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James Dill

On December 18 Lieutenant Dill boarded the USNS Hienselman, had his first bath in forty-three days, and experienced a strange sensation: “I had forgotten what it felt like to be warm.” The retreat continued, and Seoul was recaptured by the communists on January 4, 1951. By spring it was again in Allied hands as “Operation Killer” restored a defensible battle line slightly north of the 38th Parallel. But MacArthur was forbidden to strike across the Yalu, protested bitterly, and was replaced. Neither side could make much headway, and peace negotiations began in July. They dragged on for two years before an armistice was signed. Three decades later the unification of Korea is still a dream. Today, James Dill is a structural engineer in Little Rock, Arkansas.

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A soldier remembers the freezing, fearful retreat down the Korean Peninsula after the Chinese armies smashed across the border