July 30, 1950
No Gun Ri, South Korea
Many hours after it ended, after the last cries echoed off the concrete walls, the elder brother stood outside the mouth of the tunnel. “Koo-hak!” he shouted through the darkness and rain. “Koo-hak!”
Chung Koo-hun had crawled away on his naked belly that first night of the killings. He crept up a slope and hid among the scrub pine. Over the next two days, he circled home to Chu Gok Ri, a village now in ruins. Then the guilt-stricken seventeen-year-old warily made his way back to the No Gun Ri bridge, staying out of sight of strafing American warplanes. The American troops had pulled back the day before, and Koo-hun heard from survivors that his eight-year-old brother was near dead when they last saw him in the underpass.
A single North Korean soldier, a nervous teenager, stood guard at the trestle. Koo-hun could make out the heaps of white. They were his neighbors, bodies stiff and swollen in the summer night.
“Koo-hak!” he shouted. Inside, the boy heard but could not answer. A bullet had sheared off his nose and torn his mouth. He was weak. His throat had gone dry. He tried to speak, but had no voice.
The elder brother drew a breath and jumped over the wall of dead blocking the way. Now he stood in the black shadows beneath the bridge. He stumbled over bodies spread on the underpass floor. “Koo-hak!” The boy heard him come closer, but still he could not speak. “Koo-hak.”
Suddenly, a hand shot out of the darkness and locked onto Koo-hun’s pant leg. His heart stopped. He reached down. He felt the shirt, the same coarse shirt he had worn as a child. He pulled him up, lifted him onto his shoulders, and found his way back out into the night, carrying a maimed little boy, the last survivor of the bridge at No Gun Ri.
* * *
“Comrades, you are liberated now.” The handful who survived remembered North Korean soldiers, on the afternoon of July 29, stepping among the bodies under the trestle to find those still stirring. They told them to wait until dark before leaving because American planes were strafing the roads.
The soldiers found “indescribably gruesome scenes,” a North Korean journalist accompanying them reported. “Shrubs and weeds in the area and a creek running through the tunnels were drenched in blood, and the area was covered with two or three layers of bodies. About 400 bodies of old and young people and children covered the scene so that it was difficult to walk around without stepping on corpses,” Chun Wook wrote in an article published August 19, 1950, in Cho Sun In Min Bo, a communist newspaper in Seoul.
The half-blinded “Golden Girl,” Hae-sook, and little brother Yang Hae-chan had shielded their wounded mother for three days. Now the mother, her legs riddled with shrapnel, told Hae-chan to lead his sister home. “Don’t worry about me. Hurry and go!” she told them. The boy and girl began a painfully slow overnight trek, the small ten-year-old leading the tall sister whose face was raw and burned, and who could see only when she peeled back a closed right eyelid with her hand. They didn’t know what lay ahead, but Hae-chan told Hae-sook he would take care of her.
Close to dawn, the weakened children and other refugees encountered North Korean soldiers along the road. They gave them rice and meat to eat. Brother and sister slowly walked on, hiding whenever they heard planes. Finally they saw the pear tree, entered their matang and, to their shock, heard their mother’s voice calling to them. Their father had gone to the trestle and carried her home on his back A-frame. He had escaped from the Americans during the chaos of the first air attack on the refugees. Now their mother would live, too. But the children’s older and younger brothers, their grandmother, an uncle and two aunts, two cousins, a cousin’s wife and her baby boy—all lay dead at No Gun Ri.
As some survivors staggered home, under the eyes of the North Koreans, others were headed south, following the tide of the American retreat.
Park Sun-yong, her life spared after losing her two children, had been taken by Jeep on a stretcher to a U.S. Army field hospital in Kimchon, 18 miles southeast of No Gun Ri. She remembered little but the sight of an American military doctor standing over her there, checking her wounds, and then the sounds of roaring engines as the 1st Cavalry Division headquarters began to pull back from Kimchon. She had “a horrible dream of death” there, she remembered. She was confused, lost. Why did they kill her children? Where was her husband, Eun-yong?
That day, July 28, on the main road through that same small city, an intense young man in a barley-straw hat was searching the faces of the thinning column of refugees from the north, looking for his wife, hoping that somehow Sun-yong would appear. Chung Eun-yong had been in Kimchon for three days. It was there that he heard the frightening tale of No Gun Ri from his nephew Koo-shik. But the ex-policeman knew he must head south or risk capture by the North Koreans. As the woman he had come to treasure lay in a hospital bed nearby, fading in and out of consciousness, Eun-yong boarded a train overflowing with people—“The last train south!” they announced—and it slowly pulled away from Kimchon station, as his eyes still searched the platform crowd.
It was not the last train. That evening another was loaded with patients from the Army field hospital. Park Sun-yong’s journey from No Gun Ri would stretch into weeks. Within days, U.S. forces would set the city of Kimchon ablaze, as they had Chu Gok Ri and scores of other South Korean villages.
* * *
A chubby boy with a little girl on his back walked down the southbound road, two small figures lost in a white river of humanity. Park Chang-rok was the thirteen-year-old who had watched from the foxhole as Americans machine-gunned the villagers at No Gun Ri. He assumed his parents were dead. His duty now, he knew, lay in saving his four-year-old sister, but this resourceful country boy couldn’t know what that would mean in this summer of war.
A U.S. Army officer had taken them away from No Gun Ri and driven them up to Autumn Wind Pass, about 10 miles east. There he dropped them off, and gestured for the boy to walk south. “I still feel grateful toward him,” Chang-rok said. As they trudged down from the pass, “there were tremendous thuds of artillery in the hills. I walked on carefully with my sister on my back. I was afraid and tired.” The girl, Chang-soo, was wide-eyed and silent.
They spent the first night sleeping in a pile of barley straw in the front yard of a roadside house. The next morning, barefoot, in short pants, they rejoined the files of refugees moving south. Chang-rok spotted a police officer. “I was so happy to see a Korean policeman and I rushed to him just to talk and tell him what happened at No Gun Ri,” he recalled. “But he shooed me away.”
Ten miles beyond Autumn Wind Pass, at Kimchon, Chang-rok found some young men from his village, Im Ke Ri. Helpless and afraid, the boy tried to join them, but they shook off the two children. “They began running,” he said. “I chased them with my sister on my back, pleading and shouting to them to take us with them.” He couldn’t catch up. “I collapsed.… I cried on the road,” and again they were swept along in the refugee flow. “I survived on food that I begged from people.”
