Unlike at past camps, civilians still lived in the village. When the guards weren’t looking, I would bow and wave to them. They looked Japanese, probably leftovers from the long and brutal occupation during World War II, and they seemed intimidated by the Chinese. One day, I interrupted a young girl getting water at the well. She and her family lived at a nearby house. When she’d seen me before, the girl had run off and watched me from inside the house.
This day, I filled my two five-gallon containers and noticed an empty jug sitting nearby. I dropped the bucket into the well, pulled it up and filled her jug. After a few days of watching me get water, the girl wasn’t afraid. I filled her bucket and smiled. My hope was to build enough rapport that when Gonzalez and I made our dash, the civilians would help. Worst case, they wouldn’t tell.
One day, a middle-aged Korean man was standing near the well. He was small, with thick black hair and dark eyes. When he saw me looking at him, he bowed and pointed to his wrist like he wanted a wristwatch.
I nodded my head yes and he turned and walked away. That night, I told Gonzalez about the Korean.
“I am sure he wants a watch,” I said. “Maybe if we get him one, he’ll help us escape.”
Neither one of us knew of anyone offhand who still had a watch. But we hoped that we could get one. If we could get the Korean to take us part of the distance, it would make our chances that much better. The one thing that kept nagging in the back of my mind was that the Korean could be setting us up. Once we got out, he could have us killed or, after he got what he wanted, turn us in to the North Korean Police.
“See how far you can take him,” Gonzalez said.
Our plan had changed since we moved. Since I got the map, we’d decided to skip the river. Instead, our plan was to move to the west coast, look for a boat and take our chances on being picked up by our Navy. We figured it was seventy miles as the crow flies to the coast.
We needed to time our escape so that it was dark. We had the moon cycle and guard posts diagrammed on the reverse side of the map and waited for a dark night to run. We didn’t see any real problem getting through the fences. It was easy to wiggle through the gaps in the wire. Now all we had to do was get the Korean on our side and wait for the moon cycle.
The Korean wasn’t there the next day, but he showed up again at the well the following day. I made sure the guard wasn’t looking and pointed to my wrist. He nodded his head yes. Then I pointed at myself and him and mimed us walking away with my fingers. He kept shaking his head yes. I did it again just to make sure he understood. All of a sudden the guard started shouting and waving at me to hurry up. I waved to the man and hurried back to the road.
When I got back to the camp, I found out that the Chinese guards had taken Gonzalez to headquarters for questioning. This wasn’t unusual, and I figured he’d be back later that night. These sessions usually took thirty minutes, or until they got tired of hearing themselves talk. After about an hour, the kitchen crew and I watched as guards marched Gonzalez to a hole near the center of the camp. After a slight shove, Gonzalez climbed inside and the guard stood near the entrance.
This looked serious. Had someone told the Chinese about our escape plan? I was the one who’d stolen the map. I was the one trying to make a deal with the Korean. It made no sense that the Chinese had Gonzalez in the hole. He must have said something to someone. That night I moved the map from the hole near my house to another hole a little farther away.
The next day, Gonzalez was still in his hole. But the guards came by the cookhouse to get him some food. I took a bowl and stuck in it a note I’d scrawled on some loose paper in the kitchen: “Hang in there.”
After I did it, I thought that was not too smart. If the Chinese found it, it would cause Gonzalez more trouble and the whole kitchen crew would be in trouble. The Chinese never discovered it, and I hoped that it gave Gonzalez a boost down at the bottom of the hole.
In the middle of all of this, my Korean villager disappeared. A day or two later someone was telling a story about the Chinese taking a Korean away with his hands tied behind his back. I had no way of knowing if it was my man, but I never saw him again.
With Gonzalez in the hole and no help from the outside, my escape plan was temporarily destroyed.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
THE LAST YEAR
“Get up! Get up!”
The Chinese guards burst into our huts shouting and pulling us onto our feet.
“Bring your belongings and get outside!”
Half-asleep, I collected up my padded jacket, blanket and towel and staggered with the rest outside. Old American Army trucks were lined up by the gate. Their engines rumbled as the guards shoved us toward the open tailgates. As we walked, I could feel the map scraping my legs. I’d stuffed it into my pants when the guards weren’t looking.
We’d only been at this camp for eighteen days. Now we were on the move again. Just before the guards threw open the gate, we saw Gonzalez. They had taken him out of the hole to his room to gather his belongings. The guards were marching him to the back of our truck. I was happy to see him.
“I’m fine, guys. Just fine,” he said as we helped him aboard.
“Why did they put you in the hole?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said, settling into a seat next to me. “They kept asking me general questions about everyone.”
I wanted to ask him if they knew about the escape. Did they know we had a map? But I couldn’t in front of the others. We headed east for hours. The only thing that stood out was we passed what I thought were a couple of mines, one small steel mill and a train engine repair shop, all located within a mile of one another. In the excitement of the move, at first it didn’t cross my mind that we were traveling in broad daylight.
Doyle noticed my nervousness.
