MEN AT WAR: Then He Was Dead

Americans sometimes tend to forget it, but after 14 months of futile truce talks, there is still a war going on in Korea. Last week a battlefront dispatch by U.P. Correspondent Richard Applegate brought a stinging reminder:

"The boy was bleeding from the eyes—both eyeballs had been shot out—and he was crying when I found him some 200 feet from the nearest dressing station . . .

"While I was talking to him two medics climbed laboriously up through the rocks trying to get him back to the aid station. I had been trying to comfort the lad, who had been in the Army only five months, and tell him he was all right.

" 'I'm not all right,' he said sadly, wiping at his bleeding face with a grimy shirtsleeve. 'I was supposed to back up the platoon with my B.A.R., and I had picked out a swell place where I could see almost every inch of the path the platoon was taking. I saw the lieutenant take the patrol over a little knoll and I knew that if they were going into an ambush, that was where it would be. Then I saw the ambush. I saw about six or eight Chinese rise up from the rim rock with their machine guns—they were American machine guns, I remember—and started to fire on us.

" 'That was what I was there for, and I had a perfect shot at them. I knew my first rounds would warn the patrol . . . But almost the second I started firing, something hit me. It didn't hurt much at first, but I couldn't see anything. I just didn't know I was blind. I know now, and it hurts.

" 'What are the guys going to think about me?' he asked in pained wonder ment. 'The only B.A.R. in the whole outfit to protect them, and I couldn't see to fire it. I feel like a heel.'

"He raised himself on one elbow and shouted, 'Here they come again!' And then he was dead."