Ha Jin: War Trash

Having waited four days without hearing from the three men, we decided to seek a way out by ourselves. It was dangerous to remain in the same area for too long. We set off north, without any specific goal in mind. After about three miles we spotted the enemy on a hilltop. They saw us too and opened fire; we scrambled into the larch woods nearby. As we ran away, bullets swished past, clipping branches and twigs. It was clear now that the three officers must have fallen into the enemy's hands.

We climbed a foothill and went down into a small valley. From there we saw a puff of wood smoke rising from a hill slope. Some civilians must have been over there, so we headed stealthily toward the fire. Coming closer, I smelled something like cooked rice and my heart leaped. Then a clearing emerged, in which a middle-aged Korean woman in a long white dress was chopping brushwood with a hatchet to feed the fire under a dark pot. At the sight of us, she yelled and dropped the ax and ran back into a shed built of wattles and bundles of cornstalks.

We loudly ordered her to come out, but she didn't stir. We waited a few minutes, then entered the doorless shed. Inside crouched four women. One of them was quite young, under twenty, her middle finger wearing an aluminum thimble. They looked clean and all wore the same kind of shoes that resembled miniature boats, made completely of gray rubber. The folded blankets and the indented straw on the ground indicated that they lived here, hiding from soldiers. They cowered together, shivering, and one broke out sobbing. We couldn't understand their language, so it was impossible to get anything from them. We brought them out of the shed; they were still trembling in the sun. When I removed the lid from the pot, a wave of steam rushed up with a sizzle. The rice looked glutinous and smelled overwhelmingly fragrant. I was amazed that under such circumstances they still had fresh rice. I had seen Korean families eat watery soup with only a few rice grains in it. Now all eyes turned my way, fixed on the cast-iron pot. I was sure that if the commissar had not been around, we would have wolfed down the food without hesitation. Pei took out his notebook and wrote "Chinese men," then stepped closer to the women and showed them the characters. He told them we wouldn't harm civilians and they mustn't be afraid. The oldest of them raised her thumb to acknowledge that we were a good army, though apparently they couldn't make out what Pei was saying. Then he wrote "Rice" on the paper and flashed it at them again.

"Opsumnida!" said the same woman, shaking her face, which was as furrowed as a walnut. Perhaps she meant "We don't have any."

I asked the youngest of them in English, "Where is your home?" She couldn't understand me and kept shaking her head. If only one of us had been able to speak Korean. Or if only we'd had a few bottles of penicillin powder or atabrine pills, which I was sure we could exchange with them for food. Korean women were very fond of medicines and cosmetics, even soap and toothpaste. We kept glancing at their pot, but dared not touch the rice.

The encounter with the civilians convinced us that there must be grain hidden somewhere. We stayed up on the opposite hill and kept a close watch on the women, but they never came out of the clearing in the daytime. They seemed aware they were under surveillance. We figured they must have lived in the village at the southern end of the valley. So at night we went there to dig around among the razed houses in hope of finding some edibles. We found nothing.

Then one day we happened on another burned village, which we watched from a distance but dared not approach while it was still light. Though there seemed to be nothing left there, a wisp of smoke rose from the ruins. As we wondered if someone was cooking over there, a stocky woman came out of the village, heading toward the hill slope in the east. We followed her through binoculars and saw her enter the bushes. Five or six minutes later she reappeared with a bulging sack that must have held grain. So after dark, we went over to dig in the bushes and found a sack of rice too, about fifty pounds. Regulations said that we must never take anything from civilians, but we were hungry and some of us were dying. Commissar Pei took out his notebook and wrote an IOU, saying that we had borrowed the grain and would compensate its owner when our army came again to liberate South Korea. He placed the piece of paper into the empty pit and held it down with a cobblestone. The words were in a running script; I suspected that the owner would never figure out the meaning and would curse us like mad.

If only we'd had money to pay them. In contrast to us, the North Korean army was loaded with cash; every man had bales of it, because they had seized the South Korean government's currency plates in Seoul. Their soldiers always paid for everything they took from civilians, who were pleased but didn't know the banknotes were losing value. I often wondered why the North Koreans wouldn't share some of the money with us. I guessed our top generals must have been too proud to ask them such a favor.

To avoid being pursued by the enemy, we moved farther south, deeper into hostile territory. Since most fields had not been sown, we didn't expect to have ripe crops to eat in the fall, but there were orchards and groves of chestnut trees on some hills. We all hoped that our army would launch the sixth-phase offensive soon so that we could rejoin them. We didn't know that from now on there would be no offensives anymore – the war had reached a stalemate.

We settled in a wooded valley where a brook flowed. In the evening frogs croaked in the water. The next day we began to catch frogs, which were a delicacy to us. We would skewer about a dozen of them on a whittled branch and roast them over a fire. But within three days all the frogs had been eaten up, and no croaking rose up at night anymore. Once in a while we heard a wild animal howling, a wolf or a leopard, but we couldn't go hunting them because we dared not fire our guns.

Time and again we sent out men to search for grain. With few exceptions they would run into the enemy, and some of them would get killed. On average every twenty pounds of rice cost one man, so we mainly ate herbs, grass, and mushrooms, waiting for the fall when the wild chestnuts would ripen. Once about two dozen men were poisoned by a whitish fungus, which looked like tree ears and was juicy and crunchy, quite tasty. Half of us ate some, myself included. Afterward we collapsed, and a few men began groaning and rolling around with cramps in their stomachs. Fortunately Dr. Wang didn't eat any. He boiled several cauldrons of water and made us drink our fill so that we could excrete the poison. I was sweating so much that my vision was blurred. It took two days for us to mend, though nobody died this time.

To shelter ourselves from the elements, we fetched crates left by the Americans along the road and used them to prop up sheets of corrugated iron we had dislodged from a dilapidated shack abandoned by charcoal burners. We also spread pieces of cardboard on the ground so that we could sleep on them. I hated to go to the road north of the mountain, because it smelled awful there, the air rife with decomposing bodies, Chinese and Koreans and Americans, all left behind, unburied. Back in China, at the Huangpu Military Academy, we had been instructed that in a battle the dead must be buried quietly, as soon as possible, so that the troops couldn't see them; otherwise the sight of the corpses would weaken their morale. But here, in a real war, nobody cared.

The woods were deep here, providing good cover. During the day we would move about as little as possible; most of the time I just lay in the shade resting. Some calmness settled over me. I had with me a paperback of Uncle Tom's Cabin in the English original, which I often read with the help of the dictionary. Commissar Pei regretted not having brought along a full-length book; in his bag he had only a few booklets that were mere propaganda material. He mixed well with the soldiers, who could endure anything but the silence in the mountains.