Interviewed by Bill Welch June 2000The march of the Marines
Weary, frozen to the bone, stunned by the brutality around them, they moved steadily to the Korean coast,
killing before they could be killed
John Sestak went through some of the toughest fighting of the Korean War as a U.S. Marine. Sestak was there from the amphibious landing at Inchon in September 1950 through the
winter march from the "Frozen Chosin" Reservoir and then back up the peninsula to the 38th Parallel in the spring. He kept most of the story to himself these 50 years, occasionally telling a funny story
or brief anecdote to his children. For the first time, he tells his story.
The holes in the roof of the tent told "Mumbles" Sestak that something was wrong.
Sestak was crowded into the
battalion's warm-up tent, trying to get warm along with other men from his unit. It was minus 35 degrees outside — too cold that night of Nov. 27, 1950, for sleeping. Marines who weren't on alert crammed
inside the tent, tried to get warm and smoked.
While puffing on his cigarette, Sestak looked up at the tent roof and noticed holes in it. "Hey! There's holes in the roof!" he yelped. More holes
appeared.
"I said, 'Holes, my foot! They're firing at us.' We got out then. Some of the men ran out. I crawled out under the tent. That's when someone said, 'We're being hit.'"
They ran out to find
themselves under fire from enemy soldiers who had quietly overrun the nearby hill that had been occupied by a South Korean machine gun unit. The enemy was on the hill firing down on the position held by the headquarters
of 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines Regiment, 1st Marine Division.
Next to him, a private was shot in the neck. Nearby, a major was shot dead, hit in the left eye.
The cold iced up Sestak's semi-automatic M-1
carbine, causing it to jam after each shot.
"Each time I fired, I had to slam the bolt back to get another round in." And he cursed.
The headquarters unit was firing back, most of them behind
jeeps or other available cover. Then a line of soldiers appeared out of the snow to their rear. "We saw a whole line of them and thought we were surrounded."
That line of soldiers was George Company,
part of the 3rd Battalion. With bayonets fixed, they advanced through the beleaguered headquarters unit and pushed the enemy off the hill and held it.
When morning came, the Marines went up the hill to check the
enemy dead. If any were still alive, Sestak said, they would "very nicely shoot them in the head."
What the mop-up party found were Communist Chinese soldiers, not the North Koreans they had been
fighting since September. From now on, what President Harry Truman called a "police action" on the Korean peninsula would take on a whole new look. And there was no doubt for the men who were there
— this was no police action; this was war.
John Sestak was 19 years old. A Coatesville native, he enlisted in the Marines Dec. 15, 1948, and volunteered for Korea shortly after the fighting
started. He was part of a nine-man squad that called in and guided air strikes for the battalion. Two Marine aviators — lieutenants or captains — led the unit. While all were armed, their main
tool was the radio they carried to contact the Marine or Navy aircraft overhead. Naturally, the officers didn't carry the 70-pound SCR-300 radio; that was an enlisted man's job. Even though there were bigger men
in the unit, it was almost always Sestak's job to carry it. And he didn't like it.
"Everyday, they'd tell me to put the radio on and I'd start mumbling under my breath." So they called him Mumbles. He
still smiles at it.
The air control squad was a tight-knit group. He's filled with stories of their wild hijinks.
"I'd love to meet those guys again."
While the mop-up
party cleared the hill after the Chinese attack, the battalion doctor called over the battalion commander to show him some Marines who had just arrived from the nearby 7th Regiment. Some were in their stocking
feet and with little winter clothing, and no weapons. The Chinese had sneaked into their position during the night and bayoneted the men while they were in their sleeping bags. Those who could get away had
no time to put on their boots.
United Nations positions all over had been hit hard by the Chinese, who had infiltrated through the lines and hit many units from behind or from their flanks, as they did the 5th
Marines. The command was given to head south. As they did, the battalion's three rifle companies were, "if you'll pardon the expression, getting the hell knocked out of them."
The air control unit
wasn't needed during this march because the two air officers could use radios mounted on vehicles to keep in contact with the aircraft overhead. "And there was a swarm of them," Sestak said. "They were
always up there."
The enlisted men in his unit were used as infantry.
At one point, Sestak and a friend named Lopez were sent to open, flat ground with four others to man two machine guns and hold the rear for the
battalion. "A few tried to get through, but the machine guns mowed them down.
"These Chinese were fanatics. They would blow the bugles and (clang) the cymbals. We'd always know they were coming.
That's one thing we liked about them. It would give us time to get ready for them."
As the column moved along the roads or railroads, Sestak and two men from the air unit were told to walk alongside and flush out
any Chinese soldiers.
"They'd be in little holes, half frozen. We'd put them out of their misery."
The images of one Chinese attack are still sharp for Sestak.
The Marines were holding a
position. Machine guns and tanks were in place. Sestak heard someone say, "Let them come." He and a buddy went to see what that was about. They looked up at a nearby hill.
"You
could not believe the Chinese that were coming down the hill. It was like a bunch of ants," he said "Then they were coming across the open ground. I don't know how close they let them get. But if
you want to see a massacre that was it," he said, grimly.
