A Brief Encounter

The following is fiction but it is based on a real incident that I heard about from various sources. It occurred during the Korean War (1950-53) in a remote village in the mid-section of the Korean Peninsula. While I was still in middle school, I became a refugee from the North Korean Communist-occupied Seoul and lived with relatives in a village near where the incident happened, and the story has remained in my mind all these years.

I wrote it down based mostly on my imagination as to what might have happened to the American flyer and young Korean girl. I keep talking about the war because it took place when I was at an impressionable age and because I realize that people on both sides of a war suffer countless, unknown personal tragedies and yet resilient life—including love and marriage—goes on even amid the death and destruction.


1

Speaking in halting but correct English, the girl told him again and again that he should never come out of the cave during the day under any circumstance. She said her village was small but there were quite a few Communists, and the minute they sighted him, they would report him to the occupation forces from the North.

The girl was sure that there was no one in her village who knew of the existence of the cave. Nor did they know that the pilot of the American fighter plane that had been shot down over an adjacent mountain a few days before was hiding there.

The cave was shaped like a small, rocky tunnel, barely large enough to accommodate three city buses. And it was difficult for anyone who did not know its existence to spot it as the entrance was practically blocked by thick undergrowth. (“How did you manage to find the cave anyway?” she asked him later).

Still it was best to remain in the cave during the day, she said. You never know when someone may decide to come up here for some reason. After all, “I ran into you unexpectedly, didn’t I?”

But hiding in the dark, hot humid cave all day was becoming unbearable for Lt. Erwin Walker of the U.S. Air Force. His plane had been hit by enemy ground fire, and he had injured his shoulder when he ejected. Now it seemed to have become infected because the throbbing pain was getting worse as he lay in the dark.

He wanted to crawl out of the cave if only for a few minutes to look at the sun and bask in its light for the first time in two days. He also wanted to look at the winding white road down below for any sign of the girl who, he hoped, would come before sundown.

The girl hadn’t shown up for more than two days now. When she last came, she had brought enough food to last for several days. Maybe, she wasn’t able to find a time when she could come up here without anyone noticing her absence. It must be difficult for a young girl to sneak out of the village.

Or maybe, she was trying to get the penicillin that he had asked her to try and find for him. Although he knew it would be almost impossible to get penicillin in her tiny village at a foot of the mountain, he asked her to try anyway.

The girl said she would have to walk 15 kilometers to the nearest town where she might be able to buy such medicine, if she were lucky. Anyway, she promised him she would do her best to get it as soon as possible.

2

When Walker had first seen the girl, he thought he was seeing a mirage; she was sitting on a small rock in a grassy clearing less than 20 feet below the mouth of the cave. Appearing to be in her late teens or early 20s, the girl had come up there leading the family cow to the small, enclosed meadow for grazing. She was dressed in what he thought was worn-out clothes.

She was of an average height for an Asian woman but appeared smaller from the distance. The top of her head would come up to his chin, he figured. As he approached her, though, he could see that she was a bit taller and older than he thought. She had high cheekbones and firm, thin lips that gave her an air of a strong-willed woman. But her eyes, which seemed to be smiling, softened the impression.

While the cow was feeding nearby, she looked vacantly at the setting sun. The top of the mountain to the east was still ablaze in the light of the August sun, but a pale, bluish darkness was already enveloping the meadow, which was surrounded by woods consisting mostly of medium-high birch trees. It was an ethereal scene—calm and beautiful—which enabled Walker to forget, for a brief moment, that he was in the midst of a cruel war and that he was desperately running for his life in enemy-occupied territory.

After making sure there was no one else around, Walker decided to approach her as he was beginning to feel desperate. So as not to frighten her, though, he laid down his only weapon, a .45mm handgun, near the mouth of the cave. Deliberately making noise, he nonchalantly walked down the slope toward her with a big forced smile and half raised arms in a gesture of surrender.

Terrified by the appearance of a man out of nowhere and a Westerner at that, the girl seemed to hesitate, not sure whether to run, leaving her cow behind, or confront the fast approaching stranger.

“Please, don’t be frightened,” Walked called out, without knowing if she could understand what he was saying. “I’m an American Air Force officer, a friend of your people.”

The girl took an instinctive, defensive gesture for a fleeting moment before seeing that the man didn’t mean to harm her. “Oh, hello,” she said. “You must be the pilot of the plane that was shot down…”

It was now Walker’s turn to be surprised—shocked, really—by her response. “Well, well! You speak English and well,” Walker stammered. It was not a statement; nor was it a question. Rather, it was a remark made to convince himself. But then, he realized immediately that he must look foolish. Anyway, it was incredible because she was a Korean girl, in a remote, mountainous village far, far removed from what Walker thought of as the civilized world like the capital city of Seoul.

“Yes, I can speak English a little,” she said modestly. “My name is Lee… Lee Jae-in. Lee is my family name; I’m a student at a college run by a Christian mission in Seoul. I studied English there.”

