There is a special place in the city of Busan where regret, hate, fear, hope and forgiveness rise from the earth like the rushing waters of a fountain, and fall into the hearts of the living like the nourishing dew of heaven.
It is a place of war and peace, of past and future, of journey’s end and journey’s beginning.
The moment I step into this expanse, my heart weeps. The moment I see the words, that “every soldier has a mother”, I cry.
I can’t help it. I have been to many war memorials, far too many, and always, sorrow would cling to me, the way hurt attends to a wound.
I quickly wipe away the tears before rising to leave the Memorial Service Hall with fellow journalists. The stained glass, the long benches and the sombre floor fall silent once more as the last of us shuffle out.
Just outside the door, an elderly Korean man, face mottled, eyes bright and arms firm, bows his head low. I bow to him as best as my stiffness allows, and he smiles and says, “Thank you for coming.” (A friend translates this.)
Ahead of us is the international relations director of the United Nations Memorial Cemetery in South Korea. I can’t quite hear what he is saying, so I step up my pace and presently come alongside him.
The wind is at rest this spring day in this southeastern city of South Korea. The mid-afternoon air is cool and crisp, and the beautiful blossoms and scents of the season ease the weariness of the heart. A large black bird is perched on one of the flagpoles nearby, and I think it is watching us, and listening, too.
“I didn’t know until very much later that my father was buried here,” says Leo DeMay.
Indeed, the tall and sturdy man had grown up not knowing his true father. But a river must find its course to the sea, and more than 10 years ago, DeMay discovered that André Adelard Régimbald was killed on his first night in combat on Sept 5, 1952. The Canadian visited the grave of his father in 2007, and an attachment grew, and years later, he took on the role of custodian of this sacred park.
Two-thousand three-hundred soldiers are interred here, the first and only UN war cemetery in the world. But altogether, more than 50,000 had died. From 17 nations they came to fight a war away from the soil of their soul, and here they remain asleep, their mortal bodies bonded to the bed where they fell.
The Korean War erupted in 1950 when the forces of Communist leader Kim Il-sung swept across the peninsula. Tales of the great battles are known well enough, from Seoul to Osan, and from Inchon to Imjin River, and on every gravestone that I look at, reflections of pain endured and ended are vivid.
I am in a corner of the park all by myself now, the world around me as still as my mind. Suddenly, the call of the bugle sails across the air like the cry of a gull. It must be the flag-raising ceremony at the raised central square. I walk quickly to it.
My colleagues have just placed a wreath and are already moving away. But two guards in immaculate uniforms remain, staring straight ahead, pupils unmoving. I look up and I see a bird on a flagpole. Is it the same one?
Jinny, a Korean friend and guide, stands close by. She reminds me
of her story, told a few hours earlier in our bus. She whispers, “It is a beautiful and sad place”. I can only nod.
Her father and two uncles were near the southwestern city of Gansun when it was overran by North Korean soldiers. They were barely in their teens then. But their parents were terrified that they would be taken by the enemy.
So the boys, and many like them, were sent to the surrounding hills and mountains, where stone and tree provided refuge from the claws of death, and where food was brought to them at night to sustain in their bodies the light of life.
But death had already mercilessly ravaged the people. When the armistice descended on the wounded peninsula on July 27, 1953, more than one million lives from the North, South and everywhere else, had been lost. Homes were destroyed, the land was savaged and the sky was blackened.
The motivations of the usurpers of peace are not to be examined in this space, for I do not have tears enough to bear their burden. But the immense suffering of the Korean people, and the sacrifices of those who came to their aid, must surely have a space in our hearts. They are the nourishing dew of heaven.