A POINT OF HONOR : ‘It’s Easy to Be Courageous When You Have a Mission,’ Says William Barber, One of Three Medal of Honor Winners From Orange County

“Can we get a picture of you holding the medal?” a photographer asks retired Marine Col. William E. Barber, one of three recipients of the Medal of Honor who live in Orange County.

“Well, I don’t like to do that,” Barber says in a slow, deliberate voice. “I am happy to talk to you about it or let you take a picture of my medal or give you a picture of the Medal of Honor. I don’t know--I don’t like to do that (hold the medal and have a picture taken). I don’t know why I feel that way, but I sort of do.”

Barber received his medal from President Harry S. Truman during a White House ceremony on Aug. 20, 1952, for his actions in the Korean War. He was honored, his citation reads, “for conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty. . . .”

For five days, during a bitter Korean winter, the 240 men of Barber’s Company F withstood repeated Chinese attacks. Their tenacity allowed them to hold a key strip of mountain terrain and permitted the escape of thousands of American troops who had been surrounded.

The men of Company F killed as many as 2,000 enemy soldiers. Most of those in the company, including Barber, were wounded. Twenty-one of his men were killed during the battles, during which his troops were outnumbered almost 20 to 1.

Barber is one of about 150 medal winners who are gathering in Orange County today for the national convention of the Congressional Medal of Honor Society of America.

A resident of Irvine, Barber has been working as the official liaison between the society and Orange County convention organizers. The four-day event will be headquartered at the Irvine Hilton.

Years later, this most reticent of heroes, the man who won’t pose with his medal, who shrugs off his wounds, who attributes his remarkable success in combat to “good training,” best recalls the bitter cold of the winter battles.

“The weather is one of the easiest things to remember,” says Barber, recalling the patches of snow on the mountainsides. “It was very cold, below zero all of the time. . . .” “Wiggle your toes,” officers would tell their men. “Wiggle your toes.”

It sounded like a stupid command, but it was one of the few ways to stay alert and avoid frostbite. Sometimes a soldier would fall over, complaining that his feet had gone to sleep.

In late November, 1950, it was unbearably cold in North Korea near the Chosin Reservoir. The reservoir was south of the Yalu River that separated North Korea from China. Rifles and machine guns sometimes froze up at night, when temperatures could drop to 20 and 30 degrees below zero. C-rations became like rocks, the water in canteens turned to ice.

Cooks could not figure out how to thaw thousands of turkeys sent to the front for Thanksgiving.

Barber remembers that the earth was frozen solid to a depth of eight inches, making it particularly difficult for his men to dig foxholes.

Sometimes they would build fires and warm themselves until the fires went out. Then they would dig the holes where the fires had softened the earth.

Early on Nov. 27, Barber, a captain then, was ordered to move his Fox Company from Hagaru-ri, a small village south of Chosin Reservoir, six miles northwest to the Toktong Pass, which was halfway between U.S. and United Nations’ forces in Hagaru and Yudam-ni, the northernmost point that Marine forces had reached.

By 9 o’clock that night, Fox company had positioned itself on high ground that was later named Fox Hill, in honor of the company that defended it. The hill ran steeply up from the road below. The frozen dirt road was simply called MSR: main supply route.

It ran from Yudam-ni to the bustling port city of Hungnam, 78 miles to the south, along the west side of the Chosin Reservoir, where between Nov. 23 and Dec. 14, some of the bloodiest battles in the Korean conflict took place.

That first night, there was a vicious battle as a Chinese regiment surrounded Fox Hill and inflicted heavy casualties on Company F. But Barber, after beating back the attacks, sent assurances to headquarters that he could hold his position if supplies were dropped by air.

The Chosin Reservoir campaign ranks in Marine history with the famous battles of Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal, Tarawa and Guam. Even in Vietnam nearly 20 years later, they referred to the battles as the “Frozen Chosin in the Freezing Season.”

In the weeks before Thanksgiving, an estimated 150,000 Chinese had crossed the Yalu River into North Korea. They hid in the desolate hills and mountains waiting for the allies--U.S. Marines and Army and South Korean regulars--to work their way northward toward the reservoir.

On Nov. 27, the enemy began to spring its trap, attempting to surround or overrun the Americans, including Barber and the 240 Marines of Company F.

The Chinese, sometimes blowing bugles and whistles, charged Fox Hill for five nights straight, sometimes two or three times a night. They seemed to like the darkness, while the Americans, with superior air and artillery, were more effective during the day.

During the onslaught, so many men were wounded that only the most gravely injured were allowed to stay inside warm tents. The others had to be placed in sleeping bags outside. Some of the wounded died because the plasma froze and there was no way to thaw it.

