My father (RIP) landed at Inchon. He made it back. A few guys from his hometown didn’t.
My uncle was on occupation duty in Japan in June 1950 in a mortar crew in the 24th Division and a week after the invasion by the Norks he was on a ship headed across the Sea of Japan.
He fought at most of these battles: Pyongtaek, Chonan, Chochiwon, and eventually Taejeon. He saw General Dean giving orders for US defense of the Taejeon right before the battle started and he was one of the last unit to break out before it fell. They fell back to Pusan and held until Inchon and then he talks about pushing through Pyongyang and it looking like a total wreck after they finished with it and going to the Yalu.
The night before the Chinese entered the war he witnessed junior officers asking the colonel in command how he wanted to set up defensive positions for the night, go down to the village next to the Yalu or stay up on the plateau and set up. He said the colonel looked around for a moment and said, will stay up here on the high ground, we can always move to the rivers edge in the morning. My uncle said strangely he went to sleep that evening and slept the most soundly his entire tour in the war.
About 2:00am he said his buddy was tugging on him telling him to wake up the front outpost was engaging something and he told his buddy its nothing and went back to sleep. About thirty minutes later the second line of defenses engaged and their armor started firing and his buddy got him up then and they were headed to trucks. Command had ordered a retreat and he said they past a rear area where the cooks had been caught and they were strung up and had been castrated and tortured before being killed. He made up his mind then he said, I would not be surrendering to these animals. Had they set up at the village by the Yalu they would have been slaughtered.
At one point during the war in a firefight him and his buddy got lost from their unit and found themselves running from the Norks for three days, up one mountain and down, over and over. After two days they were out of food and at the bottom of one of these mountains was a farm house and they found a chicken and the buddy wanted to kill and cook it and my uncle said, no kill it and bring it with us will cook it later and they hadn’t more than started up the next mountain and looked down and it was swarming with Norks.
Finally the third day they came to a road with an intersection and noticed soldiers in what appeared to be green US fatigues but they were not Americans. Taking a chance they walked up to one and the soldier was shocked to see two Americans and they started trying to communicate. Thank God he said they were ROK troops and he pointed them in a direction and they went that way and ran into a couple of Americans in a jeep who were shocked to see them. They took them to a big US air base where they stayed for three days as the base tried to find out where their unit was so they could get them back to it. In the meantime he said him and his buddy ate very nice meals with some big brass at the base, they were well fed and enjoyed themselves until they got sent to their unit.
He struggled with PTSD for nearly a decade after the war, he had seen hand to hand combat and killed people up close, shovels, bayonets, knives. His first marriage didn’t last because of the PTSD. He finally settled down and came to terms with it in the early 1960’s. Now he will talk to you about the war if you ask him.