Word: chopping
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...Pork Chop Hill (Melville; United Artists). Silent over the battlefield hang the stars of a clear spring night. Suddenly a loudspeaker, shockingly close, blares among the forward positions: "WELCOME TO THE MEAT GRINDER!" The U.S. infantrymen, slogging up the lower slopes of Pork Chop Hill in central Korea, skip a heartbeat and a stride, and then move grimly forward-^into the meat grinder. And the audience moves with them into this heart-racking film translation of S.L.A. Marshall's classic report on Pork Chop Hill (TIME, Nov. 19, 1956)-that inopportune Thermopylae where the American fighting man wrote...
...action at Pork Chop Hill began on April 16, 1953, when . two Chinese Communist companies swarmed over the small U.S. garrison. Militarily, the hill was of small importance; morally, it had immense significance. By taking it, the Communists posed two questions that were crucial to the course of the peace talks at Panmunjom: 1) Was the U.S. high command, with a war-weary public at its back, still willing to incur large casualties merely to hold a little ground? 2) Was the U.S. infantryman, his morale weakened by a Congress-coddling rotation policy that moved him out of the line...
...before the first question can be answered by the Far East command. But even before King Company can reach the first Chinese defenses, the rusty U.S. chain of command has snapped. The assault group is caught in the full glare of an Allied searchlight battery that has confused Pork Chop with "some other hill," and before the lights go out, a dozen or more Americans lie dead or wounded. Shocked and bewildered, the green troops nevertheless hold firm, then make a wild charge that carries the Communist outworks...
Nevertheless, demons and his men push forward. Several hours later they swarm, exhausted but triumphant, into a bunker just below a fortified crest on Pork Chop Hill. A few seconds later, the U.N. barrage blasts the bunker to rubble. Morale collapses. Lieut, demons tonguelashes his men into the firing line, counts what is left of them (35 men), calls up his small reserve, charges the top of the hill and takes...
...while, back in the headquarters of the Far East command, a little group of earnest, greying generals are solemnly debating a question that may carry, for the unmilitary observer, some suggestion of the impersonal horror, the mindless irony of war. The question: "Do we really want to hold Pork Chop Hill...