litter and hoisted it up. The soldier in the litter had a horribly mangled leg. His calf muscle was long gone and his foot rested on the litter limp and lifeless. None of the wounded men had seen a doctor since being captured. I heard someone say they’d been in trucks, but were dumped on the road when the trucks were needed elsewhere. A whistle sounded and we started to shuffle forward. None of us were strong enough to carry the stretchers very long. My shoulders burned. I tried to focus on each step.

Whenever things got tough, my mind wandered back to the guy with the sucking chest wound or I stole a glance at the guy on the litter with the mangled leg. I vowed to never quit, but soon my body started to break down. I tried to get another prisoner to relieve me. But everyone I asked looked away or moved ahead. Most hid in the dark, trying to stay as far away from the stretchers as they could.

I was disgusted. It reminded me of the soldiers that first night fighting over the rice. We’d forgotten that the backbone of any military was the bond of the soldiers. We fought for the guys to our left and to our right. That is why we fought. To protect our unit buddies, and we expected them to do the same. But on a death march, every man was an island. There seemed to be no place for anything else. I refused to be that way.

When I finally got someone to relieve me, I stayed close by and tried to get eight more men to stick close together so we could relieve one another. If we stuck together, we could make this march. Soon, I was back on the litter, and just when I thought we would not be able to take another step, we stopped. I could see the pink sky peeking over the mountains as the guards herded us onto the side of a hill. We sat in little groups huddled together against the cold. North Korean soldiers walked around carrying a chogie stick with a bucket of millet on each end. The millet was a fine grain almost like powder. As they passed, the guards slopped the gruel into our helmet liners. We didn’t have bowls. Five or six men ate out of each liner.

We didn’t have spoons and used pieces of wood instead. I found a flat piece of wood and sat down with my group to eat. The millet was a pasty gray and had weevils and worms crawling through it. Some of the men near me started gagging and spitting it out on the ground nearby.

I shrugged and started scooping the millet into my mouth. I hadn’t eaten anything except corn for several days. A few bugs weren’t going to scare me off. I shoveled another spoonful into my mouth, careful not to hit my tooth. From that point, I ate everything I was given regardless of what was in it. Like before, we rested in the field, under the stalks, and were back on the road heading north just after sunset, again with a pocketful of corn.

Each night the guards were getting tougher. They were constantly pushing and hitting men with their rifles. If a man fell behind, he was shot and pushed off the mountainside. Everyone was rapidly losing weight. Lack of food, wounds and dysentery were taking their toll. Carrying the men on stretchers was becoming even more difficult.

We looked like skeletons. Our uniforms hung off us like a scarecrow’s coat. Each time we topped one of the mountains, we faced another. Ears, nose, fingers and toes were becoming numb. At times I felt as though I was walking on my ankles. I was lucky that my legs had always been the strongest part of my body.

Many of the wounded men who were strong enough to walk earlier now were in need of stretchers. However, there were none, and we found ourselves carrying them along between two of us. In some cases we were practically dragging them.

When I heard a single rifle shot back down the road, I knew another man’s struggle was over. My heart was aching for them, but at the same time my mind kept telling me to move. We had two choices: march or die.

There was no doubt in my mind that during these night marches I could have easily escaped. The question was, escape to where? I knew that I wasn’t strong enough mentally or physically. And with no map or idea how far I was from the front now, I wouldn’t last long. My only choice was to keep marching.

My survival mode kicked in, not allowing me to surrender to pain and fatigue. When I could, I tried to focus on pleasant thoughts of home. I imagined baseball games I’d played in. I thought about my friends. My family. When I was eight years old, I’d get up in the dead of winter with no heat in the house. I would dress and walk a couple of city blocks to a store and get two bags of coal and one bag of charcoal. I would carry them back to the house and start a fire so that my brothers and sisters could get up in a warm room. I could almost feel the warmth of the fire on my face as I walked. When the good thoughts failed, I let myself retreat into a zombie state. My mind would black out, but my body would just keep moving until something snapped me back to consciousness. Like a snowflake on my face.

We were climbing up a mountain road. The snow made the road slippery. I saw a few guys slip, dropping a litter onto the ground. When we got to the top of the mountain, everyone was spent. It was hard to breathe in the thin air, and fighting the cold left us with little strength. My fingers were so numb I couldn’t button my fly after relieving myself.

The guards shoved us into a cluster of huts. We were jammed into the room so tightly that my legs rested on another soldier. The only good thing about sleeping this way was that we were warmer. I heard O’Keefe’s Boston accent reciting the Twenty-third Psalm in the darkness.

As he said this prayer, a quiet came over the group. Afterward, I took off my boots for the first time in days. It was so cramped that I couldn’t reach my feet. So I massaged the feet of the guy across from me and he rubbed my feet. We both put our boots back on, but a few guys left them off. We were all dead tired and had no trouble falling asleep. I woke to a bunch of guys raising hell.

But we knew what had happened. When we went outside the hut, a few of the guards were wearing the boots. The North Koreans gave some of the men open sandals to wear instead. The cold was not only taking a toll on us, but also on the guards. A cold front from the plains of Manchuria came roaring down and slamming into the very mountains we were struggling through. We were facing the coldest winter in fifty years.

As we got ready to move out, the commander of the guards told us to leave the stretchers. The wounded were pleading with us to take them. I started to move toward one and got a rifle butt in the gut. Others tried to grab the stretchers, but the guards pushed them away too. I started to move toward the helpless soldiers again, but couldn’t risk another blow. I let my mind drift into a zombie state, hoping to block out the screams of the wounded.