Valleys of Death

Half-asleep, I collected up my padded jacket, blanket and towel and staggered with the rest outside. Old American Army trucks were lined up by the gate. Their engines rumbled as the guards shoved us toward the open tailgates. As we walked, I could feel the map scraping my legs. I’d stuffed it into my pants when the guards weren’t looking.

We’d only been at this camp for eighteen days. Now we were on the move again. Just before the guards threw open the gate, we saw Gonzalez. They had taken him out of the hole to his room to gather his belongings. The guards were marching him to the back of our truck. I was happy to see him.

I wanted to ask him if they knew about the escape. Did they know we had a map? But I couldn’t in front of the others. We headed east for hours. The only thing that stood out was we passed what I thought were a couple of mines, one small steel mill and a train engine repair shop, all located within a mile of one another. In the excitement of the move, at first it didn’t cross my mind that we were traveling in broad daylight.

We were on a straight stretch of road heading east, when a truck going west passed us. In the back of the truck there were two Catholic nuns and one civilian Caucasian male. They were standing and waving to us, and in a second they were gone. We had heard rumors of Catholic nuns being held by the Chinese. We all thought that the male might have been Frank Knowles, the photographer who was being held in the officers’ camp. It was amazing the uplifting feeling it gave all of us just seeing the three of them. They dominated the conversation for many miles. Who were they? Where were they going? If this was Knowles, where was he coming from? Twenty questions, none of which could be answered.

The trucks finally rolled to a stop in front of a schoolhouse. A tall fence surrounded it. Each truck unloaded and we were corralled into the fenced yard. Guards patrolled outside the wire. Doyle figured we were close to Mampo, a large city with a railhead.

Inside the yard, they split us into groups by rooms. They made us strip and searched us two at a time. While the first pair got dressed, the next pair stripped. I still had the map. The bucket that we got our food in was sitting by my leg. I looked straight at one of the guys that had finished dressing. It was O’Keefe. I looked at him and then down at the bucket. At the same time, I palmed the map and slipped it out of my pants. Holding it against my leg, I dropped it into the bucket. O’Keefe stepped over and picked the bucket up. I turned and started to take my clothes off just as the Chinese turned to me. O’Keefe walked out of the yard. My heart was beating so hard I could hardly breathe.

After the search, they loaded us on the trucks and moved us across a bridge over a large stream. O’Keefe handed me the map and I put it back into my pants.

We pulled up to a gate, with seven or more buildings spread out in the fenced-in area. We were put in an old school building. A hall ran down the middle of the building. Four rooms that I guess at one time had been classrooms became our bedrooms. Sixty of us were put into two rooms. The rooms had wooden sleeping platforms running around the perimeter, two feet off the floor. The best thing was the presence of a potbellied stove. We could look forward to a little heat during the winter.

There was an outside latrine at one end of the building. It soon began to stink, since more than one hundred people used it on a daily basis. The odor was awful. For me, it was like old times in the morgue.

As usual, I wandered around the camp talking to some of the others. There were British, Turkish and some American prisoners in the compound right next to where we were. I started looking for guys from Philadelphia or close by in Pennsylvania. I soon found Charles Wray and three others from Pennsylvania.

Of course everybody wanted to see it, so he passed it around. It got to me and I noticed that this was only half of a picture. I looked at it closely and then started to laugh.

“I’m telling you, it’s me. That girl is Claire, my father’s girlfriend’s daughter,” I said. Wray’s eyes had grown wide and his mouth hung open, stunned. “We took that picture in June of 1950 when I visited her home with my father.”

That blew everybody’s mind. Unbelievable. I stared at the picture for a while longer. I could still remember the exact moment. For the first time in a while, I thought of home and my family. I hoped that my father was happy. Did they know I was alive? I never received any mail and didn’t know if anyone had received the two Mother’s Day cards that I had made and was able to send. I hoped they knew I was alive.

The Chinese left us alone for a couple of weeks, and we all settled into a routine of cleaning, cooking and sleeping. Then all of a sudden the Chinese started giving us lectures on germ warfare. This was part of the great re-education system. The majority of the population was uneducated, so for the most part they did not have to be re-educated, they only had to be educated through the words of their great leader Mao Tse-tung. This type of education required constant reinforcement. They pounded away with the same garbage, over and over again.

Our planes dropped chafe, thousands of small pieces of aluminum foil that blocked out enemy radar. The Communists had convinced their soldiers and the North Korean civilians that this was a form of germ warfare. They had everyone wearing masks and carrying jars with tweezers or chopsticks so that they could pick up the small pieces of foil. There was no better example of Communist control of the masses.

The winter of 1952-53 was livable compared to the past two winters. We were allowed to select our own leaders and organize committees to work on different facets of our daily life. A sanitation committee, athletic committee, a daily action committee—all brought some semblance of order to our lives. Food had improved too. We got steamed bread, vegetables and rice; once in a while some fish and meat, but it was usually just a scrap. The change in diet was enough to let us gain some weight.

We were also receiving English newspapers from Communist countries, including the New York Daily Worker. Printed by the Communist Party of the United States, it was a propaganda rag, but it had a small entertainment and sports section that we looked forward to reading. I got ahold of a copy of The Last Frontier by Howard Fast. The book tells the story of the Cheyenne Indians in the 1870s and their bitter struggle to flee Oklahoma. I also read Spartacus, about the leader of a Roman slave revolt.

Fast was branded a Communist in 1947, which is why the Chinese gave us the books. But I didn’t care, for me it was an escape. The stories not only took me away from the prison camp, but showed that suffering is part of the human experience and it can be overcome. A good lesson and one that I’d learned through experience.

In the spring, all types of athletic equipment began to arrive as well. We formed teams and started to have soccer, football, volleyball and basketball tournaments. We should have known that the sudden interest by the Chinese in athletics and competition was more than just concern for our well-being. It was all in preparation for their great “Peace Olympics” to be held in Pyoktong.

The Olympics were part of the Chinese propaganda machine showing how wonderfully they treated U.N. prisoners. It was fifty years before I realized how the men who participated were exploited. When my mother died, my sister found an unopened envelope from London containing a large magazine full of stories from the camps. It included a large section on the “Peace Olympics” held at Pyoktong. The entire magazine was enough to make me sick.

The track and field events were highlights for me. To the surprise of everyone, I won the preliminary hundred- and two-hundred-meter runs. My legs had gained that much strength.

I got to the starting line and waited for the signal to go. I’d never thrown a race or game, and I was having trouble doing it. I knew I had to lose, but I shot out of the starting blocks. My mind knew I had to slow down, but my legs didn’t want to lose. Lucky for me, a guy from another company was faster. I came in second place.

I had thought about escape every day, but now escape crossed my mind less and less. Life had become more bearable. We read about peace talks, and in March, the Chinese finally accepted a U.N. proposal to exchange sick and wounded prisoners.

Five months after the exchange, the war was over. The war had begun three years before with a North Korean invasion of South Korea. It ended July 27, 1953, with neither side winning a decisive military victory.

The Chinese had us all in a formation when they announced that a peace agreement had been reached. We stood silently, looking at one another. No one said anything. This news had been a long time coming.

I just stood there, a smile plastered across my face. I looked down at my rail-thin frame. Like a map, it showed my journey. Scars on my back from shrapnel. A missing tooth from the corn. Night blindness from a lack of vitamins, which luckily only lasted for a couple of weeks. I was one of the fortunate ones. I’d survived.