Old Men, Old War

By Curtis Prendergast/Seoul

Old men we were--many of us in our 80s now--back where, a half-century earlier, we were reporters and photographers covering that often unremembered Korean War. On our arrival for the anniversary celebration, Seoul was plastered with slogans commemorating the war's outbreak and expressing the nation's gratitude to the 16 countries--from North and South America, Europe, Asia and Africa--member states of the United Nations that came to South Korea's defense after North Korea attacked. Six of those countries were represented in our group. On our return to the peninsula in late June, we were given a lavish welcome--almost too lavish, considering that we had been only reporting, not fighting. Yet 18 correspondents did die in the war, and seeing their names memorialized in bronze evoked thoughts of the luck that had saved us from having our own names listed there too--a ride not taken in a jeep that hit a mine, killing two correspondents; the shuttle back from Japan not boarded that went down in the sea, killing another.

For each of us, the war began differently: the correspondents who rushed over from Japan and then had to share a single Army telephone line to get their stories out; the veteran photographer eager to go, who was told by his editors to forget it since the war would be over in a week. For me, the Korean War began in my backyard. Before becoming a TIME correspondent, I was with the American embassy in Seoul, and on Sunday morning of June 25, 1950, I'd been trying to get a patch of grass growing outside the Japanese-style house where I lived with my wife and three small children when a breakfast-time call came to get in to the office quickly. By midafternoon, trucks loaded with South Korean soldiers holding branches over their heads, as if those sprigs could camouflage them from enemy aircraft, were lumbering through Seoul's dusty, potholed streets. And by nightfall, evacuation of embassy families had begun. Fortuitously, a Norwegian freighter with accommodations for 12 passengers lay at anchor in the seaport of Inchon. Crammed into the ship's hold as it sailed the next morning for safety in Japan were a couple of hundred women and children, including missionary wives and others. Everything in the world that my wife and I owned--clothing, furniture, books, pictures--was there in Korea. She packed mainly diapers. Remembering tales of what her Georgia ancestors had done as General Sherman's army approached, she briefly considered burying the silverware but then wisely packed it too.

My turn for taking only what I could carry--a few clothes, an Oriental scroll my wife had given me for my birthday--came on the third day of the war. North Korean planes, Soviet-built Yaks, had strafed the afternoon before, and our house was deserted, the servants gone. At the embassy, two jeep convoys were forming , one to join the American military advisers who were with what remained of the South Korean army, the other to find the government, which had evaporated. I was to have joined this group, but to my dismay, it had already left; perhaps I had taken too long in that last look around the house. Seoul was a human tide, surging toward Namdaemun, the city's Great South Gate, and I inched my jeep through it, fighting back an almost uncontrollable urge to jump out and hide somewhere. But at a crossroads, the others were waiting, and we pushed on into open country, along the rough gravel road snaking between paddy fields. Late that day, near Taejon, some 90 miles below Seoul, we spotted a jeep approaching. Perched in the back was the South Korean Defense Minister; Korea's autocratic old President, Syngman Rhee, could not be too far away.

The Western-style bungalow on a hillside where we set up a makeshift embassy had housed an American military adviser. Where his Korean army unit was now could only be guessed. In a parting gesture, he had smashed the typewriter, and broken keys littered the floor. Exhausted, I lay down among them. When I awoke, the American ambassador, John Muccio, a tough Italian American, was pacing the darkened room, pounding his fists together gleefully, repeating over and over, "We're coming in, we're coming in." President Truman had acted. Korea's war was now America's war.

It was a war already won, it seemed in October, when I returned as a correspondent for TIME. General Douglas MacArthur's amphibious landing at Inchon had succeeded brilliantly. The North Korean invaders, encircled from behind, had been taken prisoner by the tens of thousands. But then, as MacArthur drove northward toward the Chinese border, dividing his forces in a two-pronged offensive, Mao Zedong's "volunteers" had slipped unseen into the mountains between. Not until July 1953, after more dreadful bloodshed at places like Heartbreak Ridge and Pork Chop Hill, was the present armed truce established.

Thanks to nearly 40,000 American troops still stationed in Korea, that truce has been maintained--safeguarded along the demilitarized zone bisecting the Korean peninsula at its waist. The DMZ is a strange place today, bristling with gun emplacements and barbed wire, studded with land mines, one of which blew the legs off a South Korean army officer four days after our visit. Yet a deceptive air of tranquillity pervades its locust thickets, and in the near absence of humanity, wildlife flourishes. White cranes re-enact scenes from an ancient Chinese painting as they stalk long-legged in the flooded paddy fields, still being cultivated (under U.S. Army protection) by their South Korean owners. Over the years, the DMZ has become a tourist attraction for both sides. From the polished-steel-and-granite peace palace on our side, we peered across the demarcation line to the opposite slope, a couple of hundred yards away, where, from a similar but less imposing structure, a party of North Korean sightseers gazed back at us.

Occasionally the North Koreans have tried tunneling under the DMZ. In light of the historic summit meeting of the leaders of the two Koreas at Pyongyang last month, an easier transit may in the distant offing become reality. Addressing a gigantic rally in Seoul that climaxed the anniversary celebration, South Korea's President, Kim Dae Jung, suggested just that. If a mere 20 or 30 kilometers of missing railway track between South and North were restored, Kim observed, "you could board the train in Pusan or Mokpo, travel through China and the Maritime Province of Siberia and reach all the way to central Asia and on to Paris." That would be a train ride I'd love to come back to Korea to take. But Korean unification--tongil, the word that was on every South Korean's lips during our visit--won't happen in the few years any of us there might have left.

A former TIME correspondent in Asia, Africa and Europe, Curtis Prendergast lives in and writes from rural Maryland