Dry July’s dust was turning to mud in drizzle and rain. Finally, 15 miles farther along, at Yakmok, the weary boy heard people saying that no refugees were being allowed across the Waegwan bridge, up ahead, where U.S. troops—Maj. Gen. Hobart R. Gay’s 1st Cavalry Division—were crossing the Naktong River. A train sitting at Yakmok station would be the last to cross the river, he heard, but refugees were barred. At the station, American military police fired shots into the air to hold back the crowds of desperate civilians.
“I knew this was my last chance, and I thought hard about how to get on the train with my sister,” Chang-rok said. The boy gathered up rice straw from around the station, wove it into rope and made a harness to carry his little sister, freeing his blistered hands. He then hid behind some trackside trees to await his chance.
“One of the MPs went away from the train and I rushed to a boxcar,” he said. “The door was open and I saw South Korean soldiers inside. I begged for our lives. I said all we wanted was to get across the river, not any farther. The soldiers threatened me. They told me to go to my father. I told them what happened at No Gun Ri, about how American soldiers killed the villagers. I told them my parents were killed by American planes at No Gun Ri.”
The soldiers took pity. “They lifted me and my sister up, like a piece of baggage, and put us in a corner with a blanket over us.” The whistle sounded, the car jerked, the last train rolled out to cross the slow, muddy Naktong. On the far shore, a hard road still awaited the boy Chang-rok and his little sister.
* * *
Other survivors from No Gun Ri families, not as clever or lucky, were stranded on the river’s west bank.
The two Kim brothers from Chu Gok Ri—Bok-jong, who talked the Americans out of shooting the two dozen “suspects” in the ditch on July 25, and Bok-hee, who escaped from under the trestle—had found each other by chance on the road south, and they headed down the west bank of the Naktong to cross the bridge at Tuksong-dong. Just after dawn on Thursday, August 3, the two young men were approaching the bridge, which lay around a hillside, when they heard a thunderous explosion. The 14th Engineers had just destroyed the span.
“People rushed back toward us,” Bok-jong said, “and they said a lot of people were killed in the explosion.” After the initial shock, refugees turned back toward the river, spreading down the shore, looking for places to cross. “We were desperate. To us, safety was just across the river,” Bok-jong said. “Word spread that North Korean communists were killing everybody behind us.”
Finding what looked like shallow places, refugees began wading out with bags on their heads, but many underestimated the Naktong. “When several people began crossing, others followed like a swarm of bees,” Bok-jong said. “Some people held the tails of their cows. A woman held her baby on her head and when the river swallowed her, she just lost the baby or abandoned the baby. Some people completely disappeared under the water. Many, I mean many, people drowned.” Said his brother, “It was total chaos.”
Before long another deadly threat appeared over Tuksong-dong, American planes strafing refugees trying to cross the river, witnesses recalled. The determined Kim brothers eventually managed to swim to the east side.
* * *
Twenty-five miles upriver at Waegwan, as the hours dragged by that August 3, the press of the Eighth Army’s deadline weighed on General Gay. One of those among a stream of civilians crossing the Waegwan road bridge early that evening was a sixteen-year-old boy from the city of Kimchon named Lee Duk-soo. He could see his father a few paces ahead, his A-frame packed with baggage. People had simply pushed past a flimsy barbed-wire barricade at the bridge’s western end, Duk-soo remembered.
Suddenly, “the bridge shook and I was knocked off my feet. I had never heard such explosions.” His father was simply gone, Duk-soo said, apparently blown off the roadway. “I thought the whole bridge would be blown up, and I instinctively jumped off this very high bridge, with my bag on my back, instead of running back to the riverbank.… In the water, I heard people moaning around me. I cried for my father, but I couldn’t find him.” The boy waded back to the west bank. He never crossed the Naktong; he never found his father.
Another teenaged boy, Kim Jin-sok, waiting on the west bank a mile downriver, heard the terrible explosions and saw the bright flashes as a section of the bridge was brought down that evening. The next day, the fifteen-year-old from nearby Yakmok, with his father and his twelve-year-old brother, joined three hundred other refugees fording the Naktong.
The murky water came to Jin-sok’s neck. He held the family cow’s tail, and he and his father grasped his younger brother’s hands to keep him afloat. Then, when they were two-thirds of the way across, Jin-sok said, American soldiers on the east bank began firing at them, groups of people almost immobilized in chest-high water.
“My younger brother let go of our hands,” he said. “I saw that he was shot in the chest. His head dipped underwater. He was just swept away.” His father also was hit, but he just stood there in the water, still carrying a tall load of quilts and bags on his back frame.
All around, the slow current turned red with blood, Jin-sok said. “People and their baggage floated slowly downstream like bundles of rice straw in flood water.” The frantic Koreans didn’t know why they were being shot. Some tried to turn back. Some pressed on toward the nearer shore.
Jin-sok said he and about a hundred others made it to the east side, and there the soldiers stopped shooting “when they saw I was nothing but a half-naked kid.” After pleading with the GIs, the boy waded back out and brought his father in from the river. He was gravely wounded in the abdomen. The boy sprinted to a nearby village for help but found it abandoned. Returning to the riverbank, he tried to comfort his father, who soon died in Jin-sok’s lap. Unable to dig a grave, the boy simply covered the body with quilts and bags, while American soldiers watched, and then left for the south. Months later he managed to return and gather his father’s bones for burial at home.
Seven weeks into the Korean War, South Korean civilians were finding that the killing of noncombatants had become a routine tactic in U.S. Army front-line units and of the U.S. Air Force to eliminate any possibility that disguised enemy soldiers or southern guerrillas would penetrate U.S. lines. But contradictions were rife, and fatal for innocent Korean families. Two days after Jin-sok’s father and brother and other refugees were killed around Waegwan, General Gay allowed thousands of similar refugees to cross the river to safety. Three days after that, one of Gay’s colonels issued his flat order to “shoot all refugees coming across river.”
The deadly inconsistencies were well known to the people of one Yongdong County hamlet. American troops had ordered them to leave their homes and head south. By the time they reached the Naktong, the bridges had been blown, and they tried wading across. But now the Americans considered them targets. One woman, Cho Koon-ja, eighteen at the time, said U.S. soldiers opened fire on her group as they tried to cross north of Waegwan. “Bullets popped and sizzled into the water. It was such a barrage,” she said. “The surface was covered with dead people and injured people and cows and bags floating down.”
Terrified, Koon-ja turned around and began a long journey back to the hamlet, No Gun Ri, where she and her neighbors were about to discover the horrors that had unfolded in their absence.
* * *
The pigtailed park Hee-sook, the Im Ke Ri girl who saw her sister, mother, father and baby niece die at No Gun Ri, had turned back earlier from the Naktong. She had heard what many were hearing along the refugee road: American GIs were allowing only young women to cross the river’s bridges. “People were also saying everywhere that GIs did bad things to young women,” Hee-sook said.
