Give Me Tomorrow

YOU KNOW, DICK, I’m not gonna make it home.” With his piercing blue eyes, Second Lieutenant James Beeler looked straight at First Platoon Leader Dick Carey as the George Company officers finished up a friendly game of cribbage.The All-American football player from the U.S. Naval Academy knew he was going to die. A premonition of his own death ominously ate away at him.

“Oh, come on.You’re going to make it,” Carey said, as he quickly tried to diffuse the situation. Beeler shook his head. “You’re a damn good Marine,” Carey interjected.

The nasty, tan keel of the 9,676-ton USNS General Simon B. Buckner cut through the emerald green waters of the Pacific.The Buckner seemed to fit George Company, as many of the men in George were from the South. Even the transport’s namesake fit: he was the first and last southern general to surrender a Confederate Army during the Civil War. George Company filled most of the ship, along with other Marines heading toward Korea.

Also playing cribbage and bunking with Beeler and Carey was Second Lieutenant Spencer Jarrnigan, who commanded Second Platoon, a solid Marine officer who wasn’t lacking in courage. Described as “sickly looking” and very skinny, with red hair, he seemed to be in a constant state of depression from a tragic automobile accident that had occurred several years before. Other people in the car had died, but he had survived. On several occasions, the men observed that his head was always down. Unlike his Marine brothers who punctuated most sentences with profanity, Jarrnigan was appalled by it. He would repeatedly say, “I don’t care what you say, but don’t say ‘mother fucking’ or you’re going to get in trouble.” Nearly every officer in the room had a death sentence hanging over his head, but only Beeler knew his future.

Below decks, the Leathernecks prepared.The reservists and other untried Marines gravitated to the combat veterans. The men flocked around the seasoned NCOs. Many of the eighteen- and nineteen-year-old reservists surrounded the experienced NCOs who had been through combat and asked them to describe the indescribable—what was combat like and how could they survive it?

The machine gun section worked especially hard to prepare. Many of its members were reservists, including Corporal Tom Enos. Of Portuguese extraction, Enos hailed from the Fresno, California, area and was learning on the job. Despite his inexperience, Enos never flinched, even after being warned by First Sergeant Zullo, “Being a machine gunner is yours to lose.”

Schooled by the WWII veterans, Enos and his fellow machine gunners trained at a breakneck pace. “Training was rigorous.We were blindfolded, put in a dark room, and forced to assemble every one of our weapons in the dark,” recalled the Marine from Fresno.

Fred and E.C. Hems taught the machine gunners how to assemble and disassemble the gun, “backwards, forwards, sideways, and upside down,” recalled Mert GoodEagle. Machine gunners were handed parts in the dark and forced to assemble their weapons or go to the proper parts box to find it. During this so-called “snap-in” training, Marines would have to name the part and the number. “Sometimes, they would throw in a different part just to throw us off,” recalled Bruce Farr.

The men learned every aspect of the .30 caliber medium machine gun. The other George Company Marines also learned to assemble and disassemble their M1 Garands and occasionally the M1911 pistol. Each four-man fire team within a thirteen-man squad was issued a Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR) M1918A2 for additional firepower. The BAR had an effective range of five hundred yards and could fire a little over five hundred rounds per minute.

In addition to training, the men also attempted to establish their sea legs. “I went by rail most of the way,” joked GoodEagle. He and the rest of George Company spent a good amount of time on the ship’s rail, heaving their guts over the side from bouts of seasickness.

A stocky Pawnee Indian from Ardmore, Oklahoma, GoodEagle was one of the few Native Americans at the heart of George Company. As an ammo bearer within the machine gun section, GoodEagle lugged around several fifteen-pound, olive-drab metal boxes of machine gun ammunition. Each box contained a belt of between 250 and 275 rounds of .30 caliber ammunition for the Browning M1919A4 machine gun. Following in the tradition of the Pawnee tribe and his father, a bareback rider and Indian dancer for the Pawnee Bill Rodeo Show, GoodEagle hoped to obtain his warrior’s feather.

For many of the men, including the veterans, the boredom was nerve-racking. They wanted to get it over with or understand what they were about to face. On board, the men had time to kill. Friendships were born. GoodEagle, Farr, Hallowell, Harbula, and many other members sowed the seeds for a lifelong friendship.

Jack Daniels, however, adhered to a different principle and generally shied away from friendship, based on the simple adage from a veteran at boot camp: “Don’t make any friends, because you’re going to lose them.” Daniels, an ammo bearer who would eventually become a machine gunner, hailed from a small town about thirty-two miles from Myrtle Beach, which contained only a post office and a service station.With a slow and deliberate manner and a tangy southern drawl, Daniels came from a large family of sharecroppers. To get to boot camp, he had had to hitchhike to Florence, South Carolina, take a bus to Columbia and another bus to Paris Island.

After more than a week on the water, the Buckner cruised to Kobe, Japan, where the men disembarked and made their way to the former Japanese Naval Base at Camp Otsu. At the base, they had hardly any time for training. “I tried to get the men in as good physical conditioning as possible,” recalled George Westover. Westover, along with the other officers and Zullo, had the men climb the surrounding mountains with full packs and gear.

