War: THE BATTLE OF NO NAME RIDGE

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Craig, a cold-eyed fighter, but a kind and sensitive man, tried not to look at his torn kids. Finally he said, with sad pride: "I haven't heard one of the wounded cry. These marines have got more guts than I have. We'll take this piece of real estate, but the cost is going to be terrible."

I asked Charles Scribner, Medical Corpsman of Rochester, Mich, who had just come off the ridge with a load of wounded, what it was like over there on the unnamed real estate.

"Sir," he said panting, his fatigues dripping with sweat and his arms so weary they dangled at his side, "over there, there is much shot and much hell. We are doing the best we can. We'll get 'em out." Scribner couldn't remember how many trips he had made across the valley.

Scribner waited until his South Korean litter bearers had loaded the man they had just brought up onto a jeep. He shook himself, said, "Come on, characters," and started down into the valley and up the bloody ridge again.

The South Koreans, without a word, picked up their litters and started following him down again into this green, green valley. I tried to get their names, but no one knew. They were just "Scribner's characters." They were good characters to have on your side.

Private Arthur Gentry of El Monte, Calif, is a bazookaman who went across the valley and up the ridge and back again. He is very young. He was so exhausted when he returned from the ridge that he could hardly talk. "We couldn't see where they were at," he gasped. "They were too well camouflaged."

I asked one marine if he had been in the last war. He looked at me through bloodshot eyes and said: "No, and I wish I wasn't in this one either."

The Padre Was Brave. The ridge did not stay quiet for long. As Craig prepared to order the second assault wave into the valley, U.S. artillery opened up on the Red positions once more. Then the Corsairs came roaring out of the sky again, their gull-like wings almost scraping the tops of the shabby shrubbery on No Name Ridge. Rockets burst all over the ridge with searing, orange explosions; the Corsairs' machine guns stitched line after line of death up, down and across the ridge.

To those of us sitting on the hill with General Craig, the terrible intensity of the aerial action could only indicate a fierce, personal desire of the Marine pilots to avenge the dreadful toll taken of their comrades on the ground. The pilots seemed unable to wait long enough to finish one strafing run before wheeling their blue-black craft around in the skies for another; they jerked their planes sharply out of bombing dives, made turns so tight that we were sure some of them would crash.