From a ridge in the Samichon Valley known as the “Hook” Lance Cpl. Mike Mogridge watched as British artillery rained shells on an onslaught of Chinese infantry. Such was his introduction to the Korean War. The next morning, after the shelling had stopped and he and his mates had had breakfast, Mogridge and fellow soldiers clambered atop the Hook to gaze on the spectacle of pockmarked ground littered with the corpses and body parts of thousands of enemy troops. The British had held the line of resistance.
Tasked with collecting the British dead from no-man’s-land, Mogridge ventured out with his patrol under the cover of darkness with empty body bags. Sporadic gunfire from Chinese positions kept them alert. Manhandling the shell- and bullet-mangled bodies into the bags was difficult enough, and rigor mortis made it harder. Worse still, if the bodies had lingered in the valley too long, they were putrid with maggots. Seventy years after war’s end Mogridge still recalls the odor.
Back at camp, after having carefully stacked the corpses, Mogridge and mates would settle into their ridgeline hutchie, a crude dugout ringed with sandbags. (The word “hutchie” derives from uchi, the Japanese word for house.) In their respective hutchies British soldiers ate, joked with mates, slept and otherwise pretended it was a peaceful retreat. Doing so helped them ignore the bodies stacked 8 feet high and consequent giant rats that infested the garrison.
“We got immune to it,” Mogridge recalls. “We just didn’t bother about it.”
other servicemen sent to Korea, Mogridge was drafted
