Floyd Hertz says he has no idea 60 years later how he started a family tradition in the Marine Corps.

"I think I liked the uniform," the 80-year-old Korean War veteran said.

The oldest of six boys born to Jake and Margaret Hertz of Billings, he joined the Corps in 1948 - three years after World War II's end and two years before North Korean forces invaded South Korea.

Next in line, his brother Tony joined as soon as he was old enough.

Jim was more interested in the Navy when his turn came, but his older brothers were having none of that.

"Tony and me took him into a bedroom and roughed him up a little and he went down and joined the Marines the next day," Floyd remembered, a mischievous grin playing at the corners of his mouth.

"Mother was beating on the door saying, 'Boys, what are you doing in there?' " Floyd said.

"They just about massacred me," Jim said, laughing. "As it turned out, it was the right thing to do."

Then one after another as they came of age, brothers Stan, Johnny and Leo chose the Marines.

Floyd and Jim, who both still live in Billings, were the only brothers who saw combat service. But for a short period in the early 1950s, the four oldest brothers were on active duty at the same time.

All six brothers were born in Bridger, but the family moved to Billings, where the boys were educated. Billings in the 1930s and '40s looked a lot different than it does now. The Hertz family lived at 414 N. Broadway, across the street from where The Gazette building now stands at 401 N. Broadway. The Gazette site was then a lumber yard. Jake Hertz worked at a Safeway store next to the family home. Margaret Hertz, proud of her brood of boys, snapped a picture of her wash line laden with clean coveralls ranging in sizes from oldest to youngest.

They weren't a well-traveled bunch, said Jim, who was in for a shock when the Marines landed him in Korea in 1951.

"I was a young man - very naïve," he said. "I hadn't been out of Montana before. Well, except once we went to visit my aunt who was working at the Irma Hotel in Cody."

But he wasn't entirely among strangers when he walked off the boat ramp into the South Korean port city of Pusan. One of the first people he ran into was his brother Jim, who had been given five days of R and R after surviving one of the earliest and deadliest campaigns of the war at Chosin Reservoir near North Korea's border with China. The Chinese had entered the war in late November 1950, overwhelming United Nations forces pursuing North Korean troops.

"We couldn't believe it," Floyd said. "It was a complete chance meeting. We weren't expected to see each other. I told him, 'Where you're going - that's hell.' I felt sorry for him. He was going right up into it. People don't realize how terrible it was."

Floyd was among the first in when the war began. As a water purification specialist, he and 20 other Marines were landed at Wonsan, North Korea's main seaport, in advance of the 1st Marine Division in October 1950. Water was essential to an operation involving thousands of troops, he said.

"We flew in on a big cargo plane that landed on a runway all gouged up by bombs," he said. "We thought it was strange the pilot never cut his engines while we unloaded. As soon as everything was unloaded, he took off."

Warily, the crew worked on securing a clean water supply listening to gunfire as South Korean troops battled the fleeing North Koreans. Bloated bodies from the fighting lay unburied around them.

After the landing, Gen. Douglas MacArthur ordered the Marines north in pursuit of retreating North Korean troops. The 1st Marine Division rolled toward the Yalu River, which marked the border between North Korea and Manchuria. The division was sent to occupy the Chosin Reservoir. The Marines fought all the way up as unusually brutal winter weather bore down on northeast Asia.

MacArthur didn't take seriously threats that China would enter the war, but tens of thousands of Chinese troops had already crossed the border and were hiding in the rugged mountainous region around the reservoir. On Nov. 27, eight Chinese divisions - about 80,000 men - swarmed down the mountains. Fighting through the night in temperatures that dipped to 40 below, both sides took heavy casualties. Often the fighting was hand to hand. Meanwhile, tens of thousands more Chinese fighters were butchering the Eighth Army on the other side of the reservoir.

Subfreezing weather was taking as big a toll as enemy guns. Frostbite took many out of commission in the long weeks that followed.

"The Air Force sent in Flying Boxcars," Floyd said. "They saved our lives. They dropped Prestone and chains, parkas that covered you to your ankles and thermal rubber boots we called Mickey Mouse boots."

Overwhelmed, the Marines had to fight their way out, battling every bloody mile south. Floyd said he was one of the lucky ones. As a water specialist he stayed behind the lines most of the time. But as part of the long march south, he said, "It was a lot easier going up than coming down."

Floyd eventually ended up on the 38th Parallel that marks the division of the two Koreas. MacArthur had wanted to take the fighting into Manchuria and disparaged President Harry Truman's caution in widening the war. Truman worried that striking inside Chinese borders would bring the Soviet Union into the war and end in a nuclear conflict. He relieved MacArthur of command in April 1951.

Floyd couldn't have been happier.

"We were getting whipped the way it was," he said. "If Truman hadn't stopped MacArthur, I probably wouldn't be here today."

Jim, who served in the 1st Marine Division in Korea for 15 months and four bloody campaigns, disagrees.

"We should have kept going," he said. "We wouldn't have all the problems with China we do today. MacArthur should have stayed."

Eight or nine months into his deployment, Jim was wounded when a piece of shrapnel pierced a tree he was hiding behind and lodged in the back of his knee. He was sent to Pusan to recover. Floyd came to visit while he recovered, Jim said, although Floyd has no recollection of the reunion.

All five surviving family members remain close, talking with each other every week. Tony, who served stateside during the war, died of cancer. He was well-known in the area as president of the Little Horn State Bank in Hardin and, later, Billings.

Floyd moved around the state working as a water purification specialist and plumber for most of his career. In Harlowton, where he was commander of the American Legion, he signed all his brothers up as members of Post 15.

Jim worked as a plumber and pipe fitter. Stan, who was a Marine drill instructor, is a contractor in Palm Springs. John raised Arabian horses in Billings, then in Colorado. Leo retired as assistant fire chief at Malmstrom Air Force Base near Great Falls and lives in Monarch.

Contact Lorna Thackeray at lthackeray@billingsgazette.com or 657-1314.