Valleys of Death

by Bill Richardson

  A couple of the guys picked up some good lighters with plenty of pinesap in them. As we walked along the road, we set the thatched roofs of the Chinese houses on fire. By the time the houses started burning, we were well down the road. We burned three houses before the Chinese became suspicious.

  Despite working many hours building the long houses, we were still required to attend lectures. And once a Chinese acting troupe came to town. It was their version of a USO show, called The White-Haired Girl.

  The story line was simple. A peasant family could not pay the taxes demanded by the dastardly landowner. So he takes the peasant’s beautiful young black-haired daughter as his concubine. She suffers terribly under his demented demands but eventually escapes to the mountains. Years later as the People’s Liberation Army frees the people, the girl returns to the village. But now her hair has turned completely white.

  The play was well done, and the Chinese officers and soldiers hung on every word. They saw the girl’s story as their own. They clapped when the People’s Liberation Army arrived. The play, of course, omitted the fact that Mao killed thousands of people in his drive to take control of China. We laughed and cheered when the landlord dragged the young girl away. The Chinese guards were not amused, and for days after there was an awkward silence.

  Later, the Chinese political officers held a lecture on the American Civil War. We paid no attention to the Chinese lecturers, and fifty-eight years later I still don’t remember much of what was said. After the presentation, the political officer passed out questions dealing with the lecture. It had always been my policy not to write anything on these papers; however, on this particular one I wrote one sentence: “The war was fought to preserve the Union.”

  The next day, the political officer started the lecture with a reward ceremony. The officer read off a few soldiers’ names and gave each one a packet of tobacco. Mine was the first on the list. To say I was shocked is an understatement. I looked around at Doyle and Smoak.

  “This is bullshit,” I said.

  I basically believed that most of the men in our camp at this time would not collaborate with the Chinese. However, prudence called for confidence in a very small number. My circle became very tight. I only shared my thoughts and plans with Doyle and Smoak. We tried to keep a low profile, thereby giving us a better chance of being successful in coming up with an escape plan or sabotage.

  “Get the goddamn tobacco, Rich,” Doyle said.

  I was completely dumbfounded as I stepped up and took my pack of tobacco and sat back down to a chorus of boos. On the return trip to our house, some of the other prisoners started to yell at me. They called me a collaborator and a traitor. They might as well have beaten me to a pulp. It wouldn’t have hurt as much. Some of the others stuck up for me. Lucky for me the majority of the men knew me well enough that there was not a doubt in their minds that the Chinese were attempting to destroy my influence. I knew what would follow: numerous visits to the headquarters. The bastards had set me up and would now try for the kill.

  That afternoon, the guards came to take me up to the headquarters. I walked into the room, which was sparsely decorated with a single table. Sitting behind the table were three of the Chinese political lecturers. As soon as I sat down, they started on me. One told me how I had listened and showed that I was willing to learn. They waited for me to answer.

  “I never believe any of the fucking lies you bastards are putting out,” I said.

  Nothing I could have said would have had the same impact on them as using curse words. They hated it.

  “You do not speak to us this way,” one of them said.

  “Fuck you, you sons of bitches.”

  Their faces were flushed. One of them headed toward me like he was going to hit me, but he pulled up short. I tried to stare them all down. I had hoped they would beat me or throw me in the hole. However, in my mind I knew that they would not do this because they would only waste this attempt to undermine my influence on the rest of the men.

  “Why you speak this way? You will be sorry.”

  My heart was pumping a mile a minute. I didn’t say another word. After hours of questions, they finally let me go and walked me back to my room. When I got there, I told Doyle and Smoak what had taken place. Smoak looked at me in disbelief.

  “Jesus Christ, Rich, have you lost your mind?”

  Doyle was mad.

  “What the hell were you thinking?” he said. “They are going to be watching us like hawks. Look, we know what got to you, but you need to promise us that you will calm down.”

  I looked at them sheepishly and promised that I would get myself under control.

