Just before daylight, the North Korean soldiers shepherded us off the road and into a field. Waving their bayonet fixed rifles at us, they had us lie down on the frozen ground. The ground was so cold that it hit me in waves. I couldn’t stop my teeth from chattering, and my legs and fingers turned numb. Staring up at the sky, I saw the last glimmer of some faint stars. I figured they were going to shoot us. But then North Korean soldiers carrying armfuls of cornstalks came out and started throwing them over us. The cornstalks were so that we could not easily be seen from the air. Lucky for us, they also trapped our body heat.
Many of us fell asleep. We were all exhausted. Huddled together, many of us spooning, we stayed relatively warm despite the freezing temperatures. By mid-afternoon, the cornstalks were frozen solid. I could hear the ice cracking around me as I crawled out of the cocoon. A few soldiers couldn’t get up. Those of us who were stronger managed to get most of them on their feet. I grabbed one man, frozen in the fetal position, but he didn’t move. He had died from the cold and his wounds. He looked peaceful. Farther down the row I saw them removing another dead man. My hatred for the North Koreans was growing greater by the hour.
While we waited to march north, two North Korean soldiers holding a basket moved between the ranks. When they got to me, they opened the basket and pressed a handful of boiled field corn into my hand. I slid the corn into my pocket, saving two large kernels. I tossed them into my mouth as we walked. I sucked on them until they were mush before getting two more. On my second two kernels, I screwed up and bit down on one of them, snapping a filling and breaking one of my molars in three places.
Pain shot through my head. My legs, back and shoulder were already hurting, but the pain in my jaw seemed worse. Probing the break with my tongue, I tried to keep the pieces of tooth together. But that only brought tears to my eyes. The pain was so sharp that I barely heard the English-speaking officer barking orders at us.
“Pick up wounded.”
He kept saying it like a broken record.
Guards started pushing us toward the back of the formation. On the ground were about twenty soldiers on jerry-rigged litters made out of burlap bags stretched between poles. Ten more soldiers stood around them.
“Pick up wounded,” the officer barked again.
It took four of us to carry one litter. I grabbed the closest litter and hoisted it up. The soldier in the litter had a horribly mangled leg. His calf muscle was long gone and his foot rested on the litter limp and lifeless. None of the wounded men had seen a doctor since being captured. I heard someone say they’d been in trucks, but were dumped on the road when the trucks were needed elsewhere. A whistle sounded and we started to shuffle forward. None of us were strong enough to carry the stretchers very long. My shoulders burned. I tried to focus on each step.
Left. Right. Left. Right.
Whenever things got tough, my mind wandered back to the guy with the sucking chest wound or I stole a glance at the guy on the litter with the mangled leg. I vowed to never quit, but soon my body started to break down. I tried to get another prisoner to relieve me. But everyone I asked looked away or moved ahead. Most hid in the dark, trying to stay as far away from the stretchers as they could.
“You son of a bitch,” I barked at one soldier who almost jerked away when I asked.
I was disgusted. It reminded me of the soldiers that first night fighting over the rice. We’d forgotten that the backbone of any military was the bond of the soldiers. We fought for the guys to our left and to our right. That is why we fought. To protect our unit buddies, and we expected them to do the same. But on a death march, every man was an island. There seemed to be no place for anything else. I refused to be that way.
When I finally got someone to relieve me, I stayed close by and tried to get eight more men to stick close together so we could relieve one another. If we stuck together, we could make this march. Soon, I was back on the litter, and just when I thought we would not be able to take another step, we stopped. I could see the pink sky peeking over the mountains as the guards herded us onto the side of a hill. We sat in little groups huddled together against the cold. North Korean soldiers walked around carrying a chogie stick with a bucket of millet on each end. The millet was a fine grain almost like powder. As they passed, the guards slopped the gruel into our helmet liners. We didn’t have bowls. Five or six men ate out of each liner.
We didn’t have spoons and used pieces of wood instead. I found a flat piece of wood and sat down with my group to eat. The millet was a pasty gray and had weevils and worms crawling through it. Some of the men near me started gagging and spitting it out on the ground nearby.
“I’m not eating that,” I heard one soldier say, tossing his “spoon” away.
I shrugged and started scooping the millet into my mouth. I hadn’t eaten anything except corn for several days. A few bugs weren’t going to scare me off. I shoveled another spoonful into my mouth, careful not to hit my tooth. From that point, I ate everything I was given regardless of what was in it. Like before, we rested in the field, under the stalks, and were back on the road heading north just after sunset, again with a pocketful of corn.
Each night the guards were getting tougher. They were constantly pushing and hitting men with their rifles. If a man fell behind, he was shot and pushed off the mountainside. Everyone was rapidly losing weight. Lack of food, wounds and dysentery were taking their toll. Carrying the men on stretchers was becoming even more difficult.
We looked like skeletons. Our uniforms hung off us like a scarecrow’s coat. Each time we topped one of the mountains, we faced another. Ears, nose, fingers and toes were becoming numb. At times I felt as though I was walking on my ankles. I was lucky that my legs had always been the strongest part of my body.
