WASHINGTON – On the evening of October 30, 1950, in the dark, early days of the Cold War, Red Chinese forces mounted a massive nighttime assault on American troops at Unsan, North Korea. As overwhelming numbers of communist soldiers attacked Americans throughout the night and into the next day, a rifleman with the Army’s 8th Cavalry Regiment took up a 30-caliber machine gun at the south end of his unit’s line, following in the footsteps of three other soldiers – all of whom had been killed at the post.

When the rest of the American troops were told to withdraw, the rifleman never received the order, and continued “steadfastly manning” the machine gun until his ammunition was exhausted, according to Army records. The brave soldier’s “determined stand” single-handedly slowed the advance of the enemy in his sector, allowing the remnants of his unit to retreat southward, and to safety.

Fifty-five years later, the valor of the rifleman, Tibor “Ted” Rubin, is finally being recognized. On Friday, Corporal Rubin, who served in Korea from July 23, 1950, to April 20, 1953, will receive America’s highest military accolade, the Medal of Honor, from President Bush in a White House ceremony.

The brave acts that saved the lives of his fellow soldiers that October day represent only a small portion of the heroism symbolized by Corporal Rubin’s medal. On one occasion, Corporal Rubin, now 76, “single-handedly captured several hundred North Korean soldiers” after the breakup of the Pusan perimeter. Sworn affidavits from Corporal Rubin’s fellow soldiers document how, in another battle, when his unit was retreating, Corporal Rubin stayed behind to protect the “vital Taegu-Pusan road link” his unit would use to escape the advancing North Korean troops. According to his medal citation, during a 24-hour battle, Corporal Rubin “inflicted a staggering number of casualties” on the “overwhelming numbers of North Korean troops” assaulting the hill where he was stationed, single-handedly slowing the enemy’s advance enough to allow his fellow soldiers to withdraw to safety.

Yet despite his glory on the battlefield, Corporal Rubin’s bravest deeds are generally considered to be his quietest. In the degrading, brutal confines of Korean prisoner-of-war camps, Corporal Rubin – a Hungarian-born Jew who survived the Mauthausen death camp in Austria – applied the survival lessons gleaned from his 14-month imprisonment at the hands of the Nazis to save the lives of some 40 fellow soldiers.

Now, 60 years after his internment by the Nazis, and more than 50 years after his suffering at the hands of the Asian Communists, Corporal Rubin can speak of his experiences with a sense of humor. He has survived and enjoys the last laugh. Reached by phone at his home in Garden Grove, Calif., he said: “Now I can joke about it, because I’m home – I’m free. I’m in the best country in the world.”

The situation in Korea, however, was no laughing matter. After receiving a serious leg wound during the October 30, 1950, battle, Corporal Rubin – who is adding the Medal of Honor to two Purple Hearts – was captured by the North Koreans and taken to the Pukchin POW camp, known to history as “Death Valley,” and later to Pyoktong.

In the camps, Corporal Rubin recalled, “the biggest killer was dysentery.” He and his fellow soldiers had been captured in their summer uniforms, he said, and the winter cold was unbearable. One of Corporal Rubin’s fellow prisoners, Sergeant Leo Cormier, described yesterday, in a phone interview with The New York Sun, sleeping among 50 men in a 9-by-12-foot cell. “You wake up in the morning, and you reach up, and the body next to you was stiff as a board,” Sergeant Cormier, now 80, said.

Sergeant Cormier recalls first meeting Corporal Rubin on the long march to the camp, during which, he said, North Korean troops would bayonet the wounded soldiers who faltered under the burden of their injuries and fatigue. Of their imprisonment together, Sergeant Cormier said, of Corporal Rubin: “If Ted wasn’t there, none of us would’ve made it out.”

The affidavits from Corporal Rubin’s fellow prisoners support Sergeant Cormier’s account. Fellow soldiers recalled how Corporal Rubin stole from the Chinese and North Korean guards, tying off the bottoms of his pants and stuffing the legs with leftover grain from the camp’s mills. “He’d mix the flour with water and make little cakes,” Sergeant Cormier, who said he weighed 80 pounds upon his release from the camp, recalled. “It tasted like manna from heaven.”

When his fellow soldiers, devastated by dysentery, could no longer muster the will to eat, Corporal Rubin force-fed them. When his fellow soldiers were filthy and injured, he bathed them and cleansed their wounds. When his fellow soldiers were infested with lice, he picked the parasites out of their hair. According to prisoners’ accounts, when one soldier was wounded in the shoulder and infection set in, Corporal Rubin, recalling lessons learned at Mauthausen, jumped into the latrine to fetch maggots. He washed off the larvae and set them on the injured soldier’s gangrenous flesh, leaving them to eat away the infection and removing them before they attacked the healthy skin – saving the soldier’s arm, and his life.

More valuable than Corporal Rubin’s shrewd survival skills, however, was his contagious sense of humor and his appreciation of life as something worth preserving at all costs. “In his stories and his escapades, he made us all laugh,” Sergeant Cormier said.

His loyalty to the Army and his brothers in arms, Corporal Rubin explains, were part of repaying a debt to America. At the end of World War II, when Corporal Rubin and other Jews were freed from Mauthausen, “We were nothing but a sack of bones. We could not even stand up. We were loaded with filth; we smelled,” he said.

The liberating American soldiers, however, “were so nice to us. They fattened us up, they took care of us,” he said, recalling in particular the generous care administered to the camp’s survivors by Army medics.

“That’s when I promised myself that I’d go to the United States,” Corporal Rubin recalled. “I said, ‘I’m going to join the Army to express my appreciation to the United States – to the people who liberated us.'”

On Friday, that appreciation will be returned by President Bush. At an intimate ceremony at the White House, he will “extend the thanks of Congress and a grateful nation” as he pins the Medal of Honor around Corporal Rubin’s neck, an Army spokeswoman, Major Elizabeth Robbins, said. Corporal Rubin will also be honored Friday afternoon at the Pentagon, where the addition of his name to the “Hall of Heroes” will be unveiled.