A .50-caliber machine gun is an awesome weapon that can lay down devastating fire at targets more than a mile away.
Bill Wilkerson remembers using one at near point-blank range to stop what seemed to be an endless stream of Communist Chinese soldiers coming out of the fog on the side of a nameless hill in North Korea.
"It shatters them," Wilkerson said. "There's nothing left of them."
There were rain showers across the Korean peninsula in the pre-dawn hours of June 25, 1950. It was the beginning of the monsoon season.
At 5 a.m., an artillery barrage opened up on South Korean forces. Only a few hundred U.S. troops remained in the divided country. The last major American occupation forces had gone home only weeks before.
It was still June 24 in the United States when President Truman, vacationing in Independence, Mo., got word that almost 100,000 North Korean soldiers, led by 150 Soviet-made T-34 tanks, had swept across the 38th Parallel that divided north from south. What had been deemed the Cold War had just turned hot.
Outnumbered two-to-one, South Korean troops retreated. The few units still in Korea tried to delay the advance in order to buy time to bring reinforcements from Japan and the U.S.
Compressed into a perimeter around Pusan at the southern tip of the peninsula, South Korean troops, U.S. troops and reinforcements from Japan and the States stopped the North Koreans and held while Gen. Douglas MacArthur launched a daring amphibious assault at Inchon, behind enemy lines.
"It was a bold move," said Carlos Dyer, who landed at Inchon with the Army's 56th Amphibious Assault Group. "It was a great move."
Dyer was 21 when he arrived in Korea.
"The worst part was the 18-foot tides," Dyer said. "When the tide went out, there was nothing but mud."
Dyer said the landing forces had two hours to get ashore and scale the sea wall. MacArthur's strategy was to have the landing forces head east across the peninsula, cutting off North Korean forces in South Korea. U.S. and South Korean forces around Pusan would attack north in a classic hammer-and-anvil strategy to destroy the North Korean army.
To a great extent, MacArthur was successful. The U.S. and South Korean forces, under the flag of the United Nations and joined by Australian, British, Indian and Turkish troops captured and killed large elements of the North Korean army.
They pursued the remainder north across the 38th Parallel and toward the Yalu River, which separated Korea from China. It proved to be a deadly mistake.
Bill Wilkerson was a machine gunner in the 25th Infantry Division. The 25th Infantry was one of the early units pushed into Pusan in 1950.
South Korea was largely an agrarian country, raising rice. The north was industrialized, its mountainous terrain unsuitable for growing crops. It was on top of one of those mountains that Wilkerson found himself, looking at Communist Chinese
soldiers materializing out of the fog
over the sights of his .50-caliber machine gun.
The mountains were so steep that the trucks that carried them north could not make it up the incline.
They had to get out and walk.
Wilkerson spent three months there, in snow and freezing rain.
"You couldn't get dry," he said. "I was never so glad to get out of a place in my life."
Below Wilkerson's position was the Yalu River. Fog would fill the valley. The Chinese troops would move through the valley and up the slopes of the mountains, trying to overpower positions like Wilkerson's by sheer number.
"The barrels of those machine guns would get red hot," said Jack Williams, a gun mechanic with the 357th Ordnance. Gun crews would carry extra barrels, said Williams, who spent 16 months keeping weapons working.
Despite the increasing number of enemy soldiers with the entrance of the Communist Chinese into combat and the terrifying artillery barrages, what most veterans remember is the cold.
"We had a lot of frostbite," said Larry Harkleroad, an Army Medic with the 123rd Medical Detachment. "I remember the cold more than anything."
In the early days of the war, soldiers had only their cotton fatigues, field jackets and thin Army blankets.
"It was terribly, terribly cold," Dyer said. Men lost fingers and toes, hands and feet to frostbite in temperatures that dropped to 35 degrees below zero.
"It got cold enough to freeze ink in a fountain pen and diesel oil in a drum," Harkleroad said.
Lyall "Red" Brown, who spent 18 months aboard a Navy destroyer off the coast of Korea, said ocean spray froze on the ship.
"The superstructure of the ship would be covered with ice," he said.
The mission Brown best remembers is going up north along the Korean coast to search for a downed pilot.
"We were out about a hundred miles ahead of an aircraft carrier," Brown said.
A pilot's plane had been hit and crashed into the sea.
"They knew he bailed out and hit the water," Brown said.
During an extensive search, they found clothing and equipment floating in the icy waters, but not the pilot.
Thirty-five or 40 minutes was about as long as he could live in that water or on any of the nearby islands or rocks, Brown said.
"It was cold," Brown said. "He didn't last long."
Although he remembers the cold, it didn't seem to bother Lawrence E. Place.
"I was used to the cold," Place said. "I came from New England."
Place spent 20 months in Korea building roads. It was not for civic improvement. It was done with the memory of the initial North Korean attack. Roads were built and widened to move supplies to attacking troops, and if need be, retreat.
In later years, President Truman said that when he first learned of the North Korean invasion, he thought it was the beginning of World War III.
It was people like the Amarillo veterans who answered the call.
"Something had to be done," Dyer said, "and we did it."