"First Kill"

    It was my twentieth day. Twenty days in Korea. Twenty days with the Seventh Regiment, First Marine Division. Most of those days were spent climbing every damned hill in sight. I don’t remember seeing one enemy soldier. We were always looking, but to me it seemed like all we were doing was climbing. 

    Actually, I had seen one enemy soldier. A dead one. He was lying ten feet or so in front of our positions the first day that I joined Able Company. He had died the day before, when our company attacked and secured the hill that we were on. He started smelling pretty bad after a couple of days, so someone kicked him down to the bottom of the hill. We couldn’t smell him then. 

    It didn’t make much difference. Because the next morning, we started climbing more hills. Clearly that was something we spent a lot of time doing. We moved north as the North Korean and Chinese troops retreated to the north. We climbed even more hills, and at the top of our last one of the day, we would dig in for the night. That meant digging a shallow fox hole — long enough to lay out a sleeping bag, but not so deep that it would take too long to dig. After all, we would be leaving it the next morning when we would be off to find more hills to tackle. That was the routine, at least so far. But everyone knew that the People’s Volunteer Army of the Republic of China would not retreat forever. Sooner or later they would turn and fight. That day came April 21st, 1951.

    As usual, we had climbed our last hill of the day and dug in for the night. I had the first watch from 2000 to 2200 — that’s 8:00pm to 10:00pm for those unfamiliar with military twenty-four hour system. I woke my relief when my shift ended, crawled into my sleeping back in my shallow trench and fell asleep as soon as my head touched the pillow (not a real pillow of course, my backpack.)

    I woke up to the sounds of the 1st explosion two hours later. It was midnight, and suddenly there was so much noise. As I opened my eyes, I looked straight up from my sleeping bag. I could see red tracer bullets flying overhead and an orange glow to the north. I could hear machine gun fire and explosives of some kind. The fight had come, and along with my fellow soldiers, I would face it. 

    I got out of my sleeping bag, made sure my rifle was ready, and looked around to assess our surroundings. I couldn’t see any enemy soldiers anywhere in front of me. One of our machine gunners about fifty yards ahead and to the left was keeping up a steady sweep of the ground in front. It seemed as though we had control of the situation, at least for now. But I knew I wasn’t in it yet. 

    What was immediately clear was that my fox hole was not deep enough. I would need to take the time before any enemy soldiers arrived to dig it deeper — much deeper. I got my shovel from my pack and started to dig. Two inches down, I found a huge rock, much too big to dig up or past. So that was that — I couldn’t waste time. My foxhole would have to be deep enough as it was. 

    The minutes passed and turned into hours, and no enemy troops got through that machine gun fire, at least not in our area. Other parts of Able Company weren’t so lucky — we would hear all about it the next morning. The stories from fellow soldiers and our commanders, surviving soldiers a little older than we were who had seen hell in The Pacific… those are the stories you never forget once you get home. You realize how big of a wonder it is you survived at all.

    Suddenly, two enemy soldiers got through the machine gun fire. They showed up right in front of a couple members of my squad who were located ahead of me just to the right in their respective fox holes. The targets were dispatched quickly without doing any damage. Those types of decisions would need to be made quickly. I had seen other soldiers exercise gun fire when necessary to disable the enemy, and at some point, I would be faced with the same moment to make a decision to pull the trigger.

    At first light the next morning, about 6am, the Chinese gave up the attack in our sector. With daylight, Marine and Navy close air support could win the fight and do some major damage to the attackers, so they withdrew. I looked around to see if there were any emery troops in sight. 

    Suddenly, on a hill about two hundred yards away, I saw something… A man running down the front slope dead ahead. He was in plain sight. He wore a brown uniform, a member of the Republic of China Volunteer army. I couldn’t get my rifle up in time to execute a successful shot, but I thought if there was one enemy soldier, there could be another. I aimed at the path that the runner had taken. Almost immediately another man ran right into my sight and I made a decision in seconds and fired my weapon. I watched almost in slow motion as he fell and went rolling down the hill. 

    In that moment, the strangest feeling came over me. That was not a cardboard cut out at Camp Pendleton’s training grounds. This wasn’t practice anymore. That was a real human being. He had a mother and a father, maybe a wife and kids. Maybe he was a decent person? Maybe he was funny even. But now he was probably lying dead at the bottom of that hill, and I was the man who had killed him. I did what I was trained to do, but I was sorry that I had killed another man. The weight of that life was not lost on me as I thought about what his experience might have been in this war, each moment leading up to the moment my bullet entered his body. That was my bullet. 

    The sorrow didn’t last long. There was no time to be sad. A minute or two later, my squad moved out in front of our lines to search for any more enemy activity. We didn’t find any, and in some ways, I was relieved. What we did find were hundreds of dead and dying Chinese soldiers — the victims of last night’s machine gun fire. Most of them were young… probably teenagers like me. There were also some older soldiers as well — men who had probably followed Chairman Mao during the Communist take-over of China following WWII… men who had seen a lot. I’d never seen a dead body before that moment, and now we were walking grounds covered in fallen soldiers. 

    As we approached our company commander’s foxhole, we saw the bodies of the Marines who had been killed during last night’s fight as well. I recognized two of them… men who had arrived in Korea with me from the states just twenty-one days earlier. It reminded me of a conversation that occurred on our flight in… one of those young fallen men was sitting to my left as we awaited arrival. I remember his fear, his expressions of concerns as the plane shook around us, the tremble in his voice as he leaned closer to my ear… 

    “I’m scared. What’s it going to be like?”

    I remember not responding… allowing his words to evaporate into cold air circulating our aircraft. I stared straight ahead, listening to the sounds of his quiet tears welling up next to me. I made a promise to myself right then and there… that I would not give into the fear that this young soldier was wrapped up in. I would stay focused and alert. I would not allow myself to sink into my own sadness or trepidations about what was to come. Fear was not focused. Living in fear allowed for paranoia and room for mistakes. I could hear his voice continuing to cry next to me… 

    “I just want to go home…” 

    I responded quickly this time, because I wanted to help this young man if I could. I wanted to keep him focused on his mission so that maybe he would have a chance of seeing his parents again. 

    “If you want to get home, you gotta quit that crying right now. Don’t become an easy target, Marine. Stay focused. We have a mission here.”

    He nodded. I remember the nod, because I hoped he had really heard me. I understood this young man’s feelings of dread and panic as we approached our destination… we all felt it in some part of our gut. We were fighting for American justice the minute we stepped foot on Korean soil, and our lives would be on the line. The minute you lost sight of that mission, you were at risk of losing your composure and your awareness, and potentially, your life. I hoped he heard me because I wanted him to live. I wanted him to survive Korea and get back home to his family, to prove that any one of us could survive. We could go home at the end of this if we just paid close attention to our surroundings. 

    Seeing those men lying dead that day, men that I remembered, their voices — one mans fear… It erased my feelings of sorrow in that moment. I had to give myself the same speech now. I had to remind myself of the same goal if I wanted to survive now. Just like I had told him, I now needed to remember my training. I needed to focus on my target and stay clear on our mission. 

    I would not end up a dead soldier on the ground. I knew that when I faced another kill of an enemy soldier — and I knew there would be more — I wouldn’t think of them as people… as another young teenager. I couldn’t. If I wanted to survive Korea, I would need to transport my mind back to my training days. They couldn’t be men in that moment… I had to see them as cardboard cut outs… just like those at Camp Pendleton.