News-Info-Alerts

Re: 50 Years Later, Ex-POW Discharged From Army

From: POW-MIA InterNetwork

Date: July 21, 2003

"Kim gets his army discharge after being held in North Korea for over 50 years.
It took 50 years for Korean War POW to get home

SANG-HUN CHOE; The Associated Press

SEOUL, South Korea - On Sept. 24, 2001, the South Korean army's "Tiger" division gave Sgt. Kim an honor guard ceremony, discharging him after counting him as killed in action for half a century.

"I couldn't tell whether it was a dream or not," says Kim, 75, a slight, wrinkled man with a shy smile.

For Kim, it was a long journey home. When he escaped North Korea in 2001 after five decades of captivity, he was one of the last Korean War prisoners to return home from the communist North.

South Korea believes at least 400 POWs from the South may still be alive in the North. Their fate is unresolved, like that of the war that ended in an armistice 50 years ago next Sunday.

As for American servicemen who may still be in North Korea, the U.S. government has never asserted publicly that there are any, although in 1996 a Pentagon analyst wrote in an internal report that 10 to 15 "possible POWs" probably were in communist captivity.

Kim and his North Korean wife talked to The Associated Press on condition that only their last names be released, and not the name of their town, fearing for the seven children they left in the North.

Kim's unit was in the front lines when communist troops poured over the 38th parallel on June 25, 1950. Kim found himself "on my own, tumbling down the hills."

By mid-October, he was among 700 POWs in an old colonial Japanese military camp in Hoeryong, a coal-mining town at North Korea's northeastern tip.

"We only had one sheet of cloth we had on when we were caught. We fought over the few rice-straw mats thrown in," Kim said. "We starved and were so weak we had to crawl or take one step at a time leaning against the wall to go to the rest room."

After the 1953 cease-fire, 8,341 South Korean POWs and 3,748 U.S. soldiers were traded for 83,000 North Koreans and Chinese.

But North Korea refused to return thousands of other South Korean prisoners, calling them "liberated soldiers" who wanted to stay in the North. Kim knew that to ask to go home could invite punishment. And so, he says, "I spent my next 50 years toiling at a brick kiln."

In March 2001, a man came to Kim and said, "You are from the South, and I know a way to get you there." So-called "brokers" smuggle people out of North Korea, bribing border guards and getting help from human rights activists.

Kim's brother in Seoul financed his escape. Kim got nearly $300,000 from the South Korean government in back pay and pension and spent about $42,000 to get his wife out of North Korea in December. Now they want to bring an unmarried daughter to South Korea. They wish their other children could come, but realize they have families of their own.

"My heart pounds when I think about my children and grandchildren in the North," Kim's wife said.

© 2003 Tacoma News, Inc."