America's First Black Marines
by Melton A. McLaurin
The companion book to the American Public Television documentary
The following excerpt is from The Marines of Montford Point: America's First Black Marines published by The University of North Carolina Press
Thomas Cork
from the chapter Korea and VietNam
When we got into Kobe, Japan, they switched us off to get on the lsts. And we went in to Inchon. Now, by this time, I am the only black in the outfit. The rest are white. And at first they didn’t accept me. Wouldn’t talk to me, wouldn’t say anything to me. But as time went along they realized that I am part of their outfit, and they are going to have to deal with me from then on.
In California I was trained on the light machine gun. That was my job. When I got into Korea, that’s what I had to do with that light machine gun. That was my duty. And went on into Inchon. From there on, we would kind of move along, but those times the segregation part never crossed anybody’s mind. Because we are in this thing together.
Never heard another word about calling me any kind of names. I became a Marine like the rest of them. And that made me feel good. I felt welcome with them. Because here I am, a nineteen-year-old, man, being in combat the first time. Don’t know what to expect. And when you got people around you, they don’t want you there, you got problems there. But as it turned out they really accepted me. And they treated me like any other Marine going into combat together.
I’m a gunner and I had assistant gunner. Our life depends on each other. He has to feed the ammunition to me, make sure I have the ammunition. I don’t have time to load it. Only thing I do is load it and cock and let it go. His job is to feed it to me. His job is to haul the ammunition up to me. Now, what’s normal with a machine gun, I found out this later, I didn’t know it at the time. The life of a machine gunner is very short. Because the enemy knows, they can see the fire coming from a machine gun, they know there is firepower. So, they concentrate on the automatic weapons, especially machine guns. But, fortunately, I made it through.
This is in Inchon. Young men going in combat. The first thing that popped in mind is now looking [at] the Marines that were ahead of us, we went in on, I think, about the thirteenth wave. The one before us, a lot of those guys were killed. And those bodies were just stacked up, you know. And you see these guys getting killed. But strange thing about it, you really don’t think about death. I mean, your job now becomes survival. And our job, once we get on land, we start moving north. And little by little we took town after town after town. We all went to Seoul, went to Seoul twice. We lost Seoul and had to come back out and start all over again. There were some hills above familiar to a lot of people. Pork Chop Hill, and, and those hills. We take them today, and tomorrow we might come back down and had to retake them again.
And one thing stands in my mind most, well, we got on the hill one time. On the other side of that hill, there was another hill. We kept seeing these people going and coming out of this building. They go in real fat and come out skinny. Go in real fat and come out skinny. So, we called back [to] the recon[naissance] and told them what was the experience up there. And they said to sit tight.We’ll try to find out what’s going on down there. So, I guess by the third day, we see these people still going out of the building. Actually, we found out later it was not a building at all. They were enemy going in out of that building. And a lot of them were dressed like civilians. . . . because they weren’t in uniform like we thought they will be. They were military people, but in civilian clothes. It was an ammunition depot for them. So, the recon called up and said, go for it. So, we started firing on it. Next thing you know, there was all kind of explosions. Because we had gotten this ammo.
The colonel came up, you know. He calls us out and gave us commendations and then talked to us about that. And then, start moving on. We moved on. And now we began to move pretty fast.We went all the way into the Chosin Reservoir. Now, Chosin Reservoir is a story within itself.We were sent and went there. And we had thought the war was over. My captain said you young men will be home for Christmas, okay. It didn’t happen that way. Moved so close to China that we looked across the [Yalu] river and see Chinese on the other side just walking around like. Think nothing about it. So, the Marines were sitting in the middle. Eighth Army on the right. And what they called the rok Division, which is Republic of Korea, on the other side. Well, what happened, the Chinese came across. They came across on foot. And everything they were carrying was like a weapon. They had all their food on them, what little water they needed. Everything, rice, whatever they are going to carry in combat they had on their body. So, how they got past us, they were literally walking past. And we had no idea there was any enemy in front of us, because we had gone as far as we could go. But those Chinese came across in thousands and thousands, and thousands and thousands.
We got from the recon back there said they had found some Chinese back there behind us now. Then we began to tighten up and found out where these Chinese are coming from. But by that time they had us surrounded, completely cut off. Now, it’s about thirty some below zero. The only clothes we have was those scout boots. And they were good boots. Nothing wrong with that. But the problem was, your feet sweat in those boots and freeze. So, that’s what happened to us there.
<<Previous excerpt Next excerpt >>
_____________________________________________
Both the film and the book are based on more than forty-six hours of taped interviews with sixty Montford Point veterans. The film...uses thirty-five minutes of those interviews. The book...provides about five hours of the very best material from the interviews.
--Melton A. McLaurin, from the author interview