Whatever their reasons, the men's fighting upset me. They had once been comrades-in-arms, and many of them would again be comrades after they returned to our homeland. Why should they behave like brutes? When led by the Communists, they had been good soldiers and seemed high-minded and their lives had possessed a purpose, but now they were on the verge of becoming animals. How easily could humanity deteriorate in wretched conditions? How low could an ordinary man fall when he didn't serve a goal larger than himself? Unorganized for honest work or for a meaningful cause, these men were just a mob ruled by the instinct for survival. Sometimes I wondered if there was a Communist cell among us, because I was positive that some of the prisoners were Party members and supposed to lead these desperate men. Yet all the Communists here kept a low profile, hardly distinguishable from others.

One morning, about three weeks after my arrival at Koje Island, I ran into Chang Ming, the editor of our division's bulletin. At first I wasn't sure if it was he, but then, spotting his bushy eyebrows and catfish mouth, I almost cried out with joy. He saw me too, but we pretended we didn't know each other because there were people around.

He was on the other side of the barbed-wire fences, in Compound 71. I squatted down to retie my shoelaces while he stopped to do calisthenics. When everyone had gone out of earshot, we rushed to the fences and started talking excitedly. The first thing he asked me was whether I had signed up to go to Taiwan. "Of course not," I said proudly. He looked four or five years older now, though still robust. His thick lips were cracked. Miraculously, he hadn't been wounded.

Through four rows of barbed wire, he told me that having seen the chaotic state the POWs were in, he and Hao Chaolin had both admitted to the prison authorities that they were officers, so that they could be transferred to Compound 71, a small place holding only about two hundred Chinese officers and staunch Communists. I was surprised to hear that Chaolin had also ended up here. I guessed both of them must have been scared by the unorganized men and the pro-Nationalist force in their former compound.

"But we didn't tell them our true names," he said. "I'm Feng Wen now."

"What a coincidence – my name is Feng Yan!"

"So we sound like siblings now." He laughed – the same carefree laugh of a confident man.

"Did you meet Commissar Pei in Pusan?" I asked.

"He's here too, in Compound 86."

"Really? When did he come?"

"A week ago. He hasn't been exposed yet. We must figure out a way to protect him."

"Do you have regular contact with him?"

"We get instructions from him once in a while."

"What should I do? The men here are like hoodlums, although some of them want to return to China."

"Try to get along with them, I mean with those who want to go home. Don't remain isolated. We made a terrible mistake last fall. We didn't think much of the leadership in the prison camp. Assuming we'd be returned to China soon, we didn't put a lot of effort into the elections. That's why most positions in the camp are held by the reactionaries."

"All right, I'll try to blend in with them. What else should I do?"

"We'll talk about it later. Our immediate goal is to get the leadership into our hands."

He also told me that there was another compound, Number 70, which held Chinese POWs. All the prisoners in it went out to work at the wharf and construction sites, and there were five hundred of them, all able-bodied. How I envied them! If only I hadn't been wounded. I would love to get out of the camp every day, even if it meant sweating like a coolie.

From that day on Ming and I met regularly, almost every morning. Following his advice, I began to mix with the men in my platoon. From the moment I joined them a month earlier, Bai Dajian had caught my attention. He looked familiar to me, though I wasn't sure if I had met him before. He was twenty-one years old, rather timid, but seemed trustworthy. Unlike others, he wouldn't gamble, never quarreled with anybody, and often sat alone absentmindedly As we got to know each other better, I found out that he had actually been my schoolmate at the Huangpu Military Academy, though one year after me. This discovery brought us closer. He had specialized in cavalry but studied at the academy only for a year. When the Communists disbanded our alma mater, he was still a freshman and was later assigned to the Fortieth Army. It turned out that both of us were engaged, so we showed each other photographs of our fiancees. His sweetheart, a nurse in Shenyang City, was an extraordinary beauty with large vivid eyes, a sharp nose, and clear skin, somewhat like a movie starlet. We both admitted that we missed our brides-to-be terribly and once even wept over their pictures.

Dajian had lost two fingers to frostbite. The story of his capture was so horrific that he couldn't tell it without gnashing his teeth. One morning in January 1951, his cavalry company had followed their division commander's Russian jeep to the front. The north wind was screaming, raising snowdrifts on the slopes and across the road, which was slippery and bumpy, rutted by American vehicles the previous fall. Coming out of a mountain pass, the commander spotted some snowmen to his left, about two hundred yards away in the woods. He told the driver to stop, wondering who on earth had found leisure to build snowmen in such a desolate place. He trudged over to the site with his orderly, escorted by a squad of cavalry. To their horror, they found that the figures were actual human beings, frozen to death, some standing, some lying on their backs, and some embracing each other, hardened into statues. They scraped the snow off one man and saw the

Chinese Volunteer's uniform; the commander realized these were actually his own soldiers.

A whole battalion, over four hundred men, had perished without being noticed by their higher-ups. The commander began cursing the regimental staff, saying he'd have some of the officers court-martialed. The truth was that these men had been under his command as well, so he ought to have been held responsible too. His orderly identified the body of the battalion commissar, who had been known as an eloquent speaker. The division commander took off his own overcoat and covered the dead officer.

Then he ordered the cavalry company to ship the bodies back to a service center. Dajian and his comrades loaded the corpses on their horses, each pair tied together with a rope and placed over the flanks of a horse. But they could carry only 230 of the dead and would have to return to pick up the rest. They walked the horses back the way they had come, while the division commander continued toward the front.

In the evening the cavalry approached a frozen lake, ready to take a rest. Suddenly a contingent of Australians under the U.N. flag appeared and surrounded them, firing mortars and machine guns and ordering them to surrender. The horsemen, exhausted and having left their Bren guns and 60-millimeter mortars back where they had found the dead, couldn't repel the enemy. They didn't even have their bugle with them. So in just one charge the Australians subdued them and rounded them up. They made the cavalrymen unload the corpses and give all the Mongolian ponies to a South Korean mule train that transported ammunition and medical supplies for the U.N. troops. Then they marched the captives eastward through a chain of mountains for a whole night. The next morning they handed them to the Americans, who herded them onto three trucks, which shipped them to the POW Collection Center in Pusan. It was during the night march that Dajian's left hand had frozen. Later in the camp his index and ring fingers were amputated. A third of his comrades hadn't survived the march, left behind on the mountains and buried by snowdrifts.