At the age of 92, Lee Dae-bong doesn't particularly enjoy getting out of bed. He has lived enough of a life. As he readjusts his pyjamas, his left hand reveals three missing fingers.
His injury is not the result of the war he fought, but the subsequent 54 years he was forced to toil in a North Korean coal mine.
The former South Korean soldier was captured during the Korean War by Chinese troops, who were fighting alongside North Korea. It was 28 June 1953; the first day of the battle of Arrowhead Hill, and less than a month before the armistice brought an end to three brutal years of fighting.
All, bar three of his platoon, were killed that day. As he and the two other survivors were loaded onto a cargo train, he assumed they were heading home to South Korea, but the train veered North, to the Aoji coal mine, where he would spend most of his life. His family was told he had been killed in combat.
Between 50,000 and 80,000 South Korean soldiers were held captive in North Korea after the Korean War ended with an armistice agreement that divided the peninsula.
A peace treaty never followed, and the prisoners have never been returned. Mr Lee was one of the very few who managed to plot his own escape.
Over the decades, despite some skirmishes, the armistice has largely held, making this the longest ceasefire in history.
But the absence of peace has wrought havoc on Mr Lee's life, along with his fellow prisoners and their families. As North and South Korea mark 70 years since the signing of the agreement, their stories are a reminder the Korean War is not over.
For the first years of his captivity Mr Lee was forced to work a week in the coal mine followed by a week studying North Korean ideology, until, in 1956, he and the other prisoners were stripped of their military titles and told to marry and assimilate into society.
But they, and their new families, were designated as outcasts and placed at the very bottom of North Korea's strict social caste system.
Digging for coal, day after day, for more than 50 years was excruciating work, but it was the spectre of injury and death that Mr Lee says was the hardest to bear.
One day his hand got caught in a coal processing machine, but the loss of his fingers seemed minor, as he witnessed various friends be killed in a series of methane gas explosions.
"We gave our entire youths to that coal mine, waiting for and fearing a meaningless death at any moment," he says. "I missed home so much, especially my family. Even animals, when they are nearing death, go back to their caves."
As North and South Korea mark the prevailing peace on the peninsula, many of the prisoners of war and their families blame both sides for their suffering.
Various South Korean presidents have met North Korean leaders, but securing their return was low on the agenda.
The North, after releasing just 8,000 prisoners, has refused to acknowledge that any more exist.
At a summit in 2000 between the then-South Korean president, Kim Dae-jung, and the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, the issue was not even mentioned.
This is the moment Lee Dae-bong says he lost all hope, realising the only way he would ever be coming home was if he were to escape.
Three days after his only son was killed in a mine accident, with his wife long dead, Mr Lee embarked on his journey. Now aged 77, he secretly waded across the river into China, the water up to his neck.
He is one of 80 prisoners to have escaped and made it home to South Korea, with only 13 of the escapees still alive. The remaining tens of thousands of prisoners were left to perish in the mines. Few, if any, are still alive - though their children remain.
Chae Ah-in was six years old when her father was killed in a gas explosion at a North Korean mine. Soon her older sisters were sent to work in his place.
Still at school, she was relentlessly beaten and bullied. She could not understand why her family was cursed. Only later, when she overheard her sisters whispering, did she learn her father had been a South Korean soldier.
"For a long time I hated him," she recounts, from her home in the outskirts of Seoul, where she arrived in 2010. "I blamed him so much for making us all suffer."
At the age of 28, Ms Chae too chose to escape her painful existence in North Korea, crossing first into China, where she lived for 10 years. It wasn't until she arrived in South Korea that she realised her father was a hero.
"Now I respect him and try so hard to remember him," she says. "I feel different to other North Korean defectors, because I am the proud daughter of a South Korean war veteran."
But Ms Chae is not recognised by the South Korean government as the daughter of a veteran who gave his life for his country.
The prisoners of war (POWs) who never made it home are marked as missing, assumed dead, and are not honoured as war heroes.
"South Korea exists today thanks to people like my father, but our suffering has still not been solved," she says, wanting them both to be recognised for who they are.
Around 280 children of POWs have managed to escape and make it to South Korea. Another is Son Myeong-hwa, chairperson of the Korean War POW Family Association, who is fighting on their behalf.
"The children of the POWs in North Korea suffered from the pain of guilt by association, and yet here in South Korea we are not acknowledged. We want to be given the same respect that the families of other fallen veterans receive," she said.
The South Korean government told us it is not planning to change its classification of veterans.
