The Last Stand of Fox Company: A True Story of U.S. Marines in Combat by Bob Drury and Tom Clavin

    The Last Stand of Fox Company was an excellent book about a company holding out on a freezing hilltop in the Korean War. It is full of amazing stories of toughness, heroism, and leadership. It is set at the high watermark of the US advance towards the Yalu River, at the very moment when the Chinese are able to turn the tide through their secret invasion into North Korea from the north across the river. In late November, temperatures have dropped into the negative thirties, and it was cold enough that bullet wounds were not as lethal since the blood froze before it could bleed out. The area around the Chosin Reservoir was known to be the coldest place in Korea, where rice could not be grown and peasants knew to expect an average of 16 to 20 weeks every winter in which the average temperature never rose above zero degrees Fahrenheit. It was so cold during the Battle of Chosin Reservoir that Marines who gripped grenades bare-handed to pull the pins left large swathes of skin behind that froze on. The Chinese invasion came as a massive surprise to the Americans, and in the last week of November, US decision-makers had no idea that there were already 300,000 Chinese troops inside Korea with the same number on alert in Manchuria ready to cross the border. The terrain that Fox Company defended was so hilly and covered in ridges that on the first night of battle, First Platoon had not even heard the firefight that Second and Third Platoons had fought. The Marines, outnumbered four to one, inflicted heavy casualties on the Chinese and used their frozen corpses as sandbags. The book is well-written down to the human level and up to the strategic level, and depicts a grim picture of the coldest battle imaginable.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• The racist term "gook" came about because in Korean, "mee-gook" means "beautiful country" and was something Korean children said to US soldiers. The Americans thought it means that they were calling themselves "gooks" and then the term took on a pejorative meaning.
• Sometimes, especially at night, Marines could smell the Chinese before they saw them, since garlic was a traditional remedy in China and their units carried a pungent odor that carried hundreds of yards.