"I felt sorry for them. We opened up with the machine guns and the machine guns on the tanks and the artillery and the mortars. It was a shame.
You saw body parts flying up all over the place. They just kept coming. They just kept coming. They kept on coming. Finally, when they decided they had enough, they turned around and ran like hell. I didn't
blame them. There must have been a thousand of them that got killed.
"They attacked day after day. I felt sorry for them."
In later years, his children and a priest would ask Sestak how it felt to
kill people.
"I said it was them or me and I figured it was going to be them and not me," he said.
Certain deaths got to him more than others. To see so many Chinese killed in human wave attacks was
sad, but to see a Marine get killed, especially one he knew — "that hurt. That busted you up." He can't forget the badly mangled body of a 12-year-old girl he came across shortly after landing in
Korea. Or the sight of a lieutenant who befriended him.
Marine casualties mounted. One was a lieutenant Sestak had come to like — Lt. Booker. Just a few days before, Booker had
proudly shown Sestak a photo of the baby his wife had recently delivered. On the march now, Booker was ordered to take 41 men from the battalion headquarters and reinforce one of the rifle companies.
The
next day, Sestak was ordered to help the graves registration detail. Bodies — frozen solid by the cold — were stacking up and the detail needed help.
As Sestak helped move the bodies to waiting vehicles, a man
pointed at one that was covered with a poncho and told Sestak it was Lt. Booker.
"I told him he was crazy. I leaned over, pulled the poncho back. Sure enough, it was Lt. Booker. His eyes were open and
looking at the sky. He was hit five times. I knelt down and covered him up," Sestak said, tears in his eyes. "I said a prayer for him and turned around and went back and kept bringing dead Marines
back to the graves registration."
It was a point of pride with the Marines that they bring their dead out with them and not leave them behind. But there were too many. A bulldozer gouged a hole in the
frozen earth and the dead Marines were buried at Koto-Ri. The place was marked on a map so that someday they could come back and retrieve them. The Marines are still there.
"I saw all those bodies and
I wondered if I was ever going to get out of there. We were so cold and so tired."
The column continued south. Wounded Marines were crammed onto every truck, jeep and artillery piece.
They got to an airfield at
Hagaru. There, aircraft brought in supplies and replacements and took the wounded out. Again, the dead were buried.
The Marine column spent four or five days there. Then it was time to move on to the east
coast of Korea where they could be evacuated by ship.
"Our battalion was given the 'honor' of leading the breakout again. We had less then 200 left in the battalion." They had started with close to
1,000.
"But now we had supplies. We had ammo. We had gasoline. We didn't have the wounded. The dead were all buried."
This was no easy march. First, a Chinese roadblock had to be eliminated by
another Marine regiment and British Commandos. Then, parts for a bridge had to be airdropped so the Marines could get across a steep gorge. Towers and trees were blown up to fall across the road. All the
while, the Chinese continued harassing and attacking the column. Trucks slid off the icy road. Sestak lived on evaporated milk and sugar. Other times, they put everything they had into a "Mulligan
stew." Sestak got diarrhea.
Stopping to take care of the diarrhea in the bitter cold was no easy task. Sestak was wearing layer after layer of clothing. "Even though that took time, I could tell the column
slowed down to make sure they wouldn't leave me behind."
Sestak's battalion was rotated from the front to the rear. What was left of an Army battalion joined up with them. Like most Marines, the
Marine commander had little use for the Army. After chewing out his Army counterpart for leaving their flank unprotected, the Marine colonel put the Army unit under the command of a Marine master sergeant.
"This isn't just hearsay; it actually happened," Sestak said. To this day, Sestak will give a ribbing to any Army veteran he meets about the time a Marine sergeant led an Army battalion.
The column succeeded in reaching the sea on Dec. 10, "fighting every inch of the way." And they froze, too. Hardly a man didn't have some sort of frostbite, some worse than others.
Sestak made sure to change his socks each day. He had two pair — one to wear, the other to tuck under his shorts next to his body. By alternating the two pairs, he could avoid the worst frostbite. Even so, on cold
days, he can feel it.
"But I laugh when somebody tells me how tough Erie winters are," he grinned.
Three or four days after reaching the port of HungNam, Sestak's unit boarded ship.
"The first thing we
did was eat — mashed potatoes, ham, vegetables. They told us to eat as much as you want; we're ready for you. " I was ready for it."
Then the shower. "I stood under that shower I don't know
how long. Then sleep — best sleep I ever had. I don't know how long I slept."
Once the ships unloaded them in a rear area of Korea, some of the air control unit was rotated home.
Sestak's time in Korea
ended later in 1951, after the campaign to re-take South Korea from the Chinese.
He returned to a family that had been convinced from the newspaper headlines that the Marines could not escape the encirclement
of the Chinese the previous winter.
"I got home, stepped out of the cab and there are my relatives and my mother, wiping her hand on her apron and crying."
Was the fight for Korea worth
it? Sestak thinks it was. It saved South Korea and it served notice on the communists that aggression would not be tolerated.
If he were asked to go back again, he would -- IF he could go with the guys he
served with. "Those guys were the greatest.
"And I would go back with the Marine Corps. No other outfit."
