Cpl. Patrick Finn, USMC, Korea, Chosin Reservoir - podcast episode cover

Cpl. Patrick Finn, USMC, Korea, Chosin Reservoir

Feb 14, 202440 min
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Episode description

Patrick Finn fibbed about his age in order to join the U.S. Marine Corps a bit earlier than he should have. He served honorably and was ready to end his service before the Korean War ever began. But his inability to come up with $92 led him to re-enlist and in the summer of 1950 he was off to fight a war in a place he knew nothing about.

The summer of 1950 was chaotic in Korea. The North Koreans invaded the south in late June and nearly conquered the whole peninsula. But U.S. forces arrived just in time, pushing out from the Pusan Perimeter and executing the very successful Inchon Landing. Within a couple of months, U.S. forces thought they would be home by Christmas.

But in late 1950, just as the U.S. and our allies had pushed the North Koreans back to the Yalu River, Chinese forces came swarming across the border, inflicting severe American casualties, taking many troops prisoner, and surrounding U.S. Marines at Chosin Reservoir.

In this edition of "Veterans Chronicles," Patrick Finn describes the surprise of the Chinese onslaught, the brutally frigid temperatures at Chosin Reservoir, how the Marines fought while surrounded, and what it was like to fight hand-to-hand. Mr. Finn also reflects on the proce of our freedom and tells us why returning to Korea in recent years was such a powerful experience.

Transcript

Welcome to Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbus. Our guest in this addition is Patrick Finn. He is a US Marine Corps veteran of the Korean War. He is also one of the Chosen Few, the Marines who found a way to escape Chosen Reservoir despite being completely surrounded and badly outnumbered by Chinese forces. Mister Finn, thank you so much for being with us. You're certainly welcome. Where were you born and raised their Minneapolis. Was there a history of

military service in your family? Oh? No, none whatsoever. Well, I had a brother that was a Navy I'm sorry. Now you actually joined a little bit earlier than you should have, right, Yes, well, some of the other guys were doing it, and it looks kind of romantic, nice uniform, and you could go into the beer hall and so on

and so forth. So I fudged my age a bit, and I was on a three year enlistment and when that expired, I thought I'd have enough, but they told me I had to bring back my uniforms and so on and so forth. So or paid ninety two dollars. That's awful lot of money, and I swettered my options as well you could re enlist, so I relisted, and within a year I was in Korea. So you ended up in Korea because of ninety two dollars exactly not very smart. But now

you were a rifleman in Korea? Where you trained initially as a rifleman? Yes? And what type of weapon were you trained? And one? Did it come pretty easily to you? Were you good marksman? Fairly decent? Coming from Minnesota. You do get involved with guns a bit, so that was a fairly decent martsman. What unit were you attached to? The fifth Marines? When did you find out that you were likely going to Korea? Probably August of nineteen fifty, late July, or shortly after the war broke

out. The war broke out on June twenty fifth, so sometimes shortly after that. Before then, did you know much about Korea? I didn't have any idea. I didn't know where it was or anything about it really. So when you arrived in Korea, what was the situation there? Chaotic? Things had happened awfully fast for the Koreans and for the US support, and so things were They seemed chaotic, but they were actually pretty well orchestrated you know, if everybody did their job, it was. It all worked good.

But to me, as a former civilian, it looked like it was to hands. When in nineteen fifty did you arrive? Were we still in the Pusan perimeter or were we around in Chao? So I came in at once on wance On Harbor. We had to wait out in harbor for a while because they had a lot of mines that they had to sweep out first.

