By Scott Longman
His point man whispered: “Hack. They’re here. I can smell ‘em.”
It was August,1951 and a special Army team, the 27th Wolfhound Raiders, was pulling a breathtakingly dangerous overnight behind-the-lines mission in Korea. They had spent hours lying in ambush, but no enemy had appeared, and they now had to beat sunrise back to their lines. Not-yet-Colonel David “Hack” Hackworth was commanding the team. His point man had picked up the scent of Chinese soldiers—the enemy’s limited diet of rice and garlic emitted a discernible odor. There’s some debate as to whether it was from their breath or from their pores, but there’s no debate that you actually could smell it. At least if the wind was right.
In a show of epic leadership and sheer sack for which he would become legendary, Hack pulled back his point man and instead took the position himself, M3A1 grease gun, open bolt back.
Cataclysm.
There was an explosive burst of enemy submachine gun fire at near-contact range and he felt the rounds stitch his stomach. He responded with a full-auto blast, then grenades. Simultaneously, his team executed counter-ambush action and cut loose with a massive hail of heavy .45 ACP rounds, which copper-jacket-blasted six of the enemy to kimchi.
The team couldn’t wait to assess: that fire would bring a ready reaction force down on them. Astonishingly, Hack felt no pain and was moving fine. They hauled ass back toward U.S. lines, issued the running password without getting killed by their own compadres, and got back into relative safety.
He understandably bolted straight to the medical tents. They lay him down and got his fatigues off, since he told them he’d been stitched.
Only. . . . he . . . just . . . well . . . hadn’t.
There were no bullet entrance wounds. Not a one. Despite the close-range burst and the feeling of horrid physical impact, there were no wounds, leaving aside a spattering of tiny steel splinter micro-perforations on his hands and chest, barely weeping any blood.
Hack, stunned but relieved, truly wondered if he’d hallucinated it. He next went to the Regimental S2 (Intelligence) tent to make a report. Consistent with SOP, he cleared his weapon and placed it on a table before entering. When he left, he retrieved his weapon. In reloading it, he suddenly understood: there was a massive hole in the receiver. Against every lottery in history, his M3A1 had caught every single last damn commie round, but it had still fired. Unbelievable—but true.
Fast forward. Do you remember the second Die Hard movie? The first one had been a surprise blockbuster, bringing in about four times what it took to make it and created a huge fanbase. So, no fools the producers, they promptly queued up a sequel. Commensurate with their “no fools” designation, they tongue-in-cheek recognized the desperate improbability of it. So, with a grin and a nudge, they featured a sequence with Bruce Willis growling: “How can the same shit happen to the same guy, TWICE?”
Life sometimes imitates art.
Later in the war, Hack’s Raiders drew a brutal mission: they had to take a terrain feature known as Hill 400. The Chinese defenders were heavily dug in at the top. So far, they’d shrugged off massive artillery bombardments and had shredded two conventional infantry outfits that had tried to assault it. The brass figured that the Raiders, with their reputation for unconventional operations, could accomplish with stealth and cunning what brute force could not.
It started off with precision. One raider killed an oblivious sentry by knocking his skull in with a rifle butt. Hack himself killed the next one, who was sleeping on duty, with a throat slash. They kept moving. And then . . . “Hill 400 exploded.”
Automatic weapons fire everywhere, both the enemy and the Raiders, to which the Raiders added satchel charges and grenades. Then they added pre-arranged artillery to the hilltop, and a flamethrower man. Total, epic violence of every sort, everywhere.
The Raiders continued their upward movement, when someone close to Hack yelled “grenade!”
Hack turned, slipped and rolled downhill, perfectly albeit inadvertently landing directly on the nasty Chicom death package. It detonated. For a horrible instant, his men reeled. Son of a bitch! They had lost him. But they were in a bad fight, and so, being seasoned with the horrors of loss, went back at it.
Hack stood up.
Incomprehensible but true, the heavy receiver of his M1A1 Thompson submachine gun had taken the brunt of the frag. His left arm was broken and mangled, and his chest had multiple frag wounds, but none were life-threatening. He staggered downslope to find the medic, Doc, who had set up shop in a shell hole. Doc patched Hack up. Then, incredibly, instead of seeking hospital care, he got up to go rejoin the fight. His Thompson had been rendered inoperable, so he found an M-2 carbine, which appealed to him because he could fire it one-handed. And did.
They took the hill.
Hack went on to have so many other mind-bending combat experiences that he became the source of legend. He’s the kind of man who lives so fearlessly that, indeed, the same shit can happen to the same guy, twice.
