War Trash

by Ha Jin

“It’s Doctor Wang,” said Tiger, Pei’s bodyguard.

  Pei told Commander Niu, “I’m going down to have a look. I’ll be back in a minute.”

  “Don’t stay too long, Old Pei,” Niu said.

  “I won’t.”

  The commissar could no longer walk steadily, so Tiger and I supported him down the slope to see the doctor. Chang Ming offered to come with us, but Pei said we’d be back shortly. Ming had sprained his neck and marched with his head tilted at an angle of forty-five degrees, so the commissar refused to let him accompany us.

  Dr. Wang’s right knee was injured and he had lost consciousness the night before. At the sight of us he wailed, “Please take me along, Commissar Pei! I’m still useful.” His pockmarked cheeks were bathed in tears. Beside him lay a leather medical box, which I picked up and strapped across my shoulder. I helped him to his feet and together we climbed the incline to catch up with the retreating troops, gripping the branches of osier shrubs all the way.

  When we got back to the trail, there was no trace of our men. My heart lurched; scared and outraged, I was reduced to tears.

  “Don’t cry, Yuan,” Pei said to me.

  “I never thought they’d abandon us like this! We’re their comrades,” I said.

  “I screw their mothers!” cursed Tiger, his baby face streaked with tears.

  Together we entered the valley. After a few minutes’ walk, when we had just passed a stretch of marshy land, a voice shouted from the edge of a larch wood, “Commissar Pei’s coming!”

  “Take us with you, Commissar Pei!”

  Voices followed one another. Then from the grass some men rose to their feet, waving and shouting. A few staggered toward us. We went down the slope to see them. Thirty yards later I felt dozens of eyes staring at us from three directions.

  “Have pity!” a man moaned.

  “Please, I’m my parents’ only son.”

  “Send us back to China!”

  “Oh, don’t leave us behind!”

  “I’ll recover soon. Commissar, please assign a stretcher to me.”

  “Don’t dump us in Korea!”

  There were about three hundred men in the valley, mostly wounded by artillery, some burned by napalm, and many poisoned by mushrooms and herbs, their lips purple and their faces swollen. A few weeks ago they had all been strong men in the pride of their youth and vitality, but now they were more piteous than a swarm of lepers. For a moment I was so horrified that words failed me.

  To my surprise, Pei Shan announced loudly, “Comrades, I won’t abandon any of you. We shall fight our way out and get back to our base.”

  Some men began sobbing and cursing the American imperialists and their own superiors who had deserted them. After they had assembled around Commissar Pei, we divided them into three teams. Now I had to assume some kind of leadership because I was an officer. We covered the dead with sheets and thin quilts, roughly dressed the wounded, and assigned the men to help each other in pairs. Before we set off, the commissar gave a short speech. “Comrades and brothers,” he said, “it’s obvious we’re surrounded. Now in front of us are two enemies: one is the American invader and the other is hunger. We must grit our teeth to endure hunger. For the time being this is all we can do. We’re going to set out now. On the way every Party member must help others and must be a model of bravery and loyalty. We’re going to use the cover of darkness to slip through the gaps in the enemy’s lines—”

  He was interrupted by an American plane flying slowly overhead, which was broadcasting a message urging us to capitulate, promising to treat us humanely. An endearing female voice said in standard Mandarin: “Chinese soldiers, your national leaders say you volunteered to come to Korea, but in your hearts you all know you didn’t come here of your own free will. Your leaders stuck the name of the People’s Volunteers on you and sent you here as cannon fodder for Stalin and Kim Il Sung. Now, you have no food or warm clothes, you dare not speak your minds, and you cannot write home. Think about it, brothers, are you really volunteers?”

  Hearing those words, a few men broke into sobs. As the plane was banking away temporarily, Pei said, “Don’t be taken in by the enemy. Remember we’re Chinese and must never betray our motherland. If I find anyone who wants to surrender, I’ll shoot him on the spot.” He slapped his pistol.

  At this point Tiger appeared. From somewhere he’d gotten hold of a mule with a lopped tail, which must once have belonged to a mortar battery. He patted the half-filled sack of grass that had been placed on the mule’s back as a saddle, and said to Commissar Pei rather proudly, “Sir, you can ride on this from now on.”