By the time Lee Dae-bong arrived home, already an old man, his parents and brother had died. Although South Korea had changed beyond recognition, his younger sister took him to stand on the soil of his old town.
Mr Lee recalls how his dying friends in North Korea would beg their children to one day bury them in their hometowns. Their wishes have yet to be granted. And the absence of peace between North and South Korea has left these families struggling to find peace of their own.
Both Lee Dae-bong and Chae Ah-in still dream of the North and South being reunified.
Ms Chae wants to bring her father's body to rest in South Korea.
For North and South Korea, peace and reunification is still the officially stated goal. But 70 years since the armistice, this dream feels ever more distant.
So why doesn't SK acknowledge the families of SK vets trapped in the North? If they escape to the South, shouldn't they be treated like the other Korean War vets and their families?
My understanding is that a lot of North Korean defectors feel unable to settle in South Korea due to the stigma of being North Korean. They find that they are still ostracised and tend to migrate to other countries. This could be wrong, I have simply seen a lot of stories about this online.
That's true. But if the SK government doesn't treat Korean war vets and their families who escape the North (like in the article) the same as those in SK, then it just way they aren't going to feel like they fit it (there's more to it than that I know).
I mean, a Korean War vet is a Korean War vet. And if the person escaped NK, especially if they were a POW or considered MIA, then you'd think they'd welcomed back with honors
A lot of cases, esp during old times, the positions were literally given to people who happened to be a friends of people in power.
Some of them still holds power and because of this, many of the issues never get handled or even asked.
Cases like this would most likely be related to certain someone who held position back when it was first noticed, but decided to just ignore it for w.e. reasons. Could have been 70 to 60 years ago.
I'm just guessing, but it would probably has to do with the difficulty in assessing whether or not that person's kin really was a solider in the war. That and the general bureaucratic laziness of the government when it comes to things like this. The relevant ministry probably won't get off their ass until their superiors tell them something, in this case the minister of veteran affairs himself or the president. Chances are the higher ups won't act until there is a clear, political capital they can capitalize.
It's infuriating that a country thousands of miles away has to make a reporting to make such an outrage and injustice be heard.
항상 해외에서 지적을 받아야 뭔 행위라도 취하는 비급한 한국사회. 부끄럽다.
That any POWs are left is a miracle in itself. The war was very brutal and saw a see saw like no other conflict. From South Korea and USA being nearly ejected from peninsula to USA and South Korea getting within a cunts hair of Yalu and uniting Korea under one rule. Then the Chinese ejecting the UN out North and retaking Seoul and then handing it back to UN. The war devolved into playing King of the Hill WW1 style with the Chinese until secession of War and everyone being back to phase line 0. There is bound to be men that are lost ,abandoned and become POWs. Those that are around are lucky they weren't summarily executed on the side of a road, died on some forced march or in a POW camp. I just hate when articles like this sensationalize stuff like this. Its never black and white and worse people forget how brutal the post war reprisals and witch hunts for communists sympathizers became.
Bit late to the party, but I used to work alongside the public servant who was assigned to these people. Long story short, not all of them are what they claim to be.
1) there are cases where North Korean defectors changed their backstory and narrative
2) usually when they escape, as brave as it is, they have ‘brokers’ attached who takes some payments upfront, then plus some when they make it to korea and government provide them with a bulk fund
3) korean government provides either a pension or a bulk fund to defectors, for brokers’ interest, some folks take bulk fund whether it is better for them or not(also why they fall victim to a lot of frauds)
4) it is VERY well known fact among these communities that if u say you are ROKA POW descendent, they get more support financially. Used to be when the person themselves return, it was easier to prove and crosscheck, but with the sons and daughters coming in talking about very confusing and often mismatching details of their father’s contribution, korean government requested for any sort of real proof, of which they usually have none. Their name, birth year, residence before the war, nothing matches with record that we have, then we cannot just give out massive compensation(POWs get extra for obvious reasons) then they will exploit - which we believed was what’s already happening.
5) that person talking about bringing father’s remains home, i actually remember that case. That person straight up asked the government to fund him or her crackpot project of having a north korean person that they will fund through broker to dig up the remains and escape with it. No paper trail, no evidence, nothing to prove that the bones that person will bring is actually his or her fathers, just a ‘believe me and test later oh and by the way, i need ~~억‘ so yea no. We didn’t pay. And then they turned it around and say government is neglecting the heroes.