  On my next visit to the headquarters they didn’t mince words. They told me in no uncertain terms that if I continued to disrespect them and be outwardly uncooperative, when the war ended I would not be released. I would be held back for five years. This was not the first or last time I would hear this, and I shook it off as one of their idle threats. But unlike before, I didn’t assault them with curse words. Instead, I just stared ahead and tried to think of anything but their questions.

  When it got warm enough, the Chinese let us stake out a baseball field near the river. We didn’t have any balls or bats, but we went through the motions. We made teams and selected umpires. We called balls and strikes. It sounds weird, but we had a lot of fun. We spent hours out there.

  Sometimes, we’d stop the game to watch dogfights, since the camp was right under MiG Alley. The Chinese fighters would come across the Manchurian border and American fighters would soon appear. I stood on the bank and watched as the fighters, high above, corkscrewed and banked in their elaborate dance of death. Most times the fights ended in a draw, with the planes flying off out of sight. Sometimes, we’d see a parachute descend. It took an unbelievable amount of time before the pilot disappeared behind the mountain. I have no idea how high they must have been when they bailed out.

  Late one afternoon, a lone American fighter jet came screaming down the river. We were out on the ball field. At first, it scared the hell out of us. It went by in a flash but doubled back and flew straight down the river. We could see the pilot looking down, and as he passed, the pilot waved and wiggled his wings at us. There were no words to describe how that incident made us feel. God bless him. He probably never knew what that simple act did for us. It was a very long time before we stopped talking about it. And we’d achieved our goal with the ball field. The Chinese refused to identify POW camps, but the ball field did the trick.

  A company of prisoners was brought in from Camp 5 near Pyoktong that fall. Just before their arrival we were told that peace talks had begun in July of 1951. Coinciding with this we were given a Chinese newspaper printed in English. It was full of Communist propaganda, including how the North Koreans were bending over backward to accommodate all the ridiculous demands made by the United Nations delegation. Despite the outlandish bickering, the peace talks were moving forward only because of the tireless efforts of the North Korean delegation.

  The new prisoners brought information that the peace talks had terminated due to the U.N. forces’ violation of the Panmunjom restricted area, a no-man’s-land along the 38th parallel that separated the countries. Whatever this was about, we were sure we would soon be told how the UN forces deliberately undermined the talks. The new prisoners also told us that the Chinese had formalized courses of instruction to the point that the prisoners were now calling Camp 5 “The University of Pyoktong.” Like us, this new batch of prisoners had become a disruptive force. So the Chinese shipped them down to our camp.

  We finished the buildings that fall and were surprised when the Chinese let us move in. The buildings were sixty feet long and sixteen feet wide. Thirty of us were sleeping on each side of the buildings, with a four-foot aisle running from one end to the other. Each end had a single door. When it got cold, the Chinese issued us a winter-padded jacket, pants and hat similar to the Chinese uniform. They also set up a potbellied st
ove in each dorm. It did little to heat the building, but psychologically it did wonders. Soon after winter set in, I got sick. I started running a high fever and was coughing up green and yellow mucus. Doyle and Smoak moved me near the stove and kept me hydrated with hot water. A medic told me I had pneumonia. I thought of Graves and was grateful that I wasn’t still in the morgue. After a couple of days, the fever broke and I got better. Doyle and Smoak both said they were sure I’d make it.

  “Yeah, Rich, some of us thought we might need to dip you in the shithouse again to make you better,” Smoak said.

  Every night a Chinese officer would enter the building at one end, walk down the aisle with a flashlight and check to see if everyone was present.

  We’d stolen a rope, and one night we rigged up one of the guys by putting the rope under his shirt so that he could be suspended from the exposed roof beam. We tied a hangman’s noose and slipped it around his neck. Then we waited. We heard the dirt crunch under his boots as the Chinese officer approached the door and stepped into the building. A thin beam of light from his flashlight cut through the darkness. It swept back and forth across the room, pausing for a second on each bed.

