1969. I was a young sergeant with an armored battalion in Korea. I’d successfully (and with honors, yet!) completed training to become a tank commander. I was trained in the things I should know to participate in WW III in Europe. I was schooled in the tactics that would help me survive in Viet Nam. And I was in Korea. In a unit whose mission included maintaining dismounted (infantry-style) security and observation points along the Imjin River.
We were in the waning days of a period in which North Korea was trying to destabilize the south by sending in teams of infiltrators, and our battalion was tasked from time to time with manning a dozen or so positions along the river. Most of our positions were on the south side of the the river, and it was in one of these positions that I found myself on Christmas Eve 1969, me and a lower-ranking cohort, occupying a bunker that overlooked the river itself.
Our rules of engagement were simple: Anything on or in the river after dark was free fire. During the day, there were registered and numbered Korean fishing boats that might be out in the river, but after dark there was to be nothing. From our tower we could see a sizable island in the river, one of those ever-changing alluvial things, covered with waist high grass. On that island was another of our positions.
The Imjin is a rather unusual river in that it flows into Inchon Bay, a body of water which has the second-highest tides in the world. The tides swing almost thirty feet. At the lower part of the tidal cycle, the river flows like most rivers in the world, towards the sea. When the tide comes in, though, things get whacky. The river runs backwards. the log you saw travelling down stream a few hours ago, well, here it comes back. Interesting. Another thing it does, though, is radically change the river level.
That island that I mentioned above? At low water, we got to that island by fording the river in an armored personnel carrier. Our officers would take a jeep out there to inspect things. (Well, it wasn’t really a jeep, it was an M151, but it looked like a jeep and that’s what we called it.) Crossing the little arm of the river that made that big sand bar an island meant that water went halfway over the tires. When the river backed up at high tide, you couldn’t ford the river. We had a lieutenant with a crazy driver who tried the trip while the river was rising. We almost lost both of them and the jeep as the waters swept them sideways off the gravelly bottom. Nobody was crazy enough to try the trip at high water. In the winter, we couldn’t get to that island. The river froze over, and instead of water rushing back and forth, it was stream of pulverized ice, impassible by jeep or personnel carrier.
I drew the night side of our two twelve-hour shifts for Christmas Eve. We ate our regular lunch at the company messhall at Camp Rose and in late afternoon we climbed aboard a deuce and a half (big ol’ truck) to ride to the position along with the crews for the rest of the positions. We relieved the day shift who got in the truck for the ride back. We climbed into our little bunker and used our manpack radio, an AN/PRC-25, known to its users as a Prick 25, to check into the company radio net. And that was it. For twelve hours. Stare at the river with a pair of binoculars until it got dark, then use a night-vision scope. Sit there and listen to the silence. And every hour, we’d pick up the microphone of that radio and check into the company to let them know we were still alive and alert.
It was damn cold. I was wearing everything I owned in the way of cold-weather gear, and sitting still, it wasn’t up to the task. Yes, we DID have a stove, an army-issue pot belly, set up to burn wood for heat, but we didn’t get much wood, a few billets a day, enough to take the chill off for a few hours. The bunker wasn’t built with creature comforts in mind, and the same opeing in the two foot concrete wall that you could look (and shoot) out of was also a way for a howling wind out of Siberia to blow in. Movement was our friend in cold weather, but there wasn’t a lot of movement area in the bunker. We took turns walking out of the bunker for a walk around, then back inside. With all that clothing, it didn’t take much to get warm, but we had to be careful NOT to get TOO warm. Sweating in your cold-weather gear was a bad deal, because it made the chill even deeper when it cooled off.
Twelve hours was a long, almost interminable time, punctuated by our meal of cold C-rations whenever hunger hit. Somewhere in the middle of the night, Christmas Eve turned into Christmas on a cold Cajun 7000 miles from home. My gift that day was hearing that deuce and a half growing down from the hills into the river valley to relieve us at the end of our shift.
That was Christmas for me in 1969. Some of my brothers in arms in Viet Nam had it much worse. But that’s one of many reasons why I pray for today’s soldiers, Marines, airmen and sailors as Christmas approaches. I’ve been there.