So as soon as they got that done, we joined the group started our track toward the Chosen Reservoir. At first the track was going well correct, Yes, it seemed like all of the tools that the war was almost over. They did a little mopping up to do of some North Koreans that were still there. But we found out a lot different after the Chinese centered the war. Well, that was obviously the game changing event there in November of nineteen fifty. How did you find out, Well, we took some

captives and found out. But the people in Tokyo that were supposedly running the war wouldn't believe that there was a Chinese there. They said they would never come in. Well, they were there, but the Chinese did a real good job of camouflizing themselves, so they were completely around us before we had

any idea they were. There was roughly one hundred and thirty thousand people Chinese, so they did a real good job of They would only move at night, not during to day, so we didn't have a clue until they were coming after us. So you had North Korean prisoners telling you that the Chinese were coming, and the higher ups didn't believe it. We had Chinese tell us that the Chinese that we captured, they said that they were. In

fact, they were very open about what we were against. They even said that there were a couple of hundred thousand more on the other side of the Yellow River. In case the first patch didn't get the job done, Explain what's happening as you discover you're surrounded, What orders are you getting, what's the atmosphere like with you and the other men. It happened very suddenly in the middle of the night. It was about one or two in the morning.

We heard these bugles and clattering and whistles going and people screaming. Really made you wonder what was happening, And there that was the Chinese coming after us, and by the time, we knew that they were all around us, and the first thing they did is just came in and looked for anybody in a sleeping bag and they would stab them. So that was our awakening

to it. Then we realized that we were completely surrounded, so you had to be very careful so that you didn't shoot some of your own people. Everybody kind of well, they did their job, so it worked out too. It was supposed to be at workout took the toll of a lot of Chinese. The bad battle. I was in un hill number fifteen to twenty. They counted the next day that there were three hundred and forty two Chinese dead, and I'm I'm not sure if our count It was like in the

twenties. So our training paid off. What kind of orders were you given once you were surrounded? What were commanders telling you? Well, at first it was a fifty percent watch, and we put up the trip wires and

so on so that we'd know of anybody coming in. The words came that there were bord Chinese or people out there than they imagined, so they pressed one hundred percent moments and then, like I say, suddenly all we hear was these bugles and all those terrible racket and it was intimidating at first we realized what was going on. That's the way they told their men what to

do. We battled until I believe it was it was starting to get light at six o'clock or so in the morning before we had a chance to really kind of every group, and it was kind of a kind of a rude awakening to this whole thing that, you know, we thought we were told that we'd fight our way up through North Korea and there's ships waiting for us, we'd go home, we'd be there for Christmas. So this is quite quite a change in agenda. You mentioned that they were the Chinese were stabbing

or bayoneting sleeping bags, trying to kill the Marines. At the same time, you've got horrible weather conditions there with the cold. Explained just how cold it was, Well, we had two enemies, the Chinese and the weather. The weather was I'm from Minnesota, so I was kind of used to weather, but this was something else. We were twenty They say thirty blows there a weather then in Minnesota. But it's cool like that. You've got a place you can go in and get warm, and so on. In

Korea, we couldn't. I mean, you were just out of it all the time. The sleeping bag incident where the two guys were killed at first on the first attack. So from then on we didn't dare use our sleeping bags, so we might wrap around our feet or wearing like a jacket for a while. But the weather was just it was horrible. Uh, we

weren't trained for that. We had to learn how to cope. For an example, that everything froze, the food froze, the water froze, and we learned to take food that we wanted and seven inside of our shirt and so eight hours or so later to be warm enough that you could open it up and eat it. The other thing was that if you didn't keep moving,

you'd freeze to death. There were a lot of bodies that were absolutely well frozen in the position that they were last in, whether it was with the rifle or sleeping or whatever happened that that was that was pretty grotesque. We had a lot of things happened that we weren't used to, just things like that that we had to learn fast. And I was lucky. I was a reserved. What I went, I was like excuse me, first replacement draft when I got into Greer uh, and so I budded up to

a fellow that was a regular marine and had been through combat. And so that was that was a real lucky break for me because he he gave me the quick education on what did you foxhoil a little deeper and uh that type of thing. In fact, he actually saved my life twice. One of them was, uh, when the Chinese came to my side and I made a move to cheot him, and my rifle approached just a click and this

