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The Soldiers Don't Forget. An important headquarters city in South Korea. On a luminous, sunny morning we are driving from the city southward toward our lines. Our jeep has to halt in the city street: in its path is a long, long file of refugees from the fighting areas. Watching them, I understand all that I have just been hearing about the danger of mass enemy infiltration even here, a good 40 miles from the nearest fighting. There are old men, and women, and young girls and children in the line. But there are also many young men. Most of them carry packs, apparently of extra clothing. They plod by, eyes down, backs bent, legs pumping up & down in the stiff and universal fashion of the burden bearers of Asia. At some point, in theory, they will be screened by Korean authorities and placed in temporary camps. But when? Where? Sitting in the jeep, watching them march by without escort, I knew the constricting doubt and fear that every American in Korea comes to know as he watches those silent strangers, to whom he cannot speak, filing down the roads, across the paddies and through the cities of the south.
Come now to a hilltop in southwest Korea. The hillside falls steeply to a river and a valley of paddies. Just across the valley is a schoolhouse, now the forward command post of an American infantry unit. Twice on this day, just before our arrival, this post had been attacked by hundreds of North Koreans who emerged without warning from the hills and very nearly overran our position. From the hilltop where we now stand, soldiers of an American machine gun squad had seen the repulsed enemy retire beyond the range and then, in plain sight of our men, calmly change from the green uniforms of the North Korean army to the white trousers and blouses of Korean peasants. The soldiers watching from the hill do not forget; every time they see a column of peasants coming toward them they reach for their guns, and sometimes they use their guns.
The Road to Nowhere. It is 6 o'clock on another morning at another place. Our command post is in a village at the foot of a valley, our men disposed across the rusty hills 2,000 and 3,000 yards beyond the post, and now, in the half-light of early morning, distant figures in white are walking down a road from the hills.
A few G.I.s, tired after a harassing night of intermittent alarms and firing, go taut, take up their rifles and walk stiff-legged toward the end of the village street nearest the oncoming people in white. One of the G.I.s says, "Christamighty, look there," and points across the paddies to our right. An old man with a stick in his hand leads the column on the road. Other men, not young, seem to be leading their families across the paddies.
They are evidently in their Sunday best —small white blouses, black cotton trousers on the boys and skirts on the little girls standing out like little dots from the all-white clothing of the men & women. Some of the boys have small packs on their backs, and already—they are three, four, five years old—their legs move in the piston motion of the Asian coolie. Now they stand, halted for a moment, looking with the bright interest of any children anywhere at the G.I.s who also stand, stiff, with rifles at the ready. Here there is none of the camaraderie of G.I. and child everywhere else that the U.S. Army has gone.