just like that, it began. Close to midnight, the men heard a cacophony of bugles and horns, and the Red Chinese fell upon the gorge—“flights of them,” said one account, “like flocks of blackbirds.” They attacked the Seventh Regiment’s two leading battalions and infiltrated the gap between them. A battle raged through the night and, in fits and starts, for the next several days. By the time it was over, sixty-one Marines, and an estimated one thousand CCF soldiers, had been killed. Smith, often prone to understatement, called it “quite a fight.”
