Growing Up
Barfield was born in Philadelphia during the arduous years of The Great Depression. His parents were divorced. His mother abandoned the family, and his father couldn’t afford to keep him and his older brother, John. At the age of 3, Barfield found himself living with John in the Southern Home for Destitute Children in Philadelphia. Though technically not orphans, the two would remain in an orphanage for seven years.
Until he reached the age of 17, he would live most of his life in either an orphanage, a foster home, or a reform school. He lived a minimal amount of time with his father and stepmother; and during those times, without the presence of his brother, it would have been a cold and isolated existence, as their stepmother wanted nothing to do with them. Their existence was, however, stable.
At the age of 11, his mother, newly remarried, reentered his life suing for visitation rights. Somehow, she had managed to convince John to move in with her. He followed his brother’s lead―a decision he would soon come to regret. He had traded a stable home for an unstable one. A cold and unfriendly stepmother for a mean and violent stepfather.
By the end of his two-year stay with his mother, she would falsely accuse John of theft, sending him to a reform school, while Barfield would move four times to three states—Pennsylvania, California, North Carolina, and back to Pennsylvania—and attend 10 different schools. His mother decided to move back to Philadelphia after her brief tenure with her third husband.
It was this return that found him on the doorsteps of his father’s home at 3 a.m. It was a home in which he was no longer welcome. In fact, he wouldn’t be allowed back into the home for another four years. During that time, he lived in a reform school called Kis-Lyn Industrial School for Boys, which treated its pupils more like adult convicts and less like struggling adolescents.
Kis-Lyn was so primal that Barfield ran away five times. The punishment for running away was solitary confinement in a quasi-jail cell for no less than a week. During this time, which could be up to two weeks, he was given only bread and water. His head would also be shaved. Before being tossed into the cell, he would receive a paddling that would leave his legs and rear end bleeding (something the boys termed “lifting” because the swat from the paddle would lift them off their feet).
He endured these consequences, but the reputation he earned among the other boys practically made it worthwhile. He would be idolized during his time there.
His existence at the reform school, and indeed his first 17 years, prepared him for his time in the U.S. Army and the Korean War.
Joining the Army
After enduring more than a decade of hardships of various kinds, Barfield would join the Army. He would breeze through boot camp, though that breeze would become rather stiff when he entered Jump School at Fort Benning. Once Jump School was completed, Barfield had his jump wings.
America had been embroiled in the Korean War for two years. Many of the newly minted soldiers would be sent there to fight; Barfield was one of them.
When Barfield arrived in Pusan, South Korea, he noted the poverty. In Korea, the times were extremely desperate. The squalor was horrendous and couldn’t go without notice, but the soldiers were there to do a job. The American, South Korean, and United Nation troops were combatting a communist enemy composed of North Korean and Chinese troops.
One night in late June 1952, Barfield was along the line atop one of the countless mountains. He told his commanding officer (CO) he could hear someone digging below. He was ordered to toss a grenade toward the sound. He did. The digging stopped. The next morning, out of curiosity, he decided to peek over to see the result of the grenade. Immediately he saw a flash and fell back. A sniper had shot at him. In his anger, he tried to throw another grenade, except his right arm wouldn’t cooperate. He hadn’t just been shot at. He had been shot.
Barfield would be sent back to Japan for major surgery. After weeks in Japan recovering from surgery, he was shipped back to Pusan, where he would spend about six months in the medical camp.
Feeling stir crazy, he requested to return to the front line. Though his papers stated he was still unfit to return to the front lines, he proved otherwise after an impromptu push-up exercise. He was not only sent back to a combat unit, but was assigned to the 187th Airborne Division. Though happy to be back with a combat unit, and especially in an Airborne Division, his return would result in encountering one of the most vicious battles of the war.
Boomerang
By mid-April of 1953, Barfield would find himself atop a hill called Boomerang in the Kumwa Valley along with the rest of F Company in the 7th Infantry Regiment of the 3rd infantry Division. A month later, he was made squad leader with approximately 15 men under his command. A month after that, his platoon was given a new leader by the name of Lewis Hotelling, a man whose life he would soon save.
On June 14, Barfield, among others, was informed that the Chinese were planning a major attack that night. Barfield told his men to remain on high alert. He gathered as much ammunition and as many grenades as he could for his men. It would prove to be vital for their survival—those that did.
At approximately 9:30 pm, the first round of artillery launched and landed on their perimeter. It would be the start of a five-hour onslaught of explosions, chaos, and death.
