Patient At An Army Hospital

My brother was the only immediate family I had in whole of South Korea, and perhaps, in the whole world, because my parents and my little sister I left behind in North Korea in December 1950 may not have survived the bombings, starvation and harsh winters. I have no way of finding out if they are alive or dead. My brother was some 10 years older, and I looked up to him as my protector and savior. When I was in grade school, he used to help me with home works and protected me from school bullies. Because my father lived with his 3^rd wife, I seldom saw my father and my brother became the man of the house.

My brother was a sophomore at Hamhung Medical College when the war broke out. After leaving Hamhung in 1950, he entered Seoul National University Medical College as a junior in 1951, while working as an army surgeon for the South Korean army. Most of the army doctors during the war were, in reality, medical students and they “attended” classes whenever they could. Theirs was an "in-field, hands-on" training, for which they received college credits. Army field hospitals were managed by medical professors and licensed medical doctors, who managed medical students working under their guidance.

I tried to spend as much time with my brother. The South Korean army kept him busy cutting up and mending wounded soldiers, and there were just too many patients for the army doctors, even with all of the medical students and doctors of South Korea working around the clock. Since he could not get away from his work, I often went to see him and stayed with him for a few days at a time. On one occasion, however, my stay was longer because of a small infection I had on my belly. For several months, I suffered from a dark itchy swelling near my bellybutton. I thought it was a minor infection that would go away by itself, but it kept on growing in size. Finally, it got to be about the size of my thumb and I wrote my brother about it. He immediately sent a hospital orderly to drive me to his hospital.

ungsik.jpg: My brother, Ung Sik, a resident medical officer at the ROK Ministry of Justice.

It was against rules to treat civilians at army hospitals, but my brother knew the colonel in charge of the hospital well, and the good colonel, who came from North Korea, agreed to look the other way while my brother took care of his little kid brother. The colonel suggested that the best place for me to stay, as an illegal, unpaid ’patient’, was the mental ward, where all sorts of loonies lurked and no one dared to go in. Mental ward patients wore a woolen cap, the kind that the American GIs wore beneath the helmet, and they could get away with murder, for whatever they did, the staff and other normal patients ‘understood’, because after all, they were crazy and crazy people did crazy things.

Upon my arrival at the hospital, which was a group of tents set up on an empty field near Uijongnu, my brother had me cleaned by a nurse, another North Korean, who insisted that I took off my filthy shorts for her. I was rather reluctant to let her see my underwear because it was so filthy. After several minutes of friendly persuasion, I gave up and she had my shorts, which she washed herself. I could see that my brother and this nurse had some thing going beyond the doctor-nurse relationship. Why else would a nurse wash some guy's filthy underwear?

My brother examined me and pronounced that I needed a surgery right away. What I had was a malignant skin cancer (or something, my brother told me what it was in medical jargon, which I did not understand or recall) and it had to be cut out right away before it could spread inside my body cavity and kill me. My brother’s boss, the hospital commander, a real doctor, examined me and volunteered to perform the surgery himself. He had a nurse scrub the infected area and cut out the rotting flesh off my belly, leaving a large cavity, a dime-sized scar of which is still visible today. The colonel told my brother that I needed post-operation attention for about a week, after which I would be healthy as an ox.

I wore one of those telltale woolen caps and army fatigue, which I wore anyway in connection with my work with the US intelligence. Thus properly attired, I was more or less free to roam the hospital campground. People would smile at me and then hurry away, which was just fine with me. I did not want anyone asking me what unit I was with or what I was doing there. Medical doctors and nurses lived in an army Quonset and the orderlies brought meals there, three square meals of rice, bean sprouts, dofu, kimchi and salty krill, a day. The kitchen staff had the head counts and meals were prepared accordingly. Fortunately for me, some of the doctors and nurses went out for socializing, and there were more uneaten meals than I could consume. I also slept in beds vacated by the doctors on the night out. On several occasions, a guy would bring a nurse or a female doctor in the shared dormitory and engage in unprofessional activities. It was tough for me to lie in bed pretending to be asleep while the moaning and squeaking went on.

