In God We Trust
"I am left with an indelible memory of a Japanese girl…. Let the world know how a vicious war influenced and touched two young people caught up in events they could not understand."
- Chris Sarno
[Editor’s Note: The following memoir was compiled and written by Lynnita Jean Brown from an interview with Chris Sarno that was conducted at the 1st Marine Division Association Reunion in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1999. Additional comments by Chris Sarno were provided for his memoir from a tape recording which he sent to a former Army rifle platoon leader in Korea, Pete Wood. They also came from voluminous correspondences for clarification between Chris and Lynnita while the Question/Answer interview was being transformed into a readable manuscript. Some photographs of tanks are published in this memoir with the permission and through the courtesy of Donald R. Gagnon, editor of the Marine Corps Tankers Association newsletter. No portion of this interview may be downloaded or copied without the express permission of the Korean War Educator. Mr. Sarno died August 06, 2014 from complications associated with diabetes.]
Chris Sarno is pictured above, thinking of "the girl I should have married." For Chris, this Japanese beauty possessed a "traditional inherent feminine quality known only to Japanese women since time immemorial." Yoshiko and Chris loved each other, but they never married due to racial ideologies that were not compatible in the 1950s.
Chris Sarno is filled with pride in the fact that he served as a combat Marine in a tank company in the Korean War. There is also an interesting twist to his war story. On R&R, he met a beautiful Japanese business girl. Eventually, he fell in love with her. In the wake of war and its aftermath, two post-war (World War II and Korea) young people from different cultures were thrown together. Each needed the other for different reasons. With only immaturity to guide them through social and racial barriers, they could not resolve their differences. The life of one ultimately ended in tragedy. Time marched on with bittersweet memories for the other.
To understand how different cultures can clash, one need only look as far back as the lives of Chris Sarno’s parents, Christopher John and Florence Shanahan Sarno. Florence Shanahan grew up in Medford, and during her senior year at Medford High, she was courted by Christopher John Sarno, who was a sophomore. He was a three-year All-State high school athlete in football, basketball, and baseball. Chris and Florence, who were very popular, did all the dances and enjoyed the "roaring twenties." After high school, Chris attended Fordham University in New York City. At that time, Fordham was a prestigious Jesuit college. Sarno, who excelled at all three sports in his freshman year, was looked upon to be Fordham’s up and coming star for the future. In turn, he loved the regimentation of a Jesuit education: morning Mass and a structured daily Catholic regimentation. His future seemed bright on a professional level as an athlete in New York City.
In the summer, he returned to Medford, where he continued to court his Irish sweetheart. This courtship was one of much chagrin to both of their families. Florence came from an Irish clan that abhorred Italians, and the Sarno family was just as parochial in their dislike of the Irish. However, Florence and Chris were passionately in love despite both families’ unrest, and they decided to marry. Once the wedding date was set, Chris’s parents threw all of his clothing out in the yard. Nevertheless, before his sophomore year, Christopher John Sarno married Florence. The couple went to housekeeping in New York City, residing in the Rose Hill area near campus. Looking back on his childhood, their son—the subject of this Korean War memoir--noted that the discord between his Irish/Italian heritage was beyond his and his siblings’ control. "My mother never visited my father’s house after they married—it was that bitter," he said. "The Irish were brazenly outspoken, while I saw how quiet and gentle the Italians were. With all due respect to the intermarriage between Irish and Italians, that holy union produced the most beautiful babies the Vatican smilingly looked upon as the vanguard of the propagation of the Roman Catholic Church. Indeed, the Vatican has always been the firm, and now respected conduit that holds the Irish and Italian Americans forevermore. I was virulently brought up as Irish-Catholic. The US Marine Corps is overloaded with good Marines from this fiery and passionate bloodline."
Christopher Edward Sarno was born in the Jewish Memorial Hospital in New York, New York, on January 25, 1932. One of seven children, he was known by his family and friends as "Junior" from day one throughout his childhood and youth. (As of the day he arrived home from Korea, however, family and friends referred to him as Chris.) Not long after he was born, his father was called into the chancellor’s office at Fordham during the Spring of 1932. He was told that he was being dismissed from Fordham for being married. "In those unyielding days," explained Chris and Florence’s son, "you had to be single to attend a Jesuit University. My father bent the rules, and someone ratted him out. I truly believe this entry in his life had later ramifications for his being a wage earner. He could have been someone in sports—people all over Medford marveled at my Dad’s prowess on the gridiron—but he was left to mediocrity for the remainder of his life." In 1942, Mr. Sarno became a regular police officer on the Medford City police force. He made a career as a police officer, serving honorably on the force for 40 years.
Although the elder Sarno worked and always had a job, there were times when the bill collectors knocked at the door. "My mother was a fighter to provide for her brood," recalled Chris "Junior" Sarno. "She was fearless. She did yeoman tasks to give us tight family ties. My mother was a Trojan in running the house, eventually going to work during the World War Two years, making radios for the US Navy. During the war, American women were recruited to work outside the home structure for the first time. Mom loved it, and she made decent wages, too," said Sarno.
Chris "Junior" Sarno attended Medford Public Schools. His boyhood years (1942-45) were also World War II years. "We were inoculated every Saturday and Sunday with patriotic movies even after the A-bomb drops," Sarno recalled. "No one, and I repeat, no one, ever would ‘play’ a Jap because of our hatred through constant radio war stories and those fascinating movies which gave Japan all the worst of it. I recall one humid afternoon when torrential rains came. I was with my father and brother Bud, and we were standing on the front porch. I clearly remember watching a total rain-out hitting the street, and I said, ‘I wish every raindrop was a bomb over Japan.’ It had to be in 1944. I never thought World War II would end. My mindset was forming about the Japs in particular." And there were movies that influenced the minds of young boys growing up in the war years. "There was another movie with Robert Ryan in a Jap jail and him looking forlornly up at bars that only showed the sky," recalled Sarno. "I felt for him—being in that godforsaken country, about to die, and no one able to save him. Little did I realize that someday I would be in the occupation of racist Japan, then under a totally awakening environment."
While some of the boys in Chris’ neighborhood were Boy Scouts, he was not. "They held meetings in a Protestant church basement," he said. "Because I was Catholic, it was a mortal sin to be in a Protestant church." Instead, he delivered newspapers in the afternoon when he was about 14 or 15 years old. He delivered the Boston Post for 16 cents a week. He got 22 cents a week for delivering the Boston Herald, Boston Record-American, and the Boston Traveler. "I had 60 homes to hit," Sarno recalled. "I got $1.00 from the news office and I made $4.00 in tips. I gave the $4.00 to my mother, and the rest was for pogie-bait [candy]. I was now helping out with the general welfare of our house/family. A year later, my brother Bud hawked papers. We eventually had a 5 a.m.-7 a.m. route of 120 houses. We split the nearby route. Tips went up to $8.00, and we had $2.00 each for mad money. The rest was given to our mother, and we never bitched one moment because we gave it to her. We were happy to be supports to our folks. Rationing was very Spartan all during the war." According to Sarno, the paper routes were very hard, and because of them, he and his brother lost 44 school days in 1948. Brother Bud was an A and B student. Chris’s grades were not that high. "I hated school," he said.
At age 16, Chris Sarno and his brother gave up their paper routes for more lucrative work. Their mother was acquainted with the general manager of Boston’s biggest theater, the RKO-Keith Memorial. There was no television yet, so movies were still the king of entertainment. "As part-time ushers six days or nights a week, we earned 47 cents per hour," said Sarno. "Movies educated me about the world outside of the USA. I loved the newsreels." One of the perks of his ushering job was the fact that the ushers in other movie houses around the city let him and his brother see for free all the movies shown in Boston.
By far, the RKO-Keith Memorial was the classiest movie theater in town. "I remember working with holes in my shoes for a long while," said Sarno. But the holes didn’t matter because the RKO-Keith was carpeted throughout. Ushers wore sharp-looking summer and winter uniforms that accented the good looks of the theater interior. Thousands of moviegoers mingled through the theater every week, especially on Saturday and Sunday.
Outside of the movie house, the Sarno brothers were active participants in local sports. "I was always looking to play the seasonal games of sport, and I threw all my passion into my performance, be it baseball, basketball, or outdoor ice hockey," Sarno said. "It was my goal to be like my famous Dad in athletics. The smell of the gridiron was like being in heaven for me." Unfortunately, Chris was small in stature and weight. This combination was to put an end to his dream to be on the Medford Varsity football team his sophomore year. His self-esteem took a spiral dive, and it was reflected in poor academic grades.
A year later, he rallied out of the academic nose dive, and achieved decent marks in high school college course work. He played varsity baseball and hockey his junior/senior years. "In 1949," he said, "we won the City League Baseball Championship with a 24-3 record and runoff 14 straight league victories as champs. Ten teammates were All-Star selections. I was best shortstop in City that year." Sundays during baseball playoffs, he was allowed to play ball for a few hours in the afternoon before rushing back to his job at Keith Memorial. In the heat of August, he kept a hectic schedule. "After the game, I rushed home, gulped down a huge bowl of cooked white rice mixed with crushed pineapple and real whipped cream, and then I took off like a raped ape to catch a trolley car to Keith Memorial," he recalled. "Then I worked from 5 p.m. until midnight—for 47 cents an hour. My calves hurt standing up there, but I loved my baseball."
After 1949, Chris Sarno’s attention turned from sports to romance. "In April of 1950," he said, "I got a whopping increase from 47.5 cents an hour to 50 cents, and I was made captain of the twenty-plus usher cadre." He worked the day shift, and also supervised three usherettes. He was infatuated that summer and autumn by a tall Irish usherette named Mary. "She wanted me to buy a car," Sarno said, "so I quit work at K-Memorial to the chagrin of my mother and the managers, and quickly got hired at New England Bedding company, which specialized in lounge furnishings. I was hired in September of 1950 at 75 cents an hour at general factory labor. It was only a quarter mile walk from my house. I liked the new work plus overtime. At times I made close to $80 a week with salary and piece work. I was on my way to a $300 used car." When the war broke out in Korea, Sarno traded in his assembly-line civilian job for a front-line military job in the Marine Corps. "In 1951, the Navy paid us nine cents an hour, 24 hours a day," Sarno said. "They fed us, clothed us, and took care of us in sick bay at the expense of the government. Talk about slave labor!."
For Chris Sarno and so many other young men his age, the police action that had broken out in Korea earlier that summer was the furthest thing from his mind when it first erupted. "Besides," he said, "we had General MacArthur and the A-bomb. Who was to worry? I was deeply in love with Mary, and she was my world now." But the world as the young Massachusetts boy knew it was about to change dramatically. He might have been in love, but he was also 18 years old—draft age. When President Truman declared a national emergency (war), he also accelerated the drafting of all men in the age bracket of 18 to 25. War reports coming from Korea were really bad, Sarno recalled. "I refused to be drafted. I decided to volunteer for the Marine Corps."
At that time, there were no draftees in the Marine Corps. "There was no way I was going into the Army," Chris said. "I always considered the Marines as elite. And…they go to war. You want combat? The Marines will make sure they’ll find you combat. With a war going on, that’s what I asked for—FMF—Fleet Marine Force—going to Korea."
His girlfriend Mary was not happy with the news, so Chris tried to soften the blow of his imminent departure by spending his last $12.00 on a night lounging coat for Mary’s Christmas gift that year. Although Mary shed a few tears over the news that the man who had lavished his affection and gifts on her was about to depart for military duty, she quickly found a new boyfriend to replace the one who had left the Boston area to serve his country. "I asked a friend of mine to keep an eye out for Mary, as he was an usher at the Keith Memorial where Mary worked," Sarno said. "I wrote to her first, but Mary never wrote one letter to me while I was in boot camp. I heard later that my pal and Mary were a hot item. Because of her sudden change of heart, it took me a long time to trust a girl. I loved a new mistress instead—the United States Marine Corps."
Sarno’s decision to join the Marine Corps came out of the blue, he said. Two of his uncles had served in World War II—one in the Pacific and one in Europe, but both were Army veterans. "Being of that age of not knowing what I wanted to do," Sarno said, "going into the Armed Forces at that time was very exciting. It wasn’t patriotism totally. It was just adventure. I always wanted to be a pilot, but didn’t have the education for it. But when the time came to go to war, I all of the sudden decided it was the Marines. My mother screamed when she found out that I had signed the papers to enlist. She didn’t want me to get killed. But I was of age to enlist without a parent’s permission." The date was December 10, 1950. Although it was not his intention to cause emotional distress to his mother, Chris Sarno held firm to his decision to join. "It was my time, my war, and I was going," he said. "I wanted to go."
In order to go, however, he had to overcome some technical difficulties with regards to his health. On his mother’s Irish side of the family, there was a long history of diabetes. When he was taking the physical for entry into the Marine Corps, the doctor asked him about diabetes in the family. When the doctor found out that there was diabetes on the Shanahan side of Sarno’s family, it caused a glitch in Sarno’s enlistment efforts. "He didn’t reject me," Sarno said, "but the physician told me I had to go see a civilian doctor and bring medical proof back that I didn’t have diabetes." Even his family doctor tried to talk Chris out of going through with his plans to join the Marine Corps. "This was when the doctors used to come to the house," explained Chris. "They knew all the families in my ethnic Irish/Italian neighborhood. It was a very close-knit group of people in the neighborhood, and he knew my family very well. He didn’t try to coerce me, he just said that I should think it over because I was just a kid. But I said I was old enough. Whether I was a kid or not, I was going. There was a war going on and I was going to go into the Marines." The civilian doctor gave his determined young patient medical clearance, and on December 20, Chris Sarno was accepted into the Marine Corps.
The next day, he was taken down to South Station in Boston with the other of only two enlistees from the Boston area—Billy Evans from Amesbury, Massachusetts. Chris Sarno eventually went to Korea, but Billy went to Cooks and Baker School in the Corps, and never made it to Korea. "It was Christmas time," recalled Sarno, "but that was not on my mind at all. This would be the very first time in my young life that I would be on my very own. I was anxious, but wide-eyed and wondering about the unknown. Billy Evans and I were the only two leaving Boston for Yemasse, South Carolina, wherever the hell that was." Sarno had never ridden in a Pullman car before, and as the train arrived at Penn Station in New York, the youths from Boston found themselves gaping at the awesome New York City skyline.
"There we picked up ten more enlistees and went on to Philly where another eleven enlistees boarded," Sarno recalled. "We had two regular Marine NCOs in charge, and they treated us like civilians—nice chatter, but they watched us like hawks to make sure that no one went AWOL. We all blended in, bullshitting and sizing each kid up. It was a good bunch, and there were no incidents. Sleeping was great, listening to that ubiquitous clickity-clack of the steel to the rail." When the NCOs awoke the youthful travelers under their charge the next day, Sarno said the scenery had changed to one with tall willowy pine trees with moss hanging from the branches. Using government-issued dining chits, he and the others ate lunch, supper, and now breakfast, served by burly black waiters, in the Pullman dining car. "I had a full order of ham and eggs in Carolina, just like that Al Jolson song," he said. Then, just after lunch, the train stopped. A tiny rusty sign marked their departure point from the Pullman—Yemasse, SC. "I didn’t realize this was our destination," recalled Sarno. "I was in the last car, which was the Club Car, standing there looking out at this poverty-looking whistle stop. I was alone, realizing that it was December, but the weather was real warm with a scrub palm here and there."
One of Chris Sarno’s long-term memories of the Yemasse train station was the sight of a little black child about ten years old, standing between two sets of tracks and looking up at Sarno on the train. "Hey, Yankee man," the child said. "Gimmie a dime, will ya?" Sarno only had a few coins remaining in his pocket. "I remember saying, ‘Get lost,’ he admitted. From now on, the recruit from Boston had bigger things to think about than loose change in his pocket. For now, another Marine sergeant took charge of the fresh batch of raw recruits. "This was a Southern Marine," recalled Sarno. "He looked ugly like a Ukrainian thug. He treated us like shit. Not that we were afraid of him, but he just treated us like we were clowns." Calling his charges "cheap-shit civilians", he herded the recruits into a World War II-style wooden barrack where the boys spent the night. "It was a one-story wooden shack with about 40 racks and a concrete shower room that smelled like creosote," Sarno said. "The supper meal we had was in a ‘Greasy Spoon’ with a white cook/owner and flies all over the interior of the restaurant." He said the menu choice for what was to be their last chit meal while traveling to Parris Island was limited to chunks of chuck beef with gravy over a bed of white Carolina rice.
The barrack was one of about seven little shacks with rusted corrugated aluminum roofs. Sarno recalled that there were some blacks shuffling along, and whites shouting orders on what they were to do. The railroad tracks ran right through the center of the rusted shacks. "Now I realized that this was the piss-poor rural south," he said. "I knew nothing about the South except that they lost the Civil War. I didn’t care about the South. My family never traveled that way. I showered, and we slept with a fire watch post in the barracks."
The next morning, with no breakfast under their belt, the 25 recruits boarded old-fashioned green buses with US Marine Corps markings. Nearing the last leg of their trip, the recruits saw lush palm trees. "I thought to myself how great it was to be seeing these tropical plants for the first time in my life," Sarno said. "I was like a lamb going to the slaughter." When the bus trip came to an end at Port Royal, South Carolina, the recruits had a shocking introduction to their first drill instructor—a Marine dressed in greens and looking sharp. Sarno said, "He walked to the back of the bus silently, turned around, and started yelling, ‘Get the fuck off my bus. All I want to see is assholes and elbows. Get the fuck off my bus on the double! When he started cursing us on the bus, that’s the first time I felt fear. We all bolted for the narrow doorway. It was panic as everyone tried to get out the door at the same time. The doorway was backing us up, and that Marine lunatic was screaming racial slurs like we were shit. We all stumbled out like drunks, and there more DI’s were waiting, screaming profanities I had never heard before. When that first SOB of a DI got onboard the bus, the world of my boyhood exploded out of my young life. Forever!! That’s what I recall vividly. I was in Hell, but within two months I was cloned into a devil-dog that will never give up its grip on me until I die." While the frightened boys made a run for the door, practically crawling over each other to get out, the DI stood at the back of the bus laughing at them. "But we weren’t paying attention to him," recalled Sarno, "we were trying to get the hell out of that bus as fast as we could."
Sarno explained that this initiation into the world of the United States Marine Corps was the beginning of a process in which recruits were shaped to withstand "being ranked upon and not reacting." He said that it had an overall bearing on the bigger picture of being a Marine. "But being civilians," he admitted, "we were just frozen with fear."
The final leg of the journey to that "asylum on the island" as Chris Sarno called it, was a short bus ride to the main gate. "There were palm trees, and it was beautiful," he said. "They stopped the bus and pointed out things. You could see the ocean with running current right behind the main gate. They said, ‘Don’t get any ideas. Once you get on the island, if you don’t like our little home, don’t think you can swim across, because the current will sweep you out. And if the current doesn’t get you, the sharks will.’ That was our entrance to Parris Island."
Back in the 1500s, Parris Island had served as a British penal colony. By 1950, it had become one of only two Marine Corps boot camp training grounds in the United States. Upon Chris’s arrival there, he took quick note of his new environment as the troops were directed to their quarters. He saw scrub palm trees that were smaller than the palm trees found in Florida, long grassy plains just back of a side road, and a huge black-topped area known as "the grinder." There were rows of wooden barracks, but the fourth training battalion that Sarno had been assigned to was quartered in the last of about a half dozen Quonset huts located by the road to the rifle range. There were 89 recruits in Platoon Number 288. "We were all like sardines because there were so many in this Quonset hut, and we didn’t know one from another yet," recalled Sarno. They were warned that there would be no pogie bait (candy), no cigarettes (at least not for a while), no radios, and no newspapers during boot camp training. The new arrivals were now cut off from the outside world. They were to concentrate on learning what it took to be a Marine. The Marine Corps wanted no diversions while the boots went through the transformation from civilian to Marine.
The new boots were put in platoons by size, with the taller guys in the first platoon and the light weights ("feather merchants") in the second platoon. "I happened to be on the end—the very last rank of the feather merchants," recalled Sarno. "The DI said, ‘About face.’ Now I was the lead platoon." The platoon followed the drill instructor’s "forward march" command. "We marched the best we could," said Sarno. "It was pitch black and the DI’s were swearing at us. And then the DI said, ‘left flank.’ I was on the left—I didn’t know what the hell he was saying. He had a rebel voice, and I was just wandering around. He screamed at me to do the left flank, and I didn’t know what left flank meant. So I went to the left casually. He was all over me. I thought, ‘Why the hell did I join this outfit? This guy’s crazy.’" With their first sloppy march behind them and still in civilian clothes, the new recruits ate an evening meal.
After their first meal on Parris Island, they returned to the Quonset hut, and to their beds. Those "beds" were actually steel racks. On each of them were two thin, steel-coiled spring mattresses. Neither bedding in the form of blankets or sheets nor military clothes had yet been issued. "Ten o’clock came, taps were blown, and our dim light went out. We were laying on the mattress still wearing our clothes," Sarno said. "A few minutes later, we heard this scream, ‘Boot 288 outside!’ The fear of God was deep in all of us. The first guy to the wooden door was crushed as we fought like sailors about to drown to get topside." Once outside, the bewildered recruits stood at attention as best as they could. "Now there were three DI’s that we’d never seen before," recalled Sarno. "They were our DI’s, but not our senior DI’s. They were all junior DI’s, and they were the worst of the worst. They wanted to be THE DI. So they got us and they were in our face. They swore at us, calling us everything under the sun. Not touching us—just in our face. I wasn’t scared, but I was bewildered."
The platoon was ordered into the Quonset hut to bring one mattress out. "We went storming back inside," recalled Sarno, "crashing through that wooden opening like rats. Then the DI told us to ‘bring out that mattress.’ So outside we went with the mattress. But then he said, ‘You brought out the wrong mattress. You’re supposed to bring out the bottom mattress.’ So we went back in with the mattress. It was chaos drill, and we were doing it with rapidity. We were not just slowly getting in, we were killing that other guy trying to get through." Sarno said that falling recruits were simply stepped on in the rush to get out the door, and there were mattresses strewn everywhere. "Once everyone came out with a single mattress, the drill instructors demanded that we then go back in and bring out both mattresses instead of just one. That went on for about 30 minutes, and by then we were sweating like greased pigs. The DI got us back into that Quonset hut, and eventually he and the others left us alone so we could get some sleep. We were laying there, and I guess everybody else and I were wondering the same thing—what the hell have I gotten myself into? This place is nuts. But I didn’t want to go home. I was just totally bewildered. This was a whole new world for me, and I didn’t know what the hell was going to happen the next day."
Many of the new recruits had never been on the receiving end of such verbal tirades before, but Sarno said there weren’t any tears. "I can honestly say that I never heard a boot crying. Not one. I’m not saying that we were tough guys, but nobody cried. I will say this, however. A lot of the 89 started to have epileptic fits. We’d be doing something and the guy would just collapse in ranks. That was done by the DI’s purposely to weed out the medical weaklings. Even though you passed the first physical, the DI’s main objective was to pounce on the weaklings—find the weaklings and get on their case something fierce so they would quit and want to go home. They only wanted the mentally tough willing to go through the wall down the road—unhesitatingly." This weeding out process was ongoing throughout the entire two months of boot camp. One day a weakling was there. The next day the "weakest link" was gone. Chris Sarno’s platoon—No. 288--began with 89 boots and graduated with only 69 after the DI’s weeded out the medical weaklings and wannabes.
The boots fell into some semblance of formation for close order drill to get their gear and clothing, minus a weapon, the day after they arrived at Parris Island. The boots went to the island barber shop to be shaved of every strand of hair on their head. Sarno had arrived on the island with a neat, short haircut from his jock years on the playing fields in Boston. On Parris Island, even crew cuts were forbidden, however. He and his fellow recruits were issued World War II-style dungarees and boondockers (a boot that only went up to the ankle). "We were issued clothes and everything else that we needed for official issue," said Sarno, "including a thick paperback book about what a US Marine in or out of boot camp must remember. It helped me understand my new interest in life now—to be a US Marine. It was like a Bible for a Marine to always refer to, but it was the religion of the USMC. I loved it and it helped me tremendously. They call it something else now, but mine was called, ‘The Guide Book for Marines.’."
Each of the new recruits also received a small aluminum pail, toiletries, and a big, hard brush. The pail would become an important part of their life in boot camp, because with it they washed their clothes before hanging them on an open clothes line to dry, and they scrubbed a lot of other things too. Boots were required to keep the Quonset hut spit-shine clean, and there were field days three times a week. Those field days were equivalent to "spring cleaning" in civilian life, only the consequences of "missing a spot" were far more miserable on the boots if the drill instructor happened to find the spot. And if there was a missed spot, the DI would most surely find it. "We were not even thinking of a weapon at this time," Sarno remembered. "I had my hands full just to know close order drill with a formation. But, we did okay. Then they drilled us on the ten general orders."
The ten general orders learned in boot camp were used throughout the Marine Corps in all duty stations to insure attention to duty, respect, and uniformity. They were and are the rules that Marines of all ranks have lived by for decades. "We were ordered to memorize them that day, because the next day we would be questioned," recalled Sarno. "You had to have it exactly right. They questioned us by going through the ranks and randomly choosing one recruit after another to recite a particular order. They wanted the proper response. It was a cram session—cramming to learn them word for word, and it wasn’t fun. But if you missed so much as one word, they got all over you."
The next day, the new boots were taken to Main Side buildings for two days of written tests. "I scored 110 on the General Military Test," recalled Sarno. "Those who got a score of 120 were asked to go to Officer’s School." In the afternoon, the men took a basic radio school test, and many of those who scored high later went on to be in the Communications Section. The recruits were allowed to list their preferences for a military specialty. Chris Sarno’s preferences were tanks or artillery, although he knew very little about either. When making his choice, he said that he just used common sense. As an usher in the Boston movie theater, he used to see numerous documentaries after World War II. "Tanks always caught my fancy with their brutish appearance, speed and fire power," he said.
During one afternoon of testing, he not only happened to chose a preference that sealed his fate as a tanker in Korea, he also had to pass a very unusual psychological test. "I remember that we were asked to draw a side profile of a woman," recalled Sarno. None of the boots knew exactly why they had to do this. The one boot who dared to ask was verbally berated by the DI for so much as questioning "why". Everyone just assumed that the drawing ended up with a Marine Corps psychiatrist. "Self expression does reveal personality pluses and minuses," Sarno noted.
The recruits were expected to passed a rudimentary close order drill in formation before they were issued a weapon. Once that was behind them, they were marched down to the grinder to go to the armory for a weapon. There was no mistaking the group for anything other than the raw recruits they were at the time, Sarno recalled. "We had dungarees with the open blouse never tucked in. We weren’t allowed to wear leggings because we were not considered to be true Marines while we were still in boot camp. Our DI told us that we looked like a bunch of clowns, and that we were a bunch of clowns. They never gave you a compliment. Not once. Any time they opened their mouths to any of us, it was always to say something derogatory."
The armory was a huge aluminum building that housed nothing but M-1 rifles. When the recruits went inside of it for the first time, they were assigned a rifle. "We yelled out the serial number of the rifle," recalled Sarno, "and then we were responsible for that rifle until we left the island. That M-1 rifle weighed 9 ½ pounds. I never saw a weapon in my life, and that thing looked huge to me. I liked it!."
Just as they were getting close order drill down pat, the recruits suddenly had to learn the manual of arms—how to handle a rifle. Sarno admitted that this new training exercise caused him some anxiety in the beginning. "I thought, oh jeez, I’m never going to get this one—using a rifle and using my feet at the same time. Within a week, however, we were looking pretty good. I remember this little DI—the junior DI. He was a son-of-a-bitch. He was a little guy about 5’4". Mean? He sure was. He had a tongue on him that he could lash out at you and you’d swear you were bleeding. He loved being a DI. He would come to various ones of us and command us to do something with the rifle. It so happened that he stopped in front of me and said, ‘Do inspection arms.’ So I went through it and I did inspection arms. But when I came back to rip that bolt down and open the chamber, it opened but I looked at my rear sight and it was missing. For whatever reason, I didn’t have a rear sight. He grabbed the rifle because he was going to inspect it. Sure enough, he said, ‘You f---ing….where’s your rear sight? I told him that I didn’t know. He replied, ‘You don’t know? Are you kidding me? A Jap would kill you in a minute.’ When we got down to the grinder, he broke me out of the formation and told me to go at high port [holding a rifle at a certain position in front of the chest] to the armory and get a new sight."
Sarno said that he ran about a thousand yards at high port, double-timing to the armory to get the sight. "I flew across the hot top knowing that I was going to catch holy hell from the armorer," he recalled. All the personnel in the armory were permanent staff, and true to Sarno’s prediction, he was jumped on immediately when the staff learned why Sarno was there. "When I told the armorer that I needed a rear sight," said Sarno, "he asked, ‘What the hell did you do with the one we gave you?’ When I told him that I didn’t know, I got my ass reamed out from him as he was putting the rear sight in. He tossed the rifle back at me and I rushed out and joined my platoon. From that day on, every morning and every night I broke my sling apart, took the shiny brass claw, and used it as a screw driver to tighten that little bar that held my rear sight. I did that every day religiously, because there was no way I was going to lose my rear sight again."
Most recruits in Marine Corps boot camp had no love for their drill instructors, except perhaps that they would love to kill them. There were senior DI’s and junior DI’s, and they held the rank of private first class to staff sergeant. "Staff Sergeant Slater was our senior DI, but we hardly saw him," recalled Sarno. "I mostly saw him when the platoon was designated to perform for an officer, which wasn’t too frequent. He was pretty good. I can’t remember him ever abusing or cursing anybody out, but we towed the mark when he was drilling us. We wanted to look sharp for him. But Corporal Payson…. We could be the sharpest platoon, and he’d still treat us like scum. Our platoon’s 24/7 regime lay in the hands of the junior DI’s, and it was a shark tank for them to surface for notice of just how unmerciful they could be. Pfc. Gaunts was one of our junior DI’s. He looked like the movie actor Sidney Greenstreet, and when he chewed us out we didn’t take it to heart like we did with Payson."
Every drill instructor had certain criteria for training their recruits, but each DI had his own method of instruction, some more unconventional than others. There was corporal punishment, and Platoon 288 recruits received some punches to the face or an occasional backhander, especially from one in particular. "Payson was an SOB of a DI", Sarno recalled. "One day 288 went for dental exams," recalled Sarno. One boot had two teeth pulled and came out of the dentist’s office with gauze and puffy cheeks. When he entered the vestibule where the rest of the platoon was waiting, he dared to address Corporal Payson without permission. "Payson’s eyes narrowed," recalled Sarno, "and he let go with a backhander to that boot’s jaw that knocked him prone. ‘Who the fuck gave you permission to speak to the DI?’, Payson yelled."
Payson’s method of instruction included repeated attempts (most of which were successful) to publicly humiliate the young boots. Sarno remembered that there was a big tall recruit named Brown. "He was good," he said. "I can never remember him having a problem mastering whatever they were teaching us. He was quiet and confident. Payson goaded Brown every single morning like clockwork. This is how he started the morning: He got right in his face. And Payson was little. Brown was six foot, but Payson as a little shit. He’d go to Brown right off the bat. He got right up under his jaw and said, ‘Brown, is that your name?’ And he’d say, ‘yes sir.’ Payson would then say, ‘Brown, what’s the color of shit?’ ‘Brown, Sir.’ Payson would reply, ‘Then you’re a piece of shit, aren’t you Brown?’ He would reply, ‘Yes, Sir.’ Every morning Payson was at it. He would go to that one guy. And, of course, it got old to us. We knew what he was going to do and it didn’t have an affect on us—at least not in the beginning. We felt bad for Brown because he was doing everything that a boot should be doing. But Brown never reacted. He took the call-down. Payson was that mean."
But Payson’s occasional use of corporal punishment to help mold raw recruits into new Marines was nothing compared to the instruction methods of Parris Island’s infamous "Locker Box Jones." Sarno sympathized with the boots in that martinet of a DI’s platoon. "There was another platoon that camped with us," he recalled. "Their DI was famous. His name was Locker Box Jones. He was a mean son-of-a-bitch who punched out guys in his platoon. He even took rifles that weren’t properly set up. He’d take the rifle and throw it like a baseball bat right into the sand. He would just heave it like a javelin. He was known to demand that his recruits break out their heavy gauged wooden locker box and drill with them instead of a rifle. That’s how he got the name ‘Locker Box Jones’." A boot’s locker box was a small wooden trunk about 30"x18", and a little over a foot deep. It held personal items, toiletries, stationery booklet, Marines Guide Book, all items of clothing (including dungarees and dress shoes with shining gear), etc. It probably weighed about 35-40 pounds when full. "The day I saw Jones drill his boots with the locker boxes," Sarno said, "the recruits couldn’t hold them too long and they spilled their company street with the contents. Locker Box Jones was a tyrant—loud and abusive--and Hell on the island for years. Payson was only a pimple on Locker Box Jones’ ass. Our DI’s put the fear in us, there was no question about it, but Jones was a lot more miserable to his boots than my set of DI’s."
Sarno admitted that during his first few days and weeks in boot camp, he was frightened of the DI’s. However, his bewilderment at the verbal tirades eventually gave way to understanding why they were doing it. "I realized that they were trying to break us down mentally," he said. "I was going to resist them. I was going to yes them to death. Whatever you say. The more I yes’d them, sooner or later they had to move on to somebody else. I wasn’t going to say no."
After the initial shock of those first days in boot camp, recruits started to be conditioned to the verbal tirades from their drill instructors. "About three weeks into boot, the in-your-face ass-chewings rolled off of us like water on a duck in a rainstorm. Silently we were going to show Payson that he couldn’t break us down. Of course, that was Payson’s victory right then—boots who silently hated his guts, but wouldn’t give in to irrational conduct unless it was in order to kick his friggin’ head in, with pleasure." Payson even made mail call an ordeal for the boots. Sarno said that every two or three days the mail could come. Payson would stand between two platoons, call out the name of the man receiving the mail, and then throw the letter in the other direction. "Then if a guy got four letters," recalled Sarno, "instead of giving him the four, Payson would throw the letters one at a time on the floor and then make the guy run around the platoon and pick each one up off the floor. That’s just the way that Payson was."
Payson was hated by the recruits who were under his charge, but his demand for obedience got results. The majority of the boots in Platoon 288 survived his punches and his verbal tirades. Some recruits, however, did not fare so well at Parris Island, and Payson used this fact to his best advantage. He taunted those who thought they could survive boot camp by setting examples of those who had failed to survive it. One cold morning as Payson marched his troops to the grinder, he stopped the platoon. "There were two guys standing on the curb in light blue overcoats," recalled Sarno. Payson told his men to ‘right face.’ "We were facing these two guys, but we didn’t know who they were. Payson said, ‘See these two assholes? They couldn’t make it. They’re sending them home to their mommies and daddies in blue overcoats. Baby blue. They’re babies. They couldn’t make it. They want to go home.’ And Payson told the boots in Platoon 288, ‘Every one of you are going to get a blue coat.’ I can remember saying to myself, ‘F--- you, Payson. I’m making it, even if I have to go over you. You aren’t sending me home in a blue coat.’ And I’ll bet a lot of other guys were thinking the same thing. We were determined. But that’s the way it was in the Marine Corps. They wanted you to have that reaction—‘you aren’t driving me out. I’ll drive over you.’ They wanted that, because it was all leading up to combat training. You’re going to get that enemy. Even if you’re surrounded, you’re going to get that enemy again and again until you’re wiped out. You’re going to do your duty. All these little things were geared for combat. We didn’t know it at the time, but our DI’s did. I’ll always remember those two kids in the blue coats." As for the boys in blue, they just stood there like statues as Payson ridiculed them. Apparently they were afraid to move, for fear they would be thrown into the brig. "They didn’t move an inch," recalled Sarno. "We sort of looked down on them. We’re going to make it. You guys aren’t good enough. That was our reaction. Early Marine attitude. I’m better than you." The boys in the blue coats were left behind that day as Payson marched his determined boots onward to the grinder.
The grinder that the new recruits saw as they first entered Parris Island became a very familiar place to every Marine and Marine recruit on the island. "There would be massive platoons out there maneuvering and doing the same basic close order drill," recalled Sarno. "Close order drill was not just marching or learning to march. It was done with foresight. It taught you instant discipline to react to a command. Right flank, left flank." It was a monotonous routine, and many recruits, including Chris Sarno, wondered, "Why do this? It’s boring." In hindsight, Sarno finally came to understand the answer to his own question. "The way the Marine Corps looked at it," he explained, "it taught you inner discipline to obey a command instantly without question. And we didn’t question—we just did it."
Each day began for Platoon 288 at 5 o’clock in the morning. Sarno was awakened each morning by "heels, heels, heels"—the sound of another platoon marching by the hut at 4:30 a.m. to be first at chow. The stomping of their boots woke up the occupants of other huts on the street, too. A normal day didn’t start with push ups and jumping jacks and other physical exercise like one sees in the movies. "We didn’t do a lot of physical training," recalled Sarno. We never did those calisthenics that you see them do now. The Marines that you see today are hard body guys right out of boot camp. Maybe it was on account of the Korean War that they skipped that when I was in boot camp, but we had no hard physical training. We did calisthenics in the morning, but they were a snap. They were only five minutes, but we were hardened just the same. We had good muscle form."
Besides the short daily physical training sessions, there was classroom instruction on subjects such as the history and traditions of the Marine Corps and personal hygiene, field days of cleaning, and close order drills. During the days and weeks that followed their arrival at Parris Island, the new boots underwent the gamut in training from before sunup to after sundown. There were occasional "unusual" tests, too. One cold winter’s night before their boot camp days were over, the platoon put on Navy blue, all wool bathing suits that were (as Sarno called them) "itchy as a bastard." The boots then double-timed to the swimming pool. "The DI’s were laughing," recalled Sarno. "They said, ‘All you clowns that can’t swim will drown tonight.’ I laughed to myself because I already knew how to swim. It was a big, heated pool, and the swim instructors had each one of us swim the length of the pool and back—50 yards. I dove in and did my swim up and back with no problem. When I got out, I observed the poor boots who couldn’t swim. Some refused to get in, but the instructors pushed them in at the deepest end, which was 15 feet deep. They sank fast, screaming like dying men. The instructors had long bamboo poles that they put into the water for the sinking boots to grab on to in order to surface. They remained in the water as the instructors made them be buoyant at best. I remember that one boot fought off getting in the water. They dragged his ass up to the highest platform over the deep end and threw him down into the water. He hit bottom and remained there. The instructors finally all dove in to rescue him." Those who knew how to swim were marched back to the barracks. Sarno said that much later the non-swimmers were dragged into the squad bay where they were "berated like shit-coolies." They went back to the pool the next night for swim classes. "We felt for them, but we didn’t dare say shit," Sarno said. There was deep comradeship among the boots, but those who showed deficiencies often got the cold shoulder from their fellow recruits. There was no room for weakness in Marine Corps boot camp.
Once the boots mastered close order drill and the manual of arms, their attention was turned to the rifle range. A month had passed since they had arrived at the front gate to Parris Island. There were only four more weeks of boot camp training left. The normal peacetime training time was 12 weeks, but with a war raging in Korea and replacements desperately needed there, the recruits were put through an accelerated training course. This part of the training—teaching boots to shoot with precision—was all important to the Marine Corps, which mandates "every man a rifleman." After boot camp was over, Chris Sarno was assigned to tanks, but nevertheless, he was trained to be a rifleman as every Marine was and still is trained. "All Marines are capable of being put into a rifle platoon and functioning as a rifleman, regardless of what you learned as your specialty," he said. "All the Marines have that in them and take great pride in knowing that, yeah, I’m basically a Marine rifleman and I can function as a grunt even though I’m trained as an artilleryman or a tanker or an amphibious guy. We’re all proud to be infantrymen. There’s no problem mentally saying, ‘what am I doing here?’. I guarantee that if you interview any Army guy and ask him if he’s been trained away from the infantry in the Army and suddenly he’s going to have a rifle in his hands, he will piss and moan and complain, ‘Hey, I’m not trained for this. I shouldn’t be here.’ And he will belabor that point. ‘Get me out of here. I didn’t join the Army to fight.’ But that is so totally foreign to the Marine training—of the mindset. A Marine won’t say that. They’ll accept that rifle and say, ‘Okay. What’s my duty within the squad?’ That’s the difference in Army and Marine training."
When it was time to go to the rifle range, the lives of the men in Platoon 288 altered. They were moved out of their metal Quonset huts and into spacious wooden barracks closer to the rifle range. Rather than being fractured apart in four or five huts, the entire platoon was together under one roof. There was better lighting and uniform racks on which to sleep. In the center of the squad bay was a long rifle rack. Meals were served at the boot mess hall, and Sarno said the chow was good.
Each morning the boots underwent thirty minutes of physical training, doing exercise with the M-1 rifle to build up the upper body. There would be no live rounds used in their first days of rifle range training, but it was deadly serious business for the recruits just the same. What they absorbed from their instructors would likely help save their lives should they go to combat in Korea.
At the rifle range, the boots were ordered to go up to staked places in the sand. There, they lined up in a skirmish line and for one week learned how to "snap in". Their concentration was on one thing only: They practiced sight alignment in offhand (standing), sitting, kneeling, and prone positions. On a stake in front of the boots were two other pieces of wood with the silhouette of a target. Initially, the boots were taught how to get the proper sight picture only. "They taught us how to get a bull’s eye," recalled Sarno. "We had to line up at 6 o’clock on the silhouette, have the circle part of the end of the barrel with the perpendicular stud coming up, hold our breath, let a little out, and squeeze the trigger. We did that religiously for seven days."
After practicing over and over again on how to focus on their target, the boots moved to the firing line and butts area of the rifle range. (The butts were the target pulling area.) For many of the boots, this was the first time they would ever fire a rifle. "The targets were huge," recalled Sarno, "and I thought to myself, ‘How in the hell can you miss these?’ But this was the first time I ever fired a weapon in my life." What seemed simple in theory proved to be harder in practice.
Supervising the rifle range training were firing instructors whose only job in the Marine Corps was to teach boots how to qualify. "He didn’t want it on his record that he had a boot that didn’t qualify," said Sarno. Each instructor was assigned four or five recruits, and he worked with them day after day to make sure that those in his charge qualified and his record as an instructor was proficient. "I remember my instructor’s name," Sarno said. "His name was Holmes and he was okay. He was nothing like a DI. There was a big difference between rifle range personnel and DIs. Permanent personnel treated us relatively good. The DI’s had nothing to do with us during rifle range training. They brought us down in the morning that first week, and then they left us. We were then in the hands of the range firing people, which was nice. For once we weren’t under constant belittlement. But they did that so that we would be calm enough to qualify. The second week was the same thing. We fired live practice rounds. No DIs were bothering us during the day. But at night the DI’s said that everybody better qualify. That was the last thought on our mind as we went out the final day on the rifle range: to qualify." Rather than risk the wrath of their DI’s, the boots paid close attention to their firing instructors.
Learning to fire was not a free for all for the boots. Each was given full clips of eight rounds, and they were closely supervised by range officers who were responsible for the safety of their inexperienced charges. "You could only function on the command of the range officer," said Sarno. "He had a bull horn and would shout, ‘All ready on the right. All ready on the left.’ We were allowed to take our time—we didn’t have to rush the eight rounds off." But they were expected to be precise in their shooting because each boot had to "qualify" (get a certain score) in order to graduate from Marine Corps boot camp. The man working the butts area would check the target to see where the eight rounds hit the target. "At certain areas you got two points, three points, four points, and five for the bull," recalled Sarno. "I don’t think I got a bull the first time, but I wasn’t all over the target like some of the other guys."
For an entire week, the recruits practiced firing over and over again every day. On Friday of the second week at the rifle range, the men would have to fire 50 rounds for record. "Your score went into your Service Record book," explained Sarno. "Any score under 190 and you did not qualify. I fired 196, which was Marksman."
