My grandfather survived the little-known horrors of the Korean War

March 9, 2017 — by Michelle Lee

Reporter shares her grandfather's recounting of early war-ridden Korea.

Bullets whistled in the air as the disorganized South Korean soldiers scrambled around in hopes of evading the shots fired by a wave of the North Korean and Japanese army.

The South Korean forces had been hastily glued together in a couple of weeks, and a majority of the soldiers were businessmen and industrial workers forced to fight for their country by a mandatory draft. The North Korean and Japanese armies, on the other hand, were far more prepared with financial backing coming from major countries such as Russia.

My grandfather, Lee Chang Ho, was only 13 at the start of the Korean War on Sept. 15, 1950, and was living in the city of Chungju with his family of six.

“Back then, Korea wasn’t the busy, loud and modernized country you know now,” he said. “The country was worse off than some of the poorest present-day African countries [like Malawi and Burundi]. There were so many people before the war who were hungry, dirty and homeless, but that was nothing compared to what happened to the people during the war.”

Nestled between the cataclysmic end of WWII and the start of the Vietnam War, the Korean War is too often referred to as the “Forgotten War.” The war truly started for my grandfather a few months after September 1950, when he saw a couple of American soldiers in their standard army green uniforms for the first time. Never having seen a Caucasian person before, Lee was most impressed by their broad shoulders and can still remember the smell of their cigarette smoke.

“American cigarettes smell different from the ones Korea had back then; they smell sharper and cleaner. I was actually grateful that the American soldiers were smoking because it covered up the terrible stench of feces covering the streets of Korea,” he said.  

Lee’s worst memory of the Korean War was the Summer of Terror. Confused, I asked him to clarify, and he was thoroughly shocked when I told him that I didn’t know what the Summer of Terror was. He even had me flip through my AP U.S. History textbook to confirm that there was no mention of it.

As the most tragic and brutal chapter of the Korean War, the Summer of Terror was a series of mass murders issued by South Korean President Syngman Rhee on June 25, 1950. Rhee was terrified about the idea of South Koreans joining the Communists and ordered more than 100,000 South Koreans to be killed in only a couple of weeks; many poor farmers and peasants were targeted despite most not even knowing what communism was.

“Despite being part of the poorer half of the country, my family and I were fortunately not a part of this huge roundup of ‘Communist suspects,’ as we managed to go into hiding in a more secluded area of the country,” Lee said. “My parents gave my siblings and me piggy back rides all the way to the city of Busan.”

Lee said that many of the Summer of Terror victims were slain on the streets and thrown in makeshift ditches that barely covered the bodies. The killings were done so hastily that some people were barely alive, and they were left to die on the streets.

Walking by these bodies every day desensitized the people to the horror around, which is what my grandfather believes is one of  the worst aspects of war. Everyone stayed silent, even the families of those unjustifiably murdered, as no one wanted to be the next target.

“It’s indescribable as to what human beings will do in times of immediate danger,” he said. “You might wonder why no one stopped to help the victim and their families. But the whole mindset of ‘every man to themselves’ is a natural instinct that you can’t help. It hurts to think about.”  

At the end of the war, my grandfather managed to rebuild his life by getting a degree for teaching. He taught all core class subjects to elementary school students for almost 35 years in the city of Chungju. Becoming a teacher, Lee said, was his way of trying to be a force for good to cure the evil that he saw everywhere in war.

He urged today’s teenagers to take it upon themselves to learn more about this significant event.

“The Korean War should not be a forgotten war. Over a million people were killed. How could it be forgotten?” he said. “We say history repeats itself, but if only people were more exposed to war, then we will put in much more thought before starting fights here and there.”

 
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