For most of these teenaged American infantrymen, only days from the taxi dancers and neon streets of Tokyo, it was the first time they had fired their weapons in Korea. The barracks inspections, the manuals, the field training in Japan didn't prepare them for this kind of war, in this strange land, among strange people. The recruiting sergeants never told them. Hollywood war movies gave no hint. Buddy Wenzel, the dropout who found his "out" in the Army, had no idea what he might be asked to do someday.
"Word came through the line, open fire on them," Wenzel recalled. "They were running toward us and we opened fire." The Koreans seemed "confused," he said. "We understood that we were fighting for these people, but we had orders to fire on them and we did." The mind of this young man, the sad boy who raised two small sisters back in New Jersey, was then and there, at No Gun Ri, imprinted with its own freeze frame: of a little girl caught in the sights of his M-1. "I think I shot her."
A "little girl" claimed her place in others' memories, too. "She came running toward us. You should have seen guys trying to kill that little girl with machine guns," said James McClure, who was in a 2nd Battalion reconnaissance squad. "She was crying and she ran back into that mess, and I guess the mortars got her."
For Ralph Bernotas, what lodged in the mind was the distant sight of a "fountain" of white clothing, of refugees' bodies "splashing" into the air with the impact of shells. "Seeing that mortar fire coming in on that mass of people was very hard to take," said the altar boy from the coal country.