“In-mo! In-mo!” His mother’s voice startles the exhausted Ri In-mo awake. In North Korea, revolutionary Ri In-mo wonders, “Has the time finally come?” On this Sunday, as news and rumors mount hour by hour about the fighting at the 38th Parallel, just fifty miles to the north, the people of Seoul hope this, too, is another border skirmish, soon to end. And their newly organized armies have clashed repeatedly at latitude 38 North, the dividing line, especially since American occupation troops left Korea a year ago, a few months after the Soviet army withdrew from bases in the North. and Soviet victors divided this former Japanese colony into separate occupation zones, the two halves have followed divergent paths, communist and capitalist, under their Russian and American mentors, each forming a government claiming sovereignty over the entire five-hundred-mile Korean peninsula. In the five years since World War II’s end, when the U.S. “The 100,000-strong Republic of Korea armed forces are sound and intact.”īut beyond Seoul’s sprawl of mud-walled houses and tile roofs, of squat office buildings and antique temples, somewhere north of the two-thousand-foot-high mountains ringing the centuries-old capital, the South Korean army is falling to pieces in the thunder and lightning of artillery and heavy tanks pushing south, in drizzle and fog, through the valleys that point toward Seoul.Īs the city’s 1.5 million people awaken, almost one-third of them refugee northerners, word of the sudden attack is alarming, but hardly a surprise. “There is little cause for concern,” it reassures listeners. All sounds normal until, at 7:00 a.m., Korean Broadcasting breaks in to report the attack. The child’s words send a chill through the Kim household of northern-born Christians, one extended family among tens of thousands of people who have poured south in recent years, a human tide driven by social upheaval, fleeing the rise of communism in the northern half of a poor, backward land.įor so early on a Sunday, the streets are strangely active, people rushing here and there, or standing talking in pairs or small groups. North Korean soldiers are coming to Myari, coming to Seoul. She hurries back home, where the adults are returning from church, and announces to Grandfather and any who will hear: The girl, tall for her age, and confident, darts from group to group, listening, picking up the news. For so early on a Sunday, the streets are strangely active, people rushing here and there, or standing talking in pairs or small groups. The feel of approaching rain is in the air. It’s barely past dawn, the summer sun rising pale beyond low clouds. She hurries out into the gray morning, trailed by a couple of little cousins, leaving a roomful of others asleep. Obedient, curious, she quickly dons her white cotton top and skirt. At age ten, Chang Sang is the oldest and brightest of a half-dozen cousins, refugee children from the North, crammed into a little house in old Seoul. An uprooted farmer lost in the teeming city, Grandfather Kim knows this clever grandchild can discover what’s behind the commotion in the streets outside. This is how God looks, the girl likes to think. The Bible says God made man in his own image. Rubbing her eyes open, she sees the white beard and the handsome tanned face of Grandfather Kim. Wake up.” The urgent whispers stir Sang from sleep. SUNDAY, JIn Seoul, ten-year-old Chang Sang awakens to war. Our excerpts open with the North Korean invasion, and the experiences that day of a northern refugee girl in Seoul, and of a communist party functionary in Hungnam, North Korea. But The Wilson Quarterly is pleased to offer readers a first look into this vivid new history. Ghost Flames will be published in August by PublicAffairs. The book offers an unflinching, truthful account of the Korean War’s dark underside, relaying little-known horrors – some of which the author helped bring to light as a journalist. It tells the story of the war through the experiences of 20 people who lived through it – from a Chinese general and an American nun to a child refugee and a U.S. His new book, Ghost Flames, is a unique, character-driven narrative history of the Korean War. military won him a Pulitzer Prize and Polk Award, and yielded a 2001 book, The Bridge at No Gun Ri. His reporting on the No Gun Ri massacre of South Korean refugees by the U.S. Hanley is one of our most accomplished American foreign correspondents, having reported from some 100 countries in a four-decade career at the Associated Press.
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