War Trash (25 page)

After everybody sat down, we began to discuss the agenda of the conference, which was approved unanimously. Then we sent for General Bell.

Bell came in with a ponderous gait and sat down in the defendant's seat. Colonel Choi announced that the conference had begun, and that the first major item on the agenda was to allow Bell to listen to the representatives' accusations and condemnations. He told the general in English, "You can defend yourself, but you must respect facts."

Then the representatives began to speak by turns. The Koreans had prepared a good deal of evidence for the abuse and violence they had suffered, and even claimed that some of their comrades had been coerced into joining the South Korean army. They described how their men had been tortured and killed just because they wanted to return to the North. A number of them had vanished, nobody knowing their whereabouts; had they been shipped away by our captors to some remote place as guinea pigs for the experiments in biochemical weapons? General Bell sat vacantly, perhaps because he couldn't understand much of what they were saying despite the joint effort of two interpreters, who spoke English with abrupt inflections and misplaced accents like beginners.

A tall man stood up and spoke in a hoarse voice, tears streaming down his face. He pointed his forefinger at the defendant and kept shouting. The left side of his face was scarred, burned, he said, by hot irons when he had refused to betray his comrades. He pulled up his shirt to display some dark wounds on his chest, which he kept slapping. He said these scars had been inflicted on him by South Korean guards and GIs. There was also a healed knife gash on his stomach in the shape of a horseshoe, which looked at least ten years old. The Korean interpreter was rendering his accusations into broken English that was hard to follow, but the main drift was clear. He was saying how he had been refused medical treatment because he wouldn't speak into a tape recorder.

After him, a squat man spoke. He said an American officer had given him a steel bar and ordered him to murder Mr. Park. He wouldn't do that, so they hung him up on a beam in the torture chamber and thrashed him almost to death. A South Korean sergeant even threatened to cut his anus and feed it to a dog. After this a willowy boy, about eighteen years old, stood up and spoke in a thin voice. He claimed that a GI often groped him when searching him at the gate to his compound.

As the accusers continued speaking, many representatives became enraged and couldn't help but shout at General Bell, who avoided looking at their scowling faces. Every once in a while Bell seemed so absentminded that Colonel Choi would order him to "Pay attention!"

One of the three female representatives, Shunji by name, could speak English. She was a high-cheeked woman of about twenty-five and must have been stout once, but now she looked rawboned with a sunburned face. She stood up and began speaking with emotion. Her voice was clear, though her accent muffled her words somewhat. She said many of the women inmates had been abused by the prison guards, who would beat and curse them at will. Some South Korean men had even burned their faces and chests with cigarettes in the presence of American officers, who had always shut their eyes to all lands of physical abuse. Shunji lifted her foot, put it on the table, and pulled up the baggy leg of her pants all the way to her thigh, which was rather skinny compared with her large body. Indeed, about a dozen brownish burns dotted her leg, each the size of a kidney bean. She also said that a girl of eighteen in their compound had been raped by four American soldiers before she was delivered to the prison camp, and that later she had given birth to a fair-skinned boy with green eyes. The malnourished mother died of heart disease afterward; now the baby was still in their barracks, as the youngest prisoner.

While she was speaking, the small woman seated beside me started sobbing. Shunji pointed at her and said, "She's been paraded through the streets of Seoul for two days, together with more than thirty sisters. The American imperialists and their Korean running dogs ride in jeeps and on big horses, whip them, and order them to take off their clothes, so all people can see them naked. They call them whores and spit on them. Some throw stones at them and beat them with canes and sticks. One of the sisters is five months pregnant, but no matter how she begs them, they go on whacking her, force her to take off her pajamas and carry an A-frame on her back, so all the passersby can make fun of her. Here's my comrade, she's living evidence of your crimes. Look at her back!" She helped the small, moon-faced woman to her feet, made her turn around, and pulled up her shirt from behind. The woman's back was a mess, marked by scars and blood-encrusted welts.

