A Marine Corps Korean War veteran and distinguished author recounts—in vivid detail—the day his platoon commander "found blessed relief."
I recall that the moon kept dodging in and out of clouds and that the spring peepers were loud, which made us nervous. Whenever a gang of them would go silent across the way, it meant a Chinese patrol was near. The frogs announced our presence as well, shutting down their spring song as we approached.
There were seven of us on that patrol, moving in single file and led by Lieutenant Edward Guyol. This officer, wanting to show us he was aggressive and brave, took the point. He did not need to do that. He should not have done that. The lieutenant had been in Able Company only a few days but already made a good impression; he was calm and decisive, and he knew how to be friendly without being familiar. I liked the way he smoked his pipe at the briefings.
For several months it had been a static, trench-warfare kind of campaign. The landscape in our sector was comparatively void of vegetation because of the shrapnel and napalm that had rained down. In our sector No Man's Land was like a desert of shale. Wandering across this barren stretch of dunes, we came across a dried corpse in the moonlight and passed it by, one at a time. I was the last man in the column and the only one who avoided looking at the face. We were all glad when we heard the lieutenant whispering to Captain Gil Krupp over the sound-power phone, "It's a gook"—meaning it was not a Marine and therefore we would not have to deal with it.
A little later, heading back toward our lines, Lieutenant Guyol stopped and again whispered into the phone, this time asking the captain to alert Outpost Hedy of our approach. This was routine.
As the lieutenant led us up the last dune, the moon emerged once more from the clouds, rendering him starkly conspicuous on the skyline. A burst of fire rang out from the direction of a Chinese outpost we called The Fan, a few hundred feet to our left; at the same time, a raucous burst cracked from our right flank, shockingly close. The lieutenant tumbled out of sight and began squealing; the sound was the sound a boar makes when he is being castrated.
We considered ourselves surrounded. Corporal Borden Hanna, muttering urgently into the phone, requested a corpsman with a rescue squad right away. The squealing was maddening.
The bravest act I ever witnessed in all my time in Korea occurred then: Private Josh Rivera ran up the slope, disappeared over the skyline, and reappeared, dragging the lieutenant into our hasty-defense perimeter. It seemed obvious that the man was dying. It was the first time I ever witnessed someone suffering agony. Tears rolled down my cheeks in the dark, but I was not only grieving for the lieutenant; I was resentful and frustrated that the Chinese could hear his cries and were likely enjoying the sound.
After a while, the novocaine of shock took effect, and the hideous noise subsided. The officer asked Private Rivera to hold his hand and then asked him to squeeze it hard.
"Harder!"
Rivera asked him questions to keep his mind off the pain. "How old are you, sir?"
"Twenty-two."
"What's your first name, sir?"
"Ned."
"Where do you live, sir?"
"Laramie, Wyoming."
He grimaced with a flash of pain and began thrashing among the debris where he lay—tin sheeting and rusting C-rations cans of some abandoned observation post. "Oh God," he cried, "let me pass out. I'm scared."
The lieutenant had been hit by two rounds, one through the kidney, one through the liver. So far, only Private Rivera knew the location of the wounds. He lay beside the lieutenant, pressing gauze against the holes.
"Are you married, sir?"
"No.... Don't even have a girl."
He began to call for his mother; this, I learned later, is something many dying soldiers do. The rest of us were splayed around Rivera and the lieutenant, weapons outboard. We listened, and heard noises, and our imaginations told us that the Chinese were closing in. I wanted them to attack, so that we could avenge ourselves for the lieutenant's agony and terror, and to make up for the squealing.
Lieutenant Edward M. Guyol, U.S. Marine Corps (1931-1953), found blessed relief a few minutes later.
As soon as we reached our lines, we were summoned to the Able Company command post, a large bunker on the reverse slope. Inside, a Coleman lantern illuminated the sandbags and the long faces of the Marines. When we were seated on the dirt, Captain Krupp informed us that the lieutenant had been killed by shots fired from Outpost Hedy by a Marine machine gunner—a private who had not gotten word of our approach.
"And now I want you all to be quiet," he said. "I have a terrible task to perform" Then he called Battalion and reported that the lieutenant had been shot and killed by one of his own men.
A few years later, passing through Laramie, I flirted with the notion of visiting his folks, so that I could tell them how brave Private Rivera had been and that the lieutenant's last thoughts were of his mother. But I knew it wouldn't make them feel any better about things. And I was afraid they might sense the true motive of my visit, which was to show off, and be made much of.
Mr. Russ is author of Breakout: The Chosin Reservoir Campaign, Korea 1950, and The Last Parallel: A Marine’s War Journal (both New York: Fromm International, 1999). He changed the names of the principals involved in this story to protect their identities.