June 29, 1950
Osan, South Korea
They clung to each other atop the rocking train, the little boy and girl trembling with cold, the young mother and father pulling them closer as they rolled south in a drenching rain. The summer “plum rain” that nourishes Korea’s orchards and paddies was this day soaking Korea’s people, a white tide of refugees overflowing roads and fields, ferry slips and rail stations from the East Sea to the Yellow Sea.
Young parents Chung Eun-yong and Park Sun-yong, with their two small children, huddled low against the pelting headwind with hundreds of others, in family groups, blanketing the roofs of railroad cars clattering away from Osan, 30 miles south of Seoul. Each car was jammed to bursting with humanity, desperate and fearful. Law student Eun-yong and his wife were lucky. They had a place to go, his home village of Chu Gok Ri, and now they had a way to get there. The monsoon downpour would end at some point, and they would be far from the war.
The war had begun with the rainy season. In the darkness before dawn four days ago, Sunday, June 25, a hard rain was falling at the 38th Parallel when the North Korean army, led by tanks, struck across the line. Thirty-five miles to the south in Seoul, hearing news of the invasion on the radio, Christian convert Park Sun-yong had stuck to her Sunday plan, taking four-year-old Koo-pil and his two-year-old sister, Koo-hee, to church for services. Military trucks and Jeeps were careening through the city’s streets, with loudspeakers blaring orders for soldiers on leave to return to their posts. In the quiet sanctuary of the church, the pastor led the congregation in prayer for the men of the South Korean military.
On the radio, the people of Seoul heard one story: “Our heroic soldiers are fighting and repelling them. All the nation’s people are urged to remain calm and carry on business as usual.” But in the mountains north of the capital, a different story was unfolding.
In the main attack, two North Korean divisions, more than 20,000 men with 80 tanks, were pushing down the “Uijongbu Corridor,” a valley system leading straight to Seoul. Immediately south of the parallel, just one regiment of the Republic of Korea army stood in their way. That division’s other two regiments backed up the first from positions miles to the rear. Many South Korean officers and U.S. military advisers were in Seoul for the weekend, and it took the high command several hours to recognize that a general invasion was under way and to order reinforcements up from deeper in South Korea. The northern armored force, meanwhile, was rolling over the outmatched southern defenders, who had no tanks or antitank mines—nothing at all—to stop the 35-ton T-34s. Other prongs of attack came down to the east and west of the main thrust.
North Korea told the world the invasion was a last-ditch effort to make Korea whole again, and a response to South Korean armed provocations. President Kim Il Sung took to the radio to declare, “The South Korean puppet clique has rejected all methods for peaceful reunification proposed by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.”
Monday, the second day of war, dawned clear and warm, and a hopeful Eun-yong set out for his law classes at Chung Ang College, only to find a notice there saying it was temporarily closed. He headed back to his rented room south of the Han River, across from central Seoul, where Sun-yong and the children had crowded in with him on their visit from his parents’ house in Chu Gok Ri. On the way, he saw ten truckloads of soldiers, covered with grime after a long journey, singing as they rolled north to the war. The ROK army’s 2nd Division was streaming up from the south for a counterattack up the Uijongbu Corridor, but the division was becoming disjointed, bogged down by slow transportation, and it failed to join the offensive, dooming the defenders’ best chance to save the city. The ROK troops at the head of the mountain corridor had already begun a pullback around midnight Sunday. By Monday evening, flashes of artillery fire were lighting Seoul’s northern horizon.
On Tuesday, hour by hour, panic set in at high levels in Seoul. At the U.S. Embassy, the staff burned documents in heaps on the street. Koreans thronged the building, begging for help in escaping the city and nation. President Rhee had decided the evening before to quietly evacuate his government to Taejon, 85 miles to the south, and left early Tuesday morning. Local radio first reported the government had departed Seoul, but then retracted that report, lulling some listeners into an unwarranted sense of security. As the day wore on, word spread of the failed counterattack. Thousands took to the southbound roads—government officials and their families, policemen, businessmen, landlords and others who would suffer under a communist regime, and uncounted thousands who simply hoped to escape the fighting. Many others stayed in Seoul, however, among them dozens of members of the National Assembly.
During the day, Eun-yong saw North Korean warplanes making repeated passes over downtown Seoul, until finally a U.S. plane appeared and chased them away. The dogfight convinced Eun-yong that the city was endangered and he should take Sun-yong and the children south.
It rained again Tuesday night. It seemed none of Eun-yong’s neighbors went to bed; all were bustling in their homes or in the streets. His two children, agitated, refused to sleep. Then, sometime in the early morning hours, a tremendous explosion rocked the area and a bluish light filled the room. In the brilliant flash, Eun-yong saw the faces of Koo-pil and Koo-hee frozen in terror.
The main bridge across Seoul’s great river, the Han, had been blown up. In a tragedy of military blunders, South Korean army engineers, following orders and a set schedule that, unknown to them, had been rescinded, blew the bridge at 2:15 A.M. They gave no warning to the throngs of civilians and retreating soldiers who were walking and riding, in bumper-to-bumper traffic, across the lengthy span. Hundreds were killed in the explosion, and many more fell to their deaths or drowned when surging crowds pushed them into the gap created in the bridge. The bridge demolition stranded ROK army units in Seoul with valuable equipment, to face likely death or capture by the North Koreans.
The blunders were not just Korean. Later that day U.S. Air Force planes, with orders to attack any military spotted on the north side of the Han, strafed and rocketed the South Korean 1st Division, killing and wounding many soldiers. Remnants of the division managed to cross the river west of Seoul.
