Chuck Ferguson had already been wounded three times before he got tangled up in the concertina wire.
It was in the early morning hours of Thanksgiving Day, 1951, when Ferguson and a fellow GI decided their best hope of survival was to head for the bottom of the Korean hill they were defending and work their way around back to their lines.
The Red Chinese had been attacking en masse throughout the night and had nearly wiped out the platoon of soldiers guarding the exposed outpost hill.
Ferguson could only crawl by that point, with one kneecap nearly blown off, shrapnel wounds up the insides of both legs, the left side of his face a mass of exposed flesh, and a bullet wound under his arm.
His comrade made it to the bottom of the hill, but Ferguson got hopelessly tangled in the maze of barbed wire.
"I must have made a noise, because a Chinese soldier came over to check it out. By this time I was laying on my back. He pointed the rifle at me, and I put my arms up and yelled, 'I surrender.'"
The enemy soldier took dead aim at Ferguson's head from two feet away and pulled the trigger.

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When Chuck Ferguson arrived in Korea in 1951, the vast movements of the war were over, and static battle lines were forming
In 1950, the North Koreans had pushed the South Koreans nearly into the sea before American reinforcements arrived. The Americans counterattacked and drove north to the Yalu River at the Chinese border before the Chinese Army intervened. The United Nation forces were forced back again before rallying in early 1951.
Ferguson arrived as a heavy weapons specialist when he landed at Inchon on Sept. 16, 1951. He was assigned, however, as a rifleman to the First Cavalry Division and sent to a location near the Imjin River north of Seoul.
Ferguson had joined the National Guard as high school senior in Cogswell, North Dakota, in 1949. The following year, after graduation, he took an eight-week college course and was licensed to teach at a country school in Brampton, N.D.
He was teaching his group of 12 students in late December 1950 when he was called up. He found out about the presidential order from a fellow Guardsman on a street in Cogswell.
"He said, 'Let's go to Barney McGraw's Bar and get a beer.' I said, 'How can we do that, we're only 18?' He said, 'We just got activated by President Truman. We're old enough now.'"
Sure enough, the bar owner, after hearing their story, honored their request.
After training at Camp Rucker in Alabama, Ferguson was among a small group that volunteered for a transfer. They were thinking of Europe, but the Far East was selected as their destination.
The young soldiers weren't that dismayed, though. "It was kind of a lark. We were only 18 years old. We didn't understand all this war business."
When he arrived with the Eighth Cavalry Regiment, Company F, Third Platoon, his unit was in an R&R status a short distance behind the front line, know in Korea as the Main Line of Resistance, or the MLR. Soon, they were back in action, and they were ordered to take Hill 334, a position that stood between the Chinese and American lines.
"They told us to fix bayonets. We were yelling and hollering. To me it was just a big game. Oh, boy, this was fun." As they were running for the hill, though, Ferguson stumbled and was nearly impaled by the soldier behind him.
"That's when it dawned on me that this was not just a game. It was deadly serious."
The Third Platoon reached its objective and took the hill, but at great cost. "We were in a trench, and the Chinese were throwing hand grenades at us. There were hordes of them, lots of them, and they kept throwing these things at us. We couldn't shoot fast enough to stop them."
At one point, Ferguson was hit in the right arm by a sniper firing from behind the American position. Despite his wound, he helped another seriously wounded soldier down the hill toward American lines.
He left the soldier in a ravine and went for help. The officer in charge ordered Ferguson back to the field hospital, and eventually the other soldier was also rescued.
Ferguson recuperated at a British MASH unit behind the lines for 30 days.
He rejoined his platoon, and not long after that had another exposure to the deadly vagaries of war. "We were heading for chow, and we decided to have a race down the hill to the chow line. A couple of guys didn't race, but stopped to fill their canteens at a Lister bag about halfway down. They were hit by a mortar and both killed. If we hadn't been running, we would have got it too."
A few weeks later, Ferguson and his mates were looking forward to Thanksgiving. On the day before Thanksgiving, Nov. 21, 1951, they were ordered on a normal rotation to man Hill 334. The hill was an important outpost because it allowed whoever held to monitor the enemy's lines.
The U.S. troops had spent several weeks reinforcing the position, and the hill was protected by a series of trenches — one that went all the way around the base of the hill, and three others, like spokes on a wheel, that connected that trench to the command post at the top of the hill.
Extra rations had been shipped in, and the men were happy because they were only slated to stay on the hill for one day rather than the normal two-day stint. There was also talk of the unit being taken out of the lines and rotated home.
