Pfc. Juan Balleza and his fellow Marines had paused to rest and await replacements near the Chosin Reservoir in North Korea when Balleza ran into a San Antonio high school buddy, Tony Lara.

Lara noticed that the Marines’ artillery tubes were pointed in all directions.

It was then they realized they were surrounded.

Just as grim was a visit the night before from 1st Lt. George Lee Earnest, who talked with the Marines one by one as they gathered up cases of hand grenades before moving out.

Sixty-nine years later, Balleza still recalls the feeling he had about that visit.

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“When he left, I told my buddy, ‘You know what, Don, I think Ernie came by to say goodbye to us,’” Balleza, 88, recalled. “‘I don’t think he thinks we’re going to survive the night.’”

Balleza’s Marine unit was part of a large United Nations force that had been about to end the war late in 1950, just five months after communist North Korea had invaded South Korea and overrun the peninsula. No one could imagine a better Christmas present.

It wasn’t to be.

China had infiltrated 300,000 of its own troops into the mountains of North Korea, far more than Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s intelligence officers had imagined and well beyond the capacity of the U.N. forces to stop. The full weight of the Chinese offensive came two days after Thanksgiving, amid temperatures as low as 36 degrees below zero.

The U.S. Eighth Army was routed, and a near-disaster befell the 1st Marine Division, which Chinese generals tried to encircle and destroy near the Chosin Reservoir. The training, discipline and leadership of the Marines would foil those plans, as would the heroism of soldiers like Balleza, who had just turned 19.

He had come to the hard-fighting division the way many others had, though the reserves. Balleza was 17 and in high school when he joined, spending two weeks in summer camp in 1949, when the United States was at peace and no one was thinking of another war.

When North Korea invaded on June 25, 1950, however, he got orders. So did an older brother, Jesse Balleza, now 92.

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Policymakers in Washington had been blindsided when 10 North Korean divisions swept south, capturing Seoul, the capital, in three days, and most of the peninsula in weeks, executing local leaders and pushing U.N. and Republic of Korea forces into a corner. MacArthur punctured that momentum, then reversed it, with an amphibious landing at Inchon.

Balleza arrived in Korea just in time for the war to shift in the Americans’ favor, but everything about it was brutal: the fighting, the weather, the terrain.

“It didn’t take very long for a young 19-year-old kid to grow up fast in that place,” the late Army Col. David Hackworth, a Korean War veteran, told the San Antonio Express-News years ago. “You either got it right or you died.”

A squared-away Marine

Balleza got it right.

It helped that he knew his business as the Browning Automatic Rifle guy in his platoon. Though short and slight, Balleza carried the 19.5-pound weapon and had amazed his trainers by knowing how to control the trigger pressure to fire off single rounds rather than the usual bursts of fire.

He was a good listener, too, taking to heart tips about how to cope with cold weather — changing his socks daily and sleeping on branches or other objects while in snow. Marines massaged each other’s feet after digging in at night. It would pay dividends in a war where the cold proved even deadlier on occasion than bullets, mortars and artillery.

The Americans ran into Chinese troops as they headed north toward the reservoir. They’d engaged them in firefights at Chipyong-ni, southeast of Seoul, and had a big battle at Sudong, where Balleza’s 7th Regiment fire team was on point.

They had close calls there. A tank fired at them but missed. Balleza’s team took cover but realized they were surrounded. It was 10 a.m., and they barely moved for the next six hours, until an officer led them out. The regiment fought all day and into the night, then fought the next day and night again. They met only light resistance on the third day. The decimated Chinese withdrew.

“We found out that we had destroyed the 124th Chinese division there at that battle at Sudong. Then, of course, we definitely knew that it was Chinese that we were fighting,” Balleza said, adding that things quieted down on Nov. 9.

And not a moment too soon. That was his 19th birthday.

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All these years later, Balleza still has a cigarette case his brother gave him. He recalls another gift from the men in his fire team — first watch, from 8 p.m. to midnight, which allowed him to sleep until morning.

A Marine told Balleza the next day that he’d carry his Browning and his ammo belt as a birthday present. Fully loaded, that came to 260 rounds, so it was quite a gift. They humped up a winding mountain road, but the party wasn’t over. The Marines had a popular candy called Lifesavers, some cookies and a candle. They put 19 cookies together and a small candle on top.

At home in San Antonio, relaxing on a recliner with a Marine Corps blanket on it, Balleza retrieved the last two Lifesavers out of the cigarette case.

“You still have it,” said his son, Paul Balleza, 60, of San Antonio.

“That day, on my birthday, we had cookies, this candle and we had these candies,” the elder Balleza said.

