NK female soldiers

By Nam Sang-so

Schools were in recess and students were helping their parents transplant rice saplings. Under the warm sunbeams in June 1950, I too bent down with the farmers in the wet fields and kept pushing clumps of seedlings into the mud.

“Soldiers!” shouted someone. There was a long file of infantry marching like ants on a dike in the distance. They wore brownish uniforms, some shouldering long rifles, others short guns with round revolver magazines attached. Among the flags they carried, one had blue and red stripes with a large red star in the middle. North Koreans! Then where were the South Korean soldiers?

Early the next morning, two county office men and three North Korean soldiers visited our village and declared that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea had taken over South Korea. Among many other instructions, they asked students to return to school. The village didn't have electricity nor telephone lines connected.

There were four middle school students including one girl in the village and we all went back to school. A North Korean officer, wearing a cloth cap, gave a long speech with accented Korean to the students. Our teachers were all lined up in front of the assembled students. The officer emphasized that under the new communist government, everyone, rich or poor, was equal.

There were two female soldiers from North Korea standing in front of an office marked “Placation Squad” in Uljin Township on the east coast. They wore fashionable brown uniforms with trousers that were skin tight around their upper thighs but loosely spread above the feet, called pantaloons. Two stars shined on the reddish shoulder straps and they wore a gun at their waists. They looked a little older than us 15- and 16-year-old boys. The way the young female soldiers smiled and invited us into their office was alluring. And we all stepped into the office decorated with a lot of communist propaganda.

The cute female soldiers smilingly explained to South Korean students of the bourgeoisie about communist ideas, and gave us each a black-and-white portrait of their leader Kim Il-sung. We were asked to frame it and hang it on a dry wall inside our homes.

It was for them less than a three-month occupation of the county. And then the North Korean soldiers escaped into the high mountains of Taebaek before South Korean and U.N. forces counterattacked, without exchanging gunfire.

In retrospect, I wouldn't deny that we teenage boys had been attracted to the female soldiers more than the communist ideas they attempted to spread. If they had made it home safe, not becoming guerrillas, those pretty soldiers must be about 88-year-old grandmothers today. I still remember their names and their hometown ― Pukchong, South Hamkyong Province. When the DMZ opens, I should look for them in the North.

The writer (sangsonam@gmail.com), 86, is a meritorious Korean War Veteran.