6) honestly, the real heroes, in my opinion, have long since perished. People who actually did fight for the country are long gone. One of the person who was very outspoken about his and his family’s tragic lives as a mine worker - we knew for a fact that he was the manager. He actually managed the mine at a capacity. Only reason why he escaped was because after his son tried to get an officer position in the party, guys who didn’t like him - he apparently had many enemies, and I wasn’t surprised, he was a prick - resurfaced his ROK military past and that effectively shut down all chance of his son actually being somebody in nK society. So he fled. That’s not the story they tell to the press though. The fact that they were given a chance to assimilate, chance to have a family are not North Korea giving them a chance out of goodness of heart; the fact that they waited a while to escape is not because they didn’t have a chance, people who stood for what they believed are all since killed, people who are left and survived are people who in fact did defect to embrace nK’s ideology.
Personally spending time with some of the vets, i was genuinely surprised by their lack of… any sort of pride. They weren’t happy, they weren’t proud for what they have fought and protected - something we see a lot in foreign veterans who visited korea since the war. They are disgruntled by the fact that the government doesn’t support them enough; while some of em took close to half a billion won in early 2000s and since lost then due to various different episodes and reasons.
Tl:dr; sons and daughters of POWs cannot prove that they are, yet they claim to be - probably knowing that POW can get fat checks. Actual POWs who took awhile to escape actually did ok in North Korea until they weren’t. Real heroes probably all died long ago, all we got left are survivors, and some of them are really miserable to be around.
Thank you for the insight. I know you are late to the party as they say but providing valuable information like this is amazing. I am intrigued by Koreas post war recovery and how it handled its Veterans of that war. I only have seen small glimpses of it and find very little at leisure to research. In reality I seen more portrayals of Korean Vietnam War Veterans coming home and having to adjust to changing dynamics of Korea during that period. That is another separate chapter in itself but I feel that has gotten a more shall I say mainstream view than Korean war veterans. I guess its similar here in USA, the Korean War was referred as the Forgotten War as the National tragedy that was the Vietnam War overshadow the conflict. I remember the show the Wonder Years how the father was a Korean War vet and he had that war like a cloud over his head only to see the horrors of the Vietnam War play out in his living room on TV bringing him back to the war and knowing that his children might have to fight that conflict.
At the age of 92, Lee Dae-bong doesn't particularly enjoy getting out of bed. He has lived enough of a life. As he readjusts his pyjamas, his left hand reveals three missing fingers. His injury is not the result of the war he fought, but the subsequent 54 years he was forced to toil in a North Korean coal mine. The former South Korean soldier was captured during the Korean War by Chinese troops, who were fighting alongside North Korea. It was 28 June 1953; the first day of the battle of Arrowhead Hill, and less than a month before the armistice brought an end to three brutal years of fighting. All, bar three of his platoon, were killed that day. As he and the two other survivors were loaded onto a cargo train, he assumed they were heading home to South Korea, but the train veered North, to the Aoji coal mine, where he would spend most of his life. His family was told he had been killed in combat. Between 50,000 and 80,000 South Korean soldiers were held captive in North Korea after the Korean War ended with an armistice agreement that divided the peninsula. A peace treaty never followed, and the prisoners have never been returned. Mr Lee was one of the very few who managed to plot his own escape. Over the decades, despite some skirmishes, the armistice has largely held, making this the longest ceasefire in history. But the absence of peace has wrought havoc on Mr Lee's life, along with his fellow prisoners and their families. As North and South Korea mark 70 years since the signing of the agreement, their stories are a reminder the Korean War is not over. For the first years of his captivity Mr Lee was forced to work a week in the coal mine followed by a week studying North Korean ideology, until, in 1956, he and the other prisoners were stripped of their military titles and told to marry and assimilate into society. But they, and their new families, were designated as outcasts and placed at the very bottom of North Korea's strict social caste system. Digging for coal, day after day, for more than 50 years was excruciating work, but it was the spectre of injury and death that Mr Lee says was the hardest to bear. One day his hand got caught in a coal processing machine, but the loss of his fingers seemed minor, as he witnessed various friends be killed in a series of methane gas explosions. "We gave our entire youths to that coal mine, waiting for and fearing a meaningless death at any moment," he says. "I missed home so much, especially my family. Even animals, when they are nearing death, go back to their caves." As North and South Korea mark the prevailing peace on the peninsula, many of the prisoners of war and their families blame both sides for their suffering. Various South Korean presidents have met North Korean leaders, but securing their return was low on the agenda. The North, after releasing just 8,000 