Soldiers of every nationality undoubtedly raped Korean women during the war. The precise extent of the crimes would never be known, but at times South Korean officials were driven to complain to U.S. commanders about the attacks. Under a U.S.–South Korean agreement hurriedly reached July 12, only the U.S. military had criminal jurisdiction over U.S. forces in Korea. The reports rippling through the refugee columns, however well grounded or exaggerated, made many women more fearful of the big, fatigue-clad foreigners. Hee-sook, whose mother hid her in an urn when the Americans came to her village, had gone as far as Kimchon when she turned back toward Im Ke Ri.
This devastated sixteen-year-old was a shocking sight along the road. She was still coated with caked blood from hiding beneath the bodies at No Gun Ri. Her clothes were stiff with it, her hair matted and sticky with it. She was so weak from hunger and her bare feet so battered that she could hardly walk. “I was a living ghost,” she said. Other refugees “clicked their tongues and wondered what happened to me. Some cringed at me.”
She had companions, a woman and two daughters who also had escaped from the trestle killings. They grew desperately hungry and then fell violently ill when they devoured some green pumpkins. They collapsed and lingered in an abandoned house for a time. Finally they separated, but the woman told Hee-sook that No Gun Ri was not far off.
The dazed girl stumbled on. “When I walked, I felt like I was floating.” Somehow she reached the trestle. From a distance she saw the ground covered with white clothing. “When I got closer,” she said, “the hair on the back of my neck stood up.”
Park Hee-sook had come upon a “scene from hell”: flies thick on corpses; dead babies atop dead mothers; faces bloated to twice their normal size; white maggots “as big as fingers” squirming in bodies; water pooled around them turned to grayish yellow muck; the dead’s bulging, staring white eyes.
Family members, neighbors, playmates who had surrounded this girl’s young life were now “a junkyard of mangled human bodies.” Her first instinct drew Hee-sook in among the heaped and strewn remains to search for the bodies that were hers. She couldn’t find her mother, but recognized her father by his cotton vest. She took his money, stained now with water and rot. She broke off a pine branch and left it to mark his remains.
She looked further but still couldn’t find her mother, nor her dead sister on the tracks. Exhausted, disoriented, sinking deeper into despair, she began moving haltingly down the road toward Yongdong, the road she last walked when her family was ordered south by the Americans. Two men were coming the other way. They were a cousin of her father, and her own cousin and good friend Lee Duk-hwan. Hee-sook broke down as they approached.
“I flailed my arms wildly and sobbed, trying to explain what happened,” she said. “But Duk-hwan kept stepping backward to try to keep a distance from me. He mumbled that he heard I had died. He seemed to think I was a ghost. He gawked at me and then said, ‘Is that really you, Hee-sook? Why do you have all that blood on you?’ He picked up a stick and lifted the sticky hair off my face, to get a good look. He was afraid to touch me. And then he said, ‘Ah, you really are Hee-sook.’”
They took her back to Im Ke Ri, where they talked over the grim business of bodies and burials. Hee-sook found the village man who oversaw most funerals. “I told him I didn’t want my father to become food for ravens. The man said, ‘I remember your father. He was very kind to me and a good son to his mother, too. Let’s go and I will see what I can do.’”
With a stretcher made of rice-straw mats, the four of them set out for No Gun Ri. They hid in the bush when American planes appeared. They reached the trestle and entered the tunnel. They began to push the father’s body onto the stretcher. But half the body had been resting swollen in water. It snapped in two, the upper half rolling onto the straw mats.
“It seemed that the bones and flesh moved separately,” Hee-sook said. “The others were scared and stepped back.” The girl grew frantic. “I cried, and I virtually scooped up the remains of my father—like mucus—with the cup of my bare hands. That was how we collected my father’s remains and brought them back home.”
As they carried the dead man’s disintegrating body homeward, they again and again ducked out of sight from prowling American planes. The relatives finally suggested they temporarily bury her father where they were hiding at the moment, at a hamlet not far from Im Ke Ri. She dug the shallow hole with her own hands, and there he was laid, and Hee-sook went home, a girl alone.
Such final scenes, of great love and devotion amid the gruesomeness, were played out in family after family in Chu Gok Ri and Im Ke Ri. The heat and humidity, the rain and the insects were all rapidly breaking down the bodies, forcing villagers to confront unspeakable sights and difficulties in doing their duty to the dead. One man’s family knew him only because he had stitched his name on his hat. One nine-year-old girl returned to the scene and saw her dead mother’s pregnant belly burst open, the fetus liquefying on the ground. Two boys and their mother found their father because she tied a strip of green cloth to his ankle when she left the tunnel. “My mother carried him on her back, and my brother and I each held a leg,” son Hwang Sam-ryang said. “We all cried and carried the body up the hill to bury it temporarily.” Months later, after the war passed them by, villagers returned to the trestle area, dug up shallow graves, and bore bones back for a proper interment among the hillside burial mounds of their little valley.
Many bodies—unrecognizable, of strangers, of families that were largely obliterated—went unclaimed, and were dealt with by the villagers of nearby No Gun Ri. When they returned home, those villagers first found that the Americans had burned most of No Gun Ri’s thatched-roof huts. Then they discovered bodies blocking the pathway through the trestle. They pushed these unclaimed bodies to the side in the underpass and threw dirt on them, and there they remained through the winter. In the spring, villagers said, the men of No Gun Ri, consuming considerable malkgulri, rice wine, to fortify themselves for the unpleasant task, buried those remains in two places outside the tunnels. Some villagers remembered bodies placed in a line of trenches the Americans had dug. Some said other bodies were buried on a trackside slope.
In a land of elaborate funerals, where the spirits of the dead seem ever-present, where holidays honor the ancestral departed and meals are symbolically shared with them, these crude farewells for so many of No Gun Ri’s victims scarred the souls of those they left behind. Villagers would always say that these spirits were not at rest, that they would wander at No Gun Ri until the han—the injustice—was resolved. Until then the restless souls would linger in a kind of Buddhist limbo called Ku-chun—Nine Springs—a place for those who die unjust deaths.
* * *
Obligations to the dead may have kept the boy Koo-hak among the living. After carrying his little brother, the last survivor, from the tunnel the night of July 30, Koo-hun rested a few hours with the boy in an abandoned hut, and then set out through the darkness for Chu Gok Ri, passing North Korean soldiers who were on the move. The spindly eight-year-old drifted in and out of consciousness on his brother’s shoulders. By the time Koo-hun walked up the valley toward Im Ke Ri, to hide in the mine out of sight of U.S. planes, the sun had risen above the eastern ridges.
