Battle Field Angels (26 page)

In 1951, within six months of the outbreak of the Korean War, helicopters became critical in a country of poor roads and interminable mountain ranges. The H13 helicopter, called the “grasshopper” for its bubble canopy and lattice-like tail, proved effective but vulnerable. Its practical speed of seventy miles per hour, nonsealing gas tanks, and exposed gear boxes made it an easy target for small arms fire. Wounded soldiers strapped to the outside landing skids were exposed to enemy fire. The helicopter’s center of gravity was so delicate that pilots brought along large rocks as ballast when they carried a wounded soldier on one side. In winter, some injured soldiers froze to death while strapped to the helicopters. Modifications were made to deflect manifold heat onto the exposed stretchers. Pilots learned to secure plasma bottles inside the warmed cockpits with tubes snaking outside and into the arms of the wounded.

Given their slow speed, low altitude, and vulnerability to enemy fire, medical evacuation (medevac) helicopters most commonly were called in when the enemy or terrain eliminated other evacuation options. Corpsmen learned to call for a helicopter only for the most critically wounded and to mark a landing zone with colored smoke. Pilots often refueled and loaded patients without shutting down their engines for fear the weak batteries wouldn’t restart. The helicopters were limited to daytime operations.

Some of the wounded were flown directly to offshore U.S. Navy hospital ships that had been retrofitted with helicopter landing pads. For the first time, Navy hospital ships provided comprehensive care for the wounded rather than ferried casualties to land-based hospitals as they had done during World War II.

If Keenan and the stretcher bearers could get the wounded out of the immediate battle zone, their patients stood a good chance of surviving. In Korea, battalion aid station doctors had whole blood for transfusions to ward off shock. In World War II, whole blood’s twenty-one-day shelf life had limited its viability in the battle zone, but by the early 1950s, faster air transport enabled whole blood from America to reach Korea in a few days. Battalion aid doctors also had an arsenal of antibiotics unknown in World War II. In addition to penicillin, new systemic and topical antibiotics including Aureomycin, Chloromycetin, and Terramycin were available for postop infections not controlled by penicillin.

Many of the wounded owed their lives to another advancement in battlefield care: mobile army surgical hospitals. MASH units had been developed during World War II as the battle lines swept across Europe. The closer doctors were to the front, the better were a wounded soldier’s chances of survival. On August 23, 1945, the Army formally established mobile army surgical hospitals. Six doctors, twelve nurses, and ninety-six medics, corpsmen, and aides staffed a typical MASH. Although the military had no MASH units in the Far East at the start of the Korean War, they quickly became part of the Korean battlefield.

At first, MASH units kept pace with advances and retreats. Later, they became more permanent facilities, typically situated about ten to twenty-five miles from the front. By the outbreak of the Nevada Cities Battle in 1953, three out of four wounded soldiers were being treated at a MASH unit, often on the same day they were wounded due to evacuation by helicopter.

The Nevada Cities Battle stretched into the predawn hours of March 27. Two of Keenan’s friends, infantrymen Daniel Holl and Floyd Caton, discovered the corpsman in a shallow gully, treating Marines through eyes filled with dirt.

“Joe, get the fuck outta here, you crazy son of a bitch. You’re going to get killed,” said Holl as Keenan bent over a wounded Marine.

“Go fuck yourself. I got a job to do and I’m gonna do it.”

“Joe, stay with my fire team!” said Holl.

“Fuck no,” said Keenan. “I ain’t staying with your fire team. I got a job to do.”
⁶⁶

Holl flushed Keenan’s eyes with water and moved out with Caton. The three outposts had been lost. Holl and Caton needed to find a safe evacuation route for the Marines’ retreat. Keenan stayed behind, high on the hill and alone in a shallow ditch, squinting in the dark to see the wounded men he treated.

At 0245, two companies of reinforcement Marines retreated toward the MLR. A rear-guard unit passed through the gully where Keenan had been treating the wounded. He wasn’t there. Four days of counterattacks by the Marines followed before tensions finally eased. By that time, 156 Marines had been killed, 801 were wounded, and the Chinese had taken 19 prisoners.

The telegram arrived at the Keenan home on April 3, 1953.

The Keenans had read newspaper articles about the Nevada Cities Battle and knew it had taken place close to where Joe had been assigned. Like hundreds of other parents, they had anxiously awaited word of the fate of their son, hoping for a letter from him and dreading the arrival of a telegram.

The rest of the family and others would have to be told immediately. Anne Grayken left the subway station for the short walk home and found one of Joe’s brothers at her front door. When he described the telegram, her world froze. As she stepped inside her home, her eyes fell on two unopened letters from Joe. She hadn’t yet read them, but she knew neither would answer her questions nor make sense of a life without him.

Other letters, so confusing that they bordered on cruelty, soon arrived at the Keenan home.

The two letters had been delivered a few days after the telegram’s arrival. Was it possible the telegram was wrong and that someone had made a horrible mistake? These two boys seemed so sure that Joe was all right. Was it possible?

