Give Me Tomorrow

“I couldn’t save him! I couldn’t save him!” screamed the corpsman as he continued to press down on the bloody neck of “his best friend” whose lifeless body lay in the back of a Jeep, his brain oozing out the back of his shattered skull. No one could remove his blood-drenched hands still clutching the dead man’s jugular.

Minutes earlier, “a North Korean woman armed with a rifle had fired the fatal shot from a second-story house,” remembered Fred Hems. Her first shot took the Marine’s helmet right off his head. Rather than reaching for cover, he grabbed his helmet, and as he was putting it on his head, the second round shattered his skull.

Navy corpsmen attached to George Company—some of the most heroic individuals on the battlefield—placed their lives at great risk as they attempted to treat the wounded. But for this George Company man, it was too much.

During the firefight, George Company had lost about four or five people in short order. The gore of the battlefield overwhelmed the corpsman’s senses and brain in a short time.The human brain can only process so much trauma. In battle, each individual finds his own way of coping or cracks. After he lost his best friend, the corpsman had to be taken to the rear.

George Company had to fight its way through the heart of Seoul. Ma Po Boulevard was lined with the burned-out gray hulks of churches and office buildings. With no room for maneuver, the men went straight up the gut, into a gauntlet of fire “so thick you could see the bullets.”

Astride each side of the road, George Company fought beside M26 tanks that supported them for most of the day. As the Marines fought up the boulevard, they faced hundreds of dug-in North Koreans. Armed with antitank guns and machine guns, the North Koreans bravely fought to the death. The narrow streets and houses made flanking attacks nearly impossible: everything in front of the barricades became a kill zone.

“As we were going up Ma Po Boulevard, a sergeant—I can’t remember his name—pushed me into a doorway because we were taking a lot of fire from the hill. As we stepped through the threshold, I heard a thud.When I turned around, I saw the sergeant had fallen to the ground. He had taken a round in the head,” said Tom Powers. He thought to himself: He’s a World War II vet and had a wife at home. These guys always try to take care of us. “He had just saved my life. I think I purposely blocked his name from my memory for fifty-nine years because it was so painful,” remembered Powers.

Under the intense fire, George Company casualties mounted hour by hour. And in early afternoon, several men went down simultaneously, including another member of First Platoon. Spotting the wounded man, Lieutenant Carey went to his aid, putting him in a fire-man’s carry to bring him to the rear. Blood from the wounded man’s body coated the young lieutenant’s uniform. In the heat of battle, the charismatic officer didn’t notice the crimson on his clothing.

Sitting on some rubble, Carey found himself “shooting the bull” with Sergeant Gene Lilly. Lilly, a WWII vet who had taken so many of the reservists, including Orace Edwards, under his wing, also asked Carey about his blood-stained clothes.

As Carey moved to the safety of cover, Lilly passed right into the space Carey had been occupying. Another sniper shot rang out. With a thud, a round penetrated Lilly’s heart. A devout Mormon, the sergeant seemed to stand up, arms and hands reaching straight up into the sky.

The platoon jumped back in action as M26 tanks from Baker Company began blasting the pockets of resistance, silencing machine gun fire. “When the tank’s 90 fired, the muzzle blast would knock the plywood and plaster off the fronts of the buildings,” recalled Dick Hock.

As the rest of George Company pushed down the road with the tanks, Lilly’s lifeless body remained alone on the side of the road, waiting for retrieval by the Graves Registration Unit.

Using the tanks for cover, one of the corpsmen went back to check the body. The medic soon returned, shaking his head. “Just nerves,” he said. “Lilly’s dead.”

The afternoon began to turn into evening, and fire became more and more intense. North Koreans pinned down George Company in front of a barricade made of logs, barbed wire, and sandbags. On the right-hand side of the street stood a stone elementary school several stories high with a rock retaining wall, which the North Koreans used as a weapons and ammunition cache. Several abandoned 120 mm mortars lay silent in the courtyard. A bend in the road to the right revealed another enemy roadblock, about fifty yards away.

As First Platoon passed over a small bridge, they were immediately hit by a torrent of small arms fire and an antitank gun. Dozens of North Koreans opened up on George Company.