Not every boot in Platoon 288 qualified, and woe to those who didn’t. "We had five boots who didn’t fire 190 or higher," recalled Sarno. "As the DI’s gathered us up after morning session firing for record…our two weeks were up on the rifle range…right away the DI’s wanted to know, ‘who the f—k didn’t qualify?’ He berated them something fierce, and made them march behind the rear platoon. The DI called them a ‘platoon of assholes’—‘shitbirds.’ When we went to noon chow that day, those who hadn’t qualified on the rifle range had their skivvies tied on as bibs, and one could see the white skivvies scattered here and there in the huge mess hall. We even ragged them in the barrack to a degree, but within a week it was a non-issue." Graduation was nearing. Boots who didn’t qualify on the rifle range were allowed to graduate with the rest of their boot camp buddies, but the fact that they didn’t qualify with the rifle was noted in their service record for viewing by the commanding officer at their assigned post-boot camp duty station.
Besides snapping in and firing on the rifle range, the recruits learned another important skill required of all Marine riflemen. They were taught how to break their M-1’s down to clean its intricate parts, and then how to re-assemble the weapon rapidly. "While learning and doing the manual of arms before," recalled Sarno, "We would field strip the M-1 just for practice. But out on the rifle range and at the cleaning racks, we loved the M-1 like a girl friend. It was our best pal in combat that M-1. We treasured it, and I never let mine hit the deck in all the four years that I handled it. I loved the M-1 and the unique noises that it gave out while we were in drill with it. The US Marine Silent Drill team uses M-1’s as they make a unique sound when snapped hard."
Sarno and the other boots may have qualified as riflemen, but ranking Marines on the base made sure that it didn’t swell their heads. During rifle range training, recruits spent the third week doing menial tasks in mess duty for all the rifle range coaches and other permanent personnel there. Boots on mess duty that week were awakened by the fire watch at 3 a.m. Once in the mess kitchen, they were at the beck and call of their new bosses—the cooks. "The meanest guys in the Marine Corps were its cooks," Sarno noted. "They never smiled, and we were just faceless bodies as they ruled their roost. You were told what to do and were expected to do it without further question. Those cooks were martinets." Sarno said that he didn’t mind the cooks because being assigned mess duty at the rifle range was far better than pulling mess duty at Main Side. "It was much easier and closer-knit doing mess on rifle range week than serving 1,000 boots at Main Side. After the morning chow was over and all nine tables were spit shine clean, we would line up the salt, pepper, tomato bottle, salad oil jars, silverware placings, two plates, one cup and one glass, and then three boots would stretch a long string across four tables. Each of the above items had to be in precise alignment. It was a perfect spectacle to walk in and savor a dining hall in order. Mess duty taught me for the rest of my life how important cleanliness is in food preparation." The rifle range mess hall had an ocean view, and Sarno said that, with the sun streaming through its large windows and hitting a gleaming deck, the pristine setting seemed somehow romantic.
The area called Elliott’s Beach was not nearly as "romantic", however. Due east and near the rifle range, but not in sight of it, Elliott’s Beach was a lush area with lots of 10-15 foot high scrub palms and sea grass. Not long after they had completed their instruction and proficiency test on the rifle range, the boots were sent on a forced march to Elliott’s Beach. They wore a 60-pound combat pack complete with M-1 rifle and all web gear and attachments. "We had two weeks left on the island," said Sarno, "and we were salty bastards. We moved out in two columns and the DI’s blew whistles to hit the deck (in a salt marsh) to simulate being under air attack. We were eating this up as it was gung-ho. The scenery was all salt marsh tributaries like an estuary to the sea. When we finally arrived at the staging area to the beach, we were all muddy and wet. We had a good noon chow and then half the platoon went to assault the fox hole position while my half went to the familiarization range and fired .22 caliber rifles. We also watched a 2.5 World War II bazooka team fire a couple of rounds, and we fired the .45 caliber pistol at wooden targets about 25 yards way. We thought, ‘this is so easy at that close range.’ I fired about 25 rounds, but I never hit the target once. Most of us did the same. The pistol coach said he was not surprised. We learned how inaccurate the pistol could be without constant practice with it. If you do hit your enemy with it, you’ll blow his head off."
Later, Sarno’s section assaulted foxholes by fire team coordination. There was no real guidance, Sarno recalled, and the men didn’t know if they had done the assault correctly or incorrectly. "There was a lot of yelling in the assault, that’s all," he said. When the assault training exercise was over, the men marched two miles back in a tactical march that still included hitting the deck when the DI’s blew their whistles.
"The tide was coming in on the salt flats," recalled Sarno. "Guys fell in deeper water this time. We got back drenched, muddy, and tired, but we ate it up just the same." In the months to come, many of these new Marines would experience much rougher training at Camp Pendleton. But for now, they concentrated on their last days on Parris Island. They spent one morning in a gas chamber, learning the basics of dealing with chemical weapons. They were required to stay in the chamber for several minutes until they were ordered out and into fresh air. They dashed out stumbling and coughing, eyes runny from the sting of the gas—but one step closer to graduation for having gone through the experience.
With the promise of that graduation just a couple of weeks away, the boots who had made it through boot camp training thus far were fitted for dress greens. Civilian tailors fitted them for their greens, as well as for khaki shirts and field scarves (ties). "I loved looking at the Marine emblem on my dungaree blouse and gung-ho cap," Sarno admitted. "As mentally grueling as it was, I loved being a Marine. It was the final ending of my boyhood, and adventure here I come!"
After rifle range training, the last two weeks of boot camp were relatively easy. "There were classes on military subjects pertinent to the USMC mindset," recalled Sarno, "and the DI’s didn’t really scare us anymore, no matter how they yelled in our faces. We also took one more written test about boot camp subjects. The DI railed at our results. He screamed at us that as a platoon we had failed miserably on the test. He yelled, ‘One of you shitheads couldn’t even spell your name correctly. You are undoubtedly the dumbest bastards I’ve ever trained.’ But, we were the saltiest SOBs he had ever seen, too."
Every new Marine wanted to be "salty." This term often crops up in the Marine vocabulary, and it has different meaning depending on how it is being used in conversation. A salty Marine has the persona of what it takes to be a sharp-looking Marine. He is a seasoned Marine—somebody you can go to and depend on if you have a problem. Salty uniforms have a "not new" look to them. As each day of his boot training came to an end, Chris Sarno washed his cover (cap) every night until it was almost white rather than the herring bone green it was when he arrived at boot camp. Just days before graduation, his platoon was marching to noon chow. Drill instructor Gaunts noticed Sarno’s cover and said, "You salty little bastard." Just to remind him that he was still a boot, albeit a "salty" one, Gaunts pulled Sarno’s visor down over his eyes. "He said, ‘right face, forward march,’ recalled Sarno. "Now turn and march. Keep your goddamned head down, Sarno. Stop looking. Keep that head up erect. You’re at attention.’ And I was staggering all over the place. The guys were pushing me because I was screwing them up. Finally we got to the chow hall and Gaunts told me to restore my cover."
Boots worked up an appetite during their arduous training, so chow time was always welcome. They were marched to chow hall, then had to wait a half hour before they went in. "It was hurry up and wait," said Sarno. But the food was good and worth the wait. "We had potatoes morning, noon and night," he recalled. Occasionally there was steak and maybe pork chops. Meat loaf, baked liver and chicken legs were common fare. These were served along with peas, carrots, spinach and other vegetables. "We also got one slice of ice cream all wrapped up in white paper," Sarno recalled. "They made their own ice cream. It was sort of a cheap, milky-tasting ice cream, but we dove into it. We had milk and cereal in the morning." Hovering nearby were the drill instructors, making sure that their charges ate. There were no seconds in boot camp, so the boots ate the food that was piled onto their plates like they were starving. The Marine Corps had complete control over who ate what, too. "The fat guys—the overweight guys—had a special table where all they ate was lettuce and tomatoes and carrots," recalled Sarno. "It was called the rabbit table." Everyone at that table was on a strict diet of low calorie foods to help them lose weight. Sarno, a mere 129 pounds, was told by one of his junior DI’s that the Marine Corps intended to put twenty pounds on him. "Sure enough," Sarno said, "when I got out of boot camp, I weighed 150 pounds. And like I said, you only got one serving at breakfast, dinner, and supper."
As a result of his boot camp training, Chris Sarno had changed in ways other than physical appearance, too. "I always had a deep resentment for someone telling me what to do," he admitted. In boot camp, he had to sleep, eat, and speak only on command. The drill instructors had constantly told him what to do. "But I didn’t fight it," Sarno said. "I learned how to be disciplined, and I was better off for it."
There was only one black recruit in Platoon 288. Like the other boots on Parris Island, he did everything he was told to do, and he did it well. He was a quiet man who caused no problems. As a result, there was no racial tension because of his presence in the platoon. Cooper was his name. In spite of the fact that he had proven himself worthy to be called a United States Marine, when everyone else got orders that they were going to Pendleton, Cooper got orders to Baltimore. Sarno recalled, "I said to the DI, Baltimore? There are no Marines in Baltimore.’ The DI replied, ‘You’re right. He’s going to be a steward in an officer’s mess. That’s the way we do it." In 1951, there were no blacks in combat outfits. For Sarno, this didn’t seem like anything unreasonable. He had grown up in an all-white neighborhood where different races did not mingle. "They were black and we were white, so we didn’t socialize with them," he explained. When Sarno entered the Marine Corps, the segregation that still existed didn’t seem out of the ordinary to him. "Even going through training and replacement command in California," he recalled, "there were all whites. I didn’t think anything of it—why Pendleton was nearly all white. That was just the Navy. They weren’t listening to President Truman in 1948 when he desegregated the Armed Forces. Sure he did it publicly and he signed a law, but it wasn’t implemented. The Navy was very hesitant to put any black in a combat billet, whether in the Navy or Marine Corps." Growing up in a white community, Sarno said blacks weren’t in his life. "They were the comical guys," he explained. "They were seen, but not taken seriously."
Whether black or white, the boots on Parris Island knew that their brutal days on that "asylum on the island" were almost over as graduation day arrived. The men in the three graduating platoons put on their greens and passed in review before every senior and junior officer in battalion formation. The drill instructors were tense, demanding that their graduating recruits not "screw up on battalion parade." Even the DI’s were answerable to higher authority in the Marine Corps. If their platoons fouled up on this very important day, the drill instructor’s proficiency would be lowered because their performance as DI’s was measurable by the performance of the boots under their supervision. "They were really sweating that we were going to foul up," said Sarno. "But we didn’t."
After the battalion parade, the graduating boots felt that they were real Marines. "All of us thought we were," said Sarno. "We had done everything they wanted of us and we passed. In the Marine Corps, you either pass or fail. We had passed and we were all proud of ourselves." That night, the men in Platoon 288 overheard another platoon’s drill instructor still belittling his boots. "We could hear him," recalled Sarno. "He was ranting and raving, ‘You’re going to Korea. You’re all going to be killed. You’re cannon fodder. You think you’re Marines? You’re not Marines."
The next day the new Marines went their separate ways. "We got our sea bags and we were going home for ten days," recalled Sarno. "We were happy. Two DI’s came down and they were still cursing us. We got on the bus and they were still cursing us. As the bus slowly pulled away, somebody said, ‘Let’s tell those assholes.’ We rolled the window down and yelled, ‘F—k you.’ Out of sight, out of mind," Sarno said, "after we went over that damn bridge, I forgot about my DI. I didn’t like him, but he was no longer in my life."
A Greyhound bus took Chris Sarno further and further away from Parris Island and the hated DI’s, and closer and closer to his home and his beloved family near Boston. While waiting to change buses in the New York City terminal, Sarno was able to put some of his newfound confidence and skills-under-pressure to work. An elderly man was having an epileptic seizure, trashing around on the floor of the terminal and frothing at the mouth. Sarno had seen this same type of medical condition with one of the boots on Parris Island. "Not one of the bystanders were doing anything to assist this poor fellow," recalled Sarno. "I took immediate action by loosening his tie. Next, I asked for a wooden pencil and managed to insert it under his tongue to prevent him from swallowing his tongue. The New York police arrived and took him away. When one of the officers asked who had helped the man with the seizure, I told him that I had. He publicly gave his praise and said, ‘Thank God a Marine was on the scene to help save this man’s life.’ It was a nice feeling being of assistance as I moved on to board the bus to Boston." Just like the day he had arrived on Parris Island, the music on the bus included the Perry Como hit, "If." Sarno said, "To this day I associate my entrance into the USMC and those two bus trips in early 1951 with Perry’s hit tune." The trip from Parris Island to Boston took almost 20 hours. He arrived at Park Square on a cold March morning, and took the subway/bus system to his boyhood home.
At 5:30 in the morning, Chris Sarno tapped on the door of his parents’ home. His father opened the door to a young Marine wearing a sharp green uniform. "I remember him opening the door," reminisced Sarno. "I put my arms around him and he embraced me. I kissed him on the cheek, and I broke up crying." For Chris, he was on a new plateau in life. He had accomplished something that he never dreamed he could. "Nobody in my family had ever experienced what I had just been through," he said. "But when I cried, my father didn’t say anything. He just patted me as if he understood. Yet he had never been in the Armed Forces." This tearful moment was short-lived, and just between the senior and junior Chris Sarnos. When his mother realized who was at the door, she came rushing into her son’s arms. "She had tears of joy and was so happy I arrived," he recalled. "There was no big party or hullabaloo—just an intimate demonstration of family love and affection." The fact that his mother was happy because her son was finally home made the Marine happy, too. "My mother was very uptight about me being in the Marine Corps," Chris explained. His mother’s hope was that her young son/Marine would get stationed at the Boston Navy Yard. "But I knew better," Sarno said. "Korea was for me. But even when I was in combat, I never wrote home about it. My mother would have worried too much. She was the only family member to write me and send items to me on a dependable timetable."
His tour of duty with the Fleet Marine Force would still be months down the road, however. For now, he enjoyed his time on leave by taking in all the movies in the big Boston theaters, and by eating at the best restaurants in Boston. "My favorite restaurant was Peroni’s, where the fried clams were an Epicurean delight," he said. "That place in downtown Boston was always packed. I would sit up in the raised part of the flooring up back, always ordering the clams and a small bottle of champagne cocktail which would fill the glass twice." It was wartime, and, just like he had admired uniformed World War II veterans during the previous war, Chris Sarno now received his fair share of looks of admiration as a uniformed Marine. "I was one sharp-looking Marine decked out in dress greens," he said, "and the times I was in public, you bet I was in uniform."
One weekend, Chris was joined at a restaurant by his uniformed brother, Bud. "My mother knew in advance the day I was coming home on leave, so she moved fast," explained Sarno. "She was politically connected and had someone clear it for my brother Bud to get a weekend liberty while still undergoing his boot training in the US Navy at New Port, Rhode Island. Sure enough, the two of us shared a weekend in the Boston hot spots." When Chris joined the Marine Corps, Bud was attending the University of Massachusetts. Having discovered that his older brother Chris had decided to give service to his country during wartime, Bud wanted to join the Marines, too. But he was only 17 years old, and as such he needed a parent’s consent—which his mother flatly refused to give. "My mother had a brother on Guadalcanal in World War II," said Chris. "He told her just how tough the Marines had it on that friggin’ island, with tremendous KIAs and WIAs. My mother saw nothing but death as a Marine. But she slowly relented in her refusal to allow Bud to enlist, telling him that she would sign for him if he would join the Navy rather than the Marines—which he did." For Sarno, about to depart for further Marine Corps training in California, it was great to spend a couple of days with his brother. "During our high school years," he said, "We were almost like twins—always together playing baseball, basketball, outdoor ice hockey, and sandlot football."
Now, however, thousands of miles would soon separate the Sarno brothers. Chris climbed aboard a four-engine TWA for his first plane ride, which took him to California, and Bud went back to Newport, Rhode Island, to finish Navy boot camp. Before completing boot camp training, Bud scored very high on his military test and was asked if he wanted to go to Officers Candidate School. He declined, and instead went on to attend "A" school at Jacksonville, Florida. He had his pick of man o’ war ships on which to serve, and chose the USS Antietam, which was berthed at Norfolk, Virginia following its return from duty in Korean waters. Bud Sarno spent three years in the Navy in the Atlantic Naval Command, with his home port being the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The Antietam also went to England for a few months during Bud’s tour of duty on it. While Bud finished boot camp and got further schooling in the Navy, his brother Chris would be getting acquainted with the west coast and undergoing combat training in anticipation of a tour of duty in Korea.
On the chartered flight to California, every seat on the plane was occupied by a Marine—some 300 of them. "There was a tech sergeant in charge of us," recalled Sarno, "and he ruled with an iron fist." After stopping briefly in Kansas City for refueling, the plane went on to its destination at San Diego. Looking below as the plane came in for a landing, Chris Sarno saw the beautiful Pacific coastline. "There were sun-kissed beaches galore, modern highways, cars up the ying-yang, exotic foliage way better than shitbird Yemasse, warm and dry sun all around and…Hollywood!!" The landscape was 100 percent different than that at Parris Island, he noted. "I loved this California base as huge as it was."
The Marines were taken from the airport to the rail station, where they boarded cattle car-type trailers that dropped them off at the receiving barracks at Main Side Pendleton. Their first impression of the military base was that of a wooden World War II barrack painted with faded yellow and black trim, squad bays that held a whole platoon, and forty racks for sleeping. "We were there for at least ten days of casual duties again," Sarno recalled. Newly arrived (and soon-to-be departing) military personnel were often placed in "casual companies" while awaiting further orders. The barracks to which Sarno and the others were assigned was across the street from the base brig. "It was great, as the drum and bugle detachment always put on a daily rehearsal of their inspiring field music," recalled Sarno. "Casual company was the direct opposite of ‘nervous in the service’ boot environment. We had base liberty every night, our own fire watch at night, and morning roll call to do various clean-up chores all over the base." There was good chow, and as was standard in stateside barracks, there was the opportunity to take a long hot shower before taps.
Two memorable things happened during the ten days that Sarno and the other Marines were assigned to casualty company. Some five days into their stay, one of the Marines began to moan and groan in the middle of the night. Rather than eliciting sympathy from his fellow rack mates, his moans and writhing incurred their wrath. As the moaning got longer and louder, the NCO in charge finally went over to the Marine to see what the problem was. The moaning Marine was not just having a bad dream that night. He was having a severe attack of appendicitis. "This Marine claimed his stomach was hurting him," recalled Sarno. "He was carted off to the base dispensary. Later we learned that the poor kid had to have an emergency appendectomy."
The second memorable event was the company’s first liberty in California. "I took off like a raped ape to Long Beach for the dance hall," recalled Sarno. "There were plenty of one-punch clubs and a seashore amusement park, just like home. Two other buddies and I got there fast in order to get a room before the horde arrived. We had a big night meal in a nice restaurant, and we danced some. There were nice looking bimbos, a hotel room, and beer as long as your dough lasted. We bought beers and although we tried hard, we didn’t score. We went back to the hotel, and the friggin’ room was standing room only with our other barracks crowd. There were five guys out on the bed, others asleep on the deck, and two in the closet out like lights. I had to spend the night in an all-night movie theater that was filled with drafts of billowing smoke rings. Some liberty." The party-weary Marines arrived back on the base in time for morning reveille at 5 a.m. "We had 20 minutes to shit, shower or shave before standing formation for roll call," Sarno said. "We were half on the wrapper shuffling to get the sleep out of our eyes when we spotted a stranger amongst us. He was a civilian dressed like Beau Brummel—real natty. He was in a daze among guys like us. We were standing at rigid attention as the Gunny went up and down the ranks. He came onto this interloper and bellowed, ‘Who the fuck are you, and what the fuck are you?’ We all laughed like hyenas. When a couple of liberty risks up in Los Angeles missed the last bus back to San Diego, this queer picked them up in his Cadillac. They forced him to drive them to the barracks, and then they let him sack out, too. Once knowing what these clowns had to do to make roll call, it was okay by all of us, even the Gunny." No one went on report for being AWOL that morning. The "interloper in the fancy duds" ate morning chow with the Marines, and then went on his way.
The Marines went on their way, too. They were issued their gear for the march to Tent Camp 1 in the Onofre sector of Camp Pendleton. "They called it a field transport pack," explained Sarno. "It included everything you owned—all your clothing in two packs with your camouflage roll secured to the two packs. It weighed about 120 pounds. We got our rifle and our 782 gear, as well. Our sea bags were dropped off in the dirt company street, and we marched to the tent camp. We now were expected to live just like the World War II Marines had lived during their training. There were eight guys to a tent in a wooded area that was complete with rolling hills and rattlesnakes. "The brutal physical endurance of combat problems was soon to commence," Sarno said.
Camp Pendleton was 26 miles deep in 1951. Within that area was a wide variety of terrain on which to gain practical, hands-on experience to be future combat Marines. "We were marching in formation," Sarno recalled, "and we saw rolling hills about maybe 200 feet high, and mountains in the back. There were crosses on these little foothills. One of the guys asked what they were for, and the sergeant replied, ‘That’s if you fuck up anywhere along your Marine rifleman training. If you do, you’re going to have to take your field transport pack up there one night, pick up one of those wooden crosses, and be the modern day Jesus Christ. You’re going to have to plant that cross on top of that hill, and then you’ll have to spend the night up there by yourself. You’ll bring the cross back down the next morning, and you won’t screw up again.’" Sarno said that while the sergeant was telling this to the platoon, the trainees could see a couple of crosses left up there. "One guy did screw up," he recalled. "He came back from liberty one day late. Tough kid from Chicago. But he had a belligerent streak in him. He had to do everything the hard way. Undisciplined to some degree. He put a cross up there. And that guy never went to Korea. For some reason he left the outfit. I don’t know why, but he didn’t make it with us."
Pendleton provided tough, disciplined Marine infantry training. Most of the guys were ages 25 down to 18, with Sarno being one of the youngest at age 18. They lived in tents that were strung out on a dusty level piece of terrain. It was nice," recalled Sarno. "It was California. The weather was sunny, warm, and dry. No rain. It rained once in the six months that we were in training—it rained like hell. But otherwise, it was dry and sunny. I loved California." Sarno said that his tent was "in the boonies", far removed from the chow tent. "We had to march a mile to go to the chow for every meal," he recalled. "It had to be at least a mile. We’d march in company formation wearing our dungarees. The chow hall was very stark with aluminum siding and benches. It was just a place to eat good, solid food. It wasn’t fancy and all of us ate fast just to get out of there."
For two months, Sarno trained as a rifleman at Camp Pendleton’s Training and Replacement Command, otherwise known as Tent Camp #1. Most of those training there would eventually end up as replacements going to Korea. The men trained as a platoon. There were 13-man squads, four squads to a platoon. Within the squad, three men were assigned to a Browning automatic weapon. The remaining "fire team" members carried M-1 rifles, and it was of vital importance that they protect the BAR men. "We protected him," explained Sarno, "because the BAR man could bail us out in a fire fight with that rapid fire."
During the training, World War II officers and NCOs who had just returned from the Korean War served as senior instructors. "They set up a combat situation for us," said Sarno, "whether it was a four-man fire team or the whole squad going to assault the position. You did it a certain way. Some of us weren’t doing too good. We found out that, in a real combat situation, what we were doing would have caused some of us to end up as casualties. The gooks would have wiped us out, either because we just weren’t moving good enough or functioning the right way."
One of Chris Sarno’s strongest memories of the combat problems the trainees at Pendleton had to undergo was that of their first live fire drill. "Most of our combat training wasn’t with live ammo, but this was going to be with live ammo," he recalled. "Only eight rounds—lock and load. Our job was to go about 100 yards down a trail in the foothills. We were going to be low terrain while the enemy was to be in high command. The ‘enemy’ was silhouette targets." The mechanized targets popped up and that’s what the fire team was supposed to shoot. Sarno was designated to be the fire team leader, and it was his job to give the command for each of his men to move up in leap frog fashion. Each man was to fire at the closest target that popped up. They had enough targets so that every man would use his eight rounds. "This was the first time that I was firing with live ammo with live Marines in front or beside of me," Sarno explained. "The main thing was that we didn’t kill each other." The fire team was graded on this exercise. "Either you made it, you survived it, or you were wiped out," Sarno said. Going back was not an option. "I remember firing at the first silhouette," he said. "I missed him. He was probably 30 feet away. I knew he was going to pop up, but I was too anxious." Instead of hitting the silhouette, Sarno fired in front of it. "So I was swearing at myself going through this drill," he recalled. "But we had enough hits on the targets that we did okay." He gave credit where credit was due. "It was always reassuring to have the World War II officers who had been in combat and the NCOs from Korea as instructors. They did their damnedest to make sure that we functioned properly so we would be survivors."
The anxiety caused by that first exercise with live ammo could not compare with the tense day when the platoon went under live machine gun fire. At Camp Pendleton, there was a special course laid out with barbed wire strung out across an area for combat problems. The trainees were expected to go under the barbed wire while simultaneously going directly under the fire of two .30 machine guns. "If you raised up three feet, you were going to get your head chopped off," Sarno said. There was only so much room on the live machine gun fire course, so the Marines were divided into two groups—one of which would go under the machine gun fire that morning, and the other in the afternoon. "We had the afternoon," recalled Sarno. "I remember we were at noon chow. We were talking to the Marines who had gone through it in the morning. Of course, they were done by now. They were big shots. We hadn’t gone through it yet. That was the way the Marines crawled over one another. They had something over us. So we asked them how it was…you know, things like, ‘Did you have a tendency to get up?’. And they said, ‘No. I wasn’t afraid of the damned machine guns. I was afraid of the rattlesnakes. There are rattlesnakes out there.’ And I thought, ‘holy jeez, there’s rattlesnakes. California is loaded with rattlesnakes.’."
For Sarno, the thought of rattlesnakes was pretty scary. "Not the damn live ammo going over my head or the bomb bursts that they had planted in certain areas to simulate incoming," he said. The guys who had already been through the live machine gun problem were totally black from the explosions and from crawling in the dusty dirt. Every one of them was black. "Now it was our turn," recalled Sarno, "and that’s all that was on my mind—‘I’m going to run face to face with a goddamned rattlesnake.’ When our time came, we moved out of the trench and the machine guns clacked over our heads. We had to crawl through it. It was noisy, and it was dirty. But I never saw a rattlesnake. Before I knew it, I was out of there and it was all over. All I had was rattlesnake on my mind. I didn’t even hear that machine gun go off, so maybe it was a good thing that I heard a guy trying to put one over on us."
This razzing happened on more than one occasion as the Marines carried on with their training. Once, while standing in line at the chow hall to receive shots in preparation for the 12th replacement draft, another prank was played. "There was a long line of us strung along the length of the chow hall," recalled Sarno. "Everybody said that we were going to get the square needle. You know…they always pulled this stuff to make it sound horrendous what was going to happen. We didn’t know what was going to happen, so the word was just rampant going through the ranks. We were waiting way down in the back and the line was finally moving. All of the sudden, a guy came flying out of the chow hall, blood all over his arm, and he went by us screaming, ‘They’ve got the square needle today.’ We looked at the guy and wondered what the hell was going on. Then the officers came out and they started laughing. They just used it to scare the hell out of us. But that was the typical Marine Corps macabre attitude. I remember that I thought the guy was really bleeding, but they had ketchup all over him and he screamed like they had chewed up his arm."
Although there was laugher and teasing, life in Tent Camp #1 was not easy. With its wooded areas, bayonet range, obstacle course, cargo nets to scale up and down, dirt roads, and low mountains with crosses on them, "it was brutal training, physically and mentally," Sarno said. "There, we learned how to survive in combat. If we didn’t pick up on things, we could be killed. I got a lot out of being a Marine rifleman." Back in boot camp, Sarno had requested to be assigned to either tanks or artillery, but upon his arrival at Camp Pendleton, he had only one thing on his mind: to be a Marine rifleman. "Tank school was never in my mind at the time," he said. "From the first day at Tent Camp #1, all my mind and energy was focused on learning to be a Marine grunt. It rewarded me to undertake this Spartan training in case I returned to ground pounders if my tank was ever shot out beneath me." In a rustic setting in southern California, where birds chirped in eucalyptus trees and a World War II veteran platoon sergeant sang cadence to the hit song, "Sparrow in the Treetop," Chris Sarno and his fellow Marines prepared themselves for combat. On Korea’s front lines, more than a thousand Marines had already died in service to their country and in opposition to a Communist enemy.
When the Marine Corps had filled its quota of rifle cadre needed for Korea, it then needed specially-trained men for its tank and artillery crews. Chris Sarno traded the sound of chirping birds at Tent Camp One for the sound of the ocean surf at beautiful Camp Del Mar, a neighboring base across the road from Camp Pendleton. He was one of the privileged few who was notified after his six-week training ordeal at Pendleton that he would be going to Camp Del Mar for tank school. "I was elated," recalled Sarno. "If the 1st Marine Division in the field in Korea needed grunts due to heavy grunt KIAs and WIAs at that time, I would have gone directly over with the 9th Draft. I was very fortunate that the division needed tanker replacements in late July 1951. It was as thin as that. I was lucky that my enlistment preference was honored by the individual who allowed me to go to tank school. As time passed during my six months of training, I had always kept my eyes and ears open for an opportunity for any MOS that would give me better chances of survival than being a ground-pounder. I admired the grunts, but if I could qualify for a specialized MOS, I wanted that opportunity. I was lucky. I got it and I did it."
At Pendleton, Sarno packed his sea bag and climbed aboard a 6x6 truck that took him and the others to Del Mar. He recalled that Del Mar was not exactly glamorous, but it was more civilized than Tent Camp One. "We lived in a World War II-era wooden barracks," he recalled. "We were right on the ocean—100 yards or less from our two-story barracks. It was a restricted area where no civilians were allowed, but it had a slop chute (recreational club) right across the street from the barracks. We could get nice fresh sandwiches, candy, and sodas, and there was a juke box. Something for a break at night. At the tent camp, we just lived in that damned tent and went on to the next problem the next day."
In the two-story barracks, the top deck housed all tank men and the bottom half housed artillery men. "I don’t know why they did this instead of putting them all together," Sarno said. "We had more fist fights in the barracks—who was the better Marine, an artillery man or a tanker. Not every day, but there were lots of fist fights over, ‘You guys are pogues and we’re Marines’, stuff like that." The bantering was part of life at Del Mar, which Sarno said was, compared to Pendleton, a "sweetheart." There was music in the chow hall, and the Marines marching up to trucks that carried them to their training areas at Del Mar could hear Nat King Cole singing "Red Sails on the Sunset."
Every morning it was the duty of Corporal Lou Storzinger—now an artillery man—to line up some 600-plus Marines in formation, and march them about 200 yards to their designated trucks. "He got a heck of a kick out of marching that number of Marines," recalled Sarno. "He had the voice for cadence." Those assigned to tanks were trucked up to Highway 101, which followed the coastline. "All you saw was beaches," recalled Sarno. "The civilian cars were behind us, and we played hanky panky with the girls, waving to them and playing the role. Every day we did that."
And every day they would pull into the tank park, where rows of Sherman tanks awaited them. To the Marines chosen to train on them, it didn’t matter that they were of World War II vintage. "A tank is a tank," Sarno said. It was what he wanted as an MOS. "Tanks. I just liked the sight of tanks," he said. "The firepower. And then the movement, you know. You’re not walking. There are a lot of benefits being with a tank than just walking with a rifle and wearing dungarees. You do have shelter most of the time, and always warm chow. You can warm up C-rations on the mufflers of the tank instead of having cold rations. We also had a huge supply of water on the sides of the tank, and anything else we could steal or put on there. Plus, living by the soles of your feet is pretty rough."
Also rough, however, was learning the Sherman tank. "I don’t know how those guys did it in World War II," Sarno admitted. "It’s a tough tank to drive, and just the maintenance on it, getting into the nooks and crannies of it, is difficult compared to the tank that we ended up with in Korea, the M-46."
Back in boot camp, Sarno had requested to be assigned to either tanks or artillery, but upon his arrival at Camp Pendleton, he had only one thing on his mind: to be a Marine rifleman. "Tank school was never in my mind at the time," he said. "From the first day at Tent Camp #1, all my mind and energy was focused on learning to be a Marine grunt. It rewarded me to undertake this Spartan training in case I returned to ground pounders if my tank was ever shot out beneath me." In a rustic setting in southern California, where birds chirped in eucalyptus trees and a World War II veteran platoon sergeant sang cadence to the hit song, "Sparrow in the Treetop," Chris Sarno and his fellow Marines prepared themselves for combat. On Korea’s front lines, more than a thousand Marines had already died in service to their country and in opposition to a Communist enemy.
Sarno explained that a Sherman tank had a clutch, whereas the M-46 had an automatic transmission and thus no clutch. The Sherman had two lateral sticks that moved to the left or right. The M-46 had only one lever, and an engine that was twice as powerful as that of the Sherman engine. "The M-46 had a better suspension system that gave you a beautiful, deluxe baby carriage ride," recalled Sarno. "Whereas, a Sherman would bounce and hit every bounce…and you could feel it. Sometimes you’d bounce and almost hit your teeth on the open hatch. The Sherman tank was a rough-riding tank and it didn’t have the big 90 millimeter gun either."
But because they didn’t know anything about the M-46, the trainees at Delmar didn’t know what they were missing by not having one. They mastered the Sherman tank in spite of its flaws. Their training was generally in-tank training, and included learning how to handle maintenance. Their instructors had been tank men in Korea. They observed the Marines as they trained on the tanks, addressing mistakes they made immediately and in no uncertain terms.
"There was one instructor that I admired most," recalled Sarno. "Master Sergeant Koontz was a 30-year man who had been in the Inchon Invasion and the taking of Seoul. In class, he would start out talking about oils—the heaviness and the lightness of the different types of oils that we used in the tank. Then one guy would say, ‘What was it like in Korea?’ He’d get away from what he was supposed to tell us, and instead tell us sea stories. He said that in Seoul, they shot up the whole damned place—anything that moved." Koontz told his tank school class about the time in Korea when a tank hatch was up and a Marine rifleman came up to his tank in the heat of battle and stuck a severed head on the travel hitch facing the rear of the tank. "A dead gook," said Sarno. "They cut his head off and stuck it on that and they drove through Seoul that way. I admired Koontz because he was the greatest tanker I ever saw. He wasn’t a hard-nosed guy saying that we were all going to die and all that. He talked about tanks and situations. He always had a famous saying, ‘Everything is predicated on the terrain and the situation.’ That meant that every instance when you’re in direct fire is different from any other. That turned out to be true. In combat, you can’t say, ‘This is the way it’s gonna be. Be flexible. If it isn’t in the book, you can accomplish it if you want to be a survivor. I liked Koontz, but we had other instructors who were good, too."
Those instructors had to be good to have survived some of the wild rides that the occasional Marine—Chris Sarno included--gave them as they learned the intricacies of the Sherman tank clutch. There was a trick to it, and some tankers-in-training had a more difficult time learning it than others. "I struggled to master the art of being able to ‘double clutch’ in the shifting of gears on the Sherman tank," Sarno confessed. "While driving a Sherman, the driver had to pull back the left lateral to go left, while at the same instance flooring the accelerator for power to thrust the tank left (just the opposite of driving a car around a corner). The right lateral had to be pulled hard toward the driver’s stomach to maneuver a right turn. The single ‘joy stick’ of the M-46 was on the driver’s right side and all one had to do was…gently…guide the stick to the left and floor the accelerator to move 50 tons left."
Sarno recalled that on one sunny, hot afternoon while in driver’s class, the instructor wanted him to drive. "My buddies drove this Sherman up a wide trail about 300 meters high. You could see the tranquil Pacific Ocean glistening and the civilian cars humming along Highway 101. The sergeant told me when to shift as we descended down the trail. I got it into neutral and we slowly moved down. ‘Shift it into first gear, Sarno.’ I tried, but only ground the gears. He repeated this several times to me, but I was unable to get into first gear. The tank picked up speed every foot now. We were in ‘Mexican Overdrive.’ I could feel the wind in my face in this out-of-control descent. It felt like 60 miles per hour as we plunged down this straight trail in a dust cloud. I was scared shitless as I saw Riley bouncing on the deck plates on the turret deck. Riley was from Boston. I prayed to the Virgin Mary to no avail—I was on my own! The sergeant screamed, ‘Just keep the tank in a straight line. Don’t hit the brakes.’ If I hit the brakes, we would be over the cliff. The four guys in the tank thought we were goners, but I used two laterals gingerly and the tank halted about 200 yards from the main tank park. It was a bumpy but fast ride—not in the book—but no one was injured. When we stopped, tank park members rushed out to help. The sergeant took me behind the tank to scan hanging parts, and then he clobbered me to the deck. I couldn’t and didn’t want to defend myself. I had screwed up. Riley told me to my face, ‘Sarno, I will never get in a tank with you as a driver.’ I was a man without a country. I was on guard duty at the tank park that long weekend."
Two days later, another instructor grabbed Sarno’s arm and felt his muscle. He said, "You’re strong as a bull. Why can’t you shift gears?" Sarno told him that it was a mental block. His inability to shift gears easily also caused him to get chewed out by a tank commander the day the trainees went through a tank machine gun drill. Looking through a periscope, Sarno easily mastered firing at ground level targets. What he couldn’t do was shift those gears. Inching his way back on the course in fifth gear, he was met by the tank commander, who grabbed him by the neck and told him never to start off in fifth gear because it would rupture the oil lines on the engine. "I almost got kicked out of tank school over my inability to shift gears," he confessed, "but I convinced the sergeants that I wanted tanks BAD. Somehow, I passed tank school." Sarno said that he went on to be a "damn good driver" on an A-41 tank, and mastered the M-46 and M-47 as well. "I went on to be a fine M-46 and M-47 driver," he said. When he left for Korea in the 12th draft, he was a private. He returned from Korea as a sergeant and a tank commander. "So much for ‘shifting gears’," he said.
Marine tank school at Camp Del Mar consisted of a great deal of classroom preparation, dealing with the weight of various oils, and constant daily preventative maintenance to the tank. "I would say that tanks are mobile twenty percent of the time while the other 80 percent of the time it is undergoing tank preventative maintenance." He recalled. "We got greasy, obviously, but that tank had to be ready at a moment’s notice." He said that Marine tankers were expected to grasp the general idea of how the engine functioned with the transmission and the hands off (the major junction box) in the ring of the turret—the master brain to the electrical circuits. Sarno and the other crew members got very proficient with breaking tracks. They underwent gunnery training on the .50 caliber machine gun, the .30 caliber machine gun, the .45 caliber pistol, and the Thompson submachine gun. They also took classes on tank tactics, "where yardstick evaluation is deemed by terrain and situation at hand."
Sarno said that it is a little known fact that tankers aid grunts in a war zone. "When moving through two split columns of Marine infantry," he said, "we slowed down to keep the dust cloud from forming. If stopped for a quick road check, we filled up grunts’ canteens with water and a few extra C-rations boxes, too. We even let them puncture a can and heat its contents up on our long muffler covers. Hot C’s were a real treat to the ground pounders." For 19-year old Sarno, who was so fresh out of high school that he didn’t even have a driver’s license or car yet, he got quite a thrill out of pushing a combat-loaded "50 ton beast" like a baby carriage.
About 55 riflemen were turned into tankers at Camp Del Mar, including Chris Sarno. With tank school behind him, Sarno moved one final step closer to attaining his dream of going into combat in the Korean War. "There was one phase left," he said. "I had to go to Main Side Pendleton to go into close combat training. It was back to being a Marine rifleman."
But before he underwent more training, he went on weekend liberty at Long Beach, which was not too far away. He went with a few of his buddies and enjoyed dancing and the night life on the board walk. On an impulse one evening, he stepped inside a tattoo parlor. Being only 19, he could not legally get a tattoo. Disappointed, he stepped back outside and told his buddies that he wasn’t able to get one due to his age. One of them whipped out an identification card that said he was 22. Within minutes, Sarno was back in the same tattoo parlor telling the needle artist that he was now the ripe old age of 22. "The tattoo artist said, ‘Sit down,’ Sarno recalled. Several painful minutes later, Sarno emerged with a Marine Corps emblem stenciled on his arm. The words "USMC" and "Tanks" were also etched there, too. "It was painful all the way," he grimaced, "but I didn’t regret it. Most of the Marines had tattoos on various parts of their body. There were Marines who didn’t get them, but they were in the minority. I never looked on it like I was defacing my skin. I was proud of it. I was proud I was a tanker and I was going to war." At least, he would be going to war when the final phase of his training—close combat—was completed.
Close combat training involved instruction on how to assault a town with fire teams, night firing problems, and lots of lectures from combat officers. All of the training that the Marines had been through—whether tank men, artillery men, or grunts—culminated in a five-day night war under combat conditions at Camp Pendleton. "For 24 hours, there was no let up," Sarno recalled. "It was all about physical endurance. If you flopped on the side of the road, you would not go to Korea. We had to come through this thing as survivors."
"I remember that our objective was to assault an old Marine Raider camp. And it was hot. Hot as hell. We were allowed one canteen of water for the 24-hour period. They said, ‘You can drink any time that you want, but you’re not going to get another canteen until 24 hours,’ which would be at the night chow. Most of us drank it up fast. As I said, it was hot as hell. We had a pack and we were assaulting positions. We were close to dehydration." Overhead, Navy Corsairs were acting as enemy planes to force the men to dive into ditches and then get back up on the road. "I remember hitting the deck," Sarno said. "I thought, ‘Gee, I wish I could lay here for an hour. I don’t want to get up.’ But the whistle blew and they had to get back up on the road and continue to march. "I remember this big kid who was well over six feet tall," said Sarno. "He came from a rich background. The older guys didn’t like him and kept ranking on him. He was beside me, but when they blew the whistle, he didn’t get up. I jabbed him and told him to get up or they would give him shit. When he rolled over, I saw that he was foaming at the mouth. I called for the sergeant and told him that this guy wasn’t going to make it." The Corpsmen were called and they took him away. If he still wanted to go to Korea, he would have to go later with another company. "But I remember him," said Sarno. "A big smart kid built like a football player, yet he conked out."
The practice war was not easy on any of the men, especially if they weren’t dressed properly to endure it. Chris Sarno had a huge hole in his right boondocker where his big toe was. "I didn’t have a lot of dough, so I never got them repaired," he said. "I knew this five-day walk was coming up. ‘So what’, I thought. ‘I’ll walk through it.’ Well, the constant pressure on that right toe eventually caused a huge water blister. I had to keep going because I was not going to go back with another outfit." He kept hobbling along, and finally was able to get off his feet when it was evening and time for their first meal.
Keep in mind that the men only had one canteen of water, and the excessive heat that afternoon had caused many of them to drink all or most of the contents. The evening meal was not a hot meal—it was a box lunch. "They gave us an apple, a jellied-candy orange slice, and a peanut butter sandwich," recalled Sarno. "We were dying of thirst and they gave us a peanut butter sandwich. You know. They’re busting our balls. So we ate it, but now we were thirsty as a son of a bitch, and water was the only thing on our minds." The next day, the simulated war continued. Junior officers-in-training from Quantico took command of these combat outfits, and they were graded by a few senior combat officers who watched, but who didn’t say a word. "They were just observing and grading the young lieutenants as well as the enlisted men under their control," explained Sarno. "And we wanted water. It was hot and the road was dusty. There was nothing but mountains. Down this dusty road came what looked like a tar truck, but it was a water truck. They were just dusting the road down. It came out of nowhere. We broke ranks and stopped the truck dead in its tracks. We took off our helmets and filled up our helmets." The officers were taken by surprise, and Sarno said they were practically whipping their charges to keep them away from the water. The incident taught them all—officers and the ranks alike—that lack of discipline could cause them to break under certain conditions, such as lack of water. "We would do anything for water," he recalled. "The whole company just went berserk and had a ball drinking the water. The officers finally just stood aside, because they knew they had lost control of their men." Sarno said the incident with the water truck remains firmly implanted in his memory. "I always remember back to that day in California, and how much water meant to me."