Many of the wounded men who were strong enough to walk earlier now were in need of stretchers. However, there were none, and we found ourselves carrying them along between two of us. In some cases we were practically dragging them.
When I heard a single rifle shot back down the road, I knew another man’s struggle was over. My heart was aching for them, but at the same time my mind kept telling me to move. We had two choices: march or die.
There was no doubt in my mind that during these night marches I could have easily escaped. The question was, escape to where? I knew that I wasn’t strong enough mentally or physically. And with no map or idea how far I was from the front now, I wouldn’t last long. My only choice was to keep marching.
My survival mode kicked in, not allowing me to surrender to pain and fatigue. When I could, I tried to focus on pleasant thoughts of home. I imagined baseball games I’d played in. I thought about my friends. My family. When I was eight years old, I’d get up in the dead of winter with no heat in the house. I would dress and walk a couple of city blocks to a store and get two bags of coal and one bag of charcoal. I would carry them back to the house and start a fire so that my brothers and sisters could get up in a warm room. I could almost feel the warmth of the fire on my face as I walked. When the good thoughts failed, I let myself retreat into a zombie state. My mind would black out, but my body would just keep moving until something snapped me back to consciousness. Like a snowflake on my face.
We were climbing up a mountain road. The snow made the road slippery. I saw a few guys slip, dropping a litter onto the ground. When we got to the top of the mountain, everyone was spent. It was hard to breathe in the thin air, and fighting the cold left us with little strength. My fingers were so numb I couldn’t button my fly after relieving myself.
The guards shoved us into a cluster of huts. We were jammed into the room so tightly that my legs rested on another soldier. The only good thing about sleeping this way was that we were warmer. I heard O’Keefe’s Boston accent reciting the Twenty-third Psalm in the darkness.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil: For thou art with me.
As he said this prayer, a
quiet came over the group. Afterward, I took off my boots for the first time in days. It was so cramped that I couldn’t reach my feet. So I massaged the feet of the guy across from me and he rubbed my feet. We both put our boots back on, but a few guys left them off. We were all dead tired and had no trouble falling asleep. I woke to a bunch of guys raising hell.
“Where the fuck are my boots?”
“Get up! Get up!” the soldier yelled, so that he could look for his boots.
But we knew what had happened. When we went outside the hut, a few of the guards were wearing the boots. The North Koreans gave some of the men open sandals to wear instead. The cold was not only taking a toll on us, but also on the guards. A cold front from the plains of Manchuria came roaring down and slamming into the very mountains we were struggling through. We were facing the coldest winter in fifty years.
As we got ready to move out, the commander of the guards told us to leave the stretchers. The wounded were pleading with us to take them. I started to move toward one and got a rifle butt in the gut. Others tried to grab the stretchers, but the guards pushed them away too. I started to move toward the helpless soldiers again, but couldn’t risk another blow. I let my mind drift into a zombie state, hoping to block out the screams of the wounded.
Left foot.
Right Foot.
Over and over again I repeated it until I couldn’t hear their screams.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF DEATH
After ten nights, we marched into a fairly good-size town wedged in a valley between the Kangnam and Pinantok mountain ranges. I heard the guards talking and finally figured out that the town’s name was Pyoktong. It was early morning and a thick fog covered the tops of the mountains. As we approached, I could see numerous small streams cutting through the valley. A patchwork of turnip and corn fields spread around the outskirts and a few cattle mingled in a pasture. The cows were small and I could see their ribs.
The guards marched us to houses that lined the road. I’d just sat down on the dirt floor of one when I heard the hum of aircraft above.
“Americans, Americans!” I heard someone yell.
The hum changed into a screech as the planes started to dive toward the road. Everyone began to panic, even the guards. The buzzing of machine guns cut through the screech. Rounds started to rake the road and blast through the thin walls of the house. It sounded like a sharp pencil popping through paper. One of the prisoners in my house understood Korean. He was from Hawaii and also spoke Japanese, which many of the guards spoke as well.
“Let’s take off,” he heard one of the guards say.
“What about the prisoners?” another guard said.
“Screw the prisoners, let’s go.”
The guards outside of our house took off up the hill on the other side of the road.
We threw open the doors and followed. I looked down the road and saw all the prisoners pouring out of the houses. Searching the skies, I saw the glint of the aircraft turning around for another pass. We climbed up the hill as fast as possible, clawing at the dirt as the planes peppered the village again. As we reached the top, I heard a series of explosions below. The Air Force hit an ammunition storage area, and multiple explosions echoed across the mountains. All the prisoners were cheering and hollering.
“Hit the bastards again,” someone yelled.
Thick black smoke curled up into the sky as the houses burned. I watched the planes climb high into the sky and disappear behind the clouds. Looking back at the town, I could see the bodies of a few prisoners near the houses. Others were wounded.
Numerous Korean soldiers started rounding up the rest of the prisoners. In the confusion, three of us slipped over the hill. We huddled together in a ditch, covering our hiding place with branches. We hoped to wait until nightfall and try to move back toward our lines. As we huddled together to keep warm, we talked about our chances of getting back .