“Hi, Miss Lee,” he said. “My name is Erwin Walker.”

He then added: “By the way, your first name sounds like Jane; so why don’t I call you that, if it’s okay with you, of course.”

She nodded her assent with a smile.

Jane then told him that she had come to this god-forsaken village from her home in Seoul after the war broke out. One of her distant relatives was living in the village. “So, I’m a kind of refugee here, waiting for the fighting to end.”

“I see.”

“I heard that an American plane had crashed into a mountain far from here the other day,” she said. “If it was you who flew the plane, you’ve come a long way.”
Walker told her he was lucky to be alive and lucky to be able to walk all the way from the crash site to this place without being seen by anyone. “I got here two days ago and have been hiding in the cave up there since,” he said. “You’re not going to inform on me, are you?”

“Of course not,” Jane said, somewhat indignantly. “On the contrary, I’ll try and help you however I can as long as you promise me you’ll keep hiding in that cave and never come out during the day.”

“Yes, I promise,” Walker said. “But there is one thing I have to ask you right away: can you bring me something to eat? I haven’t had anything to eat for two days, and I’m starving.”

Jane said she would. “But I’m afraid there isn’t much that you can eat,” she said, “Can you eat rice? Or, potatoes, maybe?”

Having eaten enough berries to last a man a lifetime over the past three days, he explained, he could eat anything that humans could eat.

Leading the cow gingerly, Jane left the meadow telling him she would be back when she could without arousing the suspicions of the villagers.

It was another whole day before she came back with a basket in which there were boiled potatoes and corn and some cooked vegetables like spinach and cabbage. She looked at him as he wolfed it down like a starved animal.

“Ah!” Walker sighed after he had had his fill. “You know what? I’ve never had such a delicious meal in my whole life.”

“We have a saying in our country: hunger makes everything taste good. Now I know why they say that.” As she said it, though, she looked at him with an expression of sympathy and concern over the uncertainty of the immediate future. Perhaps, she was also thinking about the danger that could befall her if the Communists arrested him.

“I know you are risking your life by harboring me this way,” Walker said. “But don’t worry I’ll leave here as soon as I regain my strength.”

“But where to? There are North Korean troops all over the place,” Jane said. “I think it’s better for you to stay here until American and South Korean troops push the invaders back to the North.”

On that day, along with food, she brought a bar of soap and a couple of used but clean towels, a straw mat and a small blanket for him to lie down on. “There is a small stream on the other side of this mountain, not far from here. You can go there if you want to wash. But only late at night,” she said.

After Jane left, Walker came out of his cave and started to walk in the direction where, she said, there was a stream. He ignored her warning about not going out in the early evening. He couldn’t wait any longer to wash himself in running water—for the first time in nearly five days. It wasn’t difficult to find the stream. And there wasn’t anyone bathing there. But Walker decided to wait in a bush nearby until it got really dark.

Perhaps because he was so happy to be able to take a bath in cold, clean mountain water; he scrubbed himself a bit too hard, including his left shoulder where the fresh wound was on its way to healing. The next morning, he began to feel slight pain. Then it became worse as time passed. It had apparently gotten infected, and by nightfall, he even felt a slight fever. That was why he asked Jane to try and get penicillin when she visited him the next day.

She showed up three days later with a vial of penicillin. She said she had found it in a town some 30 kilometers from her village. By then Walker was delirious with a high fever. She had no experience giving injections but with a borrowed injector that was used for animals, she gave him a shot. The effect of the penicillin was immediate and positive. Within a couple of days, Walker was up and walking around the cave and from then on Jane spent a lot of time nursing him.

After Walker had found the cave and had slept there for two nights, he planned to keep moving from one area to another—preferably deserted and isolated areas—so that pursuing parties, if there were such an organized effort to capture him, would loose track of him. He was sure the U.S. Army which was fighting down south of the peninsula, would soon come up to liberate the parts of South Korea occupied by the Communists.

But now as Jane visited him almost daily, bringing food and taking care of other necessities, Walker forgot all about his plan to move on. And while they were enjoying each other’s company, they were oblivious of the time that seemed to be flying by. Walker lost count of the days since he had settle in his cave.

Then, one day when he was out enjoying the sun in a small clearing near the cave, he looked up into the sky and saw quite a number of U.S. transport planes flying north toward Seoul. It might have been going on for several days already or it might have begun that day. In any case, he realized that if the planes were carrying ammunition and other logistic supplies north, it could only mean that the U.S. and allied forces had already recaptured the areas north of where he was. It was time to move out of this hole, he thought.

But on that day, Jane came to the cave and told him that some villagers were saying that a lot of North Korean soldiers, some in tattered uniforms and without weapons, were racing north along the high mountain ridge that runs behind the village. She said she had come to warn Walker to be very careful in case some of them passed through this part of the mountain.
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