"Look at her face," said Shunji, pointing to the other woman still in her seat. All eyes turned to that face, spotted with scabs. She was quite young, under twenty, with tender, healthy skin on her neck; her blemished face must have been quite pretty once. She got up too and began speaking through Shunji as her interpreter. She said she had been a guerrilla and had been caught by Americans, who then handed her over to the South Korean police along with twenty of her comrades. They beat her, beheaded several male guerrillas in front of a large crowd, and even forced her to hold her elder brother's decapitated head so that they could take a photo of her. To this day she still had nightmares and often screamed and writhed in bed at night, wrestling ghosts. Why did the police treat human beings worse than animals? Why did the Americans encourage and connive with them? Why did GIs cross the Pacific Ocean and come to this land to ruin their lives? Her voice was growing shriller and shriller as she continued. She was so choked with emotion that her words gradually became incoherent, hard for Shunji to interpret. Finally she stopped in midsentence, then the three women held one another and broke out wailing.

A man jumped up and rushed toward General Bell, his arms flailing wildly; he was yelling like crazy, but two representatives restrained him. He said he and his comrades had also been ordered by Americans to undress completely when they were captured. The GIs thrashed their buttocks with rifle butts and jabbed the muzzles of the guns in their crotches. As a result, one of the men still had blood in his semen to this day.

Like everybody else, I was angry too, as I remembered how some men had been tortured by the pro-Nationalists. Colonel Choi told us to remain coolheaded, reminding us that Bell was just an officer who had to obey orders given by the real criminals – the U.S. government and Wall Street.

I saw Bell 's large hands, hairy and veined, shaking a little. He held the edge of the table to stop them from trembling and fixed his eyes on the teacup in front of him. Now and then he bit his lower lip.

In the afternoon the accusations and condemnations resumed. A Korean officer, who had lost his left arm, accused the medical personnel under the defendants command of amputating his good hand. He rushed over to General Bell and shouted in English, "Drue or not?" His only fist punched the tabletop, but he didn't touch Bell as we had been ordered not to.

The general stood up and said, "I'm not sure. Some of the awful things you mentioned I know might have happened, but some I don't think are true. I shall look into them nonetheless."

He remained on his feet even after the Korean officer had returned to his own seat. Colonel Choi asked Bell to sit down, and said, "We're Communists and won't treat you the way your men treat us. We respect your human dignity and will not insult and abuse you. But as an American general, you must have the courage to face the facts."

Bell nodded, sweat beading on his domed forehead.

At the midafternoon recess Chaolin and I talked about our prepared speech scheduled for delivery the following day. We felt that although we had written it out, we should present more evidence. Also, it would be impossible for me to translate our lengthy accusation into English that very night by myself; I would need help. So Chaolin went to talk with Colonel Lee and returned to Compound 602 in a jeep after dinner under the pretext of fetching a witness. The truth was that he wanted to report to Commissar Pei on the current state of affairs. At the preliminary meeting the night before, there had been a heated argument over how to handle General Bell should the enemy resort to force to rescue him. Some Korean officers insisted that they fight back with all their might, and that if need be, they should execute Bell and blame his death on the Americans' indiscriminate gunfire. Some people disagreed, saying this suggestion bordered on adventurism. Chaolin argued that we should protect Bell at all events. If the enemy attacked us, we should smuggle Bell into another compound (the Koreans had some kind of underground connection facilitated by their agents among the guards). As long as Bell remained alive in our hands, we would have an edge on the enemy. Mr. Park praised Chaolin's idea, but they were still uncertain whether Bell would cooperate with us. What if he refused to sign any agreement? The answer to this question remained unclear. Chaolin was eager to go back and consult Commissar Pei, who was more experienced and could give us instructions.

An hour later Chaolin returned with Ming and another man, Wu Gaochen, who had witnessed the bloodshed in the Third Collection Center in Pusan during the "screening" a month ago. That night together Ming and I revised our speech for the following day; then we translated the whole thing and the gist of Wu's accusation into English.

