As part of the Tuskeegee Airmen fighter squadron, Lt. Col. Charles Bussey helped break the U.S. military's racial barriers during World War II. In Korea, he received the Silver Star for leading an attack on a North Korean unit and preventing it from outflanking the Army's 24th Regiment in the Battle of Yechon on July 20, 1950. Bussey and three Army truck drivers were credited with killing 258 enemy soldiers. Bussey, who says he was denied the Medal of Honor because of discrimination, published his memoirs, "Firefight at Yechon: Courage and Racism in the Korean War," in 1991. He was interviewed for the COLD WAR series in February 1997.

On conditions for U.S. occupation forces in Japan:

The lifestyle involved a lot of leisure, a lot of involvement with the native women. The officers were involved with buying furniture, buying fancy chinaware for their homes. There was no concern whatever about combat-readiness. Absolutely none. Even in the maneuver areas the concern was [for] the good life. ...

It was an army of occupation and they were occupying and that was all they were doing. They were involved with doing nice things for nice girls. They had nothing to do with combat in any way, shape or form. It just wasn't there. And the attitude of the soldiers was that "We've got an atomic weapon now, so we don't have to worry about enemies. There are no enemies for the United States at this point." And that was the way life was. ... No one could imagine that there was a war just over the horizon.

On being deployed to Korea:

We were told to take our athletic equipment and leave everything else behind, because we'd only be gone for maybe six weeks. ... We'd go over there and we'd have a show of force in the field and those "gooks" would go back across the 38th parallel and we'd come home. That was the attitude that was prevalent at the time. ...

We had equipment left over from World War II, most of which had been in a warehouse some place and was from unserviceable to non-existent. ... We had no [maps]. The only map I saw was one that I had removed from the back page of our newspaper, "The Stars & Stripes." It had a map of the total of Korea and I took this off of the [news]paper and I folded it up and put it in my pocket. And that was the only map that I had for the first couple of weeks. It had no contours, no elevations, it had none of the things other than the location of principal cities. That was all we had. You cannot fight a war that way. You cannot do it. Eventually we got some Japanese maps, with Japanese characters, which had been in the archives from the time that the Japanese had occupied Korea. ... And they did not do the job for us, obviously. They were impossible. I guess we'd been there maybe as much as a month before we ever got anything that resembled a map that you'd use to fight a war with.

We had no bedding. For the first six months in Korea, I slept on the hood of my jeep. I had no bedding, I had no mosquito nets. None of those nice things were available. ... When our shoes wore out, they wore out, and that was it. We had radios that had been in storage so long that the alkali or whatever is in the battery had eaten its way through the shells. We were in very poor shape for everything. Food [was] poor in quality and poor in variety. We were not ready to fight a war. That's what it amounts [to]. That's the long and short of it. ...

On their North Korean enemy:

They had been training and they were motivated. They were communists through-and-through, and they recognized their physical superiority and they exercised it. And they were highly successful at it. They were in tremendous physical condition; they were able to climb the mountains to do the things that were necessary to engage the Americans, who were in poor condition, absolutely poor. And they were highly successful. They were the best mortar men in the world. They were unbelievably good. ...

They were determined, believe me. They were well-trained and tremendously motivated. I can remember once we captured two ... youngsters, maybe 14, half-grown. They probably weighed 75 to 85 pounds, and I had my interpreter [help] interview them. I just wanted to know what they were about. And they were very glad to talk to me. They told me where they came from, which is a town in Kaesong, and they were both very proud to be soldiers of the People's Army. I talked to them about their training, and they told me that when they came into the army they didn't have shoes -- and they weren't wearing shoes at the time. And I said, "Well, why not?" And they said, "Well, we don't get shoes until we take them from American soldiers." I said, "Well, how are you gonna take them?" They said: "We'll crawl up one of the hills there and when we hear a soldier snoring, then we'll sneak in behind him and --" He reached in, he took out ... sort of a stiletto or dagger-type thing, and he said "Well, I'll crawl behind him and I'll mug him, and stick this right down that little goozle he's got here and I'll hang onto him until he quits kicking and then I'll go down in the foxhole and I'll take his shoes."

I said "Well, isn't that kind of dangerous?" He said, "Sure it's dangerous, but if I can get a pair of shoes, I may have to kill eight or 10 soldiers, because Americans have big feet and I've got smaller feet and I'll have to kill them until I can find one whose feet are my size. And I will." That was his determination. ... That's what we were up against.

On the battle that earned him the Silver Star:

We'd been in Korea for a week or 10 days. ... I had a platoon supporting the 3rd Battalion, 24th Infantry, in a place called Yechon, so I decided I would take the mail up to them and so I got in the vehicle and we drove up there. When I got there, I could hear a lot of gunfire in the town of Yechon, but I couldn't see very much. So I climbed a small hill so I could see the town somewhat and assess the fire that was going on. I had been there a few minutes and I saw a column of people: most of them wearing white clothing, which was what the farmers wore there. [But] there was a situation where you are a farmer by day and a soldier by night. I watched them proceeding toward the American vehicles that were parked on a levee. The levee wasn't wide enough for [the U.S. vehicles] to turn around [on], but the [vehicles] had headed down into the town of Yechon [anyway].

I saw this situation, and I said, "Well, they appear to be determined and they're heading toward the end of this American column. And all they have to do is burn a couple of vehicles and that battalion would have been grounded." ... So I went down and I had the sergeant get his .50 caliber out of there and a .30 caliber weapon as well -- machine guns, of course -- and we carried them up this hill that I had been on previously. And as this column had moved in ... I said, "I'll fire a few rounds over their heads, and if they're soldiers they'll dig in, and somebody will take over and give some signals. ... If they were farmers, then they would scatter and run." And they did the former, so I went to work on them. Oh, I had taken a .30 calibre machine gun also, and two men, and we went to work on them. Very shortly, a mortar started coming in from the mountain behind them and I got nicked a little bit, but not enough to stop me. And we destroyed them, mostly. There were a few who didn't surrender and we destroyed the rest of them.

That's the first half of that story. ... The next day, word came down that I should send a [bull]dozer over to a place called Po-Hang, as I recall, to clean up a beach that had a lot of rubble on it, so that the Marines could have a comfortable landing. ... But on the way there we went right by the battlefield of the day before. And the very few townspeople that were left in Yechon ... were bringing these bodies up out of the rice paddies down below and they were digging graves by hand. And since I had the bulldozer there, I took it off the vehicle and I scooped up a grave for them, about 75 to a hundred yards long and six or eight feet deep and maybe 20 feet wide and we buried those people. That was the long and short of that story.

On the Allied advance to the Chinese border:

I thought we'd won the war! (Long laugh) I shouldn't laugh at this point, but I have to. I really thought that we had won the war. And I think that was a general feeling, and we went north with high hopes. As a matter of fact, they were so high that there was a rumor out of the 8th Army Headquarters that theoretically the first troops to the Yalu River [were] the first troops to go home. And that was the attitude that we went north with. We never got to the river and a lot of us never got home.

We had moved into North Korea with no difficulty at all. The North Korean army was not in sight. We moved up to the Chungchon River, and Thanksgiving Day came and we had all of the food and things that Thanksgiving had meant when we were at home. And we at that time were nearing the Yalu River and that meant going home. First to the river, first home. It was a very cheerful occasion and we were very happy about it. We played some baseball and did all those little things that we might have done at home, you know, -- "home" meaning wherever we came from. It was a happy kind of a day.

And that night or the next night, the first Chinese showed up. We had no idea of what their force was, what their strength was, their weaponry. We had no idea that the Chinese were even coming into the war. The first I heard of it, really, was that they had annihilated -- and that may not be a good term but that's what I [understood] -- the 8th Engineers who had crossed the Chungchon River and had been issued tents. ... The Chinese caught them in their tents and they destroyed the tents with bullets and of course the men inside [them]. ...

That disturbed me somewhat but then very shortly after that, we got messages that other units had been hit by Chinese as well. We had no intelligence to tell us what was really going on, and little by little the Chinese strength increased and they began to kill Americans in significant numbers. Still, [we had] no intelligence whatever. There came a time to withdraw, and we did; and the first engagement that my company had with the Chinese was with their bugles. At night they'd blow these bugles and they had a chilling effect on the soldiers. [We] had no night training prior to going to Korea, and the Koreans fought almost exclusively -- or extensively certainly -- at night. All of their attacks were usually at night and they'd blow these bugles and these were signals to do something. ...

It was kinda tough on GIs, and we had an incident there. If your name was Abernathy, chances are pretty good that you're gonna be called "Abernasty," and we had such a person -- a little fella, very sour. And at night I always went from foxhole to foxhole; I talked to my guys, and some of them of course I knew and [others] I didn't know well. I'd ask questions about where they came from and what their parents did and all of those things that you need to know about a man that you're commanding so that you are really in charge. And he was rattling over there. He was just shaking. I said "What in the hell's the matter with you?" And he said "Well, that bugle does bad things for me" and I said "Well, what do you mean by that?" And he told me, "Well, I'm afraid of it. When that bugle goes off, I'm shaking." So I said, "OK, well, quit shaking and I'll tell you something." And he didn't quit shaking but I decided to tell him [anyway]. And I told him ... "The very next time that bugle goes off, then you point that gun right where you heard that bugle." He said, "But I can't see Ôem." I said, "Put it right where you heard it."

