Return of An Old Soldier > IDEAS & IDEALS

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        "Wonders are many, but none,
                       None is more wondrous than man."
                                     Sophocles (495-406 b.c)

     His journey home took more years than anyone's in the world, real as well as imaginary. It overshadows, nay, puts to shame the 10-year wandering of Odysseus over the sea in Homer's epic Odyssey, Rip Van Winkle's 20-year sleep in the Catskills mountains in Washington Irving's short story, and Robinson Crusoe's 28-year solitary life in an isolated island in the romance by Daniel Defoe. His story of escape is stranger than any wild dream we can dream, more thrilling than any novel we can read, and more tragic than any tragedy we can see on the stage. He suffered more and endured more than any man in the world of reality and of fiction. He came home after 43 years of absence.

     When he left home, he was a youth of 19, freshman of Yonsei University. When he came home, he was 64 years old man, sick and weak. When the War broke out with the North invading the South in 1950, his mother, unlike most of the other mothers, urged his dear son to volunteer to fight for the country, and the good son followed his mother's advice faithfully by joining in the army. Commissioned as a second lieutenant for 101 Artillery Battalion of the Korean army, he fought in the front as an observation officer, was captured by the Communist Chinese soldiers and handed to the North in 1951 as a prisoner of war. Since then until the moment he was drifting all alone on the open sea in a tiny fishing boat, more of a makeshift raft than of a boat, and was rescued by the officials of the Office of Fisheries on 23 October, 1994, his life had been a long and lonely battle to escape from captivity in the Communist North against the all the odds that can be conceived. He has finally made it. He made the impossible possible.

     Very unfortunately, the news of his dramatic escape from the North came at the same time with the tragic as well as shameful news of tumbling down of Sung-Su bridge that crosses the Han River in Seoul. The news of the war hero's return was smothered by this unexpected and unthinkable national disaster, and was buried deep in the noise of shock and fright, lament and mourning, incrimination and accusation over the cause and responsibility of the unprecedented tragedy. His return was hardly a news at first. It was casually mentioned at the end of the sensational news of the day, and was dealt lightly as if there were another runaway North Korean laborer from the wood-cutting labor camp in Russia who could not endure hard work and hunger any longer.

     Although the news report on TV about the old soldier's return was momentary, it caught me. I felt immediately drawn into the image of an old, sick, exhausted man lying in the patient's clothes on bed in the hospital. As time went on, and more facts about this man came to be known to us, and more people came to their senses, the meaning and importance of his return began to gather momentum. President Kim Young-sam sent him a huge bouquet of roses along with a warm message of welcome and well-wishing through Minister of Defense, Lee Byung-tae. On the place of his first meeting with the Defense Minister something occurred that expected by none and that threw the whole nation into astonishment and moved all the countrymen to tears.

     Despite earnest request and dissuasion from the nurse and the Minister himself, he struggled to stand up from the bed and stood upright to his feet, and raising his shaking hand slowly made a solemn military salute to his superior, and formally reported Second Lieutenant Cho Chang-ho's return from the mission. No military history of the world has ever provided such an example. He was no longer a despaired, exhausted and devastated old man. He was a solder, a true soldier; still truly alive and brave young soldier, an embodiment of courage, honor and duty; the man, the soldier, we need today badly. I wept at the scene.

     I don't know why, but I just cannot think of the collapse of Sung-Su bridge without comparing it with the return of the old soldier. The two cases have nothing in common except that they occurred in tandem, and that both made a big news. But ironically enough, from this fundamental difference of nature and kind between the tragic accident and the hero's return can be deduced a perfect foil for illuminating the meaning of the two occurrences. Although we stand aghast at the falling-down of the iron-concrete bridge, a moment's reflection will bring us all to a simple and clear conclusion that the accident had long been anticipated. We built the bridge slapdash and in haste, as we do many other works habitually as well as customarily, and after that we did not take necessary care of it, as they do in advanced countries. Even the repeated warnings about the possible risk of its breakdown had been ignored or passed unnoticed by the authorities concerned. What was needed was a everyman's common-sense, routine checks and constant maintenances, and proper measures to be taken in time, not the intelligence of a genius.

    But, truly, we did not, and could not know, in the frailty of man there is something that is undestructible, invincible, and unconquerable. It was not the iron-cement-concrete structure but this man that should have been conquered and destroyed so easily. Indeed, more often than not, man is a wonder, a mystery, a miracle. Bring Marx, Pavlov, Skinner, or Freud, and let them explain about this man. According to their plausible explanations this man should have died long ago, or should have been completely conquered and subjugated by, or tamed and adapted, willingly or unwillingly, to that slavish life in the North. But something in this fragile man defies any analysis, explanation, or detection by any means. This man who has returned home refused to be explained away by anybody, by any methods, and by any attempts. His return is a great victory of man over, a retaliation against any attempts to engineer and manipulate the mind and spirit of man. His escape is not simply a successful escape-story of a prisoner of war; it is one that illuminates brightly the future of mankind.

     The long journey home of the hero has finally come to an happy end. He came back home he had left to save. Leaving behind a huge, empty meaningless space of war, destruction, ruin, violence, deaths, changes, moves, and uncertainties, the hero of this unwritten epic has finally made his home-coming. He has returned to his family, to real life, to a meaningful experience, to true existence, and more than anything else, to himself.
          (November 2, 1994)