In Seoul, thirty-three thousand American soldiers, in the biggest mass surrender since Corrigedor in 1942, made the short but humiliating march across the NKA’s pontoon bridge, built in the shadow of the old Chamshil Iron Bridge, toward the shell-pocked Olympic Stadium, where they were separated according to regiment. Fifty-two senior officers were weeded out as quickly as possible, the NKA interrogators insisting, upon pain of death, that the officers sign confessions of “criminal imperialistic aggression against the Democratic Republic of Korea.”
Only three signed. Seventeen of the others, described over the loudspeakers as “recalcitrant warmongers,” were shot in the dressing rooms below the baseball stadium, their bodies dumped on the diamond from a captured U.S. Army truck that roared about the field of six thousand prisoners, the blood of the murdered men dark on the poorly lit artificial turf.
One of the bedraggled and shell-shocked soldiers, a U.S. private from the Eleventh Division, clutching a military blanket about him, watched each of the bodies fall limply onto the tread-torn diamond, wondering aloud why they had not killed all of the officers who had refused to sign.
“Why seventeen?” he asked numbly of no one in particular.
“To scare us,” answered an ROK lieutenant who had torn his intelligence corps patches off moments before he was captured. “To show the others what happens if they hold out. To show us what will happen if we resist.”
The American looked around the dimly lit stadium, few of the lights working after the artillery barrage, “There are ten times as many prisoners here as guards.”
“But they’ve got the guns,” said the ROK soldier.
One of the bodies they saw was a major, his collar stud standing out even in the poor light. He looked as if he were smiling, but it was an illusion — a death mask of pain — tortured before they shot him. The private noticed for the first time that the white U.S. stars on the truck’s doors had been smeared red. When it drove out of the stadium, there was a silence heavy with the stench of pickled cabbage and excrement. The NKA had forbidden use of any of the toilets behind the stands, and most of the wounded were now crowded into the north corner beyond the diamond, where they had to defecate into a shallow trench.
Soon the loudspeakers were ordering all intelligence officers to report to the stands.
“Fuck you!” the ROK lieutenant shouted in perfect English, and got a weak round of applause.