“What’s up?”
“Christ, do you realize that we are moving in the daylight?”
Doyle just looked at me and grimaced. We never mentioned it again.
We were on a straight stretch of road heading east, when a truck going west passed us. In the back of the truck there were two Catholic nuns and one civilian Caucasian male. They were standing and waving to us, and in a second they were gone. We had heard rumors of Catholic nuns being held by the Chinese. We all thought that the male might have been Frank Knowles, the photographer who was being held in the officers’ camp. It was amazing the uplifting feeling it gave all of us just seeing the three of them. They dominated the conversation for many miles. Who were they? Where were they going? If this was Knowles, where was he coming from? Twenty questions, none of which could be answered.
The trucks finally rolled to a stop in front of a schoolhouse. A tall fence surrounded it. Each truck unloaded and we were corralled into the fenced yard. Guards patrolled outside the wire. Doyle figured we were close to Mampo, a large city with a railhead.
Inside the yard, they split us into groups by rooms. They made us strip and searched us two at a time. While the first pair got dressed, the next pair stripped. I still had the map. The bucket that we got our food in was sitting by my leg. I looked straight at one of the guys that had finished dressing. It was O’Keefe. I looked at him and then down at the bucket. At the same time, I palmed the map and slipped it out of my pants. Holding it against my leg, I dropped it into the bucket. O’Keefe stepped over and picked the bucket up. I turned and started to take my clothes off just as the Chinese turned to me. O’Keefe walked out of the yard. My heart was beating so hard I could hardly breathe.
After the search, they loaded us on the trucks and moved us across a bridge over a large stream. O’Keefe handed me the map and I put it back into my pants.
“That was close,” I said to O’Keefe. “Thanks for the help.”
We pulled up to a gate, with seven or more buildings spread out in the fenced-in area. We were put in an old school building. A hall ran down the middle of the building. Four rooms that I guess at one time had been classrooms became our bed
rooms. Sixty of us were put into two rooms. The rooms had wooden sleeping platforms running around the perimeter, two feet off the floor. The best thing was the presence of a potbellied stove. We could look forward to a little heat during the winter.
There was an outside latrine at one end of the building. It soon began to stink, since more than one hundred people used it on a daily basis. The odor was awful. For me, it was like old times in the morgue.
As usual, I wandered around the camp talking to some of the others. There were British, Turkish and some American prisoners in the compound right next to where we were. I started looking for guys from Philadelphia or close by in Pennsylvania. I soon found Charles Wray and three others from Pennsylvania.
We were all together one day shooting the bull when Wray fished out a picture.
“Hey, I have a picture of my girlfriend.”
Of course everybody wanted to see it, so he passed it around. It got to me and I noticed that this was only half of a picture. I looked at it closely and then started to laugh.
“Do you know who is on the other part of the photo?” They all looked at me. “I know who’s on the other part. Me.”
“Bullshit, Rich, who are you shitting?” Wray said.
“I’m telling you, it’s me. That girl is Claire, my father’s girlfriend’s daughter,” I said. Wray’s eyes had grown wide and his mouth hung open, stunned. “We took that picture in June of 1950 when I visited her home with my father.”
That blew everybody’s mind. Unbelievable. I stared at the picture for a while longer. I could still remember the exact moment. For the first time in a while, I thought of home and my family. I hoped that my father was happy. Did they know I was alive? I never received any mail and didn’t know if anyone had received the two Mother’s Day cards that I had made and was able to send. I hoped they knew I was alive.
The Chinese left us alone for a couple of weeks, and we all settled into a routine of cleaning, cooking and sleeping. Then all of a sudden the Chinese started giving us lectures on germ warfare. This was part of the great re-education system. The majority of the population was uneducated, so for the most part they did not have to be re-educated, they only had to be educated through the words of their great leader Mao Tse-tung. This type of education required constant reinforcement. They pounded away with the same garbage, over and over again.
Our planes dropped chafe, thousands of small pieces of aluminum foil that blocked out enemy radar. The Communists had convinced their soldiers and the North Korean civilians that this was a form of germ warfare. They had everyone wearing masks and carrying jars with tweezers or chopsticks so that they could pick up the small pieces of foil. There was no better example of Communist control of the masses.
The winter of 1952-53 was livable compared to the past two winters. We were allowed to select our own leaders and organize committees to work on different facets of our daily life. A sanitation committee, athletic committee, a daily action committee—all brought some semblance of order to our lives. Food had improved too. We got steamed bread, vegetables and rice; once in a while some fish and meat, but it was usually just a scrap. The change in diet was enough to let us gain some weight.
We were also receiving English newspapers from Communist countries, including the New York Daily Worker. Printed by the Communist Party of the United States, it was a propaganda rag, but it had a small entertainment and sports section that we looked forward to reading. I got ahold of a copy of The Last Frontier by Howard Fast. The book tells the story of the Cheyenne Indians in the 1870s and their bitter struggle to flee Oklahoma. I also read Spartacus, about the leader of a Roman slave revolt.