“Artillery rained down on us, so many rounds you couldn’t count them. Artillery landed and burst in front of us, behind us, in the trench line, on the bunkers. The whole world shook like jello. Like being in a huge washing machine, slammed back and forth ... like being in a bass drum ... making our ears ache and bleed, slamming our brains around in our skulls. ... The sound didn’t stop ... the rounds just kept falling. ... We hunkered down in our bunkers. ... There was nothing we could do but crouch in terror.”
He said there were thousands of rounds that landed in that 2 1/2-hour span. The barrage had destroyed bunkers, annihilated trenches, and killed soldiers along the lines. Once the barrage stopped, Barfield peered over the line of his demolished bunker only to see hundreds of Chinese soldiers charging toward them.
“I had to go up and down the line, reposition what was left of my squad, and redistribute ammunition. ... We fired everything we had at them, and they still kept pouring in on us.”
Barfield told his men to fix bayonets. It would ultimately come down to hand-to-hand combat.
“I picked up a BAR [Browning Automatic Rifle]—can’t remember whose it was, but he was dead—and charged down the trench line, killing about eight or ten Chinese. ... I ran back and forth, screaming at my guys, shooting every Chinese I came across. Several times, just by sheer number, they forced us back, but just as quickly we waded into them and pushed them back.”
In the trenches, he found one of his men and a South Korean soldier wounded. He and another soldier pulled them to the aid bunker. He then turned his attention to one of the tanks that was crawling with Chinese soldiers.
“I grabbed my sniper and a couple of others, and we charged into the Chinese troops, killing several and repelling the rest. Then I quickly repositioned a machine gun, got a few other troops in position, and began firing on the tank, killing most of the enemy and forcing the remainder off the tank.”
The company’s communication had been completely severed, so a runner was sent to the command post, but it was empty. The runner ran back, but was shot in both legs before getting back. Barfield heard his screams, ran to him, and carried him back to the trench line.
From the trench, he could see Hotelling firing at the enemy when suddenly a mortar round landed next to him. Hotelling was gone. Barfield and the sniper ran past dismantled bodies looking for their commander. They found him “half-buried, upside down in the trench.” As they started to dig him out, five Chinese soldiers ran up on them. Barfield turned and fired, killing all five.
Hotelling was alive, his right foot nearly blown completely off. Barfield used a bandoleer as a tourniquet to slow the bleeding. He and the sniper lifted Hotelling and began carrying him to the medic station, stopping every so often to put him down and fire at the enemy. The two finally got Hotelling to the station.
Hotelling would later write to the Army Awards Board that “Sgt. Barfield shielded me with his own body while he returned fire. I know if it had not been for Sgt. Barfield, I would have died in Korea that night.”
“By the time I got back to my platoon, it was daylight,” Barfield said. “The Chinese had gone home. The battle was over. ... Of the 56 in my platoon who had watched the sun go down the night before, only 14 of us walked off that hill. Nine of those were wounded.”
Under intense fire and hundreds of incoming Chinese soldiers, Barfield would pull three men to safety during that battle and kill dozens of enemy soldiers. Shortly after the battle, reports were issued describing Barfield’s heroism, but those documents were somehow lost. Lt. Col. Ricardo Cardenas had promptly recommended Barfield for the Medal of Honor.
Waiting for Recognition
The requirement to receive the Medal of Honor is that one must be recommended within three years of his military actions and that he “distinguishes himself conspicuously by gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty” while engaging the enemy.
Four decades later, Cardenas, along with Pfc. Thomas Innocenti, who fought alongside Barfield and was awarded the Bronze Star, discovered that Barfield hadn’t received any recognition. They immediately contacted then-Rep. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), who contacted then-Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.). Barfield was then awarded the Bronze Star with “V” for valor in 1995.
The following year, Barfield, at the urging of Cardenas, garnered eyewitness accounts and had them sent to the Awards Board for consideration of the Medal of Honor. The recommendation for the medal was denied, but he was awarded the Silver Star.
In 1998, Hotelling, who was a retired major and had been awarded the Silver Star for his actions in the battle, was contacted by Barfield. He decided to recommend Barfield again for the Medal of Honor.
Hotelling stated that “Sgt. Barfield distinguished himself with several acts of heroism and bravery that were way above and beyond the call of duty and reflected great credit and devotion to his unit and country.”
In all, Barfield had 10 witnesses of his brave exploits—five of them eyewitnesses. Nine of those 10 sent notarized affidavits to the Awards Board confirming his heroic deeds.
