Marine Corps veteran Ron Burbridge couldn’t talk about his experiences in the Korean War for about 30 years after he came home.
Now, with the cushion of 58 years and countless presentations about the war behind him, the Emporian will be featured in a Smithsonian Institution documentary about Maj. Curt C.E. Lee, the first Asian to serve in the United States Marine Corps.
Burbridge returned to Emporia on Wednesday, after filming the interview in Dallas earlier in the week. Being involved in the documentary was an honor, he said, but most of the excitement of the trip came from being able to visit comrades he hadn’t seen in years.
“It’s gonna take me a little while to get down off the ceiling,” Burbridge said. “I got to meet up with two of my buddies that I hadn’t seen since I left Korea 58 years ago.”
Burbridge and those buddies served under Lee during some of the hardest and most casualty-stricken battles of the war. About 50,000 servicemen and women were killed in Korea.
Burbridge enlisted in the Marines in 1948, and served in peacetime at several bases, until the war began.
“North Korea invaded South Korea on the 25th of June in 1950,” he said.
That action caused Burbridge to be sent to Camp Pendleton, Calif., two months later. He’d arrived at Pendleton at 8 a.m. on a Monday; at 10 p.m. the following Friday, the ship carrying him and and the First Marine Division pulled away from the dock and headed to Korea, he said. They arrived in Inchon, South Korea on Sept. 20.
“We were supposed to land the 15th, but we ran into a typhoon and it held us up,” he said.
The plan was to take Inchon, which they did; then his unit, the First Battalion Seven, moved on toward Seoul.
“The objective was to recapture Seoul, the capital of South Korea, then push the North Koreans back across the 38th parallel, the dividing line between North and South Korea,” he said.
Gen. Douglas MacArthur and South Korean President Singhman Rhee had decided that the goal should be to unite Korea. Pres. Harry S Truman, on the other hand, did not want Korea to turn into the battleground for World War III.
“The Chinese government warned if we crossed the 38th parallel, they would enter the war,” Burbridge explained. The Chinese did not want American troops that close to the Manchurian border.
MacArthur finally got permission to go beyond the 38th parallel, under one condition: “As we advanced into North Korea, if we ran into any Chinese people of any kind ... we were supposed to stop where we were at,” Burbridge said.
It was a condition that MacArthur ignored. The U.S. military began picking up Chinese prisoners occasionally as they advanced.
“We kept moving and that upset the Chinese, and unbeknownst to us ... they had moved 500,000 Chinese into South Korea,” he said. “I don’t know where our intelligence (operatives) were, but they would move only at night, not during the day.”
Burbridge’s unit moved on to the Chosin Reservoir, encountering fighting along the way.
“They tested our strength by putting several thousand troops around the little village of Sudung,” he said.
After three days of skirmishes, the Chinese withdrew and seemed to disappear. The Marines advanced to Udamnee village.
“They let us in, then they closed the door,” Burbridge said. “They put 150,000 Chinese troops around the First Marine Division with the full intention of eliminating the First Marine Division to the last man.”
The division had only 12,000 men to fight the Chinese.
“The only way we could get out was to break out,” he said. “I don’t like the word retreat. ... The Marine Corps does not retreat. That’s not in our vocabulary.”
The order came, though, to pull out to the sea.
“We had more Chinese troops behind us when we started our withdrawal than we’d have had if we’d gone on, because they were expecting us to pull out.”
The Chinese were not the only danger the troops faced in that area. Temperatures often ranged from 20 to 30 degrees below zero, he said.
“Weapons froze, food, water, and humans — everything froze,” he said. “We lost a lot of people to frostbite.”
Eventually, Burbridge, too, would be evacuated because of severe frostbite and received a purple heart that he does not wear because he believes his injuries were not serious enough to warrant the honor. Nonetheless, his hands and feet still show the gnarling brought on by that winter in Korea. And the Chinese soldiers suffered as well.
“They were in as deep a trouble as we were,” Burbridge said. “We took prisoners who didn’t have any feet. All they had on the bottom of their ankles was ice.”
During the fighting, Lee — then Lt. Lee — was in charge of another platoon. He was seriously injured and taken to a Navy field hospital at the back of the fighting. Doctors determined that he needed to be flown to Japan for treatment, but Lee and another injured Marine disagreed with the plan. They slipped away from the field hospital and returned to battle.
“They broke out or escaped from the hospital, commandeered a Jeep from the hospital and came back to us,” Burbridge said. “They chased him I don’t know how long before they gave up on him.”
Lee’s exploits and his stern, by-the-book manner were well-known among the Marines “and we were always thanking the Lord that he had machine guns and not Baker Company,” said Burbridge, who was part of Baker’s second platoon.
When Lee returned to battle, though, his position had been filled and he was put in charge of Baker’s second.
“He was a tough taskmaster, afraid of nothing,” Burbridge said. “Probably one of the finest field officers in the Marine Corps at that time. He was fantastic ... because of his magnificent leadership and knowledge.”
Lee also held an advantage that other Marines did not have, because he could speak and understand Chinese.
“He knew what they were going to do,” Burbridge said. “He knew ahead of time what was going to happen and he’d get us ready to go.”
By the time Burbridge’s unit boarded the ship to leave Korea, the 250 men who landed there in September 1950 had diminished to 28.
“The rest of them was either wounded or killed,” he said. “I had lots of good friends ... that didn’t make it.
“I have thanked God many times that we had Maj. Lee as our leader coming out of the Chosin Reservoir,” he said. “I really believe I would not be here today if it had not been for Maj. Lee.”
The major has maintained contact with many of the men he commanded, through reunions and through personal visits with the veterans.
Burbridge, now 80, has visited Lee in Washington, D.C. Lee took him and another veteran on a tour of the city, and made arrangements for both men to stay in a visitor’s apartment at the complex where he lives. Each morning, the 83-year-old Lee prepared breakfast for the men.
He talked to Burbridge once about how Baker Company felt about him, speculating that they didn’t like him much and wondering why that was.
“I said, ‘I don’t know it was so much we didn’t like you,’” Burbridge recalled saying. Then he laughed. “We were more afraid of you than we were the enemy.”
The Smithsonian documentary on Lee is expected to be broadcast in about two months, Burbridge said.