At first light Wednesday, June 28, Eun-yong stepped outside and saw the roads alive with rivers of people headed south. On the radio, an announcer repeated the pleading message: “Citizens! Please stay at your jobs. Let’s defend Seoul.” But the law student and his wife gathered up the children and whatever else they could carry, and melted into the white-clad multitudes. “People overflowed the road, spilling onto cucumber, tomato and barley fields,” Eun-yong said. “It was ragtag. Young men carried their baggage on their A-frames and their sick parents sat on the baggage. Women carried their bags and cooking utensils on their heads. Children walked along barefoot. We also saw some injured soldiers limping along, with their legs and heads bandaged over.”
Units of the North Korean 3rd Division had entered Seoul on Tuesday evening, their tanks smashing open Sodaemun Prison and freeing thousands of jailed leftists. By Wednesday afternoon, the northerners held the entire city north of the Han. Civilians in red armbands, local sympathizers, urged their neighbors to come out to cheer the conquering army, but many people simply retreated to their homes, to look out from behind windows at the young victors filing down the streets in their mustard-drab uniforms, many still with camouflage foliage in their helmets.
Within another two days, less than a week into the war, the Korean People’s Army controlled all the territory above the river, and the Republic of Korea army was struggling to regroup after having lost 44,000 of its 98,000 men, either killed, captured or missing. From generals to privates, uniformed men trudged down the main road along with the army of civilian refugees, streaming south past abandoned possessions, broken-down vehicles, exhausted families on the waysides. One small family among the thousands, Chung Eun-yong’s, reached the town of Suwon, 20 miles south of Seoul, late Wednesday and spent the night at a school. On the radio, President Rhee was still urging people to defend Seoul.
The next morning, General MacArthur landed in the same town on his fact-finding flight from Tokyo. In a sedan that pushed north through the retreating throngs, the supreme commander rode up to the Han River with U.S. Army advisers and surveyed the scattered South Korean units holding the south bank. It was then, MacArthur later said, that he concluded the U.S. military should be brought in to stop the North Koreans.
As the famous American general flew into Suwon, the Chung family was departing, walking to Osan, 10 miles farther south. There they found a train ready to roll south, but already overloaded. The ex–police lieutenant, a slightly built but self-assured young man, managed to squeeze his family in among the people packed on the roof of a car. Soon after the train set out, the darkening monsoon sky opened up, emptying its clouds on the wretched refugees. Soaked through, shivering, they pulled into Taejon that night, 60 miles farther south, the city where Eun-yong once worked and where they could find real refuge at the home of his brother, a prison guard. Eun-yong learned from him that Rhee himself had fled to Taejon on Tuesday, a day before the president went on the radio urging everyone else to stay put in Seoul. On Friday, June 30, the day the first North Korean troops crossed to the south side of the Han River at Seoul, the haggard husband and wife and their two small children finally reached the thatched-roof home of Eun-yong’s parents in Chu Gok Ri.
The village lay barely 100 miles south of the battle-torn capital city, but for the people of Chu Gok Ri, in their valley beyond their craggy little Sonang shrine, the war might as well have been 1,000 miles away. “Most of the ordinary people weren’t ready for war,” recalled the village’s Chung Koo-hun, the tall, studious seventeen-year-old. “Even after it broke out, they just kept tending their fields.”
* * *
From the light green of spring, the wet fields of rice were deepening into the rich green of summer. The ever-present herons, snowy white, prowled the paddy rows in search of tiny fish and snakes. Down Chu Gok Ri’s muddy lanes, front yard persimmon trees shed their flowers and showed their first green fruit, bees hovered over household hives, family cows tended to calves. Barefoot girls jumped rope while the boys roamed the summer hills. For the adults of Chu Gok Ri it was a season of hard work, like all seasons. The rice cycle governed the calendar in this Year of the Tiger, as it had every year for centuries, and the calendar told them it was time for the backbreaking task of weeding.
The cycle had begun early in the year when the villagers readied rice seeds for planting, soaking them in a salt solution, and prepared fields with manure. Each family then sowed its seeds closely packed in seed beds—the richest soil—to sprout and grow for several weeks. In mid-spring, the tiny stalks were transplanted to the more extensive paddies in weeks of arduous work carried out by groups of neighbors. To speed the long days, a village troupe traditionally supplied “farmers’ music,” with gongs, drums and oboes, sometimes improvising songs from country jokes, with mock-complaining lines—“How long will we have to do this?”
The early summer weeding was exhausting. Backs bent to the sun, paddy mud oozing through their toes, the villagers’ knowing fingers felt for the weeds crowding their young plants, uprooted them and buried them upside down in the mud. The favorable weather of 1950 promised a good harvest for the people of Chu Gok Ri. But in good weather or bad, rice demands constant care. “The rice grows hearing the footsteps of the farmer,” according to a Korean adage.
The farmers of Im Ke Ri, the neighboring village up Chu Gok Ri’s side valley, were weeding their way through the paddies one day soon after the invasion when someone rushed up to report that police had arrived to take away young villagers suspected of leftist sympathies. The war had come to the valley.
One farmer, Lee Choong-keun, immediately sent his son into hiding, not because he was a leftist, but because he once helped a couple of young guerrillas who came down from the hills looking for food. Two young men in Chu Gok Ri got no such warning. Sohn Seok-tae and Chung Chan-young were the villagers who, months earlier, had been forced to join a “political rehabilitation” program after being accused of giving food to a leftist guerrilla friend. Now that war had begun, they were taken away by the police, never to be seen again.
All over South Korea, villagers were disappearing from their homes, as the Rhee regime rounded up “enemies,” real or imagined. The political terror of the late 1940s was continuing, bloodier than ever. Killings were already occurring on the other side as well. Leftists freed from Sodaemun Prison staged “people’s courts” in Seoul and summarily executed national policemen and others they blamed for their persecution. Those deaths behind the northern lines would not be discovered and reported until months later.
The killings in the south were also carried out mostly in secrecy, but they were too widespread to escape attention completely. In early July 1950, O. H. P. King, an Associated Press correspondent, reported that the national police chief in Suwon said police firing squads summarily executed sixty alleged “communists” or “communist sympathizers” in the two days after MacArthur’s much-publicized visit to the town. King, in touch at the time with the U.S. Army advisory team, wrote later that he was “shocked that American officers were unconcerned and not interested in helping me ascertain the answers to the many questions the executions raised.”