The boy moaned for water. Koo-hun put him down and went to the nearby stream, cupping some water in his hands. Coming back, he looked at the boy’s face in the morning light for the first time. “I dropped the water and froze in place,” Koo-hun recalled. “My brother’s face was gone. It was black with dried-up blood and flesh. I ran away, quite a ways. Then I stopped. My heart raced and my mind raced. What should I do? He was not the brother I used to play with. He had a monster’s face.… But Koo-hak still was my little brother.”
Koo-hun went back, picked up the boy again and walked on. Their father soon came down the path toward them. The despondent man looked at his two sons. One, he saw, was dead. “When I put him on the ground and looked at him, he did seem to be dead,” Koo-hun said. The father said Koo-hak should be quickly buried on the hill, but the elder brother protested. “I told him the boy died such a tragic death and we should let him spend a night at home before his burial. I insisted.”
In Korea, to die away from home is to risk an unsettled afterlife, eternity as a roaming soul. The high school student Koo-hun, who had wanted to learn so much about the modern world, still felt the pull of age-old beliefs.
Back at their house, one of those in Chu Gok Ri that had been spared burning, he placed his brother’s limp body in one room, to “die at home,” and he went to sleep in another. The next morning, the father shook the elder brother awake. The boy was alive.
“He said we had a big problem,” Koo-hun recalled. “I said, ‘Why is it a problem?’ He said Koo-hak was not going to live like a normal person and that was a big problem. I told him that even if that was a problem, it was a problem for me, not for him, because I was going to take care of my little brother.”
Koo-hun learned that North Korean army doctors were working at the old Salvation Army hospital, one of the few buildings still standing in Yongdong. The tall, strong teenager put Koo-hak on his back and walked to town, three miles away. Homes still smoldered in Yongdong, and bodies were scattered along the streets. Bombed and burned buildings held still more dead, many of them South Korean civilians killed by the continuing American air attacks. At the hospital, Koo-hun found the courtyard filled with wounded, moaning in pain, both soldiers and civilians.
He could barely squeeze through hallways packed with broken, bloody bodies. He put Koo-hak down in front of a North Korean clad in a white doctor’s smock, and asked for medicine. The soldier scowled. He didn’t have enough medicine for the troops, let alone civilians, he said. Koo-hun’s desperation made him unafraid. “You are a so-called people’s army and you refuse to treat a villager! What kind of people’s army is that?” he asked loudly. The impressed soldier relented, giving Koo-hun some powder to make a medicinal paste for the wound.
The boy’s injury was severe. Parts of his nose, his lip, his cheek, his gum were gone. Through the summer it did not heal. Pus ran from it and it smelled badly, making Koo-hak something of a village outcast. He wore a mask to hide the grotesque hole in his face. He remained weak, too, and his brother had to carry him for months. Koo-hun found two civilian doctors doing relief work in Yongdong, and he lifted his brother onto his back and walked there every day for a month to have the wound checked and antiseptic applied. It would be months before Koo-hak could walk, and years before the young man who lost half a face, but found an unbreakable brotherly bond, could face the world.
* * *
Villagers’ hearts pounded when they heard the fighters and other warplanes shrieking in from the east and south in those days of August and September. American pilots attacked anything that moved. When he carried Koo-hak on his back every day to the doctors, “we almost got killed several times because of the American planes,” Koo-hun said. Villagers took to hiding in the hills during the day and returning to their homes after dark, when the planes stopped flying.
The rice cycle still governed their lives. They tried to weed and cultivate in the late-night gloom, as the autumn harvest approached. But families had been decimated, survivors were often too disabled or weak to work the paddies and North Korean soldiers would sometimes keep them from the fields, drafting villagers for labor gangs to repair bombed stretches of railroad overnight, or to transfer boxes of ammunition from place to place on their A-frames. In the end, however, the two villages were blessed: It was a healthy crop that year, one that “grew on its own.”
The North Koreans occupied the Yongdong area for barely two months in mid-1950, but their political takeover was swift and well planned. Later, in decades of repression that followed in South Korea, it became a crime to speak well of the North Korean occupiers of 1950. But that short-lived regime was popular, at least at the outset, among some ordinary Koreans, from Chu Gok Ri to Seoul.
Although tens of thousands fled Seoul in late June, more stayed behind, some donning red arm bands to welcome the invaders from the “Red” north to the southern capital. American intelligence reports later said most of Seoul’s student population actively worked with the northerners. Many Koreans with strong nationalist sentiments, bent on making their country whole again and expelling the foreigners, supported the northern cause, whatever its ideology. Many Koreans were simply disgusted with the corrupt, autocratic Rhee years. That opposition deepened with the bloodbath of executions carried out by the retreating government through the summer, when military police and other agents shot thousands of leftist political prisoners and dumped their bodies in mass graves outside Taejon and Taegu and elsewhere in the south.
As the northern army rolled over most of South Korea, leftist activists from north and south restored local “people’s committees” as provisional governing bodies, the committees that had been outlawed by the U.S. military government in South Korea in 1945–1946. Beginning in late July 1950, the new regime conducted elections for permanent committees, a vote designed to favor candidates of the communist Korean Workers Party. Popularly elected village committees, largely of young and poor peasants, then chose representatives to township committees, which in turn elected county committees. The communists promised things many in Korea’s vast lower class had never imagined: an end to unemployment, an eight-hour workday, improved medical care and schools, equality for women. The new rulers quickly confiscated the property of the yangban landed elite and of Rhee government officials, and announced an elaborate land reform. Many peasants were simply told they now owned the small plots they had been renting.
The North Koreans were not a heavy-handed presence in Chu Gok Ri, villagers said. A small armored unit settled in for a time, its two or three tanks hidden beneath the village’s big persimmon trees. Villagers said the northern soldiers treated local women respectfully. Nine village youths were drafted into the People’s Army. Three eventually fled and returned home, and six were never seen again. New allegiances were declared and old ones hidden, but years later the villagers generally chose not to relive those days. Chung Koo-hun recalled that the young Chu Gok Ri woman whose rape he witnessed at the hands of the Americans became active in the pro-communist Women’s Alliance. Other villagers said one Rhee government official in their midst avoided persecution by transforming himself into a school janitor who taught pupils songs in praise of North Korean leader Kim Il Sung.
Those who were children then invariably remembered the music sessions. Up at Im Ke Ri, local leftists gathered people in a tobacco shed in the evenings and led them in political song. “If some people did not join, the young leftists found them and slapped their faces, humiliating them in public,” Yang Hae-chan said. His sister Hae-sook recalled one lyric in particular: “General Kim Il Sung. Ah! Ah! Our General Kim Il Sung. His name will shine forever!”