  “No, I won’t!” Pei’s eyes shone with determination. To our astonishment, he pulled out his pistol and shot the mule in the forehead. The animal dropped to the ground, gasping noisily while blood flowed out of its mouth and its legs stretched as if pulled by invisible ropes. With his left hand on Tiger’s shoulder, Commissar Pei raised his voice and announced, “Comrades, we must live or die together! I shall walk with you all the way back to our lines. Don’t lose heart. We must help each other and find our way out.”

  Why did he shoot the mule? Just to show his resolve to these men? Or to assure them that he wouldn’t run away? Or to frighten them into obedience? I was confounded, and so was Tiger, who looked upset and hurt, but we didn’t dare say a word. If only we could have stayed a little longer and cooked some mule meat before we had to leave.

  We set off for Shichang Village. Dead tired, we couldn’t walk fast. The enemy didn’t shell us at this time; probably they saw that we were just a bunch of wounded men and could hardly get anywhere, no immediate threat to them. When darkness deepened, we began moving faster in the direction of Shichang, at the pace of about one mile an hour. Without a map or a compass or stars in the sky, we just followed our instinct for direction. The commissar, Tiger, Dr. Wang, and I walked at the head of the first team while the other two groups marched behind us.

  Originally I had thought I would be assigned to lead a team of the wounded men, but Pei had ordered both Tiger and me to stay close to him. Perhaps he was scared too. Tiger carried on his back a leather bag containing Pei’s personal belongings. The commissar, suffering from a stomachache caused by an ulcer, pressed his fist against his belly from time to time. He told us that if we couldn’t break out of the trap, we would go to the mountains and wage guerrilla war, waiting for an opportunity to return to North Korea.

  To our horror, at daybreak the two teams behind us had vanished. We couldn’t see whether they had purposely quit following us, or had been captured by the enemy, or were simply too exhausted to march anymore. I guessed they might have disbanded of their own accord. Now we had about eighty men with us, most of whom had belonged to the Guards Company and the Mountain Gun Battalion. Many officers were also in this group.

  3. THREE MONTHS OF GUERRILLA LIFE

  After a month of hiding in the daytime and trying in vain to find a rift in the enemy’s encirclement, our team was reduced to thirty-four men. Whenever someone was killed or disappeared, I couldn’t help but think about my promises to my mother and Julan. It seemed unlikely I would be able to make it home. But in spite of my fear and sadness, I forced myself to appear cheerful, especially in the presence of Commissar Pei, who always insisted that at all costs we must survive. Some of the remaining officers were familiar with guerrilla tactics. Our team leader, Yan Wenjin, the director of the divisional security section, had led dozens of guerrillas in both the war against the Japanese and the civil war. But we were in a foreign country now. Without the knowledge of its language, its terrain, and its people, how could we get the civilians’ support that was the basis of guerrilla warfare?

  Hunger was our most pressing problem. During the day we picked wild grapes and berries on the mountain, though we dared not move about conspicuously. The wild fruits, tiny and bitter, numbed our tongues and made a greenish saliva dribble out from the corners of our mouths. Commissar Pei couldn’t eat what we gathered b
ecause of his ulcer, but he encouraged us to search for fruits and herbs for ourselves.

  One morning Yan Wenjin ran over and beamed, “There’s a dead horse in the woods!”

  We all went over to take a look. The horse, a Mongolian sorrel, had been dead for some days. Its hair had begun to fall off, and the gun wound in its chest festered with rings of maggots like a large white chrysanthemum. Flies droned over it madly even though a man wielded a leafy branch to drive them away. Yet we were elated to find the carcass and immediately set about looking for bayonets, wooden shell boxes, and steel helmets. I went up a slope with two men to search the area beyond a patch of dwarf fir trees. As we walked, flocks of crows took off, cawing fitfully. Behind a low rise we came across four dead South Korean soldiers. In the middle of them lay a Chinese soldier, whose head was smashed and whose face was gone, eaten up by birds. Around him were scattered splinters of wooden grenade handles. Clearly he had detonated the grenades and died together with the enemy. We carried his body into a cavity under a juniper and covered him with stones and green branches. After saluting him, we went back with two bayonets and an empty box that had contained mortar shells. We had also found a brass lighter in a Korean man’s pocket. The other groups brought back a bayonet, three helmets, and some wooden cartridge boxes too. From God knows where one man returned with a dented field cauldron.

