Something to Remember

When a mass of Chinese soldiers burst out of a concealing curtain of brush and charged Company E, 19th U.S. Infantry Regiment, last Nov. 5, there seemed, in the first split second, nothing that any man could do to stop them. The men of the 19th were caught by surprise in scattered holes and ditches along a ridge near Chonghyon. The Chinese started their dash only 100 ft. from the 19th's most forward outpost.

But the man in the hole up front was Corporal Mitchell Red Cloud, a big, impassive, 26-year-old Indian from Friendship, Wis. and Red Cloud did not hesitate. Half rising, he shouted an alarm, and then began loosing furious bursts from his automatic rifle into the running Chinese soldiers.

Mitchell Red Cloud had become a fighting man early in life--almost as early as if he had lived when his Sioux ancestors were warring on the Great Plains. He had left high school, before Pearl Harbor, to join up with the Marines and win his expert rifleman's badge, had served at Midway Island, through the thickest of the struggle on Guadalcanal, and in many a mission with Carlson's Raiders. He had weighed 195 Ibs. when he joined the Marines, only 115 when he was mustered out. But when the Korean war began Mitchell Red Cloud was in uniform again, this time with the Army.

On Nov. 5, that turned out to be the 19th's good luck. The Chinese charge faltered. Then an enemy burp gun chattered. Mitchell Red Cloud was knocked flat, badly wounded. He pulled himself weakly erect, got one arm around a tree, clung there and went on firing. Then he fell again--dead. But Red Cloud's last stand had given the 19th the time it needed; the company fought its way to safety with its wounded.

Last week the nation did what it could to honor a brave man. Mrs. Nellie Red Cloud, a silent, 53-year-old Winnebago woman who lives in a converted automobile trailer at Friendship, was asked to come to Washington to receive the Medal of Honor (the eighth to be awarded in the Korean war) on behalf of her son.

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