While children glorified him across more than 90 percent of the land, Kim himself had his eyes on the one corner of Korea where they did not yet sing his praises. “The Korean people are determined to fight until all the American invaders are expelled,” Kim told a French journalist as the U.S. Army withdrew into its Naktong River defense perimeter.
* * *
Once across the Naktong, stopping in Waegwan, thirteen-year-old Park Chang-rok dropped down from the boxcar with his sister, as he promised the soldiers he would. Taegu, the big town, lay 12 miles to the southeast, over the Shindong Pass. With four-year-old Chang-soo on his back once more, Chang-rok trudged through the thick dust of the road over the pass. Finally reaching teeming Taegu, he didn’t like what he saw. He walked straight through.
“I knew that it would be harder to beg for food in a city,” Chang-rok recalled. “In the countryside, houses at least left their doors open and you could enter and get a chance to beg. But in a city, people locked their doors.”
Walking on several miles, he found what he was looking for, a village free of refugees called Wooksoo, and an empty village shrine. “We begged food from villagers and ate it in the shrine and slept there. It was spacious and it was all for just the two of us.”
Then other refugees began arriving. The Park children were shunted into a corner of the shrine, and eventually the floor was filled and they moved outside, to eat and sleep in a field, or to huddle under the eaves when it rained, hugging each other as they slept. From inside, they heard parents softly singing lullabies to children. “On those nights, I cried a lot. My sister cried, too.”
Soon the other refugees ran out of supplies and began begging, competing with Chang-rok for food. Seven or eight would stand in line before each village house. Each might get just a spoonful of boiled barley before moving on to the next house. The boy was lucky to collect five spoonfuls a day, and his little sister would get most of that.
“She ate like a baby bird. She opened her mouth whenever she saw food. I was starving.”
Village grandmothers, seeing the boy growing thinner, took pity on the motherless children, sometimes giving Chang-rok rice balls or yellowed rice scraped from the bottom of a cooking jar. Some even told the boy he should give his sister away, or otherwise starve. They weren’t serious, but Chang-soo heard and she never strayed more than arm’s reach from her big brother.
Finally, Chang-rok made up his mind: He would go to the township office for help. With his sister on his back, the boy found the building and strode in, asking to see the head of the township. “An official slammed his fist down on my head and threatened to beat me more if I didn’t go away. But I was desperate. I locked onto his leg and pleaded. I made quite a scene. I yelled and begged for help. I talked about how I became a war orphan at No Gun Ri and had to flee with my baby sister.”
Hearing the commotion, the myon-yang, or township chief, came out of his office, took the children back inside and listened to Chang-rok’s story. The myon-yang gave the spirited boy a government ration ticket, a guarantee of food. Chang-rok returned to Wooksoo, his sister on his back, his ration ticket in his pocket, the only refugee in all the village to possess such a prize.
* * *
The train from Kimchon, with people clinging to its rooftops, steamed into Taegu’s chaotic main station. Repeated announcements ordered refugees to continue southward; they were barred from the overcrowded city. Chung Eun-yong paid no heed. The stern-faced young man slipped through the station crowd, into the sweltering streets and straight to Taegu prison, where Kwan-yong, his elder brother the prison guard, had found shelter. It was July 28, four days since Eun-yong had left Im Ke Ri.
The ex–police lieutenant was a smart and determined man, but in the face of war’s upheavals he felt increasingly helpless. Somewhere, back where he came from, his young wife and two small children were in danger. His brother was just as distraught, having left his wife and four children behind. Their cousins the Kims, the two young men who had swum across the Naktong, soon found the Chungs at their Taegu refuge. Kim Bok-jong’s first words were a blow to the heart. “Our whole village was wiped out by Yankee bastards!” he told them.
The Kims, in rags, sunburned, dust-covered, sputtered with curses for the Americans. But Kim Bok-hee reassured Eun-yong, as nephew Koo-shik had done previously, that Sun-yong and the children were all right when he saw them under the trestle.
Days dragged by without news. Then, on August 17, a long-distance call came for Chung Kwan-yong at the prison. When the grim-faced brother returned, he told Eun-yong that his wife, Sun-yong, had called from a military hospital in Pusan. Eun-yong asked for more details, and his brother fell silent. Go to Pusan as quickly as possible, he told him.
Eun-yong set out by foot the next morning for Pusan, 70 miles to the southeast. The Kim brothers joined him. They found they were accompanied by tens of thousands. Seven artillery shells fired by advancing North Korean troops had landed in Taegu before dawn, and by midmorning the provincial government was distributing handbills advising the population to evacuate the city. Learning that President Rhee had left the day before, people panicked. Taegu’s population of 300,000 had swollen to 700,000 with refugees, and much of the city now packed up what they could and poured out on the southbound road, in the now-familiar scenes of young and old, oxcarts and the occasional automobile, boxes and bundles atop heads. Eun-yong and the Kim brothers were caught up in the southbound sea of white. By midday, after reconsideration within the government, police loudspeakers began urging people to return home. In the heat of the afternoon, the frenzy slackened and many turned around.
The midsummer sun finally drove the three young men from the road as well. They took to traveling only in the morning and evening, and began following the winding route of the Naktong River toward Pusan. Refugees still filled the roads, the shade of every tree seeming to hold one or two exhausted people. Villages along the way ran low on food to help their displaced countrymen. Eun-yong and the Kim brothers, eating poorly, grew weaker and walked with sticks.
Reaching the town of Namsung, Bok-jong spotted an army recruiting table at the railroad station and decided on the spot to join up. He asked Eun-yong to take care of younger brother Bok-hee.
The two trekked onward, begging food where they could, sleeping in the rain. They reached the outskirts of Pusan, only to find people heading north, saying new refugees were being turned back from the jam-packed city. Eun-yong found a policeman who listened sympathetically to his story and helped them enter town.
The old port city was seething with the flood of homeless from the north, tens of thousands crowding every possible shelter. “Homes” made of packing cases blanketed the hillsides. Filthy, barefoot children roamed the streets, begging, selling fruit. Refugees trying to peddle their possessions or services crowded the city’s Kukje Market, in streets shaded by white canvas. Telephone poles were plastered with scribbled notes—people trying to find lost parents or children, brothers or sisters. Bicycles, rickshaws, oxcarts, U.S. Army Jeeps crawled through the throngs.
Chung, more than a week after Sun-yong’s call, finally reached the hospital, but she was no longer there. She had been released and had gone to a refugee center on the harbor island of Young-do.
