The Lord & Private Stanley

Back home in Mansfield, La., Courtney L. Stanley liked to go to church and liked to go hunting. When he was drafted eight months ago, he says, he could light a match at 25 yards with his .22 rifle. Arriving in Korea in January, he wrote home to his mother for a Bible. At night, in the gloom of his bunker, 19-year-old Private Stanley read his Bible by the light of a Coleman lantern; during the day he cleaned the Browning automatic rifle the Army had issued to him. Last week, in his first contact with the enemy, the six-foot Negro put both his religion and his rifle to good use.

"Boy, I'm Hurt!" At 2 a.m., two Chinese companies began attacking U.N. positions on the muddy, jagged slopes of "Little Gibraltar." Mortars and artillery pounded U.N. lines. At 4 a.m., Stanley and twelve other men from the 9th Infantry Regiment were sent crawling up Little Gibraltar, looking for wounded. Halfway up, Stanley and a South Korean soldier ran into two Chinese coming towards them with their hands up, as if to surrender. Suddenly, from a closed fist, one of the Chinese flipped a hand grenade. The grenade killed the Korean. Stanley hoisted his 20-lb. rifle to his shoulder and killed both Chinese with a single burst. Then, as burp gun slugs and a hail of grenades fell around him, he began to creep back down the slope, looking for cover.

Near him, a voice cried out: "Boy, I'm hurt!" Groping in the mud, Stanley found his battalion commander, Lieut. Colonel Harry Clark Jr. of Columbus, Ga. With another G.I., Stanley carried the wounded colonel into a nearby bunker.

He propped his shoulder against the wooden doorframe. His combat boots sank in the soft mud of the communication trench. As Chinese heads popped around a bend in the trench, one by one, Stanley cut loose with his BAR. "All through the shells and burp guns," he recalled later, "I kept on whispering I believe in only one God, Jesus, and crying out the Lord is my shepherd."

Bodies in the Sun. For more than three hours Stanley stood guard at the bunker door while a medic within worked on the colonel and another wounded soldier. Once, when his overheated BAR jammed (he had fired 620 rounds from it), Stanley ducked into the bunker, borrowed an M-1 rifle. When reinforcements arrived at 9 a.m., there were eight dead Chinese sprawled in the mud at the corner of the trench. Stanley slithered down the hill, had his cuts treated and returned to his outfit and his Bible. "If the Lord wasn't with me, I'd never have made it," he said.

Two days later, Stanley got the highest battlefield decoration--a Silver Star--that the 2nd Division's commander, Major General James C. Fry, could award, and was recommended for a D.S.C. Then he jeeped down to a hospital to shake hands with Colonel Clark, who told him: "You were the bravest man I ever saw." Private Stanley shyly looked down at his big calloused hands and said: "Heck, I would have done the same thing for a private."

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