  The officer got a quarter of the way down before his flashlight shined on the feet of the hanging man.

  The Chinese guard stopped immediately and took a deep breath. The light moved quickly up the hanging man, finally stopping on his face, head cocked to one side, tongue hanging out. The officer dropped the light and we could hear him dash for the door. Two minutes later, ten guards arrived. They were all trying to squeeze in the doorway. All of them were talking at once. In the lead was the officer, who was pointing where he’d found the man hanging. But when he got back, there was no body. There was no rope. And there was no flashlight. All gone, never to be seen again. The Chinese were raising hell and we were all lying there snickering. Finally, they stomped out, the officer protesting and still pointing to where the body was.

  We all laughed ourselves to sleep.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  PREPARATION FOR ESCAPE

  In early spring, my legs were finally in shape to begin thinking about escape again.

  Every day, I stared at the river. It was the best way out. I figured we could lash a few logs together and two or three of us could float to freedom. If we stayed low in the water, it would be impossible to see us. We’d look like some debris going down the river. The plan was to travel at night and spend days under cover on the bank. We still didn’t know the back-waters of the river, but we didn’t know the mountains either. So overland was a problem too. Plus, going by water would be easier on my legs.

  During the next few weeks I started looking for logs at least four feet long. I found two and stashed them down by the river. I also started hunting around for the telephone wire we’d stolen. It would be perfect to lash the logs together. I started to ask around, trying to see who had it. But I had to be careful. There was no doubt in my mind that the Chinese had informers. How many and who they were was anybody’s guess. They very possibly had someone in each room. As much as I would have liked to think there was no one in my room, it was possible.

  I also needed a partner. It would be too hard alone. The old two-man foxhole certainly was true in this case. I trusted Doyle, but the winter had taken a lot out of him. I didn’t think he could make it. Smoak could be trusted and he was tough. There was no doubt he could make it. One afternoon, I pulled him aside. He followed me outside the house and we walked close to the river.

  “That is our way out,” I told Smoak when we’d gotten to the bank.

  He nodded and smiled.

  “I’ve got two logs down there ready. All we need to do is lash them up and float out of here,” I said. “We travel at night and hide during the day.”

  Smoak liked the plan. We made a decision to move west during the night then leave the river and move southeast for two days, then move east to the coast. But like me, he wondered if we needed another guy.

  “If something happened to one man, two of us could possibly help take him along,” I said.

  “Right, but if one of us can’t continue, the others should go on,” Smoak said.

  He looked at my leg. “You think you can do it with those legs?”

  “I’ll be fine,” I said. “I can make it. My legs feel better. Stronger every day.”

  “So who is our third guy?” Smoak asked.

  I suggested Gonzalez. He was a smart, tough Latino. He and I had talked many times on detail getting firewood or carrying timber down from the mountain. From Texas, he had broad shoulders and a thick head of black hair. Of average build, he was strong and always did more than his share of the work. More than once, we talked about escaping. No details or plans. We were too careful for that. But his desire to get out matched ours. Smoak wanted to take a couple of days to see what he could find out about Gonzalez.

  A few days later, the team was set. Gonzalez had passed muster, and Smoak and I set out to test the logs. Just after midnight, we walked to the latrine and stripped. Bundling our clothes in a ball, we snuck down to the bank and slid the logs from their hiding place in a clump of bushes and into the water. The river was cold and sent a shiver through my body as we waded deep into the water, our clothes balanced in the center of the raft. Clinging to the logs on either side, we paddled and kicked our way across the river to the far bank and then doubled back to the camp. The logs worked perfectly, and three hours later we were back in our building. No one knew. The next morning, over our breakfast of maize, we told Gonzalez how easy it had been to get the logs into the water. This was going to work.

  “Now all we need is warmer weather,” I said. “I froze my ass off.”

  Gonzalez laughed, but Smoak just grunted.

  “I don’t feel well,” he said. “My stomach is killing me.”