“Any idea which way our lines are?” asked one guy. I’d never seen the other two soldiers. It didn’t matter. We were all prisoners with one goal.
The other soldier and I shook our heads no. I sat back in the ditch and tried to get my bearings. It was hard because we had moved in during the night and the mountains now seemed to wall us into the valley.
“Well, we came from that direction,” I said, pointing up the road that seemed to turn south. “I guess we could start that way and try to get over the mountains. We can use the road as a guide, but we will need to stay off it. All we need to do is keep moving south.”
The older-looking guy with a healthy beard just shook his head.
“Suicide in our condition,” he said. “We won’t make it over those mountains. We don’t have warm clothes and we will probably die of hypothermia.”
We knew he was right. It was smarter to wait until springtime. We needed to try to survive and hope our forces liberated us. A few minutes later, a Korean patrol spotted us in the ditch. None of us ran. We were all too cold and knew there was no place to go. The guards started to yell at us and quickly surrounded the ditch.
As they thrusted their bayonets at us, one guard gestured for us to stand up. We stood, and he pointed back over the hill. They pushed us around a little as we climbed out of the ditch. When we got to the other side, we saw the rest of the prisoners together in a tight group. The excitement of the air raid was long since over, and now everyone’s interest was in trying to keep from freezing.
The North Koreans seemed reluctant to take us back to the huts, so we huddled on the hill and suffered another frigid night. From above, our mass of men probably looked like a giant blob having a seizure. This time, we didn’t have the cornstalks to keep us warm. We tried our best to stay huddled together, but the cold from the ground easily seeped into our bodies. I couldn’t stop my teeth from chattering and barely slept. It wasn’t until I was so cold that I couldn’t feel my hands and feet that I finally got some sleep.
At dawn, they marched us down the road. But instead of back into town, we headed south. It was obvious they had no idea what to do with us. After hours of shuffling down the road, with one eye hoping to see the glint of more Air Force fighters, we stopped at a village. I figured we couldn’t have marched more than a dozen miles from Pyoktong. The village sat deep in another valley. There were small farms of one or two houses stretching all the way up the valley for approximately two and a half miles. A small stream ran alongside of the road. It was completely frozen over.
As we moved up the valley, the Koreans started randomly splitting us up in groups and placing us in the houses. The guards crammed about twenty men per room in each house. Each farm appeared to have been one family’s home.
The houses were made from wooden poles, with mud-baked walls and thatched roofs. Each house had three rooms, two bedrooms and a kitchen. The doors were covered only with paper and offered very little insulation or warmth.
It looked like the families that owned the houses had left in a hurry. Some of the farm tools were still there in open lean-to sheds beside bins of corncobs. Doors to the houses had been left open. Clothes, missed by the families as they hastily packed, littered the floor. I was placed in the last farmhouse. There was one other house beyond us, at the highest point in the valley, where the officers were held.
The valley was deep and the sun was only visible for three hours a day before it dipped too low on the horizon to warm the land. Temperatures hovered at freezing most days and dipped well below at night.
I got stuck sleeping near the paper-covered sliding doors. It was the coldest place in the room. One side of my body was always freezing. We were packed so tightly into the rooms that everyone had to move in unison. I was always happy when the decision was made to roll over.
The next morning five North Koreans crashed into our house. They threw open the sliding doors in both bedrooms and rousted us out. The leader, a stocky English-speaking officer with a clipboard in hand, started asking for our names and ranks. As we
answered, they checked us off and moved on. When they got to me, the officer told me to come with him. I had no idea why. Did they know that I’d tried to escape twice already?
“You in charge,” he said. “Everyone must stay in this area.”
He indicated by pointing.
“You can go get water there,” pointing to a nearby stream. “You understand?”
I nodded my head yes.
“Go inside,” he barked. The rest of the group went back into the house, but I stayed.
“When are we going to eat?” I asked.
“Soon,” he said.
The millet, which the guards brought to us twice a day, was running right through us. There was absolutely no nutritional value in it and no seasoning whatsoever. Everyone was losing weight. We were all beginning to look like scarecrows, some like walking death. Four or five men were still eating out of one helmet liner. Everyone was watching the other guy to make sure he did not get more than his share. We were slowly being reduced to the level of animals.
“We need medical care. We have men that are wounded and sick.”
He said nothing.
“We need blankets and heat.”
He looked up from his clipboard and gestured for me to go into the house.
“Go, go, go now.”
I never saw that officer again. Our complaints and needs had fallen on deaf ears once again. I went back inside and tried to organize the men. I knew the North Koreans weren’t going to take care of us. Sergeant Martin was the next highest ranked soldier in the house. I pulled him aside and told him he was responsible for the soldiers in the second room and I’d take care of those in the first room. I’d never seen Martin before. We didn’t bother with first names or backgrounds. At this point, he and I were focused on living another day. I knew he was in my same situation, and that was good enough for me.
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