a team from 1st Marine Division Headquarters told him, had been selected for a “special mission of crucial importance to the landing at Inchon.”
The lieutenant colonel made it sound like an honor. Dunwood’s experience as a Marine made him suspect it was a euphemistic description of a mission that would get a lot of Marines—probably including him—killed.
Baker Company was shortly thereafter assembled in the gymnasium of the U.S. Naval Base, Sasebo, where, after the windows were covered and guards posted at the doors, the colonel described their mission to them.
It seemed that to reach the landing beaches at Inchon, the invasion fleet would have to traverse the thirty-odd-mile -long Flying Fish Channel. In the channel were a number of islands, two of which, Taemuui-do and Yonghung-do, had to be invested and neutralized twenty-four hours before the invasion fleet arrived, otherwise the enemy could blow large holes in the sides of the transports with ordinary field artillery.
Baker Company had been given the mission, the honor, of investing Taemuui-do and Yonghung-do. Before they landed on the islands from Higgins boats, the islands would of course be subject to an enormous barrage of naval gunfire, which would effectively reduce to minimal the enemy’s ability to resist Baker Company’s invasion.
Actually, from that perspective, the colonel said, the real mission of Baker Company would be to occupy the two islands and prevent the enemy from coming back and bringing more artillery with them.
Captain Dunwood had gone ashore at Tarawa and Iwo Jima, on each occasion having been assured that following the massive preinvasion barrages of naval artillery to be laid on those islands, resistance would be minimal. That assurance had turned out to be bullshit, and he had therefore concluded that it was logical to presume this one was, too, and that Baker Company had just been handed the short end of the stick.
But he was a Marine, and Marines go where they are ordered to go, and he was a Marine officer, and Marine officers do whatever is humanly possible to reduce Marine losses by the only means that has ever looked like it works—training and more training.
By the time Baker Company reboarded LST-450, Captain Dunwood was sure that ninety-five percent of his Marines hated him for the regimen of training they had gone through under his command. And he was also sure that he had trained them as well and as thoroughly as he knew how, and that would probably result in fewer KIA and WIA than otherwise would have occurred.
At 0415 14 September, as the schedule called for, LST- 450 was at the mouth of the Flying Fish Channel, preparing to load the men of Baker Company aboard the Higgins boats for their assault on Taemuui-do and Yonghung-do islands.
Every ear, of course, was listening for the thunder, and every eye the flash, of the massive naval gunfire bombardment that was going to reduce the potential of the North Koreans to repel their assault to minimal. That was scheduled to begin at 0415 and last for a half hour.
At 0445, when Baker Company’s Higgins boats were scheduled to depart LST-450 for the beaches of the islands, they were still listening, in vain. There had been some kind of a fuckup, obviously, and there wasn’t going to be any massive barrage of naval gunfire.
Or, possibly, Captain Dunwood had thought privately, some candy-ass chair-warming swabbie clerk-typist had made a little mistake typing the order—hitting the “5” instead of the “4”—and there would be a massive barrage of naval gunfire landing on Taemuui-do and Yonghung-do starting at 0515, five minutes after the first Higgins boat touched the shore, and Baker Company would be up to its ass in angry North Koreans.
Marines go where they are ordered to go, with or without massive barrages of naval gunfire to reduce opposition to the minimum.
At 0510, on schedule, the first Higgins boat transporting Baker Company to the Flying Fish Channel Islands touched ashore and dropped its ramp.
Marines ran down the ramp and turned right and left, spreading out, weapons at the ready. Captain Dunwood was in the center of what ultimately was a formation in the shape of a V, holding his carbine in one hand.
“Hold your fire! Hold your fire!” a voice shouted, an obviously American voice.
A figure appeared. He was in black cotton pajamas and had a band of the same material around his forehead. He held his hands over his head in a gesture of surrender.
It soon became apparent that the Marines Had Landed and the