The five-day war with the failed water discipline was just one of many facets to the close combat training which the Marines received at Camp Pendleton in their final days stateside. Two mornings a week, they were taught very basic judo. They learned how to use the K-bar (similar to a large Bowie knife) as an effective back-up to replace a rifle. "A Marine always has his weapon and his K-bar," explained Sarno. "The K-bar is the last line of defense if your weapon goes out of commission." The Marines also spent an afternoon at the base pool, but not to swim and bask in the California sun. "We thought we were going swimming," recalled Sarno. "But instead, they taught us how to use our poncho to transport our weapons across a river stream without getting them wet. In the shallow end of the pool, we learned how to fold the poncho to turn it into a makeshift raft so that we could carry our pack and rifle into the water and not get them wet. They showed us how to use the bottom of our dungarees as flotation."
Troubles were not yet over for the Marine who had foamed at the mouth from heat exhaustion during the five day war. Another training requirement at the base pool was to listen to a lecture at the side of the pool. He fell fast asleep in the middle of it. An angry swimming instructor woke him, and pointed to a thick manila rope that was strung from the shallow part of the beginning of the pool up to a high 50 foot diving board. Sarno said that the instructor ordered him to get up on the high platform with his pack and rifle, and then shimmy down the rope. Sarno noted that this was the same rich kid who was hated by the older guys in the platoon. "They were screaming, ‘Fall, fall, fall. Don’t make it. Don’t make it.’ He didn’t have far to go, and I’m sure he wanted to show them up. This was his moment. He’d finally come through for himself. But then he fell, and everybody cheered. He went right to the bottom of the pool. That’s the last we saw of him." Another weak link was gone from the chain of Marine strength.
The long months of Marine training were finally over. With the five-day practice war behind him, Chris Sarno was just about ready for overseas duty in Korea. "That training at Pendleton was more severe to me than Korea ever thought of being when I look back on it," he said. "There were more goddamn hills in California than we could imagine, and they were tough. Even now I think I don’t want any part of hills. At Camp Pendleton, there was always one more hill before we got back to the company area." He said that he was part of the first company to go through the five-day practice war for the 12th draft. "There were four or five other companies waiting for us to come in before it was their turn. They wanted to see what we looked like by the time we had completed the course. We looked ragtag," he admitted. But before the company went over the crest of the hill, the officers halted the formation and told them to spruce up. "We’re coming in sharp," they said. "Let’s look good." The company marched to the hilltop in front of the company barracks and then went through the final inspection arms command, where they were required to run the bolt back and then finish up with inspection arms. "Now you push your bolt back and then you pull the trigger," explained Sarno. "We all pulled the trigger. But one guy had a live round. It went right over his left shoulder. The instructor said, ‘Get that guy’s name. He’s restricted until we get on the boat.’ He wasn’t going to get any liberty. He let a live round go off. He didn’t clear his weapon. That’s how easy it is for somebody to kill you."
The remaining two weeks at Pendleton saw the Marines practicing more judo on the mats, taking a bayonet refresher course, and learning how to neutralize buildings at Combat Town Course. The latter was a squad (13 Marines) assault problem that consisted of less than ten wooden shacks, with a few of them being two stories high. "We broke off into the four fire team formation with a base of fire pinning down ‘the gooks’," recalled Sarno. The objective was for each house to be cleared by a fire team. "This was not a live ammo demonstration or problem," he said. "There were no actual gooks in the shacks. It was all simulated. It was more about assaulting with correct maneuvers with a lot of commands from the fire team leader." When assault was necessary on the second story, Sarno continued, "we were to gain control with ropes thrown through upper windows. We had to scale the entrance." Fortunately, Chris Sarno and his fellow Marines did not have to carry out a live assault once they got to Korea. "The only urban fighting done in Korea by the USMC," he explained, "was at the Inchon-Seoul capture. The rest of the battles were hamlet intrusions." But the Combat Town Course training at Pendleton served as a means to familiarize the Marines on how house to house combat was to be conducted should the annihilation of embedded enemy troops be necessary. "We spent two days on this course, repeating the appropriate assault techniques," Sarno said. It was one of the last crucial training phases that he was to undergo in California.
Now that his training consumed less of his time because it was almost over, Sarno took a little time to enjoy his California surroundings. He commented, "Do you know what I always loved about California? Fog in the morning that all cleared by 10 a.m. The mid-afternoon cool breeze. At break time, all crapped out and sweating like a wetback, I loved feeling that cool breeze against my skin and watching the stringy branches of the trees flitting in the soft breeze." In spite of the brutal training he had to undergo at Pendleton, he still has strong memories of the softer moments there, under the eucalyptus trees.
On his last liberty weekend at Pendleton, Sarno spent his free time at the base while a big gang of Marines went to Tijuana, Mexico, to "raise holy hell." He made no calls home because he was too broke to make them, but he did mail a letter to his mother telling her the day that he was scheduled to board the troop ship. The Korea-bound Marines also got five shots, but Sarno didn’t mind. "I was eager and totally happy to be finally going to Korea in July of 1951," he said. "After eight months of training, I considered myself a most fortunate Marine to be completely ready for combat from intensive virulent training by World War II NCOs and officers. They helped me to be a survivor and to come home from the Korean War alive. They were a wonderful bunch of dedicated Marine instructors."
Nobody got a delay en route to go home to visit their families before the ship embarked.
" Cripes, we’d never come back," Sarno said. Four or five days before the whole replacement draft was to board the ship, Chris Sarno and others from casual company were told they were to be the advance party. "We thought we were special," he laughed. "Hey, we’re the advance party." On the day they cleared their gear out of their lockers, one of the Marines suddenly found the thought of combat too daunting. He told Sarno and the others that he had changed his mind and wasn’t going to go to Korea. But everyone knew that he would have to go whether or not he wanted to—his orders for FMF had already been issued. As the men paused at the gangway to be identified, Sarno noticed that the Marine who changed his mind was sure enough not there. "His father was very wealthy and a high diplomat in Washington, DC," Sarno recalled. "He was good. He did everything good. But his father must have got him out to do something else. This kid wasn’t going to Korea. He passed with flying colors, but he just chickened out in the end."
The "special" Marines remaining in the advance party found out why they were needed on the ship a few days before its scheduled departure. "We had to load the hold, which was cavernous," Sarno said. The General Meigs was a two-stacker that held 5,000 troops. Sarno had never been on a ship that big before. "Our job was to work the cargo nets for every sea bag that was going over to Korea," he said. "Our draft was close to 4,000 Marines. That was 4,000 sea bags that we had to put in the hole by hand. It was a shit detail." The only good thing about the work was that they had the opportunity to see a wide variety of artwork that had been drawn on the sea bags by some of the 20-year men.
With the cargo all safely stowed away, the remaining troops in the 12th draft began to board the Meigs. Besides the Marines it carried, there were some 500 Army troops and a few Air Force guys. Excitement was in the air, and some of that Marine ingenuity started to kick in before the ship even set sail out of the California harbor town. Little boats carrying enterprising merchants and merchandise came out to port or starboard side. "They were selling pogie bait—ice cream, candy, and chips," recalled Sarno. "They had a system already rigged up. They came up and threw out a rope that was just like a clothes line." Those onboard the Meigs secured the rope. "They had a wicker basket with a price list on what they had available," explained Sarno. The troops on the Meigs marked off what they wanted, and then they put money in the basket and sent it down to the merchant boats. The merchants filled up the basket and sent it back up to the departing troops via the clothesline rope. Sarno and one of his buddies got behind some Army guys who had the basket. Neither Sarno nor his buddy had any money, but the two brick pints of ice cream sitting in the basket were too great of a temptation for Chris Sarno to resist. He snatched them out of the basket and told the Amy guys that he had paid for them. "The Army guys were easy pigeons," Sarno laughed.
On a serious note, however, Chris Sarno had the opportunity to talk to Army personnel who were onboard the Meigs for the trip to Korea. He said that he remembered talking to an Army rifleman one day while standing in the noon chow line. "I was standing beside a couple of Army guys," he recalled. "One had a slung carbine over his shoulder with a big tag on it like you would tag a piece of clothing. The carbine was coated with cosmoline. I asked him, ‘Hey, did you ever qualify with that weapon?’ The Army guy replied, ‘What, with this half rifle?’ I said, ‘Half rifle? That’s an M-1, A-1 carbine.’ The Army guy said, ‘Oh, is that what it is?’ When I asked him what outfit he was going to, he said that he was going to one of the Army outfits in Korea. I thought to myself, ‘That guy will never make it. He doesn’t even know what a carbine is.’" Sarno said that the Army guy admitted that he had never fired a weapon in his life. In contrast, the Marines provided their troops with intensive training—including specialized training with rifles--for six months. "This guy was going into combat and he didn’t even know what he was packing," Sarno said. He figured that the Army guy probably got killed in Korea due to his lack of training and inexperience with his weapon.
Light bantering between Army and Marine personnel sometimes turned to the threat of fisticuffs on the sea voyage. A shove on the spiral stairwell going down to the chow line one day resulted in a face-off between an Army guy and a Marine. "One of the Army guys got an elbow by accident," recalled Sarno, "and he didn’t like it. So a Marine from Chicago gave him another elbow on purpose. The Army guy said, ‘I’ve had it with you goddamn Marines. You think you guys are world beaters. I’ll take youse all on now.’ This kid from Chicago says, ‘No, you’re not going to take my buddies on. You take me on.’ So the Army guy was going to give him a sucker punch and that’s all he waited on. He took that arm just like we were taught in judo. He could have broke his arm, but instead he threw him down so fast on the deck that Army guy didn’t want any more. The fight was all over."
Fighting onboard ship was limited, however, because companies as a whole were assigned duties. Sarno said that a few companies were guard detachment. "They were on security every 24 hour security fire watch," he said. "My company actually drew mess duty. Every ship I got on, our company always got mess duty, and I always ended up in the scullery washing trays. There were only maybe three or four of us in this scullery where we cleaned off the trays and put them in a rack to go through a hot cleaning apparatus." Because the water had to be hot to kill bacteria, Sarno said that the temperature in the scullery was about 125 degrees. Like the Marine cooks on Parris Island, Sarno decided that the cooks on the General Meigs were also the "meanest guys in the Corps." He said, "There was something about their mentality. They hated everybody. I couldn’t take it after a few days—heat gets to me." Figuring that he was going to collapse from heat in the scullery, he asked to be transferred to the serving line. Unfortunately, the transfer never came. "I stayed in that goddamned scullery," he remembered with chagrin. "It was hot. It was unbearable. We had to keep a tee shirt on. We washed thousands of trays." No sooner had he and his fellow scullery mates finished the morning chow trays, than it was time for them to start on the noon chow trays. The cooks allowed them to take a 15-minute break between meals, but there were no chairs or benches to sit on. "We could only lay on the deck," Sarno recalled. "Everybody ate standing up in the chow section, simply because if the ship ever got torpedoed, there wouldn’t be chairs blocking the exit."
Although he had trouble adjusting to mess duty in the scullery, Chris Sarno felt great on this, his first voyage out to sea. He got his "sea legs" quickly, but all around him his fellow passengers started to get sick by the fourth or fifth day out to sea. A Marine named Slagenhoff got sick and never recovered until the ship docked. "He never got out of his rack from the day we left until we got to Korea," recalled Sarno. "He couldn’t even eat. I used to bring food back from the chow hall, but just looking at it he would get sick and have the dry heaves. I don’t know how he made it. The only thing he could keep down was water, crackers and milk."
It wasn’t long before Sarno could empathize with Slagenhoff. "One day we had a boat drill down on the fourth deck," he said. "The air was really foul. It was August. It was hot and sticky. It was miserable. I remember just waiting around with the rest of the guys in the compartment to go top side to the boat station for the drill. All of the sudden I looked at a Marine beside me who had a Hershey’s chocolate bar—one of those brown bars with the paper on it. I remember just looking at that brown paper and the next thing I knew I felt something coming up and my cheeks were full of fluid. I tried to hold it, but the next thing I knew I was ready to burst. And that was the beginning of my being sea sick. For the next three days I was in misery. I could get around, but once I got rid of what was in my stomach, I still had the dry heaves. Those were worse because your stomach really knotted up and it was really painful. Nobody gave a damn that you were sick, either. I remember after the third day thinking that I could make it down to the chow hall. I got down there and had a tray full with a chicken leg on it. I was starving. But as soon as I put the tray down to dig into it, right away I felt those pains. I went to the GI can where we dumped all the remnants off of our trays. There were two cans, and guys were standing by them banging their trays clean. I was on my hands and knees puking into the can, but guys still tried to get their tray in beside my head in the can." Sarno’s seasickness left as abruptly as it came, and then he was able to "eat like a horse." But he said that he went through the same process on every ship he was on.
In spite of Marines and Army guys upchucking as the ship stayed on its course to the Far East, Navy officers insisted that the Meigs be kept as clean as circumstances would allow. Every morning there was compartment inspection. The men were sent on deck while Navy officers and Marine commanders inspected the compartment. "If it wasn’t clean," explained Sarno, "we had to go below and clean it again to meet Navy specifications. They didn’t want any virus to run rampant. It was so grungy on the fourth deck down below—there was no fresh air or breeze or anything—we decided we would sleep above deck." After the night movies, the Marines took a blanket and slept on deck. "It was cool," remembered Sarno. "You could feel a breeze. Early in the morning, the next thing I knew I was being pushed down the deck with a power hose. The ship’s personnel had to hose the deck down every morning. They didn’t bother waking us up—they just blew us away."
Sometimes the ship hit rough weather, and the Marines were not allowed to stay on deck. "We had two or three days of constant huge swells," recalled Sarno. "This also exposed me to the power of the ocean. The ocean is the most powerful natural element I ever saw in my life. Those waves were so huge they crested over the bow and went rushing by us followed by another one and another one. It was like a little roller coaster. You went down and that wave looked like it was going over the whole ship. It was scary. But it wasn’t just the wave. The wave was thick. It had a lot of girth to it, and it was powerful. I’ve never seen anything more powerful than an angry ocean." Under rough sea conditions, the men had to stay below deck and sweat it out.
The General Meigs traveled on to Kobe, Japan, where members of the 1st Marine Air Wing disembarked. Their unit operated out of Japan and Pohang on the southeast coast of South Korea. The remaining passengers stayed aboard ship, and a little later, 500 Army troops were dropped off at Yokohama, Japan. Their final destination was Pusan, Korea. "As the 12th Replacement Draft sailed slowly in the Sea of Japan near the port of Pusan, Korea," Sarno recalled, "we all rushed to the rail to watch another troop ship passing in the opposite direction. Over the watery span between both ships, we heard this chant…. ‘You’ll Be Sooorrreeee.’ Believe me, that summed up just what was ahead for us. It was the epitaph for service in Korea."
Sarno and the other members of the 12th Replacement Draft finally set foot on Korean soil during the last ten days of July in 1951. "We were on that damned boat for 19 days—the most miserable 19 days of my life," said Chris Sarno. "I was happy as hell to get off that bucket." He said that the first thing he noticed about Pusan was that it was a shabby port. "We didn’t see many of the natives at the dock," he recalled, "but there was a terrible stench in the air. It was an acrid, dry stench that I had never smelled before in my life."
The men were herded into cattle cars, and then driven through the dirt streets of Pusan. There, they got their first glimpses of the natives. "When we were going through these streets," Sarno said, "I saw a couple of civilians and a little kid. One guy was taking a dump and the kid was taking a leak. That was the stench." A town originally with some 30,000 natives, Pusan had swollen into a haven for over a quarter of a million refugees from the northern regions of South Korea because of the invading North Korean/Chinese forces.
They were trucked from Pusan to Chunchon into a secured area; a barbed wire compound where one of the first people Chris Sarno saw was a Marine tanker from his home town back in Massachusetts. His name is Sgt. Jacky McGaffigan; he was awarded the Silver Star for rescuing his tank crew at the Chosin Reservoir epic battle in December 1950. The arriving Marines were replacements for the survivors of the Chosin Reservoir campaign. A member of Charlie Company and a buck sergeant, the war-weary Marine was on his way home. Although the Chosin veteran and Sarno were not chums, they were neighbors who lived a block away from each back home. "It surprised me to learn what a small world it was," Sarno said.
In Korea, Sarno’s world only revolved around Able Company, 1st Tank Battalion. The Marines had five tank companies in Korea: Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog, and Flames. The five of them made up the 1st Marine Division’s one tank battalion for supporting arms, along with Headquarters and Service Companies (mechanics and S-2 officers). "A company was twenty tanks," explained Sarno. "A platoon of tanks consisted of five tanks. The regiments had five tanks each. These five tanks were complemented with a 75mm recoilless rifle company of grunts called ‘anti-tank companies.’ The tank battalion was assigned to help any Main Line of Resistance (MLR) unit out, but sometimes the tanks would also go out by themselves on direct fire missions." Details on any given day about what a tank company did versus enemy forces was recorded in Command Diaries by the tank reconnaissance group and clerks. "Mundane happenings were not included," Sarno said.
Able Company was in a Reserve area some 70 miles north of Chunchon when Sarno arrived in Korea. "The first peace talks were in progress," explained Sarno. "So there was no shooting going on. But that meant nothing to me. As long as I was there, to me it was total war. But the whole division was non-combatant at the time." Now that they were moving up closer to the front line, the new arrivals were given an M-1 rifle with two clips of ammunition for the trip up to Able Company. "It was all mountainous territory," Sarno recalled. "Everything was shattered. Whatever hamlets we went through were gutted or destroyed. There was nobody living there. Everybody was stuck in Pusan, I guess." They had no access to or dealings with South Korean civilians. Able Company was strictly a combat tank outfit.
Able Company had three Sherman tanks with a dozer blade on the front of each of them. The Shermans also had a 105 major weapon. The rest of the tanks in the company were mostly M-46 Pattons and a few M-26 Pershings (forerunner to the M-46A1 Patton Series tank). The Pershings had 90s in the turret, but the driving compartment, suspension system, engine, and transmission were different than those of an M-46. "The Pershing still had those two hand grips to drive it," explained Sarno. "The M-26 had to have an expert driver to double clutch and ease that accelerator perfectly. If you weren’t a good driver you could clip a transmission band easily, and you were disabled." The M-46 was fully-automatic with an 810 horsepower Continental engine. "In a few words," Sarno said, "the M-46 was a modern replica of the vaunted SS-German Tiger Tank. It had a lot of thrust," he recalled. "And there were no transmission bands problems. It was a different transmission. A beautiful tank. The M-46 was supreme in Korea versus the Russian T-34s. The German Tiger had an 88mm weapon, while the Patton had a 90mm trajectory velocity that would go in the front hull of a T-34, keep churning, and exit through the rear. An awesome weapon, the 90mm."
According to Sarno, the 1st Tank Battalion received all of its tanks from Army Ordnance. "We repainted the tanks with a deep green color and white numbering. ‘A’ Company started with A-11 to A-15 for the first platoon; A-21 to A-25 for the second platoon; A-31 to A-35 for the third platoon. Platoon headquarters tanks were numbered A-41 (commanding officer’s tank) and A-42 (executive officer’s tank). In addition, there were A-43, A-44, and A-45 Sherman dozer tanks. That was one entire tank company. B-C-D-and F were numbered in a similar manner. There was one retriever tank per company also. The three regimental AT-Company tanks were numbered 11-15 for the first regiment, 51-55 for the fifth regiment, and 71-75 for seventh regiment tanks. The US Army tanks that I saw had nicknames all over the turrets. Some even had the big teeth of ‘Jaws’ art/painted on the front slopeplates." Nose art of this type was not permitted on Marine tanks.
Chris Sarno’s first assignment with Able Company tanks was not to be on the M-46 that he so greatly admired. "I was the youngest one in the company," he explained, "so I was first put on the dozer tank. There were a lot of uses for that dozer in and out of combat. Say we were in Reserve. Every time we went into Reserve, that dozer was used to dig out a deep hole for our trash pit and for our head. They eventually put up a wooden contraption where we dumped waste. In combat, the blade of a dozer could barricade any position—or collapse it. There was a lot of power in that blade." Sarno said that he didn’t have the opportunity to see the dozer blade in action in combat, but he did see its 105 weapon in action. "A 105 came in high like artillery," he explained. "You could light a cigarette in between before it exploded. It had high angle fire and had a popping noise like a pop gun." Sarno and the others used to laugh at its pop, and during the two months that he stayed on the dozer tank, he kept hoping for the opportunity to move on to a bigger, more powerful tank. Nobody laughed when the M-46 90mm was fired. "The 90mm fired directly like a rifle shot and it could go that way for six miles accurately," Sarno said. "It had a vicious noise coming out. Vicious." But in spite of his partiality to the M-46, he remained assigned to the dozer for about two months.
The first couple of weeks after he arrived at Able Company, Sarno was put on mess duty by the Company Commander, Captain Albert W. Snell. "What is it with these Marine CO’s," Sarno thought, "that they go out of their way to protect the younger Marines by trying to keep them out of harm’s way if at all possible." He said, "I was too immature to realize just how keen and farsighted in understanding and judgment CO’s like Captain Snell were. I was on mess duty from 0300 to 2100 every day. All my tank school buddies went out on direct fire missions while all I did was sling hash for a cook who was one devil of a slave driver. He owned our asses and gleefully worked us into the deck. We were lower than coolies to him, and he let us know it."
The slave driver cook got his come-uppance, however, when he got into a fist fight one day with a platoon sergeant. The platoon had eaten steak and eggs for breakfast that morning at 0400 because they had a fire mission to complete. "Much later," recalled Sarno, "that same platoon rumbled into the CP at 1400. The tankers had taken a lot of gook incoming, and the crews were pretty well drawn and weary from that ordeal. Their platoon sergeant S/Sgt. Red Saunders, came into the mess tent area and told the cook that his Marines were hungry and to rustle up a quick chow. The cook was a big, brawny Texan with a perpetual sour disposition. He told Red in no uncertain terms, ‘No chow until 1700 as scheduled.’ Furthermore, he let Red see the back of his head. I have to amplify, none of the mess men gave a fiddler’s screw about this cook. Red flared up, and I sensed that today would be our day of retribution."
Red Saunders had a temper, and it quickly sparked at the cook’s remarks. "A real Marine," Sarno said, "Red Saunders went after the cook, turned him around, and cold-cocked him with one power-packed punch that sent the heavyset cook reeling backwards. Quick as a flash, Red leveled him with two more shots to the jaw. The cook hit the deck in a heap." Sarno and the other Marines who were jam-packed in the mess tent watched with glee and cheered Saunders on. "The cook was down for the count," Sarno recalled, "and Red was atop him flaying away in a rage. Two of Red’s men had to body-block Red off the vanquished cook. Red had made my day. Truthfully, Red Saunders was one platoon sergeant that always looked out for his Marines. A negative mess cook was not going to get away with ignoring or ridiculing him or his platoon, all of whom had just given their all in mortal combat." Red stayed with Able Company as platoon leader. The cook was never seen again.
Initially, due to his mess and dozer duties, Chris Sarno saw limited combat action on the eastern front in Korea. With its steep, razorback mountains, the Punchbowl area of Korea was not "tank country" anyway. The mountains there had numbers, and some of them were named by the Allied troops that fought to gain and hold them. There was Hill 1026, 1009, 749, 1007, 812 ("the Rock", also known as Luke the Gook’s Castle), and more. The granite mountains of Korea had small scrub trees on them, but otherwise very little foliage. During the Korean War, the razorbacks were robbed of their natural beauty, and instead became miserable places where humankind fought to kill and fought to stay alive.
The heat of a Korean summer did not make Sarno’s experience in the razorbacks any more pleasant, either. "It was hot in July, and even hotter in August," he recalled. During those two months when the first truce talks were underway, there was no battle action. "We had torrential rains," recalled Sarno. "We were down to bare skin during those monsoon months of July and August. It was unbearable. It was sticky too. It wasn’t sweat. It was just sticky humidity." Everything was compressed inside of the dozer tank, and there were five Marines (two drivers and three Marines in the turret) inside. "You couldn’t walk in a straight line in the turret," Sarno explained. "You had to move your body with your feet caddie corner, taking baby steps." The high temperature of the outside climate, combined with internal heat caused from firing the 90mm gun of the dozer and the ejection of the brass shell, made conditions inside the tank extremely uncomfortable. On top of that, gases from the firing lingered in the turret rather than rushing out. "That was bad stuff we were breathing in," said Sarno.
"I had two fire missions as a loader on the dozer, and then we went back into Reserve," he said. Both were in September. He recalled that on one mission, a line of tanks was stuck on one entrance to the Punchbowl. When the lead tank hit mines, not only did its track blow off, there were a couple of guys killed. All of the tanks behind it were stopped, and the entire mission had to be aborted. "We were restricted to one lane in and one lane out," recalled Sarno. "We couldn’t drive the tanks into the paddies because they bogged down. When the North Koreans spotted tank activity, they came in at night and mined the tank approach." When the lead tank got hit, all of the personnel in other tanks in the line got out to see it. "I remember very vividly two casualties who were taken in litters past me. They were the first casualties that I saw in tanks. One was Red Wheeler. He was the platoon sergeant of the 3rd platoon, and he was on a stretcher when I saw him. All I saw was the bloody mass of his head. I figured half his head must have been blown off. When they brought out the driver, they said that both of his legs were crushed. He took the percussion of the mine explosion. Red Wheeler died at Easy Med, our aid station behind the Main Line of Resistance (MLR)."
With the mission aborted, a retriever tank (which worked on the principles of a tow truck with a big boom on it) picked up the disabled tank. "They just picked that thing practically up and dragged it up," he recalled. "We always retrieved our tanks. Very seldom did we leave a disabled tank out there. We always went back for it. There were isolated incidents of a tank not being towed back, but that happened very, very little."
On his second firing mission with the dozer, Sarno saw the North Korean enemy up close for the first time. "The gooks could get into positions in the mountains where it was tough to get them out," he said. "You had to spot them, and even then they could always go into another crevice. The gook was a resolute enemy, especially the North Korean. The Chinaman fought and then he withdrew if he could, but the North Korean basically fought to the end like a Jap. I don’t consider them as equal to a Jap, but the North Korean would fight to the death because it was his country."
In this particular mission, when the tanks stopped, two North Koreans came across a rice paddy and surrendered. "Everybody was dying to kill them right out in the open," recalled Sarno. They had no weapons, so the lieutenant ordered the tankers not to shoot the prisoners. "Don’t shoot," warned the lieutenant. "Not this time. If they throw grenades we’ll wipe them out, but let these guys come in. We want the prisoners." The surrendering North Koreans wore quilted winter uniforms and canvas sneakers that were in shreds. "These guys were pretty good-sized with big Mongol heads," he recalled. "They had lice all over them." All of the sudden, everyone heard noises going over their heads. "We all scattered," Sarno said. "I had never heard this noise before in my life. It was frightening." The tankers discovered that the noise was made by part of their company behind them, out of sight and firing further up. "Now we knew the horrendous sound of a 90mm shell overhead," said Sarno.
The sound of that shell overhead shook all of the guys up, and it lead to a serious mistake on Sarno’s part that could have resulted in death or injury to him. When the noise stopped, he got back up on the road and returned to his dozer. "There was a gook right beside me," recalled Sarno. "He was my size. He said to me, ‘chow Joe, chow.’ He was hungry—starving to death. The next thing I knew, Corporal Affleck pushed me aside and clobbered the gook. He just hammered him in the shoulder blade with the butt of his .45." The seasoned tanker told him not to ever let any of the prisoners of war get too close to him. "They could go for your weapon," he explained to Sarno. "We don’t know what’s on their mind." The MPs came up and hauled the North Korean POWs away. "You can’t trust your enemy," Sarno learned.
In spite of the dangers of getting up close to a treacherous enemy, Sarno felt that being on a dozer tank would not give him the kind of combat action that he wanted to see and the prospects of which had caused him to join the Marine Corps in the first place. He liked his fellow dozer tank crew members, but he continued to yearn for the type of combat duty that he felt he could only get if he was assigned to one of those beautiful M-46 tanks. "I just loved the appearance of it," he said. "It was the modern tank," and Sarno wanted to be assigned to one of them. With tons of fire power that could be decisive in obtaining objectives against the odds, the mere presence of a tank terrified the enemy. The 90mm gun on the M-46 could shoot rounds of 45-pound weight with a velocity of 3,600 feet per second. "The infantry never wanted to see a tank either, unless they knew they were getting the stuffing beaten out of them," Sarno said. "Then they wanted the whole damn shebang."
Sarno got his opportunity to be on a 46 due to a casualty. "We were unloading all of our willie peter (white phosphorus) ammunition, which was ten rounds per tank," he recalled. "It was old, so ordnance was bringing up fresh willie peter rounds for us. As we were digging them out of the deck row, we heard a muffled explosion up on tank 41. I saw Rendoza running toward the river bank screaming his head off. I had gone through a tank school with him so I knew him. He was a big, tall, affable Mexican kid who was always smiling. What happened was that, when they handed him down a willie peter round, it went off and exploded on his chest. That stuff had a chemical on it that thrived on oxygen, and it went right to the bone fast. You had to smother it to try to save yourself. He dove into the river. This was November and the water was ice cold, but he got in. That’s how desperate he was trying to cover it up. And you know, he was out of his mind." Rendoza was evacuated to Easy Med where they patched him up. "They said that he was alive, but they wouldn’t let us see him," Sarno said. "I don’t know whatever happened to him. That’s how I ended up going on gun tank A-41. I took his place."
When the peace talks broke down, the 1st Tank Battalion moved out of Reserve and back up into the Punchbowl’s combat zone. In October, Able Company went on line for a month, going on daily direct fire missions. With Rendoza out of action and shipped out to recuperate in the Naval Hospital at Yokosuka, Japan, Chris Sarno volunteered to be the assistant driver on A-41 tank, which was the captain’s tank. Sarno first served as the tank’s assistant driver and loader, depending on the mission for the day. "I was the low man on the pole, but that’s how tank crews are broken in," he explained. "You either started as a loader—most of the time as loaders—and you ran the radio." When Sarno came aboard Captain Snell’s tank A-41, Pfc. Lionel Durk was the driver; Sergeant Carr was gunner; and Pfc. Ray Kapinski was loader.
A tank crew consisted of five Marines, including a driver and assistant driver. In the turret, there was a loader for the 90 and the coaxial turret .30 caliber turret machine gun. There was also a gunner who was sitting down even lower than the loader. "He was really jammed in there with a telescope and a periscope and the trigger mechanism to fire the 90," Sarno said. Above the gunner was the tank commander seat. He had a cupola with prisms so that he could have a 360 degree view of the terrain around the tank. Inside the driver’s compartment, there were dual controls. Using a "joy stick" with his right hand, the driver controlled reverse, neutral, first and second gears. "The same prevailed on the assistant driver’s side," Sarno explained. "Only he had to use his left hand if the driver got incapacitated. But I never saw that - most of the time I was the driver."
Beneath the drivers were escape hatches that (theoretically) could be used to get out of the tank in case something went wrong with the turret hatch. "But," said Sarno, "we found out that when we hit mines, they were so powerful the force would drive the whole hatch in under the driver’s or assistant driver’s legs." He said that the driver’s legs could be crushed against the top of his compartment. Able Company personnel discovered this when Red Wheeler’s tank hit a mine back in July. "After that," explained Sarno, "they started welding sprockets below both escape hatches so we couldn’t come out underneath. We had to come out of the top of the turret. It was a problem, but it did save the driver’s legs if the tank hit a mine in the future."
Sarno saw several tanks hit mines, but he said that Tank 41 was never hit. "We had shrapnel from artillery hitting us, and sometimes there was shrapnel from small arms such as machine guns," he said. "But that couldn’t penetrate the tank unless the artillery round was a direct hit on the turret or the engine doors. That could disable us. We had a couple of tanks that took direct hits from artillery—one on the eastern front and two on the western front. They were hit on top of their engines and they were totaled."
The hit on the eastern front took place in November of 1951 when Able Company was on the MLR. "We were in Artillery Valley about a mile behind the trench/bunker line," Sarno said. Located just above Inje, Korea, this valley held the 11th Marine Regiment artillery, as well as a three-mile stretch of Army field artillery battalions. "Our CP was located in a dried up rice paddy south of the crater entrance of the Punchbowl and just below the northern rim of the higher hills of 1052, 1026, and 907," Sarno recalled. "We went out every other day on direct fire missions, returning to the CP to load up, gas up, clean weapons and do maintenance on the tank."
Adjacent to Tank A-41 was a US Army field artillery unit of "long toms" [a type of long-range gun]. Sarno said, "When they had a fire mission, the entire deck would tremble. The rest of this battle-scarred valley contained the entire 11th Marine Artillery Regiment of 105’s and 155’s. It was a reassuring vista to look out on tons and tons of artillery pieces for miles and miles. One bright chilly morning, I noticed this Marine jeep coming over the skyline and towards our area. Upon the jeep’s hood were two cruddy North Korean prisoners lashed to the windshield." He said that two Marine military policemen were escorting the prisoners to Division, which was way in the rear.
"Suddenly," he said, "I heard these loud roaring sounds in the sky above, ending with hellacious explosions. My day of reckoning was at hand--it was gook incoming and plenty of it. I hit the deck fast and remained there flat as a bastard." Two other crew members, Sergeant Holler (tank commander of A-44 and a World War II veteran) and Pfc. Barr, were by him. "We couldn’t get into the dirt deep enough," Sarno recalled. "The ‘incoming’ was falling all around us. We could hear the hot shrapnel whizzing from all angles." Sarno crawled to the dozer tank, where Corporal Blasi (a strong kid from Kansas who was the assistant driver) and Sergeant Burke (a Marine tanker who had seen action at Inchon-Seoul-Chosin) dropped the driver’s escape hatch. "Punchy [gunner on dozer tank A-44] and I got up into the turret and looked out the periscopes. Hot lead was zinging off the turret as the incoming exploded." Sarno said that he could see the pasting going on below them. "We had a grandstand seat, viewing hit after exploding hit raining down into Artillery Valley. There were black oil clouds, air explosions, and ammo dumps hit," he recalled. "This gook forward observer [FO] was good, and he was having a field day on all of us in the valley. The command diaries read that seventy rounds of 122mm rained down on us that day. Much later, we learned the FO was captured and word had it, he was a North Korean Major."
Sarno said that he felt a lot safer from the incoming artillery rounds once he was inside the Sherman tank. "Next to the dozer was A-33," he remembered, "and all hell broke loose as it took a direct hit on its engine compartment. I even flinched inside my tank on the percussion effect. The heavy steel engine and transmission doors flew through the air like empty coffee cans. A-33 was totaled with engine and transmission fires. Later we found out that two Marine tankers were killed in action, and another was wounded as the result of the direct hit."
The MP jeep that had been approaching just as the artillery fire began was still within sight. "With all the din of battle continuing," Sarno said, "I decided to check out the two gook prisoners on the jeep. There the jeep was, still out there on the road with the two screaming gooks taking in this incoming barrage from goonyland. The two MPs were nowhere in sight—probably in the dirt and mud of the nearest rice paddy. We were laughing our asses off at the plight of the two gooks going through purgatory out there still on top of that jeep. No one cared how much shrapnel the gooks had to take. No combat Marine gave a rat’s ass about our enemies." He said that it seemed like an eternity before the 122’s stopped splashing into Artillery Valley. "Finally the two MPs meandered up to the jeep," Sarno recalled. "We again had to laugh at the two MPs for getting their starched uniforms all muddy. They started up the jeep and proceeded to drive off as if nothing at all had happened with the two crazy and frenzied gooks. To this day, I can still hear their screams of terror."
This was Chris Sarno’s "baptism of fire"—a frightening introduction to the realities of combat. When it began, he had just left mess duty in the mess hall to head back to his quarters. Fifty years later, when he read the command diaries about the incident, he learned something that he had long forgotten. "The mess tent area was completely blasted to bits," he said. The trek to his quarters probably kept Sarno from either being killed in action or seriously wounded that day. "My first encounter with lethal gook firepower was under my belt, with plenty more to come before I was rotated stateside in August of 1952," he said. "In addition, I realized something else. Our violent Marine training and mindset showed ever so clear our contempt and utter disregard about these oriental aggressors, whom we never gave any quarter to, in or out of the heat of battle."
The crew of Tank 41 was in combat on both the eastern and western front, but they stayed on the east coast of Korea for several months. During the late autumn, the 1st Marine Division put five Dog Company tanks on five mountain tops facing North Korea. "They provided direct fire right into the goonyland on the trench line," Sarno said. Two or three of the tanks supported Korean Marine Corps regiments. The other two tanks supported U.S. Marine operations. While Dog Company Marines endured the miserable conditions on top of the mountains, Marines in other tank companies were waiting in Reserve, including those in Able Company. Sarno’s company was in Reserve at Wontog-ni from November to the 15th of December 1951. They set up camp adjacent to the Soyang-gang River, which was down to a trickle. The river’s big boulders were visible in the riverbed.
On November 10, as all Marines are wont to do no matter where they are, the members of Able Company marked the anniversary of the Marine Corps’ birth with a traditional birthday cake. It was an especially significant day for Chris Sarno, because he had just received a battlefield promotion to corporal. "I was happy as a pig," Sarno said. "I had some combat time under my belt, and as the youngest Marine in the company, I had the first cut of sweet cake from Top/Sergeant O’Neil, who was the oldest Marine in the company. I got to slice the cake with Captain Snell’s K-bar. After the ceremony ended, O’Neil got me to join the 1st Marine Division Association as a life member for the $25 of script that was in my pocket." Sarno never had any regrets for having spent his last dollars on that life membership that day. The date of November 10, 1951 was, indeed, a good day for USMC Corporal Chris Sarno. "I was still wet behind the ears," Sarno recalled, "but I was one happy, unmarried gyrene who was cocky and brash but, conversely, hardly knew anything about the mystery of life. The older NCOs read me like a book. I was still blinded by an 18-year-old’s immaturity. I was a combat veteran, and to me, my world looked like a bowl of cherries."
He would soon taste a fruit that he discovered was far tastier than a mere bowl of cherries. The tank company was settled into the daily routine of work details, attending gunnery classes, and standing watch on machine gun outposts every night. One day, Gunny Bird sent Sarno on a beer run to Wonju. A non-drinker, Chris could not understand why he was chosen to pick up beer. The angry gunny grabbed him by the neck and said, "You dumbass bastard, I know that. That’s why I selected you! This way you won’t drink a case of beer on the way back."
Fifty-plus years later, Chris Sarno still remembered the beer run to Wonju. "The beer detail consisted of one buck sergeant and four corporals," he said. "It was very cold when we shoved off for Wonju, some 70 miles south of Artillery Valley. I recall at several pit stops observing South Korean peasants standing in the cold water paddies, that smelly, brown water. Clusters of kids also gathered around us looking for anything we had to hand out. A couple of USMC old salts had pogie-bait for a few lucky kids wearing rubber inserts for footwear—civilians victimized by the ravages of a war-torn country. Wonju was a battered village and completely leveled; however, it was still a vital, military junction because five roadways intersected this pastoral hamlet. The 8th Army units controlled the entire area and it was a huge distribution complex for ammo, gas, chow, and, of course, beer."
Sarno said that their 6x6 arrived at Wonju around noon, and by late that afternoon, it was filled with cases of beer. "The Army invited us to evening chow in their spacious mess hall," he recalled. "As usual, the doggies had thick steaks with all the fixings. Many miles north, Marines were getting their butts shot to bits, while these rear echelon pogues lived the life of Riley. Marines never got a break! I was wondering where we were to sack out when one of our detail had the bright idea to go through the wire and link up with the local rice paddy queens. Silently I joined the party and played follow the leader. After all, I hadn’t seen a woman since June so, hell’s bells, my interest was very keen with this liberty risk group. A few hours later, and happily satisfied like hogs in hog heaven, we slipped back through the Army wire; the doggie sentry held the wire up for us—what an outfit! Can you imagine a Marine sentry doing such? Hell no!"
The next day, Gunny Bird asked the youngest Marine in the outfit if he had "scored" while he was at Wonju. "With a big shit-eating grin I stated ‘Friggin’ A, Gunny,’" Sarno told him. Sarno said that the gunny just kept on walking, then looked over his shoulder, and yelled, "Now aren’t you glad that you don’t drink?" Sarno recalled with a smile even fifty years later that he was beaming at the gunny’s remark. "I just cranked off a salty salute back at him," he said. "Indeed, I was now accepted as one of the old combat tankers." At age 18, Chris Sarno had just experienced two types of loss of innocence. He had seen and experienced combat first hand, and he had scored with one of the South Korean girls. "I had at least another long nine more months to go in Korea, never thinking I was going to make it out of this asshole-of-the-world country in one piece," he explained about his loss of innocence. "So we all lived vicariously for the moment. It was a heady existence, but one I could associate with very easily at death’s door."
Over the months that Sarno was assigned to the Able Company dozer tank, the crew members came and went. Punchy Barr of Hamburg, Pennsylvania, had served with him on the dozer tank as a gunner. So had Corporal Blasi [Kansas], who helped Sarno learn his first on-the-job combat skills. "He was a very soft-spoken guy," recalled Sarno, "but he could be a holy terror if he wanted to be. He helped me out when I needed it, but he didn’t baby me." Sarno noted that both Blasi and the dozer driver, Sergeant Burke [Colorado] used their status as "old salts" to help newcomer Sarno learn the ropes of combat. "When I joined Burke’s crew late in July of 1951," he said, "I was the last guy to get a pistol. I lugged my M-1 on the tank and had to sack out on the deck with cut pine branches while the rest of the crew slept on cots. That used to piss Burke off to no end. He hounded his buddy—a former police sergeant we called "Sergeant Skuzzy"—to get me a cot."
Another time, when it was Sarno’s first time to stand watch on a high machine gun outpost with three other Marines, Burke and Blasi followed Sarno. "They gave me a poncho and sleeping bag that I needed for the night watch above the company perimeter," he said. "Little things like that remain in my memory—how he looked after me. Burke didn’t have to do that, but he knew how green I was to combat." Sergeant Burke left the dozer crew in November of 1951 when he rotated to CONUS. The next time Sarno saw him was in 1954. Burke had apparently lost his stripes, because he was a private first class at the time.
Burke was a veteran tanker who had seen combat at Inchon and in Seoul. By the time he left Korea in 1954, he had survived the Chosin Reservoir, Operation Killer, and the Punchbowl campaigns as well. "Burke said that when they were going through Seoul, there was a sniper," Sarno said. "The assistant driver saw a gook in the gutter who fired at the tank, disappeared, and then came back up again 20 yards in another hole on the same side of the gutter to fire again." The assistant told Burke what was going on, so the next time the North Korean popped up, Burke just drove the blade right over him.
Sarno noted how fleeting life can be in a combat zone. Sergeant Burke had seen lots of action since his arrival in Korea, and his life was on the line many times. However, his life could have been extinguished in a moment—not by enemy fire, but by a simple mishap with the tank. One time after the tanks had returned from a mission, Burke was coming out of the driving compartment of the tank when the .30 caliber coaxial machine gun just above his head suddenly fired. "As Burke started to come up," Sarno said, "a round cooked off and went out just above Burke’s tank helmet. If he had jumped up quicker, he would have got it in the back of the head or the back. It was just a round that was in the chamber. The rifle barrel was hot. It was just cooking at a certain temperature when it exploded and out came the round. After all the hazardous times Burke had been through, he could have been killed like that. Burke just dropped down into the driver’s seat like a big marshmallow, knowing what could have happened. Gee, you never know. What a way to die." But, Burke’s time was not up here on earth. He survived the mishap.