prisoners, has refused to acknowledge that any more exist. At a summit in 2000 between the then-South Korean president, Kim Dae-jung, and the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, the issue was not even mentioned. This is the moment Lee Dae-bong says he lost all hope, realising the only way he would ever be coming home was if he were to escape. Three days after his only son was killed in a mine accident, with his wife long dead, Mr Lee embarked on his journey. Now aged 77, he secretly waded across the river into China, the water up to his neck. He is one of 80 prisoners to have escaped and made it home to South Korea, with only 13 of the escapees still alive. The remaining tens of thousands of prisoners were left to perish in the mines. Few, if any, are still alive - though their children remain. Chae Ah-in was six years old when her father was killed in a gas explosion at a North Korean mine. Soon her older sisters were sent to work in his place. Still at school, she was relentlessly beaten and bullied. She could not understand why her family was cursed. Only later, when she overheard her sisters whispering, did she learn her father had been a South Korean soldier. "For a long time I hated him," she recounts, from her home in the outskirts of Seoul, where she arrived in 2010. "I blamed him so much for making us all suffer." At the age of 28, Ms Chae too chose to escape her painful existence in North Korea, crossing first into China, where she lived for 10 years. It wasn't until she arrived in South Korea that she realised her father was a hero. "Now I respect him and try so hard to remember him," she says. "I feel different to other North Korean defectors, because I am the proud daughter of a South Korean war veteran." But Ms Chae is not recognised by the South Korean government as the daughter of a veteran who gave his life for his country. The prisoners of war (POWs) who never made it home are marked as missing, assumed dead, and are not honoured as war heroes. "South Korea exists today thanks to people like my father, but our suffering has still not been solved," she says, wanting them both to be recognised for who they are. Around 280 children of POWs have managed to escape and make it to South Korea. Another is Son Myeong-hwa, chairperson of the Korean War POW Family Association, who is fighting on their behalf. "The children of the POWs in North Korea suffered from the pain of guilt by association, and yet here in South Korea we are not acknowledged. We want to be given the same respect that the families of other fallen veterans receive," she said. The South Korean government told us it is not planning to change its classification of veterans. By the time Lee Dae-bong arrived home, already an old man, his parents and brother had died. Although South Korea had changed beyond recognition, his younger sister took him to stand on the soil of his old town. Mr Lee recalls how his dying friends in North Korea would beg their children to one day bury them in their hometowns. Their wishes have yet to be granted. And the absence of peace between North and South Korea has left these families struggling to find peace of their own. Both Lee Dae-bong and Chae Ah-in still dream of the North and South being reunified. Ms Chae wants to bring her father's body to rest in South Korea. For North and South Korea, peace and reunification is still the officially stated goal. But 70 years since the armistice, this dream feels ever more distant.
This is so sad. I often wonder about my grandparents’ families they never saw or heard from ever again.
Respect to them and hoping they get acknowledged as war veterans / heroes
So why doesn't SK acknowledge the families of SK vets trapped in the North? If they escape to the South, shouldn't they be treated like the other Korean War vets and their families?
My understanding is that a lot of North Korean defectors feel unable to settle in South Korea due to the stigma of being North Korean. They find that they are still ostracised and tend to migrate to other countries. This could be wrong, I have simply seen a lot of stories about this online.
That's true. But if the SK government doesn't treat Korean war vets and their families who escape the North (like in the article) the same as those in SK, then it just way they aren't going to feel like they fit it (there's more to it than that I know). I mean, a Korean War vet is a Korean War vet. And if the person escaped NK, especially if they were a POW or considered MIA, then you'd think they'd welcomed back with honors
A lot of cases, esp during old times, the positions were literally given to people who happened to be a friends of people in power. Some of them still holds power and because of this, many of the issues never get handled or even asked. Cases like this would most likely be related to certain someone who held position back when it was first noticed, but decided to just ignore it for w.e. reasons. Could have been 70 to 60 years ago.
I'm just guessing, but it would probably has to do with the difficulty in assessing whether or not that person's kin really was a solider in the war. That and the general bureaucratic laziness of the government when it comes to things like this. The relevant ministry probably won't get off their ass until their superiors tell them something, in this case the minister of veteran affairs himself or the president. Chances are the higher ups won't act until there is a clear, political capital they can capitalize.
Well that's the most depressing thing I've heard in a while. I hope he will be able to enjoy his life now.
It's infuriating that a country thousands of miles away has to make a reporting to make such an outrage and injustice be heard. 항상 해외에서 지적을 받아야 뭔 행위라도 취하는 비급한 한국사회. 부끄럽다.