I did meet and got to know a real mental case, another North Korean. The poor chap, I don’t recall his name but I will call him Park, was with a Special Forces unit that landed behind enemy lines on a secret mission. Unfortunately, the enemy saw them coming and killed or captured the whole group. Park was wounded and captured by the People’s Army fellows, but was let go because of his wound. He managed to make it back to the friendly line, where his real ordeals began. North Koreans usually released or conscripted captured South Korean soldiers. During the war, some 100,000 South Koreans were captured, of which less than 10,000 were placed in POW camps and the rest were let go or pressed into the People’s Army.

Park crossed the front line and walked into a South Korean camp, expecting some kind of a welcoming party for his heroics behind the enemy lines, but instead, he was arrested, beaten and tortured for weeks by South Korean CIC, counter intelligence, goons. In those days, South Korean Special Forces were issued ‘temporary’ ranks and serial numbers, which were not officially recognized. As far as the regular army was concerned, the special force members were a bunch of draft dodgers or communist spies from North Korea. Their services were not recognized and they received no veteran’s benefits. In fact, they were arrested as draft dodgers and pressed into the regular army, if they were lucky and unlucky ones were shot summarily.

Park had no papers with him and there was no official record of his service, either. The CIC interrogators were sure that Park was sent south to spy and kept on torturing. They told Part, “We know you are a communist spy and we will keep on torturing until you confess”. But Park persisted, repeating his story million times, “I was with a special forces unit. We landed behind the enemy line. We were attacked and I was wounded and escaped. All of my comrades were killed or captured. I am telling the truth. Why don’t you contact the Special Forces HQ and verify my story?” But the HQ refused to confirm Park’s story.

Park was subjected to all kinds of mental and physical tortures. His testicles were smashed, his eyeballs were punctured with sharp needles, and electric shocks were sent through his organs. After a few days of this, Park lost his mind. The CIC men gave up on him and sent him to the field hospital. There was no cure for poor Park and he whiled his life away repeating “I was with a special forces unit,,,,”. Park had no relatives in South Korea and had no place to go. I learned later that Park killed himself a few months after I left the hospital.

It was time for me to leave this cuckoo’s nest. My brother drove me back to Seoul in an Army jeep. He took me to a doctor, a North Korean and a class mate of his at Hamhung Medical College. My brother wanted to make sure that I would receive proper medical care in Seoul. The doctor said he would be happy to take care of me, free of charge. In those days, North Korean émigrés were close-knit and took care of each other. I told my brother that my intelligence unit had a medical facility but he knew how bad it was and would not think of my getting treated by the quacks.

Seoul University Campus Life

My freshmen year at Seoul National University was at the Pusan campus. Even when the People’s Army boxed up Rhee in the Pusan perimeter and closed in on it for the final blow, Rhee had the University in operation. I give the old man credit for believing in education. The campus was made of several US army tents set up on a muddy field. When it rained, it rained often in Pusan, the campus ground turned into a stinking giant cesspool. Our latrines were of a outdoors type and rain falls mixed human wastes with mud all over the campus and classrooms.

Our tent classrooms, of course, had no air-conditioning or heating. Fortunately, winters in Pusan were mild and an extra layer of clothing was enough to keep us from freezing. Summers in Pusan, on the other hand, were hot and humid; making life in tent classrooms extremely hard and moreover, the foul smell of open sewer was suffocating and unbearable. I was lucky in that I spent only a few days on campus, for there was a war going on and I was in the front with the US Army Security Agency.

 ysk1954.gif. The author in Seoul University student uniform in 1954

The campus was surrounded by a sea of hutches, made of cardboard boxes and tin cans, put up by refugees from both North and South Korea. Each hutch held several families and only God knows how many refugees lived in the Hellhole. The refugee city had no modern conveniences, no water, no sewer, no gas, no police and no firemen. It was only a matter of time before a major calamity befell on it. During a chilly winter night, the whole area went up in flames. It was my bad luck to be in town that night. I had to be back to take a final exam and I was staying with a friend’s family in a cardboard hutch. It was unreal; fires were everywhere, people screaming and children crying all around me. The entire area burnt down, killing no one knows how many of the wretched refugees. I hopped on an American jeep bound north and returned to my unit, shaken but safe and sound.

The Seoul campus was a paradise compared to the Pusan campus. The campus was located near the Yi Dynasty palace ground and there were tall ancient trees everywhere and our classrooms were inside modern buildings. There was even a student cafeteria that served daily luncheon specials of curry rice for a few pennies. There were numerous coffee houses around the campus. Coffee houses offered several brands of coffee and they were ideal for people with time to kill to hang around. You would pay for one cup of coffee and stay there until the closing time.

