On a Moonlight Night

Charley Gilliland. a towheaded Ozark farm boy, learned to kill a rattlesnake and throw a mule by the time he was ten. He put in his turn milking and plowing, bought his first shotgun when he was 13, played football and refused to play basketball ("for sissies"), grew strong enough to hold a 98-lb. anvil over his head, but never once stopped dreaming of the day he would become a soldier. He sent away for cereal buttons, collected old CCC caps, medals and sheriff badges, and wore them all, strutting around the house.

On his 17th birthday, he talked his parents into signing his papers so that he could join the Army. When the Korean war came, he was an expert with the big Browning automatic rifle. Not yet 19, he went to battle.

On a moonlight night in 1951, Charley Gilliland was staring down a long ravine covered by his BAR when the shadows erupted in a mad, whistle-blowing, screaming Chinese attack. Rifle fire raked his position; shells crashed in around him. Charley Gilliland stood firm, aiming, firing, aiming, firing. His ammunition loader was killed, but still he held the position. Two Chinese got behind Gilliland. He left his foxhole, killed them both with a pistol. But he was shot in the back of his head himself. The order came for the company to retreat. Gilliland asked permission to stay so that he could cover, giving his company enough time to get away. Charley Gilliland was last seen firing his BAR, still holding off the enemy attack. His body has never been found.

Last week, tears streaming down his face, Leon Gilliland of Yellville, Ark. accepted from Army Secretary Robert Stevens a real medal, the Medal of Honor, posthumously awarded to his son for "incredible valor."

Also given the nation's highest award posthumously last week for heroism in Korea were:

¶ Corporal Charles F. Pendleton, 21, of Fort Worth, Texas, who delivered devastating fire during an attack, cradling his machine gun on his knee. He hurled hand grenades back at the enemy, swung his machine gun in great arcs, was critically wounded but continued to fight. When his machine gun was knocked out by a grenade, he picked up a carbine and fought on. The next morning 37 enemy dead were counted around Corporal Pendleton's position.

¶ Sergeant Gilbert Georgie Collier, 22, of Tichnor, Ark., who was injured when he and his commanding officer stepped off a cliff in total darkness deep in enemy territory. Collier refused to go back with the rest of the unit, but stuck it out with his commanding officer. They crawled back up the cliff, hid, were ambushed and separated. Collier was wounded, ran out of ammunition, and routed four of the enemy with his bayonet before being rescued. He died at a battalion aid station.

¶ Corporal Dan D. Schoonover, 19, of Boise, Idaho, an Army engineer who took command of an infantry rifle squad and stood in exposed position, directing fire. Several times he made one-man attacks on enemy bunkers, once with only a pistol and hand grenades. When his unit was relieved, he volunteered to stay on and continue fighting. He was killed by a mortar shell 48 hours after the battle started, but not before he had "personally accounted for hundreds of enemy casualties."