  Immediately they started butchering the horse. The air turned putrid as dark sticky blood dripped onto the ground. Soon, large chunks of the meat were being boiled in the cauldron, which had been propped on a horseshoe of rocks. Dr. Wang limped over. Frowning, he had a look at the carcass and then with a pair of tweezers poked the horsemeat in the pot. He said in a thin voice, “The meat is rotten. You’ll get poisoned if you eat it.”

  Disappointed, we walked away to wash our bloody hands in a puddle of rainwater. Some men couldn’t stop swearing.

  To solve the problem of hunger, Yan Wenjin offered to go down the mountain with five men to search for grain. Commissar Pei let them go. They left after sunset, and we waited for them anxiously. But for five days we heard nothing from them. Later in the prison camp I learned that they had ambushed an American truck transporting a squad of GIs and some supplies. Three of them had been killed by a machine gun, and Yan Wenjin had been hit in the stomach and died on the way to the hospital. After that failed attempt, smaller groups were sent down the mountain to search for food, but none of them ever came back. By chance, I had seen through binoculars how three of our men fell into the enemy’s hands. It was overcast that morning, but the air was clear. As our comrades were approaching the foot of the southern hill, suddenly about twenty GIs with two wolf dogs appeared in front of them. Our men swung aside, dashing away in different directions, but the Americans caught up with them and brought them down, some kicking them furiously and some stomping on their chests. For a moment a cloud of dust obscured the human figures. When I could see again, the dogs were springing at our men and tearing at their limbs. Viewed from the distance of one and a half miles, the whole scene was eerily quiet, without a single shot fired. Horrified, I reported the loss to Commissar Pei. His face fell, and for hours he didn’t speak a word.

  During this period of hiding, several men starved to death. However hard we tried, we simply couldn’t get any grain and had to live on wild herbs and fruits, which day by day were becoming scarcer.

  One afternoon a band of bareheaded soldiers emerged in the southeast, moving toward us. They looked like a platoon. After observing them through binoculars, Commissar Pei decided they were our men. Indeed as they were coming closer, we recognized their leader, Wan Shumin, who had been the deputy commander of an engineering company. Before we withdrew from Jiader Hill, he had led two squads to demolish a bridge on a roadway. They carried out the mission but were cut off from us and trapped in that area. Since then, they had roamed around to elude the enemy and look for a way to return north, to no avail. Two days before, near Maping Village, they had picked up a large sack of sorghum that smelled of gasoline. They hated to use up all the grain themselves, so now they offered some to us. We were all delighted, not just about the food, but more importantly, that these men were unwounded and less combat-fatigued. Their arrival increased our fighting capacity and made us feel like a functional unit again.

  Commissar Pei’s mood often affected us. He was our mainstay, as though he had always known what to do and where to go. In fact he was just ten years older than most of us. When he was happy, we tended to be in good spirits too. Unfortunately, thanks to his ulcer, he was gloomy and miserable most of the time. But he could eat sorghum porridge now, so we saved half a bag of the grain for him, about thirty pounds. Luckily Tiger found a bottle of multiple vitamins and a pack of Fortress cigarettes in a secret pocket of the leather bag he had carried for the commissar. Pei offered a cigarette to everyone who was present. I didn’t smoke at that time, so I declined.

  From that day on Pei took three vitamin pills a day, which helped him a good deal. In addition, the cook boiled sorghum porridge so well for him that it looked almost like paste, and soon Pei stopped regurgitating food. Miraculously his ulcer began to heal.

  Once again we attempted to find our way out of the hostile territory. A group of three men, all officers, was sent out to probe the enemy’s positions, but they didn’t come back. They were all Party members, unlikely to have deserted. Actually desertion made no sense if they wanted to go back to China alive, because they couldn’t mix with Korean civilians and would be easily identified. Logically speaking, the only way to survive was to surrender to the enemy. But most of us, terrified by the propaganda that described in grisly detail how the Americans had tortured Chinese POWs, dared not think of capitulation. We had been told that the enemy would turn most captives into guinea pigs for testing biochemical weapons. As a result, many of us thought we would prefer death to captivity.

