This is the 66th Anniversary of that experience
Out there in Nolan County, West Texas, where there's nothin between you and the North Pole except a barbed wire fence, we lived in a little clapboard, three-room house, where the north wind sang sad and lonely tunes through the cracks between each board, the windows, and doors. The only heat was the dying fire in a wood stove the size of a five-gallon bucket. That little stove fought to the death against what Daddy called a "Blue Norther" straight lining out of the Arctic, whining through that barbed wire fence to our little weather-beaten shack. The winter often brought freezing degree temperatures to our beds. Mom would iron the sheets with a hot brick before we crawled in, but the cold found us anyway under covers so heavy we couldn't move. On those long winter nights ... I thought I was cold ... but...
I grew up quick and when I was 16 I had a job on a farm near Hastings, Nebraska. Every night, after a twelve hour day of hard, dirty work, the farmer's wife made me take a bath out under the wind-mill in a huge tank of icy water pumped up by the windmill, out of a deep well. That North wind, on its way to our tiny house in Texas, swept across that freezing water tank and my naked body like a gust of razor blades and ... I thought I was cold ... but ...
A year later, when I was 17, my Marine Battalion was sent on a "Cold Weather Training" expedition far North, much closer to the North Pole, to Kodiak Island in the Alaskan Aleutians. We were testing sorry cold weather gear, sorrier freeze dried food (just invented), and sleeping in pup tents, which magnified the mid-winter cold, to test our endurance and survivability under extreme conditions. I was sure it had never been that cold anywhere on earth. Yes, again, I thought I was really cold ... but ...
Three years later, in early December 1951, after a long, cold November as low as -30 degrees below Zero, we 12,000 Marines were fighting our way out of The North Korean, northern Taebaek Mountains. We were near China's Manchuria, and Russian Siberia, and were surrounded ten to one, by 120,000 Chinese soldiers, at a place called The Chosin Reservoir. On one of those last nights, before we made our final breakout, the temperature dropped to -35 % below zero. The north wind blew the snow horizontal but "Windchill" factor wasn't even a word back then. Weapons were frozen up, food, water, oil, medicine. and bleeding wounds froze up. Everyone there endured some degree of frostbite. Hypothermia was a normal condition. Some lost fingers or toes, and some their lives. Few had slept for days, but nobody slept that night, and for the first time in my life, I was, this time, truly cold.
We had all been fighting, in all four directions, for days. There were as many enemies behind us as in front of us. The entire US army to our west folded up, so we received orders from General MacArthur to cease attacking North and return south to the coast, 78 miles behind us. So we turned and began attacking South. A reporter asked Marine General O.P. Smith if "this was the first time in history the Marines had retreated?" To which, Gen. Smith said, "Retreat Hell, we are simply attacking in a different direction". He then explained to the reporter that when you are surrounded, there is no place to retreat, so you can only attack in another direction or stay where you are, and we're not staying.
Would I join the Marines again if I were 17 again? Bet your boots on it. It's part of who I am.
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