(Yonhap Feature) Soldiers buried with stories of longing for home

By Sam Kim
HWACHEON, South Korea, May 19 (Yonhap) -- Underneath a string of valleys grown
lush in the May sun lie tens of thousands of men who fought decades ago in what
historians describe as a forgotten war on the Korean Peninsula.
The troops -- Koreans, Americans and Chinese -- mingled with each other on the
battlefield, thrusting bayonets and firing rifles at their opponents, until the
1950-53 Korean War halted in a ceasefire.
Now they lie in silence, waiting to be returned by their fellow countrymen, to
their home and their families.
"There is no greater deed" than to discover the remains of soldiers missing from
a conflict and return them to their loved ones, said Captain Mark Welch, chief of
a 12-member U.S. team conducting a joint excavation project with South Korea.
The team from the Hawaii-based U.S. Joint Prisoners of War, Missing in Action
Accounting Command (JPAC) have been digging a strip of land about the size of
three sedans near a farmhouse in this remote town, just over 110 kilometers
northeast of Seoul, since last week.
Having cordoned the hill where North Korean-Chinese forces clashed with South
Korean-U.S. troops, the team said it has extracted bone shards and items believed
to have belonged to an American soldier.
"Just a small amount of bone fragments," said Jay Silverstein, an archaeologist
working with JPAC, also showing an American-made fountain pen covered in rust and
broken in half.
"In the 1950s, for soldiers, writing letters was very important. That was their
only way to communicate back home," he said, adding a pair of empty bullet
cartridges, a four-hole button and a part of a buckle to his collection of
discoveries.
About 8,100 American soldiers remain unaccounted for from the Korean War, which
technically continues to this day. Many of them are believed to be buried on the
North Korean side of the peninsula.
"I'm disappointed that politics interferes with human rights," said Silverstein,
who was forced to leave the communist state in 2005 after tensions spiked over
North Korea's nuclear weapons programs.
"I remember one (American) fellow I found," he said. "He had a pack of Lucky
Strikes in his shirt pocket that had nearly decomposed, but you could see the
stain from the cigarette pack. He had a newspaper clipping. He was a World War II
veteran who fought in Italy."
Hwacheon is just two dozen kilometers south of the border between the Koreas. The
frontier remains one of the world's most heavily armed areas, thick with mines
and the untold stories of soldiers whose bodies were buried in a rudimentary
fashion and never retrieved.
Forty percent of those missing are believed to be in either North Korea or the
Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), a 4-kilometer-wide buffer bisecting the peninsula,
according to defense officials in Seoul.
South Korea and the U.S. plan to start a joint excavation of the DMZ next year.
Col. Park Sin-han, the top South Korean excavation official, said mines pose the
biggest threat, but hoped that the foray would prompt North Korea to join their
efforts once again.
"This is a task that should transcend political interests. All soldiers want to
return home, whether they are North or South Korean, and all families want to
know where their loved ones are," he said.
Silverstein recalled the experience of working with North Koreans as "very
pleasant."
"They gave me a lot of hope for the future that relations between the North and
the South and the West would someday improve," he said. "I found them very
reasonable."
The joint excavation in Hwacheon and three other sites in South Korea is
scheduled to end on June 13, according to the workers.
Silverstein voiced hope that time would be on his side, telling the story of a
widow who passed away just before he was about to inform her that her husband, a
U.S. soldier who died in the Pacific War, had been wearing a bracelet that said
"Love, Barbara."
"I remember thinking his wife must have sent him this as an anniversary present,
and that he received it and was wearing it when his plane crashed," he said. "She
may never have known he received it. I tracked her down, and found out she had
also died recently."
South Korea has discovered the remains of about 2,500 of its soldiers who died
during the war. Eleven U.N. troops and 630 enemy soldiers were also found while
another 200 are being examined to determine which side they were on.
The U.S., which fought under the U.N. command, maintains a force of 28,500 troops
in South Korea as a deterrent against North Korea.
samkim@yna.co.kr
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