  Having waited four days without hearing from the three men, we decided to seek a way out by ourselves. It was dangerous to remain in the same area for too long. We set off north, without any specific goal in mind. After about three miles we spotted the enemy on a hilltop. They saw us too and opened fire; we scrambled into the larch woods nearby. As we ran away, bullets swished past, clipping branches and twigs. It was clear now that the three officers must have fallen into the enemy’s hands.

  We climbed a foothill and went down into a small valley. From there we saw a puff of wood smoke rising from a hill slope. Some civilians must have been over there, so we headed stealthily toward the fire. Coming closer, I smelled something like cooked rice and my heart leaped. Then a clearing emerged, in which a middle-aged Korean woman in a long white dress was chopping brushwood with a hatchet to feed the fire under a dark pot. At the sight of us, she yelled and dropped the ax and ran back into a shed built of wattles and bundles of cornstalks.

  We loudly ordered her to come out, but she didn’t stir. We waited a few minutes, then entered the doorless shed. Inside crouched four women. One of them was quite young, under twenty, her middle finger wearing an aluminum thimble. They looked clean and all wore the same kind of shoes that resembled miniature boats, made completely of gray rubber. The folded blankets and the indented straw on the ground indicated that they lived here, hiding from soldiers. They cowered together, shivering, and one broke out sobbing. We couldn’t understand their language, so it was impossible to get anything from them. We brought them out of the shed; they were still trembling in the sun. When I removed the lid from the pot, a wave of steam rushed up with a sizzle. The rice looked glutinous and smelled overwhelmingly fragrant. I was amazed that under such circumstances they still had fresh rice. I had seen Korean families eat watery soup with only a few rice grains in it. Now all eyes turned my way, fixed on the cast-iron pot. I was sure that if the commissar had not been around, we would have wolfed down the food without hesitation. Pei took out his notebook and wrote “Chinese men,” then stepped closer to the women and showed them the characters. He told them
we wouldn’t harm civilians and they mustn’t be afraid. The oldest of them raised her thumb to acknowledge that we were a good army, though apparently they couldn’t make out what Pei was saying. Then he wrote “Rice” on the paper and flashed it at them again.

  “Opsumnida!” said the same woman, shaking her face, which was as furrowed as a walnut. Perhaps she meant “We don’t have any.”

  I asked the youngest of them in English, “Where is your home?” She couldn’t understand me and kept shaking her head. If only one of us had been able to speak Korean. Or if only we’d had a few bottles of penicillin powder or atabrine pills, which I was sure we could exchange with them for food. Korean women were very fond of medicines and cosmetics, even soap and toothpaste. We kept glancing at their pot, but dared not touch the rice.

  The encounter with the civilians convinced us that there must be grain hidden somewhere. We stayed up on the opposite hill and kept a close watch on the women, but they never came out of the clearing in the daytime. They seemed aware they were under surveillance. We figured they must have lived in the village at the southern end of the valley. So at night we went there to dig around among the razed houses in hope of finding some edibles. We found nothing.

  Then one day we happened on another burned village, which we watched from a distance but dared not approach while it was still light. Though there seemed to be nothing left there, a wisp of smoke rose from the ruins. As we wondered if someone was cooking over there, a stocky woman came out of the village, heading toward the hill slope in the east. We followed her through binoculars and saw her enter the bushes. Five or six minutes later she reappeared with a bulging sack that must have held grain. So after dark, we went over to dig in the bushes and found a sack of rice too, about fifty pounds. Regulations said that we must never take anything from civilians, but we were hungry and some of us were dying. Commissar Pei took out his notebook and wrote an IOU, saying that we had borrowed the grain and would compensate its owner when our army came again to liberate South Korea. He placed the piece of paper into the empty pit and held it down with a cobblestone. The words were in a running script; I suspected that the owner would never figure out the meaning and would curse us like mad.