Fast was branded a Communist in 1947, which is why the Chinese gave us the books. But I didn’t care, for me it was an escape. The stories not only took me away from the prison camp, but showed that suffering is part of the human experience and it can be overcome. A good lesson and one that I’d learned through experience.
In the spring, all types of athletic equipment began to arrive as well. We formed teams and started to have soccer, football, volleyball and basketball tournaments. We should have known that the sudden interest by the Chinese in athletics and competition was more than just concern for our well-being. It was all in preparation for their great “Peace Olympics” to be held in Pyoktong.
The Olympics were part of the Chinese propaganda machine showing how wonderfully they treated U.N. prisoners. It was fifty years before I realized how the men who participated were exploited. When my mother died, my sister found an unopened envelope from London containing a large magazine full of stories from the camps. It included a large section on the “Peace Olympics” held at Pyoktong. The entire magazine was enough to make me sick.
The track and field events were highlights for me. To the surprise of everyone, I won the preliminary hundred- and two-hundred-meter runs. My legs had gained that much strength.
“You know, Rich,” Doyle said. “You win and you’ll go to the Olympics.”
I was on my way to the makeshift track to race in the final heat. I didn’t want to be part of their Olympics.
“So I guess I am going to lose.”
I got to the starting line and waited for the signal to go. I’d never thrown a race or game, and I was having trouble doing it. I knew I had to lose, but I shot out of the starting blocks. My mind knew I had to slow down, but my legs didn’t want to lose. Lucky for me, a guy from another company was faster. I came in second place.
I had thought about escape every day, but now escape crossed my mind less and less. Life had become more bearable. We read about peace talks, and in March, the Chinese finally accepted a U.N. proposal to exchange sick and wounded prisoners.
Five months after the exchange, the war was over. The war had begun three years before with a North Korean invasion of South Korea. It ended July 27, 1953, with neither side winning a decisive military victory.
The Chinese had us all in a formation when they announced that a peace agreement had been reached. We stood silently, looking at one another. No one said anything. This news had been a long time coming.
I just stood there, a smile plastered across my face. I looked down at my rail-thin frame. Like a map, it showed my journey. Scars on my back from shrapnel. A missing tooth from the corn. Night blindness from a lack of vitamins, which luckily only lasted for a couple of weeks. I was one of the fortunate ones. I’d survived.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
FREEDOM
The day I left the prison camp, my fifth, I thought about a recurring dream I had. I was on a train going to see Rose. She was on a passing train going in the opposite direction. Somehow we never knew we were passing each other.
But in the dream I knew. It always left me sad. I had the dream on my last night at the prison camp, but it was impossible to feel anything but hope that morning. To this day, when I think of our movement south, I get butterflies in my stomach.
We all climbed into the back of old U.S. Army trucks. There was a great deal of nervous talk. God only knew what freedom would hold for each of us. What would our world be like that we were returning to? How were our families? Did they know we were coming home? Did they know we were alive? What was their situation?
They were moving us to the railhead at Mampo. The Chinese gave one of the prisoners a lock and told him to close the gates after the trucks pulled out. After we passed, he snapped the lock shut, closing some of the darkest chapters in my life.
At Mampo we were loaded in railcars that had recently carried cattle. The residue deposited by the cattle still remained on the floor. It didn’t bother me. I looked at it as the sweet smell of freedom on the way. A couple of guys started mooing, and almost instantly everyone was mooing and laughing like hell.
Looking through the wooden slats as we moved, I saw the aftermath of our bombing campaign. Railroads, rail stations, bridges all had been totally destroyed and repaired over and over again. We stopped at a railroad station outside of Pyongyang that
was completely destroyed. Only the concrete platforms were left.
Our final destination was a tent city near Panmunjom on the 38th parallel. Every afternoon, we sat impatiently waiting for a motorcycle rider to deliver the list of men to be moved that evening. Day after day this took place. Finally Doyle’s name was called, and before he left he handed me his little red book that was filled with his poems and quotations. I spent many hours and days reading the poems over and over. I found one about the men he’d lived with. I studied the lines. A few stuck out: They can identify all the whiskeys by the way they treat the throat.
They’ve been to all places worth the seeing no matter how remote.
They know the distance to the stars measured in light years.
They can answer physics problems that would reduce Einstein to tears.
I pity these sagacious fools in their self estimated fame, for there is ONE wise one here and that one bears MY name.
He was the wise one. He’d kept us together and helped me survive. But now I’d become extremely anxious, and thoughts of getting across on my own ran rampant through my brain. I fought the urge. I’d come too far now to risk escaping. The camp had thinned down to only a couple hundred men when the Chinese finally called my name.
We moved by truck to a holding area consisting of five or six buildings with a pagoda in the center of the square. We were fed a good meal of rice and I think egg drop soup; this was great compared to what we had been receiving. After we finished eating, they separated me and another guy and put us in a building by ourselves with a guard outside the door.
Valleys of Death Page 20