Veteran remembers 'the forgotten war'

Nearly dead, and paralyzed from the waist down from a bullet that had hit his spinal cord, Marine Sgt. Carl L. Cash reached over and straightened the hat on his dead lieutenant’s head.

Restoring that slight degree of dignity to a fallen comrade was done even as a fierce battle raged. It was Feb. 7, 1951, and B Company, 5th Marines, 1st Marine Division, was fighting for its existence against a greatly numerical force of Chinese and North Korean infantry.

This week marks the 60th anniversary of the Battle of Chosin Reservoir, which was one of the epic struggles during the Korean War. In the 1987 book, “East of Chosin: Entrapment and Breakout in Korea, 1950,” historian Roy E. Appleman wrote that the hallmarks of the battle “were misery, soul-crushing cold, privation, exhaustion, heroism, sacrifice, leadership of high merit at times, but finally, unit and individual disaster.”

Carl, an athletic Marine sergeant from the Belmont neighborhood of Charlottesville, almost miraculously had avoided his own personal disaster for a good while. He and his fellow Marines had been fighting nearly nonstop for weeks in an all-out effort to recapture lost territory.

On a recent morning, the 81-year-old sat in his wheelchair at the kitchen table of his Albemarle County home. His voice alternated between good humor and sadness as he remembered his part in what has been called ‘the forgotten war.’

“I had always wanted to be a damn Marine for some reason, so I joined up,” Cash said with an easy laugh. “It might have been the uniform.

“I went over to Korea on the USNS General William O. Darby. People were sick and throwing up. When we landed in Korea, they told us to dig in on this hill.

“I was digging in and this bullet just missed hitting me in the head. I wasn’t in Korea an hour before I got shot at. I said to myself, ‘Well, we’re in the war now, and that’s that.’ ”

Cash was one of 154 Leathernecks and five Navy medical officers who left Charlottesville on July 31, 1950. The month before, on June 25, communist-ruled North Korea had invaded South Korea.

Within days President Harry S. Truman ordered American ground troops into action, and Charlottesville’s Marine Corps reserve unit was one of the first to be deployed. Cash had been in Korea only a few days when he and his buddies were presented with graphic evidence that they were fighting a brutal foe.

“We had started moving forward when we found some of our men all cut up and hanging from trees,” said Cash, who had been the leader of a five-man fire team. “There were other dead Marines that they had stuck in the ground so the top half of their bodies were exposed.

“That really pissed us off. I was so mad I could have killed every son of a bitch over there. We had skirmish after skirmish going after them.

“There were places where their dead bodies were piled up to our waists. I remember seeing what I thought was smoke rolling out of the bodies of some Chinese we had just killed.

“But it was actually steam coming out of the places where they had been shot. We could see it, because it was so cold.”

As many combat veterans know, it’s often the seemingly insignificant incidents of war that get permanently logged into the long-term memory. Cash laughed when recalling how he was waiting in line to get a shot in his arm from a corpsman when the enemy attacked and nearly killed all of them.

He didn’t laugh when recounting another miserable moment of war.

“I’ll never forget the time I was headed up this hill, and my helmet flew off,” Cash said as he nursed a cup of black coffee. “The damn thing rolled all the way back down the hill.

“Somebody said I could pick up another from a dead Marine, but I didn’t want to do that. So I went back down that hill and got mine, and then ran to get caught back up.”

Fighting was fierce, the temperature was usually well below zero, and exhaustion and frostbite were taking a heavy toll on the Americans. The only way they could get resupplied with food and ammunitions was by airdrops.

The day Cash got hit, his commanding officer, Lt. Richard Hancock, had told him to take his fire team out in front of the company and scout out a valley. The lieutenant said he would send teams onto the adjacent ridgelines to cover them.

“I said, ‘OK,’ even though I knew it was going to be trouble, because of the high ground on both sides of us,” Cash said. “We were way off down in there when all of a sudden there was gunfire from the Chinese coming in from every direction.