man Riley shot and killed the Chinese. So saved my life. Uh. He taught me a lot of things about don't don't be satisfied with it with a shallow foxhil, keep taking even though the ground was like rock. That's exactly I was going to ask. Could you dig a foxhole when the grounds that cold? It was hard? You take your your k knife or canine knife and just break it up much you could. It was very tempting to

stop and not do it. A lot of the guys took a little piece of wood and so and so forth and built a kind of a barrier around the fox showl. His advice to me. It was really well taken. Sometimes I didn't want to do what he suggested. But one night a mortar but off right behind us and killed two guys right behind us. And if we hadn't had a deep Fox show we'd been, we'd have been dead.

We were kicked out of the Fox show like the concussion. But if we hadn't, if we'd have been more towards the surface, we'd have been either killed or seriously wounded. So he used my safe. Here's my guardian angel. That's Patrick Finn, a veteran of the US Marine Corps and the Korean War, describing how he and other Marines were surrounded by the Chinese at Chosen

Reservoir after an ambush in late nineteen fifty. As you just heard mister Finn say, there were two enemies for the Marines at Chosen Reservoir, the Chinese and the weather still ahead. Mister Finn describes the brutality of hand to hand combat against the Chinese and how the Marines finally broke out from Chosen Reservoir. But when we come back, we'll talk more about the horrifically frigid temperatures. The one thing he says you had to do to stay alive in those conditions

and much more. I'm Greg Corumbus and this is Veterans Chronicles sixty Seconds of Service. This sixty Seconds of Service is presented by T Mobile. T Mobile offers exclusive discounts for veteran and military families and are proud supporters of the National Defense Network. Visit t mobile dot com to learn more about how they support our military community. In Cadillac, Michigan, a program at the Veterans Serving

Veterans Park is helping to memorialize the sacrifices of their local heroes. The group has a goal to assimble one hundred memorial picnic tables to place on the park's brand new pavilion. So far, they have about seventy of them put together, and it's been done with the help of several community groups. It costs fifty dollars to have a veteran's name engraved into the table. Each one is built from the ground up, with much of the material donated by the Home

Depot. They tell us it takes anywhere between forty five minutes to an hour to assemble just one table, but they say it's well worth the time and effort. The Manton High School cross country team is scheduled to be on hand next to put together tables next week. For more great veteran stories, just go to National Defense Network dot com. This is Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg

Corumbas. Our guest in this edition is Patrick Finn, a veteran of the US Marine Corps and a survivor of the horrific Battle of Chosen Reservoir during the Korean War. Mister Finn and the other survivors are often known as the Frozen Chosen. We now pick up mister Finn's story as he explains what he and his fellow marines tried to do to generate some warmth in the bitter cold and really just stay alive. One of the things we had to do, whether

you wanted to do or not, was keep moving. If you didn't move, like some people that were wounded and so on, and they had to stop, they froze to death. It was just as simple as that. You could. We knew it was on the other side, so in the daylight when they weren't attacking us, we could wrap the sleeping bags around us and so on, and we could build a fire and warm some chow. But that night you just, uh, you were on guard all the time,

and that's kind of what wears you down too. You get so exhausted and the cold weather also helps exhaust you, and you can't you eatn frozen chow, so you get a lot of strikes against you. But we wouldn't have made it out of there, I don't believe unless it was as well orchestrated as it was. I mean, uh, the air force was uh protecting us and keep firing at the communists and keep their heads down. So it gave us a chance to to react more if if they'd have been able

to swarm in in the numbers that they had had been bad. But uh, in the Marine Corps, everybody looks out for the other guy, so and that worked. That worked. Everybody remembered it, and uh, you were very dependent on the guy next to you and see on you. The training that they gave us was well worthwhile. But they didn't know that we could have this weather thing to contend with, and that was really that was really a crippler. We were very fortunate, I think in our commanding general,

man by the name of Opie Oliver Oliver Smith was uh. He was combat savvy. He he knew exactly what the and he didn't do exactly what they asked him to do with Tokyo because he knew better what should be done. And he wasn't insubordinate, but he was. He slowed things down where they'd fit. In other words, Tokyo wanted to go right up to the