But the Suwon shootings were just a sampling of what was happening, and of what U.S. Army officers knew. After North Korean troops captured Taejon on July 20, a British communist journalist traveling with them reported in the London Daily Worker that they had discovered that the South Koreans had killed thousands of political prisoners in the Taejon area before retreating. The U.S. Embassy in London denounced the newspaper report as an “atrocity fabrication.” The Daily Worker’s account would eventually be supported, however, by a U.S. military report and photographs, material classified “secret” and kept classified for almost a half-century.
The South Korean military police had trucked hundreds of political prisoners to a spot outside Taejon, shot them and dumped their bodies in long trenches. The killings were photographed by U.S. Army officers. A report to the Army intelligence staff in Washington by the U.S. Embassy’s military attaché, Lt. Col. Bob E. Edwards, told the story succinctly: “Execution of 1800 (one thousand eight hundred) political prisoners at Taejon, requiring three days, took place during first week in July 1950.” The accompanying photographs were grimly reminiscent of scenes from the recent Nazi holocaust, showing the terror on prisoners’ faces beforehand and the tangle of corpses afterward.
Edwards suggested that the Taejon bloodbath was only one of many. He wrote that he believed that “thousands of political prisoners were executed within [a] few weeks after fall of Seoul to prevent their possible release by advancing enemy troops. Orders for execution undoubtedly came from top level.” In another long-classified document, U.S. Embassy diplomat Everett F. Drumright said he and Maj. Gen. William F. Dean, in command of U.S. front-line troops, had protested the Taejon executions to top South Korean officials. Their intervention seemed to have little effect, because other documents unearthed decades later showed that wholesale political killings went on.
For the two Chu Gok Ri youths, along with thousands of others swept away by the Rhee regime, “rehabilitation” led to an unmarked mass grave somewhere in South Korea.
* * *
Day by day, the war was upending the lives of millions, not just in the south but in North Korea as well, where U.S. bombers began raining tons of explosives on the cities by mid-July.
Thousands of southerners every day trekked down South Korea’s unpaved main highway, laden with bundles and boxes, trailed by children, sometimes by children carrying children. The road, at times of mud, at times of dust, ran through the crossroads town of Yongdong and then east for several miles, skirting past Chu Gok Ri. For some travelers, that peaceful village was the journey’s end, the safe harbor.
Even before the war, new people had come to Chu Gok Ri and its sister village Im Ke Ri, including some who had lost their homes when guerrilla-hunting police set fire to the nearby hamlet of Ahn Jom. Others, relatives close and distant, began arriving after the war broke out. The high school student Chung Koo-hun’s cousins were among them, including Chung Koo-ok, a young woman who was the pride of the village, daughter of the 1919 village patriot Chung Hee-yong.
At age twenty, Koo-ok had managed to achieve an ambition rare for a Chu Gok Ri girl: getting an education. She had attended a one-year teachers’ college and won a position at a grade school in a nearby village. A model for younger Chu Gok village girls, Koo-ok often wore a Western-style jacket over her teacher’s uniform of white blouse and long black skirt. Her shoes were leather. She even had her hair permed. She was modern, smart, attractive. She would have been a prize for matchmakers, but Chung Koo-ok resisted the marriage overtures from other villages because a wife could never work outside the home and she loved her job and loved helping children. Even on school breaks home in Chu Gok Ri, when she threw herself into her books and papers, she made time to play and joke with village boys and girls, especially her eight-year-old cousin Koo-hak, Koo-hun’s sickly little brother.
The schoolteacher’s older brother, Chung Koo-il, twenty-three, had also made his way home to Chu Gok Ri from Seoul with the outbreak of war. The family of three sisters and two brothers, all tall and distinguished-looking, pinned its highest hopes on this eldest son and model student, a sophomore at the capital’s Yonhee College.
This hardworking family, the only Chu Gok Ri family wealthy enough to have a tile roof on their mud-walled house, might strike the communists as ideological enemies, since the father was doing well in the dried-fish business. But the South Korean police outdid the communists in this particular “enemies” game. Unknown to the Chungs, the fishmonger’s son Koo-il was on a police “watch” list—apparently for the offense, uncommon in his home village, of attending a university. For generations, under corrupt kings, colonialists and now President Rhee’s beleaguered and unpopular right-wing rule, students had been viewed as troublemakers in Korea.
As July wore on and the war moved south, the homes in the peaceful valley grew more crowded and noisy under their thatched roofs. “Golden Girl” Yang Hae-sook’s family of seven, in their cramped, century-old house in Im Ke Ri, took her father’s sister and her husband in, with their four children, after they left their nearby home village. The aunt, Yang Mal-soon, was close to delivering a fifth child. To feed the brood, her worried husband brought along a huge sack of barley on his back A-frame.
One July refugee traveled more comfortably. President Syngman Rhee had hopscotched, by car and special train, all the way to the southern tip of the Korean peninsula within a week of the invasion, moving into an island beach home under Korean navy protection. Ordinary South Koreans were unaware how far from the front lines their president had retreated. They were also unaware that, back in Seoul, 48 legislators of the 210-member National Assembly, foes of Rhee’s rightist autocracy, had pledged allegiance to Kim Il-Sung’s northern Democratic People’s Republic.
In mid-July, acknowledging his government’s near-total dependence on the Americans, Rhee assigned overall command of the reeling Republic of Korea Army to MacArthur. The U.S. Far East commander, in turn, sent his Eighth Army chief, Lt. Gen. Walton H. “Johnnie” Walker, a short, stocky Texan with a reputation as a tough fighter, to the southern city of Taegu to lead U.S. forces in Korea.
