Interviewed June 2000 by Bill Welch
The price of survival
A Korean War veteran comes to terms with the war and the toll it took on him in the decades that followed
By BILL WELCH
Staff writer
The day after his first action in the Korean War, the day after he saw 30 of 38 men in his platoon cut down, Lewis Knight made a decision he must be a loner.
From this point on, Knight told any soldier
trying to get to know him there was only one thing he wanted to know the soldier's name.
Today, Knight has lived alone for five years and that's the way he prefers it. A softspoken man, he's been married
twice, went through a long period of heavy drinking that started after he left Korea, and still deals with depression with the help of Veterans Administration counselors.
He has come to grips with himself and what he
went through, but it took all these years for it to happen. And now, for the first time, he can tell his story about Korea.
Initiation at Pohang
When the call went out in July 1950 for volunteers to
go to the unexpected "police action" in South Korea, the blond, slightly built, 19-year-old private from Riceville, Crawford County, signed up. It was five years since the U.S. had won World War II
against much more powerful nations than North Korea. He had his share of relatives and acquaintances who had gone off to war and came back. Why should this be any different?
"We figured that the American Army
would show up and the North Koreans would turn the other way."
Like many young soldiers whose early and mid-teen years spanned the Second World War and now found themselves in Korea, Knight thought this war would be
like the ones they had watched in the movie theaters.
"My mind changed in a hurry."
He arrived in Korea Aug. 3, 1950, exactly a year since he had enlisted. In the six weeks since the first American forces had
joined the fight in Korea, they had been in steady retreat, sometimes taking heavy casualties. The U.S. Army and what was left of the South Korean army held a steadily shrinking perimeter around the port of Pusan.
The 21st Infantry Regiment held the north flank at the town of Pohang along the eastern coast of the Korean peninsula. The regiment was part of the 24th Infantry Division, which had supplied the first U.S.
troops to join the fight.
"Pohang was my initiation to the war."
First Platoon, Company K, was ordered to take Hill 99 sometime in August. Two squads the first and second, about 18 men would set off at 9
a.m. from their hill, advance through rice paddies and then take the hill 1,000 yards away. The third squad and the fourth squad, the platoon's mortar unit, would provide cover fire.
"As we got halfway there, all hell broke loose."
The North Koreans opened up on the advancing squads with machine gun and rifle fire, and hit the third and fourth squads with mortars so they couldn't provide the cover
fire. Matter-of-factly, Knight described what happened. Sometimes there were just the briefest pauses, as though the scene was replaying itself one more time.
"We were just out in the middle with no place
to go, no cover. Guys were dropping. The lieutenant and my sergeant, Sgt. Bolin, told us to keep advancing, it was our only hope. We did. I got to the top of the hill and directly in front of me
about 6 feet away were two North Koreans. One of them had a burp gun and he whirled around and fired it. I felt something. I didn't know what it was. They always say the bullet that gets you,
you'll never hear, but I felt a 'splat splat' and I felt a warm sensation going down my leg. I figured I was hit. I don't remember firing my rifle. I fired from my hip and they both went down. I heard the
tinny sound of the empty clip.
"Bullets were hitting all around me. One of the North Koreans I had shot was really quivering, shaking. It was totally chaos at that point. Sgt. Bolin was yelling at me to
get down. I just couldn't move. He jumped to his feet and knocked me back over the hill. I said to him, 'I'm hit.' He said, 'Where?' I looked down and what had happened, I had had my water canteen on
my hip and one or two bullets had penetrated it and it was warm water that was running down my leg. I wasn't hit."
The small battle continued. The two squads what was left of them remained on Hill 99 all day
long.
The opening mortar fire from the Americans had apparently sent the North Koreans in retreat. They were on their way to retake the hill at the same time the first and second squads came up the other
side. "And we just kind of met."
"It was total chaos. Nobody knew what to do. We just kept firing. They were trying to come back up the hill. We were trying to stop them. Late in the afternoon,
we were running out of ammunition. Finally, our jets came and started strafing the North Koreans, firing rockets, dropping napalm. When this happened, we were told to pull back to the hill we just left.
"We did this.
And that's when reality set in. There were dead bodies all through the rice paddies. When we got back to the hill we jumped off from, there were a lot of dead bodies from the third and fourth squads.