Ferguson was assigned to a foxhole overlooking one of the hill's spurs or fingers. He and his fellow riflemen spent part of the day reinforcing their position with sandbags, but finally had to give up the task because of sporadic enemy shelling.
As the evening wore on, the GIs hunkered down in their positions. "It was really quiet. They had extra rations, and so I had two. It was very peaceful."
At five minutes after 10 that night, though, all hell broke loose in the form of an artillery barrage. Over 1,000 shells hit the hill. "They hit us with everything they had, and then they attacked."
Masses of Chinese troops attacked the hill, and the Americans fought them off with machine guns, rifle fire and artillery support of their own. The enemy bodies were three and four deep in places, but the attack just kept coming.
Early on, Ferguson was hit with a bullet under his left arm. "I was wearing a bullet proof vest, and it might have glanced off that and hit me. The vest might have saved my life."
Ferguson lost all feeling in his arm. Because it was difficult for him to fire his rifle, he was assigned the job of guarding the trench for the other men manning the foxhole. They had heard that the Chinese had captured the trench at the far side of the hill, and had also taken the command post at the top of the hill.
The attack soon came from above as well as below. An enemy soldier began lobbing concussion grenades into the trench where Ferguson was sitting. "The first grenade came in and I kicked it out with my feet while I was on my back. This happened three more times, and each time I was able to kick it out. The next time, though, it exploded right at my feet.
The blast sent shrapnel into both of Ferguson's legs, nearly removing his right knee cap. Other shrapnel hit him on the left side of the face, and blood gushed from the head wounds. "I just lay there trying to stop the bleeding on my head, and wondering why my knee hurt so bad. After a while, I just passed out."
Two hours later, he woke up and the battle was still raging. Many of the 48 men in the platoon were dead or badly wounded. Ferguson told a fellow GI that he had noticed a small cave nearby where they could take shelter, and the two men headed for it. On the way, several other grenades exploded near Ferguson, sending more shrapnel into his head. One of the grenades shattered an eardrum.
When they got to the cave, though, they found it already crowded with soldiers. "We didn't have too many options left, and so we decided to head down the hill and try and get through the wire, go all the way around the hill, and try and make it to the MLR. I was crawling on my hands and knees."
Caught in the wire, with the Chinese soldier standing above him, Ferguson figured he had breathed his last. "I kept yelling, 'I surrender,' but I don't think he understood me, and I don't think they were taking too many prisoners anyway. I saw he was using an American rifle, and it looked kind of beat up."
Despite firing from point blank range, the enemy soldier somehow missed Ferguson entirely. Ferguson put his hands up again and yelled his intentions to surrender more loudly, but the Chinese soldier fired again, this time hitting Ferguson in the right hand.
"I finally figured out that yelling wasn't working, so I just rolled over, moaned and pretended I was dead. I was amazed, but the soldier walked away and left me alone."
Ferguson again passed out. He woke up later and tried to make it back up the hill. He managed to crawl some distance, but again became unconscious.
"The next thing I remember is somebody standing over me saying, 'Hey, sarge, this one's still alive.'" The battle was over, and the medics were separating the dead from the wounded.
Ferguson was helicoptered to a hospital where he awoke for a few minutes to find a nurse cleaning him up. He apologized to the nurse for being such a mess, and slipped back into dreamland.
"I don't remember them stitching me up. I suppose I was out for two or three days." It turned out Ferguson had lost eight pints of blood on Hill 334.
Ferguson spent the next few months at Letterman General  Hospital in San Francisco as his wounds healed.
Just before Christmas, he got an unexpected visitor and some front page notoriety. His mom came to visit him at the hospital, part of a program funded by the Army, a San Francisco newspaper and the Red Cross.
The Fergusons were on the front page of the Minneapolis Tribune on Dec. 23, 1951. It was almost exactly one year since Chuck Ferguson had been called to active duty.
Ferguson spent nearly six months recuperating, and then was given a medical discharge. He had earned two purple hearts, two bronze stars with a V device and a unit citation in his time in service.
He returned to college, earning a teaching degree and ended his teaching career after teaching for 17 years at Crosby, Minnesota. He had been active in the American Legion for many years, and took a job as director of the American Legion's National Education program in Indianapolis in 1977.
In 1978, he returned to Minnesota to become Department Adjutant, a position he held until his retirement in 1994.
He and his late wife, Dorothy, had four children. "Right now, I do as little as possible. I like to work around the home."
Ferguson, 67, has made contact through the years with some of the men in his platoon. The 48-man unit on that day earned three Distinguished Service Crosses, 12 Silver Stars and a Medal of Honor. It was the smallest unit up to that time to earn a Presidential Unit Citation.