Joe’s father, Tom, asked Boston Congressman John McCormick for help. He called everyone he thought might have influence. Inquiries were made through official and unofficial channels. A few days later, the family received a second telegram, again from Vice Admiral Holloway Jr.

“AGAIN MY SINCEREST SYMPATHY IS EXTENDED TO YOU,”
⁷⁰
it concluded, after explaining that Holl and Caton had seen Joe earlier in the battle and didn’t know he had returned to action. Keenan had been killed sometime between 0200 and 0500 hours on March 27, 1953. A letter from then-Senator John F. Kennedy confirmed a second time that Joe Keenan had died in battle.

A letter from Keenan’s battalion surgeon, William Beaven, provided scant solace when he declared:

Almost thirty years later, Mike Keenan received his dead brother’s war letters. Only thirteen years old when Joe was killed, Mike read each letter, over and over. A nagging feeling unsettled him. How could Holl and Caton report Keenan was injured twice, believe he had survived, and yet the Navy confirmed Keenan had died on the same battlefield? What had happened between Joe’s nonthreatening injuries and his death? There had to be more to the story.

The questions nagged at Mike as he walked through the Boston Public Library one day while looking for a book for his daughter’s school project. His eyes settled on
Medic
by Eloise Engle. He picked it up and found a passage about Francis Hammond, the corpsman who had been awarded the Medal of Honor for his courage in treating wounded Marines near Reno. Keenan contacted the author, who indicated Joe Keenan had treated injured Marines practically alongside Hammond, one of the most famous corpsmen of the Korean War. Bloodied and blinded, Keenan had helped save the lives of wounded men in indescribable conditions together with another corpsman who received the Medal of Honor. Why hadn’t Keenan been honored for his courage and compassion?

Mike Keenan contacted the same Dr. Beaven who had written the family decades earlier about their son’s valor. In 1983, Beaven, who worked at a military hospital in Saudi Arabia, wrote that he was certain he had recommended the Medal of Honor for Joe Keenan. Military officials could not explain what had happened to the nomination. Perhaps it had been lost when the Marines experienced a huge infusion of new personnel in the aftermath of the Nevada Cities losses, coupled with the usual rate of transfers.

Undaunted and encouraged by his discovery of Marines who had fought alongside Joe, Mike Keenan compiled one fact after another about his brother’s final hours. Largely on the strength of Beaven’s recollection, Keenan contacted various military officials. Surely they would be interested in rectifying an omission of posthumous recognition of more than thirty years’ standing. But in the absence of original documentation, few showed interest in Keenan’s pleas. Although hope had dimmed that the Joe Keenan case file would be reopened, Mike persisted. One day the Keenan family received another letter.

The Navy had completed an exhaustive six-month investigation and decided to posthumously award the Navy Cross to Joseph Francis Keenan. Researchers had compared Keenan’s actions with those of other corpsmen on what became a night of unmatched corpsman bravery in the Korean War. Along with Hammond, corpsman William Charette received the Medal of Honor for his courage in the campaign to retake outpost Vegas. Keenan joined corpsmen Paul Polley, Thomas Waddill, and James McVean as recipients of the Navy Cross. Corpsmen Jay Guiver, Henry Minter, and Eldon Ralston received Silver Stars.

The Marine Corps color guard stood ramrod straight on the parade ground. A gray afternoon sky hung over the rectangular, grassy park at the Marines’ Washington, D.C., barracks on May 12, 1999. Motionless, they faced two rows of blue-and-white folding chairs at the foot of a low-slung grandstand of a dozen metal rows. More than fifty members of the Keenan family, who had made the trip from Boston for the ceremony, filled the seats and benches.

At the far end of the parade ground, “The President’s Own” Marine Corps Band began the national anthem, drums and horns echoing off the brick buildings that surrounded the ceremonial field established by President Thomas Jefferson in 1801. A half-beat after the anthem’s end, a deep, unseen voice read an award citation over the public address system—a recitation of exploits by a young man who nearly fifty years earlier had repeatedly climbed into enemy fire to save the lives of wounded men.

General Charles Krulak lifted a medal out of the box and presented it to Mike Keenan, who gazed at it through misted eyes. The general stepped away to shake hands with each Keenan brother as applause rolled across the field. He turned and faced the crowd. As military aides escorted the Keenan brothers to their seats at the foot of the grandstand, Krulak looked up at the crowd.

“We few, we precious few, we band of brothers. For he who sheds his blood with me shall be my brother,” said Krulak, a short man with a bearing and voice that filled the parade ground.
⁷²

Joe Keenan was “a very special, special man. He fought with the 2nd Battalion, 5th Marines,” said Krulak. “He gave his life protecting the members of the 2/5. My father was the commanding officer of the 5th Marine Regiment, so this has a very special meaning for me.”
⁷³
Krulak had requested that he present the Navy Cross when he had learned the recipient had served under the command of his father, General Victor “Brute” Krulak. Keenan’s family listened on as Krulak continued: