soldiers of the Eighth Army were living and dying in a faraway, miserable land simply because they had been told that it was their job . . . and they were Men. So it was in Korea that when the First Marine Brigade disembarked at Pusan they walked ashore with boots dry, which spoke of the gallant men holding the Perimeter curving northward. Trained to war, masters of amphibious landing, mustered out of camps, technical schools, special missions and embassy posts from all around the world, those Marines of the First Brigade knew the value of their dry boots, and the price being paid by men somewhere over the mountains behind the port. Stumbling down the hillside from where we had dug-in for the night, Tom Lambert of the Associated Press and I had stopped to scrounge bits of breakfast from those Marines already prying open their ration cans when a helicopter came churning over the valley from our rear, then landed out in the nearly dry riverbed below. At the same time about a dozen of the Marines’ new Pershing tanks rumbled up, turned and fanned out upon the river banks. We cut across the paddies to where the plane spraddled with rotor blades still spinning while the pilot held her ready for immediate take-off. We both spotted the snowwhite head of Marine Brigadier General Edward Craig as he stepped from the plane. With his men scheduled to attack, Craig had moved up, taking personal command of the assault. Watching a slow smile start across his lean, deeply tanned face, while a pair of cool blue eyes swept the nearby hills where his Marines were deepening their foxholes, I knew that that veteran of Iwo Jima and Bougainville could take anything Korea could hand out. Suddenly that old familiar bucket-swinging swoosh cut out all other sounds and two mortar bombs dropped into the riverbed. Great geysers of mud and gravel mixed with red-hot fragments shot into the sky. So did the helicopter. Before another bracket of bombs could fall the plane was halfway down the valley, General Craig was in his jeep headed for his CP on the mountainside and Lambert and I were diving for cover next to a nearby howitzer. Two bombs burst 46 l Ⅲ. Korea 1950 This is War!
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