I had an uncle who was a Navy Corpsman who was with the Marines at Chosin. It wasn't until very late in life that he even really even talked of being there. He spoke of how bitter cold it was, the intense fight, the rough situation the Marines were in, and how he learned to ditch the Red Cross on his helmet and medic bag as the Chinese would target medics. While being a medic he wasn't supposed to carry a weapon and use it to he said "there was enemy everywhere and I had to do what I had to do to survive." He ended up with two Purple Hearts and one Bronze Star from the Chosin campaign.
My uncle spoke quite a bit about how cold it was. He said they couldn't have fires to keep warm, and it was like 20 below zero. Sleeping in small, slit trenches, covered with tarps, covered in snow. For several weeks. With very little supplies. How he would patch up a badly wounded solider who would then go back to the lines to fight because the solider was gonna likely die from his injuries anyway so the soldier would rather die fighting then die on a stretcher at the aid station. And the wind. The fog - so foggy, that air drop resupplies were not possible. And how many Air Force pilots, flying in the fog trying to drop supplies, would crash into the hillside. He then hugged my Dad in salute to the Air Force pilots as my Dad was a career Air Force pilot (although he wasn't there flying at Chosin). They were in those condition for several weeks, surrounded by "100,000 pissed off Chinese." He said the Chinese even had it worse the the Marines had it. He said, at times, that when you shot, there were so many Chinese, you couldn't help to not hit them.
He said they recovered as many of the US soldiers dead bodies they could from the battlefield and took them with them on their fight southward (as they were surrounded by those 100,000 Chinese) toward safety of the United States front line.
He also spoke of how hard it was to see his fellow Marines bodies, frozen solid in grotesque positions, bouncing along behind the trucks, having been lashed with ropes together in long lines behind the trucks in the convoy as the wounded were inside the trucks. He said as the roads were bomb cratered, that they would use the Chinese bodies as fill material for the craters and simply drove over them as they couldn't dig in the frozen ground to get and dirt to fill in the craters, all the while, fighting of ambushes much of their route out while doing what they could to survive.
My Uncle, being from Idaho, when he got out of the service, moved to Las Vegas as he said he couldn't tolerate the cold anymore after being at Chosin and lived in Vegas the rest of his life. He became a school teacher. He died in 2007 and is buried at the National Cemetary near Henderson, Nevada.
Oddly, he told me about his experience about a year or so before he died. When I was growing up, I had no idea what he had went through. I never even knew he was in the military. I just thought he was a quiet, rather short, thin, school teacher.
His name was Bruce Kenney. RIP Uncle Bruce.
