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A “Hard Got” Christmas Dinner
Add to pheasant hunting the element of trip-flares
and you can count on an eventful sporting afternoon
By Frank D. Praytor
Copyright 2009
The Eastern Sector, Korea
December 1951
The prospect
of feasting on
fresh pheasant
for Christmas
led to a lapse
in our attention
to details such
as those existing in combat zones. Eli Walker and I, along with our orphaned Korean “mascot,” Mike, walked slowly over eroded furrows of a battered-down cornfield. We were sure pheasants were lurking in the stubble of brown and broken stalks. We also knew that this deep river valley had been a battleground less than six months earlier.
It was Sunday, December 23rd, and we were determined to serve up a big batch of chicken-
fried pheasant on Christmas night back in the squad tent. Artillerymen of the 11th Regiment occupied positions above the valley. They assured us an hour earlier that the valley had been cleared of landmines.
With Mike shouldering our M-1s and Eli and I with our shotguns we made our way down the precipitous slope toward the river valley. We came upon a wire stretched across our path. It was connected to a live trip-flare conveying the news that the valley had not been as cleared as presumed.
But flushing up pheasants was our reason for being there. We detonated the trip-flare then walked out on a plateau alongside the river. Here, farmers some months earlier had forfeited their greening crops to rampaging killers pouring southward early in the Korean War. Now the area was known as “the Punchbowl.”
Overviewing the cornfield were remnants of bunkers and connecting trenches. Communication wires crisscrossed the ground. The plateau that summer had been an infantry defense position and the cornfield was its field-of-fire. Eli was on the edge of the field nearest the river; I was on the opposite edge and Mike walked midway between us.
A pheasant cock flushed a few feet ahead of Mike and flew back over his head. Eli and I whirled at the same instant and brought it down, my shot hitting it in the wing and Eli’s in the head. Mike retrieved it and we resumed our slow, quiet coverage of the cornfield. It was high adrenalin time. The only thing on our minds was nailing more pheasants so everyone in our tent would get their fill of a Christmas feast. Even Eli, a wily Nevadan raised on a ranch, forgot to keep an eye on the ground just ahead of his feet.
The explosion I heard caused me to duck so violently it sprained my neck. I dropped to the ground, shouting at Mike to get down as I looked around trying to determine what had happened. My first thought was that it was a mortar round, but it wasn’t loud enough to be one. I flinched when I heard a “pop” overhead. A parachute flare, burning red, drifted down above Eli, who was lying on his side.
“Trip-flare!” he yelled, his voice rasping with distress. “I stepped on the sonofabitch! My foot’s shot!”
I ran across the furrows to reach him. Mike, frozen in his tracks, began sobbing.
“Don’t move, Mike!” I shouted pointlessly. Mike wasn’t about to move. He was only 14, but he wasn’t anybody’s little stupido.
I carefully cut and removed Eli’s boot. The sole was indented an inch and a half into the arch. His foot was grotesquely twisted, but not bleeding. The calf of his leg had bleeding punctures caused by fragments from the trip-flare Eli’s pain was immediate and almost more than this salty Marine could bear. I bandaged the open wounds and wrapped his distorted foot with my woolen sweater. I had to pry our houseboy out of the middle of the cornfield, instructing him to walk in my footprints over the furrows to Eli. Mike quickly got a rein on his emotions and tended to Eli while I hurried to seek assistance.
Almost two hours had elapsed by the time I was able to recruit four men to carry Eli out of the valley on an improvised stretcher and get him to the 11th Marines sick bay. The sun had dropped behind the mountains and winter’s evening chill quickly set in. After sweating profusely, Eli lapsed into the first stage of hypothermia. We took off jackets and long underwear to cover him. An ambulance from D Company Med came to get us. After a torturous ride over a two-rut “road,” we finally reached the field hospital.
Throughout the ordeal our little Korean buddy, Mike, doggedly clutched our one bagged pheasant. Eli noticed and said, weakly:
“Don’t you go and lose that bird, Mike. It was too hard got.”
“No way, Eli, “ the little boy replied.
At the field hospital they shot him up with morphine and did what they could do to make him feel better. Mike and I hitched a series of rides back to our unit, leaving Eli to spend a miserable night. Early the next morning, I borrowed a jeep and drove to D Company Med, carrying a fifth of Canadian Club that Lt. Ed Gaines had contributed.
Hindsight assures me today that Canadian rye and morphine are not medically compatible. But because intense emotions of the moment disallowed room for common logic, donating the CC to a doped-up Eli seemed like the only act of compassion we could muster. At the field hospital, I tucked the bottle beneath my jacket and went in to see my hunting pal. He looked a lot better than he did the previous evening.
“Lucky thing that flare didn’t go off in my foot,” he said. “I’m still gonna be gimpy from now on they tell me. I just hope I’ll still be able to work cattle.”Eli said he was being flown straight to Japan instead of to the hospital ship because the injury would require a “big hospital operation.”
I slipped him the fifth of CC and he hid it between his legs. Corpsmen loaded him on a helicopter. We shook hands.
“Hope you’re nicely snockered by the time you reach Japan,” I said, not realizing that I may have done him more harm than good by giving him the bottle of Canadian.
“I plan to be,” he grinned.
Corporal Miller cleaned the pheasant. On Christmas night I cooked it in margarine from the mess galley, along with a few goodies my parents had sent. We all felt lousy, and a bit guilty, because Eli wasn’t there to share in the meager distribution of chicken-fried pheasant. We drank a little and played dime-ante poker a little.
“Poor ole Eli,” somebody said in mock sympathy. “The poor guy didn’t get to finish out his tour.” Everybody chuckled a little.
Not one of the 58 Christmas nights I’ve lived since then has gotten by without my thinking of Eli Walker and wondering if he made it okay as a rancher with his kooky foot.
Betcha he did. He was too tough to let something like that get him down.
I just hope whiskey chasing morphine didn’t kill him as he left Korea strapped in a helicopter.
Korea, Punchbowl 1951
The Punchbowl as it appears today. Courtesy of Jon Stafford-http://rokdrop.com
