As you read this 81-year-old Uncle Dickie is in North Korea. He left his cozy and well-stocked Ft. Myers den for San Francisco last week, arrived in Beijing the following day, and flew into Pyongyang the next morning. In the North Korean capital he boarded a motorcoach for the 3-hour, 150-mile journey to Yudam-ni, not far from the place where 63 years ago the North Koreans and Chinese were doing all they could to kill him on a lonely knob of frozen earth celebrated throughout Marine Corps legend as Fox Hill.
Uncle Dickie's name is Dick Bonelli, and he is not really my uncle. He began signing off with that honorific--and trust me, I am honored--several years back when over copious amounts of Barolos, Chiantis, and Pinot Grigios I interviewed him about his heroism on Fox Hill. The then-19-year-old PFC Bonelli was one of the 192 officers, enlisted men, and corpsmen of Fox Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Regiment, 1st Marine Division--Fox 2/7--tasked with holding that hill 7 miles south of the Chosin Reservoir. The Chosin was where the bulk of the entire 1st Marines, some 10,000-strong, were trapped by hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops. The only road out passed below Fox Hill.
Hold the road Fox Company did, for four days and five nights, against an enemy force numbering close to 10,000. Hold the road Fox Company did, long enough to allow their brethren to famously "charge in the opposite direction" and escape the Frozen Chosin. Hold the road Fox Company did, at harrowing cost. More than half of the outfit was carried off Fox Hill in body bags, and not a Leatherneck among the survivors was not wounded, with almost all suffering some level of frostbite.
And now Uncle Dickie--whom the corpsmen and doctors expected to die from the Chinese bullet lodged near his heart, and who earned the Silver Star for his actions on Fox Hill--is returning with a contingent of Americans to bring back the remains of one of their own, Ensign Jesse LeRoy Brown. Brown was the Navy's first African-American naval aviator and the recipient of the Distinguished Flying Cross.
In December 1950, on his 20th mission in-country, Brown's Corsair spun into the side of a mountain after taking small arms fire while providing air support for the besieged Marines at the Chosin and on Fox Hill. His wingman, Tom Hudner, deliberately crashed his own jet in an effort to rescue Brown, who was trapped in his cockpit. To no avail. Hudner, who is accompanying Uncle Dickie to North Korea--escaped and was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his gallantry. Brown died where he lie, pinned in his cockpit. The next day the Navy "buried" him by napalming the site. The pilots vectoring overhead said The Lord's Prayer in unison. Brown was the first naval officer killed in the Korean War.
Uncle Dickie's family and friends didn't want him traveling to North Korea. He straddled the fence about the idea himself. "Doin' my homework on these North Koreans, they don't take no shit at all," he told me the day before he left. "You might as well wear a dress and act like a little girl because they ain't gonna let you do crap. But Jesse Brown flew air support for us--hell, the planes come over so goddamn low we could wave at 'em in the cockpits--and that puts a whole 'nother lighting on the thing. Makes it much more personal."
What cinched the deal, Uncle Dickie added, was a four-word email he received from a friend, the former Navy Fighter pilot Dick Petrucci.
"It said, 'Bring him home, Dick.' That's all I needed."
As the road to Brown's crash site wends along the base of Fox Hill, Uncle Dickie toyed momentarily with the idea of gathering some pebbles from the prominence to bring to Fox Company's next reunion. He just as quickly dismissed the thought. "I find out when you get there they take your passport and they don't give it back 'til you leave. And if they catch you carrying a bag of rocks? Stealing North Korean property? For Christ sakes, with my big mouth they'll put me in a gulag in Manchuria and I'd never see anybody again. So I decided I ain't touching anything, no pebbles, no rocks, no nuthin'."
But there was more to Uncle Dickie's trepidation than fear of the gulag. Emotionally, he said, he was not certain if he could even tread that hallowed ground again. Eight members of his company, he reminded me, remain buried on Fox Hill.
"If I were to see a bone, a skull ..." and here his voice trailed off.
"Too much," he finally whispered. "I know where every rock is, where my Marines fell. I'd freak out, be a basket case. Those ghosts might be humming in my ear, maybe tapping on my shoulder."
Before he departed Uncle Dickie was informed that a North Korean Army general and a unit of North Korean troops would be waiting for them at the wreckage site. Afterward, he would be invited to a state dinner where he would personally meet the country's Supreme Leader, Kim Jong-un.
"I gotta bring a shirt and tie," he groused. "And I don't even dance Korean. By the way--rice wine. Any good?"
Ain't a gulag in the world that'll hold this guy.
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