Sun-yong’s three weeks in the makeshift hospital was a time when her injuries began to heal, but she grew sicker at heart. A kindly older woman helped clean her up and bought her new clothes. The woman’s husband, like many civilian patients in the hospital, was being treated for wounds suffered in a U.S. strafing attack. With the aid of penicillin, Sun-yong’s own wounds, in her right arm and torso, were mending. The woman’s son, a telephone worker, arranged for Sun-yong’s call to her brother-in-law in Taegu.
In the evenings, after meals, civilian and soldier patients alike would join in singing songs of loss, of faraway hometowns. Sun-yong, day in and day out, would kneel atop her cot, praying for Koo-pil and Koo-hee. “I cried a lot, day and night. I could not stop it,” she said. “My mind kept returning to my dead children.”
Eun-yong hurried across the bridge to Young-do and the refugee shelter, an old school. Children swarmed, playing, over the dusty grounds. Their parents cooked over open fires in cans discarded by the U.S. military. Eun-yong’s eyes searched for Koo-pil and Koo-hee among the ragged youngsters. Then he spotted a woman with a bandaged arm doing laundry at the school well. It was Sun-yong. He ran to her and they embraced. She collapsed in tears, her face buried in his chest, her back heaving with sobs. He asked again and again about the children, but she couldn’t answer.
“At that moment, I realized what happened,” Chung Eun-yong remembered. “And I knew that I was never going to have another happy day in my life.”
The twenty-seven-year-old husband, guilt building in him, joined his grieving wife in the bare, empty existence of refugees, a life of waiting for life to begin again. At night, among snoring men and filthy baggage, the young couple would startle awake, reaching out in their sleep for the children who were no longer there. Sun-yong told her husband of a strange vision preying on her mind. Over and over she would see Koo-pil’s blistered, bloody little foot, that morning on the road to No Gun Ri, and the boy’s tear-stained face. “I think I’ll go crazy,” she told him.
Eun-yong ran out of money, and the law student walked Pusan’s noisy, jostling streets looking for work. He found it with the Americans, unloading U.S. military supplies at a Pusan wharf, joining hungry teachers, journalists and others desperate for any employment. It was hard, unpleasant work, under GIs who yelled orders at the “gook” laborers and sometimes whacked laggards in the buttocks with a stick. “I felt my blood rising when I saw that,” Eun-yong said.
On his third day on the job, he heard a soldier holler “Goddamn!” and saw him drag out a worker who had been eating stolen sugar behind a stack of boxes. The American took the Korean into an office, had him kneel down and then poured sugar into the man’s mouth. When the humiliated worker struggled, other GIs kicked him in the rear. After that day, a disgusted Eun-yong never returned to the wharf.
Church workers came regularly to the Young-do camp and gave Sun-yong food and other items. One day, sixteen-year-old Kim Bok-hee left the center to look for work and never returned; he had been seized by police and impressed into army service. As August turned to September, Eun-yong would sometimes climb a hill over the harbor and stare out at the calm aquamarine of the sea. In his mind Eun-yong would see his children and imagine their terror at No Gun Ri. If he could just know where they were buried, that would be something. “The sorrow and the sense of guilt was staggering,” Eun-yong remembered. “I would wonder to myself whether I would ever overcome this sorrow. Sometimes I thought my heart would knot up and knot up until it exploded.” It was during those days in Pusan that Sun-yong persuaded her husband to go to a Christian church with her. Together they prayed.
* * *
The paddies around Chu Gok Ri turned a rich golden yellow as September wore on. Despite the dry spells, the well-timed rains gave the hungry villagers a strong rice crop, even with too few hands doing too little tending. But the peasants were worried, since the new regime was methodically checking the fields. They feared all their crops would be confiscated.
The communists enlisted an educated helping hand in Chu Gok Ri. Chung Koo-il, the twenty-three-year-old college student who pleaded futilely for mercy with the GIs at No Gun Ri, had escaped from the trestle with cousin Koo-hun that first night. His mother, his schoolteacher sister Koo-ok, another sister, and her small son had all died.
“Of course, my brother had anti-American sentiments because of what happened at No Gun Ri,” said Koo-il’s younger brother, Koo-hong. “But I don’t think my brother became a communist. He was a troubled man and didn’t know what to do. He was angry but he didn’t quite want to become communist.”
The family of fishmonger Chung Hee-yong, the village patriot of 1919, had the only tile-roof home in Chu Gok Ri, a house that quickly caught the invader’s eye. North Korean officers commandeered it as a headquarters, confiscated family possessions and consigned the father, his surviving eldest daughter and the two brothers to a single room. But Koo-hong said the soldiers were “not too bad.” They sometimes gave villagers rice and even meat.
Like other villagers, the Chungs hid in the hills during the day, when American warplanes roamed the skies. The strong, tall sons had an added motive: to avoid the local Korean Workers Party cadets who drafted villagers for a “People’s Righteous Army.”
As the rice harvest approached, the local party committee finally summoned Chung Koo-il, the village’s star scholar, to Yongdong. They wanted him to work on rice “donations.” He began going from village to village collecting data about each farmer’s production to report back to party officials. Koo-il did this for three weeks leading up to Chusok, the harvest moon holiday. Shortly after dawn that day, September 26, 1950, the grieving family performed a hurried ancestral ceremony at home, with a meager food offering of steamed barley. Koo-il then left, dressed in his usual white shirt and black pants. He said he had to survey the crop at Shimwon, over the mountains a few miles to the north.
That afternoon the Americans returned to Yongdong County, and his family never saw Chung Koo-il again. The rebuilt 24th Infantry Division, breaking out from the Pusan Perimeter, had pushed up the main road through Kimchon, to Hwanggan and now Yongdong. The 1st Cavalry Division this time followed a route to the east. Demoralized North Korean units, trapped by the Inchon landing force to their rear, scattered into the countryside.
Koo-il’s family, fearing he was killed by advancing American troops, searched the route to Shimwon but found no trace. Villagers then speculated that the young student had joined the northerners, and may even have made his way to North Korea. A village legend took root. Over time Chung Koo-il, once the promise of Chu Gok Ri, would be remembered as “the American-made leftist.”
* * *
The tree branches in Im Ke Ri dipped under the weight of apples and ripe red persimmons. Wildflowers tinted the hillsides with pink and white. The cry of the wild goose fleeing Siberia’s chill would soon announce the height of autumn, the season in Korea when “the sky is high and horses are fat.” But the autumn of 1950 in the valley was most of all a season of tears and fearful homecomings.