Looking up from their paddies, the people of Chu Gok Ri were relieved to see trainloads of American soldiers and equipment heading up the main line toward the Taejon front, and U.S. Army truck convoys rumbling up the parallel highway, towing artillery. American jets screamed overhead—“shriekers,” the startled villagers dubbed them. In their little wooden school, the children of Chu Gok Ri were assured by a teacher that the U.S. soldiers would quickly end the war by driving the communists back north, “where they belong.”
Then, at the end of the third week of July, the traffic reversed. The North Koreans had driven the 24th Infantry Division from Taejon, and ragged remnants of U.S. battalions were withdrawing south. “The American defeats were a terrible shock,” U.S. diplomat Harold J. Noble wrote of President Rhee’s reaction at the time. “Like us he had thought our troops well-nigh invincible.” On the central matangs of villages across Yongdong County, a morning’s drive southeast of Taejon, clan elders traded rumors and fears. They knew the fighting was coming their way. Whistling southbound trains rolled past jammed with refugees, hanging from boxcar doors, sprawled perilously atop roofs.
In Chu Gok Ri and Im Ke Ri, the bone-tiring work of weeding and cultivation went on. The two small villages in a rugged green heartland, rich in people but poor in every other way, were a portrait in permanence—in their closely arranged homes and their intricately marked-out paddies, in the venerable hillside gravesites of ancestors, in the paths worn smooth by the feet of countless generations. For centuries, through typhoons, epidemics and famines, these communities had held together. Would they be abandoned now that Korean was set against Korean in the first civil war in a thousand years?
In the murmuring darkness of those summer nights, husbands and wives searched for answers: If we go, how will we feed the children? How can Grandmother travel? Where will we get money? Who will care for the paddies? Who will tend to the graves?
Some in Chu Gok Ri found an easy answer as the North Koreans neared. Suh Jong-koo, for example, a young man who worked for the government in Yongdong town, climbed over the Three Peaks Mountain behind Im Ke Ri and trekked to a more isolated village to stay with his in-laws. But almost everyone else remained, and remained torn. “We thought we would die of starvation if we left the village. But we also feared being beaten to death by leftists,” said Koo-hun, whose father, like his uncle, was a dried-fish merchant. “To leave or to stay, both were dangerous for us. In the end, my family decided to remain.”
* * *
One midsummer morning in this year of the tiger, the Americans arrived in the valley. By the soldiers’ reckoning, it was “0745, 22 Jul 50,” as noted in the 5th Cavalry Regiment’s operational log. A 5th Cavalry battalion set up a command post off the main road at the nearby village of Ha Ga Ri. Another battalion arrived at 4:30 P.M. They totaled more than a thousand men, with trucks and heavy weapons. Artillery units also moved in, and the Americans spread up the road to Chu Gok Ri, a mile away, some settling in along the streambed between Chu Gok Ri and the main road. The sharp smell of burned diesel and the grit of churned-up earth hung in the air around the village. The Americans pointed artillery in the direction of Yongdong, three miles farther up the road. They were troops on standby, assigned to back up another 1st Cavalry Division regiment, the 8th Cavalry, which moved farther ahead, through Yongdong, to deploy on its far outskirts to meet the oncoming North Koreans.
The villagers saw the Americans playing cards in twos and threes, or lounging beside the paddies watching and listening as the farmers sang their work songs, odd and incomprehensible to the American ear. Curious boys approached the foreign soldiers, knowing they might get some chocolate or other favors. But many of the Chu Gok villagers, having heard of the Americans’ rough behavior, and especially of things done to Korean women, kept their distance.
One who didn’t was a young drifter and farm laborer named Lee Bok-hun, who went to the GIs asking for “cigarettos” or “gum,” words he’d picked up somewhere. Villagers observed the Americans showing cigarettes to Bok-hun and using, in a broken attempt at Korean, a vulgar word to signify “woman.” Just days from their Tokyo haunts, dropped into a traditional Confucian village in the Korean mountains, the Americans hoped to trade cigarettes for sex. Some of the rifle-toting Cav men apparently were determined to have it, whatever it took.
Two GIs were led by Lee to a house where a young woman of nineteen or twenty lived. They went inside, and “it was clear what they did,” said Koo-hun, the tall schoolboy. He and a neighbor woman, watching and listening from over a wall, knew that a rape had occurred.
Village families grew frantic as the Americans, putting aside their duties or card playing, began strutting over to the paddies and huts in search of women. People secured their gates and doors. Grandmothers made girls wear dirty clothes and smear their faces with charcoal to make them repulsive. They hid them behind trees and shrubs when GIs passed.
“I hid in a big urn and Mother put the lid on the urn,” remembered Park Hee-sook, who was a sixteen-year-old with high cheekbones and a long pigtail tipped with a red-and-yellow silk ribbon. “The GIs seemed to go wild whenever they saw women, whether they were old women or young girls. They tried to grab them.” When soldiers bulled their way into village homes, she said, older women, enraged, waved scythes and threatened to emasculate them. “We girls didn’t dare walk in the open.” Then something else happened to anger the villagers, and to chill their souls.
Like most Korean villages, Chu Gok Ri had a burial society, a group that took care of the common equipment used for all funerals, kept in a small thatch-roofed shrine. Two American soldiers found this sacrosanct place and vandalized it. They hauled out the funeral bier, a brightly decorated platform on which the deceased’s coffin is borne to the grave. They carried it here and there, playing with it, clowning. Seemingly bored, they threw it aside and then spotted a brass bell inside the shrine, the funeral procession bell, and toyed with that, ringing it repeatedly, so that its metallic knell, the sound of death in Chu Gok Ri, echoed over the village, filling those who heard it with a nameless dread.
* * *
By Sunday, July 23, the sound of war could be heard on the far side of Yongdong. The North Koreans’ 3rd Division, which had seized Taejon three days earlier, had moved in from the north and was probing the lines of the newly arrived U.S. 1st Cavalry Division. The northern troops soon discovered a gaping seven-mile hole between the 8th Cavalry Regiment’s two battalions at Yongdong, and found the U.S. flanks exposed. In fact, from Yongdong west to the Yellow Sea, a distance of 70 miles on the Americans’ left flank, the North Koreans faced no resistance.