Yallou River. Well, that would have meant a supply line that was probably seventy miles long, and General Smith knew that that was not safe, and so he had any reason to slow it down, he would do that. And the other thing that I knew about there was he stopped and built an airport runway. Should say that's crazy, but he knew that it really got bad. He wanted the place to be able to take the dead and wounded out and bring replacements in and also supplies. So he did those kinds of

things quietly. But he's amazing General. I think personal thoughts, I wasn't quite as impressed with those that were trying to run the war from Tokyo. I understand why, yes, how did they resupply you when you're totally surrounded. A lot of it was by parachutes before they blew up the bridge. There's only one supplier out one road, and when the Chinese watched us go into the trap, but once we were in there, they blew up the

only bridge that we could get out through. And so therefore we were pretty much dependent on air drops of supplies both AMMO and food whatever we needed, and parts of the bridge to rebuild it. Right. Yeah, that was that was amazing. It was one of the miracles of the war as far as I'm concerned, that they could take And somebody remembered that there was a sedgeway bridge over in Japan, and they put their thoughts together and flew over.

They dropped one first, and the parachutes weren't enough they didn't support the part of the bridge, so it kept crashing down. So after that they had extra parachutes and so on, and you dropped eight of those position then it was our way of survival. I just marvel at that all keep together. How big of an area is it at chosen reservoir that you are in as you're encircled, you know, I don't know if I can answer that

because it kind of tapered off, but it previous sized area. I guess I can't tell you exactly, but it went up toward the Yalu, which was I think twenty or twenty five miles north, and then first we had to fight our way south as the Chinese had you encircled, how did they try to attack you and how did you try to to respond or take the fight to them. We more often took a defensive nature because of that. There was a few of us compared to how many of them there were,

and they would manpower didn't mean anything to them. They just keep waves. In fact, the first wave often times they wouldn't even have rifles, wait till somebody else was killed, and then they'd take that rifle. So it was like a shooting gallery really a lot of the time. It had to be for us to do that with that many of them versus what do we had. So they did not value their soldiers' lives. No, No, they were more interested I think in trying to get food if they if they

made an advance or whatever. And they weren't for the most part, weren't dressed very well. I didn't have one case where friends in our group named David kind of disappeared. Well, you know, we're did you go worzy. It's one nobody knew. And three or four days later somebody shot a Chinese soldier and wearing David's clothing. Those kinds of things are they're hard to

look at. I mean, it's just painful. You mentioned that they parachuted in supplies of weapons and food and the parts to create the bridge amazingly. How did they deal with wounded service members? How did you evacuate? Well, that was that was a problem. Uh, it was hard to evacuate them up from the reservoir once we got down a further breaking out of there than we could. But uh, it was a case of making him as

comfortable as we could. The corman, Uh for plasma's when they'd have to put in their mouth to keep it from freezing, or morphine, you know, pain killer. Uh. The wound that it was really hard because they almost had to stack them up and a lot of them are on the trucks and if there were wounds to bed that they couldn't be mobile at all. It freese enough and we saw all of that. That is Patrick Finn, a US Marine Corps veteran of the Korean War and one of the frozen chosen

the Marines who survived the horrific Battle of Chosen Reservoir. When we come back, we'll spend time discussing the brutal fighting at Chosen Reservoir and how a lot of the fighting was hand to hand, and later mister Finn tells us how the Marines finally broke out from Chosen Reservoir, what happened after that, and his unforgettable return to Korea decades later. I'm Greg Corumbus, and this is