With First Platoon in the lead, they were followed up by Tom Enos’s Second Platoon. “I remember the after-effects. One of the Marines was hit by an 85 mm round. It hit him in the chest, tore him apart. He was a radioman, and the radio was torn off his back and disintegrated. I just looked at it and kept going.This is the stuff I never talked about after the war.”

“With the curve in the road, there was such heavy fire,” recalled Hock. One of George Company’s advance teams out in the vanguard soon became pinned down. Luckily, the men found a nearby shell hole as they sought cover. The rest of Carey’s platoon clambered behind the other roadblock and began to return fire on the North Koreans in an attempt to relieve the beleaguered four-man fire team. The firefight went on for well over thirty minutes with no letup. Soon, battalion ordered Westover to pull back from the curve in the road to the protection of the stone wall and hill. Citing the iron rule of the Marine Corps to leave no man behind to the enemy, Westover informed the battalion that he needed to extricate his cutoff fire team.

The George Company men came up with several novel solutions. First, they attempted to pierce a nearby building wall with rockets so that they could reach the trapped men and pull them out. Once a small hole was created, two blocks of TNT were used to make it wide enough for a Marine to slither through. As the riflemen went through the hole for the rescue mission, they were cut down immediately by small arms fire. The first two men had holes drilled through their heads as they emerged from the other side of the aperture.

Next, the forward observer team called up mortars to lay in smoke, but the wind caused it to drift too far. With smoke mortars in short supply, a solution came in the form of incendiary grenades. As Hock recalled: “Someone threw out the grenades as far as they could.We used the smoke to cover the withdrawal.”

Through the smokescreen, Hock and the other Marine sprinted down the street and extricated the fire team, including two badly injured comrades. Their fellow Marines placed the wounded men in fireman’s carries and sprinted down the street under heavy fire, miraculously avoiding further wounds.

After the melee, another problem surfaced. On the eastern edge of the intersection near the schoolhouse lay a sewage canal. A South Korean civilian, acting as an interpreter, reported to Westover that dozens of North Korean soldiers were hiding in the culvert.Westover turned to Zullo: “First Sergeant, how about taking care of that.” (Throughout the melee, Zullo had been “all over place and wherever there was a fight,” barking orders, recalled Dale McKenna.)

Zullo nodded and sprang into action. He carefully maneuvered down into the drainage ditch. Next he ordered a machine gun set up on one end of the culvert and ordered his men, “Don’t fire until I tell you too.”

Zullo then ordered a small group of riflemen and a BAR-man to the other opening in the culvert. “I made it clear if the enemy fired no one would come out of the culvert alive,” he recalled.

Zullo wanted to take the North Koreans alive. Using an interpreter, Zullo attempted to coax the North Koreans into surrendering. The First Sergeant knew they might be able to provide valuable intelligence. But “someone got trigger happy and fired into the tunnel,” recalled Hems.

Hems began firing the .30 caliber machine gun into the darkness. The BAR-man and the other men with Zullo followed suit. The incident ended when Zullo went down toward the drainage ditch alone and pitched two grenades into the darkness. Placing his carbine on full automatic, he emptied a thirty-round clip of ammunition into the dark tunnel. A Marine foolishly tried to place his head into the ditch. Zullo barked, “You stupid son of a bitch. Do you want to die?”

Hems recalled, “ I felt bad about it. It was the first time I killed someone at close range. I think about it all the time, killing human beings. And I didn’t like to shoot them. As I think about it now, I was only a teenager.”

Not all of the Marines agreed with Hems. “Later, Hems would recap what happened that day, internalize things. It got to be too much sometimes. I’ll never forget telling him one day to shut the fuck up!” recalled Powers.

The effects of the incident—both physical and mental—remained for days. “My boondockers were coated with green shit. People avoided me because of the stench,” recalled Powers, who had waded into the raw sewage to feed belts of ammo to Hems’s gun.

A handful of Marines had destroyed an entire enemy platoon, over forty men. Later, Zullo explained, “I wanted to take them prisoner, but we had to annihilate them once they didn’t come out. Otherwise, they would have hit us from the rear. Nice guys don’t win wars.”