One day in early October, a boy with a little girl on his back strode up the road. Park Chang-rok had seen soldiers moving north and knew the tide had turned. The grandmothers of Wooksoo cried when their favorite refugee told them he was going home. With an empty U.S. Army can dangling from his neck and oversized shoes on his feet, the thirteen-year-old walked all the way from Wooksoo village, more than 60 miles, wading across the Naktong in water up to his chin, his sister on his shoulders. Finally he reached No Gun Ri and his grandparents’ house. They saw the children from a distance, the boy’s unshorn hair now brushing his shoulders.
“They were so happy that they forgot to put on their shoes before rushing out to cry over us,” Chang-rok said. Then came the news: His two-year-old brother and paternal grandmother had been killed at No Gun Ri, but his mother and father survived the carnage. His father later searched the tunnels and tracks for the bodies of the two missing children but finally gave up, thinking they must have been blown to pieces.
From the grandparents’ home, brother and sister pressed on to Im Ke Ri, where their shocked parents burst into grateful tears at the sight of them. The news spread down the valley. “Some people came to see me from Chu Gok Ri,” he said. “I was a village hero.” The dutiful son had come home, many weeks and miles after first dashing for the small culvert with a wide-eyed girl on his back.
* * *
Although accepting a ride from a U.S. Army truck driver frightened Park Sun-yong, her husband insisted they climb aboard. Eun-yong and the childless young mother were hitchhiking back home after two months in the south, joined by his brother Kwan-yong. They walked part of the way, fording the Naktong River at a shallows where people had placed stepping-stones. They saw the ruin and butchery of the war in the blackened hulls of villages, in bodies along the road. At one village they saw people pulling decaying soldiers’ bodies from a hut, North Koreans who had been packed wounded into a room during the retreat, only to die there.
A final Jeep ride with a South Korean soldier left them at the doorstep of Chu Gok Ri. It was almost dark, the evening of October 2, but they could see the Chung family home had burned down when the Americans “scorched” the village. Family survivors were crowded into a single room of a relative’s house. There, amid the choking tears of reunion, the mournful accounting was made: Kwan-yong’s wife, Min Young-ok, had died in the tunnel; her baby, their only son, died of a head wound after his grandmother brought him home; one of their three daughters died of her wounds soon after. Now the prison guard was a widower with two girls to raise, children forever changed by the terror they had witnessed.
* * *
As the autumn nights lengthened and the air grew chill, survivors struggled to reestablish village life. The snow came early that year, dusting the mountains by late October. Although the war had moved north, even into North Korea, its dangers were never far away. The leapfrogging American offensive northward had bypassed thousands of North Korean soldiers. These stragglers, often armed, sometimes riding horses, often wounded and on stretchers, would pass through the villages in the night, trying to make their way north, as residents huddled behind closed doors. Sometimes they would stop and ask for food.
One cold winter’s night in Im Ke Ri, a female soldier came to the door of the hut of Park Hee-sook, the orphaned teenager. She told the pigtailed girl how she hoped to find her way back home to North Korea. “I fed her well, and she stayed in my home for a few days,” Hee-sook said. “Because I was living alone, I welcomed strangers.” Villagers remembered women soldiers asking for help in arranging marriages for them locally, so they could settle in the south and drop out of the terrible war.
The daytime belonged to the Americans, troops who would appear along the road headed north. At the sight of them, village children, survivors of No Gun Ri, would hide in terror.
During the two-month North Korean occupation, rumors spread through the valley that the communists had drawn up blacklists of local people to be executed as political enemies. By the time the North Koreans fled, no one had been killed in Chu Gok Ri or Im Ke Ri. Other places, the villagers learned, were not so fortunate.
Chung Eun-yong returned to Taejon, a city now in ruins, and heard from an aunt a tale of North Korean atrocity. Before retreating from the city, she said, the northerners took their rightist prisoners out of their detention places and did to them what South Korean military police did to the leftists in July. They took them to a nearby valley, forced them to dig a long ditch, lined them up on its edge, and then shot each prisoner in the head, to tumble into the mass grave. Returning to his job at Taejon prison, Eun-yong’s brother was told the prison’s well had been filled to the brim with the bodies of executed detainees, most of them policemen, soldiers, government officials and their relatives, all shot or beaten to death by departing North Koreans. These mass killings were the ones discovered by advancing American troops in the Taejon area in late September.
Witnesses across the occupied territory attested to “people’s court” spectacles at which handfuls of alleged enemies of the people were denounced before an assembly of frightened neighbors and then bludgeoned to death or otherwise executed. Especially in Seoul, the sudden North Korean military setbacks inspired hasty killings of political enemies by young leftists. Returning briefly to the capital in November, Eun-yong learned that a professor at his college had been murdered by one of his own students, a communist. Some southerners were simply transported north and into oblivion.
The brutality alienated many in the south who had tolerated the leftist takeover, but many southerners were outraged anew by the bloodbath that followed as the Rhee regime reasserted power over South Korea and eliminated alleged communist collaborators. Village feuds, clan grudges, business jealousies produced baseless allegations of collaboration, and countless people with little link to leftist politics were summarily executed by southern authorities.
When Eun-yong visited his Taejon aunt, she was distraught because her son was being interrogated and beaten in the police station for having served in the Workers Party during the North Korean occupation, even though he had been forced to become a party member, she said. Another son had been drafted into a North Korean art troupe and disappeared with the northerners.
Back in Chu Gok Ri, the vanished Chung Koo-il’s “rich” family, targets of North Korean harassment over the summer, now became victims of the Rhee rightists. The family’s home was a command post once more, this time for South Korean police guarding the rail line against guerrilla attack. The railroad police repeatedly abused them, beating the father, Chung Hee-yong, and his surviving daughter, Tae-gu, with rifle butts and wooden bars from field cots, demanding to know where the “collaborator” Koo-il was. For Hee-yong, battered nationalist hero of 1919, only the identity of the batterers had changed, from Japanese to Korean.
* * *
A different kind of war, guerrilla war, dragged on in the south for many months. As in 1949, people heard the crackle of gunfire in the night as police combed the Yongdong hills for armed leftists. As late as 1952, guerrillas descended on Yongdong and attacked and burned the county administrative building. Stranded North Korean soldiers joined forces with southern guerrillas, especially in the rugged Chiri Mountains of the far south. The Rhee government crushed them with scorched-earth campaigns, burning mountain villages suspected of supporting the leftists. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of villagers were killed, including women and children. These killings went largely unreported.