The 1st Cavalry Division’s Gen. “Hap” Gay, in his first week as a combat commander, also feared enemy infiltrators were crossing his lines among refugees. On this Sunday, the division sent out an order describing a plan for evacuating civilians from the battle zone, with “controlled movements” of refugees to screening points. After that, U.S. news reports said, the Americans might shoot anyone in civilian clothes in the battle zone.
At noon, villagers remembered, an American Jeep drove into Chu Gok Ri and a U.S. Army officer jumped out, a Korean interpreter at his side. He told farmers taking a lunch rest in the shade that the village should be evacuated immediately, that Chu Gok Ri, a few miles from the front lines and set back just 200 yards from the main road, would soon turn into a battleground. He then climbed back into the Jeep and pulled away, apparently to alert other villages.
Some nervous Chu Gok Ri residents had already moved belongings to Im Ke Ri, a little more than a mile up their side valley’s dirt track. The slopes around the smaller hamlet offered plenty of fruits, nuts and water. People might live there until the war passed through, just as peasants 350 years earlier pulled back into the folds of the mountains when Hideyoshi’s Japanese invaders rampaged up the same road.
Now, as word spread from hut to hut, every family hurriedly gathered up what they would need, what they could carry: bags of barley and rice, extra clothing, sleeping quilts, cooking utensils, scythes and other tools for foraging for food. They tied squealing pigs and chickens on oxcarts. Some quickly dug holes in their tiny kitchen gardens or earthen floors and buried big pots holding ancestral tablets and other family treasures. Then they set out for Im Ke Ri, family after family, some five hundred of them, bags balanced on women’s heads and lashed to the wooden A-frames on every man’s back, bundles and household gear in carts or on the backs of family cows, hobbled grandparents and pregnant women lagging behind, small children wrapped tightly to their mothers’ backs. The sturdily built teenager Chung Koo-hun carried little brother Koo-hak atop the bag on his A-frame because the eight-year-old was recovering from malaria and was too weak to walk.
Moving a village family was onerous: Someone had to carry the big cast-iron pot for cooking rice, the heavy mortar for pounding barley, and other cumbersome items. Many took bulky, padded winter blankets, knowing they might have to sleep outdoors. Some grumbling farmers wondered aloud why they would flee communists who, according to rumor, promised equal property for everyone.
Reaching Im Ke Ri, up the narrowing valley, they knew the village had far too few huts to hold them. Families sought shelter in sheds, under big trees, in caves. Some thought the houses too exposed anyway. The Yang family of Im Ke Ri—“Golden Girl” Hae-sook’s family—left their crowded old home and claimed a hiding place in the small gold mine behind the village, a black, forbidding hole in the hillside, unseen from the valley floor. Hae-sook’s father carried her grandmother there on his backframe, and thirteen-year-old Hae-sook, little brother Hae-chan and the rest of the Yangs settled in among the resident bats with six other families.
On a nearby slope, a poor rice-growing family from Chu Gok Ri excavated its own hole. Chun Soon-pyo, who had served with the Japanese military in the Pacific war, dug an air-raid shelter with his younger brother, then covered the opening with tree branches and spread rice straw mats on the dirt floor. Their temporary home was big enough to hold all nine family members, including Tae-sung, a baby boy whose name meant “Great Success.”
Chun and his wife, in their first dozen years of marriage, had produced only three girls, and two had died. Choon-ja, now ten, had watched as her two younger sisters writhed through the feverish agonies of smallpox, the fearsome scourge villagers dubbed Son-nim, “Respected Guest.” She watched as her distraught grandmother prayed and sacrificed to the samshin, the mountain gods, for mercy. It was to no avail. The girls were buried on the hill behind their house. Her parents doted on the survivor, Choon-ja, but she knew they wanted a son above all and would keep trying. Finally, some months before the war, a boy was born. “They handled him as if he was a piece of gold,” Choon-ja recalled of the overjoyed family. “It was as if we were the only family in the world that had a boy.”
Now, in their hillside shelter, the baby’s ever-protective grandmother watched over him as the family prepared to wait out the war. They planned to survive mostly on a home concoction called misookaroo, a powder made from roasted barley for mixing with water. To the lively little girl Choon-ja, wondering what new things awaited them, it was a lark. “It was like camping out,” she said.
The afternoon heat that Sunday built white billows of cumulus clouds high into the sky. When rain poured down that evening, it caught some Chu Gok Ri peasants, inexperienced refugees, poorly protected. The flash and thud of big guns, reflecting off the sky’s low cover and resounding off distant mountains, struck new fear into the villagers. One in particular, Chung Eun-yong, had a special fear.
The ex-policeman’s family, like many, had been unable to find a room when they trekked up from Chu Gok Ri, and spent the night in a shed housing a small millstone. Their bags, like many others, had to be left outside and were soaked in the rain. Along with Sun-yong and the two children, the group included Eun-yong’s parents and two younger brothers, and the wife and four children of his third brother, the Taejon prison guard who had already gone on to the south.
Eun-yong’s parents and wife were deeply worried by rumors refugees brought from the north that North Korean troops were rounding up policemen in conquered areas and executing them. Eun-yong himself had heard about such kangaroo courts from a young man who fled Kaesong, north of Seoul. In the cramped, damp shed that night, as the rain outside pelted the persimmon leaves, Sun-yong quietly read her Bible and then told her husband the entire family should flee south.
In the morning, the start of a rain-free but steamy late July day, Eun-yong talked to his father about going south, but the old man resisted. The family, especially the children, should not undertake such a hard journey in the heat of summer, he said. His father told Eun-yong, with Sun-yong’s support, that he alone should go. “Don’t worry and just go,” the elder Chung said. “Even if they’re communists, the North Korean soldiers won’t harm children, women or old people.”