In 1999, Barfield requested a review of his records by the Awards Board. He also requested a hearing before the Army Board of Corrections of Military Records. He went before the board in September 2000. Hotelling; Stan Cahill, a soldier who fought in the battle with Barfield; and Bernard Serishon, the legal representative who wrote Cardenas’s affidavit, went with him.
While waiting for this meeting, Barfield had requested his records, including the board’s previous decisions, from the Department of the Army under the Freedom of Information Act. His request was accepted, although it was stated in the letter that the Army Decorations Board Voting Sheets would be withheld so as not to “prohibit future open, honest communication between members of the Board and Command.” Whoever sent the meeting notes to Barfield sent the Voting Sheets anyway. Those Voting Sheets can be found on Barfield’s personal website, RobertBarfield.com.
After the 18-month wait to go before the board, Barfield, as well as the eyewitnesses, stood before the seven board members, several who ironically had never experienced combat. In typical governmental fashion, the board was unprepared for the meeting.
“No one, I repeat, no one on the Board even had my recommendation for the Medal of Honor,” Barfield stated. “What ... were we all there for? This so-called meeting was a scam.”
It was not until the meeting was over that someone associated with the board found the letter of recommendation in another stack of papers. But the meeting was over and the results of it were inevitable: The recommendation was again denied.
Before ever knowing he had been recommended for the Medal of Honor, Barfield had moved on with his life. He eventually got out of the Army, only to join the Navy less than a year later. He would join the boxing clubs of both military divisions and would continue boxing later in life, a sport his sons would also compete in. He would enjoy a long career with the U.S. Postal Service before retiring. Moving on, however, is possibly a careless phrase. Much like any soldier who has endured intense combat, Barfield has struggled with post-traumatic stress disorder.
“Believe me, it has caused me many problems in my life,” he wrote to me once. “My company commander at Fort Bragg Colonel (ret.) Charles Shay who had served in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam as an infantryman sent me a letter stating that I was the worst case of ‘battle fatigue’ he had seen in 34 years of service.”
Barfield wrote a book in 2012 about his life called “Insufficient Evidence: From Orphan to Medal of Honor Recommendation.” It’s a fascinating read with elements of the story so heartwrenching and at times so comical they are hard to believe. One thing about Barfield, however, that cannot be questioned is his courage. Even as a child, he faced with determination the hardscrabble life that was set before him. Barfield is no stranger to unfair consequences and the deprivation of recognition. This may be why he still holds out hope that he will someday receive the recognition he deserves, and the insult issued multiple times by the Army Awards Board will be rectified.
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What His Fellow Soldiers Say
Pfc. Thomas Innocenti wrote to the Army Awards Board that he and Barfield defied orders “to leave the dead and wounded until the next morning.”
“Putting aside his own personal safety he did what ‘good leaders’ do, he saw to the safety and well being of his men. ... I cannot say enough about the heroism and bravery displayed by Sgt. Barfield in the performance of his duty,” Innocenti wrote.
Lt. Col. Ricardo Cardenas wrote that “Barfield took command of the situation without regard to his personal safety, he recovered his platoon leader [Hotelling] and other wounded soldiers.”
Kendall Everett, a sniper who fought with Barfield, wrote: “Barfield should have been awarded the MOH, he certainly deserved it. ... I saw Bob kill many CCFs (Chinese Communist Forces) and save Lt. Hotelling and many others.”
Rene Silva, Barfield’s assistant squad leader, wrote, “I can attest to the fact that Sgt. Barfield did indeed rescue three of our fellow soldiers, I cannot say enough about the courage shown by him.”
Paul Brown, medic from Company G who treated several of the wounded from Barfield’s company, including Hotelling, wrote, “God bless you, Bob, a lot of the wounded mentioned your name as the guy who held the CCF off so they could get down the hill.”
Ernest Clifford, who was severely injured during the Battle of Boomerang and spent time in recovery with Hotelling, wrote, “It seems unfair because someone lost the paperwork and the person who originally wrote the document and other direct witnesses to his actions are still with us, that he is still denied his just award.”
Sgt. 1st Class Billy Ervin wrote: “Although I was not in Barfield’s platoon, his heroic action was the talk of the company from the time it happened until my departure some nine months later. Throughout the years I taught small unit tactics to troops, many who eventually fought in Vietnam. At every opportunity the brave deeds of Sgt. Barfield were incorporated into my presentations stressing duty, honor, and country.”