Coffee houses had modern bathrooms and played popular music, more importantly, they hired the best-looking waitresses in town. Coffee houses were ideal for secret rendezvous because there were so many of them in Seoul and the chance of running into unwanted people was virtually zero. I would learn years later that many of the coffee houses were run by Rhee’s secret police and that many unsuspecting souls were caught with loose tongues at coffee houses. Some of the good-looking waitresses were in fact Rhee’s informants out to frame you and collect bloody bounty money.

For many of us, the campus was the only mailing address. I had no permanent address in Seoul. I stayed here and there with friends and friends’ friends. I was a homeless lumpen without a mailing address, and there were many others who were in the same situation. The university had a mailbox for each student and it was God-sent for the refugee students. In addition to the refugees from North Korea on campus, there were many students from rural areas, who were too poor to rent an apartment in Seoul and they, too, lived in transit and used the campus as their permanent mailing address. The only problem with the university postal service was that our mailboxes were wide open and anybody could grab other students’ mail, and therefore, when I expected an important piece of mail, I more or less camped out by my mailbox.

drkim2.jpg. My best friend Kim Sung Whan (right) and I (left) heading out to a Seoul coffee house in 1954.

Another kind of gathering place popular with the students was pancake houses. Korean pancakes, called bin-dae-dduk, were ideal for cash-strapped hungry students, for they were cheap and filling. Pancake houses also sold cheap Korean drinks called mak-kul-le, an alcoholic beverage made from fermented rice and other grains. Until recently, every Korean household made its own brand of mak-kul-le, which Koreans of all age and gender, drank like water. Mak-kul-le was much cheaper than beer or Japanese sake. Mak-kul-le contains a great deal of nutrients and enough of it would make a meal. More significantly, many Koreans did not consider mak-kul-le an alcoholic beverage,  an important consideration for tee-totaling Mormons and other Christians.

I would get together with some of my friends and spend hours at a Korean pancake house, eating, drinking mak-kul-le and singing, until our stomachs could not take any more intake and we got drunk senseless. I would say we invented what today’s people call “kareoki” years ago. Singing at a public place can be hazardous to your health, in fact, it could cost your life. Most of my friends in Seoul came from North Korea and most of the songs they knew were North Korean, which were forbidden in South Korea. To Rhee’s secret police, anyone singing a North Korean song was a communist. Countless parents were arrested and tortured on account of their young children singing Kim Il Sung songs.

A close friend of mine, who went to school with me in Hamhung and Kojedo, was tortured to death by Rhee’s secret police. In one of our mak-kul-le fests, he got drunk and belted out: “If we were to meet again somewhere in the battle field, dear comrades, we will drink together and sing praises of our comradeship bound in our blood…”, which was a Soviet Army ballad popular during World War II. Back in 1950 in Hamhung, this song was popular with the Student Volunteers Army for a month or so, until someone told us that it was a communist song and forbade us to sing it any more. My friend was too drunk to realize that he was singing a communist song and unfortunately, I was not there to stop him. An informant fingered him to the secret police and he was picked up on campus and taken to a torture chamber, where he died.

There were happy pleasant moments, too. Until that time 1954, I have had numerous poppy love affairs, a timid boy dreaming of a girl, but no serious adult love. One of my friends from Kojedo majored in German and persuaded me to minor in German. My major was physics and so mathematics would have been the logical choice for my minor. My German major friend was a hopeless romantic and claimed that he knew a girl just right for me. She was also a German major and I was invited to enroll in a class she was taking, the 19^th Century German literature of Hoelderling. The textbook was in German, of course, and I had to learn German in a great hurry, for my true love hinged on it. 

She was indeed a beauty, coming from a rich family. She had a brother in Germany and she was about to move there to continue her education. Even though my friend hoped that I would see her everyday in class, I could manage only two or three classes in a month because of my work with the American intelligence and I could not get connected with her. Her mind was already in Germany and she made it clear that she would not waste her with a homeless refugee from North Korea. So, my first adult love flopped. Years later, my friend from Kojedo received a graduate degree from a German university and taught at a university in Seoul until his death in 1995.  I do not know what happened to my first true love. I would guess that she married a German fellow and settled down in Germany.

http://www.snu.ac.kr Seoul National University

http://www.escortmap.co.kr/chinese/c_sall.htm  Map of Seoul