Sarno understands the meaning of "survival" when it comes to combat. As an example, he told about the taking of Wolmi-Do during the Inchon Invasion. Just off of the west coast of Korea, very close to Inchon, is a small island called Wolmi-do. For the safety of invading allied forces, it was necessary for the Marines to secure the island in advance of the main invasion thrust. After aerial bombardment to soften the landing ceased, the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines landed on Wolmi-do on 15 September 1950. Able Tanks landed ten tanks, including two dozers. These tanks came in handy when ground troops met resistance from enemy forces dug into a low cliff along the shoreline. One dozer took care of that resistance when he plowed his tank into one of the emplacements, burying its occupants alive. "I’ve seen numerous films that Marine Corps photographers took of Wolmi-do," Sarno said. "I was looking at the film and saw this Marine Corps dozer tank. They were describing it. Some of the North Koreans wouldn’t surrender, so they just buried them with this tank. As the tank came through, you could see the number ‘44’ on its side. You couldn’t see the ‘A’, but you could see ‘44’ thinly stroked. That’s the way our number was on A-44—it was a thin 44."
While someone who has never experienced combat might think that burying someone alive is cruel beyond necessary, Sarno thinks otherwise. "Those people are far removed from what combat is all about," he said. "It’s about survival. If you hit the enemy over the head with your entrenching tool, what’s the difference? You had to survive. You can’t argue or plead with the enemy—come on, that’s not real. This is war. And I always had that gut feeling that no Chinaman was going to take the last breath out of my chest. A couple of times in Korea I thought I was going to die, and I was petrified thinking that I didn’t want to die like that. Nobody was going to take my last breath if I had something to do about it." Up on a Punchbowl mountain top, however, the enemy certainly tried to take Sarno’s last breath from him. They failed – but they sure tried.
Just days after the beer run to Wonju detail returned to the Reserve area, members of Tank A-41 were ordered to go back up on the Punchbowl mountains to relieve Charlie Company tankers of their duty on five Dog Company tanks. "Dog Company tankers had patiently negotiated five (5) of their M-46 Patton-class tanks up this goat’s trail in late October," Sarno explained. "With the emergence of heavy weather predicted, it was ruled by tank battalion honchos to relieve tank crews rather than the impossible task of risking heavy armor along this icy and treacherous road."
Sarno’s tank crew remained on the top of Hill #1026 from 15 December 1951 to 28 February 1952. Their job was to provide direct fire missions for grunts from the 1st Korean Marine Corps Regiment, which was defending the Hays Line of Defense. "This majestic sweep embraced the most extreme northern allied penetration into North Korea," Sarno said. "Two miles to our rear on the southern rim was the stabilizing ‘Kansas Line’, which positioned itself similar to a snowcapped zenith of a denuded sentinel protecting the frozen-over Soyang-Gang river spilling its way on the valley floor below."
Sarno and his fellow Marines were trucked to the base of the mountains. He recalled, "The truck couldn’t get us too far up the mountain because the road got too narrow for a 6-by, so we walked up the rest of the way. There was not only snow and ice, but gale force winds as well. That wind never stopped the entire time we were there. It was brutal and lethal cold. We eased our way up the treacherous mountain side. There was ice all over the place, so one wrong step and we would be expressed to the valley floor. Just going up the side of that mountain road in December was pretty eerie. There were no trees; there were just stumps. And they had a purple haze on them. While we trudged along in this rarefied thin air, our breathing became somewhat laborious, and it sapped our oxygen supply. When we arrived at Dog 31 tank, the Charlie Company tankers manning the Dog tanks were glad to see us. They had manned D-31 tank for forty-five days and nights, and they didn’t conceal their relief and glee to have us take over. The impact hadn’t yet hit me as to what we were in for on that mountain top."
The tank to which Sarno’s Able Company crew had been assigned was frozen in place. "D-31 tank was bellied up in a revetment with only the fighting turret exposed and the supreme 90mm pointing straight into Goonyland," Sarno recalled. "It would have to be a direct hit on the top of the turret to render us useless. Certainly the earthen pocket enveloping the tank hull was frozen rock solid; thus, no fear that a 76 AT shell or worse could get at our tracks or hull. The entire topography from eye to eye encompassed a skier’s dream of a white, blue and icy panorama. Silently I whispered to myself, don’t be lulled into making a mistake with all this winter majesty about; indeed, once you let your guard down you are bound to get one right between the horns with compliments from a patient gook sniper."
It didn’t take long for Sarno and the others to understand why the Charlie tankers were so happy to see their replacements arrive. "Let me tell you," he said. "We froze our gajonies off each and every night on that coldest of steel chariots. It was cold beyond imagination. We knew it was cold down in the valley, but on the mountain top, the wind never stopped any day or night. That wind coming out of Siberia was incessant, and at night time the temperature dropped to 35 below and lower." Sarno said that everything was iced up so much that they didn’t even receive competition from the enemy. "We had everything the Marine Corps could give us to keep warm," he recalled, "but our first two nights were ungodly unbearable. We thought we were properly clothed, but by two o’clock in the morning we were crying—crying body pain from the cold. The intense cold contracted our muscles so tight the pain was excruciating, so much so that it caused tears to flow." He said that by the end of their guard duty that night, their only goal was to just stay alive in the cold. "For sure," Sarno said, "this was our devilish frozen hell on earth, and our internalized mission was to fight and to endure." He said that the temperatures were so low that all five tanks had to be started up every three hours and left to idle for one hour to prevent the gasoline-fed engines from freezing up solid.
Pfc. Lionel Durk was the driver, and Sarno was the assistant driver while on this freezing cold guard duty. "Every night our assignment was to stand night watch on the tank," he said. "I can count on one hand the nights I never had watch while in "A" Company tanks." He and Durk were supposed to stand on the engine doors or stand on the tank commander seat just so the enemy would see them and not come near. "If a fire-fight ensued, we were to wake up the other three Marines on the reverse slope to man the turret. But I would say that most of the nights--90 percent of the nights in the winter time while we were up on top of those mountains--we had no combat exposure." The Korean Marines were in the trench line within sight of the tanks, and there was always activity there. In fact, the first nights of fire watch were filled with anxiety for the newcomers on the mountain tops. "We couldn’t tell if they were North or South Koreans," Sarno said. "We were in constant anxiety about possibly killing the wrong gook. They never came over to be with us. They didn’t speak English and we didn’t speak gook, but we could see them. They were close by." Sarno’s first night on the Dog tank went by uneventful, and he did manage to somehow survive the "bitter brass-monkey cold" atop that Punchbowl mountain.
The next two nights passed the same way. Sarno could not get used to the miserably cold nights, even though he was properly dressed. "We were hunched over and we could hardly move," he recalled. "So the third night—I don’t know why I did it—I took off my boots. Now these were thermal boot, not combat boots. Thermal boots were supposed to keep us warm no matter what the temperature was, but it wasn’t working in that kind of cold. So I took my thermal boots off and I remember wrapping the woolen sleeping bag around my feet as I stood up in the tank commander’s position. I got circulation back into my feet. I couldn’t walk around, so I just stood there. But with the sleeping bag around my feet, I could handle it." Of course, if the enemy had suddenly attacked their position, Sarno would have been caught bootless. "But that’s the only reason we could gut it out in those early morning hours until we got relieved every morning at 7 o’clock," Sarno said. "We told the tank commander what we had done, but he really didn’t care. Our assignment was to maintain security during the night, and it didn’t matter whether we did it with or without our boots on."
Come morning, Sarno and Durk went back to the bunker to get some sleep. "The others [Ray Kapinski, Red Carr, and Bob Hunt] would do fire missions in the daylight hours," he said, "and we would go back to the ratty bunker." When asked if he meant ratty as in crummy or ratty as in real rats, he replied, "Really rats. Even in the coldest of the cold, the rats were in our bunker. We had a sandbag roof. We also had a little makeshift stove made out of an ammo container and a small stove pipe. It was all a mom and pop thing. We had a diesel line coming in from the fuel barrel that drip-dropped into the empty steel ammo container. It would ignite and the fumes would go up the chimney. That’s where the rats were—laying up along the warm smokestack going through the sandbags on the roof. At night they came in to see if there were any scraps of food on the ground. We tried not to leave anything, but still they crawled at night. It always sent a chill up my back when I saw a rat. I always looked at Korea as a goddamned country with nothing but rats all over the place. They came from the rice paddies, which were fertilized by human waste. There were tons of rats."
The bunker was compact and had two makeshift double racks for sleeping, Sarno continued. "We’d maybe eat a little C-ration, and then we were so cold and tired we’d get into the woolen sleeping bag and get some sleep before that sun went down for another watch. I remember falling asleep and being awakened by the 90 going off. Loads of dirt came down through the overhang of the bunker when the 90 fired, but we went right back to sleep. I don't say that I slept soundly, but I did get some sleep." When the other tankers returned for a noon chow break, however, they woke up the sleeping Marines to chit chat. When night fall came, "We’d have those long hours from 6 p.m. until 7 a.m. just to freeze out there on that damn tank," Sarno said. "We did it for 60 nights. That was more imposing on me than any of the few firefights that we engaged in with the enemy. It seems funny, but when we were in a firefight, all of the sudden we didn’t even think of being frozen. I can’t say that it was a figment of my mind—when you’re cold, you’re cold! But when there were a couple of eerie firefights, we were toasty warm, even though it was still the subzero weather."
Sarno remembered his first fire fight on the mountain top. "They got damned close," he said. "Those Korean Marines were really cutting loose, and the burp guns were loud. Even Durk told me that I’d better go back and get those three other tankers up there." In the pitch black of 1 or 2 o’clock in the morning, Sarno went back over the reverse slope. Always being on night guard duty, he didn’t know that his fellow Marines had jerrybuilt a crude alarm system for the bunker. "They had a poncho in front of the entrance of the bunker," he said. "Behind it they had two empty jerry cans so that if somebody stumbled in, they would make a commotion and wake them up. I hit those ponchos wide open, and those cans and I went flying ass over tea kettle. I ended up lying on the deck. My face was about a foot away from Kapinski’s face. It was pitch black and Kapinski panicked. ‘Who’s that, who’s that,’ he asked. I said, ‘Sarno, Sarno,’ and I saw his .45 right in my face. I knew that he was a panicky kid, so I told him, ‘Don’t pull that f---ing trigger. You’ll blow my head off.’ The other guys said, ‘Who is it? What are you doing here?’ I told them that there was a goddamn firefight out there, and I woke the tank commander."
The commander just told him that the Korean Marines would handle it. "Those guys never came out," Sarno said, "even though they could hear the crack of the weapons going off. I went back out and thank God the KMCs did handle it. We didn’t have any rifles, so all we did was throw a couple of grenades. We couldn’t get the 90 down low enough anyway. We were practically useless and the Korean Marines were shooting up a storm. We could see the muzzle blasts from the North Koreans’ weapons." While Able Company Marines slept on, Sarno and Durk threw grenades down on top of the North Koreans as Korean Marines continued fighting in the dark of night.
Sarno explained that Korean Marines were trained behind the lines as quickly as American Marines could teach them. "They did adequate work," Sarno said of the Koreans, "but they had a long way to go to equal American Marines. You’ve got to realize that Korea was not liberated until the Japanese surrendered it after World War II. In 1945, we walked into Korea—a country that had always been repressed since time immemorial. They never experienced any semblance of freedom until 1945, and here it was just six years later. Yes, they were Korean Marines. They wanted to be like American Marines and we gave them accelerated training, but they were an undisciplined lot." In addition, he pointed out, there was a language barrier that caused communication to be limited. "But they didn’t run," Sarno said. "The ROKs ran, but the Korean Marines fought until they were killed. I give them credit there. And they didn’t run in the Punchbowl. My first experience with them was in the Punchbowl, where they went up in columns. They were just a fledgling outfit in 1951. In the beginning they needed a lot of formal training, but they had to be rushed into combat. I never saw the Korean Marines retreat, and I wasn’t apprehensive if they were on our flank helping us out. I suppose that they are okay now. They’re proven. But I don’t see them on par with us regardless."
Certainly the discipline or reprimand meted out to wayward Korean Marines was different than those given to United States Marines. On the third night of their guard duty on Hill 1026, both Sarno and Durk spotted a figure staggering past the rear of the tank. At the time, there was a blizzard. "Moving through the howling snowstorm," recalled Sarno, "this character had a 55 gallon drum of diesel fuel on his A-frame. This dwarf-like figure, with bowed out legs, continued to scurry on down the KMC trench while still bouncing up against both sides of the trench; after all, he was toting a dead weight of 500 pounds. The drum of fuel was taken from our small dump on the reverse side. Durk and I kicked it around on what to do about this. In the blink of an eye, it was crystal clear to us. At 0600, we reported this theft to TC/Sgt. Bob Hunt (Syracuse, NY). He promptly radioed our report to our platoon leader, Lieutenant Henderson, atop hill #702. The lieutenant made contact with the CO of the KMC platoon stationed on our section of the line. Scuttlebutt had it, the KMC captain would ferret out this thief and he would execute him. Our lieutenant interceded and suggested a lesser punishment, and the KMC captain reluctantly reconsidered."
The American Marines were notified to observe the reverse slope one afternoon to witness the punishment decreed by the KMC officer. Sarno said that his crew was about 100 yards from the scene. "It was a damn cold, cloudy afternoon (+5 degrees above) when we saw two KMC officers come out of their bunker. They screamed out something in Korean and out came the 12-man KMC squad. The KMC officer drew his Lugar and motioned for two men to tie the looter to a pole by binding his two hands above his head. Then two squad members proceeded to strip this poor devil of all of his winter clothing. The culprit was now bare-ass naked. The KMC captain motioned with his sidearm for the first enlisted man to step forward and to grab this four-foot long bamboo rod. This squad member gave the tied-up thief five terrible lashings across his back, buttocks, and legs. The KMC officer, with a menacing look on his face, stood over each squad member, which meted out this bloodletting caning, and each KMC, under that gun, lashed away with gusto. When it was finished, the thief laid limp against the pole while his back, buttocks, and legs were but a bloody pulp of red meat. The platoon sergeant cut him down and his squad quickly carried the battered body into their bunker. Next, the KMC captain holstered his Lugar, turned in our direction, and gave us a salty salute, which Sergeant Hunt returned. Although we were Allies, we were seeing a vast difference in cultures in no uncertain and graphic terms."
The United States Marines atop hill #1026 continued to coexist within a few yards of the Korean Marines throughout the rest of that winter. They "coexisted" with the Chinese enemy located in that vicinity as well. "The Chinese started serenading us in the daylight hours from across the chasm," Sarno said. They played Christmas carols over tinny loudspeakers. Along with the music, however, they announced continual warnings to the Marines. "The gooks promised that we would all die like good Marines on Christmas Eve," Sarno said. "They guaranteed it." As a result, the Marines were ordered to stand 100% watch. "Sure enough," Sarno said, "They came in hordes as the still night scene exploded with the staccato and authentic sound of gook burp guns and grenades. It was all-out carnage and bedlam in the heat of mortal combat for over an hour in a murderous and bloody firefight on that fateful Christmas Eve. However, the Chinese failed to accomplish their mission. We and the KMCs repulsed another nerve-racking attack. They tried and they died. We didn’t even bother to cross the concertina and apron wires to check on the dead Chinese who lay crucified and frozen in grotesque positions out there. No quarter was ever given. For the remainder of Christmas Day 1951, we crouched in our constrictive and rat-infested bunker. In addition, we looked up pensively toward heaven, counting the seemingly endless crunch of gook 122mm mortars plastering our crest and forward slopes. We were perpetually grateful for our Marine close air support this day that kept the enemy at bay out of fear with napalm and strafing sorties."
Sarno said that the Marines holed up in the mountaintop bunker celebrated Christmas Day with a secular holiday tune. "We had a relic of a Jap windup Victorola," he said, "and it was able to play a scratchy 78rpm recording of Jingle Bells. We were cruddy with baked-on sweat and we listened endlessly to the melody, while wolfing down cold rations. We thought of home, which seemed like a million miles away." If they were lucky, the crew of Tank D-31 would be home for Christmas—next year.
With the arrival of 1952 also came the arrival of a barrage of incoming artillery rounds that injured three members of the crew on D-31 during the first week of the new year. Since the tank was frozen into stationary position on the mountain top, the enemy knew the exact range of fire on which to inundate D-31 with artillery barrages. "We had a lot of barrages, Sarno recalled. "There was nothing we could do about it. Late in the day on 5 January 1952, a sudden gook barrage raked the forward slope and crest. I thought the gooks were after the stationary tank. They could see the tank, and it wasn’t their first attempt to get D-31, so I didn’t want to get inside. I made a dash to get onto the reverse slope and to the bunker, hoping that there was less of a chance for a shell to get me. As I dashed, I heard the swoosh of incoming artillery, and hit the deck as three explosions hit the mountain—two on the front slope and one on the crest. I got up and made it to the bunker, but had some pain. I thought that I had avoided the shrapnel, but I was hit nonetheless. I got mine in my ankle and foot, right through my thermal boot. Durk and Kapinski followed me into the bunker. They also had minor wounds. In a short time, a KMC corpsman showed up and took a small sliver of steel out of my flesh, and put whatever it was on my wound to patch me up. He administered first aid to Durk and Kapinski. We were lucky. It was ‘shrap-nails’—just about spent remnants of steel." The corpsman left a supply of new combat bandages and liquid disinfectant. None of the three tankers suffered any long-term effects from their wounds. The bleeding stopped, and the discomfort ended when their wounds scabbed over. In the meantime, they stayed put on Hill 1026.
For another month and a half, Sarno and his crew continued to defend their position on the Punchbowl mountain top. By the end of his sixty days on the Punchbowl mountaintop, Chris Sarno said that he had reached the cruddiest point in his life. "We were the crud of cruds," he said. "When those firefights came up, we sweated. When it dried on our skin, it became baked-on sweat. Slime. By the next day, we felt like our skin was totally slimy and greasy. And there was no change of clothing. We only went out of the bunker to make a head call, and even then, we came back in quickly because the gooks sent in what they called H&I rounds—harassing and interdiction rounds. We did it, too. We just sent rounds indiscriminately into where we thought enemy troops might be resting, hoping that we blew them apart. So every time we went out, we went out quickly and we returned quickly. We didn’t want to get hit by an H&I round." Even inside the bunker, the men wore their gung-ho caps because of the cascades of sand and dirt that fell on them when the 90s fired.
Constantly being dirty, as well as constantly being on edge due to the threat of enemy attack, caused that easy comradeship that Marines are known for to erode. "We were really cruds," Sarno recalled, "and crudiness made us angry every day. We weren’t walking around with a smile. Nothing made us smile, because we knew the severity of the lethal cold. We were all angry amongst each other too. There was no cajoling. There were always snippy answers and remarks. Everybody was uptight. Nobody wanted to die, and we were filthy rotten on top of that. We had no bath at all in the 60 days we were up there. Water discipline was a critical daily factor."
The stint on Hill 1026 had caused a lot of misery for Chris Sarno, but he also felt that something good came out of it. "That stretch up on 1026 made me a combat Marine for all the difficult times to come on the Western Front," he said. "The Punchbowl campaign defined me as a combat Marine. The gook was never given any quarter—none at all. Kill or be killed was the daily regime, and we thought nothing of it."
For the next three weeks, Sarno stayed in Tank Battalion Reserve at Wontog-ni on a riverbed. He and the other crew members were then sent off to a muddy CP some fifty miles inland from the eastern coastline and another 140 road miles east of Seoul to await the arrival of other tank companies. The new orders for the entire 1st Marine Division called for a massive move from the eastern front to the western front of Korea. In a 35-mile front from the Yellow Sea to the central part of Korea, the Marines were to take up positions forty miles north of Seoul in relief of the 1st ROK Division. "We had the largest combat front on the western front for a division," Sarno explained. "We were specifically assigned to that sector because intelligence had reason to believe the Chinese 63/65th Army was going to burst through and try to take Seoul again."
The western coast of Korea would offer the tank battalions a less restricted space in which to operate tanks than the east coast had provided. "Once they took us to the western front 50 miles above Seoul," Sarno recalled, "it was all rolling foothills. There were no razorback mountains. There was only Hill 226, sitting just straight up in level terrain. The gooks had that, and they could see all the way in to our sector. Even still, we had much more mobility and space to operate on in the western front." To get there from the eastern front, the grunts were trucked westward. Meanwhile, all of the 1st Tank Battalion’s 105 armored tanks were to assemble in one area for a spectacular drive to the sea. At the small port of Soko-ri, the tanks were to be picked up by LSTs, and then shipped all the way around the bottom of Korea and back up to Inchon. From there they were to be driven to Seoul.
Just before they moved out of the eastern sector of Korea, there was an incident of an accidental discharge of someone’s weapon. "That’s frowned on by Marine officers," Sarno explained, "because there’s nothing recognized as an accidental discharge. You’re supposed to fire that weapon on purpose. So the platoon sergeants came and announced that everybody was to go outside with their .45s for inspection. We cursed and got squared away to go out there. In comes this big dude who was always in trouble in the Reserve area. He said, ‘Jeez, I’m in trouble. I accidentally discharged my weapon, and I’ve got no bore cleaner.’ We knew that they were going to smell the muzzles of the .45s. All of our bore cleaners were on the tank, so one of the guys in the tent yelled out that he had some Wildroot Cream Oil for his hair. That’s all we had. But the Marine who had accidentally fired his weapon said that he would take anything just to get the carbon smell out of the bore before they smelled it. He jammed the cream oil in there. Finally, we all fell out and the officers came down. They had murder in their eyes because a pogue in battalion who was always in Reserve got hit in the back during the accidental discharge. The officers came by us. Our XO was a good combat officer, but he was a typical Marine officer in Reserve—he was a prick. He was subbing as a CO, and new at running the show. We disliked him in the Reserve area because he changed his spots when he felt safe in the Reserve area. On the line, his life was in jeopardy from his own men if he wasn’t careful."
The XO was determined to find the culprit who had fired the .45, and to run him up on charges once he found him. "When he grabbed the big dude’s pistol," Sarno recalled, "he smelled it. He said that it didn’t smell like bore cleaner. But that dude was sharp. He told the XO, ‘naw…that’s gook cleaner, sir—a mixture of gasoline and oil. That’s all we’ve got.’" Nobody ratted on the guy who actually fired the weapon, and the XO couldn’t find the culprit.
The 17th replacement draft had arrived with replacements, so there were new tankers and a new platoon tech/sergeant who had just arrived in Korea. It was with disappointment that the crew of A-41 learned that the captain had assigned a "stateside pogue with eight years in the Marine Corps," as tank commander. "Orders were orders," said Sarno, "and we obeyed." Nevertheless, none of the seasoned veterans were happy with the idea that a newcomer unfamiliar with Korea was going to take command on the trip to the sea - not only that the new tech sergeant was not a seasoned combat veteran, either.
The night before their journey began, the Marines had a chance to relax for a while and watch a movie. A couple of disgruntled Marines, assigned to tedious guard duty on the machine gun outposts set up to protect the command post, decided to liven things up a bit in the middle of the movie. Some of the moviegoers had been forewarned that machine guns might go off unexpectedly. Others, however, had no inkling that a false alarm was about to sound. "We were watching the movie," recalled Sarno, "when halfway through we heard the chatter of a machine gun going off. There was chaos up the ying-yang as somebody shouted, ‘The gooks are coming through.’ Everybody was going in every direction." The new guys—edgy now that they were in Korea’s combat zone--were especially bewildered at the situation. "They didn’t know what the hell was going on," Sarno said.
Among those who panicked in the chaos was the new platoon sergeant. Sarno said that the green officer was on dozer tank A-45 in the tank commander’s position with the intercom mike saying, "Driver, Driver. Driver, start the engine. Driver, Driver, move out." Sarno and two other combat-hardened Marines looked at him with disdain, and in spite of his rank said, "You f---ing asshole. There’s no driver down there. You’re on a tank by yourself. You’re our new platoon sergeant? What an asshole!" Fresh from the states, the platoon sergeant never had anyone of lower rank talk to him like that before. "But when you’re in combat," Sarno said, "you don’t give a damn. In a situation like that, we pegged him as an incompetent, so we thought nothing of telling him so." Although everyone started up their tanks, when it was determined that everything was secure, the word came down through the line to kill the engines shortly thereafter. "Nobody ever figured out what happened up there on the outpost," Sarno said. "But we knew those guys had kept their word."
It was the end of March and winter was still with the troops, recalled Sarno. "It was a continuous, 24-hour road march to the sea with no break. This was the only time in the Korean War that the entire 1st Marine Tank Battalion was all assembled in one spot. It was an awesome sight scanning all that mechanized might. Precisely at 0500 on 27 March 1952, the entire tank battalion hit the magneto and starter switches and, with Able Company on the point, shoved off for little Soko-ri." He recalled that the line of tanks had to go over a mountain range and then drop down to the sea coast. The tanks were combat-loaded for the journey. "Each tank had all kinds of gear lashed to its turrets," Sarno recalled. "There were helmets, Russian and Japanese rifles, C-ration boxes, tarpaulins, cammo nets, air panels, ammo boxes galore, 55 gallon gas drums, tents, etc. The Oklahoma Sooners had nothing on us as this gypsy and cutthroat band of Marines headed east, right smack into a raging snowstorm by 2200 hours," Sarno said.
Tank A-41 had gotten a lot of water in the gas tank during the winter. "It was a cranky tank," Sarno said. "It sparked and sputtered and backfired. We really had doubts about whether we would end up disabling it or whether we would end up being dragged in by the retriever." This was not good news, especially considering the fact that A-41 was the lead tank in the march to the sea. Captain Milton L. Raphael, newly-arrived in Korea and "a helluva good Marine officer and competent combat officer," according to Sarno, was assigned to the ‘cranky tank.’ Because the eastern front of the Korean peninsula was similar to the back of an alligator, the tanks had to travel over one mountain after another to get to the coastline.
Durk took the first stint driving, and Sarno curled up in the tank driver’s seat and dozed off in spite of the racket. After getting some sleep, he woke up to take over as the driver. Now 2 a.m., it was pitch black outside when Sarno took over as driver. It was his initiation as a tank driver in Korea. "It was the dead of winter. When I looked out, the snow was coming down in these big white flakes. We were up high. I said to myself, ‘Oh Jeez. It’s the goddamn Punchbowl again.’ " Ahead of the lead tank was a jeep. "They sort of scouted out any treacherous part and redirected us," Sarno said. "The snow was coming down big as cotton balls on my goggles." Conditions were dangerous not only because of the snow, but also because of the narrowness of the road. "There was just a road and a half space before we were off a sheer cliff on those mountainous, dirt roads," Sarno recalled. "It was treacherous driving. My responsibility as driver was not to slide over the side while coming down the hills. I was uptight, but I kept thinking, ‘I’m going to get my crew there. I’m not going over the side.’ I stayed very close to the mountain side of the road and decided that I would drive into the side rather than slide off the precipice if anything happened." Behind Sarno’s lead tank, the other tankers followed the glow of the tank mufflers in front of them. The tanks were about 30 yards apart from each other, following in a serpentine fashion all the way back.
At the end of the difficult journey, an outfit of Army military police stationed on the coast came up to meet the tank column and escort it to the Soko-ri beach. "A small Army MP unit proudly escorted us a couple of miles to the rendezvous point," Sarno said. "The Army couldn’t do enough for us. They gaped at us like we were from another world—and we were. We were combatants compared to the rear echelon pogues. Inwardly, I was bursting with pride in the USMC with all of this Army adulation. We all shook hands and were back-slapping with these soldiers. I recall one smiling soldier saying over and over again, ‘It’s the Marines. They rescued my butt at the Yalu, and here they are again.’ ."
Sarno said that the tankers stopped for a maintenance check, and then waited on the beach for the Navy to arrive over the horizon. "With the sun coming up fast," he said, "the beach area was packed like a giant sardine can with 105 tanks side by side. It was another eye-filling sight to see the Navy steaming in bigger and bigger off the horizon. Seven LSTs, two destroyers, and a cruiser would be our chauffeurs on the five-day cruise around the boot of Korea. Marines always loved to see the Navy, for we knew that we would have clean dungarees, hot damn good chow, showers, and a dry sack to crap out in."
With the promise of decent chow on the ships that would soon arrive, some of Sarno’s tank crew decided to give away some C-rations to native children they had seen at a nearby schoolhouse. Not yet in firm control of his crew, the green platoon sergeant gave his men permission to go to the school on the condition that they came back quickly if they saw the LSTs arriving. He had not forgotten his humiliation during the machine gun incident. "You get your asses back here fast when you see those T’s coming in," he told his men. They agreed, but along the way, they were sidetracked.
The crew members went up to a small wooden schoolhouse. "It looked like a madhouse," Sarno recalled. "Kids were up there like rats running over each other. They were screaming. It was bedlam. And the few women teachers were just relaxing." It was recess time. Once they distributed the C-rations, the Marines decided to venture further into the community. "Then we got the bright idea to go into the village," Sarno said. "Why, I don’t know. There was nobody there." Eventually their eyes turned from the empty village to the seacoast. They were shocked to see only five tanks left onshore. "We knew our ass was in a sling, and double-timed back to our tanks," Sarno recalled. "There was the platoon sergeant going aboard an LST, screaming his head off, ‘You son-of-a-bitches. I’m going to bust you all down to private.’ We went aboard a different LST. Thank god we did, because he was going to run us up this time." But at least they had made it back to the ship on time. "That would have been hell for us to miss the boat," Sarno said.
While on board the LST, the Marines took turns pulling 24-hour watch on the tank deck. Knowing what lay ahead for them on the MLR north of Seoul, they also cleaned their weapons and ammunition every day. During the five-day trip, Corporal Sarno was called before the captain. Assuming that he was about to catch hell for nearly missing the boat, he was apprehensive on his way to "officer’s country." Everyone figured he was on the way to the brig. However, when he went before Captain Raphael, he was told that ‘Almar #15’ (All-Marine Order #15) had just come through. "You’ve been promoted to buck sergeant," the captain informed him. Sarno said, "I was a year out of boot camp and now I was a buck sergeant, simply because I was in a combat outfit with casualties and rotations of personnel. If you could do the job, you got the rate. When I told the other guys, they were all happy as pigs for me." Meanwhile, on another LST, the unfortunate tech sergeant assigned to be their platoon sergeant, had suffered a heart attack and was sent off to Japan. "We had a party to celebrate my promotion, with the first toast being said for the tech sergeant’s recovery. We felt badly for him," Sarno said, "but we knew that he wasn’t ready for combat."
Once the fleet arrived at Inchon, they continued on their journey. First, however, they gave a salute to Navy personnel. "I can still envision looking back at the sea and the ships when suddenly a submarine surfaced and blared us a farewell to go get them. How about that. Even a sub for added security on that little cruise." Moving away from the seacoast, the tanks went through devastated Seoul, the railhead at Munsan-ni, over the Freedom Gate Bridge spanning the wide Imjin River, and into their sector of the MLR in support of the 5th Marine Regiment. By 1 April 1952, the First Marine Division was fixed into position on the western front for the defense of Seoul. Sarno drove A-41 tank for Raphael and Hunter for a short while after crew member and driver Durk got rotated home. Sarno was then designated as Raphael’s gunner.
"The Chinese Communist Forces (CCF) were redoubtable adversaries," recalled Sarno, "with more than ample weapons and gear generously bestowed upon them by their Russian allies, as we were soon to find out. Before the 1st Marine Division arrived on the western front, the 1st Republic of Korea (ROK) Division was defending this sector. There was no combat to speak of, even though the patrols were visible to one another. Neither the Chinese nor the ROK gooks got into firefights. On 2 April 1952, just to let the Chinese know a new kind of kid was on the block, we were assigned to tank combat patrols, one platoon of tanks to various line companies of the 5th Marine Regiment. On our first mission, I was the bow gunner with 2nd Lieutenant Sheldon as Tank Commander and Cpl. Ray Kapinski as gunner." (Soon after this battle action, Sheldon went to Dog Company tanks as a tank platoon leader.)
Sarno said that the platoon slowly moved behind the low hills. "When we got to the crestline, lo and behold, below us and in the paddies to our front was a company of Chinese, all shagging ass for cover that was about 400 yards away. Lieutenant Sheldon and I had the binoculars on those terror-stricken troops, who were literally sprinting for their lives. His immediate command was to open up with 30s and 50s, but not to use the 90mm—yet."
The five tank gunners couldn’t believe the field day unfolding in front of them. "Live troops were caught out in the open," Sarno explained. "It was a turkey shoot. Shortly thereafter, Lieutenant Sheldon ordered the use of the 90s with high explosive rounds and a fuse setting to cause air burst effect. The 90mm was a demoralizing weapon when you were at the receiving end of it." Sarno also said that it was a foregone conclusion that there were to be no enemy survivors. "The green rice paddies ran crimson on that spring day as one Chinese company perished," he recalled. Where in the history books can one read about the Able Tank turkey shoot? It isn’t possible, noted Sarno, "because the coverage of this war was restricted by the politicians who were now dictating to our field commanders. Truly, Korea was the ominous harbinger for a Vietnam, a decade later."
Only the tanks, not the men themselves, were made of durable steel. That night, one of the men agonized over the fact that he had seen the face of an enemy point blank range as he squeezed the trigger of the 90mm and sent the gook to his death. Sarno put his arm on his buddy’s shoulders to reassure him. "I saw the entire fire fight from above and outside the hatch," Sarno said. "There were bodies and parts of bodies flying through the air, so try not to feel depressed over one lousy enemy." Both of the Marines knew that these were the wages of war. "We were in the asshole of the world," Sarno said, "doing what we were diligently and assiduously trained to do by expert Marine officers and NCOs who had vanquished the Japanese throughout the Pacific Island campaigns in World War II."
While endless peace talks were going on at Panmunjom, slaughter of mankind continued on the MLR that night, and for many days and nights to come. "All through that night, heavy artillery from Goonyland raked the entire Marine MLR for hours," Sarno said. "Hundreds, maybe thousands, of 122s and 155s slammed into Marine positions. The Chinese Communists now realized that they had a far more portentous and awesome opponent in the 1st Marine Division now guarding the gateway to Seoul."
The Marine tankers relieved the 2nd Army Division’s 72nd Army Tank Battalion there. "All of our twenty tanks pulled into this Army tank outfit’s CP," he said. "Their tanks were so outwardly different from ours. Theirs had weird names—any kind of a name—written on the turret. There were no numbers. There were just names. We went into a rather large bunker and found that the tankers were all black, with the exception of one white officer." Sarno recalled that there was no intermingling of black and white troops. Nobody was shaking hands or showing gestures of friendship of any kind. "Every Marine was reacting the same way," he said. "They were just looking and staring, not even saying hi. That’s the way the Marine Corps viewed blacks at the time. There were no goodbyes when they left. They just got in their tanks and went out of sight. We remodeled the CP area to our standards." The gateway was now protected by members of the United States Marine Corps.
Many Purple Hearts would be awarded as the result of combat actions in that gateway. Nevertheless, a Purple Heart was not something that the Marines generally or intentionally sought. After all, the criteria for receiving this special award was that one had to be wounded in action to be eligible for it. In early April of 1952, the inexperienced new commander of A-41 decided that he wanted to get a Purple Heart on his very first fire mission. "He surmised," said Sarno, "in a cocksure and lordly manner, that if all of us young jarheads had been awarded Purple Hearts, he could obtain one there in the Bunker Hill sector of Korea. While all of us were wolfing down an early chow of cold C-rations in the confines of our rat-infested bunker, we collectively snickered at the sergeant, and tried to rationalize with him on just how we came by our wounds. All in chorus, we had a damn good laugh at his phony bravado. Imagine, this stateside pogue had the brass to actually tell us he was going to win the war for us, and ‘John Wayne’ had arrived on the scene to save us."
Sarno said that orders came down the very next day enjoining five tanks in a combat operation. Tank A-41, commanded by the Purple Heart-seeker, was to be the point tank. "Within minutes," recalled Sarno, "we eased into the revetments overlooking enemy terrain. The range was no farther than 3,000 yards. This was considered very close firing distance to our tank gunners manning the supreme 90mm weapon, along with 50s and 30s machine guns. We all opened up on targets of opportunity, such as 76 AT bunkers and automatic weapons emplacements, as well as anyone who was stupid enough to be caught in the open on their forward slopes."
"We anxiously kept waiting to receive small arms fire or heavy artillery," Sarno continued, "so far—nothing. Close to two hours lapsed, with each tank blasting off 40-some rounds of H.E. into the enemy camp. New orders crackled over the SCR 300 radios to secure and return to the CP posthaste. When the driver started up the engine, right away the sergeant began to commiserate about what a shame it was that he couldn’t get his Purple Heart that fine April day. He was moaning about no resistance from the Chinese enemy. Lo and behold, a Willie Peter [white phosphorus] (WP) round landed about 300 yards in front of us. Seconds later, another WP exploded 200 yards or less behind A-41."
The inexperienced sergeant had not yet realized that the Chinese forward observers were bracketing A-41 with 122mm mortars. Sarno yelled at him to move the tank over the ridge line 200 yards to their rear and into a defilade zone for cover and concealment. "I noticed the sergeant was peering out of the vision blocks of the tank commander hatch, taking in all this bombardment while chewing gum a mile a minute," Sarno said. "His eyeballs were bulging out of their sockets. This inexperienced pogue didn’t realize that the next salvo would be on top of our turrets. The shells were coming down all around us. One could easily hear the plink, plink against our steel turrets as the searing shrapnel flew through the air. Concussion effects from the bursting shells blew both of our front fenders off. The Chinese had a field day on the five tanks caught out in the open terrain. I frantically cursed at our tank commander to crack open his hatch and stick his head out. I declared, ‘You’re going to get your Purple Heart today after all. Go ahead, stick your friggin’ head out you hero S.O.B. You have the tank, you’re going to do this and that, you’re going to win the war for us—open your hatch.’."
But the hatch remained closed. Sarno said that the inexperienced commander, "just gave out a low and scared laugh, sweating and looking out the vision blocks, still chewing gum rapidly, his eyes still bulging. "Thanks to divine providence," Sarno said, "we rumbled over the ridge line to a safer spot. Later I huddled outside with my crew. We were drenched with the sweat of fear, and we all silently gazed at our tank commander with a look of disdain and contempt. So he wanted to be a hero!" Instead, he froze in combat. Many fire missions followed this one. In none of them did the A-41 tank commander reach his coveted hero status or receive a Purple Heart.
The same tank commander froze a second time on another fire mission that followed his very first one. "They sent a young lieutenant out with us," recalled Sarno. "We looked at him with his gold bars and his starched dungarees, and we were cruds. All of the sudden he showed up and he was going out on a captain’s tank in charge. We called him ‘Lieutenant Candy-Ass.’ I don’t know where in the hell he came from, but the XO told us to break this guy in and give him a little combat time. It had been raining like hell, and it was treacherous moving 50-ton tanks out there. We knew we shouldn’t go out that day, but the lieutenant was fresh out of the states and going by the book." Sometimes, Sarno said, you don’t go by the book in a combat zone. No wonder that he and the other tankers were apprehensive about taking orders from somebody who didn’t have any combat experience. At that time, in an effort to conserve ammunition, the 8th Army had a restriction on the amount of ammunition that the tanks were allowed to fire. "We could only fire nine rounds," Sarno recalled. "So I said to the lieutenant and asked, ‘What if we get in a jam? We will have to blast our way out.’’" That would be hard to do with a nine-round restriction. "The lieutenant was playing tank commander," Sarno said. "We couldn’t see anything and we were in No Man’s Land with no protection around us. I said to myself, ‘This is crazy. We could get wiped out with a bazooka, and we won’t even see it coming.’ That’s what was on our minds."
But the possibility of a bazooka attack dimmed in their minds as a bigger threat became more immediate. The gunner fired a couple of rounds with the tank’s 90mm, but the inexperienced "Lieutenant Candy-Ass" wouldn’t let the crew throw the expended round outside of the turret and on to the ground. Expended rounds give off a thick gas. "It just dries up your nose and throat," Sarno said. "Lieutenant Candy-Ass wouldn't let the tank commander throw the rounds out and the next thing I knew, Kapinski said, ‘Uh oh. We’ve got trouble up here.’" An inexperienced tank commander, who was taking orders from an equally inexperienced go-by-the-book young lieutenant, meant double trouble for the crew of A-41. The tank commander once again froze under combat conditions. "He was chewing gum and his eyes were popping out again," Sarno recalled. "He panicked. Someone who freezes up like that shouldn’t be in combat. He was going to get us killed up there, I thought."
Meanwhile, the green lieutenant hadn’t yet realized that something was amiss either. Even when he finally realized there was a problem, he apparently neither truly understood the situation nor did he know what to do about it. "We were buttoned up like a turtle," said Sarno, "way out in front of the USMC trench line in No Man’s Land. Injun territory. If the commander of our tank collapsed on the deck," he explained, "the turret couldn’t have traversed at all." The level-headed Ray Kapinski took immediate action, Sarno said. He pulled the tank commander to safety by risking his own life. "Ray had no other option except to crack the lieutenant’s hatch and lift that lame-ass up by his armpits and outside onto the side of the tank [sponson boxes], open my hatch, and dump him into my compartment," Sarno said. "I slithered up under all the fluid pipes into the gunner’s seat. Kapinski then told me to go back down and open up the hatch under the assistant driver. We just dropped him in there, closed the hatch, and secured it. Then Ray jumped back in. He could have been killed, because any gook close to us could have popped him off." Thank goodness the weather was lousy with fog and rain. "The gooks were hiding," said Sarno. "Thank god."
Even still, Sarno said that Kapinski was ‘scared shitless.’ "When he got back in the turret, he had that ‘I’m gonna die over stupid stuff’ fear. He was all keyed up like he had just had a vision of dying. When you get to the point that you think you’re going to die, you don’t care what happens. He told that lieutenant off. ‘What the hell are we doing out here?’, he yelled. ‘Let’s get the hell out of here.’ " The green lieutenant managed to get them back to the CP alive, but none of that day’s battle reports—which were filed by the gum-chewing, battle-shy tank commander—reflected the true events of that day. "Then I went in to the executive officer and told him what happened to the tank commander," Sarno said. "I also told him about the lieutenant’s indecision. I didn’t care. I was scared for Ray, and glad that he didn’t get popped. I told 1st Lieutenant Corson that our tank commander shouldn’t be a tank commander because he had freaked out and frozen up twice. He was useless." In spite of Sarno’s negative report to the XO, neither one of the less-than-competent officers in charge of the fire mission were reprimanded for their conduct that day. The third time, however, would "be the charm." In a May fire mission the tank commander came up short in his leadership role once again.
Prior to that May fire mission, Able company spent the remainder of the month of April helping out the 1st Korean Marine Corps Tank Company. The KMCs had World War II Sherman tanks with a 75mm weapon. Behind the MLR, the Korean Marine tankers were trained by US Marine Tankers who were in Reserve. "The only day I saw the KMCs in action," said Sarno, "they failed miserably in fire discipline and improper radio communications. Captain Raphael was tank commander that day, and I was his gunner. Twenty Sherman tanks manned by Korean Marine Corps tankers were taken out to the revetment line that day for a direct fire mission into goonyland. It was the KMC tankers’ first fire mission. The KMC, like all other Koreans, were very exuberant and highly motivated, but needed to be reined in as well. Raphael told me to lay a willie peter round way off to the left as a marker, and then traverse 180 degrees to send out another wp round on the right for the field of fire. A willie peter round looked lovely--it would burst into a huge white on white cloud of toxic acid. It exploded, just as I described, on the left marker. Before I could traverse to get the right marker, the KMCs opened up with their 75mm, .30 and .50 caliber machine guns. All hell broke loose. Which targets they were clobbering was anybody’s guess. Raphael got on the horn for them to cease fire, but now the KMCs chatter cluttered up all tank radio frequencies. It was total chaos, and a terrible waste of ammo. The KMCs were totally undisciplined in fire control and radio communications. It was a nut house! After the KMCs finally ran out of ammo, Raphael ordered a withdrawal to have a post-battle action critique with KMC officers. He was very dejected at the miserable showing of the KMC tankers. I had no faith in them at that point of time, and besides, I had much more important things to worry about with my own crew’s performances day to day on the western front."
