Saturday, 5 Aug. 1950 found Reusser leading a division of Corsairs from Lieutenant Colonel Walter E. Lischied's Marine Fighter Squadron (VMF) 214, the "Black Sheep," made famous by the legendary Gregory "Pappy" Boyington in WW II. Flying from the deck of USS Sicily (CVE-118), the division was seeking targets of opportunity in the vicinity of the South Korean port city of Inchon, now occupied by hostile forces. Despite intense and accurate antiaircraft fire, Reusser led his flight in a low-level strafing and rocket attack against a North Korean vehicle park and factory that resulted in a number of trucks destroyed and NKPA soldiers killed.

The ferocity with which the North Koreans defended the area aroused Reusser's suspicions. Ordering the rest of the division to orbit the target out of range, he set his Corsair snarling past the large factory building barely above the ground and close enough to actually look in the windows. What he saw explained the tenacity of the enemy defenses. The building was a tank maintenance facility, packed with Soviet-made T-34 tanks.

With both of the Corsair's wings damaged by heavy ground fire, Reusser flew to USS Sicily to rearm and refuel, then returned to the target, setting the factory ablaze with rockets and napalm, destroying every tank and truck in the area. Continuing on, Reusser led his division in a low-level attack against oil storage tanks in the Inchon harbor area, turning the tanks into fireballs.

With all of his rockets and napalm expended, Reusser then attacked a camouflaged oil tanker in the harbor, diving through murderous antiaircraft fire to mast height and raking the tanker with 20 mm gunfire. The tanker exploded, almost blowing Reusser's Corsair out of the air. For his daring attacks Maj Reusser received a second award of the Navy Cross, becoming the first Marine to be decorated for bravery in the Korean War.

The courage and flying skill exhibited by Kenneth Reusser would set the tone for Marine air operations during that desperate summer when 11 NKPA divisions sought to land the knockout blow on the American and allied forces clinging grimly to the perimeter ringing the vital port city of Pusan. For the first time, the invader's front-line troops would find out what it was like to be subjected to deadly accurate air attacks. From the moment Marine ground units went into action, the constantly swarming Corsairs were a fixture in the skies overhead. Combining with the Black Sheep, the "Death Rattlers" of Maj Arnold Lund's VMF-323, based aboard USS Badoeng Strait (CVE-116), flew in daily support of their fellow Marines on the ground.

That support was of the first-rate, professional variety. Fully three-fourths of the pilots of both squadrons were experienced combat veterans of the war against Japan, men with more than 1,000 hours in the cockpit. They knew their business, frontwards, backwards, inside out and upside down.

Utilizing the air-ground tactics pioneered by Marine aviators in Nicaragua a quarter-century earlier, and honed to perfection in the Pacific, the Black Sheep and the Death Rattlers quickly taught the North Koreans that there was a dimension to warfare they had not considered. That dimension was that of fully integrated air-ground combat conducted by a truly combined-arms force, the only such force in Korea—or in the world, for that matter.

Racing in from the sea, the Corsairs plastered North Korean targets in front of advancing Marine ground units as the Marine brigade drove into the Sachon corridor in the first United Nations offensive action of the Korean War. Vectored to targets by the tactical air control parties (TACPs) of the battalions on the ground, Marine aviators ripped in, skimming the treetops to devastate North Korean units with bombs, rockets, napalm and gunfire, often no more than a few hundred feet in front of friendly lines.

At Kosong, MAG-33 pilots broke the back of the enemy defenders with a punishing attack that sent North Korean soldiers fleeing in disarray from the key ridge below the town. The echoes of that encounter had hardly faded away when a division of Corsairs from VMF-323 caught a column of more than 100 North Korean vehicles on the road. What followed came to be known as the "Kosong Turkey Shoot," resulting in the complete destruction of the NKPA 83d Mechanized Regiment, leaving nothing but shattered, burning vehicles and blood-soaked corpses to mark the event.

That was also the day that First Lieutenant Doyle Cole met his brigade commander, Brigadier General Edward A. Craig. With his Corsair shaking and stuttering from multiple hits by ground fire, Cole was forced to ditch at sea just offshore at the very moment BGen Craig was making an inspection tour by helicopter. Pulled dripping wet from the ocean, Cole was dumbfounded to see BGen Craig operating the hoist.

The 1stProvMarBrig, with its integral aviation combat element, quickly became known as one of the most powerful, friendly combat formations in Korea, packing a punch far out of proportion to its relatively small size. The responsiveness, accuracy and ready availability of Marine aviation combat elements, coupled with their ability to spend much more time over the target than Japan-based U.S. Air Force planes, was the envy of Army commanders operating adjacent to the Marines.