One man who always seemed to be at the back of the pack was Private Ralph Whitney. “Many of the men picked on him,” recalled Farr. I felt sorry for him.” With a demeanor described years later by some Marines as “like Gomer Pyle,” he struggled to keep up. Despite some of his shortcomings, Whitney had a talent for photography and took official photos of the unit during training exercises.

The men were crammed into the small rooms of Otsu’s barracks, normally eight to ten men per room. “We took anything that wasn’t nailed down,” recalled Dick Hock. “Sheets, blankets, soap, anything that the Army didn’t really need, we would take.”

There was no liberty, but someone found a small hole in a fence behind the barracks.At night, George Company would slither through the hole to make their way to the nearby town. We called it “rice paddy liberty,” recalled Hock.

The small town contained several local watering holes that catered to the men. Often, they traded sheets, blankets, and other nonessential items for money to buy booze in a barter system. Hock recalled one woman who acted as a middleman: “We found a woman who was married to an army sergeant who had been deployed. We used her as a saleswoman to sell blankets, soap, and towels. We traded the stuff to her, and she gave us money for drinking.”

On or around September 8, George Company loaded into an LST (Landing Ship,Tank). Each man made his way into the cramped bowels of the grimy ship, stowed his gear, and claimed one of the scarce racks, otherwise known as a bed, a place to sleep.

The forward observer team, recently detached from the Eleventh Marines, was an artillery unit organic to the First Marines. Artillery observers were trained eyes that could radio in the exact coordinates of enemy targets and call in a deadly storm of steel from the Eleventh Marines’ howitzers. The six-man team was led by First Lieutenant Dalton Hilscher from Texas. The team included Carlos Banks, Richard J. Jewel, Stanley J. Walerski, and PFC James Harrison, an orphan from Atlanta, Georgia. A product of the South, Harrison never shed his heritage and carried a small Confederate flag on his knapsack at all times and also played a small harmonica, his favorite tune being “Dixie.” Harrison seemed fearless and often oblivious to imminent risk.

The unit’s top NCO was Clark G. Henry, an Irishman from Galway. At age thirteen, he had traveled alone from Ireland to the United States to work on his grandfather’s farm. When World War II broke out, the five-foot-nine, 119-pound Henry had lied about his age to the Marine Corps, which was desperate for young recruits. Starting at the Solomon Islands, Henry fought throughout the Pacific and was later wounded while serving as a naval gunfire observer. Prior to Korea, he was assigned to the Eleventh Marines Dog Battery and was a sergeant of the forward observer section. Known for his piercing blue eyes, pragmatism, and keen mind, Henry effectively led the forward observer team, which also acted as a scout section.

Even as the ship was docked in Japan, Marines had somehow found a way to create their own liberty. That night, the forward observer team, led by Henry, struck out into the streets of the local town. Making their way through winding back alleys, the men found what they were looking for.A shaky building built of bamboo, no more than two stories high, that had curtains that doubled as doors. The makeshift bar complimented the crude building, but its main draw was that it was also a bordello. The men made their way through the seedy structure. They were greeted by a group of Army MPs. The Marines held the Army MPs and, for that matter, all Army personnel—known pejoratively as doggies—with disdain. One of the MPs snapped at Henry, “You’re not welcome in this bar.” Apparently, the MPs were trying to protect their turf, recalled Henry.

A verbal melee ensued. Smokey Somers, a friend of Henry and a fellow forward observer, but attached to How Company, decided he had had enough and landed a punch on one of the MPs’ faces. The Marines and the MPs launched into a full-scale barroom brawl. The Marines were victorious, but they wisely chose to escape and fight another day. The men fled through the back alleys and made their way to the ship. They were greeted by Lieutenant Dalton Hilscher, who was dipping a tablespoon into a five-gallon container of ice cream as he waited for his men on the gangplank of the LST.

“Where have you been?” he barked at Henry. No sooner had he questioned Henry than several huffing and puffing MPs arrived on the scene. Dipping the spoon back into the ice cream, the lieutenant confidently greeted them.

Several hours later, the gull-grey prow of the LST cut its way through the emerald coastal waters of Korea. It headed south toward Pusan, where it would round the tip of the Korean peninsula before turning north again toward one of the only large harbors in South Korea, Inchon.

The captain of the Japanese crew, a former navy chief in the Imperial Navy, had two subordinates, including a radioman. Communication between Westover and the Japanese captain remained a challenge throughout the voyage. Hand signals, gestures, and pointing at charts and maps replaced a translator. Neither could speak both English and Japanese.

After two days at sea, the men faced the worst possible scenario: a typhoon.The flat-bottomed boat would ride up the crest of a wave and then crash back down, creating massive seasickness throughout George Company, even affecting the veterans who had long-established sea legs. Everyone was doubled over and seasick.

On September 15, George Company finally arrived several miles outside Inchon.The LST was just one ship in an armada of more than a hundred that were about to conduct one of the most audacious amphibious landings in history. A day or so before the invasion, the men assembled above decks, nailing together scaling ladders out of two-by-fours.These ladders would supplement some aluminum scaling ladders that they had brought from Japan.

As the ships made their way toward the landing area, the men were briefed on their objective. They would be part of the first wave on Blue Beach.The “brief for the Inchon landing was just that—brief. There wasn’t really much of one,” recalled Westover. The men and officers received hardly any details.The landing was so rushed that the only maps available were at 1/50,000th scale and were largely strategic. Later, after the landing, they were supplied with better maps.