Politics in the south, behind the front lines of war, deteriorated into a bald power struggle between the seventy-six-year-old Syngman Rhee and his opponents in the National Assembly. The assembly elected the president and was prepared to bring Rhee’s corrupt rule to an end in 1952. But his strong-arm methods prevailed. On May 24, 1952, he had dozens of assembly members arrested for “communist connections” and then put the body under virtual house arrest, ringed by right-wing militants, to coerce a unanimous vote amending the constitution in favor of popular election of the president. Rhee subsequently claimed 86 percent of the popular vote later in 1952.
The North Korean occupation bequeathed one legacy to the countryside: The Rhee government did not try to undo the reassignment of land to tenant farmers. A U.S.-inspired land reform, interrupted at the war’s outset, was resumed and it accommodated what the North Koreans had begun.
But the wantonness of the war had left the rice-and-barley heartland devastated. Thousands of southerners’ homes had been destroyed by American soldiers and by American jets’ 100-gallon napalm bombs. Then, just weeks later, civilians were allowed back to live among the charred shells. A classified report to President Truman said half the livestock in South Korea, mostly used to work the fields, had been destroyed, along with 70 percent of South Korea’s industrial capacity.
By late 1951, when the 7th Cavalry Regiment left Korea, the war had stalemated. It stretched on, with mounting human losses, until the armistice of July 27, 1953. By then, battle-related deaths included more than 33,000 Americans and an estimated 200,000 or more South Korean soldiers. The South Korean government put the number of North Korean and Chinese soldiers killed at 479,000.
On this peninsula whose people had not waged their own war for centuries, the civilian death toll was enormous, but never conclusively calculated. A South Korean history estimated 244,000 South Korean civilian deaths. In 1974, however, the Seoul government reported 990,968 civilian “losses” during the war. Reviewing the uncertain numbers, American historian Allan R. Millett wrote, “U.N. officials think 900,000 deaths not unreasonable” among southern civilians. The huge noncombatant toll in North Korea remained undocumented outside the country. The American air war against the north was catastrophic, climaxing with the bombing of giant irrigation dams, triggering calamitous floods that swept away villages, rice crops and thousands of lives through drowning and starvation.
“We attacked every type of target. We did some major damage out there,” the Air Force’s Maj. Gen. Emmett O’Donnell Jr. told U.S. Senate committees in 1951. “I would say the entire, almost the entire Korean Peninsula is just a terrible mess. Everything is destroyed.” Gen. Curtis E. LeMay, the U.S. bombing expert, came away from the three-year war with this impression: “We burned down every town in North Korea, and South Korea, too.”
Even a little schoolhouse: The new wooden building where the children of Chu Gok Ri and Im Ke Ri were taught was burned down. No Gun Ri’s youngest survivors, many scarred and maimed, sat on straw mats under the trees, in the open air, and tried to begin anew. An indomitable boy named Park Chang-rok scored first in his class.
* * *
For the people of the valley, the damage was not all visible, the wounds not all of the flesh. Chun Choon-ja, the girl who wanted to see big towns, had been taken to the far south by helpful adults after being saved at No Gun Ri and was cared for by an older couple in a town south of Taegu until finally her grandmother traced her, with information from travelers, and brought the ten-year-old home. But at home all had changed. The Chu Gok Ri house was badly damaged, the family of nine was now just four, and her father, who fled from the trestle on the second day, was a broken man.
“He used to hold me on his lap and weep all day,” Choon-ja remembered. “People said he went back to the tunnel and went through the decaying bodies over and over looking for me.” He didn’t work the fields; he was sick, complaining of choking and difficulty in breathing. The grandmother prayed for him, before an offering table of food and fruit. Then she called in a shaman, a mutang.
Your son is possessed by the spirit of his wife, the woman told her. Choon-ja’s mother had lived a hard life and died an unjust death at No Gun Ri, the mutang said, and her spirit now will not rest in the afterlife.
Choon-ja came to believe that what possessed her father was guilt, that he was overwhelmed at having survived when his wife and father, his brother and sister-in-law, and his new baby son did not. What Choon-ja didn’t know was that the baby, her parents’ “Great Success,” had died at the hands of his own father, silenced in the shallow water of the trestle.
For some in Chu Gok Ri and Im Ke Ri, death’s timeless rituals provided some consolation. The seventeen-year-old student Chung Koo-hun found his mother’s body at the trestle and temporarily buried her nearby. Then, in the winter, he exhumed her remains and laid her in state at their home. The family prepared food, as is traditional, and placed it before the deceased, and then they gave her a proper burial on the valley’s slopes. The Suh family buried an empty set of clothes in place of the grandfather whose remains they never found. For months, such processions wended up the village path, led by the funeral bell, the bell whose knell, one midsummer’s day, had told of the Americans’ arrival.
Some could not be consoled. Cho Nam-il’s wife, the young woman who gave birth on the tunnel floor and who abandoned her infant there, was seen in later days running aimlessly up and down the crooked village lanes, wandering through the fields barefoot, floundering in the stream, laughing hysterically, her mind seemingly gone. The family took to locking her up in a room. They bought herbal medicine. Slowly the frenzy subsided.
In her lonely hut, sixteen-year-old Park Hee-sook “waited” for her mother, the woman lost among the heaps of dead. “It was as if my mother would open the door and step in any minute.” And at night Hee-sook would kneel before a scrap of paper stuck to a mud wall, a funeral tribute to her father, scrawled out by his cousin. “I cried all night, day in and day out. I could not believe my father died.” Years later, a man who had been an Im Ke Ri watchman told her he remembered passing the dimly lit house on winter nights and hearing the girl weep. “It was such a sad wail, the man said.”
* * *
In December 1950, Chung Eun-yong rejoined the police at the provincial headquarters in Taejon, in part to avoid conscription into the army. He and Sun-yong moved in with his brother and the two surviving nieces. The young husband resumed his studies part-time and completed his college course just before the war ended in 1953.
Sun-yong drifted through the months, disturbed, sleepless. Her full face paled and thinned, showing her cheekbones. In January 1951, Eun-yong suggested she spend some weeks with her parents at Shimchon. She improved in her home village. She found a devout Christian deaconess there who prayed with her for five straight days, after which Sun-yong felt her faith restored. She knew she would meet her children again, in the kingdom of God. But Koo-pil and Koo-hee never let go of her; their faces appeared before her; their spirits tugged at her unconscious.
For the father who left his family to the mercy of American soldiers, no prayer could lift the weight. Eun-yong would always hear his boy’s cry that last morning to take him along. Now Koo-pil was just a face in a photograph. The picture from his first birthday celebration, buried in a leather box with other keepsakes, had somehow survived the fire that consumed the Chung home. The Americans had taken his son’s life and left the boy in a lost grave. All he had was a photograph, its edges singed by heat, and a burning sense of guilt, and duty.