On the morning of June 25, 1950, we three young brothers and two sisters were walking leisurely from our Gahoe-dong home to Hwanggeumjeong, then newly named Euljiro, for Sunday lunch at our aunt’s house. On utility poles and building walls, we spotted notices written in brush pen: “North Korean puppets launched a surprise attack across the entire 38th parallel at 4 a.m. this morning …”
On the way back, we saw soldiers on weekend leave rush back to their units in civilian trucks. Then we heard the Defense Ministry announcement repeated in radio broadcasts, asking citizens to remain calm and engage in their routine business.
When I went to school the next morning, the teachers turned us back at the gate. We had no adult to look after us; my physician father had died years earlier from a disease he caught from a patient, our mother went to our country home to fetch money for the schooling of her five children in Seoul. My oldest brother had just entered college.
The following day, we heard the sounds of gunfire approaching from the distance. We spent the night in the basement and when I ventured out the next morning, there were the strange sights of the North Korean Army, in muddied uniforms and with rifles that looked too long for them. Already, men with red armbands were moving about in the neighborhood. Seoul was now under communist occupation.
On an early September day, my two older brothers left on foot for our native town of Gangjin, which was also under communist control. (The oldest brother had received a safe conduct pass with the help of a friend who was working for the Seoul people’s committee.) I and two older sisters were to follow them with a group of relatives a week later. Our rice bin was empty and the only way for us to survive was to go to the country home where food was still no problem. Before our brief separation, we decided to have a feast with the meat of the rabbits I was raising in a cage in a corner of the yard.
We woke up early and an old neighbor came to help us prepare the big “breakfast.” When I approached the cage, I froze; its door was open and the rabbits had gone. Somebody had either freed them into the wilderness behind the house during the night or the animals, knowing their fate, had broken the shutter open and escaped. The feast was gone and my brothers and sisters seemed to suspect me, the one who had been feeding the pets. But I swear I did not release them.
By late September, we all safely arrived in Gangjin by God’s grace. I was no longer hungry, but soon fear engulfed our family. The Communists were retreating, but only after creating a bloodbath. Inmingun (the regular People’s Army troops) left first and the local Reds killed people everywhere. Landlords, families of the Republic of Korea Army soldiers and police, intellectuals and county officials were slain in their homes, in the streets and in hillside ravines.
After the massacre, they fled to the mountains and eventually to the Mount Jirisan range. South Korean Marines and police combatants moved in and chased the Reds. We youngsters followed the adults to the town square, where police were identifying bodies they carried in trucks from the sites of mop-up operations. For days all villagers were out in search of their murdered family members.
After 65 years, older Koreans still keep the war, its sights and feelings in their memories. Mine has the young Inmingun soldiers in baggy pants, the silvery U.N. jets bombing the enemy-occupied city of Seoul through the black clouds of North Korean antiaircraft gun blasts, the tiring trek to the faraway hometown, the screams of neighbors dragged by the Reds from their houses, the pale heads of dead bodies and the stench blowing in from mass graves. And the mystery of the opened cage of rabbits is still unsolved.
The nation has had popular uprisings, military coups (May 1961 and December 1979) and political upheavals, but the war left the deepest impact, mental and physical, on Koreans. During the three years, especially in the first several months of the war, people both in the South and the North experienced extremes in human conditions, the worst since the 16th-century Japanese invasion, as historians say.
Nearly 4 million soldiers and civilians were killed and maimed on both sides and a countless number of families were displaced from their homes on this little peninsula. The “war generation,” holding back the pain, sorrow and despair of the war, exhibited a great deal of resilience in treading on the rugged course of national reconstruction. A generational shift took place from about the beginning of the new millennium and now the president and the all the Cabinet, except the education minister, were born after the war.
June 25 is as sacred to the older generation as May 18 is perhaps to the younger Koreans. As fewer and fewer people remember and sing the song, “How Can We Forget the Day (the Song of 6.25),” on the war anniversary, we hear “The March for My Love (Nimeul wihan haengjingok)” not only at the memorial services for the dead in the May 1980 Gwangju Uprising, but at the ubiquitous scenes of labor disputes and civil protests.
I feel a little uncomfortable when I hear the “Nimeul …” song blare out in the street, worried that a new dispute is underway somewhere in an industrial or public organization. The Song of 6.25, on the other hand, has a strong emotional appeal, particularly with its poignant lyrics. Yet, these songs should not be allowed to symbolize the right-left face-off in our increasingly divided society. Furthermore, it is not desirable that the war anniversary is used as an occasion to boost only the conservative cause. All souls in the nation, whatever ideological shade they may be, are called upon to recite today in reverberating unison: “No second Korean War.”
Having survived the war without losing a family member, I certainly belong to the luckier group in my generation. There are the war orphans, widows and those who visit the National Cemetery in Dongjak-dong on the war anniversary to talk to their loved ones buried there. The war has not ended in many people yet, and my heart goes out to them this morning.
By Kim Myong-sik
Kim Myong-sik is a former editorial writer for The Korea Herald. ― Ed.