The twenty-seven-year-old law student, once a young man so determined and sure, was torn with indecision. “I was not comfortable with the idea of leaving my family,” he said, but he felt they would be safer among neighbors and a secure food supply in his familiar home valley. He felt, too, that if he stayed with them, they might soon be permanently without a husband and father. He decided to leave. His mother prepared a small backpack of rice, spare clothes, soy sauce, a bowl, spoon and chopsticks.
With a deep bow to his parents and a gentle squeeze of Sun-yong’s hand, he set off. He had barely passed Im Ke Ri’s hollowed-out big tree, a landmark at the village entrance, when four-year-old Koo-pil came dashing after him, begging his father not to go. “Please take me with you,” the boy said, as his mother came and scooped him up.
It was a difficult moment. The bond of intimacy between father and son is the greatest bond of Confucianism. Now, at a dangerous time, Eun-yong was leaving his son, the bright boy who had shined from the start, learning to speak at an early age. At the traditional first-birthday celebration, Koo-pil had been bedecked in customary finery of “rainbow” sleeves and silk “Good Fortune” hat, and had posed, a little man, before his own small table bearing writing brush, coins and bow and arrow, traditionally arrayed to represent a child’s future. Grandparents, uncles, an aunt were delighted, and Eun-yong was filled with pride. “He was a smart boy,” he said. “I had a lot of expectations for him.” He indulged in a luxury for the party, hiring a photographer to take a picture of his gaily dressed son.
Now that photo of their first-born lay with other family keepsakes in a buried leather box beneath a shed at their Chu Gok Ri home, and a grim Eun-yong, having parted from his wife and son, was soon striding onto the main road, heading away from the sounds of the Yongdong fighting. He joined the strung-out columns of refugees following the road east, then south.
Around noon, a few miles along, Eun-yong decided to take a rest away from the burning sun. He stepped off the road and into the cool shadows of the concrete railroad trestle near the hamlet of No Gun Ri. The little double-arched bridge was a local landmark, built by the Japanese when they added a second track to the main line in the early 1940s. Eun-yong splashed his face with water from a small stream that ran under the soaring, echoing arches, sat a few minutes, then finally felt a chill and went on his way.
Less than a mile farther along, just before the town of Hwanggan, he ran into a bottleneck, a refugee checkpoint set up by South Korean police who inspected the luggage and identities of the hundreds of civilians pressing southward.
While Chung Eun-yong shuffled along in this queue, and then finally walked on through Hwanggan, a train pulled past him in the opposite direction. It carried the 2nd Battalion of the 7th Cavalry, the U.S. Army regiment known as the Garryowens, at the end of a tiring rail journey from Korea’s east coast. Lt. Col. Herb Heyer, Capt. Mel Chandler and the battalion’s more than six hundred other officers and men were arriving at Hwanggan to aid their sister units defending Yongdong, nine miles up the road.
Back at Im Ke Ri, as nightfall spread over the valley, the Chung family settled into a hillside shelter they built from tree branches, sleeping on a floor of leaves. Young mother Sun-yong’s heart grew heavier, hearing the thunder of war nearby. She saw red streaks crisscrossing and a glow in the northwest sky, and wondered whether villages were burning out there, where Shimchon lay, the home she left five years before as a hopeful bride, a young woman “rescued” by a serious young stranger.
* * *
It was on the main north-south road near Shimchon, five miles northwest of Yongdong, that a battalion of the 8th Cavalry had first clashed with the North Koreans two nights before. By this night, July 24, fires set by U.S. and North Korean artillery and by American air attacks were raging across the Yongdong front; by the next morning, Tuesday, July 25, the forward American troops were trying to extricate themselves from a North Korean trap, from an enemy whose soldiers seemed to advance from every direction.
By the morning of July 25, too, 1st Cavalry Division and other U.S. military commanders, worried about reported infiltration by civilian-clad North Koreans, had issued orders that were at times clear, at times confused over what to do with the South Korean refugees trying to escape the fighting.
On July 23, the orders had gone out to evacuate civilians from the battle zone, after which anyone in civilian clothes might be shot. The next day, Monday, orders came from the 1st Cavalry Division headquarters for front-line units to shoot refugees—“fire everyone”—trying to cross their lines. Then, within minutes, the division telephoned higher headquarters to report both that it was shepherding refugees southward and that it was dropping leaflets warning villagers to head north or be treated as enemy. A division operations officer, Lt. Col. J. P. Powhida, offered still another version of what was happening in late July. “Communists in Allied territory were giving false information to villagers to start them on their way along the narrow rocky roads,” he said in a training bulletin issued months later in Washington.
The Air Force, meanwhile, at the Army’s request, was following a policy of strafing refugees; Navy pilots had been told to attack any groups of more than eight people; and on Tuesday, July 25, the Air Force’s Col. Turner Rogers would write his memo warning of the potential “embarrassment” of blatant U.S. killings of noncombatants.
At Im Ke Ri, Monday night passed sleeplessly for many as they listened to the artillery duels and worried what the day would bring. In the morning a few families set out for the south through a high pass in the 2,500-foot mountains beyond the village. Most remained, including many who spent the day tending to their paddies.
Wispy columns of smoke drifted over the valley, from the cooking fires of grandmothers and housewives. In the late afternoon, a small plane flew in and circled low over the village, so low that people could see the helmeted pilot. Children waved. About two hours later, at dusk, a truck bumped up the dusty path to Im Ke Ri and about ten American soldiers in olive-drab fatigues jumped out, carrying rifles, villagers recalled. An officer, through an interpreter speaking Japanese, told men idling under the village “big tree” to gather up everyone. They had to leave and head south.
