"I guess I'll be qualified for chief surgeon after the war is over," said a tall doctor with blond eyebrows. Apparently he was in charge of the operation.

My heart shuddered as I realized they were two medical school students who probably hadn't completed their course work yet. I closed my eyes tight wondering if I should beg them to save my leg, but I decided not to talk and just endure it. Outside, a downpour lashed and blurred the windowpanes.

"Ow!" I yelled as one of them poked my wound.

"It hurts?" asked a concerned voice.

Before I could answer, the tall doctor said, "We should start."

The anesthesia hadn't taken full effect yet when they began cutting me. Bouts of pain radiated to my insides and to my neck and head. Despite gritting my teeth, I couldn't stop groaning and twisting while their instruments explored my wound.

The room turned foggy. All the objects – the intense lights, the bottles hung on a steel stand, the bluish caps on the human heads – all seemed to be floating and bobbing around. A moment later I blacked out.

When I came to, my left thigh was dressed with a wooden board tied alongside my leg and hip. "You're all set for the time being," the tall doctor said to me with a grin. "You'll keep your leg."

"Thank you," I sighed.

"You speak English?"

I shook my head and regretted having blurted that out.

"Do you understand what I'm saying?" he asked again.

I didn't respond, just stared at him. With a wave of his hand he summoned two orderlies to take me away on a stretcher.

Besides the American medical staff, there were more than three dozen orderlies working in the hospital. Most of them were Chinese who had cooperated with our captors and had been assigned to work in the building, carrying patients and cleaning. As "collaborators," they probably wouldn't be going back to mainland China, where they would be held accountable for their behavior here, so they treated us according to their own moods and whims. Sometimes they even beat patients. The two orderlies who carried me back to the ward made fun of me all the way, saying I was lucky the doctors hadn't sawed off my leg.

The minute I was returned to the tent I began shivering. The doctor hadn't prescribed any painkiller for me, so I sweated and moaned throughout the night and the next morning. Thanks to the fellow inmates who gave me water to drink and even fed me some rice porridge, I survived that night. Among the ward mates there was a man from the Guards Company of our division, Ding Wanlin by name, who had suffered a bullet wound in his left side, which had almost healed. His bed was next to mine. He had recognized me, having seen me with Commissar Pei a few times, but I didn't remember him. He was considerate to me and sat at my bedside for several hours that night, wiping the sweat and tears off my face now and then. Meantime, a Korean man, wounded in the chest, raved continually and flung his hands as though quarreling with someone.

Later Ding Wanlin told me that our divisional staff had been captured by the enemy two days after they had abandoned us in the valley strewn with the stragglers, but Commander Niu had managed to flee back to North Korea with his orderly and a few officers, because a squad of guards had run in the opposite direction and drawn the enemy away.

In spite of my weak condition, I could eat. My appetite was remarkably good, perhaps kindled by the hunger I had suffered in the wilderness. At long last there was food, though we couldn't eat our fill. I was given a bowl of dry milk every morning and sometimes a can of beef or tuna for dinner. Once we were each issued a fruit compote, which I enjoyed very much. At a regular meal each patient could have one bowl of steamed rice, usually with a ladle of vegetables, salty turnip or carrots or cabbage. Sometimes a half mug of soup was added as a side dish. The standard enamel bowl the prisoners used was not small, four inches tall, six inches in diameter at its top and four inches across at its bottom. To be honest, the food was better than I had expected. I told myself I must eat to get well so that I could return home in one piece.

Wanlin and I promised each other never to disclose our true names and identities to the enemy. He was twenty-one, two years younger than me, tall and bony, with a straight nose and thin eyes. When he spoke he often burbled a little, as if he were still an adolescent whose careless innocence hindered the clarity of his speech. His smile displayed his yellow, lopsided teeth (most of us hadn't been able to brush our teeth for months, so although we had tooth powder now, our teeth still looked awful). I was grateful to him, because he often helped me relieve myself and fetched meals and water for me.

In our tent there was an emaciated man with a fractured thigh, whose name was Zhou Gushu. He was from a different division and had been captured near Wonju the previous winter. His leg was encased in plaster and had been operated on several times. He hurt terribly and was bedridden. He often cursed Dr. Thomas, the tall, blond one in charge of my case as well, and said that man meant to experiment with his leg. Gushu wept a lot, at times tearlessly. I thought that he was too much of a crybaby and that he had better have more self-control, because the tent housed more than forty Koreans who might laugh at us Chinese and view us as weaklings.

Then one day his pain was so overpowering he couldn't eat his midday meal. Wanlin went over, moved the bowl of cabbage soup closer to him, and tried to persuade him to have some. As he spoke, Wanlin caught sight of a maggot wiggling on Gushu's bed. He opened Gushu's blanket and found more maggots. He put away the bowl and went out. In no time he returned with an empty vial and two thin sticks and told Gushu to turn on his side. After collecting the maggots into the bottle, he raised the tail of Gushu's shirt and saw a swarm of the grubs gathering on his lower back, at least fifty strong. Another two patients also lent a hand in rounding up the larvae. Though they had wiped the small of Gushu's back clean, more maggots were creeping out from the top end of the plaster cast. We were all horrified – there must have been an army of them deep in there eating away at his leg.

At the demand of the other patients, two medical personnel arrived with pliers the next morning. When the cast was pried off, balls and balls of maggots appeared wriggling and crawling about. The flesh around the wound was whitish and decayed, messy with pus and blood; the maggots had even bored into the adjacent areas too, where the skin had been intact originally. I turned my head away, my guts twinging.

For the rest of the day Gushu groaned without stopping; his breathing was labored, and from time to time he would tear at his chest. He cursed Dr. Thomas relentlessly, believing the surgeon had intended to mangle his leg. Most of the patients in the tent shared his belief that he had become a guinea pig for germ experimentation.

He was taken to the Operating Section the following day. A patch of skin was peeled off from his other thigh and grafted onto the wounded one. I wondered if the young doctors here were capable of skin grafting. Maybe this was the first time they had even attempted such a job.

Gushu was carried back in the afternoon. He was given a soporific for the night, so he slept soundly. But from the next day on he couldn't stop moaning with pain. He said, "Why didn't they just finish me off? They can use my body parts any way they like once I'm dead." In fact, as I learned later on, the next year when he went through his seventh operation and his leg became numb, another American doctor insisted on amputation, but Gushu refused, saying he'd die rather than lose his leg. Eventually they did manage to save it, though he had to use crutches when walking.