Valleys of Death (21 page)

“Where the fuck are my boots?”

“Get up! Get up!” the soldier yelled, so that he could look for his boots.

But we knew what had happened. When we went outside the hut, a few of the guards were wearing the boots. The North Koreans gave some of the men open sandals to wear instead. The cold was not only taking a toll on us, but also on the guards. A cold front from the plains of Manchuria came roaring down and slamming into the very mountains we were struggling through. We were facing the coldest winter in fifty years.

As we got ready to move out, the commander of the guards told us to leave the stretchers. The wounded were pleading with us to take them. I started to move toward one and got a rifle butt in the gut. Others tried to grab the stretchers, but the guards pushed them away too. I started to move toward the helpless soldiers again, but couldn't risk another blow. I let my mind drift into a zombie state, hoping to block out the screams of the wounded.

Left foot.

Right Foot.

Over and over again I repeated it until I couldn't hear their screams.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF DEATH

After ten nights, we marched into a fairly good-size town wedged in a valley between the Kangnam and Pinantok mountain ranges. I heard the guards talking and finally figured out that the town's name was Pyoktong. It was early morning and a thick fog covered the tops of the mountains. As we approached, I could see numerous small streams cutting through the valley. A patchwork of turnip and corn fields spread around the outskirts and a few cattle mingled in a pasture. The cows were small and I could see their ribs.

The guards marched us to houses that lined the road. I'd just sat down on the dirt floor of one when I heard the hum of aircraft above.

“Americans, Americans!” I heard someone yell.

The hum changed into a screech as the planes started to dive toward the road. Everyone began to panic, even the guards. The buzzing of machine guns cut through the screech. Rounds started to rake the road and blast through the thin walls of the house. It sounded like a sharp pencil popping through paper. One of the prisoners in my house understood Korean. He was from Hawaii and also spoke Japanese, which many of the guards spoke as well.

“Let's take off,” he heard one of the guards say.

“What about the prisoners?” another guard said.

“Screw the prisoners, let's go.”

The guards outside of our house took off up the hill on the other side of the road.

We threw open the doors and followed. I looked down the road and saw all the prisoners pouring out of the houses. Searching the skies, I saw the glint of the aircraft turning around for another pass. We climbed up the hill as fast as possible, clawing at the dirt as the planes peppered the village again. As we reached the top, I heard a series of explosions below. The Air Force hit an ammunition storage area, and multiple explosions echoed across the mountains. All the prisoners were cheering and hollering.

“Hit the bastards again,” someone yelled.

Thick black smoke curled up into the sky as the houses burned. I watched the planes climb high into the sky and disappear behind the clouds. Looking back at the town, I could see the bodies of a few prisoners near the houses. Others were wounded.

Numerous Korean soldiers started rounding up the rest of the prisoners. In the confusion, three of us slipped over the hill. We huddled together in a ditch, covering our hiding place with branches. We hoped to wait until nightfall and try to move back toward our lines. As we huddled together to keep warm, we talked about our chances of getting back .

“Any idea which way our lines are?” asked one guy. I'd never seen the other two soldiers. It didn't matter. We were all prisoners with one goal.

The other soldier and I shook our heads no. I sat back in the ditch and tried to get my bearings. It was hard because we had moved in during the night and the mountains now seemed to wall us into the valley.

“Well, we came from that direction,” I said, pointing up the road that seemed to turn south. “I guess we could start that way and try to get over the mountains. We can use the road as a guide, but we will need to stay off it. All we need to do is keep moving south.”

The older-looking guy with a healthy beard just shook his head.

“Suicide in our condition,” he said. “We won't make it over those mountains. We don't have warm clothes and we will probably die of hypothermia.”

We knew he was right. It was smarter to wait until springtime. We needed to try to survive and hope our forces liberated us. A few minutes later, a Korean patrol spotted us in the ditch. None of us ran. We were all too cold and knew there was no place to go. The guards started to yell at us and quickly surrounded the ditch.

As they thrusted their bayonets at us, one guard gestured for us to stand up. We stood, and he pointed back over the hill. They pushed us around a little as we climbed out of the ditch. When we got to the other side, we saw the rest of the prisoners together in a tight group. The excitement of the air raid was long since over, and now everyone's interest was in trying to keep from freezing.

The North Koreans seemed reluctant to take us back to the huts, so we huddled on the hill and suffered another frigid night. From above, our mass of men probably looked like a giant blob having a seizure. This time, we didn't have the cornstalks to keep us warm. We tried our best to stay huddled together, but the cold from the ground easily seeped into our bodies. I couldn't stop my teeth from chattering and barely slept. It wasn't until I was so cold that I couldn't feel my hands and feet that I finally got some sleep.

At dawn, they marched us down the road. But instead of back into town, we headed south. It was obvious they had no idea what to do with us. After hours of shuffling down the road, with one eye hoping to see the glint of more Air Force fighters, we stopped at a village. I figured we couldn't have marched more than a dozen miles from Pyoktong. The village sat deep in another valley. There were small farms of one or two houses stretching all the way up the valley for approximately two and a half miles. A small stream ran alongside of the road. It was completely frozen over.

As we moved up the valley, the Koreans started randomly splitting us up in groups and placing us in the houses. The guards crammed about twenty men per room in each house. Each farm appeared to have been one family's home.

The houses were made from wooden poles, with mud-baked walls and thatched roofs. Each house had three rooms, two bedrooms and a kitchen. The doors were covered only with paper and offered very little insulation or warmth.

It looked like the families that owned the houses had left in a hurry. Some of the farm tools were still there in open lean-to sheds beside bins of corncobs. Doors to the houses had been left open. Clothes, missed by the families as they hastily packed, littered the floor. I was placed in the last farmhouse. There was one other house beyond us, at the highest point in the valley, where the officers were held.

