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thedrifter
11-12-06, 09:02 AM
'Forgotten War' letters still make readers shiver
Korean War vet wrote hundreds to his 'dear Arlee' as he dodged frostbite at Chosin Reservoir in 1950
The Arizona Republic

Robert "BJ" Johnson could barely hold a pencil without his hands freezing. Twenty degrees below zero on warm days, wind chill of 60 to 70 degrees below zero on most days. He could hear his fellow Marines crying in the darkness near the mountains of North Korea.

But Johnson began his barely legible scrawl to write a letter to his sweetheart back home like the dozens he had written ever since the train pulled out from Seattle, loaded with his Marine reserve unit, collecting hundreds of soldiers along the way to Camp Pendleton, Calif.

Just five years after World War II ended, the Korean War started after North Korea invaded South Korea in June 1950.

By November, as BJ's 22nd birthday approached, he chronicled each day with his letters, writing to his girlfriend, Arlee, about the despair of what became known as the "Forgotten War."

As his unit pushed toward combat in a mountainous region near the Chosin Reservoir, one that historians would regard as one of the fiercest, bloodiest battles in modern warfare, he recorded the frigid conditions on whatever scrap of paper he could find.

All BJ wanted was to keep from freezing to death and to make it home to marry Arlee.

With ground so impenetrable, he could barely dig a foxhole. No tents. The zipper on his sleeping bag, left over from World War II, froze. It was impossible to even dig a hole in the snow to block the wind. Shelter came from lying flat on top of the frozen crust.

Anything to keep the frostbite away.

Pen, pencil and paper helped, too. The letters provided a sort of armor, a shield to stave off loneliness and thoughts of home.

He wrote with whatever he could. Like the unsharpened pencil he pressed to paper on Nov. 16, 1950.

"My darling Arlee," he wrote.

"About 200 cases of frostbite turned into sickbay. Besides all that we've moved up everyday and are now at the southern tip of the reservoir. I hope this will be the last move we make.

. . . Just about everyone has something wrong with him. I need to go to a dentist as my bridge in my mouth came out last night and I can't chew. Everything is frozen solid so I have to warm everything up so I can eat it.

"Days pass rapidly, but the nights just drag out, so that we hate to see the sun go down. It's so cold you can't sleep and you seem so much alone.

"I miss people."

At the end of November, BJ's unit pushed through the icy ridges of the reservoir.

He had learned how to shoot only a couple of months earlier and was now trapped.

BJ and his fellow Marines were in the midst of a battle with Chinese Communist forces that raged on day after day in subzero temperatures.

There were close to 15,000 casualties out of the 20,000 Allied ground troops. Almost 2,500 men were killed in action, more than 5,000 were wounded, and the rest suffered severe frostbite and cold injuries.

All through the battle, Johnson kept letters from Arlee tucked close to his body in his knapsack.

Arlee was a high school senior. She could hardly wait to get home from school every day to get BJ's letters. The mail was slow.

From the time he wrote her to
the time they reached her in Tacoma, Wash., it took nearly two weeks.

She zipped them in her loose-leaf notebook, carrying them to and from school. Or locked them in her cedar chest to keep her younger sister from reading them.

Sometimes they'd arrive as a stack in her mailbox, and sometimes, as when BJ was in the reservoir that winter, weeks passed without a word. She filled the silent stretch by poring over his letters.

Then, on Christmas Eve, two letters arrived.

Bundled with ribbons, packed into a worn cardboard box, brittle and faded with time, the letters crackle as Arlee Johnson, 73, reaches into the box and pulls a couple of envelopes.

The Johnsons have carried the letters - hundreds of them - for decades. They read them over and over. They laugh. They cry.

Arlee retyped many of the letters and had them printed into a booklet.

As he sailed on the high seas farther and farther away from home, closer to Korea, on Sept. 7, 1950, BJ wrote:

"Not knowing just for sure what is going to happen is an awful feeling. This all happened so fast that just now I am beginning to realize how terrible this is. It's almost like a living nightmare. . . . I know there will be times when it will be a lot worse than now."

On Sept. 18, 1950:

"It's getting closer to K all the time, about 48 hours from now. Everyone tries to put on that it's nothing at all but they're all scared. Including me."

The most important ones, Arlee says, are the two she received 56 years ago on Christmas Eve, dated Dec. 12 and 13, after BJ survived the battle.

"This is written in pencil, so it's very hard to read," she says, unfolding the onion-skin stationery.

"It seems so strange to hold a pen or pencil in my hand again," Arlee reads, leaning over the letters. "You probably know all about how we were trapped way up in the mountains. . . .

Quite a lot of our buddies never made it. . . . It was worse than hell up there."

After the battle at the Chosin Reservoir, as he waited to come home, BJ wrote a poem at the end of his letter to Arlee:

"Soon I'll know one way or the other, if I should head to the nearest port. If not, here in Korea, Another month I'll spend. Crossing the days off my calendar. Days seeming never to end."

BJ's sitting nearby. Silent. Listening to Arlee read the letters in their living room.

His feet and hands feel icy cold.

Ellie