My Grandfather’s Korean War Story (Conscription Chapter)

The Korean War story I heard from my grandfather. I will probably be able to share several episodes. I plan to continue it as a series as much as I can.

When the Korean War broke out, conscription began immediately. Our village was the one with the township office in it. Naturally, there was no avoiding the swift exercise of administrative power. The men around my grandfather’s age, who were in their early twenties at the time, were conscripted right away and scattered in every direction. But one of them came back to the village not long after he had left. The story behind it goes like this.

He had climbed onto the cargo bed of some truck and was being carried off without even knowing where it was headed. As he thought it over, no matter how he looked at it, he was now as good as dead. While he was lamenting, choking on the acrid dust, he suddenly grew curious about the pile of cargo loaded onto the truck bed alongside him. When he looked, it was sacks of rice. Figuring he was going to die anyway, he decided he might as well eat first, and he stuffed raw rice into his mouth until his stomach was about to burst. He really did get a stomachache, and right then and there he was given a hardship discharge on family-circumstances grounds. Seeing him come back, everyone rejoiced.

But that was the end of it. Of the people who had been conscripted, not a single one ever came back after that. And so nearly an entire generation vanished. Someone might think this: judging from the fact that I was able to hear this story from that time, surely the only survivor of the village was your very own grandfather. It is a reasonable inference, but there is a slight twist. My grandfather was able to avoid conscription in the very earliest part of the war thanks to my great-grandfather having registered his birth a full seven years late. Probably no one knew it would turn out this way. It was an era when luck and the unexpected were everything.