There was sergeant who had been kneeling, firing over our heads and the right side of his head was just gone. Yet he was still upright. Kind of weird.
"We spend the night on this hill. If they had come up
at us, we would have been finished."
The day had started with the platoon strength at 38 men. Eight were left.
'Stand or die'
The next day, they were withdrawn to Taegu where they would get more
replacements, including South Koreans and re-form.
"I didn't want to know any of these guys that were coming in," Knight said. "I mean, I knew all these guys we had lost. And all through the war I just had
this tell your name but don't tell me anything else."
About this time, the word came down from Gen. Douglas MacArthur, commander of the United Nations forces in South Korea, to hold at all costs.
"We would
stand or we would die. There were no ships to take us out of there. We were to hold at all costs until more people came. I personally thought we were all going to die."
More people did come. The U.S.
and other nations sent a steady stream of troops to hold the perimeter at Pusan. In mid-September, Marines went ashore at Inchon on Korea's west coast, far to the rear of the invading force, and drove eastward to
cut off the North Koreans. The forces inside the Pusan perimeter broke out and drove north.
'Don't let me freeze'
Knight's unit was ordered to cross the Naktong River. Unlike most river
crossings into enemy territory, this one would be made in daylight.
"We went across in small plywood boats. My squad again was the first squad to cross. My heart was just pounding like I thought my chest
was going to burst. I couldn't swallow, my mouth was so dry. And I kept saying to myself over and over, 'God, don't let me freeze." The memory of freezing back in August still haunted him.
"I don't even
remember leaving the boat. There was a hill we were supposed to take and we all charged up this hill. I remembered. When I hit the top of the hill this time, I hit the ground."
From the top of the hill,
they could see a valley and a ridge beyond. They could see movement in the valley. One man from the Second Platoon led the way across a bridge and was hit.
"He was lying there. We could hear him saying,
'God, help me.' Every time someone would try to get to him, they would open up. Sgt. Bolin looked at me and said, 'Let's go kid.' "
Bolin charged down the hill, with Knight following right behind and
headed for a creek that wound its way behind the North Korean position.
They got down to the creek, which was 8 inches deep, and could still hear the injured soldier from the Second Platoon. They also saw
movement. Side by side, Knight and Bolin advanced through the creek, firing their M-1 rifles at the North Koreans.
"Two of them jumped up in the air with their hands over their heads to surrender. We quit
firing but kept moving towards them. Then two more jumped up and waved their hands. By now, we could see that the guys got out on the bridge were tending to this guy who had gone down, but it was too late. He was dead.
"And the lieutenant of the Second Platoon hollered out, 'Kill those sonsabitches.' And the whole Second Platoon opened up. Dropped them all.
"I felt really terrible. But it wouldn't be too many days
from then when we found 42 of our guys with their hands tied behind them with wire and shot in the back of the head." He didn't feel so bad then. The massacre of those American prisoners and others like it put the
Americans in no mood for mercy.
Though the Americans now had the North Koreans on the run, casualties built up, especially after diehard elements were left behind to slow the UN forces.
"You had to kill them. They wouldn't give up. We lost a lot of people.
"Replacements came in. I had developed this attitude everybody did I think. We didn't want to know anything about them."
No way out
The UN forces reclaimed South Korea and then continued north to take the entire Korean peninsula. Communist China, however, was about to join the fight, as it had planned from the beginning of the war.
"It looked like the war was over. We had the Koreans beat. We were just 18 miles from the Yalu River."
Then the 21st Regiment turned south. "We didn't know why. The officers knew, but they didn't say."
They knew that half a million Chinese soldiers had come over the Yalu, had the 1st Marine Division and other Army units nearly cut off and were threatening to envelop their own division. If vehicles stopped for
breakdowns or even lack of gasoline, they were pushed out of the way and blown up.
It was November now and cold, very cold. The 24th Division had not been issued winter clothing yet. Knight would suffer
frostbite, which he still feels on cold days. As it marched south through the cold, the division was hit over and over by the Chinese. Bugles and whistles would blow in the night and the Chinese would swarm
at the Americans. "They overran us a few times."
Knight, at this point, became convinced he would not survive this war.
"When we heard the Chinese came, I thought, 'No way am I getting out of here.' "
The sentiment had been building since the disaster at Pohang.
