WEST PARIS – From a kitchen table scattered with dozens of faded black-and-white Polaroid photos, Josephat Levesque picks up a folded yellow map.

The images, taken with Levesque’s own camera, show bare-chested soldiers in camouflage pants, wearing cartridge belts and carrying guns. Also on the table are letters of commendations and other correspondence.

Levesque gently unfolds the map showing Korean combat outposts from a war long ago. The outposts are named for cities in Nevada: Carson, Reno and Vegas.

He lays the map on the table exposing a long thick line of rust-colored stain near the top.

“It’s the blood of the Chinese soldier I shot,” says Levesque, 73, a Marine Corps veteran of the Korean War.

More than a half-century removed from the moment that is forever penetrated into the map and his memory, Levesque, his hair white and receding and his body now frail, sits at the kitchen table in the West Paris mobile home he shares with his wife of 51 years, Rita.

With a picture-perfect view out of his window to a quaint white New England church and hills beyond burnished in fall colors, Levesque recalls a bloody ambush on a remote Korean outpost 55 years ago in an area known as “Three Cities Triangle.”

Levesque, a star hockey player at St. Mary’s School in Lewiston, left school and hockey at age 16 when he was shot in the back while bicycling to a job in Sabattus. He joined the Marines two years later and earned some of the nation’s highest honors – the Silver Star and later the Bronze Star for what he did in Korea.

It was March 1953, a year after the First Marine Division arrived on the western front of the Republic of Korea. The Marines positioned themselves at combat outposts near the main line of resistance just below the 38th parallel between Chinese Communist Forces and the United Nations lines. There, Levesque learned how frightened a man could be.

As a member of the Company C, 1st Battalion, 5th Marines, Levesque and his fellow squad members manned the Carson and Reno combat outposts, known to them simply as COPs. The snows and bitter cold of winter – with temperatures as low as 40 below zero – had subsided as he huddled in trenches on Carson, which he called “bunny holes,” trying to give warning of enemy attacks.

“It was me that was on watch that night, and I kept my cool I guess. ‘Don’t leave,’ I said. ‘You’re going the wrong way. You’re getting too close to the Chinese line.’ I said follow the trail out to Carson. They will show you the way to the (main line of resistance). They did that,” Levesque said. He tried to keep 17 men under the command of First Lt. Jack Ingalls from being ambushed. “I was trying to save the people going up the Chinese trail.”

“When they got closer, I couldn’t talk anymore so he (Ingalls) had me blow one time. He asked are they getting close? I would tell him,” he said of the signal system that was set up.

The men were successfully warned, but enemy fire continued to erupt. It was later that night Levesque’s map turned blood-red.

“I never was so scared in my life. I was more scared than anything else,” said Levesque, his eyes glazing behind his gold-framed glasses, betraying the agony of the moment he was recalling. As he looked out of the hole, with heavy enemy mortar and artillery fire around his position, Levesque knew someone was advancing on him.

“I thought it was the shine of my gun…I knew he wasn’t American. An American wouldn’t get on top of a trench when we were overrun. When I saw (the Chinese soldier) from the trench, I fired,” he said.

“He was only 15 feet away. I heard him moaning and moving like when someone’s dying, but I didn’t know that. He could have thrown a hand grenade. The men came out and said he’s dead…Then I came out and I stopped shaking,” said Levesque, who said he believes he later received the Bronze Medal with V (Valor) insignia for his actions that night in warning Ingalls and his men.

Five days later, the outpost was completely overrun. Levesque, who was to move over to the Reno outpost, earned the Silver Star in what was described as a “heroic, selfless act” for gallantry in action by the War Department and a Purple Heart for the injuries he received.

“I remember putting my spoon inside my shirt,” said Levesque, who was eating supper when the hand grenades and a mortar opened up on them. He and a buddy moved out quickly with machines guns and amunition boxes. “The Chinese were throwing hand grenades over the hill and the road down the hill to us.”

His buddy set up a gun in a trench between two American patrols. A nearby cave filled with soldiers had collapsed under enemy fire.

Suddenly his buddy’s gun fell silent. Levesque knew something was wrong.

“He was hysterical and crying. He told me to get on top of him. I couldn’t get on top of him so I had to lay in the trench sort of at an angle across him, so he told me to cover his head with my helmet. Because he was hysterical, I did put my helmet on his face. That’s when I was hit,” said Levesque, who had tried to cover his own head with his arm.

Levesque was hit by shrapnel injuring his ear, eye and head while trying to assist the critically wounded Marine. “My head was burning. I held my head in my hand,” said Levesque, who was bleeding profusely as he looked around to see only injured and dead men with heads blown off.

“They were gone. Period,” he said.

Before being knocked unconscious, he recalled seeing the collapsed cave. “There was a Chinese mortar sticking out of the ground. If I would have been conscious I would have helped dig them out. I knew where they were. I couldn’t tell anyone. There was no one to tell.”

The War Department described his actions as taking “indomitable courage, quick initiative and selfless effort.”

There are no pictures that depict Levesque’s heroic actions on Carson and Reno. Instead, he used the Polaroid camera that his mother sent him to ingrain images of his buddies smoking Lucky Strike and Chesterfield cigarettes, the million cases of beer that were delivered to a field when the truce was signed, the Korean workers who cleaned the bunkers and cooked the food and many other day-to-day scenes that occurred in the midst of the war.

After taking each picture, Levesque would apply a drying glaze that would preserve the image and send it back to his mother in Lewiston, along with U.S. Bonds that he hoped she would use. She carefully kept the images for her son and never cashed the bonds.

The camera is long gone, but the images, including one of himself, a strong, good-looking young man with dark hair weaing khaki pants, have been carefully preserved in scrapbooks.

Among the scores of photographs on the kitchen table was a copy of an article from the March 1998 issue of Leatherneck, the Marines’ official magazine. In it, Sgt. William Jansen, one of the noncommissioned officers in that long fight for the Nevada COPs, described the event in an article titled, “A Bad Night at Reno block.” Levesque highlighted two sentences in yellow.

“The men on Reno were our buddies. We did not hesitate.”