Harry Burke thought it was pretty neat that he and a few others were ordered to sleep in a hut on that cold night in late November in Korea.
"We figured we were really getting away with something. We had a roof over our head. We were only on watch for a half hour each. The rest of the company was up on the hill grousing and griping about trying dig in among the rocks."
As it turned out, being down next to the road that night wasn't the best place to be in Fox Company, Second Battalion, Seventh Regiment, First Marine Division.
"I even took off my clothes that night. I got in my sleeping bag, and I was sleeping good," Burke recalled. "But at about 2:30 a.m., there were Chinamen shooting all over the place. I woke up to bullets zinging over my head."
Burke dressed as well as he could under the circumstances. "I had my boots on the wrong feet, but it didn't make much difference." He headed up the hill with his bazooka, firing his .45 pistol as he went.
Before he left, he stuffed his sleeping bag and pack into a large cooking pot in the hut.
As the Marines dug in a little deeper on the hill, the Chinese soldiers called out from the hut below, "Hey, Marine, come back and get warm gear. We won't shoot you."
After the long night's siege was over, Burke and others made their way back down to the hut. The other Marines' gear was gone, but Burke's was safe in the pot. At least he could stay a little warm in the next few days as his company defended its position, later to be known as Fox Hill, on the west side of the Chosin Reservoir in the bone chilling cold of 1950 in Korea.

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Harry Burke grew up in Clarkfield, Minnesota, and graduated from Clarkfield High School. He was working a good job in 1948, when some friends encouraged him to join the Marine reserves.
"It didn't take much encouragement. I liked that sort of thing. I wanted to do some traveling, to see some more of this country."
Burke did three summer camps, and was on his way home from camp in a Studebaker convertible on June 25, 1950, when he and his comrades learned abut the outbreak of the Korean War.
Burke was a bazooka man. "I was 21 years old and had a lot of experience with the bazooka. We figured we would be instructors."
The unit was called up on Aug. 19, but instructing was not the duty they got. "We were fooled. We didn't think they'd send us over that fast. But on Sept. 21, we were landing at Inchon."
Burke's unit moved through the north side of Seoul, cutting off North Korean troops. The company reached a point 30 miles north of Seoul when it was ordered back to Inchon to board transports that would take it around to the other side of the Korean Peninsula where another major landing was planned.
The troops stayed on the Navy ships longer than anticipated during what came to be known as Operation YoYo as the convoy moved up and down the coast. There wasn't enough food aboard, and at one point the Fox Company men resorted to cooking little cakes over gas stoves.
"We had found these instant cake mixes, and several the guys had cooked their cakes. When I tried it, apparently there was some leaking gas because it all blew up. My little cake got blown all over the place, and I did a backwards summersault. I didn't get hurt, but I didn't get my little cake either."
The First Marine Division finally landed at Hungnam, and began its long trek north toward the Chinese border. Along the way the Marines were given warm weather gear including down-filled mummy bags and rubber coated boots.
"They also had cold weather experts who told us how to stay alive. The guys from Minnesota understood what they were talking about, but the southern guys didn't quite understand it."
Burke's ammo carrier for his bazooka got his feet wet. "They just froze up and he was gone."
Fox Company had its Thanksgiving meal at Hagaru-Ri, a small city at the southern tip of the Changjin Reservoir, called the Chosin Reservoir on the Japanese maps the Americans used.
Burke was assigned to the headquarters company where he would be available with his bazooka if a likely enemy target showed up. The company moved out of Hagaru-ri and took up a position at the Toktong Pass, a critical bend in the road that must be held if the rest of the two Marine regiments advancing further north along the west side of the reservoir would have a route of escape.
The men dug in on the 27th of November, the day that Burke and the rest of the headquarters group was so happy they had been assigned a hut down by the road to sleep in.
That night the Marines fought off attack after attack by the 59th Chinese Division. In the morning, it was determined that 19 Americans were dead and over 50 wounded. But the Marines had held the high ground overlooking the pass.
Orders were given to fight their way out of the position and return to Hagaru-ri, but the company's commander, Captain William E. Barber, chose to stay and defend the position. He later was awarded the Medal of Honor.
Burke spent that first night and day helping the wounded. They were evacuated to the huts in the morning, but then had to be brought back up the hill at night. "I felt sorry for our wounded. Some of them were in bad shape. I remember one guy in particular through all these years. He didn't want to moved. He wanted to stay down below. He knew he was going to die. We left him propped up in a sitting position."
Parachute drops brought food and ammunition every day. "We never got enough food, but we got plenty of ammunition." Burke gave up his bazooka for a rifle. "We had plenty of weapons to choose from with so many of our men down."