While we two were working, I told him that we had eaten dumplings the night before. He slapped me on the shoulder and said, "Damn, I should've come with Chaolin first. You stole my luck."

"Maybe tomorrow they'll give us some goodies again," I said.

"Hope so." He turned away to check an English word in our dictionary. In fact, for the rest of the conference we ate the same food as the other prisoners.

The next morning the condemnations resumed. Our man Wu Gaochen stood up and spoke. We had given General Bell the English version of his accusation, so there was no need for me to translate Gaochen's words orally. Colonel Lee had our material in Chinese and interpreted it directly from the paper for his comrades while Gaochen was speaking. In a torn voice the accuser described the violent incident that had occurred in the Third Collection Center about a month before. He told this story, which he had rehearsed twice the previous night:

"On the evening of April fourteenth two battalions of GIs surrounded our compound. Together with them were six Sherman tanks. Through a loudspeaker they ordered us to come out of our tents within five minutes and to go through the screening, which was held just outside our compound. But five minutes passed, and nobody went out. The loudspeaker ordered us again and gave us another five minutes. When the time was up, still no one had come out. They repeated the orders several times. Then about an hour later they took action. Two tanks rolled into the compound, followed by a platoon of GIs. They came to move us by force, and we resisted them with whatever we could lay our hands on. In the scuffle we beat up some GIs and grabbed two rifles from them. Because there were more prisoners involved in the fight than they'd expected, the GIs were scared and withdrew from the compound. Even the tanks turned back. This enraged their commander, who ordered another attack twenty minutes later. They fired machine guns and threw grenades at us. Instantly, thirty-four comrades were killed and more than fifty wounded. Since it was impossible to resist them with bare hands, about two hundred of us agreed to submit to the screening. Also, many of us were ill and starved and couldn't fight back at all. Their gas bombs nauseated us and stung our eyes, and we couldn't breathe and vomited repeatedly. So the Americans rounded us up and took us to the screening area.

"Both my cousin and I were among the two hundred men. Before this massacre, we two had talked about what to do if we were forced to go through the screening, and we were both determined to return home at any cost. Now all the men lined up, but we were allowed to go up to the screening desk only one at a time. When my turn came, an American officer asked me, 'Do you want to go to Free China?' 'Where's that?' I said; I truly didn't know what country it was. ' Formosa,' the man said. 'No, I want to go back to mainland China,' I told him. He handed me a card. 'Go there and join those men,' he said and pointed at a door. That's how I avoided going to Taiwan. But afterward I searched through the crowd in the yard and couldn't find my cousin. Someone told me that he had betrayed our motherland. That was impossible! We had sworn to go home together. I was so worried I burst into tears. What happened was that he had mistaken Free China for mainland China, so he'd said yes to the question. As a matter of fact, another four men from our group had made the same mistake and all had landed in the enemy's hands.

"Now, General Bell, you tell me, why did your American army force us to go through the screening? And why did you purposely set the trap for us at the screening desk? Two of the four men were loyal

Communists and couldn't have been willing to join the Nationalist ranks at all, but they were tricked into the demons' den. Before I came to Korea, I had promised my uncle and aunt to take care of my younger cousin. Now he's gone, what can I say to his parents?" Gaochen broke into noisy sobs, which made his words unintelligible. A Korean man handed him a towel.

His accusation seemed to affect General Bell, who sighed, chin in palm, his elbow resting on the table. "There're lots of crimes in the war, but I can't be responsible for all of them," he said in a low voice.

In fact, Gaochen's story of the massacre wasn't the entire picture. He had left out the immediate cause of the incident: the Chinese prisoners had planned an uprising at night, to break prison, attack an American company nearby, seize some weapons, then flee to a mountain where they would carry on guerrilla warfare. But a traitor among them stole away to inform the guards. That was why such a large force came to subdue the prisoners. Of course, when preparing the accusation, we were told to expunge the cause of the incident. Neither General Bell nor the Koreans could know the whole story.