The valley was deep and the sun was only visible for three hours a day before it dipped too low on the horizon to warm the land. Temperatures hovered at freezing most days and dipped well below at night.

I got stuck sleeping near the paper-covered sliding doors. It was the coldest place in the room. One side of my body was always freezing. We were packed so tightly into the rooms that everyone had to move in unison. I was always happy when the decision was made to roll over.

The next morning five North Koreans crashed into our house. They threw open the sliding doors in both bedrooms and rousted us out. The leader, a stocky English-speaking officer with a clipboard in hand, started asking for our names and ranks. As we answered, they checked us off and moved on. When they got to me, the officer told me to come with him. I had no idea why. Did they know that I'd tried to escape twice already?

“You in charge,” he said. “Everyone must stay in this area.”

He indicated by pointing.

“You can go get water there,” pointing to a nearby stream. “You understand?”

I nodded my head yes.

“Go inside,” he barked. The rest of the group went back into the house, but I stayed.

“When are we going to eat?” I asked.

“Soon,” he said.

The millet, which the guards brought to us twice a day, was running right through us. There was absolutely no nutritional value in it and no seasoning whatsoever. Everyone was losing weight. We were all beginning to look like scarecrows, some like walking death. Four or five men were still eating out of one helmet liner. Everyone was watching the other guy to make sure he did not get more than his share. We were slowly being reduced to the level of animals.

“We need medical care. We have men that are wounded and sick.”

He said nothing.

“We need blankets and heat.”

He looked up from his clipboard and gestured for me to go into the house.

“Go, go, go now.”

I never saw that officer again. Our complaints and needs had fallen on deaf ears once again. I went back inside and tried to organize the men. I knew the North Koreans weren't going to take care of us. Sergeant Martin was the next highest ranked soldier in the house. I pulled him aside and told him he was responsible for the soldiers in the second room and I'd take care of those in the first room. I'd never seen Martin before. We didn't bother with first names or backgrounds. At this point, he and I were focused on living another day. I knew he was in my same situation, and that was good enough for me.

My goal was to bring back discipline and start acting like soldiers again. The scene the first night with the rice dropped on the ground was burned into my brain. The only way we could survive until spring and a possible escape attempt was to start working together.

“I asked the officer for food and blankets,” I told Martin. “It remains to be seen if we get anything from him.”

We walked out to the stream near the house. It was covered in a sheet of ice. Near the bank was a three-foot-deep hole where the Koreans got their water.

“Get a detail together and start getting water to the men,” I said. “We can carry the water in the helmet liners.”

Soon, three men were on the bank. Two of the men held the other by the legs while he went headfirst into the hole like a bucket in a well. Seconds later they pulled him up with a helmet liner filled with frigid water. I hoped the cold took care of the germs. I knew one thing: I didn't want to be here in the spring after hundreds of men had been defecating all over the place.

The Koreans took ten of us out under guard and moved us up the valley, where they told us to collect some firewood. We took the wood back to the house and the guards made us break it down into five piles, one to heat the house each night.

The house had hard dirt floors, and underneath was a small tunnel system that ran from the kitchen. Normally the family cooking in the kitchen would heat the floor of the house, but since we weren't cooking, no heat. That night, we took a pile of wood and started a fire in the tunnel. The heat in the floor only lasted half the night, but it still felt great. The lice loved it too. As I scratched, I thought of an old joke.

A guy goes to the doctor.

“I've got crabs.”

The doc asks him if he has a lot of crabs.

“Well I've either got a lot or one on a motorcycle.”

The sick and wounded suffered the most. Our frostbitten feet had turned to trench foot, and open wounds were infected or gangrene had set in. For those guys, it was only a matter of time before they died, since we had no medicine to treat them. I saw some of the soldiers turn to home remedies or even voodoo to treat their wounds. One guy took burned wood, scraped the charred area into powder form and swallowed it, thinking it might help stop or slow down the dysentery. Another one thought putting pine sap or turpentine on wounds would help heal them.

I tried none of it. I tried to clean my wounds every day. They were doing remarkably well considering I had no medication or bandages. I was keeping them as clean as I could. The shrapnel across my lower back was my biggest problem. I couldn't see it. I could only feel the shards and they were aggravated by the waist of my pants. But I was a lucky one. I healed quickly and none of my wounds got infected.

A couple of guys in the house were already sick. All of them were running a fever. Others, like a guy named Graves from Philadelphia, were bordering on pneumonia. He was nineteen years old and had just graduated from high school. Without any medicine, the only thing left was to feed his mind with good thoughts. My only hope was that if he stayed positive his body could fight off the infection.

We talked about all things Philly. We talked about meals at Bookbinders seafood restaurant. Everyone from Philly knows Bookbinders. A city landmark, in the 1950s it was known for its five-pound lobsters and for being a place to see celebrities and sports stars. We talked over and over again about the lobsters' orange-skin shells. We talked about what we'd eat. What we'd drink. At times, I could almost smell the food.

If we weren't at Bookbinders, it was a block party. The police would close off one whole block and partygoers, bands, games, food and rides were set up. As with the restaurant, the memories were driven by our lack of food. Over the next month or so I repeatedly smelled the food, until I could taste what I was thinking about. We soon realized we were torturing ourselves.

As the days passed, he got worse until finally he stopped eating. I talked to him about his mother. I pleaded with him to eat so that he could leave when the American troops got to us. Anything to give him the will to keep going. Soon, he became delirious from fever and no food. He talked to his mother like she was in the room. He wailed at night. This spooked some of the guys. I saw a few lie with their hands over their ears.