“I told my guys we’d have to go out the way we came. Then I got hit by a bullet in my right side. It hit my backbone, and I must have a good one, because the bullet ricocheted off it and came up and went into my lung.

“The bullet is still in there. Every time I’d get a chest X-ray they’d go, ‘Oh, my God, what is that?’ ”

Within seconds Cash’s fire team had been wiped out. He likely would have died where he fell, too, if it hadn’t been for the heroics of Sgt. Frank J. Lischeski.

“Lischeski got up to where I was and grabbed me by the arm,” Cash said. “I was paralyzed, so he had to drag me for what seemed like a mile.

“We were under fire the whole time. He got me out of there, but I knew I was in right rough shape.

“They put me across the back of a Jeep. I looked up and there was Lieutenant Hancock, dead as a doornail. They had set him up in the front seat. I straightened his hat for him.”

Cash was given a shot of morphine, and he started slipping in and out of consciousness. At some point the Jeep got stuck in the middle of a river, and the driver abandoned it.

“Me and Lieutenant Hancock, with the fireworks going on all around us, everywhere, stayed there all night long,” Cash said. “Then, sometime late in the afternoon of the next day, a truck came up and pulled us out with a rope.

“Then I only remember things like being in a helicopter, and then being in a place where they were operating on me. There were rifles hanging down from the ceiling so if we got attacked, and you could still fight, you could get a gun.

“I woke up again and there was a preacher giving me last rites. They hadn’t expected me to wake up again, but when I did, I told the preacher, ‘I don’t need you.’ ”

Cash ended up in the U.S. Naval Hospital in Yokosuka, Japan. While there, he was told that most of the men in his unit had been killed.

The wounded Marine’s spirits were lifted considerably when he was visited by soldiers and sailors from Charlottesville who were stationed nearby. A surgeon from the University of Virginia raised his spirits even more.

“This doctor from UVa operated on me, and if it hadn’t been for him, I’m not sure I would have made it,” Cash said. “I can’t remember his name to save my butt, but he made it possible for me to move my left foot, and I got some feeling back.

“I told him, ‘Man, I’m glad you got some education in Wahoo Land.’ ”

Like most veterans returning from the Korean War, Cash quietly set about making a life for himself. While recuperating at McGuire Veterans Hospital in Richmond, he attended the University of Richmond in the morning, and the Richmond Professional Institute of the College of William and Mary in the afternoon.

After earning a degree in business, Cash went into real estate and founded the very successful Ambassador Realty Company in Richmond. At one point he had 28 agents working for him.

Prior to going off to war, Cash had been a star basketball player for Lane High School. He was good enough to have been offered a scholarship to play for UVa.

Cash didn’t let using a wheelchair put him on the sidelines. As a player and coach, he was instrumental in helping develop wheelchair basketball throughout the East.

In 1962, at the Stoke Mandeville International Games in England, Cash helped his team win the world championship with a last-second, game-winning shot from midcourt. In 1975 Cash was inducted into the National Wheelchair Basketball Hall of Fame.

In the fall of 1990, Cash became the 10th wheelchair basketball player to be inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass.

“I’ve said that maybe the good Lord didn’t want me to play basketball for UVa,” Cash said. “I’ve played wheelchair basketball all over the world, and it was so much fun.

“I don’t have any animosities at all because of what happened to me in Korea. I believe you should fight for your country, and that’s what I did.

I think we did the right thing going into Korea. South Korea has become one of the most prosperous countries in the world, and the North Koreans are still sucking the hind you-know-what.”

Cash said he has always tried to look at things from the “better side.”

“I didn’t have time to say the war wasn’t worth a damn, because I wanted to go on with my life,” Cash said. “I wanted to get my degree, go into business and get married.

“I was married and had two beautiful children, a boy and a girl. And guess what my son is?

“That’s right. A Marine.”