65 years after Korean War, Smyrna vet returns to the hill haunting him

Peter Chacho went to Korea this year for a hill he last saw bloody and burning.

It once was called Outpost Harry, a Korean War battle site now nuzzled in the demilitarized zone buffering the south from the north. After 65 years, Chacho said, the hill that defined his war is a lush, green revision of the scarred ruin he left behind.

"Should it ever come, some day, that there's a reunification of both north and south, I wish and pray that someone would go up there and put a plaque up there stating that this is hallowed ground, that so many lives were lost for this hill." Chacho said.

Chacho lives with his wife in Smyrna. He's the son of a gravedigger and spent his life after the war as a Linotype operator. He wants his combat boots thrown into his grave, because that's when the Korean War and Outpost Harry will finally will be over for him. 

Before that day, Chacho knew he had to make it back to Outpost Harry.

"I've got to see this one more time in my life," Chacho said. "We didn't liberate Paris. We didn't liberate Berlin. Just this one lousy, stinking hill that took the lives of many men." 

He joined the army and spent his 18th birthday — July 28, 1952 — in a bunker behind Outpost Harry and rotated onto the hill every few weeks. He was there again almost a year later, and on that hill in June 1953, Chacho witnessed war in full.

"War is not a game," Chacho said. "War is hell. There are no winners in war." 

Chacho and his grandson, Michael Czahor IV, left for Korea in late July to participate in Revisit Korea, a South Korean government program that brings back United Nations veterans for tours as thanks for their service. Chacho had gone before in 1997.

This trip, he wanted to go farther than what the tour had to offer. He wanted to spend his 84th birthday around the same place he spent his 18th, the hill called Outpost Harry. 

"I led a wonderful life," Chacho said. "But Outpost Harry always gnawed at me."

At an Arlington, Virginia, conference on forgotten battles in April, Chacho met a South Korean general and told him he yearned to stand on the hill again. The general took the request to heart and arranged that, after the rest of the Revisit Korea tourists had left, Chacho and Czahor on July 28 would receive a special escort to the edge of the DMZ. 

The general's niece picked them up after the official tour ended and they drove two hours north until they met South Korean military police who took over as escorts.

"All you're seeing is military," Chacho said. "We were entering a restricted area. This is not a tourist attraction. The area is very vital to keeping that sector." 

The war was coming to an end in June 1953, but the fighting was never more intense.

The Chinese and North Koreans wanted to knock American and Greek defenders off Outpost Harry to better position a path to Seoul, the South Korean capital. Losing the outpost meant United Nations soldiers would have had to retreat southward for miles.

"It had real tactical significance," said U.S. Marine Corp Ret. Col. Allan Millett, now a historian with the University of New Orleans specializing in the Korean War. "It was part of a general campaign in June (1953) under the assumption the armistice would be signed relatively soon, and the Chinese were looking for a set of relative advantages." 

Both sides fought bitterly to hold the most strategic spots possible before peace came.

Chacho saw some combat on and around Outpost Harry after arriving on the peninsula in 1952. He spent some time later in Japan, but returned to the hill in May 1953.

"This is the ballgame," Chacho said. "Now the full scale war hit."

The running battles in June 1953 on and around the hill were punctuated with raining artillery and hand-to-hand fighting, Millett said. The UN controlled the skies during daylight hours, but the night belonged to Chinese hand grenades and bayonets. 

"Darkness concealed the attackers who tried to get as close as they could before they sent in the grenade shower," Millett said. "Casualties were so serious the companies had to be rotated. They'd last only one night and the survivors would be withdrawn."

Chacho still remembers where each bunker stood, where each piece of artillery was positioned. Of the fight for Outpost Harry he said, "This was my battle." 

"They wanted this hill. There's no question about it. It meant everything as far as position for the North Koreans," Chacho said. "But they didn't get it." 

The sounds of artillery and tank blasts still ring in his ears. Against his eyelids, he sees the flares lighting up the night sky. He still can feel the weight of guns and ammunition. 

He knows the dread of enemy soldiers advancing from the nearby hill they occupied.

"Jets. Bombs. Napalm. Here comes the Navy, bombing it. Here comes the Marines, bombing it. Then the Air Force came," Chacho said. "I thought there'd be no hill left." 

Chacho earned enough points to rotate home and left Korea alive, heeding the wishes of a father who asked that he not have to bury any of his servicemen sons. But the hill lived on in his memory, and returning would honor the dead and bring him closure. 

"I wanted to go back and pay my respects to all the men that fought in that area that lost their lives. I had to see it again," Chacho said. "It will never leave my mind."

Chacho didn't make it back to Outpost Harry. He couldn't. No one goes there now.

Instead, on his 84th birthday, he climbed a nearby hill occupied by South Korean soldiers guarding the DMZ who are shadowed by North Korean forces on the other side. 

Chacho received a hero's welcome there. South Korean soldiers saluted his passing car. A military band played when he arrived. The general who arranged the visit had sent a personal gift, dog tags with Chacho's name, serial number and the date of his visit emblazoned on them. Another South Korean general presented him with commemorative medallions and a piece of barbed wire clipped from the DMZ defenses.

That general took him to an observation tower that looks down into the DMZ, and from that spot Chacho could see the hill that he knew as a place of carnage and fear.

It has changed.

"It's green. It's lavish. It's beautiful," Chacho said. "How did the seeds from those trees and those plants ever survive this destruction?"

Chacho asked the same question about himself for 65 years. 

Contact Adam Duvernay at (302) 319-1855 or aduvernay@delawareonline.com

VETERANS 

Dover Air Force Base DNA lab takes lead in identifying Korean War remains

Remember Delaware hero James Connell, who died a POW in the Vietnam War