And he did, and a few minutes later that bugle went off and he touched off a bullet and you could hear it [hit] that bugle -- hitting a bugle's a little bit different than hitting a man, the sound. I said, "Okay, you got Ôem." The night went on and the next morning we went out there and sure enough, that bullet had gone right down that bugle and right into this joker's head, most of which was gone. And I said "You see there?" And Abernasty became about 6 feet tall! (Laugh) He grew a lot, just [from] that little success. And not only was it good for him, it was good for our other people as well.

On winter warfare in Korea:

The first night the Chinese hit us I lost 39 men to frostbite. We evacuated them, and I went by the next afternoon, down to the medical station, and the doctors were breaking off those frozen toes with forceps. I never saw those men again. That's how badly we were equipped. From the frostbite I lost a whole platoon. We were not equipped at all. We had no tents, we had leather shoes. We got some mukluks later on, and eventually we got some [of] what they call "Mickey Mouse" boots, but all of this came much later and we lost a lot of people long before that.

We probably lost more people due to conditions than we did to enemy action, I think. That's an after-the-fact attitude, of course, but we lost a lot of people to situations and that winter was one of them. I don't know how people in the Pentagon and all the way back through the supply chain let that happen, because summer is always followed by fall which is followed by winter, and winter imposes some real difficult situations on soldiers.

The Koreans were much [better] equipped than we were in many respects. First of all, they had a quilted cotton uniform. ... [And] the Chinese ... were wearing a one-piece quilted uniform. ... They had shoes that were rubber and the feet were a part of this uniform that they wore, made right into the thing so there were no gaps, and they had gloves where you could extract one finger for a trigger and they had blow-back type weapons and they didn't care how cold it got. They wouldn't freeze. If you have a cylinder that vibrates back and forth, the oil will freeze and you can't fire this thing. They didn't have that problem.

They were issued each a sack -- I'd say it was 4, 5 inches in diameter -- and it was long enough to fit over a shoulder, which left both hands free and that sack had either rice or millet or some type of grain in it. And they were required to live off the land: Their protein and their sugar and things, they took from whatever the land provided. They were healthy. They did very well for themselves. They cooked wherever they got hungry, and they killed a pig, a cow, a chicken, or whatever the land provided. ... They were hearty, they were strong, they had very poor communications equipment, they had plenty of guns and plenty of ammunition and one helluva lot of men, and they did very well.

They chased us all the way from the Chungchon River all the way to the Imjin River, and this was a couple of hundred miles. We didn't stop for anything. We were heading all the way for Pusan, and if Gen. Ridgeway hadn't taken over, we'd have finally gotten to Pusan. We fared very, very poorly.

When we got to the Imjin River, the first thing I did was to destroy all the boats along the river. Everything on the north side of the river I destroyed. The river then was freezing at night -- oh, 3 to 4 inches thick ice. And every afternoon I blew the river with bangalore torpedoes. A bangalore torpedo is sort of a pipe that ... is filled with [explosives], so that when you fired this thing, it broke the ice. And for the first three or four nights that we were there, I fired these bangalores about 4 o'clock in the afternoon, and that cracked the ice. It takes quite a bit of time for that ice to become strong enough to support a man, and there were thousands of Chinese across the river from us -- but they couldn't cross this thing because we blew this ice.

One afternoon, the regimental commander said, "What's that noise I hear every afternoon about 4 o'clock?" I said, "Oh, I blow the ice out of the river there so we won't have to worry anybody walking across at night." He said, "Well, I don't like that noise." And I said, "Well, I don't either, but it's effective." And he said, "Well, I don't wanna hear it anymore." I explained to him that [destroying] the ice ... made it possible for us to have the security that we needed against that horde of [Chinese] on the far bank. He said, "Well, I don't wanna hear it anymore." And he didn't. And the next day at high noon, 10,000 of Ôem hit us and drove us all the way back to Yan Dang Po. ...

On the Chinese advance:

The Chinese ... crossed [the Yalu River] in great numbers and we lost thousands of men. The Second Division, for example, lost battalions. The 24th Infantry lost a company. It was a disaster -- and it was a leaderless disaster. And I'm not aware of any other movement of Americans that were as futile as that rout was -- and it was a rout. ...

It was a rout exactly like the one Napoleon faced leaving Russia and identical to the one that the Wehrmacht faced leaving Stalingrad. We ran headlong, helter-skelter, pell-mell, trying to get to Pusan, trying to get back to Japan. It was disgusting. All grades. No generals -- I didn't see any generals -- but I saw all grades less than that, as individuals, heading south. I had a number of trucks, and we had people on top of the trucks, on the running boards. We were just heading south. Disgusting. I never felt so inadequate in my life as to be part of an army that was running helter-skelter, pell-mell. It's unbelievable.

I used to have nightmares. I could feel 10,000 Chinese walking over my chest, you know, but I don't have that anymore. I sleep well, I think. I didn't mean for this to happen. (Voice breaks with emotion). I guess I don't sleep so well.