Veterans Chronicles. This is Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbus. Our guest in this edition is Patrick Finn, a US Marine Corps veteran of the Korean War and the brutal Battle of Chosen Reservoir. In a few moments, we'll hear how the Marines finally broke out of Chosen Reservoir and what mister Finn has to say about the price of freedom. But now mister Finn takes us inside the intensity of the fighting at Chosen Reservoir. As I asked him if he had

engaged in hand to hand fighting, Yeah, it was. It was so close in As I mentioned earlier, you're cautious in your shooting because you didn't want to shoot your own people, and we had a close combat like that that can be a problem. So yes, there was there was hand to end. What's that like? You know, when it's over, it's scary what's happening? You're just so busy doing what you're taught to do that don't

I don't remember ever being scared when it was happening. The boy. After it was over, it you know, it's it becomes a reality then and it's it's uh uh I'll say it, but it's it's shakes you. When I got back to the hospital of Japan, I was really, uh a kind of overwhelmed or concerned with what I'd done in the hand to end and whatever. Killing somebody is it's not my nature and uh we had some good advice and so on and kind of tempered that, but it's it's, uh,

you know, they're they're there. They didn't want to be there anymore than we didn't want to be there. So it's just uh, kill ery killed. Were you? Was this with fists? Was it with knives or whatever you could grab or well? Yeah, usually it was uh was made at if you had or or a butt or uh. There wasn't too much of that. Usually we had uh enough uh latitude that we could shoot or throw over an aid or whatever. It was an experience that I wasn't raised

to uh be involved in. I mean, this is so different than anything I'd do. The thing that really kept it glued together is people doing their own job, from the general, the air force, and the medics, the chaplains of everybody took chaos and it was chaotic and did what they had to do or we should have done to get us out of there. And

that plus some prayers that got us out. Talk about the defensive strategy, how much was it explained to you based on where they positioned you and so forth, what they thought was the most effective way of stopping the Chinese from attacking. I wasn't high enough in the management to get all the inside, but I can give you an example of the hill that I had the toughest

time, the hill number fifteen twenty. The Chinese were already embittered up, and they had foxhols and so on, and we were told to take the hill, and we did. That's always harder when you're going up and they're already there. But we did manage to take the hill. And we were holding it, and we sent down for more AMMO and the AMMO carriers got ambushed, so we didn't get the AMMO, and we kept firing until the

Chinese were kind of quiet. Then they knew that as soon as that machine gun we were down to one machine gun stopped firing, that it was open game for them. And twenty of our guys are eighteen, I'm not sure the count went down the hill and there were six of us, one machine gunner and five riflemen still up there, and when that machine gunner ran out of ammo, we had to go, and we took a trail down the

side to the mountain. We regrouped. There wasn't enough of us left to have a company, even so they joined us with I think it was how company, and they went back up again the next day. It took the hillow again. That's kind of the way it operated. You did what had to be done at the time because there was no real there's no real game plan is to you know what they're going to do, or we just have to react to it. That at some point, did you injure your leg?

Yeah, well it froze them. Yeah, very embracelest today because of it. It's uh. And then the trigger finger. You know, you had the gloves which you couldn't wear the gloves all the time because you wouldn't be able to fire at a short notice. So we had to cut the chips up of the gloves, so we had our fingers. I've got some problems from that, but it's I was lucky compared to a lot of the guys. How long did your recuperation take? Wait? I was in three

different hospital in Japan. It was just kind of a gradual thing and it never did really go away. It changed into neuropathy in later years and that type thing. It got better. Yeah, they said it would get better. It did. We had to watch out for fumus or something after that because your feet were very sensitive to it. A lot of the guys lost toes and lost feet, and yeah, I was. I was very fortunate. Are you still sensitive to cold? Oh? Yeah? Was that the

end of combat for you or did you come back after recording? Oh? We fought our way down. Every every able bodied person had to do that, and we had a wounded and did in the trucks. Then we would guard the trucks as best we could and keep them, but as I said earlier, a lot of them frosed to death anyway. So tell me how you finally escaped from Chosen reservoir. Was it once the bridge was completed, Yes, that's that kind of opened a way, But we had to fight

our way all the way down. I mean, the Chinese were not going to give up that easily. What was that like? Describe that fighting well? Sporadic. What they would do is try and slower a convoy down and they would shoot the drivers of the trucks or jeebs or whatever. That was a favorite because that would stop everything. And every time that happened and the possession stopped, you have to, you know, start combat again to break it loose and get the clear the nest and get rid of the Chinese.

