100 Bojagis for Peace Washington DC, July 25th, 2010

These are excerpts from the interviews that played on speakers folded within the bojagis as part of the art exhibit.

Professor Ji, 84 years old, New York
I must have been in my early 20s when the war happened. It was a bit weird. Just one week prior to June 25, 1950, I was sent by my company to Busan on a business trip. Otherwise, I would have been dead or I would have been drafted to the army. Coming back from Japan after the liberation and not being able to go to my hometown due to the 38th parallel, I was just a young person without any family or relatives in Seoul. With a twisted luck, well, I am not sure if I should call it luck, but, I was in Busan at the time of the Korean War.

Living as a refugee was very hard and scary. The makeshift houses on top of mountains were often without any water. We didn’t have blankets. If you could share a blanket with 4-5 other people, you considered yourself lucky. We would have to climb down to the village to get drinking water and then climb back up the mountains. I don’t know how I survived. It was scary. It killed a lot of people, and made a lot of people suffer.

Now, when I look at the first generation Koreans in the U.S., I feel that they are losing their identity as Koreans. 2nd and 3rd generation Koreans have more interests in Korea. The immigrants from 70s and 80s lost their memories about the war. Recently, the President of South Korea stated that he is not afraid of a war. People forget about the war. The immigrants are mainly anti-communist, or rather anti-north. They do not understand how miserable a war is. They just think of conquering the North. We do not need a war in Korean peninsula. If there is a war, the entire Korean peninsula will suffer and be destroyed. At the time of Korean War, the weapons were still conventional and devastating. Now, we have more advanced weaponry. The entire Korea will disappear. I am sure if people realize that.

Peter Bronson, 76 years old, New York, Korean War Veteran
The reason I joined the military - part of it was, it was something to do and it was a way of getting away from home, and of course, there was the thrill of seeing the world. You don’t’ think you’ll end up in a place like Korea…

When squadron planes came in, we serviced them… The only time I thought about the war was when we had to load up munitions.., I don’t think I ever thought about where those bombs were going, or who would be at the other end of them. That’s the sad thing that I realize now.



Soo Kim, 66 years old, New Jersey
I was born in 1944, one year before the liberation. So, I was 6 years old when the war happened in 1950… I was hurt by a machine gun from an airplane, often erroneously called an “Australian plane” or the F-86. I lived in Nonsan, which was a very small village in Choongchung province. Now, due to the ROK Army Training Ground built near Nonsan everyone knows the name of city, but back then it was a really tiny rural village. In my memory, many of those fighter jets covered the whole sky. They came and started to fire on everything in the village. The airplanes destroyed the entire village and there were fires everywhere. They also destroyed the only bridge that connected our village to Booyeo and Gongju, bigger cities further north. The debris came into our town and broke ceramic pots in the yards. The date would be around July 26 or 27, 1950.

I was not the only one who was shot. My younger brother was three and my sister was nine when we were shot in the bedroom of our house. All three of us. My older sister was shot in the thigh. Another brother who was about 10 years older than me, with his youthful curiosity, went out to the front yard when we heard the sounds of airplanes. He was jumping and waving when the firing began. He also survived through all the debris flying and fires the guns caused.

It was hard for us to be medically treated and taken care of. We didn’t even have much to eat. My mom used to put pumpkin paste in our wounds, which became a good hatching place for flies and other insects. Terrible, isn’t it? When the infection was severe, my mom put all three of us in a handcart and pulled it with camouflage on top. She did this to get us to the next town and have our wounds treated at a clinic run by the Communist Army. Without the camouflaged handcart, the U.S. airplanes would drop a bomb on us or use machine guns.

Even with that incident, I still believed that the U.S. army was our permanent ally and I was grateful for their assistance until about 15 years ago. I guess I never doubted why that incident happened. Civilian killings committed by the U.S. army became public in the mid 1990s. Then, I learned that it was a crime. I began to think of that day again. I know many farmers and their horses were killed that day. I don’t know if any Red Army members were killed. I read about the Truth and Reconciliation Committee investigating various civilian mass killings during the Korean War. I have not heard anything about the shooting in Nonsan, though. The only reference to the Nonsan killing was made in a novel, “Taebaek Mountains,” written by Cho, Jung-rae. I would like to do some investigation myself. I want to know who made that order to shoot and why -and how many civilians and their horses were killed.



Lee Jae-on, 66 years old, New York
On June 25, 1950, I was in grade school. They said a war broke out, so I fled with my mother and became a refugee. We were supposed to go to Yang-ju to meet our father, so my mother carried two of my younger siblings on her back, and I held her hand with one hand and another younger sibling’s hand with the other, and we set out to Yang-ju. It took us an entire day to get there. After a month, they said Seoul was recaptured, so we left for Seoul. After we arrived in Seoul, the Chinese air force intervened, so we had to flee again. We were on a truck, and it was packed. Over fifty people and their essential belongings were on that truck, and people were sitting on top of people’s things and hanging off the truck. We headed for Busan, I think we stayed there for about three months, in a huge school auditorium. Government officials and their families, and refugees all lived together, over a hundred families. We all cooked for ourselves, but nobody had enough food to eat.

There were children dying of starvation. And I saw a mother taking in other people’s children and feeding them out of pity, even though she didn’t have enough to feed herself and her own family. I learned then what it means to have compassion for our people. Just like mothers who saw their neighbors’ starving children and divided scarce food to feed them during the war, we should protect the North Korean people.

Sixty years. Sixty years is one person’s lifetime. An entire generation’s lifetime has passed. Reunification must happen. Without reunification, we get used by foreign powers. Korea’s division is like an obstruction in a blood vessel. Reunification is like removing that obstruction and allowing blood to circulate freely to nourish the entire body.

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Nodutdol eNews is the monthly e-mail newsletter of Nodutdol.Through grassroots organization and community development, Nodutdol seeks to bridge divisions created by war, nation, gender, sexual orientation, language, classes and generation among Koreans and to empower our community to address the injustice we and other people of color face here and abroad. Nodutdol works in collaboration with other progressive organizations locally, nationally and internationally as part of a larger movement for peace and social change.

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