It was 1951 in war-torn Korea when Sgt. Lou Jurado carried the wounded Sgt. 1st Class Fernandez for a mile to an aid station as bullets whizzed around them. It was a brotherhood born amidst chaos. The story of that day is one that neither of them will ever forget.
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The two were members of the 82nd Antiaircraft Artillery Automatic Weapons Battalion, among about 7,000 men from the 23rd Regimental Combat Team holding onto the key crossroads town of Chipyong-ni against an attack by four divisions of the Chinese army.
The three-day battle of Chipyong-ni, Feb. 13-15, 1951, is largely forgotten now except by historians and by soldiers like Jurado and Fernandez who fought there.
But it was a pivotal engagement, sometimes called “the Gettysburg of the Korean War.” U.S., United Nations and South Korean forces had endured a string of defeats since the Chinese had entered the war the previous October.
But Lt. Gen. Matthew Ridgeway, the 8th U.S. Army commander, realized the Chinese had overstretched their supply lines, and he gambled on a last stand at Chipyong-ni. He won. The victory by his outmanned and outpositioned forces boosted morale and turned the war in favor of the U.S. and its allies.
It didn’t feel like a victory yet, though, when Jurado and Fernandez ventured across a snow-covered field to retrieve badly needed ammo and medical supplies that had been air-dropped for them in no-man’s land outside the American perimeter.
On their third trip together, an enemy mortar exploded in front of them, wounding Jurado and Fernandez and killing a third soldier.
Fernandez lay in agony, drifting in and out of consciousness, with bloody shrapnel wounds in his belly and legs. Jurado didn’t realize it yet, but he had been hit in the legs, too.
No one could help them. There was only one way out. Jurado — all of 5-foot-7 and 128 pounds — would have to carry Fernandez, 4 inches taller and 35 pounds heavier.
“I went to pick him up, and I fell down,” recalled Jurado, now 82 and living in Olathe, Kansas. “I didn’t know if I could make it. I got up and shouted, ‘God, help me!’ ”
He scooped up Fernandez and carried him on his back, under fire, staggering up a hill to the distant aid station.
Fernandez got a lifesaving blood transfusion, was evacuated to a hospital ship and, later, to an Army hospital at Fort Sam Houston, Texas. He spent 3½ years there off and on, enduring 76 operations to repair his broken body.
Medics patched up Jurado and sent him back to the front three days later.
Both men served many more years in the Army. Jurado retired as a chief warrant officer in 1968, and Fernandez as a command sergeant major — the Army’s highest enlisted rank — in 1973.
It wasn’t until a 1995 meeting of the Second Indianhead Division Association that the two saw each other again, and ever since then, the pair has been inseperable.
“We’re very close,” Jurado said. “You can see why.”
So close in fact, that they both have sons named after the other.
“It’s a miracle that we’re here, really,” the 84-year-old Fernandez told the World-Herald.
“The good Lord was with us.”