In the end, according to Barber’s citation, only 82 of his men were able to walk away from Fox Hill.

On the second night, Barber was wounded as he moved from position to position, encouraging his men and “ejecting” Chinese who had broken through the company’s perimeter.

“On the night I was wounded, I was with a platoon leader,” Barber recalls. “The enemy had actually broken through a portion of our lines and overrun one of our machine guns.” As he ran through the darkness, a rifle bullet struck him in the right hip and groin, missing a major artery by less than an inch and causing a hairline fracture of the hip.

Barber says he felt the blood under his clothing but really did not have time to examine the wound. He could still limp along.

“I had been hit before,” Barber says. “After a while, one sort of knows what this is.”

Actually, Barber had been wounded twice before--during World War II as a Marine on Iwo Jima.

“A lot of people were getting wounded,” Barber recalls. “It was no part of any great interest and certainly no credit to me to get wounded.”

His superiors disagreed. As he was presented with the Medal of Honor, this country’s highest military award for bravery, he heard a citation that said, in part:

“His profound faith and courage, great personal valor and unwavering fortitude were decisive factors in the successful withdrawal of the division from the deathtrap in the Chosin Reservoir sector and reflect the highest credit upon Capt. Barber, his intrepid officers and men and the U.S. Naval Service.”

Barber is 67 now. He retired from the Marines 17 years ago and lives in Irvine with his wife, Ione, in earshot of fighter jets that take off and land at the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station.

The couple have two grown children who live in Seattle.

The prelude to heroism provided few indications of what was to follow: born in West Liberty, Ky., two years at Morehead State College in Kentucky and enlistment in the Marine Corps in March, 1940.

It was the beginning of a 30-year career.

Commissioned a second lieutenant in 1943, Barber was sent to the Pacific in July, 1944, where he and his company landed on Iwo Jima. During a major battle there, Barber was wounded twice and awarded the Silver Star for bravery. In addition to his service in Korea, he also saw combat duty in Vietnam, where he was a psychological operations officer for the 3rd Marine Amphibious Force. He was awarded the Legion of Merit for service in Vietnam and retired as a full colonel in 1970. In between, he had seen duty here and overseas in areas such as instruction and embassy duty and had returned to Morehead to graduate with a double major in history and business administration. After leaving the Marines, he worked as a military analyst for the Northrop Corp. in Anaheim.

In addition to the Medal of Honor, the Silver Star and the Legion of Merit, the gravelly voiced Barber has two Purple Hearts, three Presidential Unit Citations, the Marine Corps Good Conduct Medal, the American Defense Service Medal, and numerous service and campaign medals and ribbons.

But even more than other medal winners, Barber tends to play down his heroics.

“Most people feel that the awarding of the Medal of Honor is an imprecise procedure,” Barber says, “because most of the medals are awarded for actions in close combat where there’s a certain degree of confusion. Nice administrative procedures aren’t always present.

“If we can assume that everyone awarded the Medal of Honor merited it, it would be equally safe to assume that for everyone who received it, there are five or six others gone unnoticed or (who) received a somewhat lesser award.”

For nearly 20 years while on active duty, Barber mostly avoided interviews about what he did in Korea that led to the Medal of Honor. Since his retirement, he has somewhat relaxed his policy, but a reporter who visited him the other day got the feeling that Barber, when asked about bravery, would rather leave the talking to someone else.

Asked why most servicemen never see combat and he saw it in three different wars, Barber replies with a kind of John Wayne logic: “Any professional Marine is supposed to know the main mission is to go where he is called and perform as directed,” he says, adding that when there is a war, Marine infantry gets involved.

Training is the key to winning, he says.

In recounting the Korean experience, Barber says the Chinese “were not especially effective” at fighting and “didn’t really use very good tactics.” He says they had a lot of manpower and were apparently willing to use it. They attacked the same position five nights in a row, at the same time and using the identical route.

“Luck in combat is very fickle. I’ve noticed through the years that those who make the best preparations have the best luck,” he says. “We perhaps were lucky in a sense we weren’t opposed by an especially skilled enemy.

“But we were also very good, and that wasn’t luck.”

And for the question of whether heroes have heroes, Barber has an answer, pointing to the prisoners of war in Vietnam who were held for years and tortured both mentally and physically.

“I understand courage in combat when you are a member of an organized team,” he says. “It’s easy to be courageous and consistent when you have a mission, when you have people around you and when you have leadership responsibility.”

The POWs, Barber says, “were subjected to terrible torture in Hanoi. . . . I have great admiration for that kind of toughness, tenacity and will power that these people have shown. I admire that very much and I think that is a different measure of courage.”