Besides his lack of faith in their combat and communications abilities, Sarno did not completely trust the Korean Marines simply because they were Koreans. "North Koreans would fight to the death," he recalled. "They would just as soon put a bullet in the head of their prisoners after beating on them, and think nothing of it. That’s why I never trusted any slant eye. Never. Not even the Korean Marines. If they were around us, I always kept an eye on them. We all did. We just had that instinct within us. You know, we weren’t comfortable around them. We would pigeon English around them, but I know I always kept a third eye on them."
Come May, Able Company went into Reserve for a two-week hiatus from front line combat and constant direct-fire missions. As usual, the Marines attended combat classes on weaponry and did a lot of preventive maintenance on their tanks. It was during this period of time that Chris Sarno and a lot of other tankers were besieged with "rat fever" and very acute strep throat. "It was hot and humid," recalled Sarno, "and I was weakened by dizziness and headaches. I was just tired overall, and I lacked concentration. Still, I never went to the corpsman, figuring I would walk out of this on my own. I was indoctrinated in Boot to never go to the Navy—walk out of it on your own stamina. I was a product of that Spartan school—I did it my way. I got weaker and weaker in the hot days. I worked on the tank, had noon chow, and then crashed for a rest. Then it was back to the tank again. Finally, I took a header. The Corpsman ragged my ass for not going to sick call. His medicine got me over it before we went back on the line. He told me that my sickness was caused by being exposed to rat urine in the rice paddies, infested bunkers, dirt, etc. I told you—Korea was the asshole of the world. Rat fever swept through the Division in the Spring/Summer of 1952."
Infantrymen, artillery units, and tank units protected Seoul on the ground during this time period (April/May 1952). "Marine front-line troops think like animals, smell like animals, live like animals, and stink like animals," Chris Sarno said. Direct and indirect fire missions were daily fare on the western front of Korea, and the continuous living on the MLR was, according to Sarno, a "grim game of survival with an occasional side trip to tedium." Humorous moments were few and far between, and whatever humor brought the slightest smile to their faces was "macabre at best," he said. One such humorous moment occurred on a sunny day in April 1952 when Sarno’s five-tank platoon eased into the firing revetments on the bunker/trench line of the 5th Marine Regiment. "More than a few grizzly Marine grunts yelled for us to get the hell out of their sector," he said, "because all was quiet. The mere presence of tanks could only make anxious Chinese Forward Observers splash the Marine line with incoming."
Sarno said that they had their orders for a fire mission, so they proceeded to plaster the Red Chinese gooks forward slopes with high explosive and white phosphorus rounds. "Ninety millimeter rounds ripped huge craters into the elevated land mass looking down on the MLR," he said. "This scenario took place for the third straight morning, with no response from ‘Luke the Gook.’ Marine tank gunners had a field day at close range, firing at bunkers. Sandbagged ridges flew all over the place. Still there was no angry incoming from Hill 656. Since I was gunning that day on tank A-41, I shifted my gunner’s telescope to the sprawling rice paddies, hoping to catch someone out in the open. But, no luck—except for a live ox that was standing all by his lonesome about 2,000 yards away at the base of the mountain."
The tank commander reported the presence of the ox over the tank radio to the tank platoon lieutenant. "His quick response to the other four tanks was," recalled Sarno, "’Don’t shoot the ox! I say again, Don’t shoot the ox!’" Four affirmative responses came over the other tank radios, and the rapid firing of the 90s continued to pour it on into enemy territory. Sarno said that some 10 to 15 minutes later, he decided to check on the ox. Traversing the turret, he didn’t see any sign of the beast. Had he disappeared into thin air? "Within minutes," Sarno said, "the lieutenant was on the horn clamoring, ‘Who’s the crazy @#$% who shot the ox?’ Naturally, no one owned up to the sending of this honorable ox to ox heaven. I know for a fact that we were all howling at the consternation of our lieutenant. The moral of this tale is that, once you train men to hate and kill the enemy, everything becomes fair game in the endless slaughter taking place night and day in ‘no man’s land’ that is being totally leveled by firepower from both sides. There were never any ten commandments on the Korean War MLR. Unfortunately, this ox was in the wrong place at the wrong time. So sorry. But we had to shoot something for the body count. Upon returning to our tank CP, we cleaned up all weapons and ammo and relaxed by downing a few bottles of Japanese beer (scrounged off an abandoned Army 6x6), toasting the poor unfortunate ox." It was a rare day of humor on the front line.
Most days, however, were serious ones, with the targets for artillery rounds being human ones. Artillery units fired their weapons under the guidance of a forward observer. The FO calculated the coordinates to help the artillery rounds reach their targets. Like an artillery unit, tanks could provide indirect fire. However, unlike artillery units, a tank was also capable of engaging in direct fire missions at targets. In May of 1952, Captain Clyde W. Hunter took over Captain Raphael’s job as commanding officer of A Company Tanks. An enlisted Marine who had served in the 6th Tank Battalion on Iwo Jima, Sarno said that Hunter was gung ho from the outset. "I only served under Captain Hunter three months," Sarno said. "He wasn’t a picture poster Marine, but he had a good, rugged look about him. He was a very impatient Marine, and he loved combat. He didn’t run amuck in combat, but he was the only Marine commanding officer who actually showed me that he was fearless. I liked him right away. I have to say in all honesty that Captain Hunter was the most fearless and courageous commanding officer I ever served with. I thought the world of him. All he wanted to do, and he put it right out there for all of us to know it, was to kill the enemy. He made it known that all we were there to do was to kill as many gooks as we could. It was as simple as that, and brother, we killed them under Captain Hunter."
Soon after Hunter’s arrival, tanks A-42 (Hunter’s tank) and A-41 (Sarno’s tank) went out on a two-tank exercise. "We traveled at a fast clip forward of the Marine trench line into No Man’s Land," Sarno recalled. "It was scary out there because we didn’t have any infantry to back us up. We didn’t know if we would be coming back. On that hot summer’s day, traveling in an area where we had never been before, we found low hills and rice paddies. As we entered, we saw two elevated rises on the terrain—one ahead and the other to my right. We came upon a platoon-size bunch of gooks crapped out in front of us." As the gooks tried to dash to safety, machine gun fire rained down on the two tanks. It was a moment of decision for the captain in Tank A-41. Which should be taken out first? Machine gun emplacements or enemy troops on the run?
"I was traversing turret to get the live gooks," said Sarno. "I knew the machine guns weren’t going anywhere." But the tank commander decided they should first get the machine gun emplacements instead. Sarno’s opinion was that it was more important to destroy the running gooks while they were exposed in a direct line of fire, especially given the fact that the two enemy machine guns that were peppering them with bullets were of no threat to the heavily-armored tanks. The machine guns could have been knocked out later at the tank crews’ leisure. During the ensuing moments, Sarno did as the tank commander requested. Two direct hits on the machine gun emplacements blasted them to smithereens. After all, they were only some 400 yards away. "Firing 400 yards away with high explosive rounds was like hitting our target with an A-bomb," Sarno explained. Their destruction was quick and easy. Unfortunately, time spent blasting the emplacement meant that the remaining enemy troops had just enough time to get behind a low hill and out of the direct line of tank fire. Those weapon-carrying gooks would live to fight another day—and perhaps live to kill U.S. Marines. Sarno was not happy. Like his new CO, Sarno felt that the only good gook – was a dead gook. "I guess the lust for body counts overruled everything else," said Sarno. "I can truly say that the more gooks I got, the more I wanted. It was an insatiable lust for killing the enemy."
The lost opportunity to kill live enemy was the last straw for Chris Sarno. He was angry, and he let Lieutenant Corson know, in no uncertain terms, that he blamed an incompetent tank commander for it. "Corson tried to calm me down," recalled Sarno, "but I said, ‘No, this guy is gonna kill us all sooner or later. He can’t make decisions.’ I talked to Corson like a guy, not an officer, because I didn’t care any more. I didn’t want to die. The rest of the guys on the crew and I had talked among ourselves about the situation. We knew that we had to somehow deep six this guy before he killed us." Even though the lieutenant broke out a bottle of his best Remy-Martin cognac and offered his irate buck sergeant a drink, Sarno did not cool off until Lieutenant Corson agreed that something had to be done with the faulty tank commander. He promised Sarno that he would realign the platoon once the company got off of the line. "I think that Lieutenant Corson sensed the desperation in my voice and body just after this direct fire mission," Sarno said. "Once that cognac got in my blood stream, it did calm me to some extent. Corson complimented me on the two direct hits and told me I was the best gunner in headquarters platoon. He said that he wanted me to give lectures on the 90mm and .45 caliber pistols when Able Company went into Reserve. As I left the lieutenant’s quarters, I still asserted that he needed to deep-six our inexperienced tank commander. Corson nodded in the affirmative. Damn, that green tank commander was worse than the gooks."
True to Lieutenant Corson’s word, when the company went into Reserve, Sarno was among the seasoned combat Marines teaching the new replacements. He was assigned to give gunnery classes on the 90mm. "When you were in Reserve, you went to classes again," Sarno explained. "Classes about weapons, classes about tank tactics - you didn’t just go there to sleep and eat. You got warm, hot chow, but you were always thinking of combat, even in the rear area." After Sarno’s Sergeant York-like blasting of the two machine gun emplacements, he became something of a celebrity among the tankers, especially catching the attention of flame throwers who were itching for a direct fire mission.
While Sarno was lecturing one day on the functioning of the 90mm, Lieutenant Corson came in and stood at the back of the tent. "He didn’t say a word," recalled Sarno. "I went through the whole damn spiel about how that 90mm functioned. I was only 20 years old, and I was holding court. Lieutenant Corson was silent, but beaming. He came up to me after the lecture was over and told me that our tank commander had been assigned to H&S Company. He would be with all the officers who didn’t go out on fire missions. That was the last we saw of him. Morale soared on Tank A-41." Lieutenant Corson had come through for his men as he had promised.
Generally, when the Marines were on line doing direct fire missions for extended periods of time, all the commanding officers were competent, Sarno noted. "Some were more competent than others, but they were all competent commanding officers in combat, and we had faith in them." But when the company went into Reserve, he said, the whole picture tended to change with regards to the commanding officers. "An officer changed his spots in Reserve," he said. "They could be the worst guys in the world when they got into Reserve," he recalled. "Chicken shit. Shine your boots. Stand pistol inspection. I mean, we did it—we were ordered to do it and we did it. But it killed us to do it. ‘Why are we doing this bullshit when we know we’re going up to kill the enemy again,’ we wondered. If we were in the States, we could handle it because that’s all we would see. You know—we were not getting shot at. But to go back to Reserve and play Boy Scout after being in combat, the guys rose up against that, and we got into trouble. We pulled pranks—like firing that machine gun before boarding the LSTs on the east coast. We did it just to make confusion for the officers and the new replacements."
One night in Reserve, the tankers went paddy-hopping to the hooch of some Korean prostitutes. "I think the insects made out the best," Sarno recalled. "The next day, a flame-thrower tank went out and burned down the two hooches. I recall we all razzed the flame tank crew for ‘combat action.’ I guess we couldn’t blame the officers for ordering them burned. The VD rate would have been astronomical if the rice-paddy queens hadn’t been run out of town."
In June of 1952, Able Company came out of Reserve and took its turn on the line conducting constant direct fire missions. It was a hot, humid month as it was building up to the monsoon season. Able Company tankers saw battle action daily, and Chris Sarno said that the Marines thrilled on the killing. "When I look back upon the Western Front activity," Sarno said, "I wonder how we stood up physically and mentally."
Unexpected things happened at the most unexpected times, and they could rattle the sturdiest of Marines. One sunny day, for instance, the crew of A-41 went on a direct fire mission. Sarno was driving the tank while the men in the gun turret were firing away with the 90mm at Hill #229, which Sarno said was, "the tallest mountain in Gooney Land." A Korean Marine Corps tank platoon was moving behind them. Sarno said that he was just getting ready to settle down in the driver’s compartment for a little sack time when an unexpected visitor arrived at the tank. "The next thing I saw was a pair of hands on my slope plate, and up popped the grinning face of a retarded gook," he said. "I immediately started grabbing for my .45." The Korean quickly identified himself, "No shootee. No shootee. KMC. KMC." Sarno was the brunt of a lot of laughter from his buddies because of his panic. The unexpected visitor was followed by a KMC Sherman tank driver who wanted to see what the interior of an M-46 tank looked like. "His eyes popped out like two big aggies at the difference between our tank and his," Sarno said. "Through pidgin gook talk," he said, "we traded information on the differences between the two tanks."
Earlier that same month, just about a week before the Fourth of July in 1952, a directive had come down from the 8th Army command post that the tankers were not supposed to fire more than nine rounds of 90 mm ammunition due to limited supplies. "That’s all they told us," Sarno recalled. "Thank god we never got into any serious trouble when we did go up on the line. But then the Fourth of July came, and they said everybody had to fire the whole load except for the anti-tank rounds we had. All of the sudden we could fire 70 rounds, yet for a week we couldn’t fire nine. What the hell kind of war was that? That’s when I thought the Korean War was a war for big business."
Right after the Fourth of July, Captain Hunter told his men that the company was going to get three drafted personnel from the States. According to Sarno, these type of Marines were originally Army draftees who were then forced into the Marine Corps whether they liked it or not because the Marine allotment needed boosting. The release of soaring casualty lists from Korea was responsible for the decline in young men joining the Corps at that time. One of the draftees (Pfc. Johns) was assigned to Tank A-41. "We bitched," Sarno said. "He was short and stocky, and he wore coke bottles for eyeglasses. He wasn’t heroic-looking at all. He was our new crewman, but we didn’t accept him for probably three weeks. We told him what to do and he did it, but none of us wanted him on A-41, so we complete ignored him. We hardly drew him into a conversation or anything. Simply, we were volunteers. We wanted to be there." The Marine Corps has always been known to be a branch of service for volunteers, so being a draftee was unacceptable at that time. Johns was "quiet as a church mouse," according to Sarno. As time went by, the crew accepted him and liked him. "That draftee kid—Pfc. Johns from Missouri—might not have looked like a poster Marine," Sarno said, "but he was a tireless worker."
Johns had a rough start on Tank A-41. Soon after he arrived, the crew went out on another fire mission. "We weren’t receiving any incoming on that particular day," Sarno recalled. "We were in bare skin, firing away. I was the gunner and Johns was a loader. I knew the mannerisms of the 90mm, and I knew that it had its own quirks. After a round was fired and the shell was ejected, the brassing ejected from the chamber. A rush of fire came down the tube across the breach block for a couple of feet. A ball of fire. I wanted to teach Johns the hard way. The first round I fired with him, he was fumbling along behind the breach block to pick up the brass. Down that fire came across his back. He screamed his head off and went through the top of that turret. I told him that he was learning the hard way not to fool around the back of that breach block until he had seen that ball of fire fade out. As time went on, I had to begrudgingly give that kid credit. He took all that crap we gave him, and he turned out to be a reliable loader."
Johns proved his mettle as a Marine, withstanding even the chilliest of fears, Sarno admitted. "One hot and pitch black night in July," he said, "it was my turn to stand machine gun outpost from 0200 to 0600 with Pfc. Johns. I felt responsible to protect this boot by warning him about boot-mines and trip wires along the path to the outpost. We manned a light .30 caliber machine gun, plus we had two boxes of fragmentation and illuminating grenades. In addition, both of us were armed with a Thompson submachine gun, .45 caliber pistol, and a last resort measure—the K-bar. Our field of fire faced to the rear with a view of the Imjin river, which was 500 yards on our range card." Due to the monsoon season, the river was swollen. "We settled into the trench and spoke in whispers," recalled Sarno. "The rice paddies surrounding our location were alive with the usual chatter of frogs, insects, and water rats. This was the way we persevered in this damned place, and there was nothing we could do about it. The old DI verbiage rang true, ‘you are going to take it and like it’."
Suddenly, the two Marines spotted the beam of a flashlight about 200 yards near the river. Sarno cursed, "Who the hell is this crazy SOB? He’s either a hopped up gook or one dumb-ass jarhead." The light continued to move in their direction. "I have to say," Sarno admitted, "I had been through a belly-full of combat these past eleven months, and prided myself that I had never lost my control amidst the confusion, din, and bedlam of battle. However, this was the moment for me. All of the sudden my two knees locked together, and I couldn’t separate them. When I did, they knocked and became welded together. I tried to right myself, and Pfc Johns asked me if I was all right. I assured him with a snarl that I was okay. I was also ‘P.O.’ed’ at myself because here was a non-combatant draftee, cool as a cucumber, and I was physically distraught." Once again, Johns inquired, "Sarge, are you okay? What are we going to do about that light down there?."
Whoever the intruder was, he (or they) were getting way too close to the two Marines waiting silently at the machine gun outpost. If they fired the machine gun, it would give their position away. Sarno regained his composure and whispered to Johns, "We’re going to throw a case of friggin’ grenades down there so they’ll think a damn battalion is up here." He said that he and Johns both hurled twelve frags in a rapid fire relay in the general vicinity of the muffled sounds below. Fire in the hole! "After the initial report and all the explosions ceased," Sarno recalled, "all became silent, with a heavy pall of smoke and gunpowder smog. At dawn shortly thereafter, we gave our report to the tank gunny. Then we all pooped and snooped our way down to see what we had. We found a damaged Chinese-made flashlight and some blood spots, but no bodies—dammit all!"
Known for his "lock and load" attitude in combat, Sarno was not pleased with himself for his initial hesitation in this incident—hesitation definitely caused by fear. "Several times I have related this one instance in the company of scores of other combat Marines at our Marine reunions," Sarno said. "It was our consensus that, fear can sabotage the bravest heart. A host of other combat Marines and I can readily attest to that facet of close combat. We were trained when we got to Korea, but there was nothing like facing your enemy and being scared to death that you’re going to die." Nevertheless, having admitted that much, they would also be quick to tell you that, "The United States Marines never bugged out in Korea - never!"
Having survived that moment of truth, Johns was serving as a loader on A-41 on the day that they sighted a lone gook. Heretofore, it had been an uneventful day on the front line. There was no incoming. "It was like a boring day at the office," Sarno recalled. "Same old stuff. I shifted down to the base of the hill and sure enough, I spotted one gook about 2500 yards away. One lone gook in a beautiful, clean, brown uniform. I decided to follow him with my sighting equipment while he was taking a stroll." He was in sight, then behind foliage, then back in sight again. Suddenly, he disappeared completely into a black spot. Sarno had Johns load a white phosphorus round in the 90mm, and Tank A-41 fired at the black spot. "I waited for the report," recalled Sarno, "but nothing happened. I thought it was a dud because at first I didn’t see an explosion. Then, sure enough, out of the blackness of this cave came the billowing white clouds of the willie peter. To ensure that they did a thorough job finishing off their enemy, the Marine tankers loaded a high explosive round in the 90mm and fired it at the same spot. "The whole side of the hill came down in a landslide and sealed that cave," Sarno said. "I laughed, because I was sniping with a 90mm." Johns was his firing buddy during this assault.
Just before Sarno rotated home, he gave Johns a treat. He allowed him to take over in the gunner’s seat and fixed a target for him. The fact that Johns wore eyeglasses was a clue that he was not an enlistee in the Marine Corps. His vision was so poor that the crosses on the gun sight that bracketed the target were blurry to him. Nevertheless, Sarno told him that all he had to do was squeeze the trigger and he would blow up the entrenchment that Sarno had targeted for him. "He did," Sarno recalled, "and he smiled. He didn’t kill a gook, but he was shooting at the enemy anyway."
The Marines also took time out from the daily regimen of combat twice on scorching hot and humid days in July and August of 1952. In July, while in the Korean Marine Corps sector of the MLR, "A" Company tankers paused for a refreshing dip in the water. "Any combat Marine who was in Korea knows how hot it was during the monsoon rainy season," Sarno commented. "It got desert hot, and our misery was compounded by a baked-on humidity, and H&I gook rounds which splashed in our area during daylight hours. After one sultry morning’s direct fire mission was successfully completed, my driver, Corporal Woods, our loader Pfc Johns, along with yours truly, had just secured from the usual daily routine of cleaning up all weapons and the preventive maintenance of the tracks and turret. We felt the blanket of the smothering humidity and the relentlessness of an afternoon sun, which was bleaching us out. We tried to just crap out in the shadow of our sandbagged bunker’s entrance for some relief. Lazily, we were keeping an eye [binoculars] on a group of KMC’s thrashing grain with long poles and leather straps about 200 yards forward and just below the skyline."
The Marines left their tank, with assistant driver Linstrom on watch. "The three of us ambled over towards the KMCs," Sarno said, "and silently we watched them do their thing. Neither group could converse without sign language, pidgin English, or gook talk. After a spell of shit-eating grins and ‘you #1’s’, we decided to depart. The heat and humidity was really knocking us down, along with dust all over our dungarees. Even the scrub brush along the path was heavily coated with a choking silt."
Sarno said that the water ration in the jerry cans aboard the tank was getting alarmingly low, and no word had come yet about when the motor transport crews would arrive with the water trailer. "No use of water other than for drinking was allowed for the past several sweltering days," Sarno recalled. "We smelled like Hogan’s goats, and we all sucked on a small pebble to keep some semblance of saliva in our mouths. As we approached a bend in the path out of sight of the KMC’s, we stumbled upon a small water well in a secluded area. The top of the well was only inches above the surface and covered with branches. Water bugs zigzagged on the water. Suddenly, we got the bright idea to take a quick bath in the inviting cool water. Quick as a flash, one of us would drop all his web gear and attached weapons, then wallow in the well with a small precious bar of soap, while the other two Marine cruds stood watch."
In short order, the Marines were 35 degrees cooler and refreshed. When three KMCs started coming down the trail, Sarno and Johns brushed away the soap scum in and around the rim of the well. "In no time, the three smiling KMCs noticed how cool looking we appeared to be," Sarno said. "While two KMCs bummed smokes off Woods the other KMC bent down to fill up their two jerry cans from the just-polluted hidden well. The KMC just splashed aside the bugs off the surface of the water and immediately submerged his jerry cans. With that done, we saluted the KMCs and bid them sayonara as we shuffled on down the dirty, dusty trail to our steel chariots. If a KMC outfit ever suffered stomach cramps or worse, then it was because of three scuzzy, mean and filthy USMC tankers, who were in dire need of….the pause that refreshes."
A month later, in early August of 1952, the Marines found an opportunity for yet another short, cool, dip in water on a hot Korean day. Just back of the MLR in a defilade area, there was a long curve in the Imjin River near Freedom Gate Bridge. Able Company tankers on three M-46 Patton tanks, "all cruds with a baked on sweat of 28 days/nights on the line", were granted permission by their officers to take a swim in the Imjin. "Now it was grab-ass time at the old swimming hole Marine Corps style," Chris Sarno said. "While parked in the tall bulrushes at the river’s edge, the three steel monsters made the greatest diving platforms a Marine could ever desire. Bars of soap were grabbed hand from hand, and we jokingly made damn sure we didn’t drop the precious scented soap. The usual hi-jinx were the order of the day, and who dared blame us? We had set up local security by means of three machine gun posts, and after half an hour those crewmen were relieved to hit the Imjin." The misery of hot weather and combat combined was bad on the morale of their men, so combat-savvy commanding officers had allowed this rare break for their men. "This simple trek to the water made us feel almost human again," Sarno said. Combat-wise C.O.’s such as Capt. Clyde Hunter knew how to spell relief for their battle-scarred Marines. Within the hour, all 30 plus tankers gathered up all their gear and weapons, and hit the magneto and starter switches for the short fast ride back to our scattered revetments. With shouts of Spartan joy, air mattresses buffeting the rush of wind, rifles, and pistols raised on high, the three tanks sped down the trail. "Being only 19 years old and a driver of a 50-ton combat loaded tank," Sarno said, "I was in hog heaven maneuvering this M-46 Patton tank that rode like a Cadillac."
Sarno said that the God of War smiled down on them that sweltering day. "In addition, it made night outpost watch a little less stressful, because ‘Luke the Gook’ didn’t probe our area that night either. We were really something in those bygone days; however, little did we realize there was an escalating morass brewing a short distance to the east. The murderous sieges for Bunker Hill #122 were about to erupt."
There was plenty of enemy, hard work, and combat action up ahead for the Marine tankers. In June, they started to travel about two miles to the east on the MLR to a hill top called Red Hill. "It was a little gumdrop of terrain sticking up in the rice paddies," Sarno recalled. "The whole topography east of Panmunjom corridor was laden with low hilltops. They were just little pieces of shit that Marines were dying for every day and night. At the time, I didn’t know that it was called Bunker Hill. I just knew it as Red Hill, Number 122-124—two gumdrops connected with a little saddle between."
Sarno said that the two gumdrops were the scene of intensive combat during the month of June 1952. "In the daylight," he said, "we would clobber this little hill after the gooks beat off small Marine defensive forces. We would just empty our whole load into it. Through our telescopes we could see that the sand was like powdered silt from the impact of our rounds and the horrific counter battery firings by both sides. This hill was the first of the new phase of warfare—the fight for these combat outposts. We won Red one night, then the gooks kicked us off. The next day we kicked the gooks off." Bunker Hill was a treasured piece of ground for both sides because whoever controlled that hill also controlled the highest observation point in that sector. "It was a meat grinder with no winners," Sarno said. "We obeyed and shot the hell out of it. War by committee is immoral," he said. "All the combat in Korea from 1951 until the end of the war in 1953 was to fight and die, but not to win. MacArthur was one hundred percent correct in taking issue with Truman for forsaking an all-out military victory in Korea. Harry-Ass-Truman was one hundred percent incorrect." Sarno said that Bunker Hill was a great arena to "train" new career officers in daily tactics. "The king-of-the-mountain daily battles that took place on Bunker Hill were sheer madness," he said. "Marines died and were wounded unnecessarily so that generals could play war. Few colonels, generals, or majors died at Bunker Hill. Heroic grunts were the casualties as Truman parlayed the war. He should have won first—parlayed later." Harry-Ass-Truman was never a friend to the United States Marine Corps.
In mid-July of 1952, Able Company was back in Reserve. It was still stifling hot and humid. In spite of the uncooperative weather, however, Tank A-41 was in dire need of major preventative maintenance. "This dependable steel chariot always started up and never missed an assigned direct fire mission since we left the Eastern Front," Sarno said. But upon closely inspecting the tank, its crew members found out that they needed to change both rear sprockets as the thirteen bolts securing it to the hub were almost sheared off. "Breaking track was a bitch," explained Sarno. "It was real bull work. The sprocket had 13 holes, and we had to tighten the bolts securing big teeth to the hub." Tension on the bolts had to be just right in order to keep the tank in good operating condition.
Once the repairs were made, Tank A-41 went back up on the MLR—this time with almost a whole new crew. Durk and Kapinski had rotated out, and Corson had "shit-canned" the tank commander. "I knew that I was due any day now for rotation," Sarno said. "I was a short-timer. I was spent, so I looked forward to going home. I left my boyhood in December of 1950, and now at age 20 years young, I was caught up into being a combat Marine. I looked at some things in life differently now."
The promise of rotation was tantalizing, but for a few more weeks Sarno had to put up with intolerable heat and humidity, torrential rains, sandbagged bunkers, and resident rice paddy rats. There was definitely water to be had, but it wasn’t fresh enough to drink. "We were now into the monsoon/rainy season," Sarno recalled. "The skies just opened up and the rain came down in ropes with no hourly preference. I had never been out in rain like this. Even our nightly machine gun foxhole was overflowing with dirty water. Because fresh water was generally delivered (late) by "motor transport pogues", Sarno’s water discipline training at Pendleton came in handy on those last days on the line.
At night, when it was humid and the rain stopped for a few hours, the bugs came out. "They were so big," Sarno recalled, "I had to use mesh for facial protection and could hardly see 25 yards in front of me. Everyone was antsy, sweaty, and filthy. We had a steady diet of C-rations up the ying-yang. Plus there was daily preventative maintenance on the tanks, as well as loading up ammo, gas, and water for the grunts we supported. We withstood this incessant regimen without giving it a thought. Our virulent Marine training sustained us mentally and physically. Yes, we pissed and moaned, but our silently instilled Marine discipline prevailed."
Having survived Korea for 11 months, forced to endure the filthy and often frightening conditions on the front line, Sarno faced one of his biggest challenges just thirty days or so shy of being rotated out. Coming back from a fire mission, barbed wire tangled in A-41’s right sprocket, which was a weak spot on the suspension system. "I was in the gunner’s seat," he recalled. "I couldn’t see anything but the turret, and it was hot in there. Captain Hunter—a warrior, but a very impatient one—was in total command of the situation. He told the driver (Durk) that he didn’t care what he had to do to get the job done, but "just break that goddamn wire and get us back up on the road." Sarno said that the enemy knew they were in trouble, and now the tank was under artillery fire. By hook or crook, Durk finally freed the wire-tangled tank. "But before he got us loose," recalled Sarno, "I was sitting in that damn gunner’s seat saying, ‘I’m not going to make it this time.’ I knew my time had run out. I saw other guys get it when they were going home. This was it for me, I thought. ‘I’m just not going home.’ All I could think of was a round coming through that turret. It didn’t happen, but that’s what I was thinking at the time. ‘All of this has been for what? I’m gonna get killed.’ I just wanted to go home."
But home was far away at that moment. The closest haven to the tankers was in a defalade position nearby where they weren’t in danger any more. "But a tank following us did get a direct hit on the engine," Sarno said. "It was totaled. On the turret, there were some Korean Marines hitching a ride. They got blown to smithereens. And while we were viewing this, wondering what the officers were going to do about it, one of the jeep drivers drove out into the impact area and picked up what he thought were live Korean Marines. He brought in three. One was alive and two were dead. I remember a major jumping all over him for being there. I thought he had just done a heroic act, and he did subsequently get the bronze star. But he also got his ass chewed out for going out there."
Obviously the big adventure of going to war—that big adventure that Chris Sarno had so yearned for while he was in training at Parris Island, Pendleton, and Del Mar—was now growing wearisome. "Nobody can survive in combat endlessly," Sarno explained. "Your body’s mental capacities eventually break down. That’s why you aren’t put on the line for a whole year with a ‘hope you make it’. They always pulled us off the line after a month or so to ‘let us come back’. Because when you’re up there on the line, survival is all you have on your mind. ‘I’ve got to keep killing more gooks. They’re trying to kill me, so I’ve got to kill more of them.’ It was macabre survival." There was one fire mission after another one--day after day, week after week--and Sarno survived them all.
On a steamy, "sweat-ass day" about August 10, 1952, Tank A-41 was slowly moving into position for another direct fire mission. Captain Hunter was commanding the tank when it suddenly came to a halt. "I was squeezed down in the gunner’s seat, so I couldn’t hear too good," Sarno recalled. Hunter told me to go topside. There were two burly Marine MPs on a jeep waiting for me. They had come to take me back to Tank Battalion for the Big PX. My tour was up!! I didn’t even have time to shake hands with the other crew members, but I was happy. I couldn’t wait for that jeep to get me out of there. I left looking back at the tank column moving over the crest into the direct fire revetments. I actually had love for all those guys as they disappeared from my view. I hoped they would all make it through."
The jeep took Sarno to tank battalion, which was located in a safe area about ten miles behind the main line. "They weren’t susceptible to incoming," Sarno said. "They lived a different life in the rear. It was a warm summer’s day and there was a softball game going on when I got there. They had structures up—a mess hall and everything. There were a few tents, but everything was mostly aluminum-type buildings. It was like there was no war going on just up the road. There were showers and three square meals. I was just looking around and in came a corporal whom I had come over with on the 12th draft. His name was Fish, and he was a battalion pogue who didn’t go on the tanks. He was a nice guy. He came bursting in and said, ‘Jeez, we made it Sarno.’ Damn right we made it. We were both happy, hugging each other. We were going home."
Tank battalion allowed several of the homeward-bound tankers to spend four hours of afternoon liberty in Seoul one day. "This was unheard of," said Sarno, "so we took it and went down to Seoul. They gave each of us $15.00, thinking that we would probably spend five of it on beer and the remainder for a short time. But there was no place to go to really drink. There was a place, but it was desolate and all blown up. We got a few brews, but there were no amenities in that place. Just drinking in a blown-out shack. When the day’s liberty was up, the tankers went back to Munsan-ni, where they would soon catch a train that would take them to the place where they would process out of Korea.
From Munsan-ni’s rail staging head, they went by train to a former Japanese complex, now called Ascom City. The troops were issued M-1 rifles and a full clip of ammunition in case the train came under enemy attack. "There were remnants of North Koreans since the Inchon landing," Sarno explained. "They survived in the various mountains as guerrillas. Most of them had been wiped out or died, but there was always that percentage that tried to disrupt things in the rear. We didn't have any problems along the way, but we had our M-1 and we weren’t afraid to use those eight rounds if we did have."
The slow-moving train carried a happy bunch of guys through one small station after another after Seoul. "I can remember one little station," Sarno said. "A few gook women and old men waved at us, but none of us waved back. We looked right through them. We didn't say anything, and we just had a blank stare. Our attitude was, ‘We’re here to bail you out. Just stay the hell out of our life.’ I think it was the Marine arrogant attitude—if you’re not Marine, you’re nothing. I mean in a combat situation or combat environment. I'm not talking about boots who just come in the war—I'm talking about men going home."
When the train stopped at Ascom City—that huge complex for the Marine Corps--they were one step closer to home. "When I alighted from that train and walked between the tracks with my M-1," Sarno recalled, "I was filled with wonderment." He no longer needed the M-1, because now he was well and truly in a safe area and soon to be even safer back in the USA. "Now I felt the world—combat readiness—was lifted off of my shoulders," he explained. "I knew that I was going home alive as a survivor. Wow! I felt so alive—so very alive—to have made it."
The complex at Ascom City had supplies and communications. Although there were buildings that had been built by the Japanese when they occupied the city, Sarno and the other homeward-bound Marines were assigned to tents. That was okay with them. The tents were clean and they brought back memories of tent camp. Besides, they were all together again. "We had tech sergeants, master sergeants, staff sergeants, and buck sergeants all in the same tent," Sarno said. Nobody got on their case while they stayed there. "Everyone was basically treated like civilians or equals," Sarno recalled, "because everybody was going home. We had survived Korea. We had a good time the few days we spent at Ascom. We woke up every morning to reveille and to Debbie Reynolds singing ‘Good Morning’ from the soundtrack of Gene Kelley’s hit movie, ‘Singing in the Rain.’ We had been in Korea for a year and we hadn’t heard it before. We were just eating it up."
There were movies, hot showers, and hot meals at Ascom City. No more C-rations. The Marines were deloused and underwent fecal tests for worms. "We were all lined up and they gave us a little carton like a half pint milk container," Sarno recalled. "I asked the corpsman, ‘What the hell is this for?’ He said, ‘We want a sample of your turd.’ When I asked him what for, he told me, ‘For worms, you dumb bastard.’ We did our duty in the carton, and turned it in. As far as I know, nobody in my outfit had to hang around Frisco because of worms when they got back to the States. But they tested us for it. I never thought about it, but it could easily have happened with that 1944 C-ration chow."
Chaplains from three different faiths were on hand at Ascom City to offer counsel and solace to the hardened combat Marines. Just before boarding the ship to return home, Sarno decided to go to Confession before a Catholic Navy chaplain who was sitting on a chair out in the open. There was a long line of Marines waiting to talk to him. "When Catholic Marines knelt in front of him, he placed his hands on their shoulder to hear their confession." Even though the line waiting to go to Confession was a long one, Chris Sarno decided to get in it. Believing that the flesh is weak, true Catholics go to Confession for absolution of sin and inner peace. "You’ve got to review your sins before you make a confession," he explained. "You’re supposed to tell the priest everything that you’ve done wrong, and they want to pry every little thing out of you." The basic penance for committing sin was three Our Fathers and three Hail Marys--prayers said directly to God and to Mary, mother of Jesus.
With regards to his own personal confession to the priest, Sarno said, "When I knelt down before the Marine captain, I told him that I didn't know how many gooks I had killed, but that I knew I had killed them from a distance. I never killed one with my hands. When he asked me if I knew how many I had killed, I told him, ‘Father, I killed over 400 of the enemy.’ I had no guilt or recriminations about killing whatever gook I had to kill. I didn't have a guilt trip because I killed them—I credit that to my Marine training. We looked at the enemy as sub-humans all the way, so it made it easy to kill somebody when you considered he didn't deserve to live anyway. Who needed him? The world didn't need this type." So the priest let it slide. He just gave me the basic penance. I thought he was going to hit me with the rosary—extraordinary penance that takes close to an hour on your knees at the foot of the altar."
Back in boot camp, when Sarno attended Sunday Mass, a Marine chaplain once passed out a piece of paper about the size of a business card, and asked the recruits to tell him why they had joined the Marine Corps. "I remember very vividly stating, ‘to stop the spread of Communism’," Sarno said. "It had to come out of my Catholic roots that Communists were our enemies. In the late 1930s and 40s, I remember that our local priest would call the congregation together after Mass and we would say three Hail Marys to save Russia. Long before World War II, there was a religious war between the Catholic Church and Communist Russia. Catholic religious leaders knew that Communists were the dire enemy that could wipe out the Catholic religion if they succeeded with the spread of Communism."
Sarno admitted that he didn't pray in the heat of mortal close combat. "I never prayed," he said. "I cursed aloud….that we didn't run out of ammo. that our machine guns didn't jam. But, when it was over, I then prayed to sweet Jesus for having spared me. I didn't do this routinely, but there were times after a heated fire-fight that I did. My virulent training got me through the combat, but my soul belonged to my God. This the Marine Corps allowed." But he also had to admit "the Marine Corps owned my ass."
In combat, his mind set was to kill as many gooks as he could and not think about it. "If I had to kill them with a pistol or my hands, I would do it and not feel guilty," he said. "I always thought that my mission in Korea was to kill the enemy not just because they were gooks, but because they were Communists too. I was doing the church’s work there. I didn't dwell on it too much, but deep down I used that fact as a solace. That confession I made at Ascom City was deliberate and fervent to cleanse my soul to God. When I die," he stated, "I hope I'm placed in St. Michael’s heavenly army." In the Korean War, Chris Sarno had faithfully done his part to eradicate the Communist enemy, proving that he was well-prepared to strike or defend when either was needed.
Now at the end of his mission in Korea, Sarno waited in a Casual Company at Ascom City for his orders to ship out. Sea bags arrived with the Marines’ personal belongings and dress green uniform and accessories. Sometime during the year that they had just served on the eastern and western coasts of Korea, the Marine Corps had eliminated the old World War I-designed green woolen overcoat, replacing it with a new nylon raincoat. "We were told to throw out the old overcoat in the company area," Sarno recalled. "When the supply sergeant asked if we had anything missing from our sea bags, we told him that our wool overcoat was missing. He replaced it with the new nylon one. That’s how easy it was at Ascom City."
Life was so casual there; one could even take in an evening movie. But having missed the movie one night, Sarno decided to stroll through the complex. He went down to an area that was cordoned off with barbed wire. The area was reserved for incoming replacement troops. "I was milling around talking to the new guys coming in on the 25th draft," Sarno said. "They all wanted to know what it was like in the front. I couldn’t describe it for them, so I just told them to obey their commanding officer and platoon sergeants. I told them that I hoped that all would work out well for them." A passing tech sergeant thought that Sarno had somehow gotten out of the barbed wire area, and he ordered him back inside the area under threat of "running him up" for disobeying orders. Sarno’s just-issued uniform didn’t show the chevrons of a sergeant, and he looked pretty young in spite of his combat experience. Although he tried to tell the Tech Sergeant that he was heading home with the other members of the 12th draft, the angry officer refused to buy Sarno’s story.
"He was right in my face, cursing me like I was a boot at Parris Island," Sarno recalled. "I wasn’t going to take his shit, so I decided I would play his game." Into the barbed wire area Sarno went, and the Tech Sergeant informed the sergeant of the guard that he was placing Sarno on report for being outside the fence. The officer of the day was called, and discovered that the name Chris Sarno was not on their roster of replacements. Sarno told them again that he wasn’t lying, but the Tech Sergeant was still angry at him anyway. He told him that if he didn’t get on the other side of the wire, he wouldn’t be going home. Sarno went back outside of the fence, but before he moved away from it, he stared down the Tech Sergeant. "I was at a stage in my life when I wasn’t going to take anything from anybody," Sarno said. "I made that martinet Tech Sergeant look down, and he knew I’d tear him apart, one on one, if he wanted to duke it out with me. That’s the one thing I don’t like about the Marine Corps—rank lords it over the lower ranks regardless."
Chris Sarno never had to worry about that Tech Sergeant again, because within hours he was on his way back to the States. "That stateside pogue was probably killed by one of his own men when the shit hit the fan," he said. Sarno was homeward bound along with the other survivors of the 12th Draft—one up on the cocky Tech Sergeant who was still on assignment in the smelly, muddy, dirty Korea, labeled by Chris Sarno as "the asshole of the world."
The departing troops boarded the USNS General Walker at Inchon, and sailed to Kobe, Japan, to pick up the 1st Air Wing guys in the 12th Draft. The same—but "different" Marines were at the rail watching them come aboard. "We went through the grinder in Korea," Sarno said. "Now we were picking up Marines who were stationed in Japan. They had it soft; two white sheets, whores, everything. They came up the gangplank carrying aluminum suitcases and wearing custom-made black velvet jackets with the words ‘Been through Hell’ on the back of them. You know, like they were roughing it." There was no sympathy for the Marines who had fought the war from the safety of neighboring Japan. "We knew that they would go home and snow a lot of people about ‘going through hell’ during the war," Sarno said, "so we ragged them all the way home." Combat-experienced Marines had little use for those who had led the Life of Riley as support units while they fought in combat units on the front line.
The front lines of Korea were now far behind the homeward-bound ship, but thoughts of their comrades in arms remained ever-present in the minds of the returning Marines. Sarno read an article in the ship’s newsletter that said that units of the 1st Marine Division were getting heavy enemy resistance, and high casualties were mounting. "I knew I had been spared by God, as the shit really hit the fan until late October 1952 in the combat outpost wars in Korea. I was going home alive. Those who remained behind were getting bumped off with regularity in a hot war again. I was fortunate being in the 12th draft, as my number would have finally come up with the advent of Bunker Hill to East Berlin [another outpost in Korea] in July 1953." For Sarno, his tour of duty in Korea had been all combat—combat, Reserve area, combat. No liberty. No Japan.
As the Walker sailed to the States, Sarno passed the time with mess duty again, but this time he was a buck sergeant and not in the scullery. He said that as the few Army troops they had on the ship passed through the chow line, they were given decent portions. "When they asked me for more," Sarno said, "I just said, ‘Move on, move on. You’re holding up the line.’ But when the Marines came through, we just plastered their trays. We overflowed their trays and thought nothing of it." Nineteen days at sea dragged by slowly. Then, at the end of the boring journey was a golden vision.
The ship’s master informed them that San Francisco was about to loom on the horizon. On a cool August day, thousands of Marines in dress green uniforms of the day crowded onto the deck of the USNS General Walker to watch. "Sure enough," recalled Sarno, "there was the bridge on the horizon. Slowly by slowly, it got bigger and bigger. I had never seen the Golden Gate Bridge in my life. We had left for Korea from San Diego, and here was the Golden Gate. I’d never seen it before, and neither had a lot of the other Marines. It got bigger and bigger and bigger." The closer the Walker came to it, the more emotional the battle-hardened Marines became. There were tears in many eyes. "It was like a release to see the Golden Gate Bridge," Sarno explained. "We had made it home after all. We didn’t get killed. We were joyful."