  Soon, Smoak was doubled over. Doyle tried to get the Chinese to do something, but they ignored his pleas. Soon Smoak couldn’t talk. He just lay in bed and moaned. When the pain got really bad, he screamed. Finally, he passed out. His face was locked in a tortured grimace and his skin had turned ashen. At noon, the medic that was helping him turned to us and shook his head.

  “He’s dead.”

  The words landed on us like mortar rounds. I just stood there staring at his face in shock. Dead? How could this have happened in such a short time? Only seven months ago men were dying all around us. It was normal. Since we’d moved, prisoners didn’t die anymore. We were the survivors. This wasn’t supposed to happen anymore. The shock quickly boiled up into a rage. There was talk of marching against the Chinese headquarters and making demands. For what, I wasn’t sure.

  “Rich, we need to show the Chinese in the strongest way we can that we demand medical care when someone is sick,” Doyle said.

  I followed the group out of the room and up the hill to the headquarters. We were screaming at the top of our lungs, demanding that the officers come out and talk with us. Guards blocked our way. Prisoners in other buildings stood outside and watched. They had astonished looks on their faces. We were out of our minds with rage. We were standing on a mound just high enough that we were looking down at the guards. The Chinese were nervous. The camp commander and three or four of the political officers approached us slowly.

  “Get back to your building,” one of the English-speaking political officers said.

  We shouted him down.

  “Get back,” the commander said, “and I will talk to your leaders. But only if you go back to your building.”

  We went back to the building and for a while thought we’d shocked the Chinese into changing things. But nothing changed. We never saw any doctors or medicine. We all fell into a funk. I could still hear Smoak’s humming and infectious laugh. Gonzalez and I were stuck looking at the river, knowing we knew how to get out. But we no longer had a third man.

  The river still ended up being our way out. About a month later, the Chinese marched our building out of the camp and onto a barge
moored at the pier. We had no idea why the guards were moving us, but it was pretty clear that our protest hadn’t helped things. The Chinese felt it was better to move the troublemakers.

  The new camp was built near a village. It was surrounded on three sides by open fields. As we walked through the village, a large double gate loomed before us. The security at the camp was the best we’d seen. The gate was flanked by two guard posts. A tall barbed wire fence with guard towers at fifty-yard intervals ringed the camp.

  Inside the wire, the guards marched us to mud huts. There were only ten to twelve small buildings in the camp. One was a cookhouse. The first thing I did was volunteer for a detail to find firewood. It allowed me to get out of the camp and check out the area. Along the way, I saw a small schoolhouse with a map on the wall. On our way back to camp the Chinese guards were in their normal lackadaisical mode. Positioned at the front and back of the column, they were too far away to see all of us. I moved up to the front, and when we got adjacent to the school building I dropped my wood bundle and shot into the building. I ripped the map off the wall and stuffed it into my shirt. I dashed out, picked up my bundle of wood and kept walking. My heart was in my throat.

  “What the hell are you doing, Rich?” one of the guys asked.

  “I just wanted to see what was in the building,” I said.

  “What the hell did you expect to find in there? A good-looking Korean teacher.”

  “You never know,” I answered. I could feel the thick paper of the map under my shirt.

  I could hardly wait to show Gonzalez the map. Later that night, I got him to the side and told him about it.

  “Jesus Christ, Rich, are you crazy? They would have ripped you a new ass if they had caught you,” he said.

  “But they didn’t catch me,” I said.

  We spread the map out, but it was a little disappointing. Not much detail. However, it showed the coast and the river. It was more than we’d ever had before. I told Gonzalez I was working in the cookhouse and would start stashing food. My job was to carry water from the well outside the gate to the cookhouse. Every day, I balanced two five-gallon cans of water on the ends of a chogie stick. A guard came with me as I shuffled along like the Koreans. The guards didn’t follow me all the way to the well. Instead, they hung by the road, just keeping me and the well in sight.