Eclipse Magazine - Produced by NABVETS 2015 First Edition | Page 8

Congressman Rangel with his gavel as the first African American Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.

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ongressman Charles Rangel (D-NY) can
describe the night of November 29, 1950— when
he and the rest of the 2nd Infantry were surrounded
by the Chinese Army near Kunu-ri—as if it were
yesterday. “It was a waking nightmare, pitch dark
and 20 below zero…I could see the flares, hear
the terrible screams of all those men wounded and
dying, hear the Chinese bugles sounding,” he says.
An artillery operations specialist with the all-black
503rd Field Artillery Battalion, Rangel was hit in the
back by shrapnel during the intense battle to evict
Communist Chinese forces from Korea. Lying in a
ditch, afraid to try to move, Rangel drew upon the
survival instincts he had honed growing up on the

wrong side of the tracks in East Harlem. The 20-year-old
private first class nicknamed “Sarge” for his leadership
skills, forced himself into action, leading over 40 of his
fellow soldiers behind enemy lines to escape rather
than surrender.
That wasn’t the scene Rangel had anticipated when,
after dropping out of high school, he had gone down
to the Harlem recruiter’s office to follow in his brother’s
footsteps and enlist in the Army. “It was just me and my
mom, and I knew how important the check my brother
had sent home was when he volunteered for the Army
before WWII. I thought that going into the Army for one
year to avoid the draft was a plan,” he says. Rangel