The news heartened some but disturbed others. After their experiences of recent days, many recoiled from the Americans. Park Sun-yong, without her husband, was greatly relieved. “They were like a savior,” she said of this promise of safety. The Chung family began collecting its things; Sun-yong took care not to forget her Bible.
Some had to be called home from the fields to join the evacuation. Many barely had time to pack. Ten-year-old Chun Choon-ja’s father came to their makeshift shelter and told them to gather their belongings. They were following the Americans. “I was happy,” Choon-ja said. “I thought that if I went to the south, I’d see big towns. I always wanted to see big towns. I didn’t know what a war was. I didn’t know what being a refugee meant.” On this night, already dark, not all went happily. Some villagers, including old and sick people, tried to stay in their homes. The Americans dragged them out. The Yang family was among them.
Yang Ho-yong, Hae-sook’s father, was a certified “loyal son.” A local administrative office had once presented him with an award, a tradition in those days, for exemplary fidelity to his parents. But this loyal son faced a dilemma when he came up from the paddies to the gold mine to tell the family they must leave. His elderly mother announced that she was too frail to go.
It was unthinkable for Yang to separate from his mother. In that case, he told her, the entire family must stay. She finally relented, and the son once again placed his mother on his wooden pack frame, lifted her onto his back and, this time, took her down the hillside. Hae-sook, thirteen, carried her small brother on her back. Her mother balanced a bulging bundle atop her head. When this large group—with two aunts and an uncle, cousins, brothers—reached the Yangs’ house in Im Ke Ri, they hesitated once more, unsure whether to proceed. Then soldiers appeared, shining flashlights into the huts, and forced the Yangs, at bayonet point, to get moving.
“American soldiers came into our rooms without even taking off their boots,” remembered younger brother Hae-chan, then ten years old. “They poked their weapons into the blanket that we huddled under together.” When the Yangs looked out beyond their gnarled old pear tree, they saw other villagers falling into line on the road. They joined them: grandmother, “Golden Girl,” pregnant aunt and all.
Once the long, pitiful procession got under way—hundreds of people, parents loaded down with baggage and crying children, oxcarts piled high clanging in the darkness, some families with little more than the white cotton or hemp clothes on their backs—the American GIs grew impatient with their slow progress and began prodding them with rifle butts, cursing loudly, checking watches repeatedly. For some in the refugee column, more distressing still was what happened before they set off, when soldiers separated out at least twenty young men and took them away. What was planned for these sons and brothers?
As the Koreans moved down the narrow valley path toward Chu Gok Ri, they saw U.S. soldiers dug into the hillsides between the two villages and planting big antitank mines along the way—in the mistaken belief, some later surmised, that the rough valley track, a cul-de-sac, was a “through” road that could bring the North Koreans in from another direction.
Even before reaching Chu Gok Ri, the refugees could smell smoke. Then they saw the flames, their homes ablaze, and U.S. soldiers hurrying away, loading up their trucks. American commanders were adopting scorched-earth tactics to deny the advancing enemy any shelter or sustenance. The thatched roofs had made an easy job of it for GIs’ cigarette lighters. The rock and tree of the Sonang, the village’s guardian spirit, stood forlorn in the flickering shadows.
Such catastrophe had not befallen the families of Chu Gok Ri for many generations. In despair, and in fear of worse happening, they trudged on, each family slowed to the pace of its slowest member, parents calling children closer to their sides in the late-night gloom. The throng stretched out as it mounted the main road—the road they once took to market and to school, the road from Sun-yong’s wedding, the road that would take them now east to Hwanggan, and then on south. Along the way, groups from other villages would come and go among them.
The Yang family was one of the biggest, numbering at least fifteen. A pregnant cousin, Min Eun-soon, had joined them with her small child. The pregnant aunt, Yang Mal-soon, had her four children in tow and was herself laden with a bag of clothes. Her husband, Park Ne-eung, still carried the sack of barley on his back.
Suddenly, the sounds of war were upon them. They heard sporadic gunfire and blasts both far and near. Lives apparently were being lost somewhere in the darkness. Some recalled refugees being killed tripping over wires that set off explosions—American mines or booby traps. “I saw cows killed the same way,” said Park Hwa-ja, one of Aunt Mal-soon’s children. “This happened after we traveled out of Im Ke Ri and approached Ha Ga Ri.”
As the slow caravan neared Ha Ga Ri, the village off the road a mile east of Chu Gok Ri, the refugees unknowingly passed just yards from a ditch where two dozen young men cowered in terror of the noises and flashes around them. These were the “suspects” rounded up hours earlier at Im Ke Ri. Without explanation from the Japanese interpreter, the Americans had marched these village youths up the main road, then ordered them over the parallel railroad tracks and into a ditch at the foot of a hill. They sensed something terrible was planned for them, and villager Kim Bok-jong appealed to the interpreter.
“What are you trying to do? There must be some misunderstanding,” Kim told the Japanese. “We’re not communists. We’re innocent villagers. Some of us work for the government.” Kim himself worked at a government agricultural center. “Please tell this to the American soldiers.”
At first reluctant, the interpreter finally talked to the GIs. He then turned back to the Koreans and told them to lie face down in the ditch. “Don’t look up. If you do, the soldiers will shoot you. Stay here until ten in the morning and then you may return home.” After a terrifying night hunkered down in the hollow, the young men emerged to find the villages empty.
* * *
The main refugee group had pressed on, under GI escort, and around midnight they came abreast of Ha Ga Ri. Truck headlights illuminated the area, an apparent assembly point for the Americans. Suddenly soldiers were pushing the villagers off the road, down an embankment to a gravel streambed. Some old people and children tumbled down the steep slope, villagers recounted, and a bulldozer pulled up and tipped oxcarts off the road, to make way for American vehicles.
As American guards watched, the refugees bedded down beside the stream and tried to rest, but the din and lightning of war made it impossible. American howitzers positioned in a field close by boomed through the night, fireballs flashed overhead, and the road above vibrated with a steady stream of U.S. Army trucks headed away from Yongdong in clouds of dust.
