The Last Regiment - Book Three

Nineteen and twenty years old, most of them. They were carrying nothing.

Book Three of the Deuce Four Trilogy, and the end of it.

Korea, October 1950. New men come up from the railhead, and Pryor, one summer older than they are, counts them in. The regiment that was nearly dissolved in September drives north toward the Yalu, and at Kunu-ri, in the last week of November, the Chinese come down out of the hills.

What follows is the regiment’s final year. Companies E and G hold their ridge. Company C is lost with Task Force Wilson. The 3d Battalion endures its ordeal, and the press makes all of it a story about race. Thurgood Marshall travels to Japan and Korea to read the court-martial records for himself. The Han crossing goes right; the Hant’an goes wrong, and a report goes back up the chain that costs the regiment its division commander’s confidence for good. At Chipo-ri, Sgt. Cornelius H. Charlton, twenty-one years old, leads the assault that brings him the Medal of Honor.

And on the first of October 1951, the 24th Infantry Regiment, which had served since 1869, ceases to exist.

The book closes decades later with two ceremonies the record also keeps: in Washington in 1996, and in Houston on 13 November 2023, when the Army declared that soldiers of the regiment convicted after the Houston riot of 1917 had been wrongly treated, and the names of 110 men of its 3d Battalion were read aloud.

Thirty-five chapters in three parts, with a coda. The 24th Infantry was real, and every dated action in these pages is drawn from the record. A full accounting of what is documented and what is invented, with sources, stands at the back of the book.

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