Every night brought another attack, and by day the Chinese sniped at the Marines from the higher hills nearby. Fox Company dug in deeper each day, "although it was hard digging in that frozen ground."
Temperatures hit minus 25 and lower at night.
On the second night, Burke was assigned to fox hole on the back side of the hill, armed with a carbine. "The Chinamen were running and moving and trying to get into position to get us. All of a sudden there was one of them about eight feet in front of me. I shot him, and then I shot another one."
When daylight came, Burke was called out of his foxhole and told to bring his bazooka to a position where they could lob a shell eight or nine hundred yards to a Chinese position. "We thought it was worth a try."
The team loaded the bazooka and Burke elevated the weapon to hoist the rocket into the enemy emplacement. A second team readied their bazooka to fire at the same time. "There was a warning written on it that said, 'Do not fire below minus 20 degrees.' I found out why."
Because of the extreme cold, the rocket was still burning as it came out of the tube. "It rolled me right over. The corpsman came over and looked at our faces. They were all seared with the hair burned off. He just put a little vaseline on and sent us back to our positions. We fired two rounds with those bazookas, and that was it."
Burke said there were usually two men in a foxhole. To keep warm, the men would line the holes with parachutes from the airdrops and with blankets taken off the Chinese killed in action. "We were dug in good, and we were dug in deep. We'd share a sleeping bag as we kept watch."
On the third night, nobody came at Burke's position at first, but then he could hear shooting near by. "The next thing I know, they're shooting right at me. I peeked out, but a bullet went by, inches from my ear. There was a log in front of my hole, and I put my gloves on top of it. A few seconds later, they were hit. One landed on my helmet, and the other landed in my lap."
A gunnery sergeant came to see what all the hollering was about. "We told him to get down, but he came right over. The next thing I know, he fell right on top of me, he'd been shot in the hand."
Another visitor the men had at various times was Captain Barber, who had been wounded twice, but still hobbled from position to position checking on his men. "The captain didn't want to give up his command. The first time he came by, he didn't want any help, but the second time he stumbled and yelled at a Marine that was with him, "Dammit, kid, can't you see I need some help?"
Burke was impressed with Barber, who had only joined the company a few weeks earlier. "He was a good leader, and he had the right personality to handle a group that got into the predicament we got into."
On the fourth night, there was no action on Burke's side of the hill. "I think we'd already killed most of them that wanted to fight."
For all five days, the encircled and embattled Marines got artillery help from the south. "It would go right over our heads. Those guys really knew what they were doing. There were no short rounds."
And Burke praised the work too of the Marine Corsairs that came in and hit the enemy with machine guns and napalm.
On the fifth day, Fox Company was joined by the First Battalion who had spent several days fighting their way through the enemy to relieve the decimated rifle company.
"They looked like hell, and they told us we looked like hell."
As the two regiments that were north on the roadway headed south through the pass that had been kept from the Chinese, Fox Company joined them. "We left just after dark, and that was a good decision. I don't think the Chinese suspected we would leave in the dark. We were very quiet and probably walked by hundreds of Chinamen, but we were never fired on."
The fighting was intense as the Marines, and now many Army troops that were evacuating from the east side of the reservoir, fought their way southeast to the coast.
On Dec. 6th, the unit made it to Koto-ri, a town south of Hagaru-ri. On Dec. 8th, still heading south, Fox Company was ordered to chase the enemy from a hill near the evacuation road. It was foggy and snowing heavily.
"All of a sudden there was a bang right in front of me." The next thing Burke knew he was on his back, and he could hear the calls for the medics. "I wasn't really knocked out, but I was bleeding pretty good." He had been hit by shrapnel from a concussion grenade under his nose and next to his right eye.
"I remember the medic saying to me, 'Get your damn hand away. I can't see what I'm doing.'"
Burke was taken in an ambulance to Koto-ri where he was airlifted out. He spent three months in an Army hospital, worked for a time as a brig chaser in Japan, and then was sent back to his unit in Korea in May of 1951. As a sergeant, he was now assigned as the bazooka section leader.
Fox Company was now fighting near the Iron Triangle, and Burke was with his unit only 10 days before he and six others were wounded by an artillery round. He spent only six days in the hospital with shrapnel in his back, but then was allowed to go home because he had two purple hearts.
After duty in Washington D.C., he got out in March of 1952. He worked for many years for Honeywell, and retired for the last time in 1997. He and his wife, Ruth, had four daughters and nine grandchildren. Ruth died in 1989.
Burke now lives in Bloomington.