Nanshan kept his promise. He got some sleeping pills from the medic and ground them. Before we boarded the ship, he hid Blackie in a field cauldron. He broke a potato in half and smeared both pieces with the sleeping powder and fed them to Blackie. Soon the dog dropped off to sleep. Nanshan covered him with an empty gunnysack, and so Blackie passed the guards undiscovered.
35. IN THE DEMILITARIZED ZONE
On September 10, 1953, we arrived at Pusan, and from there we headed for the Neutral Zone, which was also called the Demilitarized Zone. It was in an immense enclosure outside a small town named Munsanni, just a few miles south of Kaesong. The town had been partly leveled by bombs; a few houses still stood with naked walls, but most of the roofs were gone. When we entered the camp on the sixteenth, the persuasion had been under way for days. The zone was guarded by Indian troops, and the governing body comprised people from other countries as well, such as Poland, Sweden, Czechoslovakia, and Switzerland. There were many representatives from the United Nations, North Korea, and mainland China. We were told that we should expect to stay at least twelve weeks in our new barracks, Compound 21.
Why so long? We were upset and bewildered.
The camp here consisted of about forty compounds, thirty-three of which held the Chinese POWs. We ate better food now: breakfast was barley porridge boiled in dry milk, and for lunch and dinner we had rice mixed with peas or soybeans, and there were also potatoes and cabbages. Each man now received more cigarettes, one pack every other day.
In the east, toward the Imjin River, stretched an orchard, whose apple and pear trees had all shed their leaves, their branches often bearded by hoarfrost in the morning. In the west rose a hill, treeless but covered with tall grass and teeming with ring-necked pheasants. We often gathered along the barbed-wire fence to watch the birds fly up and away with fluty cackles. From the distance the males' iridescent plumage glittered in the sunlight like tiny explosions and often brought out shouts among us. How we wished we could have gone hunting for them. The soil was dark and rich here, but the fields were deserted, pockmarked by bombs. Still, there must have been some grains, grass seeds, and berries in the wilderness for the birds to eat. The pheasants, unlike human beings, seemed to have multiplied thanks to the war.
Our compound had obviously been inhabited by troops before, because there were bunks instead of plank beds inside the tents. The Indian guards, often armed with lathis, treated us decently on the whole. On the day of our arrival, they even offered us each a cup of coffee and a chocolate. But they guarded the gate so strictly that nobody could get out of the compound without official permission. As a result, all the battalions were isolated from one another. If somebody was sick and had to go to the hospital, which was within the Demilitarized Zone, two or three guards would escort him. On the other hand, the Indian authorities allowed the representatives from China to broadcast to us for three hours on end every day. Some of the persuaders went so far as to threaten us, saying, "Think about your families, who are all on the mainland. You should at least come home for them." Their words intimidated the prisoners so much that many men in our battalion refused to meet with the Communist persuaders. Wang Yong got furious and assigned some men to pound on two upended oil drums with sticks to drown out the broadcasting, but this just produced more din and we still could hear snatches of the speeches. So he ordered his bodyguards to smash the amplifiers at the tips of the tall poles, and they knocked them out with stones. The Indians never had them repaired.
Wang Yong was desperate to communicate with the other compounds after several attempts had failed. One day someone suggested using Blackie to carry messages to Compound 22, which was about one hundred yards to the south. So they got hold of the dog, tied a letter around his neck, and pushed him out through a hole in the fence near the gate. Blackie was a successful messenger, since some prisoners in Compound 22 knew him and he would respond to their whistling. But the guards noticed his missions from the very beginning. I was worried about his safety and begged the secretary not to write any more messages on white paper, which was too eye-catching.
Nanshan had by now replaced me as the owner of Blackie, which I didn't mind, because I might not be able to bring the dog along if I ended up being repatriated. The boy could take better care of him; he could feed him and had already persuaded the other cooks to let Blackie snuggle in a corner of the kitchen. I was pleased that Nanshan loved the dog so.
One night Blackie went out on an errand and didn't return. I thought he might have gotten randy again, but he couldn't possibly have escaped from the zone, in which, to my knowledge, there wasn't another dog. Both Nanshan and I waited late into the night for him to come back. At about two a.m. I was too exhausted to stay up any longer and went to bed.
Nanshan went to the gate alone the next morning to talk to the Indian guards. He couldn't speak English but pleaded with a lieutenant in Chinese, "Please, please tell me where Blackie is!" The thick-bearded officer kept shaking his head as I approached them. In desperation the boy, assuming they really couldn't make out what he was trying to say, began barking and got down on all fours like a dog. The Indians burst out laughing.
I went up to the officer and asked him if they had seen Blackie. He rolled his gray eyes and told me matter-of-factly, "That dog was a secret courier, so we had him executed."
I told Nanshan, "They killed him."
At those words the boy sprang at the officer, wielding his small fists, but I restrained him in spite of my own tears and dragged him back to our barracks. Together we wept in the kitchen.
When the same bearded lieutenant came in to do the head count that evening, two inmates suddenly lunged at him, each holding a brick. The officer tore away toward the fence while more men pursued him, some brandishing short clubs. They all looked murderous. I was so shocked that I didn't know what to do. I wouldn't have minded if they'd roughed him up some, but killing him might bring disaster on ourselves. Fortunately, before they could corner him, a squad of Indian guards rushed over from the other side of the fence, raised their rifles, and pulled the bolts. So the prisoners let him go.
Blackie's death disrupted our communication with the outside, but except for Nanshan and me, most inmates forgot the dog in a matter of days. Their attempt on the Indian officer's life in fact had little to do with vengeance. Uncertain of their future, most of them were desperate and irascible; they had seized the occasion to vent their emotions.
Wang Yong assigned Dajian and me a job: to talk with the Indian soldiers as often as possible, gather information about the persuasion, and report it to him in the evenings. He issued each of us some extra cigarettes for the job. So every day I tried to approach the guards and chat with them. From them I began to get a better picture of our situation, about which, unfortunately, the more we learned, the more disheartened we became. Two Chinese divisions were less than three miles away in the north. If they attacked, the Imjin River would block our retreat. Furthermore, the Indians who ran the Demilitarized Zone seemed partial to the Communists and might connive with them to send us back to the mainland. We estimated that our chances of reaching Taiwan were at most fifty-fifty. One afternoon, while talking with an Indian officer, I heard something I had never thought of before. The square-chinned man told me that if you were reluctant to go to either mainland China or Taiwan, you could apply for a third country. "Where is that, Chuck?" I asked him, not knowing his last name. His men called him Officer D.
He fluttered his pomfret eyes and said in a nasal accent, "Like India, Brazil, or Argentina."
"Are you sure?"
"Positive\y." He stressed the third syllable of the word in a chipper voice. "There's already a group of such POWs, you know." He touched his green turban, his hand holding a cigarette I'd given him.