The best gift was yet to come. On the road, Balleza saw a discarded Chinese bandolier and reached for it. Machine gun bullets peppered a nearby rock.

“Then I realized that if I hadn’t moved to get that bandolier, those shots were meant for me. And I got scared. Up to that time, it was just like an adventure,” he said. “Then I realized I could get killed doing this.”

Into the nightmare

Somewhere past Hagaru, on a four-man patrol, Balleza met the new enemy face to face.

“We went out right before dusk,” Balleza said. “As we were going up I sensed a presence to my right front and I turned with my weapon. There was a Chinese soldier there.”

Balleza took him prisoner. Back at camp, he and the other Marines started a small fire to make coffee. He offered the prisoner water to mix with his rations, a cigarette and motioned to him to lie down and sleep.

“In the morning we (had) a fire so we could warm up some canned food and I gave him some, and when the MPs came for him he started crying. He didn’t want to leave. He wanted to stay with me,” he added. “I often wonder what happened to him.”

Balleza and his unit arrived at the reservoir and dug in. It was Nov. 17, and they were quickly attacked. The Chinese hit hard, then withdrew. He and his men spent Thanksgiving on patrol and came back to find the turkey and mashed potatoes enveloped in ice.

“At least they had bread,” he said. “We had some tin can C-rations but they were frozen, so (what) we would do is just punch holes in it and put them in the fire. After they were warmed enough, we would eat whatever was in the can.”

They were at Yudam-ni, a small village on the western side of the reservoir, and would advance no farther.

MacArthur’s lack of caution in pressing north made his staff’s failure to gauge Chinese strength among the worst intelligence blunders in U.S. military history.

All these years later, after reading many books on the Korean War, Balleza thinks the Chinese intentionally withdrew from Sudong in hopes of drawing the Marines to the Chosin. Whatever their intentions, when the enemy finally sprung the trap on Nov. 27, the timing couldn’t have been worse — for either side.

A Siberian front had rolled through. Exactly how many Chinese died in the next four weeks isn’t known, though estimates range from 19,000 to 30,000 across the entire front. American losses were roughly 2,500 killed in action, 5,000 wounded and nearly 8,000 injured by frostbite.

The 31st Regimental Combat Team, known as Task Force MacLean, an Army unit, was all but annihilated at the Chosin. The farthest the Marines got was a few miles north-northwest of Balleza’s position, where they ran into a wall of enemy troops and fell back.

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Balleza and his company spent four consecutive days in contact with the enemy before being pulled off the line.

On their way down, they passed another regiment, “and my friend, I saw him, and he said, ‘John,’ because I knew him from school, ‘Look at our guns!’” Balleza said. “The artillery, instead of facing straight north-northwest, we’re now facing all quadrants. He said, ‘We’re surrounded.’”

Decades of silence

The walls of Balleza’s living room are filled with memorabilia that include photos of him and his boot camp buddies at graduation, him in his dress uniform, him with his bride, Nidya, cutting a wedding cake.

He came home in March 1951, and they married and had five sons and a daughter. Before the war, Balleza worked as a driver for a creamery, but he had taken shop classes at San Antonio Vocational and Technical High School and after Korea he applied to work at Kelly AFB.

He started on July 1, 1953, in the machine shop, where he figured some of the base’s highest-paying jobs were. He later moved up to a desk job, retiring in 1987.

Balleza studied accounting and learned to prepare income taxes, filing them for family and old friends. He had 12 bookkeeping accounts at one time. These days, he’s down to one client whose books he has kept for 20 years.

Like a lot of veterans, Balleza didn’t talk much about his war. In a lengthy interview, he never mentioned even one grisly incident, though there had to have been many. The Marines’ fighting retreat from the Chosin lasted until Dec. 24, 1950.

“His foxhole buddy, Don Theobold, is the one who opened him up,” Paul Balleza said. “He never spoke about it until Don and his brother opened him up and we started to learn about what he went through, and it wasn’t a pretty picture.”

Part of it was the constant combat. At one point, Juan Balleza endured 17 consecutive days of it. The platoon had landed at Inchon 47 strong, but saw 30 killed or wounded at Chosin.

“It was a miracle we survived,” he said.

Earnest, the lieutenant who spoke to each man near the start of it, was one who survived.

Oddly, the day Theobold got Balleza to start talking about the war was on Balleza’s 25th wedding anniversary, while they were sharing drinks on his backyard gazebo.

Asked why he stayed silent for so long, Balleza had a simple answer.

“They wouldn’t understand,” he said. “Like a woman can’t really tell you what it feels like to have a baby.”

sigc@express-news.net