The villagers tried to stay low, to stay silent. Park Hee-soon, sister of the pigtailed girl Park Hee-sook, was helpless to control her baby’s wailing, and her father became furious, saying the noise would get them all killed. Finally the grandmother took the child from the unpracticed new mother, who had fled her Yongdong-area village when her husband was seized for army service.
A pale half-moon dropped behind the mountains before two in the morning. Gunshots and explosions—of grenades or mines or other devices of war unfamiliar to these peasants—cracked and thundered in the blackness. Suddenly their own neighbors were becoming targets. “People who strayed away from the group were shot and killed,” said Chun Choon-ja, the little round-faced ten-year-old whose excitement had turned to terror. Two older villagers, Chung Jin-myong and Park Jong-dong, both around twenty at the time, said the victims were people who went off to relieve themselves. Unknown to them, the village families had been led by the Americans, at gunpoint, into the middle of an American retreat.
The official Army record showed that the two battalions of the 5th Cavalry Regiment that had arrived July 22 were still positioned at the Chu Gok Ri valley on the night of July 25, the night the villagers were rousted and evacuated. Sometime on July 25, a third unit, the 2nd Battalion of the sister 8th Cavalry Regiment, pulled back through Yongdong and eastward past Chu Gok Ri after being badly mauled by North Korean troops southwest of Yongdong. Stopping at Ha Ga Ri, where the refugees were, they were beaten, bitter Americans, having seen comrades killed in their first encounter with the Koreans. The North Koreans occupied Yongdong by 8 P.M. on July 25, taking defensive positions on its eastern edge, the official U.S. Army history reported. This was 3½ miles west of where the refugees spent the night at Ha Ga Ri.
Around 1:30 A.M. on Wednesday, July 26, as the moon disappeared, the 1st Cavalry Division ordered all units to pull back still farther from Yongdong, to align its front with the withdrawing 25th Division on its right. In the darkness, the Chu Gok Ri refugees were hearing the trucks of 5th and 8th Cavalry elements heading east.
Two miles east, the 2nd Battalion of the 7th Cavalry Regiment, in its first full day at the front, had fanned out over the hills to support and relieve the retreating sister regiments. But the 1:30 A.M. order to pull back produced what the Army historian called the “panic” in that 2nd Battalion. It was accompanied by exchanges of fire, possibly with other retreating Cav troops, although 7th Cavalrymen maintained they were attacked by North Koreans, miles from the reported enemy line.
The sun rose at 6:25 A.M., at the end of a frightening night for the villagers. They looked around and found their American guards gone. They could see Americans in the hills, but things were eerily quiet. Then they discovered that a half-dozen of their number had been killed in the night—whether by gunshot, grenades, exploding mines, they were not sure.
Shaken by what they had been through, desperate to get as far from the war as possible, the villagers slowly gathered up their things, climbed to the road and resumed their trek. Along this eastbound segment of the road to the south, they were flanked on their immediate left by the parallel railroad track and, beyond that, an abrupt wall of barren slopes rising to 1,000 feet or more. On their right, fingers of rice paddy land stretched in among hillsides and pine groves that gradually rose toward jagged peaks.
They stumbled upon more terrible, unexplained sights. Slipping and falling at one point, the seventeen-year-old Chung Koo-hun lifted himself up and saw a woman’s hair spread through the dirt. Looking closely, he realized it was a body, her head crushed by a heavy vehicle, “like the flattened body of a rat run over by a tire.” His cousin Chung Koo-hong recalled seeing three bloated, blackened bodies along the road that morning. Another villager, Lee Byong-hoi, saw a dead baby, with “dust settled on her face.” They shuddered and pushed on.
As the morning lengthened, the midsummer heat grew intense. In their rice-straw sandals and baggy white garb, under towering loads, they walked on, stopping to readjust packs, haul weary children to their backs, slap faltering livestock. “It was terribly hot,” said Park Hee-sook, the sixteen-year-old. “I always seemed to be lagging behind. I huffed and puffed to catch up.” Some children sweltered under extra sets of clothes mothers had layered on their bodies. Koo-pil lost a shoe and his foot was soon bloody. His grandfather picked up the tearful four-year-old and carried him.
Two miles up the road, near a hamlet called Seo Song Won, they came to a U.S. Army vehicle—a truck or an armored vehicle—blocking the way. Soldiers waved the Koreans off the road and toward the empty railroad tracks. The Americans were rough with some of the slow-moving elderly, and again loaded oxcarts were toppled into roadside ditches, villagers said.
After climbing up on the railroad embankment, the refugees pushed ahead down the double-tracked right-of-way, only to be stopped again by American soldiers who searched their things, jabbing bags with their rifles and bayonets, and taking away chicken knives, scythes, saws and other sharp implements they found.
They were two Korean villages, perhaps six hundred people in white—weary, afraid, bewildered, and hot, irritable and hungry. At this rate it might take until dusk to cover the almost three miles to Hwanggan. Other refugees were backing up behind them, in a dense column stretching 200 or 300 yards back. Less than a mile ahead they could find the cool shadows of the railroad trestle near No Gun Ri, an inviting rest stop. Instead, detained again by the Americans, families began spreading out beside the tracks to find some wispy shade beneath the acacia trees and scoop out some crushed barley to cook for a midday meal.
There they rested for the long journey to come—the pigtailed Hee-sook and her nervous sister; the pretty schoolteacher Chung Koo-ok; the sprawling Yang family, with the loyal son and unhappy grandmother, with Hae-sook ever watchful over the boys; Choon-ja and the “success” baby, Tae-sung; the tall, idealistic student Koo-hun; and the heartsick Park Sun-yong, with her four-year-old and two-year-old and well-worn Bible, and with her faith that Eun-yong, who found her once and saved her, would find her again.
The sun was high. In the glare, through the haze of heat, the villagers could see American soldiers in the hills around them.