Even if it meant pushing the truck over the edge of the mountain. You did what you had to do. A lot of it was text and a lot of it wasn't that. The parts that really kept things going, I think is the fact that everybody's supporting each other. If they hadn't done that, if they just kind of ran rampant and scrambled, we'd all been buried up there. How was the escape organized? Where were you and the convoy and and that sort of thing. Well, we were towards the end of

it. Item company was to carry up the rear. When we first we're leaving the reservoir. We kept our big guns at the end, of course, and kept lobbing them over into the Chinese and you can see them coming over the over the ridges as we proceeded out. The kind of eerie feeling. You feel very powerless. I mean, you have to do what you have to do, and you want to do that, but you feel like you'd like to do more, and you know you're kind of lovered it.

Once the evacuation started. How long did it take you to get out of there? I can't tell you exactly. I'm guessing twelve thirteen d's. That's a guess, because we did it more or those two parts. I did anyway down from the reservoir down to hagar Ree and then met up with some of the others and continued on from there. Now, the thing most Americans take from the story of Chosen Reservoir is the fact that the Marines were able

to escape. They weren't annihilated there, but What sometimes gets overshadowed is it still came at a very heavy cost. Terrible, terrible woodman is a heavy cost. But this was a lot of men, A lot of men would and I think if I remember correctly, there is thirty five thousand killed in a war. That's some people from other countries too, of course. Yeah, that was that was uh uh very expensive war in the way of human beings and and uh disabilities what have you. Yeah, it's hard and you

lost some close friends there. Oh no, that was that was hard. That's Riley I was talking about. That saved me so many times. On uh December third, he got killed and a couple others, real close friend. December third, for some reason, Uh was the toughest on my friends, you know. But uh, yeah, it's painful. It's painful to to see a wounded person that you can't really help in a way. Well, for example, let's tell you what. The six of us were coming

down the side of the hill. We weren't quite sure we were coming down into uh our territory. But on our way down, I heard this real hard mourning and crying, and we stopped and here was a gunny sergeant the bars that he was this she was just really badly shot up. He died later, but then hauling him down the hill. Uh. It just there so many of those things happening that. Uh, there's a lot of stories

any others that stand out to you. One of them was, of course, on our way out, we were afraid that we weren't going to be having air support because it was cloudy and the guys couldn't fly well. And the night before we really took off, we looked up in the sky, uh, and here was a star came through it, almost like the Star of Bethlehem. And we knew then that they that the weather was clearing and

that we had a chance of getting out. That was there was things like that that do stand up about that, and the bridge and individual things. The touchy roll story has been told so many times where we were running out of ammunition and everything had a code name, and mortars were called tutsi rolls, and they got out the radio and said, Japan said we need toutsier

rolls really bad. And the next day, I think it'd be nineteen over there, the flying box car came through it through palets of toutsyer rolls. But it was a good thing for us because all of our food was frozen, so we could take these toutsyer rolls and shove men against our bodies and have something to nourish us. But there's a lot of those kind of stories. Did they finally send you mortars at some point? Oh? Yeah, they correct that. You know afterwards you could laugh at it. At the

time, it was very serious. The tucci roll people come to our conventions every year. They very good supply as what's yer olds with? What was it like when you were finally free from that horrible situation? Unbelievable. I got flown through uh Japan as in the hospital, and we were we were hungry because we weren't eating right, you know, we're eating anything frozen. And I remember they told you you could you can have anything you want to

