He was only 18, conscripted, and he still felt like a child.
As a child, he'd climbed these hills past the gates of familiarity, yet his rifle weighed down his slender frame as he found himself stumbling and changing its position against his back. Not far past the glimmering village, the boy stalked in the sparse forests dotting the hillside gazing down to the river and past to the hill on the other side.
As a great wind blew through the valley, the old kerosene lamps shuddered, causing the shadows to dance across the snow and flutter along the new snowfall that came each evening with sunset. As the sun set on the flat Chinese side of the river, the lights of the village of Ji'an began to flicker on, catching his eye in their rich orange and yellow tones and casting the settlement in long, foreboding shadows along the grey and white ground. Now, from his machine gun nest, dug into the side of the squat hills facing the Chinese border, John shivered against the harsh northern winter, drawing his thick army coat close round his broad shoulders and slumping his rifle from its sling onto his lap. Nonetheless, their venture northward had been easy sailing, especially compared to the struggles faced by invasionary forces, and only the weather and the rotten conditions stood to make the venture miserable by the time they arrived at the Yalu River and prepared for the Chinese counter offensive.
By the time the 32nd had landed, much of the North Korean force, once the greatest threat in the region, had been exterminated except for a few loyalist groups left stranded in the mountains, ambushing Americans at any opportunity. It was a far cry from the flat, open deserts of Arizona, John thought, as the division wound its way through the mountainous half of the Korean Peninsula. Even the great evergreens which still stood on the mountaintops, far from any strategic holds or villages, seemed lonesome and forlorn, the last of a once mighty race now struggling to survive through the capitalist crusade. After they entered North Pyongan, however, the harsh winter had rolled in, leaving the land barren and riddled with dust and snow and the craters where coalition shelling had bombarded North Korean camps. In the early months of autumn, as John and the rest of the 32nd infantry made their way north towards the Chinese border, there had still been trees lining the tops of the Korean mountainsides and straddling the borders of bombed out villages. The Manchurian hillsides fell, steep from their tops, before suddenly breaking into flat land which led all the way to the riverside.
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