Responsibilities of a Platoon

Interviewer: With the 12th Platoon D Company of the Royal 22nd Regiment position that you took up in the line, can you now describe to me what the military situation was? The task at hand was improving the positions. I guess in today’s lingo you would be enhancing your positions, trying to make them more comfortable, really. A hole in the ground isn’t the best place to live. Trying to do rat control, a lot of rats in Korea. They feasted mightily on anything they could find. A lot of standing patrols in the valley, recce patrols, trying to find out who was out there—were the North Koreans, the Chinese, were they active out there? —an occasional fighting patrol. The emphasis at the time was trying to take a prisoner and that wasn’t always very successful. A lot of hard work. A lot of night work. Not much movement during the day for obvious reasons. While we were on the Ong-dong feature which is across the Sami-chon Valley from the enemy positions, it was a lot of distance. It was a long hike to get from where we were to where they were. The good news—it was just as long a hike for them. Minefields—as we got into winter, mines froze which was sometimes good news for us because if you did get off the beaten path and find yourself in a mine field, the chances were they weren’t going to blow up anyway because they were frozen into the mud.