On the first night at Toktong Pass, the Chinese came in waves. Lou Merkadanti, a nineteen-year-old Marine replacement who had never seen combat before, was dug in at the extreme top of the hill with a slit trench for cover. He had joined Fox Company, Second Battalion, Seventh Marines only weeks earlier, and now he was watching the night explode around him. A friend named Hector Cafferata came running up the hill in his sock feet, having been chased out of his position lower down the slope when the Chinese hit his position first.
The temperature was forty below zero, and Cafferata had left his boots behind. He climbed into Lou’s trench with his buddy Kenny Benson. That same night, Cafferata earned the Medal of Honor. Lou never saw him again after that first battle, because Cafferata went back down to retrieve his shoes and was shot three times by a sniper, leaving one arm partially paralyzed.
Lou’s journey to Toktong Pass had begun in 1949, when he joined the Marine Corps Reserve as a high school senior in Ambridge, Pennsylvania. When the Korean War broke out, President Truman activated the reserves, and Lou left Pittsburgh on September 9, 1950. He trained for thirty days at Camp Pendleton, California, with almost no prior military experience, no boot camp, and no real preparation. He shipped out of San Diego, passed through Kobe, Japan, where he received winter gear, and landed in North Korea.
The advance north was quick because resistance was light. He joined Fox Company near Hagaru-ri around the second week of November. The company enjoyed a hot Thanksgiving meal, and then came the order: they were to defend a mountain pass called Toktong. Fox Company numbered about 250 Marines.
They were loaded onto vehicles, driven about five miles up the mountain, and dispersed along the ridge. Lou, assigned to the third platoon, ended up at the top of the hill on the extreme perimeter. He was alone at first, and nervous. He asked his lieutenant, Robert McCarthy, if someone could join him.
McCarthy brought up a friend, Jim Hoster, from the second platoon, and the two spent a night together on the hill. After that, Lou was mostly on his own, with only Lieutenant McCarthy in a small compound at the end of the trench and two brothers named Gonzalez from Texas about twenty yards away. After the first night, no one else was beyond him. He was the farthest man out on the hill.
The first night was almost an overrun. The Chinese attacked after dark, using flares and bugles to coordinate their assaults, and came in hordes. They briefly pushed through the Marine lines but withdrew by daybreak. The second night was nearly as bad.
Each successive night brought a slightly weaker attack. By the third and fourth nights, the Chinese were less aggressive, and by the fifth night, no one appeared at all. Lou was never resupplied with food. He later recalled searching the pockets of the wounded and the dead for scraps of chocolate, and he went five days without eating.
He did receive ammunition, dropped by Flying Boxcars in supply bundles, and the Marines marked a drop zone with flags so the pilots knew where to release the cargo. Artillery support was available. Lou could hear the 105mm shells passing directly over his head and striking the hill across from him, where the Chinese were concentrated. But communications were broken.
The radios could transmit out but not receive, so the Marines on the hill could not hear incoming instructions or confirm that the artillery was receiving their corrections. Phosphorus rounds with aerial bursts exploded overhead. Lou, still a rookie with limited military schooling, understood little of the technical details. He only knew the shells were flying over them and hitting the enemy across the way.
The cold was a relentless enemy of its own. Lou had been assigned a Browning Automatic Rifle, the BAR, typically given to the smallest man in the unit. On the first day of battle it worked. On the second day, it froze solid.
He picked up an M1 rifle and used it until it too froze, then switched to a carbine. The weather, he later said, was one of the worst enemies they faced. He did not know how they survived, but he credited the discipline of the Marine Corps. Captain Barber, the company commander, visited the lines every day, even after he was wounded.
His order was simple and absolute: once it got dark, no one was allowed to move. Anything that moved was to be shot, because it had to be the enemy. The Marines stayed put, no matter what. Lou believed this discipline was the reason they survived, because anyone who got up and ran in the dark would have been shot by his own men.
Almost everyone on the hill was wounded or frostbitten in some way. Lou suffered a severe concussion from a grenade on the first night, but no one could leave their position. Men with bullet wounds and shrapnel wounds kept fighting because the company was so shorthanded. Lou later guessed that fewer than half a dozen men came off the hill without some kind of wound or injury.
On the fifth day, Colonel Davis and his men came through the pass. They had marched over the mountains from the area near the Yalu River, and they walked directly past Lou’s position. Lou told Lieutenant McCarthy, “Here they come. ” The column continued past him to the command post where Captain Barber was waiting.
Lou remained in his position. After a couple of hours, no one had returned, and he thought it strange. He walked down the hill to find the company was gone. They simply left him there.
He believed it was an oversight. With the vehicles still streaming down through the pass, Lou joined them and made his way to Hagaru-ri. If Fox Company had not held the pass, Lou later estimated that roughly seven thousand Marines would have been trapped and would never have gotten out. By the time he reached Hagaru-ri, he was badly frostbitten.
He went to the medical tent and was ordered onto a plane. He took the last plane out of Hagaru-ri, arriving in Japan around the first week of December 1950. He remained there until April 1, 1951, when he returned to the United States. He was stationed at the Yorktown Naval Mine Depot until his discharge in 1952.
His time in combat in Korea had lasted about two months. Lou was proud that he was the last man off Fox Hill, even though he was not aware of it at the time. His closest friendships from the war were formed later, at reunions, when he finally had time to meet the men he had served alongside. He never saw Hector Cafferata again until their first reunion, years later.
He remained close with Lieutenant McCarthy, calling him regularly until McCarthy’s death a few years before the interview. He never asked him why they left him on the hill. He assumed it was simply an oversight. The war changed Lou in ways that stayed with him for decades.
It made him appreciate being home, and it gave him a perspective on hardship that never left him. He often said that nothing could ever be worse than what he had experienced in Korea, and that every day from then on was a good day, some better than others. He returned to his old job driving a milk truck, then went to school for two years, worked in industry, moved into public accounting, and eventually started his own business in 1960. He ran it for fifty years, sold it, and worked with the buyer for another eleven years after the sale.
The company kept his name because of the reputation he had built. He married the girl who had been one of his milk route customers and a friend from high school. They had a long marriage, raised a family, stayed active in their church, and he devoted himself to the Boy Scouts, leading troops on camping trips and canoe expeditions into Canada. He never regretted the path that led him into the Marine Corps, even though it started as a spur-of-the-moment decision made at a high school assembly where all the military branches were recruiting.
He believed the Marine Corps gave him discipline and taught him that nothing could beat him down. He advised younger generations that the Marine Corps was not an easy choice, that every Marine is trained as an infantryman, and that those who joined had to be ready for the hard things the infantry does. He remained active in his church his entire life, never missing a Sunday, and he flew an American flag in front of his home, with a spare flag ready to replace it whenever the one outside wore out. He wanted a second flagpole to raise the Marine Corps flag beside it.
At ninety-four years old, he still kept a large garden, stayed close with his sons, and held firmly to the belief that the discipline and respect he learned as a Marine carried him through everything that followed.