Massacre, Nightmare or Hell's Canyon

Bill Parsons
US Army

After fighting a rear guard action as the back door of the Eighth Army, pulling back from Pyongyang, the 187th ARCT wound up near Hoensong, doing backup duty to a ROK unit that was supposed to be on line in the high hills around us.

The morning the CCF arrived was cold, but on the whole a pretty nice morning, until we became aware of the sounds of small arms fire and the all too familiar snap and buzz of slugs passing thru the tops of our tents.

Running outside we could see on the mountainsides, long streams of ROK troops throwing away their rifles and tobogganing down the side of the mountain on their butts and boogying off, away from the oncoming chinese.

We spent the day putting out brush fires, rushing from one hot spot to the next. My driver had been slightly wounded, so I became not only the squad leader but the driver. Our other jeep was with a Cpl. Charcoal, a tall, lanky Indian from Oklahoma, and he was spending his time hosing down chinese with an LMG. To the extent that he actually warped the barrel with heat.

As night fell, we loaded up the jeeps and trailers with the equipment we did not want to leave for the chinese and began a slow trek out of Nightmare Valley. It was a very dark night and even the troops marching close to us were almost unseen. As we drove along, people came out of the night, lugging the dead and wounded. We stopped and took as many of the wounded as we could into the jeep and laid the dead across the hood.

With me as gunner on a pedestal mounted LMG was Cpl. J.B. Hawks from Tiptonville, Tennessee, a friend from the days we were still part of 511th AIR, 11th Abn., in Camp Campbell, KY.

Down the line a bit we were relieved of our passengers. Wounded to the Btn. medics and the dead were piled on 21/2 ton trucks like cordwood. As we progressed out of the valley onto a main road, as main as roads were in Korea in those days, we rolled on until we reached a knot of people standing in the road. The Btn. exec came over to the jeep and told us, "turn this thing around and go back up the road until you don't see any of our people. Check the roadside for any that may have been walking wounded and just laid down. Get as many as you can and when you think no more are coming out, get your butts back up here in case we need you."

Going back up that road was probably one of the hardest things we had ever done. We had almost made it out of the valley and they were sending us back into it. We agreed it was a bad deal.

Luckily, all the troops we saw were small knots of people, moving on their own, in the right direction. Sometime later, after not seeing a living soul for what seemed like an eternity, we decided to go a mile or so further and if we saw no one we would turn back and catch up with the column. Just as we were about to turn around, down the road at top speed came a 21/2 ton with only its blackout lights on. We were not using our lights for fear of becoming a target so they never saw us, or if they did they didn't even honk as they blasted by us. The only thing we could do to avoid a collision was to drive the jeep over the edge of the road and down an embankment into a rice paddy.

After taking inventory from our wild ride into the paddy, we found that other than Hawks taking a bad lick in the knee from the gun pedestal, we were OK. At least we thought so until we began to see we were at the edge of a group of huts in which men in padded uniforms with padded, floppy-eared hats, with long rifles, not a bit like our M1 Garands, which the ROKs used, were warming themselves by fires built on the floors of the huts.

We allowed as how we wanted to be anywhere but there. So with Hawks urging we made two or three unsuccessful tries to exit the paddy and get back on the road. I believe we literally wished that jeep back on the road and we beat feet.

After driving for quite some time we realized we were not catching up to the column and most likely had taken a wrong turn somewhere, so we continued driving in the direction we knew the battalion was headed. We came upon a small village, still burning from having been in the way of two colliding armies. Sitting fairly near the road were more of the same people. Oriental, dressed the same way, carrying the same weapons. We had to be driving through a chinese unit or a ROK unit, the like of which we had never seen. What was more impossible was that not a soul acknowledged we were even driving by.

Along toward morning we began to see signs of UN troops and a sign or two left for stragglers, pointing toward Wonju, where the 187 ARCT, Some Dutch troops, 38th infantry, ROK 18th Regiment, 2nd Battalion of the 17th Infantry were to beat back the chinese from the high ground north of Wonju.

During that action the 3rd Battalion went out and brought in many men of the 2nd Infantry Division, which had been cut to pieces in the previous days and nights.
I wonder to this day how Hawks and I made it out of "Massacre, Nightmare or Hell's Canyon', take your pick, they all fit, and did we really pass through that many chinese, if they were indeed chinese, and survive to grow old. At last contact J.B. was living in Tempe, AZ., and doing well.

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