“Move it!” Miller shouted, the urgent tone of his voice needing no translation for those who didn’t speak English.

Behind them, maybe not more than a mile away, the Chinese soldiers were coming after them. They couldn’t see any sign of them yet, but there was no doubting that the enemy was in pursuit all the same. The enemy was not encumbered by their own wounded, which they had left behind to die.

If the enemy caught up to the remains of the battered task force, nobody would reach the line.

“How much farther do you think we’ve got to go?” Miller asked the tank officer, who was helping to keep everyone moving along as rapidly as possible.

“At least five miles,” he replied.

“We’re not gonna make it that far before they catch us,” Miller said.

“That’s what I’m thinking,” Dunbar agreed.

“Any ideas?”

“I’ll take my men and form a rear guard.” He grinned bitterly. “It won’t be the same as a tank, but at least we can hold them off for a while if the enemy catches up to us.”

Miller agreed to the plan and the tank officer assembled his men, who moved to the back of the column. They would keep moving, but fall back to fight if the need arose.

Unfortunately, even that small measure had cost them precious time. Some of the tankers had been carrying the wounded and had to shift their burdens to others, which required some organization.

Time was something that the retreating task force didn’t have.

“Here they come!” the kid shouted.

Looking behind them, they could see the vanguard of the enemy, approaching at a trot. There were only a handful of soldiers, but it was clear that their intent was to catch the task force. They were like hounds chasing rabbits. The road went around a bend, and the vanguard in the distance was temporarily lost from sight.

Weapons that had been slung over shoulders were put back into hands. Fresh rounds were jacked into chambers by grim-faced soldiers. They all knew that this would be a fight to the end this time.

“What’s that?” someone shouted.

“I hope to hell those belong to us and it’s not more of the damn Chinese!”

Miller looked up. He had heard it, too; the unmistakable sound of aircraft. He counted three planes. The planes were coming in low, settling in above the road. To his relief, he recognized them as United States planes.

One of the Corsairs waggled its wings at the task force, where the soldiers waved their arms wildly. Then the planes swept toward the north and the pursuing Chinese troops. Explosions and machine-gun fire from the planes marched up the road toward the enemy.

“Give ‘em hell, boys!” Miller shouted. He ached to be back in the cockpit himself, but for now, all that mattered was getting these survivors back to the line. He ran to help a wounded soldier who had stumbled, dragging the man’s arm across his own shoulders. “Let’s go!”

Two hours later, thanks to the intervention of the planes, the task force survivors reached the Jamestown Line. As they entered the barricades and trenches, some collapsed as if they had just finished running a race. In a sense they had — they had managed to outrun the enemy.

More reinforcements had been brought up to the line, and with the air cover and added artillery, they braced themselves for a Chinese attack. What had been a thin line of defense was now much more solid, ready to repel the enemy.

By then, the enemy had lost all element of surprise. The Chinese troops were battered from the battle at the fort and then from having been caught out in the open by the planes. When the attack against the main line came, it had no more effect than a wave crashing on the shore in all its brief fury, only to quickly recede into the sea. There was no second wave.

All along the MLR, the defenders held their breath and kept their weapons close, but the Chinese had retreated to dig into the hills and lick their wounds. The Jamestown Line had held.

Once again, Don Hardy was at a borrowed typewriter the next morning, trying to put into words the experiences of the last few days. The Stars and Stripes published straightforward battlefield accounts. There wasn’t any space in the newspaper’s pages for philosophical matters or what the editors like to call navel-gazing. Just why had the battle been fought or what had been won? Those questions would not be addressed in Stars and Stripes.

Laboring that morning at the grimy keys, Hardy could not know that thirty years later, as a more seasoned writer, he would win the Pulitzer Prize for a history of the Korean War. But for now, he was still finding his way around the battered keyboard, struggling to put the images in his head into words. He paused just long enough to take a swig from a mug of bitter coffee balanced on the board set across two crates that served as his desk.

Like everyone else who had survived the last stand by the task force at the fort, he was exhausted. He would have loved nothing more than to crawl into a tent somewhere and sleep. However, he needed to get this story out. His typed pages would need to be delivered by Jeep to the Stars and Stripes editors and the sooner he sent them on their way, the better.

Already, his writing had changed considerably since coming to Korea as a budding journalist. His early articles had been filled with literary allusions and even a few poetic descriptions that were sneaked in, an echo of his many college literature classes.

The sights and sounds of war had cured him of that urge. For example, what place did a couplet from Wordsworth have in the mud and blood of Korea?

Hardy shook his head. His article contained nothing flowery or poetic. Just the cold, hard facts, like what it felt like to turn to your buddy and see that he was dead with a Chinese bullet through him.

Still, it made him a little sad to turn his back on Wordsworth and all the rest. Maybe all the fighting now was so that there would be a place for poetry in the future.

A clerk approached, wielding a dented coffee pot.

“More joe?”

Hardy nodded. “Got anything stronger?”

The clerk looked around, then surreptitiously went to a bag, produced a flask, and poured a dose into Hardy’s mug.

“The colonel would have my ass if he saw that, but I figure you deserve it.” He shook his head. “It’s amazing what you guys did.”

“It’s the Battle of Thermopylae in the Korean mountains, is what it is.”

“Not sure I know about that battle, but if you say so.” The clerk added another splash of whiskey to Hardy’s mug.

“Thermopylae was where a group of Spartan soldiers held off an entire army at a mountain pass, thus saving Greece from invasion.”

“When was that? Back in forty-two?” the clerk asked, thinking that Hardy was referring to a battle from the last war, when the Germans had attacked Greece.

“More like 480 B.C.,” Hardy said. He took a gulp of the bourbon-laced coffee, a combination that somehow amplified the worst qualities of both beverages. He choked it down and nodded his thanks to the clerk, then turned his attention back to the typewriter.

“You’re talking about ancient times. Guess that’s why I never heard of it. Hell, nobody around here can remember what happened last week, let alone two thousand years ago.”

Ignoring the clerk, Hardy kept typing. He was getting better at writing quickly and clearly, having been whipped into shape by the beady-eyed military editors with their sharp pencils. Scarcely an adjective survived their attention. Hardy described the last stand in hard detail, including the heroism of the Puerto Rican troops. Nobody would question their courage now. Their earlier failures had been forgotten and threats of court martial had quietly been swept under the rug. Every last one of the Borinqueneers was a hero now.