The ship slid under the two-tiered bridge silently. "A few people on it waved to us," Sarno recalled. "The deck was full of green uniforms, and the guys were screaming their heads off. We pulled into the harbor and the scenery was just beautiful. We were back in America. The buildings were big. I saw the Presidio, a nice, squared away Army station. I saw Telegraph Hill. I was back in the United States. It was probably the greatest thrill of my life." As the ship was berthed, a Marine band wearing dress blue uniforms played the Marine Corps hymn. There were few family members to meet the returning Marines, but it didn’t matter. "Nothing in my life had such an impact on my being as coming up to, and going under, the Golden Gate Bridge, waiting for it to dock and listening to that dress blue Marine band serenading us. After all the shit we had endured in Korea, well, tears welled in my eyes despite my attempts to control them. I was so happy coming down that gangway. I was bleary-eyed with tears, but so damn proud I was a combat Marine. At 19 years old, I was in love with the 1st Marine Division, FMF. I was not a super hero, but I liked war. I believe that if you’re trained under wartime conditions and there’s a war on, the Marine Corps wants you in that war."
Chris Sarno hadn’t been home to see his parents for almost two years because of his commitment to the Marine Corps. His first contact with anyone back at home in Massachusetts came shortly after his arrival in San Francisco. There was a five-day processing period, and during that time, he called home. When nobody answered the telephone at his parents’ home, he called his grandfather Edward Shanahan, who lived on the second story of the two-family home that he owned in Medford and shared with his daughter’s family. Always close to the Irish grandfather he called "Papa Eddie", Sarno said that it was an emotional conversation on both ends of the telephone wire when Junior Sarno said the words, "I’m home, Pa." The elderly gentleman, who had really been the major breadwinner in the family and a primary caregiver for Chris Sarno and his siblings, was happy to once again hear the voice of Junior, his maternal grandson "I almost broke down talking to him," Sarno recalled, "because I loved my grandfather." In a few days, grandfather and grandson would hug in person after a too-long separation caused by the Korean War.
While his orders were being processed so that he could go home, Chris Sarno basked in the company of other Marines in Frisco. He stayed at the Marine Memorial, which was an exclusive club for current and former Marines. The combat Marine felt at home in its atmosphere of Marine decor and Marine comradeship. While staying there, he walked around San Francisco, just drinking in the pleasure of seeing American people, American automobiles, American movies, and enjoying American food. For $35.00, he also purchased his first pair of dress blues. "I remember breaking out my blues in my room for the first time," he said. Just as he was putting on his jacket, the maid wanted to come in and do up the room. She was a black woman about 30 years old. "She was quiet, and she was going about her business," Sarno recalled. "I was standing in front of the mirror putting on the blues to see how they looked when she said, ‘Could I ask you a question?’ When I told her, ‘Yeah, sure,’ she asked, ‘How old are you?’ When I told her I was 20, she said, ‘You look like you are 15 years old. And you’ve just come from Korea?’ She was just amazed that I looked so young." Although a salty combat veteran at the crusty old age of 20, Chris Sarno was still youthful in 1952. "I wanted to be 21 so I would be old enough to get a driver’s license, be able to vote, and legally buy beer."
After five days in San Francisco, the now-worldly Marine caught a flight on a TWA prop engine airplane to New York City for $120.00. At LaGuardia Airport in New York, he transferred to an AA prop C-47 named "City of Los Angeles" for the last leg of his journey to Massachusetts. "I had over 400 bucks after my Treasure Island sojourn," Sarno recalled. "I was now feeling so happy to be so near Boston. It was early September, and I was all decked out in my dress greens. I took a cab from Logan Airport to Medford." On a warm, Indian summer night around 9 p.m., the cab dropped the returning veteran off in front of 55 Sheridan Avenue in Medford. "People sat on their verandahs in the early evening," Sarno said. "They shouted at me and wished me a happy welcome home, and I cranked off a salute with a big grin. When I went inside the house, my mother was sewing and my sisters were trying on clothes. All hell broke loose. ‘Chris is home, Ma,’ my sister announced. Everyone was yelling with relief that I hadn’t been killed, I guess."
Many months had passed since Chris’ last opportunity to relax at home, surrounded by people who loved him. "It was a great 30-day leave," he said. He visited with neighbors, spent time with his brother Bud—now a civilian, and enjoyed Boston seafood like Peroni’s fried clams—which were far tastier than the clams sold on Fisherman’s Wharf in Frisco. Chris spent a couple of hours visiting his former girlfriend and her mother, but the object of his childhood puppy love said that he had changed. Now afraid of the uniformed Marine who had come to visit her, she was cold and distant toward him.
When his 30-day leave was over, Sarno went on to his new duty station at Camp Lejeune. There, he was assigned to be one of ten tank instructors on the new M-47 Patton Series tank. Only two of the ten instructors were Korean War veterans. "I had no guard mounts and no watches," he said of his Lejeune assignment. "We had liberty every Friday at 4 p.m. until 7 a.m. on Monday. Major Snell was my Battalion Adjutant and my CO was Captain Curtis, a brigade Marine tanker in Korea. My Company Gunny was Master Sergeant Geiger, who was our Gunny in Able Company up until we went to the Western Front in Korea."
In the company of other Korean War combat Marines, and instructing young tankers who gave him respect, Sarno did not hate his duty in the South. But, in spite of the spit-shined base and large quantities of good chow, it had its drawbacks. He said it was all redneck country, with no good liberty spots close by. "The nearest good liberty was DC," he recalled, "and most of us had no cars." Once he attended a tank battalion dance. Dressed in his blues, he asked a pretty local girl for a dance. "We chatted while dancing and she asked me where I was from," Sarno said. He told her that he hailed from Boston, Massachusetts. "When the music started up again, I asked her to dance again. She said, ‘No, I don’t dance with Northern Yankees.’ Hello Joe! I walked out. I never felt comfortable in the South at any time. It was living in the past with bitter prejudice."
The "Northern Yankee" now started going up to Boston every other weekend for a 24-hour liberty. "A Marine with a car would get four or five other Eastern Seaboard Marines to help pay for the gas," he said, "and the driver would net about 35 bucks for himself. It took 18 hours of non-stop driving to get to Boston at 10 a.m. on Saturday. We hit the night clubs in Boston, and then were back on the road by noontime on Sunday. We weren’t allowed north of DC, so we were officially ‘out of bounds’ and could be put up on report if we were found out." Their cars were dependable, but one day after Christmas leave was up, it started to snow at Worcester. "This Marine who owned a 1952 Ford spun out of control on concrete at a turn in a bridge. We did a couple of 360s and ended up on a big grassy divider with both front wheels blown out and a busted radiator. We had to hitchhike from Worcester." Through a series of relays, various drivers got the near-tardy Marines back to the barracks at 6:50 a.m. Too late to change clothes, Sarno stood roll call in civvies and out of breath. "The Sergeant of the Guard chewed on me inside and out, but he didn’t put me on report," Sarno said. "Right then and there I swore I was going to go ‘back home’ to the First Marine Division in Korea. I didn’t want to go back there to get killed, but I just couldn’t stand stateside duty."
To get a transfer back to Korea, Sarno had to present his case to Captain Curtis, a veteran of the Chosin Reservoir campaign in Korea. He refused to grant Sarno’s request for two reasons. At that time (December 1952), the Marine Corps policy stated that anybody coming back from Korea had to spend a year in the United States to "think it over" before requesting another assignment there. The captain also pointed out to Sarno that a good Marine also has to be ready to serve in stateside duties as well as in combat duties. "There’s not always going to be a war," he told Sarno.
But Sarno was adamant that he wanted to go back to Korea. "From that time on, I was always trying to get back to Korea," he said. "I thought I could get a transfer without waiting an entire year, but it never happened. I did spend my full year in the United States before I was allowed to go back." During the wait, he took two tests in late January of 1953 in preparation for promotion to staff sergeant. One was a test on combat tactics, and the other was a technical test on the new M-47 tank.
That same month, Major Snell was in charge of a recruiting drive for Marines in the 8th Tank Battalion who might be interested in shipping over to Korea. Not surprisingly, Sarno was one of the first tankers to volunteer. He agreed to a one-year extension of his original three-year enlistment so that he would qualify for overseas duty to Korea again. On April 4, 1953, Chris Sarno was promoted to Staff Sergeant at Quantico, Virginia. He now enjoyed quarters with just staff NCOs, apart from sergeants and others of lower rank. "I had no guard mounts," he said. "No watches at all. I was in direct contact with the commanding and executive officers every day." But, he remained persistent in his quest to go back to FMF. "I requested to see my battalion commander, who was Col. Ray Murray. He approved my request in July or August of 1953," Sarno said. "One day, Joe Hoplock and I were told to get all our gear together and wait for a truck to pick us up for the 3rd Marine Division." Sarno knew that the 3rd Marine Division had just been formed for active duty in Okinawa, and he was not happy. "I was so dejected to think that Murray had shit-canned me to the 3rd Marine Division," he said. But when the truck pulled up, the NCO asked, "Who’s Sarno?" He said, "You aren’t going with the 3rd Marine Division. You go to the 1st Marine Division in Korea next week." Sarno was elated. "Colonel Murray did keep his word to me. I felt great, because I was finally going home to the 1st Marine Division in the field."
At the time, scuttlebutt had it that the 3rd Marine Division was to replace the 1st Marine Division in Korea so that the 1st Marine Division could go back to the States. "That never happened," Sarno said. "After a short period of time, there was an exchange program set up between the two Marine Divisions there in the Far East. Once an enlisted Marine had three months in his assigned division, one Marine could transfer provided that both time remaining and MOS were exactly the same. I saw five Marines transfer out of AT-7 and we got five new Marines [in MOS] into AT-7. I was almost tempted, but eased off and remained with the 1st Marine Division. I hated to give up all those nice liberties in Nippon and what they had to offer, but I figured I would have gone completely broke financially if I ever had a tour in Japan. As it turned out, the 1st Marine Division departed once and for all from Korea in April 1955." But until their departure that year, 1st Marine Division troops had unfinished business in Korea. Volunteers were still needed in post-war operations, and Chris Sarno was excited that he would be one of them.
Preparations for his second trip to Korea were far different than his first trip. "While I was in the staging regiment at Pendleton, this time there was not three months of rugged Tent Camp intensive training when war was going on. For the love of me I can’t recall anything like it was compared to the first time. I know I had liberty every weekend and I went to LA once. The movie ‘From Here to Eternity’ was playing, and they had street cars two abreast coming and going on Wilshire Boulevard." He said he stayed at Pendleton for 30 days. "We must have done some training at Pendleton," he pondered, "but I can only remember the weekend liberty. It was not at all as demanding as the training of the 12th draft. The 36th draft was ‘tit’ duty."
Then he boarded the USNS General Walker, a huge two-stacker with full complement of 4,000 replacements, and he was on his way back to the Korean peninsula with the 36th Replacement Draft. It was the first draft after the truce was signed—a three-month break from the last draft.
The ship was at sea for 19 days before it stopped at Kobe, Japan, and then sailed on to Inchon, Korea. "There was a huge sign that everyone walked under at Inchon," he recalled. "On one side, it said, ‘Welcome to Korea.’ The flip side said, ‘Bon Voyage.’ Once they had disembarked at Inchon, the troops were trucked in the pitch dark of night to their various assigned units. Jeeps then took them on the last leg of their journey from regiment to their individual companies. It was now late September 1954, and Sarno was happy to be far away from a stateside duty station, where he tended to spend all of his money on liberty rather than saving it. "Stateside, I always spent my monthly pay," he said. "I wanted to build up enough stash to buy myself a car (in cash). When I got out 17 months later, I did." Sarno said that he still felt like Korea was the "asshole of the world," but he had no regrets about being back. "I never had one misgiving about volunteering to have a second tour in Korea," he said, "never".
But things were definitely different in Korea on Sarno’s second tour of duty. "By February of 1954," he said, "all of the combat personnel had rotated home. All new replacements and officers were coming aboard from the States, and they were a different breed. They tried to make us back into spit-shined Marines while cavorting with the dusty, dirty, muddy, cold, and hot environment. It created low morale, and a lot more ‘soap operas’ arose in this contrasting garrison duty/climate than compared to the fast-moving combat situations of my first tour."
Sarno was assigned to Anti-Tank Company, which was up near the Hook command post on the Samichon River and valley. The company was made up of two components—five tanks and two or three platoons of 75 recoilless rifles. He said, "AT-7 was commanded by Capt. Timothy Kearns, who was an outstanding combat CO. He had much combat experience and ran a tight and cohesive outfit with high morale. To me, his greatest attribute was that he over-identified with his Marines. I only served with Captain Kearns from late September 1953 to late December 1953, when he rotated home. AT-7 was never the same after his departure. A new wave of non-combatant officers drifted in/out of AT-7, thus causing a huge decline in morale, as I will allude to further along in this chapter."
"We complemented each other," Sarno said. "But they were basically grunts and we were tankers. The CP never moved one inch in the 14 months I was there," Sarno said.
"I was assigned to a tank platoon of five M-46 tanks. Our platoon lived in squad tents with the 75mm recoilless rifle platoon. We were five miles away from regiment. Just over a big foothill were 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines grunts. Right away I sized this tank CP and outfit up as a bastard outfit. Hardly any of the tank platoon had ever gone through tank school. About 60 percent of the ‘tankers’ were reject grunts from other 7th Marines outfits, and all officers were grunt officers from regiment. I know for a fact that two officers in Tank Platoon hardly ever came to the Tank Park at all, and when they did crawl over their tanks, they knew nothing about them as their chatter gave them away. This outfit was a far cry from Tank Battalion. I had it made. They really needed me. I kept a quiet profile, but a lot of tankers came to me about tank talk. Some names that I recall are Johnny Vaneer, Cooper, Wrightson, Thompson, O’Donnell, King, Warren, Tyson, Lorne Bayliss, Swinderman, and Wilson."
For Sarno, whose combat tour in Korea included "squared away duty" in the tank battalion, some days in AT-7 were trying, to say the least. The men of Tank Company were assigned to guard the Main Line of Resistance. "After the truce was signed," he said, "we destroyed all of our fortifications by hand or by dozer. We withdrew a mile back of a trench line that happened to be on the other side of the Imjin River. We were constantly on watch to check to make sure the gooks would not break through." Although a cease fire was in effect, Sarno said that duty on the MLR was not like stateside duty. "We were constantly on watch 24 hours a day, ready to repel and attack," he said.
When intelligence sensed possible trouble, or when regiment just wanted to test "readiness", a state of alert was pronounced. According to Sarno, "Condition Red was sounded at random times day or night. The tanks of AT-7 would crank up fast and go to our assigned revetments, where we would remain on station for up to two or even four hours." They were in direct radio contact with the regiment communication section. "We were timed as to how quickly we could get to our station to thwart a gook invasion," Sarno said. "We always took these alerts seriously, realizing that the gooks would pile down the valley as it was the traditional invasion sector that Mongol tribes/hordes always traversed to capture Seoul. Throughout my 14-month tour in AT-7, we were frequently hit with Condition Red, winter and summer. It got to be boring, because we would get into those revetments and stay there two or three hours just facing goonyland." The tank commander kept in communication with regiment via a headset. Those times when Condition Red was not caused by enemy actions, the crew members on the tank slept on the engine doors to pass the time.
Sarno said that there was ever-present danger near goonyland, but nevertheless, his second tour of duty in Korea was more lax than the first one. "It was actually stand-up duty, not having to crouch down for fear of incoming all the time. AT-7 even had a softball team to break the boredom. "Softball was practiced after night chow during July and August 1954," he said. "AT-7 had the best softball team in 7th Marine Regiment play. We won the Regimental championship and then competed in a final game with a Marine air wing team on our field. The winner got to go to Tokyo for the Far East Championship 10-day playoff series. We were one lousy win away from heaven on earth—Japan. Our captain, who thought that softball was a waste of his Marines, didn’t want us to leave for Japan. He actually wanted us to lose so he could keep his command up to snuff. We made him one happy SOB, as we lost 3 to 2 to a bunch of Airwingers—lucky bastards."
Where his assigned tank battalion in 1951-52 was squared away, AT-7 differed, according to Sarno. "We had every reject from grunt units in the 7th Marine Regiment," he said. And there were more "domestic problems" because of it. "One Marine cracked up with a Dear John letter. Another Marine refused to get out of the sack. He just moaned to go home to his farm in Iowa. The tankers of AT-7 were assigned at various times to send ten-man working parties to Regiment, mostly in the winter and early spring. Those times I vented to the XO that two-man tanks was not a good idea. It landed on deaf ears, and I was told to follow orders. Our tankers went on working parties five miles down the MSR to regiment for the daylight hours. Things like that never happened in Tank Battalion—never!!"
Once or twice a month, Sarno made a trip to Seoul, where he saw the people there struggling to overcome a multitude of hardships. The country and the city had definitely been ravaged by war. "I saw the Koreans in filth, and there was pestilence, starvation, and death in the streets," he said. "After a while, I turned a blind eye. I got laid for $10; it was the needed revenue for that family to feed itself. It was strictly sex for sale—a business going full blast. I just made the trip for my needs, and then returned to AT-7. The problems were too big for me to solve. That’s what generals got paid for. Seoul in those days was purgatory…hell."
Towards the end of his second tour of duty in Korea, Sarno also saw his first violent racial incident in the 75 mm recoilless rifle platoon. It ended up in an attempted murder charge. One of the black Marines originally assigned to AT-7 was transferred into the 75 mm recoilless rifle platoon. There, he was constantly harassed by a private first class from Vermont. The black Marine ignored comments like, "All niggers to the back of the line" for a long time, but the months of needling finally caused him to snap. The black Marine fired a shot at his white tormentor. "The next morning," Sarno said, "the whole company watched as the black Marine left the company in handcuffs on the back of a deuce and a half. He was screaming at the top of his lungs that when he got out of Portsmouth Brig, he would be tracking that white Marine down." Unlike the all-white units that Sarno had served with and saw during his first tour in Korea, the post-war units were integrated due to the draft regulations that went into effect in the later part of the Korean War. In post-war Korea, black and white Marines patrolled and guarded the northern boundary of South Korea.
In later months and years, the small strip of land separating South and North Korea acquired the title of "demilitarized zone" (the DMZ). But the men of AT-7 did not refer to it as the DMZ "It was the defensive line," Sarno said. "There was no fence or anything like that. There was no patrolling. We were just watching, watching, and waiting for the gooks. We were just a company strung out on a little piece of real estate, in radio contact with Regiment, which might have been four miles down the road. We had our own company security 24 hours a day." For many years to come, there would be deaths at the hands of the enemy on the DMZ, but Sarno said AT-7 never lost a man. "Reports filtered in once that a Marine sentry in an outfit further away from us was found hanging from a tree. It happened on a 2 a.m.-6 a.m. watch. We were only one mile away from the gooks." This news was upsetting to the Marines, and made them wary of the fact that North Koreans were constantly trying to infiltrate. "If they got a lone guy, they tried to kill him out of spite," Sarno said. "It kept us on our toes, and like I said, I never trusted a gook, north or south.
In spite of "peace" due to the recent truce, animosity against the North Korean enemy was ever present. Not only that, there was also animosity within the anti-tank company itself. "Morale was at the bottom in this outfit," Sarno recalled. "We had officers who had never been in combat. Most of the Marines had never been in combat, either. We had five tanks and 25 tankers, and I would say that no more than six were actually trained at tank school. The rest were grunts who had screwed up in regiments and were thrown into anti-tank company as a result. It was nothing like tank battalion. In Marine tank battalion, we went to school classes. Even when we were in combat, when we went into Reserve areas, if we were not working on heavy repairs to the tanks we were going to combat classes so that when we went back into the line everybody knew what the hell they had to do. There was constant repetition."
Not so in the anti-tank company. Sarno said that the officers were nothing like combat officers. "If anything, they were distant from us," he recalled. Sarno told about one incident in particular that illustrated his point. It happened during a cold, bleak January in 1954. "They decided that ten Marines from Anti-tank Company would be driven down to Regiment to build a huge sandbag bunker for the colonel in charge," he explained. "We built this thing while the pogues in Regiment were going about their duty. We were the only guys humping sandbags up on the wire line." It was a stressful situation. "We were in territory that hadn’t been trodden over," he said. "We could easily have stepped on a land mine. We were ordered to build a huge bunker for the colonel. And it was cold." After several hours of work, they got a break to eat noon chow there. Since Regiment was way bigger than a little tank company area, there was a massive mess hall. Regiment was spit and polish, and here we were like a bastard outfit." At 4 o’clock they were finally brought down off the skyline to wait for transportation back to the AT-7 company. "We were freezing out there and the wind was whipping around," Sarno recalled. To pass the time, the women-deprived Marines watched two young girls doing laundry for the Regiment. "Being away from women," Sarno said, "we looked at those girls. It wasn’t what they looked like—it was what they could provide us with. It was constantly on our minds like that—being away from women, you know."
Finally, the motor transport personnel showed up (late) to transport the hungry Marines to the chow hall. "The motor transport pogue didn’t give a damn that he was late," Sarno said. "He wasn’t a tanker. He was just a taxi cab driver." He could care less that his delay in arriving caused the tired, frozen, and hungry tankers to be the last ones in the chow line. "That particular night," Sarno recalled, "they had hamburgers for night chow. That was sort of a treat to have hamburger. We had been living on beef and grease in a can. Shredded beef with a lot of greasy gravy. We got that constantly. But tonight was hamburger. Oh, jeez! To us, it was like a steak. We were at the back of the line and waiting and waiting. But just before we went into chow, they ran out of hamburgers and brought out this beef and grease. We were pissed."
Sarno said that the officers ate in the same mess hall as the enlisted men, but it was partitioned off. One of the enlisted men had to serve them. "That was one thing about the Marines," Sarno said. "They didn’t allow gooks in the kitchen at all. In Army units, Army cooks did the cooking, but gooks washed and did odd and end jobs like setting up and all that. But I give the Marine Corps credit, right until the last day the Corps was in Korea, even when the war wasn’t going on, no gooks were allowed to prepare food or serve it as a precaution from them poisoning us. We had washee boys who did our laundry for $15.50 per month, but no gook ever got into our mess hall to prepare food."
On the night the cooks ran out of hamburgers, it was bad enough that those Marines who had worked the hardest that day on "shit wire and sandbag detail" had then been relegated to the back of the line, and were served crummy food. But to add insult to injury, the company dog—a Scot terrier named Lady--was treated better than the visiting Marines. "One of the lieutenants threw hamburgers to the dog. We looked at each other thinking, ‘That dog is more important than us.’ "Sarno and the other Anti-Tank men were angry. Near them was a garbage bucket where, having had his fill of hamburgers, Lady was crawling and munching on the garbage. Nearby was also a 55-gallon barrel of hot boiling water where the Marines dipped their mess gear to sanitize it. "I took a canteen cup of that boiling water and I dumped it right on the dog’s ass," Sarno said. "He shot into that barrel, hit the bottom of it, and came running out heading to the lieutenant, screaming dragging his ass. All the guys were cheering. That was our only way of getting even with our officers. We had to hurt that poor bastard dog. But that’s how mad we were. We wanted those hamburgers, but the lieutenant threw them on the ground to his dog. These officers didn’t care about their men." Sarno explained that Marine officers were taught from almost Day One at Basic School that officers eat last and enlisted men eat first. "When they’re sure that all of their men have been served, then it’s time for the officers to eat," he said. "That’s the traditional way, but that wasn’t the way it was in this company. Here, the officers had their fill before even checking to see if all of the men had gotten their hamburgers first. They knew we were on a steady diet of beef and grease, but they didn’t care. They just fed their dog while we were dying for those hamburgers."
The remainder of January and the first of February that year were very cold in Korea. But in February, at least the hearts of the Marines were warmed when the beautiful and sexy Marilyn Monroe came to Korea to sing and otherwise entertain the troops serving there. The Marine Corps allowed three men from each tank to attend a USO show featuring Monroe. In addition, practically all of the recoilless rifle platoon got to go see her. "Our tank lieutenant had the final overall decision as to who went and who was to remain in AT-7 CP when the Marilyn Monroe show came," Sarno said. "Now that I think of it, none of our officers made the trip." Chris Sarno was one of the lucky ones who got to attend, and he remembered the experience well. "It was a long, cold February day," he said. "It wasn’t bitter cold, but it was damn cold--and it was cloudy. It was an hour’s bumpy ride down to Munsan-ni. Those 6x’s hit every bump. Our spines were hurting by the time we got off that truck. They didn’t miss a bump. But, although the trip was uncomfortable, we knew that we were going to see Marilyn Monroe, so we weren’t thinking about the bumps."
The men in Sarno’s unit got there early, waiting nearly an hour for the show to begin. One Marine from each of the five tanks had grabbed binoculars as they headed out for the show. "We were in the fourth row, waiting for her with high-powered binoculars," Sarno recalled. "The place was packed with Marines. We swore the whole division was there. There had to be close to 10,000 Marines there. The MPs were all in front of us there on the stage when they flew her in by helicopter. It was so cold there were snowflakes, but there wasn’t a snow storm."
In spite of the cold and the flakes of snow falling from the sky, Sarno said that Marilyn Monroe stepped out onto the stage in a stunning cocktail dress with spaghetti straps. "The cheering was the loudest I had ever heard," he said. "I never thought that well of Marilyn Monroe. I never thought that she was a good actress, and I considered her sort of like a slutty person." But the longer Marilyn stayed on the stage, the higher Sarno’s regard for her grew. "It had to be only like 5 or 10 degrees above zero," he said. "She wasn’t a great singer, but who cared. She sounded good enough. She was a knockout. She was proportionally beautiful." Sarno said that she played up to all of those thousands of Marines who watched her perform on the stage. "We got a kick out of that," Sarno said. "It was a raucous crowd. No swearing or vulgarities, just--‘More! More! More!’ Everybody was in love with her - everybody. Like I said, she couldn’t sing that good, but to us, she was the greatest singer in the world. She sang a couple of songs I had never heard her sing before. One of them was ‘Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend,’ because that movie was out at the time. She sang that a couple of times. Whatever she did, we thought it was terrific. She could do no wrong. She changed my mind towards her. She was truly beautiful; really beautiful, gorgeous. She had a naiveté about herself despite being the most desirable woman in the world. She wasn’t performing like a tart. She was really trying to entertain us."
Sarno said that Marilyn had a backup of about five musicians, but they weren’t prominent in the show. They didn’t do any solos. Instead, they just did basic backup music for the famous blonde actress. "She did the bump and grind, smiled, and moved her hands while singing." The Marines all knew that she was married to baseball great Joe DiMaggio, but they didn’t care. For that one day, Marilyn Monroe was theirs to dream about and to admire. When the show was over, the men got back into the trucks for the long ride back up to the AT-7 area. The Monroe USO show temporarily lifted the men’s spirits, but morale was still at an all-time low in AT-7.
After returning from Korea, Sarno didn’t follow Marilyn Monroe’s career, even though he thought a lot of her. "I didn’t see every movie she was in after that," he said, "but the ones I look at now, I really look differently at her. Joe DiMaggio was one lucky SOB." He felt that Monroe’s death was an untimely tragedy, caused by the fact that she got mixed up with the wrong people. Her appearance in Korea was the best thing that so far had happened to him in Korea while he was on his second tour there. But the very best thing was yet to come…on an island called Japan….
When combatants have to endure front line conditions over an extended period of time, casualty rates and mental health problems generally tend to increase. This phenomenon was understood in World War II, and the same "cure" was introduced in the Korean War on December 31, 1950, when a formal rest and recuperation (R&R) program was established. Not all of the troops were lucky enough to get this break, which consisted of about five days free time in Japan. For various reasons, some of them didn’t even opt to take this break.
A Marine from New Jersey who was in Sarno’s squad tent talked incessantly about his recent R&R. "He was no lover to look at him," Sarno recalled. But after five days of R&R in Japan, he came back crazy in love with a Japanese beauty named Cookiesan. "The night conversation at light’s out was Cookiesan this and Cookiesan that," Sarno said. "So we always used to rag on him something fierce about Cookiesan and the Oriental Hotel." Sarno didn’t pay all that much attention to his buddy’s Japanese R&R tale. "I hadn’t come to a decision to go to Japan," he said. "I was saving my dough to buy a car when I finally got discharged. I almost had it all saved." In addition, Sarno still had a wartime mindset about Orientals—Koreans and Japanese alike. "I had no sympathy for the way they had to live," he admitted. "My mindset toward the Koreans was like mine towards the Japanese in World War II. They started the fight, and I had no respect for them. I fought the Oriental."
But now the fighting was over. All that was left was the tension caused by endless hours of edgy guard duty on the now-silent MLR, and officers who were always on the men’s case. "The officers were now on us something fierce," Sarno recalled. "They let one man do the work and sent the other four tankers out on working parties. One guy can’t do all the maintenance work on a tank. They let the driver stay and even took the tank commander and other crew men down to Regiment to do whatever the colonel wanted. That was no way to run a tank outfit. You might get away with that with grunts, but those tanks needed constant attention. We were sweating like fools. We were working like wetbacks. I finally said, ‘That’s it. I’m getting out of here. I’ll go to Japan if I have to in order to get away from this. The doldrums, the tedium, and the boredom had finally set in. Sure enough, two guys from tank company got to go on R&R." If the allotment for that month didn’t get filled, headquarters skipped the next month and nobody got to go. Sarno decided to opt for the free trip to Japan. The other company member who got to go with him was a black Corpsman whom he did not know personally.
"I wasn’t familiar with him," explained Sarno, "because I very seldom went to sick bay. They always taught us right from boot camp not to go running to the Navy for help with imaginary ills or ailments. Walk out of the damn thing, and you’ll be stronger for it. And, by God, even up to this day in my life if I have some little infirmity, I’ll walk out of it. I’ll get out of it one way or another. So I never went to the Navy looking for any help, you know. Only the time I got wounded." Once again, Sarno’s prejudice surfaced. He respected the Corpsman for being a Corpsman, and admitted that he was a good-looking black guy who spoke well, "but he was black, and I had nothing to do with any black or any other third world person when I socialized." Sarno was polite to him, but very much wanted to shake loose of his unwanted R&R companion.
The two men were sent back to Regiment, and from there took a bumpy flight to Kitami Air Station. Prior to leaving Korea, Sarno withdrew $200 from his savings in order to finance his R&R to Japan. "Most guys drew a hundred bucks," he said. "I drew two hundred, thinking that I would take extra and really enjoy myself." The tanker, still in love with Cookiesan, told him not to forget to go to the Oriental Hotel. When the flight took off for Japan, Sarno was happy, but he still had what he called a lousy attitude. He still didn’t like Orientals, but his taste was soon to change in that regard.
In contrast to Korea, which was blown to bits by three years of war, Japan was lush and verdant. Sarno arrived there in a soft summer rain. He saw rice growing strong, houses with nice tile roofs, and neatness. "Everything was orderly," he recalled. The R&R Marines arrived via a cattle truck that traveled from the airport on a two-lane highway. It was a warm July day when the truck stopped at Camp Fisher, located at the outskirts of Kyoto, a very green landscaped city that had been spared from the bombings in World War II. "It was loaded with temples and Buddhist and Shinto shrines," Sarno recalled. "The city, considered the ‘Vatican of the Empire of Japan’, was built into the side of a small, craggy mountain with green fir trees jutting out on the skyline and craggy knolls. It was very romantic-looking, and simply a beautiful city to look at and to be in, as I later found out." Camp Fisher was actually a massive Marine brig. "It was for Navy personnel and Marine malcontents who screwed up on R&R," Sarno said. "The Japs called it the ‘big monkey house.’."
Camp Fisher was the stepping stone to the exotic world that awaited American Marines and G.I.s in Japan on R&R. Sarno and the others took a refreshing shower. Then they were fitted with khaki uniforms and went to night chow. "I remember this one thing in night chow," Sarno reminisced. "Milk, ice cold milk; we hadn’t had milk, oh, for a good ten months. Everybody kept saying, ‘Pass the milk.’ We couldn’t get enough of it—just ordinary pasteurized milk. But it was real milk not that crap powdered milk that we used to choke on. We hadn’t had fat in our diet for so long that the milk tasted like a heavy milk shake. ‘Pass the milk. Pass the milk.’ It went down nice and sweet. That I remember." It was lights out after night chow. They needed their rest, because the next day would begin five days of fun and uninhibited living in Kyoto, Japan.
"The next morning," Sarno recalled, "they gave us a little pep talk before they turned us loose. The Staff Sergeant said, ‘Look it, you assholes. We’re turning you loose in a town that has 20,000 whores waiting for clowns like you. You get 360 yen for every American buck. Know the going rate when you shack up with these broads, and don’t get VD. Check these whores out for their ID card.’" In Japan, prostitution was an accepted, legitimate and lucrative business. "When I say Japanese whores," explained Sarno, "I don’t mean that they were like those dingy, rotten-looking tramps we see on our streets in the United States. Prostitutes in Japan had to have a medical ID, a picture ID, and a medical stamp. The Japanese government provided medical exams and treatment for the prostitutes once a week, and that did keep VD down to a great degree."
There was a hum in the room as military advisors warned the anticipating Marines about keeping their money and wits about them on the streets of Kyoto. "Everybody was yapping and elbowing and pushing, because we were one happy bunch," Sarno said. "We had five days and five nights to do whatever the hell we wanted to so we could get out of the chicken shit routine that was daily fare in Korea. They gave us one final warning: ‘You have five days on the government. If you behave, you’ll be coming back to go to your outfit. Otherwise, you’re going to face a summary court when you go back.’" When the lectures were over, the men were released to go their own separate ways.
Sarno, however, was not alone at first. The black Corpsman was still with him. The two of them jumped into a compact cab and headed for the R&R hotel. "Years ago, MacArthur had set up hotels for enlisted men only," Sarno explained. "No officers were allowed to stay at this hotel. It was protected by MPs stationed in the lobby, who made sure that we behaved within its walls. If you got in a jam, you were sent to the Camp Fisher brig. You’ve had it." Sarno said that the 13-story R&R Hotel was actually the Kyoto Hotel, but American service personnel generally referred to it as the R&R. "It was beautiful, beautiful," he said. "It was like being home in the States. All of the sudden, I was in the United States again, but there were Japanese girls doing all the counter work. The hotel had souvenirs that could be purchased from its curio shops to send home to loved ones in the States. They mailed packages home for you and everything for just a couple of dollars. They had a nice little thing going there." There were hundreds and hundreds of prostitutes available on the streets of Kyoto, but none were allowed to come into the R&R alone. "They had to be accompanied by an American GI or sailor," Sarno said. "Otherwise, they could not enter the hotel."
He said that the hotel staff was dressed in nice, western clothes. "It was nothing like Korea," he recalled. "I was eating it up. I liked this! The second or third floor had professional office space, and then there was a huge dining room with all white tablecloths. A long line of young, uniformed, Japanese girls were waitresses in the hotel restaurant. They also held perfunctory jobs on all floors of the hotel. They were all virginal girls, blushing and laughing and giggling. They were untouched, and we were told not to ever proposition them. ‘Don’t ever pull any fast ones. No tipping.’ If we tipped the girls, they lost their job. They were glad to have their jobs because the Japs weren’t out of their economic problems yet. They could speak good English." The R&R Hotel had an interesting system for calling waitresses to tables. "There was a little cigarette ash tray in the center of our table," Sarno recalled. "It had a small, round light fixture on the top of the cigarette disposal. When you flipped a switch, a light would go on that said, ‘Service.’ A Japanese girl dressed in white and black like a maid, would come over and take our order."
The R&R offered more luxuries on higher levels. "There was a penthouse on top of the hotel which offered dancing to the tune of a live 12-piece Japanese band," Sarno said. "Those kids really put their hearts into the songs. They played the same type of Glenn Miller music available on the dance hall on another floor of the hotel, and they were good. You could look over the railing and see the whole city of Kyoto at night—all the different colored lights. All of the food cooking on the outside stalls throughout the city, as well as in the homes, wafted up into the night air. It was really exotic and romantic. You couldn’t put a price on it—this atmosphere that we absorbed. You could dance under the stars to a nice band on a big dance floor. Everybody behaved. You could wear civvies or a uniform, and the prices were inexpensive. Light sandwiches and liquor were available there. I said to myself, ‘Hey, I like this. This is going to be where I’m going to eat and where my nightly entertainment is going to be.’" He based this decision on not only the penthouse ballroom that he saw at the top of the R&R Hotel, but also on the other luxuries offered in the hotel.
On the tenth floor, they had another ballroom set up for dancing. There was a big orchestra that played Glenn Miller music. "It was made up of about 15 Japanese boys," Sarno recalled, "and they were pretty good—almost as good as Miller. Perhaps they were a little tinny, but they were good. The dance floor was spacious. You could get brandy alexanders for 50 cents and beer for 10 cents. You could get a thick, filet mignon and all the trimmings for $1.35. This was in mid-July, 1954. The buck was powerful." Sarno indeed loved what he saw at the R&R Hotel. But although he decided that that it was where he wanted to eat and be entertained, he didn’t want to sleep in its USO facility, where servicemen could pay 50 cents for a cot. "I’d been on a cot all my life in the Marine Corps," Sarno said. "I had dough, so I decided not to be Spartan about spending it on a place to stay. I decided to go to the Oriental Hotel, a Japanese-style hotel." At the curb outside of the hotel, Sarno flagged down a cab, and told the Corpsman that he would see him in five days. With the Corpsman standing alone outside of the R&R, Sarno told the cab driver to head for the Oriental Hotel.
Because of the language barrier, Sarno wasn’t sure that the cab driver was actually taking him to the Oriental Hotel. He waved the driver to the side of the street and asked the first girl that he saw to give the cabby instructions to take him to the Oriental Hotel. When Sarno slipped the girl 1500 yen, she asked him if he wanted to stay with her. But Sarno was focused on just one thing—getting to the Oriental Hotel. A ten-minute taxi cab ride took him to a verdant and quiet part of town. "When I got to the Oriental Hotel," he said, "there was an older fellow up on the top step, nattily dressed like a businessman. His name was Mr. Lee, and he owned the hotel. The cab left and I introduced myself. I told him that I was on R&R, and he suggested that we go inside and talk business." Inside, Sarno found Polynesian decor—booths and thatched roofs in a nightclub setting, bamboo and all kinds of teakwood. In spite of the Polynesian decor, it was still very much Japanese. There was a small dance floor, and Glenn Miller music was wafting through the air from a radio. Sarno and Mr. Lee sat down in a cushioned bamboo booth, and began to negotiate prices.
Talking with the hotel owner, Sarno discovered that a five-night stay at the Oriental was $25.00. "I had money in every pocket," Sarno said. The Japanese yen was a much bigger, coarser slip of paper than an American bill. Sarno said that if water spilled on it, it would suck it up like an ink blotter. "It was so large, I couldn’t fold it up in my wallet. I had money bulging out of every pocket, so twenty-five bucks was nothing. I had money coming out of my ears" He then asked Mr. Lee how much more it would cost for a girl. Lee told Sarno that getting a girl was no problem, as the Oriental Hotel had a huge selection of them. But the price went up to $50.00, excluding food and liquor. Sarno agreed to the price.
The search for the right girl began with a free drink from the bar. When Sarno asked the clean-as-a-whistle hotel owner for a brandy alexander, the Japanese man was unfamiliar with it. But he was in the business to please his customers, so having obtained the ingredients from Sarno, he had the bartender make one. "When a waiter in a white and blue uniform brought it over, it was as good as any I had ever tasted," Sarno commented. With drink in hand, he and his Japanese host went in search of the perfect room. "There was a matted runway," Sarno recalled, "and we were in stocking feet because we left our shoes at the front step. Everything was bamboo or wood, and there were big glass panels—pretty modern for 1954. You could see a huge oriental garden on the other side of sliding glass verandah panels. There were bonsai plants and rocks, and gardeners were puttering around. There was also a big fish pool with rock bridges and stepping stones. Carp were swimming in the pool."
Sarno rejected the first vacant room Mr. Lee showed him. "Right next door were two sailors with Japanese girls, and they were sort of loud," he said. "I didn’t want to be around a couple of swabbies." Mr. Lee told him that not too many Marines stayed at the hotel, but there was a quiet room at the end of the hall that overlooked the garden. It was a good-sized, squared away room, about two sizes bigger than the average American bedroom, with drapes across a window that overlooked the garden. For the next few days, this would be his home in the Orient.
Once settled in the room, the Japanese owner told him that he would bring an assortment of Japanese girls in one by one so that Sarno could choose his ‘business girl’. "Holy shit," Sarno said. "This was all new to me, and I was kind of embarrassed." But Mr. Lee told him to relax, because that’s how they did business in Japan. "I felt awkward because I had never done such a thing before," Sarno admitted. Yes, he had made the occasional trip to prostitutes in Seoul from January to June of that year, but sex was still relatively new to him. "I felt socially awkward with my staid, regimental Catholic rearing…but going through a vicious war and being in a devastated Korea made one live for the moment and grab all that life offered, regardless of the consequences. I wanted this atmosphere to happen and last as long as it could. I might die tomorrow, so I wanted to live like I never did before." One by one he rejected six girls. They left the room with a bow and a ‘gomennasi’—which meant, ‘I’m sorry.’ "I was not really picayune," Sarno said, "but for some reason I was at that moment in the Oriental Hotel. None of the girls that Mr. Lee brought before me appealed to me." The hotel owner seemed to understand his American client’s dilemma, so he told him to wait while he made a phone call. Sarno said that he would get squared away and prepare to take a shower. "It was hot and there was no air conditioning," he recalled. "They only had a ceiling fan." Sarno got his gear in place and waited anxiously for the hotel owner to return.
"Within probably 15 minutes," Sarno said, "the door opened and closed, and there was a real pretty girl standing there. Her name was Yoshiko, and she spoke good English. She said, ‘Do I pass your inspection?’ I told her that yeah, she sure did. We were going to spend some time together." And they did. For nearly two decades prior, Chris Sarno’s world had centered around his Catholic family and straight-laced neighborhood in a suburb of Boston. Now, after almost four years in the Marine Corps, his knowledge of life was expanding—not just because of his experiences during his combat tour in Korea, but also because of his experiences with the opposite sex. "Being close to a girl and sharing everything 24/7 was an invigorating wake up call to my psyche," he admitted. "It was a lawful business deal in Japanese social life. I was about to grow up with sharing all of me with her, and her with me, for the first time in my young life. This was so different from the USA ways. It was a heady five days and nights. I treated Yoshiko with awareness and dignity. She was not a love slave to me. I was a gentle guy, and her Japanese femininity was unmatched by any other woman I had ever met before or would ever meet thereafter. I was aware of this characteristic, and totally loved her company."
Yoshiko was a little older than Chris, but not a lot. "I was 20 years old," he said, "and she must have been about 23 or 24. She had shiny, jet black Oriental hair and sort of slanty eyes. Unlike the Koreans, who had boney faces and high Mongol cheeks, Yoshiko had the traditional Japanese almond-shaped face. She had a nice smile and a real nice figure. She wasn’t dressed tacky. In those days, Japanese women wore skirts below the knee, similar to the way the girls dressed back in the United States. In fact, the Japanese women, especially the young girls, couldn’t copy enough of the American way of life. MacArthur’s occupational scheme of things was working. He was Americanizing this country on an accelerated course. The women benefited more than the men, and the young people were picking up on that real fast."
Just before the girl had entered his room, Sarno was getting ready to take a shower. "I had my uniform unbuttoned, and she asked me if I wanted to take a shower. I told her that I wanted to freshen up before we had supper at the R&R hotel, and I wanted to get my uniform cleaned. I took it off and rang for the kid to clean it, and then we went down for an afternoon shower/bath. They didn’t have individual heads in the rooms at the Oriental Hotel. Instead, they had a common shower room. I had my robe on and she had her clothes on, and we walked down to the shower. It was three o’clock in the afternoon."
