Initially, the 5th Marines had expected to launch an immediate counterattack to regain Reno. In the early hours of the 27th, however, it became apparent this plan would have to be revised. Reinforcing elements from the 5th Marines, composed largely of F/2/5, had been unable to mount out effectively from the Block for Reno. At 0144, the commanding officer of Company F, Captain Ralph L. Walz, reported he had one platoon left. Between then and 0220 his diminishing unit had rallied for attack three times. It had successively engaged the enemy in fire fights, one of 30 minutes’ duration, evacuated its wounded, regrouped, and then had come under heavy incoming again. Countermortar fire had been requested and delivered on active enemy positions at Arrowhead, Hills 29, 45, and 21B, some 500 yards northwest of Vegas. But as the Marines girded their defending platoon at the Block to company-plus size, the Chinese had done likewise, throwing in continuous rounds of new mortar attacks and additional troops. When, at 0246, another hostile company was seen spreading south from Reno toward the Block, the 1st Battalion directed artillery fires on the enemy and ordered its troops to disengage and return to the MLR. By 0300, early efforts to retake Reno were suspended. Relief forces from Companies F and C were on their way back to the battalion area. Ground action had ceased. During these early attempts to rescue Reno and its defenders on the night of 26–27 March, Marine elements had struggled for more than four hours trying to get to Reno, but the enemy had completely surrounded it. At Reno itself, the Marine in command of the outpost when the Chinese struck, Second Lieutenant Rufus A. Seymour, machine gun platoon commander of C/1/5, had been taken prisoner along with several of his men. Of the Marines originally on duty there, all but five had been killed. Casualties of the Reno reinforcing units were later estimated by the regimental commander as being “as high as 35 percent, with many dead.”[369] [369] Statement by LtGen Lewis W. Walt, as cited in Eloise Engle, _Medic_ (New York, N.Y.: John Day, May 1967), p. 211. A 21-year-old Navy hospital corpsman from Alexandria, Virginia,[370] attached to a Company C relief platoon from 1/5, helped save many Marine lives that night in the Reno Block area. He was Hospitalman Francis C. Hammond, who lost his own life but was awarded posthumously the nation’s highest honor for bravery under fire. For more than four exhausting hours the young hospitalman helped others to safety, even though he had been struck early in the fighting and was hobbling around with a leg injury. When his unit was ordered to withdraw from its attack against a strongly fortified CCF position, Hammond skillfully directed the evacuation of wounded Marines and remained behind to assist other corpsmen. Shell fragments from a mortar blast struck him, this time, fatally.