"What for?"

"It will be useful. We'll fight the enemy again. Teach us some words we can use on the battlefield."

So I began to teach them English, just some phrases and short sentences, such as "Hands up!," "Drop your weapon, we spare you!," "We don't kill prisoners," "Don't move!," "Surrender, you are safe!," "Don't die for American imperialism!"

There was no paper to write on, so I used a stick to inscribe on the ground the written characters representing the English sounds so that the literate ones among them could have some phonetic guidance. I couldn't possibly make them pronounce the words accurately, since half of them didn't even speak Mandarin well. But they were eager to learn, even if they did complain about the pain inflicted by the English pronunciation on their tongues and jaws. A few claimed they had sore throats. I was amazed that in just a few days they could rap out to one another what they had learned. Most of them were smart men who would have gone far in their lives had they had the opportunity and the education. I wondered why they would concentrate so much on learning a few foreign words that they might never use at all. Heaven knew what would happen to us tomorrow; we might get captured or killed anytime. The enemy was just two miles to the north.

I suspected that to them the act of learning must represent some kind of hope. At least this meant there was still a future, on which they could fix their minds. Their limited awareness of the larger world and their inert response to the menace of death endowed them with the strength needed for survival. I was moved by the tenacity of life shown in their desire to learn.

One afternoon, as we sat near a cliff learning how to sing a folk song, a man rushed back from the bushes where we would go and relieve ourselves. He shouted at us between gasps, "Enemy! They're coming from both sides!"

Immediately Tiger began pushing Commissar Pei toward the edge of the cliff, which wasn't very steep, overhung with tussocky grass and jujube shrubs. "You must go down now, sir!" he urged. As Pei was hesitating, Tiger shoved his shoulder forcefully. The commissar tumbled down and disappeared; then four or five men jumped down too. Tiger raised his pistol to fire at the enemy coming out of the woods. As he was about to retreat, a bullet hit his arm. "Oh!" he yelled. Then another bullet struck his neck and he died instantly, his blood flowing down the granite rock he fell on. The rest of us were pinned down by machine guns and couldn't move. While I was wondering what to do, a grenade landed near us. Our cook picked it up, but before he could throw it away, it went off. A burst of light opened in front of me and a wave of heat swept me up. Then everything turned black.

When I came to, I realized I was in a vehicle, probably a jeep. The cool air was brushing my face, which must have been swollen. The sky seemed quite low, with the tattered clouds jittering violently. Someone said in English, "Damn, we let some of the gooks get away."

A breezy voice answered, "Relax, man. We got eight of them, not bad."

"Are they Koreans or Chinese?"

"Must be Chinks."

"How can you tell?"

"They don't wear no uniform."

The jeep horn tooted, then some passing vehicle beeped back. The man in the passenger seat called out, "Hey, how's it going?"

"Swell," someone cried back from a distance.

They caught me! This realization shot a sharp pang to my heart, which seemed to jump up and block my throat. Two other Chinese men, whose faces I couldn't see, were also lying in the jeep. I couldn't tell if they were dead or alive. I could still move both arms, but my legs were numb. I tried to wriggle my toes to make sure they were still there; to my horror, I couldn't feel anything in my left foot. I touched my left thigh, which felt wooden. Hard as I tried, I couldn't move the leg; it must have been fractured. I touched my crotch – we had been told that some Americans would castrate Chinese POWs – but everything was all right there except that my thigh was bandaged. It seemed my captors meant to keep me alive. Why didn't they kill me? It would've been better that way. At least people back home would treat Mother as a Revolutionary Martyr's parent and the government would take care of her.

Where were they taking me? To a prison? To a hospital? I was overwhelmed by fear and shame. What should I do? We had never been instructed how to act honorably if we were taken prisoner, except to kill ourselves. Only Commissar Pei had once said that if we fell into the enemy's hands, we must never tell them the truth: always lie to them. That was all the preparation I had received for this situation. I was confused. Why hadn't the Americans finished me off? That would have made their job much simpler.

4. DR. GREENE

I was shipped to the First Closure of the POW Collection Center in Pusan. The city, then the provisional capital of South Korea, had so many American military offices and supply stations that the bustling streets reminded me of the Chinese city Dandong on the Yalu River, though more automobiles rolled around here and ships in the foggy harbor loomed like small buildings. Besides, this was a much bigger city with an airport. The closure I was put in comprised a hospital and several large compounds, each of which held over a thousand prisoners. The Collection Center was a transit point, where wounded POWs received medical treatment. But most prisoners stayed here just a few days; after being processed – registered and interrogated – they would be sent to different camps in other places.

My left thigh was fractured. A piece of shrapnel had hit the area near my groin and shattered the femur. Because of my injury I didn't go to registration, which I heard was a tedious process – the waiting lines were long there, though the clerks, mostly North Korean prisoners, were sympathetic to Chinese captives. Nor was I interrogated like other POWs, some of whom collapsed under the torment.

Nonetheless, I was ordered to have my fingerprints taken and to provide the information needed for registration. A stout American officer and a Chinese interpreter came to our ward, in which over seventy patients, wounded and diseased, were lying on canvas cots. The ward was in a large iron-framed tent with a plywood floor and two entrances. The air was foul in here. The officer asked me my name, rank, education, my unit's serial number, and questioned me about my immediate superiors. I told him that my name was Feng Yan and that I was a new recruit, serving as a secretary in an infantry company in the 539th Regiment. The Americans must have known that regiment's serial number, so I told him the truth: 3692. He showed me a bunch of snapshots of Chinese soldiers who all looked like officers, and asked me whether I knew any of them. I didn't recognize a single one. I was still weak, having been operated on just three days before, so after a few more questions the officer and the interpreter left, saying they'd come again. Throughout the questioning, I didn't speak English, fearful that I might reveal my true identity.

Outside the compound fenced with barbed wire, forty yards away from the gate, stood a white-stuccoed building, two stories high, with a red-tiled roof and dormer windows. Before the war it had been a schoolhouse, and now it was occupied by the Operating Section, which the patients called the Butchery. Almost every day dead bodies were carried out of it and then stacked in front of the closure's admission center, to join those who had died en route to the hospital. I had spent four hours in that building three days before. After I was placed on a table, two doctors had talked in whispers about my leg. I couldn't understand their words completely, because I was still delirious and unfamiliar with their medical vocabulary. They sounded unsure about the procedure to come. An anesthetist injected some drug into my lower abdomen and the small of my back, and then they tied down my arms and calves. When a nurse had spread a white sheet over my belly, one of the doctors smirked, saying, "I never thought there'd be so many patients to cut when I was drafted. This definitely beats any residency."