George Leffingwell, of Bristol, a Korean war veteran, displays a gold wristband with his serial number, which Chinese soldiers stripped from him in Korea in 1953.

The Providence Journal Mark Patinkin

I asked George Leffingwell if I could see the bracelet. He is 76 and lives in Bristol next to his family-run car-repair garage.

The bracelet is gold-plated and has his Army serial number on the back. He was wearing it when wounded in Korea. Today, he will tell you God was with him as he played dead while Chinese soldiers removed it from his wrist. That was 55 years ago.

I asked how he got it back.

“One in a million,” said Leffingwell.

He was a graduate of Barrington High and working as a merchant marine when he was drafted April 28, 1952. He was 18. He said goodbye to his girlfriend, Kathy Belmore, 16.

By that October, he was a ground soldier in Korea near the 38th parallel.

I asked what it was like.

“A lot of people think Korea was a police action,” said Leffingwell, “but it was all-out war. I seen so many people get killed. Young boys my age, 20 years old. It was kind of heartbreaking.”

By January of 1953, he was on the front lines between Pork Chop Hill and another called Old Baldy. It was a freezing winter. He was in the Second Infantry Division, 9th Infantry Regiment, and one of his main missions was to go on night patrols from 9 until 2 a.m., probing for the enemy. He was routinely in firefights.

“You got used to it,” Leffingwell says, “but it was awful.”

On good nights, he was able to sleep in bunkers made of logs with sandbags on top. Often, it was in frozen trenches or foxholes.

In February, he was ordered into the Kumwha Valley to help stop the Chinese from moving troops through it.

One day, the mail Jeep came by. Leffingwell’s name was called out and they gave him a small package. It was a man’s wrist bracelet from his girl-friend, Kathy. She sent it to him for Valentine’s Day, and had engraved “2-14-53” on the back. She also engraved the words “Love, Kathy,” and added Leffingwell’s Army serial number. On the display-plate that lies over the wrist, she put “Leffie,” the nickname she called him then and still.

Leffingwell put the bracelet on and felt a lot of comfort in it. “It boosts your morale up, sure does,” he says now.

On Feb. 20, he was in a squad of 14 that began night patrol at the usual 9 p.m. It was mountainous terrain bordering rice paddies in the valley. The soldiers stayed on lower ground. It was 20 degrees, and the paddies iced over.

Leffingwell had split off with five others when the enemy suddenly began shooting. They set up a perimeter, each lying apart on flat, open, frozen ground. It was pitch dark.

Twenty yards away, Leffingwell could hear a voice giving orders in Chinese. He didn’t want to fire his weapon because the muzzle blast would give him up. He was wearing a bandoleer of 12 hand grenades. He took one and lobbed it toward the enemy voices.

After long minutes of on-and-off enemy fire, he saw a silhouette and threw another hand grenade. The silhouette fell over. It went on like this for almost an hour. More enemy came, and he began to use his Thompson submachine gun. He would see silhouettes and fire a blast.

“The enemy was that close,” he would later say. “It was terrible.”

He did not know it at the time, but Leffingwell later learned his squad had engaged a company of 300 Chinese.

It was too dangerous to call out the names of his fellow soldiers so he rolled through the rice paddy to check on them. He found three of them dead. He rolled to a fourth. That soldier had been shot in the throat and was choking.

“He kept saying, ‘Do something for me,’ ” Leffingwell recalled. He whispered to the man for a moment, promising to help, but had to get back to his position. Five minutes later, he checked again, but the soldier had died.

The other few had apparently moved; he couldn’t locate them. Leffingwell realized he was now alone. He was over a mile from base. There would be no easy way to call for support, or expect it. It was often like that on night patrol, and everyone understood the risk.

Suddenly, an enemy hand grenade landed near him. He rolled safely away from it as it blew up, but a second bounced by his other side and detonated.

Shrapnel punctured Leffingwell’s upper right arm and shoulder. A big piece struck him below his bulletproof vest and deep enough into his stomach to damage his intestines.

“It felt like I got hit with a baseball bat,” he says.

He lay there bleeding for a few minutes, then stood to try to run, but they shot at him with small arms fire, and he felt something strike a leg and arm. Leffingwell fell down on his back. He assumed he would soon die.

After a short while, four Chinese soldiers approached him. He felt his best choice was to play dead. He kept his eyes open because that’s how soldiers in combat often die. If there was any hope, it was that these were Chinese. North Koreans, he would later say, were known to shoot the wounded or dead to make sure. “They were mean sons of bitches,” Leffingwell says.

But he also knew these soldiers weren’t likely to walk past. The enemy in Korea was known to strip American bodies of anything of value. As Leffingwell lay there, it began. They took a small Bible and his wallet. They took a trench knife.

At one point, one bent next to his face to see in the cold if he was breathing. He is not sure whether they thought he was dead, or mortally wounded. But he had never made himself so still. It helped, he says, that it was 11 p.m. and pitch black.

They were there perhaps 15 minutes. They tried to take off his Barrington High School class ring, but it wouldn’t budge. They pulled harder and harder. He thought they might cut his finger off, but they got it free.

Finally, they took the bracelet. Then they left.

Leffingwell lay there until daylight. He passed out and came to many times. At dawn, he tried to stand, but his frost-bitten feet made it hard to walk. He couldn’t feel them at all.

At last, an American day patrol came by and found him. They took two M1 rifles and put them through the sleeves of a field jacket to make a stretcher. They took him back to the MLR, the Main Line of Resistance, at the 38th parallel. There, they put him on a litter Jeep, then onto a stretcher on the rail of a helicopter and flew him to a M.A.S.H. unit, where they took out the shrapnel and sewed him up. The doctors told him that if the temperatures had been warmer, he’d have bled to death. The freezing weather had caused the blood to congeal.

After recuperative stays in Hawaii and San Francisco, he spent months in Murphy Army Hospital outside Boston. In September of 1953, he was honorably discharged as a private first class with a Purple Heart and two Bronze Stars. He had been in the military 15 months and in Korea for 7.

“As far as the wounds,” he says, “I came out pretty good.” But his feet are still sensitive from the frostbite.

On Oct. 18, 1953, he and Kathy were married. They would go on to have three children.

Not long after the wedding, a small package from the Army arrived for him in Rhode Island.

He could not believe it. Inside was the bracelet.

“I says, ‘Where the hell would this come from?’ ” he recalls.

There was no explanation, and he never got one. But clearly, he says, it was recovered by Americans in the field, almost certainly from a dead Chinese, perhaps the very one who took it off him. The Army found him through the engraved serial number.

“What are the odds?” George Leffingwell asks.

Today, the bracelet is as he received it, partly blackened. He guesses the enemy who took it dipped it in fire to keep it from glinting.

Leffingwell keeps it in a drawer but thinks he will take it with him tomorrow when he goes to the Korean War Veterans Memorial in Providence for a Memorial Day ceremony.

He’s not the kind to flaunt it but is happy to show it to anyone who asks.

He says it was his good luck charm.

mpatinkin@projo.com