"I was resigned to the fact that I wouldn't be coming home from Korea. It was just, try to survive as long as you could."
He barely survived one encounter.
Knight was manning a machine gun. The Chinese were hitting hard. His assistant had gone off to get more ammunition.
"I saw something off to the right and thought it
was my assistant coming back. It was a Chinese soldier. He had an M-1 with a bayonet and charged me. I put my knees and elbows up to protect my body. He stabbed at me, getting me in the knees a couple
times. I had a .45 (pistol) but couldn't get to it. Then he slumped. My assistant had got back and shot him."
The M-1 the Chinese soldier carried didn't have any ammunition. "Otherwise, I wouldn't be
here today."
No prisoner
After the long winter retreat, The UN forces stopped the Chinese and in the spring advanced, eventually pushing the Chinese back to a line that roughly matched the original border
between north and south. During that counteroffensive, Knight and four men were sent on a reconnaissance patrol. They were pinned down in a rice paddy and their radio knocked out, leading the rest of the
platoon to think they had been wiped out. They stayed low for the rest of the day, planning to move out at dark.
While pinned there, Knight kept his M-1 ready and a grenade in one hand. He put his little
finger through the ring. If he were hit or surrounded, the grenade would fall down, but the pin would stay with his finger. It was sure death.
"I had decided long before that I would not be taken
prisoner." Visions of the 42 men who had been executed helped him decide.
It didn't come to that. At dark, the patrol got up and started walking back to the platoon's position. Their sergeant told
them to be sure to walk and to take their helmets off. Just behind them were the Chinese, on their way to assault the rest of the platoon.
"They started blowing the bugles and when they started blowing their bugles,
we went right along with them. At one point, one was so close behind me he could have reached out and touched me on the shoulder.
"We yelled out, 'Patrol coming back in.' By some quirk of fate, all five of us
made it." Not only did the patrol return, but the assault was repulsed.
Knight's time on the front line continued until June 1951 when the platoon lieutenant decided Knight had been in combat long enough.
By this time, he was the only one left from those he started with the previous August. "Every day somebody got hurt, killed. It was just a way of life. It was a just a matter of when my number would be up."
The
lieutenant made Knight a Jeep driver. And it was while driving the Jeep, he sustained his only wound other than the bayonet cuts to his knee. An artillery round caught the ammunition trailer the Jeep was pulling,
sending shrapnel into Knight's back. It remains there today.
Some peace at last
In late September 1951, Knight was shipped home.
"For the longest time when I got home, I was messed
up. Nobody knew why we were there. Nobody did a good job of telling us why. I wanted to forget about it. Most Korean veterans wanted to forget about it.
"And for the longest time I wasn't very happy
with myself. I actually didn't like myself for some of the things we had to do over there." He doesn't want to talk about those things.
Not a day has gone by since August 1950 that he doesn't think about
it.
Though he was married twice and now lives alone, Knight is very happy with his two daughters, five grandchildren and two stepgrandchildren. He has used these years of living alone to reflect and, finally, to
come to terms with himself.
Last year, for the first time, he went to a reunion of the men from Company K. He only knew one man there, but was able to say things there he hadn't been able to say since the
war. Last month, he went alone to Washington, D.C., where he visited Arlington National Cemetery, the Vietnam Memorial and the Korean War Memorial.
"I thought there were no more tears to shed, but I got
quite emotional there."
He can look back now and realize that the fight in Korea did have a purpose, that it was successful in preserving South Korea and in setting in motion the string of events that would decide the
Cold War.
"I wasn't proud of anything I had done. I'm definitely not a hero. I don't consider myself a brave person. I never did anything you might call heroic. I never tried to.
"I was scared all the
time. I felt like throwing down my rifle and running. I never did."
Why? Because of the men he was with. He might not have wanted to get to know them, but he was in the same boat with them and would
not let them down.
"One thing I found out about myself, that even though I was scared to death, I had the courage to stand there and fight when I had to. Today I'm very proud to be a Korean veteran."
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Horrifying as his experience of war was, Knight feels like many combat veterans do: He would not go through it again, and he would not trade it for a million dollars. And yet:
"If I had a son, I would have gone in his place rather than see him go through it."
