Though they did not know it at the time, and the combat of 1953 was no less forgiving, the Belgian Volunteer Corps for Korea was in its waning year when Claude Billiet disembarked at Pusan on June 24th.  From the wharves, the newcomers were herded by truck and train northward. Along the roads of Kyŏngsang the rice fields shone under a bright sky until the approach to the 38th parallel revealed blighted hills ruined by three years of fighting.

The Belgian battalion – almost 850 men attached to the United States’ 15th Infantry Regiment – was still holding the sector of Chatkol.  Since May, the Belgians had endured an attritional defensive campaign of raids, patrols, and nightly bombardments. Every company manned a forward maze of listening posts – Alice, Barbara, and Carol – positions dug into shale slopes overlooking the sinuous valley of the Imjin.

Billiet reached the line only days before the crescendo.  Each night, a dozen men crept forward to the listening posts. Each dawn, they crawled back through trenches slick with condensation, brushing past the bodies of Chinese soldiers left from earlier assaults. The smell of decay hung over the shattered ridges. To their right and left stood American units as worn as their own, and to their front, scarcely 250 meters away, the enemy occupied mirror positions – close enough that voices could sometimes be heard in the fog.

In the first two days of July, the Belgian Battalion launched what would be its last offensive action. Artillery laid down two-hundred rounds of 105mm and 1,200 mortar shells to cover an assault detachment from A Company. The men advanced behind the curtain of smoke, scaling the slope through torn pines. At 0310 they reached the crest, only to find the Chinese trenches empty; seconds later, counter-fire struck from the flanks. Thirty Chinese counter-attacked to retake the ground. The Belgians fell back under cover of their own flamethrower section, the flames whipping sideways in the night wind. In half-an-hour, they were again in their original holes, shaken but intact.

The next nights differed only in small details. The Moniteur Belge later cited the battalion for these engagements. When the fighting slackened, the men were ordered back into “blocking positions,” trenches turned into defensive bunkers with sandbagged roofs and firing slits, living side by side with the rats that gnawed their rations and boots.

Through mid-July, disease did what shells had not. Three-quarters of the battalion were struck by angina or intestinal infection – a result of heat, dust, and exhaustion. Antibiotics were rationed and the medical tent became a humid greenhouse of cots and empty serum bottles.  While the camp reeled under fever, orders arrived on July 17th for the Belgians defend Chatkol once more, relieving a young American formation short of combat experience.

The cease-fire ten days later did not bring departure. Through autumn 1953 and spring 1954, the Belgian Battalion remained on duty along the new Demilitarized Zone, alternating with South Korean and American regiments in guard and patrol work. The positions once blasted by shellfire were now quiet fortified outposts, each still sandbagged command posts, trenches covered in pine beams, and hand-painted signs warning of mines.

The work was monotonous and dull. The men rebuilt bridges, cleared the slopes of unexploded shells, and burned the rotting debris of war. They stood sentry over the line at night, rifles slung across damp greatcoats, watching the flares rise and fall above No Man’s Land, getting very little sleep as the days were too hot and the nights too cold.

By June 1954 the Belgian flag had flown in Korea for three and a half years. The battalion, reduced to a detachment of two hundred men, received orders to withdraw. On June 20th, Claude embarked at Pusan, and just six days later he stepped ashore in Belgium, where the summer smelled of rain and coal dust instead of sweat and cordite.