As far as Hong remembers, Jiang Qingquan was the first one who shouted “fire at me” and in turn inspired the eponymous article. However, when he was about to publish the report, he was told not to publicize Jiang any more, because he had been captured by US troops.
Jiang was repatriated back to China after the war and has spent his life working as a farmer. No villagers knew about his past until Hong finally tracked him down after 40 years of persistent searching.
When Heroic Sons and Daughters was first screened in 1965 in his home village, Jiang was immediately taken back to his time on the battlefield. He told Hong that after watching the film, he wept all night. Despite his obvious trauma, he remained tight lipped about his past. He was ashamed of his experience as a prisoner of war and thought he did not deserve the title of “hero” given to Wang Cheng in the film.
“Why didn’t they [the artillery] fire at me? If they had done so, I would not have been a POW,” he said.
However, in Lu Hongkun’s eyes, Jiang is a “true hero.” Lu, also a radio operator responsible for communicating with Jiang’s forward position, told our reporter that he clearly remembered how Jiang stood his ground, even as his companions went down in flames around him.
“The enemy is 50 meters (165 feet) away from me,” he heard Jiang shouting over the walkie-talkie, “30 meters (100 feet), 10 meters (33 feet) … fire over me at the pillbox!”
Same Memories
Wang Cheng’s story helped to soften O’Callaghan’s emotions. After watching a video tape of the movie, he told Tan he would no longer harbor hatred towards the Chinese soldiers who killed his comrades, as they had also safeguarded a soldier’s dignity.
“A hero understands a hero,” Tan wrote in his article. In his eyes, the American soldier O’Callaghan and the Chinese “Wang Chengs,” though different in their stance, were cut from the same cloth: obeying orders, being brave and loyal to their countries.
O’Callaghan would never forget the combat in which he lost his left leg. He related to Tan how after regaining consciousness, he randomly seized a fistful of soil and surprisingly found about 30 shell casings in it. The Chinese soldier had been blown apart, leaving only a honeycomb-like tree trunk behind. The blast had blown off the other surviving soldier’s legs and severed his right arm, while the third survivor was left blind and deaf.
Such bloody scenes were familiar to his Chinese enemies. Hong Lu had encountered similarly brutal combat in the battle for Pig Chip Hill, staged several months before the armistice.
“After four rounds of combat, the hill was heaped with the bodies of troops from both sides,” Hong said. “We could not dig a trench, because what our shovels ran into was not soil, but bodies, piles of bodies.”
‘Never Again’
“The biting memory is always gnawing at your heart. Nobody but those who were personally engaged in that war could have such a feeling,” Hong told NewsChina.
A war perpetuates hostility between two opposing sides, but also connects them through shared experiences, as the Korean War did with O’Callaghan and Tan and Hong.
Hong, now also a friend of O’Callaghan, revealed that O’Callaghan had hoped to make an anti-war film about his experiences. He had even devised the first scene of the movie, set around the famous anti-war sculpture of a gun with a knotted barrel standing before the UN building in New York. Before his death, he urged his family to finish the movie.
Hong fully comprehends how O’Callaghan felt. The last day of the battle remains fresh in his mind. ‘Other troops were counting down to the armistice, and all the gunshots abruptly ended. It was a ceasefire. We held our breath for fear of ruining the armistice. A platoon commander beside me began to cry, it was at that point that we knew we were going home.”
Hong saw US soldiers come out from their trenches, hailing the armistice. They sat on the ground and smiled at each other.
No carnival would be more joyous than those immediately after the war, as the book The Korean War by American author and Korean veteran Matthew Bunker Ridgway explained, but this peace was traded for millions of lives.
“I hope we will never again meet on the battlefield,” Hong engraved these words on a woodcut he gave to a US GI as the two sides flooded onto no man’s land to exchange gifts. The soldier, through an interpreter, instantly got the meaning and repeated the words again and again until his CO asked him to go back.
This episode, Hong said, would be engraved on his mind.
