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They taught Popko to fire an M-1 rifle and a carbine. The closest he came to artillery and flamethrowers was an exhibition; he also saw a tank from a distance. After his basic training was over, he went to Quartermaster School at Camp Lee, Va., where they made him a salvage technician, i.e., "one of the guys who clean up the battlefields."
On Sunday, June 25, Popko slept late, played a double-header Softball game against a local bakery company. When he returned to barracks, someone turned on a radio. The North Koreans had attacked the South Koreans. "We figured that if the Koreans wanted to fight among themselves, let them fight. It was like that revolution in China. It was nothing to do with us."
Fifty-four days later, Popko was in Pusan.
A lieutenant was just about to assign Popko to duty in a warehouse when a sergeant rushed in, crying: "They got to have riflemen." Popko thought: "There is the only guy in the world I'd like to shoot." The sergeant won his argument with the lieutenant and got Popko.
"I Was All Alone." Unhappy, scared and wishing he had never left Bayonne, Popko was loaded onto a truck with 60 other G.I.s, and started along dusty "Cavalry Boulevard" toward the Naktong river front. Says Popko: "After the first couple of days we got to be pretty good. We learned the tricks. We knew what to watch for and when to fire and how to take care of yourself. If you can Jive through the first couple of days, you got a chance."
About three weeks after Popko had moved to the front, the big attack came —part of the enemy's hard-driving try to take Taegu. Popko's squad was holding the left side of Hill 303.* The enemy came up in three banzai-screaming waves. "Once I was going to get out of the hole and throw my rifle away and go over the hill. You can't explain how it is. You just think you can't stand it any more. But the guy in the next hole to me started talking sense into me."
By 3 a.m., all was quiet. Popko's platoon sergeant discovered that all the other men on Hill 303 had either been killed or pushed back. Popko and his buddies managed to get off the hill with the help of a South Korean who led them through enemy lines. At dawn, they were ordered to retake the hill. A couple of times that morning, Stan Popko ran up & down that hill, chasing the enemy or being chased by him. Then he went up for the last time. "It seemed like I was all alone. There were supposed to be guys on both sides of me, but I couldn't see them. I spent a lot of time in Korea looking back down a road and wondering when someone was going to come up it and help us. There never seemed to be anyone coming up.
"I kept going up this hill carefully and then all of a sudden I see this light machine gun up real close. There were two gooks with it. I grabbed a grenade and threw it at 'em. The damned thing was a dud and didn't go off. The first thing I felt was my leg hurt real bad. Then the other leg hurt and both my arms were numb. I yelled, 'I got hit!' but there was no one around. I looked up and saw both of these gooks coming for me. I couldn't find my rifle and I knew I couldn't throw my last grenade because I could hardly move my arms."