The American Marine and the Japanese prostitute went to the hotel’s communal bathroom. "It was huge," Sarno recalled. It was all tiled—ceilings, walls, everything—in pretty colors. The sparkling clean room was far different from the company area back in Korea. I was loving every minute of being in this new environment. Iremember that there was a huge sunken hot tub in one corner of the room, and then down on the end there were the spigots with the showers with wooden buckets. There was a special type of sponge for your body, too. I asked Yoshiko where she was going to go while I showered, and she said that she was going to be right there with me. ‘I’m going to show you what it is to have a Japanese shower,’ she told me. So I striped down and we took a shower together. She said, ‘I like your Maline body.’ I started to soap up and she said, ‘No, no, no, no. Let me do that. Let me wash your body.’ Which she did. And then in turn she wanted me to wash her body. It was a feeling like I had never had before. I had never gone through this anyway. I used the sponge, which was really cloth. It did something nice to your skin, whatever it was called. I then soaped her. She had all the in’s and out’s. You know, there was no hanky panky going on, and I didn’t even get aroused. I was suppressing it really. She looked at me and started teasing me."
Yoshiko broke away from her American companion, went over to the hot tub, and went in to it. "She went in like a slick eel, but I could see the heat coming out of that water," Sarno remembered. "So I procrastinated. I was still showering when she called me over. She couldn’t pronounce my name right. ‘Clis’, she called me. I tried to correct her pronunciation, but she couldn’t say the ‘r’. She said, ‘Come over here,’ so I did. I rinsed off and was about to stick my foot in when she started screaming, ‘You’ve got soap on you.’ I asked her, ‘So what—what the hell’s the difference?’ I was clean. But she said no soap in the tub. She was teaching me Japanese stuff. I had to go over and rinse off under my feet and everything. So I went over like a little boy. I was a Jap now. I had to rinse off."
Once rinsed off, Sarno returned to the tub’s edge. "It was time to put that foot in the water," he said. "Awww! No way. That stuff was boiling. She started to laugh. She said, ‘You no Maline. You’re scared of water.’ I wasn’t scared of anything. So I put my foot in halfway up to my calf. Whew! I was gritting my teeth, and she was really laughing. ‘You Malines…hot water scare you.’ She called me phony and whatever the hell. So I decided I had to show her up. I stuck both of my legs in. I was just shivering. Shaking. Like I was being electrocuted. I said all I wanted to do was get the hell out of that thing and get some cold water on me. She laughed. She really ranked on me—in a nice way. Finally, I decided that I was going in. I sat down in the boiling water. When that water hit my scrotum, whew. I went straight up in the air like I was going through a loop. I came back down right up to my neck and then back up again like a cork. I couldn’t handle it, but she showed no mercy. She was laughing her ass off, sitting there cool, calm, and collected. I squirmed around and gritted it out. After a while I couldn’t even feel my body, but it was relaxing. A nice flush feeling came over me. We spent about ten minutes in there. It was humid in the room, but coming out of the water was like coming out into air conditioning. I didn’t even feel my skin. It was like velvet. We got our robes on, I put my arm around her waist, and we walked back to the room. I couldn’t even feel my skin, and she kept on laughing."
Back in the room, Yoshiko asked Chris if he wanted a back rub. He had never had one in his life, so he said yes. "I took the robe off and I lay down on my side," Sarno said. "She got behind me and started to rub my back with her fingers. I felt like I had no skin on. It was a feeling like I was smooth all over, like a cat, and it was a great sensation. I almost went to sleep, but she woke me up and said, ‘No sleepy now. Later on tonight I give you best back rub of your life - wow!’" Sarno said that Yoshiko wanted him to buy some civilian clothes. With his thick black hair, a white shirt and navy blue trousers would give him a Japanese look. But Sarno nixed that idea. "I have to say in all honesty," Sarno reflected, "the Japs are racist people in their own right. To them, the Japs are the chosen people." However, Chris Sarno was an American Marine who was proud to wear his uniform. He had no intentions of trading it in to get the ‘Japanese look.’ For 15 or 20 cents, the hotel’s laundry service had already cleaned and pressed his uniform, and that’s what he wore for his first night of R&R in Kyoto.
The couple went to the R&R Hotel. "We took the elevator up to the tenth floor," he recalled. "I can still picture today walking in and seeing the white tablecloths and all the Japanese girls lined up in their uniforms to wait on us. It was a typical restaurant atmosphere with Navy guys, Army guys, Marines, and guys in civvies—all R&R guys. Everybody behaved, and it was a nice feeling." Sarno ordered filet mignon and Japanese beer, but Yoshiko ordered nothing. Yoshiko didn’t like American food and she didn’t drink beer or alcohol, so she just watched her companion eat. "She told me that she was familiar with the R&R Hotel because she had been there with Army GI’s before," Sarno said. "But she said that I was the first Marine that she had gone on R&R with." There was teasing and banter between the two of them during the meal, and Yoshiko sipped orangeade while Sarno ate. When he was finished, they went out onto the streets of the city to find a Japanese meal for her.
"There were Japs all over the street," Sarno recalled. It was not a street for automobiles. It was a narrow pedestrian mall. "The streets were no more than 20 feet wide," he said. "A car couldn’t come down those streets, but carts went up and down them as vendors sold whatever they could to make a buck. I looked all around me, figuring that I would get a knife in the ribs or whatever. She told me to relax and that I was safe. She said that after World War II, the Japanese people didn’t like the Marines at first because of the war, but when they found out that we treated the civilian populace with respect, their opinion of American Marines changed. Some Japanese bowed as they went by us. When I asked her why they did that since I didn’t know them, she said they were being polite. That’s when I started to realize how polite the Japanese people were."
"We stopped in a little wooden place with a mamasan and papasan running it," he continued. "Everything was small in Japan. We sat down at a small table, and I sat in a space where maybe two and a half Japanese people would sit. I found Japanese accommodations to be very tight. Anyway, they had a big steamer and they put a bowl with noodles in it and a piece of cooked fish and a little vegetable. That’s what she wanted to eat. Now it was my turn to watch her eat with the chop sticks. I never mastered chop sticks. Never did. But she did. She brought the bowl of noodles up to just below her mouth and she got those chopsticks going. They were going like a machine gunner—loading, firing, reloading, breaking the jam down quick. She didn’t miss a beat, and she didn’t miss a noodle either. When she finished eating the ingredients, there was liquid left in the bottom of the bowl. When I asked her how she was going to get that out with chop sticks, she took some bread and dipped it in the soupy pot and absorbed all the soup." After she finished eating, Yoshiko and Chris went back to the R&R. They found a seat beside another uniformed Marine and his girl, and enjoyed what remained of the evening, dancing and partaking in the light-hearted atmosphere in the R&R Hotel.
From there Chris and Yoshiko took a rickshaw ride back to the Oriental Hotel and took a quick shower together. "I wasn’t going to get in that tub again," Sarno said. On a Japanese-style bed (a futon mattress on the floor), they enjoyed a night of sex. "And you know," Sarno reflected, "to this day—I spent five nights with her—I can’t remember the sensation of sex with her for some reason. It was like being in Marine Valhalla to me. I was in a situation that I would probably never be in again in my life. I wanted to remember every detail. Instead, I can’t recall the sexual gratification with Yoshiko. Maybe because I wasn’t in love with her. I looked at her like a prostitute. She was doing this simply because there was money involved. I enjoyed it, but it wasn’t long, lingering love. It was just relief. Yeah. I have to be honest with myself. I remember her very clearly. Eventually I even fell in love with her. But at that stage, I wasn’t in love with her. I liked her and we had fun. I enjoyed the sex, but I can’t even recall it."
He does recall his second day of R&R. He and Yoshiko went to a Japanese haberdashery to get Sarno some civilian clothes. "I watched her in action with the Jap salesman," he said. "She reminded me of my mother caring for her brood of kids. She was in control of the sales, and gave the salesman a run for my money. A white shirt, navy blue pants, two silk ties, and white underwear all came to $10.00. She saved me from getting ripped off." Chris and Yoshiko then went to a Cinemascope movie. It was a new technique, and one that the former American movie theater employee had never seen before. The Technicolor movie was by 20th Century Fox, and it starred Richard Widmark. It was the first of two Cinemascope movies that Sarno saw while he was in Japan.
He liked the Widmark movie, but his second trip to the movies in Kyoto ended abruptly and unpleasantly. "It was a western movie about a cavalry officer taking care of a wagon train going through hostile Indian territory. Guy Madison was the star. The co-feature was a black and white kamikaze film—a Jap show," he recalled. "It was a big theater, with mostly Japs and very few G.I.s there," he said. Every time the kamikazes took off, the Japs would start crying. Not loud, but you knew that every time it showed them taking off, the audience was affected. Those guys weren’t coming back. Then it showed a B-29 being shot down. In the next scene, they were picking through the wreckage. All the Japs were cheering. I said to Yoshiko, ‘What’s the story? They’re cheering about killing a man.’ But she just said, ‘Hush, hush.’ You know - she didn’t want me to say anything. But I said, ‘Don’t say anything? What do you mean don’t say anything? Who won the war? America won the war.’ Yoshiko said, ‘Be quiet. Come on, don’t make a fuss.’ But I told her I wasn’t bothering anybody. When the Jap planes took off again in the movie, everybody cried, but I clapped. Clap - clap - clap - clap. Because they were going to get shot down. But she said, ‘Don’t do that. Japanese punchy-punchy.’ I told her that I would punchy, punchy the whole place out in return. She wanted to leave, but I wanted to stay." Reason got the better of Sarno, however. He realized that the room was packed with Japanese and they were all looking at him. If a fight broke out, the MPs would be called and his R&R would be short-lived. "But I was sort of laughing when we left the theater," Sarno said. "I told her that I didn’t understand the Japanese. I stick up for my side and it’s wrong. She sticks up for her side and she’s right." Sarno suddenly realized that American Marines were not the only prejudiced people in this world. The Japanese were prejudiced, too.
In conversations with her, Chris discovered that Yoshiko’s family didn’t fare well during World War II. Born in Osaka, some 20 miles away from Kyoto, she lost a large part of her family in the 1940’s war. Her brother was killed by Marines at Iwo Jima. Her sister was killed in a bombing raid at Osaka, and so were her mother and father. "That’s how she ended up being a prostitute," Sarno explained. "She had a limited education, and without a family, there wasn’t much social acceptance. Family means everything in Japan. Yoshiko said that she could have gone to live with relatives when she lost her family during the war, but she knew that she would always be treated like a poor cousin because she wasn’t a part of the immediate family." She also couldn’t intermarry with an American on occupation duty in Japan. "A stranger coming in wouldn’t be accepted because he was not Japanese," she told Sarno. When he told her that was racist, she pointed out that the same thing would happen if she married an American and then went to live in the States. "The light went on," Sarno said. "I realized that a lot of guys would be calling her a gook or slant eye or whatever." At that point in time, both the Japanese girl and the American Marine realized that they were both prejudiced in their own way. But the respect that they had for each other gave them some middle ground. "We had talks about the USA versus Japan, as both of us were tempered by wartime youths with different approaches of who was right to go to war, Japan or the USA," he said. "We felt akin, yet it took time to mesh as one. We got along great together—her teaching me her ways and me with my ways. It was fun coming together."
From the theater, the two people from different worlds took a walk to the beautiful Heian shrine. Along the way, they bought some ice cream. When the waitress brought the cool treat over to them, Sarno laughed at the small size of the scoop. He ordered five more scoops, telling Yoshiko to translate to the waitress that he needed a "taksan" not a "skoshi" order. "She came over to us giggling, and put the five scoops in front of me," he said. Those five scoops would make two scoops of American ice cream." Sarno treated some nearby Japanese children to ice cream, and in return he received bows of thanks from the youngsters. The more he saw of Japan, the more Chris Sarno came to appreciate the simple way of life, the Japanese people’s obedience to the law, and their cleanliness. "It was a nice, easy day," Sarno recalled. "I remember watching her eyes light up as she taught me her customs. She was a proud Japanese and without vulgarity. I loved her midnight black hair and modern Asian hairdo, her black eyes and oval-shaped face—so unlike the Korean and Chinese moony-shaped faces. I was slowly realizing that the Japanese were the elite of Asians, by far."
Yoshiko wanted to take Chris to meet her sponsors—the people who now took care of her and provided a home for her. "Yoshiko came from the other side of the tracks," Sarno said. "She was working because they were poor. They lived in basically two houses." There were areas for sleeping and cooking, as well as a big wooden hot tub on one side where they bathed every night. "Every night, as poor as they were, they bathed," Sarno remembered. "The North Koreans and the Chinese gooks were dirty rotten bastards. But to the Japanese, cleanliness counted. They were the cleanest people I ever saw in the Orient." Sarno was reluctant to go with her to see her sponsors, because he didn’t want to share her and his time with her with others. But Yoshiko was persuasive. He said he agreed to go with her, but he complained all the way.
The street to Yoshiko’s home was lined with weather-beaten wooden shanties. As Chris and Yoshiko walked down the dirt sidewalk, the side of one of the shanties collapsed in front of them. "All of the sudden," he recalled, "right in front of us, maybe ten feet before we got to it, the side of this guy’s house fell right out on what would be the sidewalk. His whole damn house partition was laying on the side and you could look right into his furnishings. His wife was running around all in a dither, and the little kids were clamoring. He came out on the sidewalk in baggy pants with a cloth belt tied around his waist. He was really poor. He was bowing down almost to his ankles to me as we approached him." Sarno offered to help him put the wood panel back up, but Yoshiko explained to him that the man was embarrassed and didn’t want him to help. "His family members came out and so did the neighbors," Sarno said. "They all put in a pitching hand, but he didn’t want me to touch the house because he was totally embarrassed. It wasn’t that I was a Marine; it was that they were so conscious of infringing on somebody—sort of like the reversal of how we would look at somebody in distress. You know, we’re going to pitch right in."
After detouring around the fallen shanty, Yoshiko and Chris went on their way to Yoshiko’s home. Mamasan greeted them at the door. Two young boys around 10 and 12 years old were also at home. Chris was introduced to the family, and he took off his shoes to enter the main part of the home. Conversation was in Japanese, so Chris had time to look around at his Japanese surroundings. When the phone rang, Yoshiko answered it. After talking for a while, she handed the phone to Chris and told him to say "mushy mushy"—which was the Japanese equivalent to hello. His pronunciation of the words caused a lot of laughter in the household.
In honor of Sarno’s visit to their home, Yoshiko’s "parents" prepared a meal. The children played a board game while the meal was cooked. At some point in time, Sarno had to use the bathroom. Even that simple task was an eye-opener for the American. "There was a bench-like thing that you sat on, and there were openings like a wooden seat," he recalled. "When you had to do a movement, the waste was collected in a drum split in half underneath. When I came out, I asked the boys how long the waste was kept there. They said it was picked up every three days by a guy that came around cleaning out the toilet. They called him the honey bucket man—that was the slang expression for it. When I asked them what they did with the waste, they said the honey bucket man took it to rural areas and sold it to the farmers for fertilizer in the rice fields."
At Camp Fisher, Sarno and the other R&R Marines were warned not to eat the native food because it was grown with human waste fertilizer. Those not used to it generally got diarrhea from eating it. "Mamasan got a big black frying pan and put it on the hibachi," Sarno said. "Using thin, shredded vegetables with thin strips of meat (ox), she cooked something that looked like sukiyaki. The brown sauce and black mushrooms looked great, and it smelled good. She asked me if I wanted to eat and I told her no, but she kept cooking. To me, it looked like Chicago chow mien. Then when she was finished and started serving it, I told her that I wanted some. I hadn’t eaten yet, and I was hungry. I had never eaten with chopsticks before, so I was their entertainment for the night. The food tasted great, and I had a good share of it."
But back at the hotel, Sarno discovered why he should have taken the Camp Fisher warning more seriously. "I got the trots," he said. "I just made it to the head. Now a Japanese hotel didn’t have a toilet. There was a receptacle in the bottom of the tile floor where you had to squat to do your duty. So I had the Japanese splatters and the next thing you know I was sitting in the damn thing. I said to myself, ‘I don’t believe this.’ Back I went into the shower." Yoshiko asked him if he was okay, and Sarno asked her the same thing. The Japanese girl was feeling just fine, and told her American companion that he just had a weak stomach. But Sarno knew it had nothing to do with a weak stomach and everything to do with being stupid. "I was told not to do it, and I did it," he admitted.
While he couldn’t handle the Japanese meal prepared by Yoshiko’s mamasan, Sarno found a breakfast favorite at the Oriental Hotel. "In the Japanese hotel," he said, "there was no American food. The only thing they had was a ham sandwich. But I caught on to their deep-fried tempura. To me, it was like butterfly shrimp—flattened out and in a nice golden brown batter. It was really sweet and tasty. Fresh. You could taste the salt water because it was fresh from the sea. They were about the size of a half dollar, and I used to order a half a dozen for breakfast. It wasn’t as good as the fried clams back home, but I loved fried fish. I drank Burley’s Orangeade when I ate the tempura at the Oriental Hotel." Yoshiko drank orangeade as well, but her breakfast was wafer thin strips of seaweed. "She gave me some to taste," he recalled. "As soon as I got it near my nose and took a whiff of it, Holy Christ. I almost puked. The strong fish odor from that thing—oh my God. I said, ‘No, this isn’t for me.’ Yoshiko ate a boiled egg with it. She put the egg on a little lacquered saucer, broke the yolk, dipped the seaweed in it, and then chewed it. I thought to myself that she must have the stomach of a goat."
Although Chris Sarno cannot remember all the 24/7 events and places that he saw while he was on R&R in Kyoto, he has memories of going to restaurants and cabarets. In one restaurant, he ordered southern fried chicken and tempura. The food was good, and Sarno was introduced to yet another new experience. "Beside the plate," he recalled, "were two white hand towels. There was a rolled up white cloth, and you could see the steam vapors coming up from it. It was hot—very hot and steamy like you find in a barber shop after the barber shaves you. Yoshiko told me that it was to clean my hands, fingers, fingernails, and face before I ate. It was a little hot and humid at night in Kyoto at this time, enough to make you a little uncomfortable. So it felt refreshing to have a nice cool skin and face and real clean fingers before you had a nice meal." He was more than disappointed with the food portions in the restaurant, however. "A half of their chicken was like a chicken leg with a little thing to it in the States," he said. "I asked for two more servings. I guess things were so stringent over there because the food supply was limited. Maybe they weren’t big eaters. I know they were big rice eaters, but I wasn’t going to eat that stuff. To me, that was gook chow. I wanted my American chow."
One other evening, Yoshiko introduced her Marine escort to the owner of a Japanese cabaret. "It was a small, U-shaped alcove with a couple of stools and a little half bar," Sarno recalled. "It only held about 20 people. It was a lot different than going to a cocktail place in the United States. The Japs were small, so when I went in there I was like a bull in a tea shop. I needed some space due to my size." The cabaret owner would not allow Chris to pay for his beer or her orangeade. Chris and Yoshiko stayed there for about a half hour before they went on to the R&R Hotel ballroom. "She was so happy that I came and met her friend," Sarno said. "He bowed very deeply to me to come back."
At the R&R, the young couple danced on the penthouse out in the open. "It was a nice, warm summer’s night," Sarno recalled. "You could look over the city from the penthouse railing and see the railroad station, all the lights, and the different flags on the banners of the city. It was nothing like the States. It was better than the States. Different customs. Different laws. You could do more with a woman there than you’d get arrested in the States for doing. Different social customs. And I liked that difference. "
Generally, Yoshiko wore American-style clothing, but earlier that day, she had asked Chris to buy her a kimono. Although he liked her western look and considered kimonos to be sexless garments, he gave her $25.00 to buy it, along with another $5 to have lunch. "She went out happy as a bee," Sarno said. "I had a filet mignon and brandy alexander lunch at the R&R and went back to the room. In she came wearing the kimono. She looked altogether different. I will always remember that she didn’t say anything. She just stood there and looked at me. Black hair. Shiny. Smiling. She wore a white summer kimono with blue speckled little dots on it with a red obi around her waist. The kimono was up to her neck and right down to her toes. She didn’t look sexy. To me they didn’t project sex—just a kimono doll. But to her, I guess, it was a big deal for her to have it. She said that she wore American clothes, but she was still Japanese. That was okay with me. She looked beautiful. She was very beautiful. I’m glad I bought it for her, because she showed me that she was totally happy in having it. I felt good about myself that I had given it to her because I knew that she was happy. She was beaming. There is something about that moment that still grabs at my heart. I was too dense to realize that she was falling in love with her first Maline. Yoshiko was radiant dancing in that kimono, and having a relationship with her came natural, even though money was involved. We went back to the hotel, and I lost myself in her arms."
While Sarno was the one with the money, Yoshiko was the one with the maturity and the worldly knowledge of intimacy between a man and a woman. "She taught me how to please her rather than please myself," Sarno recalled. "She taught me how to be a lover rather than just ‘wham bam, thank you ma’am, time’s up.’ Being close like that with Yoshiko was long-time love, not short-time love."
That was the day before his R&R was over. It was also the day that Sarno ran out of money. He had turned all of his money over to Yoshiko soon after meeting her. "You see," he explained, "The Japanese woman controls the money in every household. When the husband comes home, he turns over the paycheck to the woman and she runs the household. I gave her about $125 because I cashed my other $75.00 into yen. Why I gave her my money I don’t know. For some reason, I trusted her, not even knowing the background of the Japanese woman controlling the money. But the fourth day was over and I was out of dough. We were living high on the hog before the money ran out. I asked her if she wanted me to leave now that I was out of money and still had one more day to go. But she said that she would pay for everything we did on the last day." What she made off of Sarno she was willing to spend so they could have another night and day together. "I treated her royally," he said. "I gave her everything—every last cent I had. If I had had any money left over at the end of the five days, I probably would have given her the remainder anyway, knowing how tough it was for her to make a living."
That final day together, Sarno wanted to send a present home to the States to a girl who had written him letters while he was in Korea. "She lived about 50 miles from where I lived in Medford," he explained. "There was no romance. She was just a pen pal. We just traded letters. I wanted to send her a geisha doll that cost 25 bucks. Yoshiko showed another side to me now. She said, ‘You’ve got a girl home in the United States and a girl in Japan. Girl home is #1 ichi-ban and I’m #10?’ In Japan, #10 means you’re the worst. #1 means the best. I told her, ‘No, no. You’ve got it all wrong. You’re my #1 and you’re right here.’ But she called me Joe Butterfly. That was a term applied to G.I.s who went from one prostitute to another at their own discretion. I told her that I was no Joe Butterfly—she was the butterfly. She went from G.I. to G.I. She didn’t like me saying that and she got mad. I hurt her feelings. Then I apologized to her because I knew that the expression had saddened her." Sarno asked Yoshiko to pick out something for the girl back in the States. She picked out a Japanese garment, and it was mailed out to her. "She was jealous," Sarno said. "Jap girls are jealous. They figure that if you’re with them, they like you and you like them. That’s it. You aren’t supposed to look at another woman. But I was single. I was a Marine. And I was not in love with her. We had fun together, but I wasn’t looking at her in a serious way." Still, single Marine or not, Sarno did not like the fact that he had hurt her feelings. "I kept reassuring her that she was my #1 ichi-ban Japanese girl. She kissed me on the cheek and I kissed her on the lips and whispered in her ear that she was my #1. When she told me to ‘prove it’, I told her that I would—tonight." She started to laugh, and the tension in the air eased up.
It was not easy for Yoshiko to understand that Chris Sarno’s true #1 mistress was not any woman—whether in Japan or the United States. "I had no Number One girl," Sarno said. "I was in the Marine Corps, I was single, and I would remain single while I was still in the Marine Corps. That way, I didn’t have to expend useless energy worrying about anything else but myself, completing my mission, saving my men, protecting my men under me, and following orders from my commanding officer. The Marine Corps was my mistress." But for just a little while longer, his duties in the Marine Corps were shelved as he enjoyed the final hours of his R&R.
Early in their relationship, Yoshiko had asked Sarno to buy her a kimono. Now Sarno asked her to pick out a gift for him. "She picked out a scrapbook," he said. "It was a big one about 2 ½ feet long and almost 2 feet, four inches wide. I had pictures of Korea and Japan, so it was the perfect keepsake. The cover was a garnet-colored lacquer with a picture of the inland sea. It had the waves and jutting pine trees. It was a really nice gift and I still have it to this day. Every time I open that up, I think of her. It’s still in perfect condition. It is my bridge to R&R and to Yoshiko."
In the final hours of his R&R, Yoshiko went with him in the taxi to Camp Fisher. "I hated to leave Yoshiko," he said. "Before we took the curve to the main gate, she asked me if I wanted to have a final short time [sexual intercourse] with her. Damn right I did, but where? She had a girlfriend who lived near Fisher Main Gate, so we spent a good hour together. Then we strolled to the main gate. About 100 yards from the Marine sentries, she bade me a nice farewell and said that if I came on R&R again to find her. I informed her that it takes six months for R&R to come back for me and I would be home in the USA in three months. When I got to the main gate and looked back, Yoshiko was waving to me with tears in her eyes. I waved back and entered as the sentries shook their heads. I silently said to myself, ‘screw you bastards. I had the time of my life. Now back to Shitsville.’
When his R&R was over, Sarno went back to the drudgery of AT-7. He had wonderful memories that he would never forget of his five-day stay in Japan. "Kyoto was like Shangri-La to me," he recalled. He held on to his memories of it in a tangible way when he got back to the company by flying a white and blue silk flag from the R&R Hotel on his tank. Unfortunately, the lieutenant made him take it down in a few days. "It was a weird, oriental thing," Sarno said. "The big calligraphy symbol on it meant fresh water." Yoshiko hoped that he would come back to Japan for a second R&R, but Sarno had little hope for that possibility. "You could only go on R&R every six months," he said, "and I would be going home in two months."
After he returned to Korea, the tankers in AT-7 were trucked to the central front to "Nightmare Range." Sarno recalled that the area was very rocky with granite ledges jutting up all over the topography, but it was also very verdant with scrub pines. "Nightmare Range was a US Army-operated live fire range with a lot of natural obstructions," he said. "There was daytime training, as well as night military problems to executive versus ‘aggressor’ forces. My lieutenant had me as lead tank on assault one evening. We were attacking a position, using the bow and turret machine guns. I ordered the two gunners to shoot the hell out of whatever looked like a target. The driver had a tough time buttoned up, as boulders were strewn throughout this venue. It was follow the leader, and we were literally shooting up the place with live .30 caliber ammo. My coaxial mounted .30 in the turret started to misfire, and the loader couldn’t correct the mechanism to fire the turret’s .30 caliber machine gun. I got pissed at his ineptness and worked the mechanism manually as the gunner fired away. The gunner was too timid, so I showed the loader how to use the mechanism and I got in the gunner’s seat and shot up the range. We used up all the machine gun ammo. It was my first time back gunning again. The lieutenant was one happy officer as the umpires liked to see a lot of return fire from the tanks. He relied on my combat savvy as I was the only tanker in AT-7 with some."
The "umpires" were made up of Army brass who watched the exercises intently to see how the team adjusted to certain problems facing them. "It was a 24/7 war," Sarno recalled, and it was not without its unexpected events. One night, for instance, a Reconnaissance unit discovered four rice paddy queens doing business in the weeds with GI’s. They were flushed out from an area right in the middle of the combat exercises. "I didn’t get laid by those US Army area rice-paddy bimbos," Sarno said. "After my R&R in Japan, I became very particular where I dipped my wick."
Another night, AT-7 and the 2/7 Marines tied in together and were hit by the aggressors. "I was lead tank," Sarno recalled. "Prior to going in to one area, I had talked to the grunt sergeant and told him to have a runner alert me if we needed to pull back. I didn’t want to get overrun and captured in the exercise. Not long after, the whole area was alive with small arms fire [blanks]. When I ran towards the grunt line of defense, I found no Marines at all. They had withdrawn without letting us in on the movement. I was still snooping and pooping to link up with grunts when an aggressor leveled his M-1 at me for capture. I threw a rock at him and made it back to my tank. We withdrew, shooting up a lot of boxes of blank ammo as now the aggressors were all over the tank and 2/7 Marine grunts."
AT-7 and the 2/7 Marines had a USMC critique as to why all of them got overrun and captured. "I was pissed at the fact that no grunt runner told us to shag ass," Sarno said. "We were eating rations with 2/7 grunts when I rushed the grunt sergeant who had given his word to tell us if they were withdrawing so we couldn’t get overrun. He screwed us but good. I went face to face with him and we tangled assholes before a bunch jumped in to break it up. I just wanted his men to see how he bayoneted my crew without passing the word that the aggressors broke through. A lot of these non-combatant Marines lacked battlefield smarts. After I chewed him out, I doubt if that grunt sergeant ever again forsook Marines who depended on him."
Then the unexpected happened. "By hook or crook, something came up in the company and nobody wanted to go on R&R that month. So I went back to Japan before the six months was up in order to fill the allotment." This time he took the company tank driver with him on R&R, and, as he had promised, he looked Yoshiko up again. "I found Yoshiko for honeymoon #2," he said. "She was in my blood, but I didn’t know it until after four months home as a civilian."
"I had five more days with her," he said. "This time I let her take charge of the whole setup. We went to a Japanese hotel in a suburban area." One night, after an evening of dancing and three brandy alexanders at the R&R hotel, Sarno passed out on the elevator as it came down from the tenth floor ballroom. "It must have been the brandies," Sarno said. "As soon as that elevator went down, I was just like a bowl of jelly. I remember somebody splashing cold water on me. I said, ‘It’s cold. It’s cold. It’s cold.’ My buddy, Lorne Bayliss of West Virginia, was splashing me with the water. He got scared because I wouldn’t come to. When we got back to the Jap hotel, he took me in the shower room and hit me with cold water to revive me. I remember puking out of the window." The next day, Yoshiko got the bad news that the group had been kicked out of the hotel because Sarno threw up out of the window. Sarno was angry with himself for causing them to have to move. That hotel was a nice one. The one they moved to was called the Sakura (meaning Cherry Blossom). "But it wasn’t a Cherry Blossom," Sarno said. He doesn’t remember too much about that second R&R. "The first one was very impressionable to me," he said.
On the third morning of his second R&R, Yoshiko got a call from her Papasan, requesting that she return to the house for a while that day. Through Yoshiko’s closest friend Margie, Chris found out that Papasan wanted Yoshiko to rid herself of the American Marine, and to replace him with an Army veteran who had also returned to Kyoto on a second R&R, and who had also sought out Yoshiko for a second good time. Chris only had two more days of R&R, while the Army guy had more days than that. Yoshiko could make an extra two days’ pay if she dumped Chris for the Army guy. Margie might have had an ulterior motive by informing Sarno of Yoshiko’s rendezvous with another potential customer. Margie was more than a little attracted to Sarno herself, and told him that her Marine was not a good dancer, a little cheap, and not so hot under the sheets. "She had designs on me," Sarno said, "but when Yoshiko came back she chased Margie out like a banshee." Yoshiko had turned the Army guy’s offer down, choosing instead to stay with her "Clis" until his R&R was over.
When he first learned that Yoshiko was considering a business proposition with an Army guy, he was annoyed. "I wasn’t in love with her on R&R," Sarno said, "but I was infatuated with living with her. The fact that she was a prostitute never bothered me at all. If she had gone off with the Doggie, I would have made Papasan give me Horiko-san, another stunning looking ‘business girl’. I saw her briefly at the house and we just exchanged polite hellos, but she was nice, too. When in Japan, do as the Japanese do. You must comprehend the essence of the times—living with war and thinking of death at hand, I lived for the moment at hand, and that was a heady existence. Even after the truce was signed, Korea was a mess. Life was cheap and the future looked very bleak. I didn’t give two red cents when the Koreans would ever get back to pre-war days. Korea is to this day a most volatile country. At the time I went on R&R to Japan, I wanted a slice at gratification. If I had to pay for a girl, so be it. It was a business deal."
In writing his memoirs, Sarno said that he wanted his R&R episodes in his profile because it is generally Korea veterans seldom discuss what went on in Japan or Korea when Korean War GI’s went on liberties." "I was a single Marine and had no guilt hooking up with a prostitute" he said. "Ninety-nine percent of the GI’s in Japan/Korea acted exactly like me. If readers find it sordid or depraved, no sweat. That is what transpired on R&R—the truth. It was the tenor of the times."
It was now the last of July, and time for Chris Sarno to leave Marine Valhalla in Japan and return to Korea once more. There was an inter-island mail setup between Japan and Korea, so Chris and Yoshiko corresponded back and forth until it was time for him to leave in November.
In August, Sarno and the Marines of AT-7 and the 7th Marine Regiment participated in an amphibious training exercise called Marlex. "The US Marine Corps never rested with crapout time," Sarno said. "It wanted to keep its troops abreast of the latest techniques in amphibious landings." To do that, the 7th Marine Regiment, along with elements of the KMC Regiment, were drilled with amphibious training exercises.
During Marlex, Sarno was a tank commander in the Anti-Tank Company. Five M-46A1 Patton tanks, along with the grunts of the 75 mm recoilless rifle platoon, arrived at the port city of Inchon for the amphibious training exercise. "This Marlex was of some magnitude and scope, complemented by elements of the Korean Marine Corps unit," Sarno explained. "The sea was heavy, and the AT tankers became green-faced on its transport—a small, bouncing LCM. Because of her flat bottom, the small craft fought each swell on the white-capped sea. The night was long and hardly any of us slept. Because of the constant buffeting, a lot of gyrenes were puking their guts out." When daybreak came, several LST’s and LCM’s were clustered in a central area on the Yellow Sea. "There was no morning chow call aboard this boat," Sarno recalled, "so the lieutenant let us tear into our C-rations stashed alongside of the sponson boxes. While chowing down, we all wondered when we would get the signal to launch the amphibious assault. The surge of the tide was moving the vessel towards a low, silhouetted, but green island, with a nice sandy beach front."
Sarno said that the skipper of the LCM was the storybook personification of a salty Navy Chief. "He bellowed orders to anyone and everyone," Sarno remembered. "It was crystal clear that he knew what the hell he was doing, so we felt secure under his nautical guidance." He dropped anchor about 200 yards off the island. "The sea had remained choppy, and a cold wind was blowing in from the north," Sarno said. "Our lieutenant was always aloof and seldom asked his NCO’s about anything. He had always been a grunt officer, and really had no training with tanks at all. He approached me and whispered, ‘Sarno, you’ve been in combat and done this before. What do you suggest?’ I shot back, ‘Hey skipper. If we don’t have to send the tanks ashore, then don’t send them in.’" Sarno said that the lieutenant thought over Sarno’s suggestion, and then did just the opposite. "I want a Marine tank on that gook island," the lieutenant demanded.
Tank 73 was guided by four Navy frogmen over the water and to the beach. "Soon 73 tank was racing up and down that beach wide open, having a helluva ride for all to see," Sarno said. The men aboard ship were watching the scene with shared binoculars, and the lieutenant was also watching with his own pair. "He was grinning from ear to ear," Sarno said. "Finally, he ordered 73 tank back to its LCM. The fun was over. We continued to watch 73 tank on its return trip, only this time there were but two Navy frogmen with the tank. Suddenly, about 100 yards from the beach, 723 tank sank out of sight almost immediately. The tank had gone off a sandbar and disappeared under the salty brine. ‘Holy ----‘ was on all of our lips when fortunately all five crewmen surfaced. They were eventually rescued by the Navy in rubber rafts. Quickly, we glanced over to our lieutenant, and he was ramrod straight with that thousand yard stare on his chalk-like face." A few days later, only four tanks returned to the AT-7 command post in the Samichon Valley. "We heard later that our CO, Captain Saunders, ripped the field telephone off the bulkhead of his bunker and shattered it to bits on the deck upon receiving a call from headquarters," Sarno said. "He was not happy to learn that his AT company had the dubious stigma of losing a $300,000.00 combat-loaded tank." The next day, the inexperienced lieutenant who had given the order to land the tank in choppy water, was seen being driven away in an MP jeep down the long, dusty road to Regiment.
The Marlex training came just four months before the end of Sarno’s second tour of duty. At the end of November, his time was up and he headed back to the States. By the time that he rotated out of AT-7 on November 22, 1954, it was getting cold, since winter came to the Korean peninsula sooner than it did in the States. "I remember as the USNS Brewster was cruising past the home island of Japan in the inland sea," Sarno said. "The oriental scenery was majestic. I whispered a sayonara to Yoshiko over and over until the horizon was filled with just the Pacific Ocean. I never thought that I would ever see her again."
Upon his return to the States, Chris Sarno signed up at the unemployment office. "I was entitled to $26 a month. I could have taken the entire 26 week handout, but I got a city job at $55 a week after 13 months of unemployment. I worked for the city of Medford until September of 1957, when I was hired to do general factory work at a lacquer plant in Medford."
Chris started writing to Yoshiko maybe three or four months after he got home as a civilian. "I missed her," he said, "and I had a hard time readjusting to the puritan dating social code of my country. She responded right away. She had an interpreter write for her. His name was Taro, and he liked me. We got along great. We exchanged letters for a couple of years, and I used to send Yoshiko and her family clothes. On several occasions I bought dresses to send to her. One was a pure white lacy dress that I bought in a Boston fashion store for $45.00. I just knew that she would look good in it. She sent a picture of herself wearing it. She was just beautiful with her black hair and white pumps."
Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and Sarno’s feelings for the Japanese girl grew stronger, even though they were thousands of miles apart from each other. "I told her that I was falling in love," he said. "I thought about it before I wrote professing my love for her. She said that she was in love with me, too. Come Christmas time in 1955, I proposed to her, and I told her that she had to stop being a "business girl." She agreed. I started to send her $25 a month to help her out—that was 10,300 yen in those years." The couple made tentative plans to get married as soon as he could save the $2,000 that was needed to get him back to Kyoto to bring Yoshiko to America. "I saved like Silas Marner thereafter," he said. He also spoke to his mother about marrying Yoshiko. "I requested her to help Yoshiko when the day came that I brought her to the USA. I saw hurt in her eyes, and she wanted me not to do it," he said. "My mom was never my enemy, but she wasn’t for a marriage between Yoshiko and me. She cited all the racial differences from World War II and the Korea years. Prejudice was still rampant here in Boston. My mom wanted me to marry an American girl. I never brought up Yoshiko again to my mother. I sought out my Dad about a Japanese-American marriage. He, too, painfully thought it wouldn’t turn out right. He said I should marry an American girl."
Concerned in a fatherly and motherly way for their son’s attraction to a Japanese girl, Chris’ parents nevertheless placed every letter that Yoshiko sent to him on his bedroom bureau on the third floor without fanfare. "I was totally in love with Yoshiko now," Sarno said. "It came easily from my heart. I asked her to chat with a Japanese Catholic priest about learning to become a Catholic. She tried, but without success. I wondered about that a lot." Chris even visited an Army GI and his new Filipino bride. "They were in heaven and in love," he said. "I thought of Yoshiko on the way home from their house. My pal knew how I felt about Yoshiko, and I told him of my family’s opposition to such an interracial marriage. He was in my corner, but was in complete surprise when I broke down crying at my inner turmoil. He was totally speechless, and I apologized to him for the show of emotions. There was really no need to apologize, however, as my Army pal was a damn good friend."
Sarno continued to work and save to bring Yoshiko to the USA. "I did my best to save dough," he said. "I worked and then came home to eat and sleep. I also did a lot of reading on Japan." One day, he casually told a coworker that he planned to marry a Japanese girl. The news of this ended up with the boss. Later that day, the boss took Sarno aside and kindly told him to reconsider all the ramifications of an interracial marriage. He felt that his young employee, unaware of what marriage entails, would be making a mistake to marry a Japanese girl. "It made no impression on me," Sarno said. "I knew Yoshiko like no one else did. I wanted her for my wife." However, hesitation set in deep into 1957 when Yoshiko stopped her usual two letters a month to Chris. He didn’t hear from her for four weeks, and although she apologized to him for the time lapse, Chris accused her of going back to being a "business girl." She denied it, and they kept writing.
But then, Sarno began to seriously reflect on the possible consequences of having children in an interracial marriage. "I had to write to her and say I had a change of heart," he said. "I couldn’t do it. She and I could probably have made it, but once we had children and my daughter or son came to me when they were ten years old and said, ‘Dad, somebody at school called me a gook,’ that would have crushed me. I told her that for that reason I wasn’t going to marry her. It wasn’t that I didn’t love her. I just couldn’t handle that aspect of being married to her. I was being honest with her and she said that she understood the racial differences. I broke it off with her and we didn’t write to each other any more after 1957."
Once back in the States and out of the Marine Corps, Chris Sarno became just an average American Joe again. "I dated local girls that I had no intention of having a sexual relationship with. I had seen the difference in the more liberal society towards sexual activity—they accepted what we frowned on. But now I was back in the way I was brought up. I didn’t like going back to the American way, but I had to do it. I was a Roman Catholic, living with my family of brothers, sisters, and parents like nothing had changed. I was a Marine, but for my family, Junior was home. When I married an American girl in 1958, I wrote and told Yoshiko. I didn’t write to make her feel sad. I just wanted her to know what was going on in my life. She wrote back and told me that she was very, very happy that I was happy. She wished me luck and told me that she wished it was her that I was marrying, but she had no hatred in her heart for me."
The Japanese girl’s future was bleak at best. With her parents dead from the ravages of World War II, Yoshiko was relegated to second class citizenry in post-war Japan. She was an outcast in the family-oriented Japanese society. "The people that she was staying with said that she was saddened that we never got together," Sarno said. "When my first child was born in July of 1960, I got a letter from her interpreter. He knew there was a big absence in our writing, but he liked me. He wanted me to know that Yoshiko had committed suicide. She left a note telling them to write to me and tell me that she still loved me, and that she hoped that my wife and I would enjoy our married life together. She also said that she didn’t hate me at all." She said that she wasn’t a prostitute anymore, but Sarno doubted that. "Because when you prostitute in Japan," he said, "they buy you to become a prostitute. They actually own you because they paid money to somebody for you to become a prostitute for the house. They had a way of keeping the girl in that bondage. She couldn’t pay her way out. They just made that impossible, even though she might save a phenomenal amount of money, say that she doesn’t want to be a prostitute anymore, and try to buy her way out."
Whether or not Yoshiko had been a prostitute would not have mattered to Chris if they had married. "Had I not gone to live with my family," Sarno reflected, "I probably would have married Yoshiko in spite of myself. But being back in a rigid lifestyle, I just fitted back in." Besides, Sarno noted, regardless of his personal feelings for the Japanese girl, interracial marriage was not accepted in 1954. "I don’t care how it’s looked upon today," he said. "In 1954 or 1955, it wouldn’t work. I truly believe that, even though I might have broken her heart, it was the best thing in those years. I wouldn’t have wanted to see my wife cry because of prejudice against her. You can’t go out socially and take on the whole world, because it’s going to happen the next time and the next time, and it’s not going to go away. Where are you supposed to run away and hide? In the woods? That’s no way to live." Still, Chris Sarno remains very sentimental to this day about the Japanese beauty that he fell in love with so many decades ago. "I regret that I did not marry her," he said. "I know she would have been loyal and eternally happy with me—poor or rich.
When Chris Sarno received his honorable discharge from the Marine Corps, he considered attending Boston University. He took the preliminary test, but his scores were weak. Advisors recommended that he attend prep school for two years, and if his scores were higher, he could finish his junior and senior year at BU. "I walked away from that," Sarno said. Instead, he bought his first car with the money he had saved in his last year in the Marine Corps. "It was a 1950 Pontiac convertible," he reminisced. "Convertibles are glitzy cars, but when you’re driving with the hood down in the sun, you roast like a peanut and you get road grit all over you. I’ll never own another convertible as long as I live."
Although he had a fancy car when he got out of the service, his job wasn’t as flashy. "I had no trade. No skills," he said. "I worked a lower echelon job, receiving basic pay, for the city of Medford for about a year. Then I got a job in a paint factory in my home town. When I went to Korea, I was making 75 cents an hour in a furniture bedding factory. Five years later I made a dollar an hour as a factory laborer working 5 ½ days a week. It allowed me to get a newer car, but that’s all. I could get a car, but that was the end of my money pool. If I had any wild ideas of settling down and getting married, I couldn’t even support a family. I worked that job for two years and eventually made $85 a week. It was a small, Jewish-owned six or seven-man outfit. I remember that every Christmas they gave us a nice bonus. It didn’t make me rich, but they did give us a bonus commensurate with our status at the factory. The two years I was there, I daydreamed at my job. It was monotonous and so dull to me that I knew I didn’t want to stay there. I felt that I could so something much more important, but I didn’t have the initiative to pursue it. I was more or less waiting for things to happen."
But he did take the preliminary test to become an officer on the local police force. After passing the test, he was hired in 1958 as a patrolman on the Medford Police Department. The pay was the same as his paint factory job--$85.00 per week. "But I had medical benefits," Sarno said, "and I didn’t have to pay into social security. They had a state-run retirement fund that we paid every week, but no money was ever taken for social security." There was no formal training to become an officer at that time, Sarno said. "I was handed a .38 revolver and a billy club, and placed under the supervision of veteran night officers for two weeks. I was to observe them and see how they handled all the different kinds of situations that cropped up."
He thought that being on the Medford police force would have a more military flavor to it, but he assumed wrong on that. "It was a very lax outfit," he said. "It was strictly civilian oriented." As time went by, he saw political corruptness in the department, as well as thieves working within the department. "I worked the midnight to 8 a.m. shift. Medford didn’t have an all-night place to socialize, but there were places that stayed open until around 2 a.m. No liquor was served in these places, but at the town’s eateries and doughnut shops, there was always an element of people who habitually circulated there. There were single (and married) women who were attracted to ‘the uniform’—and it didn’t matter whether a single or a married police officer was wearing it. "There was a lot of temptation being a night police officer," Sarno said. "I was young and single. I never succumbed to them because my father had been with the department for twenty years. He had a good name and I was still living at home." Chris was determined not to tarnish the Sarno name on the police force or to be an embarrassment to his father. "I was a straight cop," Sarno said. "An honest cop, I was never involved in corruption and I was never on the take."
He was a different kind of officer than his father was, however. "My father never made an arrest in the 40 years he was a police officer," Sarno explained. "He was the old-fashioned type ‘good’ cop that everybody knew. I was a good cop, too, but I was more aggressive than my father. I made plenty of arrests in my 23 years on the force—whether it was a drunk or a felon." He liked being a police officer, but he was disappointed that it wasn’t run in a more military fashion. "It was worse than an Army outfit," Sarno said. "Most of the department was Irish, but about 30 percent of the younger, incoming officers were Italian kids. Eastern Massachusetts was predominantly a huge Irish settlement, and the Irish on the Medford police force didn’t want to relinquish their hold as an all-Irish department. There was a little racial friction there. Generally it was good-natured, but sometimes a fight broke out over differences of opinions."
Honest cops on the Medford police force had to be dedicated to their jobs, and they also had to understand that they were on their own when it came to making decisions about actions that might or might not backfire on them. "In the Marine Corps," Sarno explained, "if a good Marine crossed the line and screwed up, he was always given one more chance by the commanding officer. ‘Okay, so you made a mistake. You’re a good Marine. So don’t do it again.’ But in the Medford police department, if you made a mistake, you would hang for it. You could be sued or you could be the subject of ridicule. There was not that camaraderie on the police force. You did police work for eight hours and then you went your own way until your next shift. It took me a while to realize that. You were on your own basically. If you didn’t want to get in trouble, don’t do anything."
As a case in point, Sarno said that two young kids once stole a car while Sarno was on duty. "We pursued the stolen car into a neighboring city at a high rate of speed," he recalled. "The fellow I picked up started shooting at the car, knowing well enough that we didn’t have enough probable cause to use the weapon. He took a couple of shots at the car anyway, but he never hit it. The car eventually went out of control in another city’s main center, demolishing a newsstand, careening across the boulevard, and resting against a telephone pole." The kids were banged up a bit, and during the booking process one of them collapsed. He was taken to the hospital.
When his shift was over, Sarno went home. At 4 p.m. the next day, the night division captain called Sarno into his office and raked him over the coals for the events of the night before. Sarno, who was driving a one-man car when the pursuit took place, had erred by picking up an extra police officer to assist him. Sarno felt that it was better to have the odds in his favor when trying to apprehend a suspect. Unfortunately, a stray shot from the fellow officer’s gun had gone through the front window of a funeral parlor, and the business owner demanded that the city pay $200 to replace the window. "This captain was a bigoted Irish guy from day one," Sarno said. "’Let me give you a tip, he told me. ‘You’re a good, young officer, but you’ve got to realize that the less you do, the better off you’re going to be. Let somebody else chase a stolen car. You do nothing, but you do it well.’" Sarno admitted that, "A lot of cops followed that trend. They got real lazy on the job. You do nothing, you last longer, and nobody’s going to bother you. Some of them spent 20 years avoiding all kinds of basic police duties. Some who got in a bad rut lost their jobs for not performing." The rut was not for Sarno. He angered the captain by talking back to him and informing him that he would not avoid his responsibilities as a police officer. If he saw a crime taking place, Sarno intended to act. "I hated that captain from that moment on," Sarno said. In spite of the animosity between the two officers, however, Sarno was cited four times by the department, all under that particular Irish chief.
Where many others on the police force opted to avoid an aggressive stance as police officers, Sarno silently (and publicly) decided to do things his way: when he saw a crime, he was determined to do his best to stop it. "In 1958, I started with the cruisers," he said. The previous police chief liked Chris, so much so that he put him in a night cruiser car. It was a steady assignment, and a good one. When the "bigoted Irish police chief" came into power, Sarno was bumped off of the cruiser and became a bouncer—not assigned to one sector, but bounced between two cruisers for two nights here and two nights there. "It was a slap in my face," Sarno said, "but I took it." He was replaced in his old sector by "guys that would play ball with the police chief."
A few years later, he requested a walking beat. "In those days," he said, "there were more walking beats than there was cruiser duty. It was a lot easier. You’d go on the walking beat for eight hour, hitting a call box once an hour. Inside of that hour there was no contact between you and the station. Walking officers had to check all the stores on their particular routes. To miss a break-in during their tour of duty could result in being run up on charges. But the job was better for an evening social life, as well as for a man who was also raising a family at the time. "I was a very aggressive officer," Sarno said. "I didn’t go out of my way to hurt people, but if I knew that somebody had stepped over the line and deserved to be arrested, they did get arrested. I didn’t arrest people just for the sake of having power over somebody legally. No. If anything, I would make sure the guy hung himself before I decided he was well over the line." As a walking officer who only had to report in to headquarters every hour, Sarno had more relaxed moments than being on call in a cruiser. "But you were out in the elements now, too," he said.
On January 13, 1971, his walking beat started out as it ordinarily did, but it ended in an extraordinary way. That day, he was destined to be in the right place at the right time to stop a bank robbery. Sarno happened to be in the back alcove of a branch bank of the Medford Savings Bank when two men made the unfortunate decision to rob it. "I was a route officer in the Italian area of Medford, and one of my duties as a patrolman in the neighborhood was to be there when the kids got out of school at the end of the day. One very cold January day, it was about ten above zero. The bank nearby had an alcove that served as a break room for the bank employees, and they always had tea and cookies there. The assistant manager was a friend of my mother, so I went into the alcove that day to get warm. I took off my jacket and was having a cup of tea. Just recently the bank had installed a security device—a small TV monitor with audio. You could see right down the line of the four tellers from the back area. I was sipping my tea and watching it, when I heard a conversation between the customer and the teller. He said, ‘Give me all the money you’ve got.’ I looked at the screen thinking, ‘Who’s this wise guy?’ That’s when I saw his hand gun. I said, ‘Oh shit. This guy means business.’ I scanned the screen to see if there were other guns so I would know what I was up against." The break room was only about ten yards away from where the robber stood, but there was no back door. If Sarno came out the door, he would be right beside the nearest teller. "The only thing I had going for me was the element of surprise," he recalled. "That was always drilled into us in the Marine Corps. If you can gain an element of surprise, you’ve got a great chance of being successful against the enemy."
The enemy turned out to be not one robber—but two, and both were wielding guns. One was at the entrance, and the other had a gun on a teller. Sarno came out of the break room with gun in hand. "When I pulled the trigger," Sarno said, "I had his whole face in front of the muzzle of my gun. But when he saw the gun, he started to go straight down. I fired right through that thick plate glass, and I heard this ungodly scream. I figured I must have blown this guy’s head off and he would now be laying in a pool of blood." Sarno knew that he was in the line of fire from the robber at the entrance. But rather than shooting at Sarno, the robber took a fast exist. When Sarno came around the counter, he discovered that the plate glass had deflected the bullet aimed at the robber. Sarno had only hit him in the hand rather than in the face. The robber crawled out through the front door, and both he and his partner in crime took off in different directions. The uninjured, would-be thief drove by in a car. Sarno got the license number, and quickly phoned it and a detailed description of the robbers in to headquarters. "No sooner was it broadcast to all the detective cars and inspector cars than the driver of the getaway car was apprehended," he said. In the meantime, the wounded robber had joined up with a female accomplice, and they were trying to get a cab when the department received a tip from a local resident regarding two suspicious people. Two officers got into a cab and picked them up."
When the mobile criminal, fleeing from the scene in an automobile, was stopped, it was discovered that he was "The Pig"—a hardened criminal from East Boston. A criminal all of his life, he had been in and out of the state prison for robbery. When officers tried to arrest him, he reached for his revolver. One of the policemen, a paratrooper from World War II, fired at the suspect at close range and the bullet went right through his neck, killing him. The other suspect was booked for bank robbery and other criminal acts associated with the robbery.
Sarno had to go to the station and file a report. "But before I did that," he said, "they sent me upstairs away from the reporters. They didn’t want me to say anything that might jeopardize the legalities of the court case that would be coming up against this guy." In came the "Irish bigot chief of police," Sarno recalled. "He came towards me sort of smiling. I had been on the job twelve years now. I hated him and he hated me. I figured that he was going to compliment me." Instead, Sarno didn’t receive that expected accolade. A couple of days prior to that, the street sergeant ordered the patrolmen to tag each and every car on their route that was in violation of the city’s overnight parking ordinance. Sarno’s route happened to be the one where the chief of police resided. The chief’s car was one of two cars that Sarno ticketed. Sarno based his decision to ticket the chief on the fact that the other ticketed car owner would not be happy if he got a ticket but the chief of police didn’t get one for the same violation done at the same time. The chief of police thought that Sarno had ticketed him at the urging of the street sergeant. The chief and the street sergeant were on bad terms with each other. "I told him that it was strictly my doing," Sarno said. "He was in violation, so I tagged it."
Sarno said that he had enjoyed writing the ticket. "The chief took care of about ten men in the department," he said, "and the other hundred could die or something as far as he was concerned. He had complete control of the police force. He was the old-fashioned chief that did it the hard way. If he didn’t like how you were doing things, you had to do them the way he did them twenty years ago. There was no union at the time--no police brotherhood or anything. None of this collective bargaining. The chief was like a dictator. Even the mayor left him alone so they could be on good terms. The chief had a fiefdom over his own men. If he didn’t like you, he buried you on the midnight shift, and there was nothing you could do about it." Sarno’s act of defiance was a legal one. In fact, it was an official order: issue tickets to all violators. As far as Sarno was concerned, the chief of police wasn't too good or too special to receive a ticket if he happened to be one of those violators. With news of the foiled bank robbery permeating the department, the chief of police’s inquiry regarding the parking ticket didn’t phase Sarno. "I could care less at that stage," he said. "I knew I was sitting pretty. I was the fair-haired boy right at the moment."
The local news media and the politicians made a big deal out of the fact that Medford officers had interrupted a bank robbery in progress. After ten years in his high-ranking office, the Irish police chief was due to retire in a couple of months. Because the attempted robbery was foiled, he exited his law enforcement career in a blaze of glory. The state’s attorney general came to Medford, and a huge luncheon for all the police officers involved in stopping the bank robbery was held. The officers were awarded the Medal of Valor, which was the police department’s highest award. Each of them also got two weeks off with pay at a future date. Sarno got renewed respect from his fellow officers. They considered his initial efforts to stop the attempted robbery to be heroic. The Boston papers carried stories about how great it was to have a good police force and good law enforcement.
The local VFW honored Sarno as "Citizen of Medford" for doing what he did to stop the holdup. "I got a big write-up in the local paper," Sarno said. "Patrolman Sarno wins the Medal of Valor." For his part in the bank robbery foil, as well as for coming to the aid of Alexander Ritchie, a member of the Medford Fire Department who was stricken ill at home and survived thanks to mouth-to-mouth resuscitation by Sarno, Patrolman Sarno was also nominated by the same local VFW Chapter for the J. Edgar Hoover Gold Medal Award. His career as a Medford police officer was as shiny as his badge.
Before retiring, Sarno switched jobs once again. He decided to go to traffic division, and he found that he liked it. "I was around people all the time," he recalled. "It was day shift work, so I got to see and know the people who frequented the square and other areas of my route. The job had a lot of diversity. I had conversations with the people, and I liked that." One eventful day, however, Sarno was temporarily pulled from his walking route to fill in as a cruiser officer. He wasn’t happy about the change in his routine.
Sure enough, right off the bat there was an incoming call over a husband and wife problem. "In those days," he said, "that was a shit call. It wasn’t called domestic violence. It was a civil problem. If we broke up the problem, we just recommended that they get a lawyer to help them out of the situation. If we didn’t see any blows delivered and if nobody appeared to be seriously hurt, we couldn’t arrest anyone. If it wasn’t a criminal matter, our hands were tied." On this particular day, the "husband and wife problem" resulted in a major injury—not to the fighting couple, but to Officer Sarno.
"It was the basic yelling and screaming at one another when we arrived," Sarno said. "I told the other officer that I would take the husband and he could take the wife. We needed to separate them and get them to calm down. We calmed the husband down, but the wife was out of sorts. She attacked her husband, so we got in the middle to try to break them up." The fighting moved from inside the apartment to the top of the stairway. In the scuffle with the wife, Sarno was tossed down the stairs. "When push came to shove," he said, "I was down the stairs doing somersaults. My back was seriously injured. I could walk, but I couldn’t walk straight up. I didn’t have a herniated disc, but I had damage to the connections between a couple of my lower disks. As a result, I was in and out of the hospital frequently. I was never the same after that. I couldn’t even put my gun belt on without it starting the pain in my back. I couldn’t perform my duty, and in those days there was no such thing as having light duty. You either came back and did street duty, or else forget it. Within two years they decided to put me on the involuntary disabled list. I was 48 years old when I was discharged from the police force with a restricted pension."
After he went on disability, Chris Sarno passed a lot of his time at the Wonderland Greyhound Park, which was a prominent race track. "I wasn’t a big bettor," he said, "but I liked the glamour of the sport." Around the back area of Wonderland, he got to know the different kennel operators and owners. The operators leased dogs from owners. They ran the dog and gave a percentage of the winnings to the owners. The owner of Paul Discolo Kennel, a number one kennel, noticed Sarno because he used to be around the track working the dogs in the morning. "He asked me if I wanted a limited job in his kennel, but I didn’t want the kennel work," he said. "Greyhounds are on a strict regimen 24 hours a day. A kennel worker has to be there for the greyhounds to let them out to relieve themselves, as well as to feed them. Everything has to be done at the exact same time every day and night, and the dogs become acclimated to that schedule. If the schedule doesn’t happen, the dogs freak out. They have no patience. They know when it is time to go out and take a leak. Why isn’t he here to let me go out? Or, it’s time to go to sleep or it’s time to go to the race track. It’s like the dogs have a time clock in their body. I didn’t want to be tied down like that." But Sarno told the owner that he would pick up the dogs after the night races and care for them. The job involved bringing them back to the kennel, feeding them, putting them up, and cleaning them off. "That’s how I got the general knowledge of how the kennels operated," Sarno explained.
For 16 years (1976-1992), Sarno was involved in greyhound racing in one form or another. From 1980 to 1984, he worked for Dicolo Kennel, taking care of the dogs under his care in a professional manner. He didn’t gamble and he didn’t smoke, as some of the high school graduates who worked at Wonderland were wont to do. "They sometimes got rough with the dogs," Sarno said. "I was different. All my attention was given to those five or six dogs at night. It got back to the owners through the trainers that I was doing my job and doing it well. I didn’t mingle with the trainers. I was cordial to them, but I didn’t sit down with them at the track. I always sat down away from everybody, ready to pick up my next entry. Most of the trainers were always together and goofing off to bet. They were in their own community. I worked at the track, but I lived in my own house. I wasn’t in their social structure at all, and I didn’t want to be."
Sarno and a partner got involved in the ownership side of the racing business when they pooled their funds 50/50 to purchase two greyhounds out of a Mexican track. "We put up the money for these two pups," Sarno said, "and they panned out pretty good. Buying a dog now opened a whole new world of some good acquaintances and a lot of competitive enemies. All of us were in quest of purse moneys by winning races. I was finally my own boss and was successful in a business designed to failure because of its competitiveness."
His next venture as a greyhound owner proved even more lucrative. He purchased an expensive dog from a small track in Arizona. A favorite to win in Arizona, Sarno’s dog caused a big stir of interest among the bettors and spectators at Wonderland. In 1981, Wonderland was at its apex. "Every night there were record crowds of three or four thousand people," Sarno recalled. His new dog, Tennessee Annabelle, was a public favorite due to the publicity that had been generated out of Wonderland after her schooling (first run) successes at the east coast track. As she won run after run, she became a heavy favorite among the crowds. "The people wanted to ride the star," Sarno said. "The public was enraptured with Tennessee Annabelle. She was the darling of the betting public now." She went on to win ten consecutive races, breaking the track record for consecutive races won by a speeding greyhound. "She was a sweetheart," Sarno said. "She was just a natural winner, bred for speed. She went on to win 17 races out of 20, and then she got hurt. She tore a muscle and she couldn’t race anymore, but that summer she was queen of the track. She came out of the clouds and stole the bettors’ fancy."
After her injury, Tennessee Annabelle was put on a farm to brood puppies. She gave her owners four litters in the next ten years. Going against conventional breeding methods, Sarno bred Tennessee Annabelle with an Irish greyhound named Minnesota Vote. Their beautiful, well-built offspring were "master race greyhounds," according to Sarno. Annabelle’s whole first litter of six pups survived. "We won the most races through that litter," he said. "We won by nine races over the nearest litter. We got the breeding award for the most winning litter (49 wins) through Annabelle." His top quality racers came from a breeding operation in Oklahoma, and when they arrived at Wonderland, they quickly caught the public’s wagering fancies. "The rabid fan base placed bets as much as $800,000 per night," Sarno recalled, "making Wonderland have the highest dog purse in the world circuits. I loved making it on my own for the first time in my life. I was very good at being a greyhound owner/breeder. When I traveled for dog-related business, I was accorded VIP status at the Phoenix Track and with Oklahoma breeders."
In 1992, Sarno got out of the greyhound business and his attention turned to writing about the Korean War. Rather than the usual blood and guts-type World War II stories, Sarno wrote about the everyday happenings that Marines were subjected to or tempted into during the Korean War. He isn’t getting wealthy off of his many published articles, but he receives many compliments from readers who have enjoyed his anecdotes. "What I get back from my writing is priceless," he said. "Money can’t buy it."
Sarno attended his first Marine reunion in Boston in 1989, and he enjoyed it. Two years later, with his children nearing and already in adulthood, he began to openly talk and write about his Korean War experiences. His two Navy sons, Gary and Chris J., typed their father’s tales so he could send formal submissions worthy of publication to various military magazines. In the course of typing them, they were surprised to read about the extent of their father’s wartime antics. "My entire family was not all that interested in my prior life as a combat Marine as a youth," Sarno explained. "They thought I was making a lot of it up because I was always just Dad to them," he said. "I was stunned."
His children weren’t to know that their Dad’s watery eyes were the result of a mild case of rheumatism, diagnosed by the family physician as being caused by the prolonged periods of time that he had slept on bare ground in Korea. Nor did they understand that, deep within the recesses of their Dad’s mind, were memories of, "that ungodly fear of dying sensation"; of "dehumanizing the enemy as if he wasn’t important in order to be a survivor"; of the "horror of killing the enemy"; and, of "the stench of death."
Like so many other Korean War veterans, Sarno had never talked about the Korean War because nobody had ever asked him about it. "We came home to polite silence," he said of his return to the States after war. "There was no war talk. It was over. We were at peace, so we just went out and got a job and did it. I put Korea way back in my memory bank. It was not until the board members of the First Marine Division Association started a drive for all combat veterans to leave memoirs to our families that I started to really think about Korea. By reliving the war through my graphic accounts of it, I took one step forward and decided to publish my written tales." Sarno’s war stories have appeared in various military magazines throughout the USA since 1994.
Heretofore, he had never talked about the war in general, let alone about killing the enemy specifically. "I wrote about what I had seen in Korea," he said, "and what I wrote was the truth." When the United States pulled out its last occupation troops in Korea in 1949, it left a door wide open for North Korea and China to walk in and take over South Korea. Sarno said that, at first, the United States entered the war not to defend South Korea, but rather, to prove the United Nations. "Harry Ass Truman was no friend of mine," he said. "He tied the hands of the American fighting man in Korea—Army, Marine or whatever. Everything that we did was under the United Nations. Every time we drew up an American flag, we were ordered to take it down and put up a UN flag, whether we liked it or not. The politicians and MacArthur certainly read it for what it was worth. They knew that the UN was going to get the greater share of glory from expelling the communists out of South Korea. It did prove the UN for what It was worth, but it took our hides to do it."
Sarno said that Truman set into motion a trend that still exists in military circles today. "Go to war, and let’s talk," is the order of the day. "Vietnam was the stepchild of his appeasement to Britain and those ‘collaborating French," he said. "I believe that when you are in a shooting war, WIN it. Then sit down to parley…as the conqueror. I despise Harry-Ass-Truman for subjecting those of us in Korea to static and positional warfare for two long, bloody, murderous years. We came home to a silent America who whispered, ‘We lost.’ We won that damned war. The emergence of South Korea as a free economic power house proved MacArthur right, not Harry-Ass-Truman. Truman did a great job of making us insignificant. But not General Mac. He applauded his troops to the high heavens."
Chris Sarno unabashedly makes a strong distinction between those who served "in the rear with the gear" and those who actually put their hides on the line in combat. Holding Chosin Reservoir Marines in the highest regard, he nevertheless reminds people that thousands upon thousands of Marines were wounded and killed in action in Korea after December 1950. "Our Marine blood was as red as any at the Reservoir, yet we get no acclaim. It’s like the war ended on 12 December 1950. Bull-shit! I consider my combat service in Korea as worthy as the first Marine to scale the wall at Inchon. As a combat Marine at ground-level who was not privy to command decisions, I made that tour…but I didn’t know where the hell I was going. I have ‘arrogance of combat’ syndrome—‘If I’m up here getting my ass shot off, how come all the rest aren’t up here with us getting their asses shot off as well?’" Consequently, Sarno’s involvement with veterans is generally with fellow Marines, most particularly combat Marines. His lifetime membership in the 1st Marine Division Association entitles him to attend monthly meetings of its Boston Chapter. He is also a member of the US Marine Corps Tankers Association, the Semper Fidelis Society of Boston (which annually celebrates the Marine Corps birthday on November 10th with a noon USMC birthday bash), the Korean War Veterans Association, and the Massachusetts Korean War Veterans Association.
Although the gatherings cause his thoughts to return to Korea, he said that he has no desire whatsoever to revisit the Korean peninsula. "When I left Korea, I left all the abject daily misery that I saw during my liberties to Seoul in 1953-54 post-war Korea," he said. "When departing at Inchon, I thought to myself, ‘This joint will never recover.’ I’m very glad they proved me wrong over the five decades of modern Korea. Good luck to them. However, two generations have arrived since the Korean War ended with a truce. The younger Koreans (age 25 to 45) do not honor the returning American veterans who liberated them from Communism. I think that American vets will be confronted by this age group just like a similar age group in the USA confronted its veterans who returned from Vietnam. This age group in Korea is vocal as big anti-war/anti-Bush opponents. One young, educated South Korean woman/activist stated that all revisit junkets that go to Seoul/Inchon for commemorative festivities this year will be spat upon and verbally assaulted. No more respect is given to the American veteran who revisits South Korea now. The Yankee Go Home attitude prevails. South Koreans are even in flux with their newly-elected President. They scream to withdraw the US Army’s Second Infantry Division and send them home to the USA. No, I have never entertained any thoughts of a Korea revisit. Not then, and certainly not now with this new wind blowing from the know-it-all younger South Koreans. We should leave Korea now. And when those North Korean gooks start nuking Seoul, Inchon, Wonju, Suwon, Taegu, and Pusan, they shouldn’t look towards the Sea of Japan for help because ‘no more Yankees come back’—EVER!!"
During this interview in 1999, Chris Sarno said that he thought the next generation of Americans would be willing to do far less than that generation of Americans who served in or grew up in World War II—and then served their country again during the Korean War. "There has been limited war since Korea," he explained. "The American people, as well as the people of other industrialized nations, are living a lifestyle that they never experienced before. War seems to be obsolete. But I believe that war is always going to be with us. Big or small, war is going to be with us."
Sure enough, Sarno’s prediction came true. During Operation Desert Storm, he sat glued to his television all hours of the day, staying up until three in the morning to watch the media coverage of the war. "I sensed a breakthrough was imminent," he said. "I was truly impressed with General Swartzkopf in 1991-92. The Marine Divisions in both wars were simply amazing in wrestling a military victory with a sophisticated force of arms. The USMC was spectacular doing what they were trained to do—WIN WARS. I expected nothing short of total victory exhibited by Marine units, and I was not disappointed in the least. I have seen the new Marines at reunions, and they impressed me as a Master Race breed of combat warrior."
In contrast, Chris Sarno is not impressed at all with American’s young people today. "The volunteer Armed Forces is an exception," he noted. "They are most worthy young Americans. But the foppish, liberated, drug-induced, rabble young ones on the home front are despicable at best, including the heavily third-world people living here who aren’t breaking any records to enlist in our Armed Forces at all. They are just a bunch of takers. Excluding our volunteer armies, young Americans are obese, lazy, and dumb."
When he learned about the attack on the World Trade Center in New York City on September 11, 2000, Sarno was shocked. "Since the attack," he notes, "the people of the USA have changed to a degree, but nothing like the change that took place after the attack on Pearl Harbor. In December of 1941, this country was galvanized for revenge and unconditional surrender. War losses were jammed down our throats for six months and the outcome looked precarious. It was war 24/7 for four years, with consumer sacrifices throughout the war. If you weren’t in uniform, you were chastised as a 4-F’er. Not so after 9/11. I noticed in my daily travels that everyone is patriotic, but it was business as usual UNLESS you had a son or daughter in Iraq. No one was much concerned or scared. Corporate America raped us from pillar to post. Thousands got pink-slipped by Corporate America. There was no high employment for war items or jobs—just plenty of unemployed American workers. There were no war songs to defeat the Raghead nations. No big concerted war effort from movies. In fact, it was just the opposite from World War II. Hollywood vilified President Bush with TV series ranking on his handling of the war and his job as President. There were loud and profane anti-war/anti-Bush demonstrations where every crank was recruited to bad mouth the American way of life. No siree, this present day USA is fragmented from within. I am personally all for Bush and his Cabinet, and I am proud of our volunteer Armed Forces—especially the USMC. But this USA is a cosmetic kiss compared to the galvanized USA nation of World War II. I see a humongous race war coming within 20 years in time. The face of the USA is now 52% Hispanic-Black-Oriental, and getting bigger each year. White America is history, and that is a statistic we can’t ever change. I’m happy I’m fading away. I loved living in a white world. This mongrel breeding has come full circle to bite us in the ass. My grandkids will have to reap the whirlwind."
Chris believes that joining the United States Marine Corps was the best thing that he ever did for himself. "The Marine Corps put me on a course in life where I look at everything with Marine Corps standards," he said. "People. Situations. It’s probably unfair, but I just can’t delineate when I see situations—this wouldn’t be tolerated in the Marine Corps. How do people do this to themselves? Or, why aren’t they squared away?"
His stints in the Marine Corps and the FMF took him to war-ravaged Korea and exotic Japan, and both gave him memories that he will cherish until he dies. After Korea, Chris settled down to forty years of married life. Now, however, with his children grown and an unpleasant divorce after 40 years of marriage behind him, he has pictures of his Japanese love posted around his house. "They always bring a loving smile to my face when I glance at her image," he said. "She was the girl I should have married in 1959, but it is too late for me now." He is left with a suicide note and a black lacquered album filled with images that haunt his memory even today. "I lost my real life when Yoshiko and I had to part," Sarno reflected. "I had a life, but I waltzed through it for my slice of the American dream. I have to live with the consequences, as I am the one who orchestrated the outcome of my life."
Chris Sarno saw combat in the Far East on his first tour of duty in Korea, and he reveled in it. A year later, the impressionable young Marine saw an uninhibited Japanese post-war lifestyle that had a dramatic and lasting impact on his psyche. "Japan and Yoshiko are imprinted upon my soul to this very day," he said. "Yoshiko opened my prejudiced eyes to her and her Japan, and living and sharing with her hallmarks my second tour of duty in Korea. All else pales by comparison." In post-war 1954, the distance between the customs and traditions of the Japanese prostitute and the Roman Catholic American youth was wide. Sadly, even love failed to bridge the gap. "My bio is so different from the usual type," Sarno commented, "but it is all frank, candid, and true." Star-crossed romance is not always the stuff of fictional romance novels. Sometimes it happens in real life, too. "It happened to this combat Marine," Sarno said, "forevermore."
"My four years in the Fleet Marine Force was the greatest adventure of my life - Semper Fidelis."
[Note from the author: "All the songs described below were popular in a four-year time period from 1950-1954. To this day, if I hear one of them, that past time/span comes right up into view. Music is a powerful trance to the past for pleasant memories or people we liked." - Chris Sarno]
SHE AIN’T GOT NO YO-YO"
BY Chris Sarno © 2000
Published in the Marine Corps
Tankers Association Magazine December 2000
Let me say this. Music intertwines our journeys through life. It can lift our spirits to the highest heights or it can make us sad and reflective. But I believe music is a staple of our human vale of tears. Music is the very sacred and awesome power effecting our sad and lonely lives.
Allow me to bring to bear the above emotions of escapism to print.
In December 1950, with the Korean War out of control, I volunteered for service into the Corps when a nervous President Harry Truman declared a "National Emergency." The Hit Parade (the music charts) of the day touted Guy Mitchell with his refrain, "The Roving Kind", along with Don Cherry’s, "Thinking of You." I had a comfy Pullman berth on the Seaboard Limited (passenger train) out of Boston’s South Station, all the way to the southern climes of the so-called asylum in South Carolina (MCRD Parris Island). Let me tell you true, there was no music at Boot Camp. What seemed a lifetime later, back home in Boston during my 10-day Boot Camp leave, the only music that I was able to hear in the numerous greasy-spoon restaurants was Perry Como’s "If."
During the month of April 1951, I was in fast company enduring Tent Camp #1 in Training and Replacement Command at Camp Pendleton. I do recall a World War II Platoon Sergeant singing cadence while he marched us to noon chow. It was The Brown’s version of "Sparrow in the Treetop." Then in May and June of that year, it was on to Tank School at Camp Del Mar where Cpl. Lou Storzinger would march all the School’s Battalion tanker and artillery Marines to the waiting 6x6 trucks for extensive combat training. Corporal Storzinger had the deep voice for close order drill, and he reveled in marching some 600 marines to the 6x6’s that were sitting just two hundred yards away. As we trooped past the sprawling chow hall, we heard Nat King Cole’s "Too Young" and "Red Sails in the Sunset" reverberating from the mess hall radios. During July, the 12th Replacement Draft was forming up and it was back to the main side area of Camp Pendleton for intensive close combat and rifleman training in the field.
In August 1951, we embarked on Navy troop transports and after a seeming lifetime on the high seas, we finally disembarked at Pusan, South Korea. It was a God-send to kiss off that grimy tub of a troop ship named the USNS General Meigs. We spent the next five days processing in a barbed wire holding pen. The hit tune on the Korean Hit Parade was the unforgettable, "She Ain’t Got No Yo-Yo [China Night]. Needless to say, this little Oriental ditty was our "Welcome Aboard" to the land of the morning calm. You could also include the hallmark expression which seemed to symbolize the Korean War veteran, "You’ll be SOORREE!."
It took us a while to acclimate to the tinny gook music, but before everyone’s 13-month combat tour was completed, we eventually turned into Asiatic Marines. How? By way of coined expressions such as "Ahh so" and "itty-wa deska", "Gook", etc. Most Marine outfits in one way, shape or form had a rear echelon pogue who had a Zenith-brand transoceanic long distance radio (the Korean War era’s version of a "boom box"). The radio hooked up to three large Marine Corps issue portable batteries which were acquired by bartering off boxes of C-rations with the Communications Section. Along with cigarettes, these two staples of the war were considered "the rate of exchange" in the shattered Korean economy. Thus well-equipped, we could now enjoy music at night in our makeshift "hobo jungles." That is, provided you didn’t have the watch or a machine gun outpost assignment. Radios changed hands when the owner was to be rotated. Someone bought it for $55.00. We were adept to fine tuning the radio skips, which would come in loud and clear from Nagoya, Japan at night, thanks to a Canadian soldier/DJ. During the day, too much military communications traffic prevented connections. But there was less military communication traffic at night, and those skips were allowed to reach us from Nippon (Japan).
"A" Company, 1st Tanks was assigned as Battalion Reserve during November, and the #1 hit tune was, "Cry" by Johnny Ray. I even hit the lottery one night when I caught a song request from a dark-haired beauty who I was writing to in Wilmington, Delaware. Dolores Winnington’s song dedicated to me was, "The Very Thought of You" sung by Doris Day. I remember Dolores cut quite a figure in the bathing suit photo she had sent me. Wow! And like a fool, I never did meet up with her.
For almost all of the month of December 1951, many of our tank crews were positioned atop the snow crusted "Punchbowl." We relieved the Charlie Company tankers there and they left us a beat up Japanese Victorola record player in our rat-infested bunker. That little wind up music box played scratchy sounding 78 rpm carbon recordings, one of which was der Bingle warbling, "Jingle Bells."
January and February 1952 there was no more music. We did have plenty of freezing, fighting, and gook incoming artillery barrages. Semper Fi, Mac! But come April, the Navy LST’s took us to the Western Front. In between direct-fire missions, Kay Starr belted out her famous tune, "Wheel of Fortune." By early June, while again assigned to the Battalion Reserve, the weather was hot and humid. Despite the weather, a lot of us had the strep throat virus that raged throughout the 1st Marine Division. Overworked corpsmen snarled, "It’s from over exposure to rat urine." Even though we were sick as sea dogs, my tank crew changed two sprocket hubs and a final drive. I think back how we crashed after each noon cow and listened to 15 minutes of the Armed Forces Radio show coming from Nara, Japan. There was Curt Massey and the lilting Martha Tilton teamed up to serenade us with good old country ballads. This musical interlude kept our morale up…along with our corpsman’s prescription to ward off rat fever, his eternal APC pills. Many decades later, I noticed Curt Massey’s obituary in the local newspaper and dashed off a note of condolence to Mrs. Massey. In my letter, I detailed how her husband’s songs in June of 1952 helped a host of us through a rough time. Being the gracious lady that she is, she replied to me and confided that my sentiments really lessened her burden of bereavement. She also truly thanked us for our stalwart service in war-ravaged Korea.
By July 1953, it was back into the line. We were very busy day and night with the bloody sieges at Bunker Hill. That military operation was an ugly morass of the new trend of positional warfare called "the outpost sieges." This was also President Truman’s penchant of what we call "limited warfare." That is, they talked peace but had us still fighting valiantly and endlessly for the next year. Casualties escalated dramatically. In August it was my turn to be rotated to the Land of the Big PX. Yee-haw! I joined the in-rear-with-the-gear pogues at the huge 8th Army Complex at Ascom City near the Korean port of Inchon. We woke up each morning to reveille and Debbie Reynolds singing, "Good Morning." Hell’s bells, this is survivors’ heaven. Indeed. I got mine. How you doing?
We boarded the USNS General Walker in late August and the tedious cruise finally climaxed as we silently shipped under the fabulous Golden Gate Bridge. As we pulled up to the dock, we heard the welcoming Marine band in dress blues sound off with "The Marines Hymn" and "Semper Fidelis." In no time, I hit the liberty beach in ‘Frisco and made the trek along that boulevard as a "Market Street commando." You could hear the strains of "Blue Tango" played by the Boston Pops while passing the music stores. A few of us stayed for five days at the Marines Memorial Club at Sutter and Mason streets. The general manager (then) was a retired USMC Major named Ames. He ran a tight ship then and I understand that "The Club" is still going full blast today and it’s still a nice spot to relax.
In summation, what was it all about? We fought the good fight and won our war in Korea. Ask any combat Marine who was there! As our epoch slowly slips out of focus, one memorable overture sums it all up, "Gone with the Wind."
Keep well and Semper Fidelis! - SSGT Chris Sarno - USMC Fleet Marine Force
The 1st Marine Division Association held its annual reunion at the Wyndam Hotel in downtown Philadelphia. This year's record turnout with 5,000 combat Marine members was a very vocal roll call. Local businessmen, Sgt. Jimmy "Wags" Wagner, a Vietnam combat Marine machine-gunner, dropped by the reunion site and extended an open invitation to the Marines: They were welcome to go to his popular establishment at Cookie's Tavern.
A plethora from the Boston Chapter, led by S/Sgt. Chris Sarno, made the forced march to South Philly and burst through Cookie's Tavern portals. A recon party found three military marches on the juke box: "The Marines Hymn," "Anchors Away" and "Semper Fidelis," all recorded by maestro Arthur Fielder of the Boston Pops Orchestra.
With the volume on full blast, the inspiring music was met with bombastic cheering and USMC jargon. "The Marines Hymn" was played endlessly and all present sang the three verses to a man: in order to be heard, one had to literally yell to his buddies within earshot. It was just like a Marine slopchute aboard any Marine base. With all this frenzied atmosphere, nary a cuss word was uttered.
Shortly thereafter, the word was passed throughout the Irish-Italian neighborhood that Cookie's Tavern was besieged by Marines of the 1st Marine Division FMF. This ethnic enclave was composed of WWII, Korea and Vietnam war Marines. They all jammed into Cookie's Tavern where all were now shoulder to shoulder celebrating in USMC fashion. A cadre of local lassies were handy adding to the frivolity, indeed!
Sgt. Jimmy Wags serenaded the hoarse throng with a bevy of old Irish dittys and he hit the heartstrings of all. Wags continued to entertain the troops, as he broke out his silver glockenspiel and expertly accompanied each rendition of "Semper Fidelis." Even maestro Fielder would have smiled at Wags' musical acumen.
Raucous applause rose to a crescendo spurring Wags on and on. Even "No Toes" Dolan, a pre-war 1940 DI, put a honey-blonde cutie through her paces, as she volunteered to portray a new recruit at MCRD, Parris Island, S.C. She was a trooper and gave Dolan all he could handle much to the merriment of the SRO crowd.
Suddenly four of Philadelphia's finest forced their way into the slopchute. They ordered us to keep the noise down to a road: fortunately all four police officers were former Marines and just left the parade deck shaking their heads.
Order was restored as Wags ushered in 15 pizzas, plus complimentary T-shirts and baseball caps to the members of the Boston Chapter, who were shit-faced by this time.
However, the get-together was far from over as S/Sgt. Chris Sarno, a Marine tanker of Korea, scrounged out a little space by the jukebox and politely asked the honey-blonde for a dance to Sinatra's "From Here to Eternity." She readily accepted and Sarno thought he was on R&R in Kyoto, Japan and the Crown Colony of Hong Kong again. His fantasy was short-lived by a Marine cut-in line formed for a twirl with the beautiful honey-blonde. All of a sudden the roof was coming off the joint again, and it was photo op time with flash bulbs popping off like gook burp guns.
In summation, when combat Marines get together, the overwhelming comraderie is like super glue. Sea stories of adventure and misadventure in the Fleet Marine Force permeated this Marine bastion called Cookie's Tavern in South Philly.
In our vast wanderings, nowhere have any of us of the 1st Marine Division Association been so graciously received and pampered by a combat Marine, wounded veteran of Vietnam, namely Sgt. Jimmy "Wags" Wagner. His Irish wit and congeniality was never been matched at any of the reunions we attended, and we always show up for every annual reunion across the USA.
Once a Marine, always a Marine, and Sgt. Jimmy Wags is that precise personification. Well done, Marine! Being at Cookie's Tavern in South Philly was a great duty station, and our melancholy memories with Wags will live on with us forever. Lock 'n' load! Combat Marines are kin in whatever war Marines are sent in to win. There are Marines, but then there are the combat Marines.
Once again, well done, Wags. Sayonara babysan, gung-ho and lock 'n' load. You are the greatest, Sgt. Jimmy "Wags" Wagner, USMC-FMF.
Since the Korean War Educator originally interviewed Chris Sarno over four years ago and posted his memoir here on the KWE, interesting things have continued to happen in Chris' life... Chris has sent us this most interesting update to his memoir entitled "Hope Springs Eternal". Based on his military-related literary works, he has also been listed in the Marquis Who's Who in the World, Who's Who in America, and The Dictionary of International Biography [Cambridge, England].
These days, life is good for Chris Sarno. Gardening is a summer/spring joy for him. Seafood and luscious concoctions in the kitchen also bring him joy, but he keeps a watchful eye on his health, walking one mile every day, seven days a week. He participates in local veterans’ activities, and is a staunch supporter of all things Marine, including annual Marine Corps Birthday celebrations and reunion assemblies.
Nearly two years ago, he began a friendship with an Asian woman, and to date they have never run out of new things to talk about and share. They discuss the war on terrorism and the whys and wherefores of immigration restrictions. They talk about their favorite foods and drink. They talk about their ills and cures, and the daily activities that go on in their lives. They celebrate holidays with cozy talks and exchanges of affection.
Sarno’s "You’ll Be Sorreee" memoir on the Korean War Educator helped Amelita (Amy) have a better understanding of not just the Korean War, but also the man Chris Sarno. And Chris’s experiences in Japan during two tours of duty in Korea help him to understand Amy’s culture and lifestyle. The two have become steadfast friends. What direction their friendship will take doesn’t cause either one of them to lose any sleep at night. Both of them realize that it is too soon to tell what the future holds for them, but they also agree that it is not too soon for either of them to know that they are immensely fond of each other, and care about each other’s well being.
Chris Sarno’s philosophy is that what is past is past, and what will be, will be. Amelita’s philosophy is that love must take its own natural course, and cannot be rushed like the hands of a clock. Both philosophies are compatible with each other. From reading his memoirs and through her intimate discussions with him, Amelita knows that Yoshiko was and always will be Chris Sarno’s first Asian love. However, like the flowers in his garden that inevitably transform from bud into blossom, the friendship between Chris and Amelita might blossom into something beautiful, too. If it does, Yoshiko will still be Chris’s first great love, but he vows that Amelita will be his last.
"All else is nobody else’s business," Sarno said.
