Ha Jin: War Trash

Originally I had thought I would be assigned to lead a team of the wounded men, but Pei had ordered both Tiger and me to stay close to him. Perhaps he was scared too. Tiger carried on his back a leather bag containing Pei 's personal belongings. The commissar, suffering from a stomachache caused by an ulcer, pressed his fist against his belly from time to time. He told us that if we couldn't break out of the trap, we would go to the mountains and wage guerrilla war, waiting for an opportunity to return to North Korea.

To our horror, at daybreak the two teams behind us had vanished. We couldn't see whether they had purposely quit following us, or had been captured by the enemy, or were simply too exhausted to march anymore. I guessed they might have disbanded of their own accord. Now we had about eighty men with us, most of whom had belonged to the Guards Company and the Mountain Gun Battalion. Many officers were also in this group.

After a month of hiding in the daytime and trying in vain to find a rift in the enemy's encirclement, our team was reduced to thirty-four men. Whenever someone was killed or disappeared, I couldn't help but think about my promises to my mother and Julan. It seemed unlikely I would be able to make it home. But in spite of my fear and sadness, I forced myself to appear cheerful, especially in the presence of Commissar Pei, who always insisted that at all costs we must survive. Some of the remaining officers were familiar with guerrilla tactics. Our team leader, Yan Wenjin, the director of the divisional security section, had led dozens of guerrillas in both the war against the Japanese and the civil war. But we were in a foreign country now. Without the knowledge of its language, its terrain, and its people, how could we get the civilians' support that was the basis of guerrilla warfare?

Hunger was our most pressing problem. During the day we picked wild grapes and berries on the mountain, though we dared not move about conspicuously. The wild fruits, tiny and bitter, numbed our tongues and made a greenish saliva dribble out from the corners of our mouths. Commissar Pei couldn't eat what we gathered because of his ulcer, but he encouraged us to search for fruits and herbs for ourselves.

One morning Yan Wenjin ran over and beamed, "There's a dead horse in the woods!"

We all went over to take a look. The horse, a Mongolian sorrel, had been dead for some days. Its hair had begun to fall off, and the gun wound in its chest festered with rings of maggots like a large white chrysanthemum. Flies droned over it madly even though a man wielded a leafy branch to drive them away. Yet we were elated to find the carcass and immediately set about looking for bayonets, wooden shell boxes, and steel helmets. I went up a slope with two men to search the area beyond a patch of dwarf fir trees. As we walked, flocks of crows took off, cawing fitfully. Behind a low rise we came across four dead South Korean soldiers. In the middle of them lay a Chinese soldier, whose head was smashed and whose face was gone, eaten up by birds. Around him were scattered splinters of wooden grenade handles. Clearly he had detonated the grenades and died together with the enemy. We carried his body into a cavity under a juniper and covered him with stones and green branches. After saluting him, we went back with two bayonets and an empty box that had contained mortar shells. We had also found a brass lighter in a Korean man's pocket. The other groups brought back a bayonet, three helmets, and some wooden cartridge boxes too. From God knows where one man returned with a dented field cauldron.

Immediately they started butchering the horse. The air turned putrid as dark sticky blood dripped onto the ground. Soon, large chunks of the meat were being boiled in the cauldron, which had been propped on a horseshoe of rocks. Dr. Wang limped over. Frowning, he had a look at the carcass and then with a pair of tweezers poked the horsemeat in the pot. He said in a thin voice, "The meat is rotten. You'll get poisoned if you eat it."

Disappointed, we walked away to wash our bloody hands in a puddle of rainwater. Some men couldn't stop swearing.

To solve the problem of hunger, Yan Wenjin offered to go down the mountain with five men to search for grain. Commissar Pei let them go. They left after sunset, and we waited for them anxiously. But for five days we heard nothing from them. Later in the prison camp I learned that they had ambushed an American truck transporting a squad of GIs and some supplies. Three of them had been killed by a machine gun, and Yan Wenjin had been hit in the stomach and died on the way to the hospital. After that failed attempt, smaller groups were sent down the mountain to search for food, but none of them ever came back. By chance, I had seen through binoculars how three of our men fell into the enemy's hands. It was overcast that morning, but the air was clear. As our comrades were approaching the foot of the southern hill, suddenly about twenty GIs with two wolf dogs appeared in front of them. Our men swung aside, dashing away in different directions, but the Americans caught up with them and brought them down, some kicking them furiously and some stomping on their chests. For a moment a cloud of dust obscured the human figures. When I could see again, the dogs were springing at our men and tearing at their limbs. Viewed from the distance of one and a half miles, the whole scene was eerily quiet, without a single shot fired. Horrified, I reported the loss to Commissar Pei. His face fell, and for hours he didn't speak a word.

During this period of hiding, several men starved to death. However hard we tried, we simply couldn't get any grain and had to live on wild herbs and fruits, which day by day were becoming scarcer.

One afternoon a band of bareheaded soldiers emerged in the southeast, moving toward us. They looked like a platoon. After observing them through binoculars, Commissar Pei decided they were our men. Indeed as they were coming closer, we recognized their leader, Wan Shumin, who had been the deputy commander of an engineering company. Before we withdrew from Jiader Hill, he had led two squads to demolish a bridge on a roadway. They carried out the mission but were cut off from us and trapped in that area. Since then, they had roamed around to elude the enemy and look for a way to return north, to no avail. Two days before, near Maping Village, they had picked up a large sack of sorghum that smelled of gasoline. They hated to use up all the grain themselves, so now they offered some to us. We were all delighted, not just about the food, but more importantly, that these men were unwounded and less combat-fatigued. Their arrival increased our fighting capacity and made us feel like a functional unit again.

Commissar Pei 's mood often affected us. He was our mainstay, as though he had always known what to do and where to go. In fact he was just ten years older than most of us. When he was happy, we tended to be in good spirits too. Unfortunately, thanks to his ulcer, he was gloomy and miserable most of the time. But he could eat sorghum porridge now, so we saved half a bag of the grain for him, about thirty pounds. Luckily Tiger found a bottle of multiple vitamins and a pack of Fortress cigarettes in a secret pocket of the leather bag he had carried for the commissar. Pei offered a cigarette to everyone who was present. I didn't smoke at that time, so I declined.

From that day on Pei took three vitamin pills a day, which helped him a good deal. In addition, the cook boiled sorghum porridge so well for him that it looked almost like paste, and soon Pei stopped regurgitating food. Miraculously his ulcer began to heal.

Once again we attempted to find our way out of the hostile territory. A group of three men, all officers, was sent out to probe the enemy's positions, but they didn't come back. They were all Party members, unlikely to have deserted. Actually desertion made no sense if they wanted to go back to China alive, because they couldn't mix with Korean civilians and would be easily identified. Logically speaking, the only way to survive was to surrender to the enemy. But most of us, terrified by the propaganda that described in grisly detail how the Americans had tortured Chinese POWs, dared not think of capitulation. We had been told that the enemy would turn most captives into guinea pigs for testing biochemical weapons. As a result, many of us thought we would prefer death to captivity.