eat. Would you like it? Oh boy? The chocolate balt pool that down and ask came right back up? I was. I got so sick because my body wasn't used to that. But for a long time it didn't think it didn't feel possible that it was that it was out of there, and had such terrible memories of what it was like. Uh, the country was leveled and the UH civilians were distraught when we heard there were cold, tired, exhausted. I should see, hungry for real food and all the

other things necessities of life. And a few years back I had a chance to go back there, and I didn't know if I even wanted to go back there, but I did, and I'm so glad I did because I saw that what we did was right. It was the right thing to do. The the Koreans have taken them, made a beautiful country out of it, and they're so appreciative. Right to this day, they're just it's like

it happened yesterday. They're wonderful people as far as I'm concerned. We've talked about South Korean people a little bit, but just when you see the difference between North and South Korea, now, how does that make you feel? It's amazing. It tells me it was the right thing to do. Painful as it was, and I wouldn't do it again, but I'm so glad I did it. You know, I really started to think about this was worth going to a country I didn't know, fighting for people, and I

didn't know. But when I look back at it now, if they hadn't decided to fight that war. It's not the communist they had kept going. I really believe that they would have felt pretty powerful. Nobody said no, and I think they would have gone to Japan and the Philippines. Well, you know, they kept going, So we did the right thing. You have seen the price of freedom up close. You know what the cost is. What do you want people to know about what it takes to preserve the

freedoms in this country? In a lot of ways, I think we really need to wake up and realize that how valuable our freedoms are. I think a lot of us, because we've been free for you know, a long time, but I think a lot of us just taken for granted that it's always going to be there, and that is necessarily true. As I say, even then example of Korea, I think if we don't let that happen, there'd be nothing to stop them. They just kept going. So I

hope become more aware. I think of how valuable it is. A lot of people would just love to get into this country and live and enjoy our freedoms. They don't have it. You need to be thankful for them, very much, very much. Just a couple of questions remaining. Sir, First of all, what are you most proud of from your service? The end result? I think of going back there and seeing what the Korean people

made out of it. You go back and they've the streets are clean, there's no graffiti, and that people are are happy, and they're they're dressed comfortably and on, and we know what's happening in the earth. They don't have that, In fact, they don't even know it exists. I guess I'm proud of that. And lastly, sir, what does it mean to you to have us at the American Veteran Center record and share your story. Well, I think it's a story that has to be kept fresh because of

the freedom part of it. In fact, are chosen few. You know, we're all getting old. I'm ninety two, and we're kind of disappearing group that we started what do we call a legacy, and that's for our children or grandchildren, widows or whoever to pick up the story and learn what did happen there in Korea. They really, even little kids know what happened.

They're so aware. When I was there, we were in a museum and they had an exhibit of chosen reservoir, and I get cheers I think of this, but there are a lot of little kids, maybe twenty five or thirty kids and two teachers, and the kids kept looking at us. The kids will do. And teachers said something to him, and they all got big smiles on their face, taken before us, and I said, we love you and thank you. So that just broke me up. That

makes it worthwhile. Mister Fann, I can't think of a better way to end. Thank you so much. It's been an honor to speak with you. We appreciate your time today and thank you so much for the service you've given to our country. Patrick Finn served in the fifth US Marine Division during

the Korean War, particularly at the brutal Battle of Chosen Reservoir. I'm Greg Corumbus and this is Veterans Chronicles. Hi, this is Greg Corumbus, and thanks for listening to Veterans Chronicles, a presentation of the American Veterans Center. For more information, please visit American Veteranscenter dot org. You can also follow the American Veterans Center on Facebook and on Twitter. We're at AVC update.

Subscribe to the American Veterans Center YouTube channel for full oral histories and special features, and of course please subscribe to the Veterans Chronicles podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks again for listening, and please join us next time for Veterans Chronicles

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