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vulnerability of a regiment of badly exposed troops. More than once when there was still time to move the Eighth Regiment back, Milburn refused to give the order.
    On the afternoon of November 1, Hap Gay was in his CP with Brigadier General Charles Palmer, his artillery commander, when a radio report from an observer in an L-5 spotter plane caught their attention: “This is the strangest sight I have ever seen. There are two large columns of enemy infantry moving southeast over the trails in the vicinity of Myongdang-dong and Yonghung-dong. Our shells are landing right in their columns and they keep coming.” Those were two tiny villages five or six air miles from Unsan. Palmer immediately ordered additional artillery units to start firing, and Gay nervously called First Corps, once again requesting permission to pull the entire Eighth Cav several miles south of Unsan. His request was again denied.
    With that was lost the last real chance to save the Eighth Cavalry and especially its Third Battalion. In some ways, the battle that followed was over almost before it began. Two divisions of elite Chinese Communist regulars, among the most experienced men in their army, were about to strike units of an elite American division that was ill-prepared and ill-positioned for the collision, and commanded in too many instances by men who believed the Korean War was essentially over.
     
     
    UNITS OF THE Fifth Cavalry under Johnny Johnson, which had been moving north toward Unsan on a relief mission, soon ran into a major Chinese roadblock. Not only would they not be able to help the Eighth Cavalry, but it was touch and go whether they could extricate themselves from a vicious battle without being destroyed. As Roy Appleman, an exceptionally careful historian of the Korean War, has pointed out, by nightfall of November 1, the Eighth Cav was encircled on three sides by the Chinese forces. Only on its east, if the Fifteenth ROK Regiment actually stayed in place and fought, might it have any protection.
     

     
    2. F IRST E NCOUNTER W ITH C HINESE C OMMUNIST F ORCES, N OVEMBER 1, 1950
     
    Lieutenant Ben Boyd was the new platoon leader in Baker Company of the Eighth Cavalry’s First Battalion. The First Battalion—with its attached unit of tanks and artillery, in reality a battalion task force—was the most exposed of the regiment’s three battalions, positioned about four hundred yards north of the town of Unsan. Boyd’s battalion commander, Jack Millikin, Jr., hadbeen his tactical officer at West Point, and Boyd thought him a good, steady man. As far as Boyd knew, their battalion was up there alone—they had been the first of the three battalions out of Pyongyang, and he had no idea whether the rest of the regiment was following. That first afternoon, right after they arrived, they registered their mortars on some surrounding targets, and there were even brief exchanges of fire with the enemy, but the action was light, and everyone had assumed it was North Korean stragglers. That night, though, Boyd was called over by his company commander, who had just been briefed at Battalion. The word Boyd got was: “There are twenty thousand laundrymen in the area.” Boyd knew what that meant—twenty thousand Chinese near them.
    Then they heard musical instruments, like weird Asian bagpipes. Some of the officers thought for a moment that a British brigade was arriving to help them out. But it was not bagpipes; instead it was an eerie, very foreign sound, perhaps bugles and flutes, a sound many of them would remember for the rest of their lives. It was the sound they would come to recognize as the Chinese about to enter battle, signaling to one another by musical instrument what they were doing, and deliberately striking fear into their enemy as well. Boyd believed his men were in decent positions, though they were not a full platoon in his mind. Nearly half of them were KATUSAs, Korean Augmentation to the U.S. Army, poorly trained Korean