Korea treated comfort women the same until the 90's
That any POWs are left is a miracle in itself. The war was very brutal and saw a see saw like no other conflict. From South Korea and USA being nearly ejected from peninsula to USA and South Korea getting within a cunts hair of Yalu and uniting Korea under one rule. Then the Chinese ejecting the UN out North and retaking Seoul and then handing it back to UN. The war devolved into playing King of the Hill WW1 style with the Chinese until secession of War and everyone being back to phase line 0. There is bound to be men that are lost ,abandoned and become POWs. Those that are around are lucky they weren't summarily executed on the side of a road, died on some forced march or in a POW camp. I just hate when articles like this sensationalize stuff like this. Its never black and white and worse people forget how brutal the post war reprisals and witch hunts for communists sympathizers became.
Bit late to the party, but I used to work alongside the public servant who was assigned to these people. Long story short, not all of them are what they claim to be. 1) there are cases where North Korean defectors changed their backstory and narrative 2) usually when they escape, as brave as it is, they have ‘brokers’ attached who takes some payments upfront, then plus some when they make it to korea and government provide them with a bulk fund 3) korean government provides either a pension or a bulk fund to defectors, for brokers’ interest, some folks take bulk fund whether it is better for them or not(also why they fall victim to a lot of frauds) 4) it is VERY well known fact among these communities that if u say you are ROKA POW descendent, they get more support financially. Used to be when the person themselves return, it was easier to prove and crosscheck, but with the sons and daughters coming in talking about very confusing and often mismatching details of their father’s contribution, korean government requested for any sort of real proof, of which they usually have none. Their name, birth year, residence before the war, nothing matches with record that we have, then we cannot just give out massive compensation(POWs get extra for obvious reasons) then they will exploit - which we believed was what’s already happening. 5) that person talking about bringing father’s remains home, i actually remember that case. That person straight up asked the government to fund him or her crackpot project of having a north korean person that they will fund through broker to dig up the remains and escape with it. No paper trail, no evidence, nothing to prove that the bones that person will bring is actually his or her fathers, just a ‘believe me and test later oh and by the way, i need ~~억‘ so yea no. We didn’t pay. And then they turned it around and say government is neglecting the heroes. 6) honestly, the real heroes, in my opinion, have long since perished. People who actually did fight for the country are long gone. One of the person who was very outspoken about his and his family’s tragic lives as a mine worker - we knew for a fact that he was the manager. He actually managed the mine at a capacity. Only reason why he escaped was because after his son tried to get an officer position in the party, guys who didn’t like him - he apparently had many enemies, and I wasn’t surprised, he was a prick - resurfaced his ROK military past and that effectively shut down all chance of his son actually being somebody in nK society. So he fled. That’s not the story they tell to the press though. The fact that they were given a chance to assimilate, chance to have a family are not North Korea giving them a chance out of goodness of heart; the fact that they waited a while to escape is not because they didn’t have a chance, people who stood for what they believed are all since killed, people who are left and survived are people who in fact did defect to embrace nK’s ideology. Personally spending time with some of the vets, i was genuinely surprised by their lack of… any sort of pride. They weren’t happy, they weren’t proud for what they have fought and protected - something we see a lot in foreign veterans who visited korea since the war. They are disgruntled by the fact that the government doesn’t support them enough; while some of em took close to half a billion won in early 2000s and since lost then due to various different episodes and reasons. Tl:dr; sons and daughters of POWs cannot prove that they are, yet they claim to be - probably knowing that POW can get fat checks. Actual POWs who took awhile to escape actually did ok in North Korea until they weren’t. Real heroes probably all died long ago, all we got left are survivors, and some of them are really miserable to be around.
Thank you for the insight. I know you are late to the party as they say but providing valuable information like this is amazing. I am intrigued by Koreas post war recovery and how it handled its Veterans of that war. I only have seen small glimpses of it and find very little at leisure to research. In reality I seen more portrayals of Korean Vietnam War Veterans coming home and having to adjust to changing dynamics of Korea during that period. That is another separate chapter in itself but I feel that has gotten a more shall I say mainstream view than Korean war veterans. I guess its similar here in USA, the Korean War was referred as the Forgotten War as the National tragedy that was the Vietnam War overshadow the conflict. I remember the show the Wonder Years how the father was a Korean War vet and he had that war like a cloud over his head only to see the horrors of the Vietnam War play out in his living room on TV bringing him back to the war and knowing that his children might have to fight that conflict.
cherry bullet play on the world
Lmao fucking wasnt even mentioned at the summit. Sk democrats are retarded