Good Night Chesty Puller, where ever you are, you magnificent son of a b*tch!
I have always found Chosin to be one of the most amazing and terrible incidents in the annals of modern war.
Some of those men in 1944 were fighting in Peleliu, no water, terrible privation, clouds of flies, living in proximity to noxious corpses that couldn’t be buried because the intense close in fighting that was taking place kept them away from getting to many bodies, and those they could reach could not be covered due to the coral rock that composed the island. All this, in a bubbling cauldron that reached as high at 115 degrees.
Unbelievable. Then fast forward six years to December 1950. Many of those same men had been called up from civilian life where they were on “inactive reserve” (I believe, not “active reserve where they had been actively training) hurriedly trained and sent to the Korean Peninsula. There they were encircled, at a 10-1 disadvantage, in snow and ice, with the temperatures as low as 36 degrees below zero, and windchill that took it down to 70 degrees below zero.
Many of these same men had fought at both Peleliu and Chosin...one can only imagine guys saying they were so unlucky they would never gamble again (or perhaps thinking all their bad luck had been used up, so gambling was something they should really engage in!)
I salute those men. That one Marine Division kicked the crap out of those ten Chinese divisions and rendered them combat ineffective...