My first reaction when I read this article
was to be highly shocked. I was not able to believe that South Korean pows of
the Korean War are still trapped in the North, even after more than SIXTY years.
It is also quite unsettling to hear that at
the end of the Korean War, about 80,000 South Korean soldiers were unaccounted
for. Most were presumed to be dead, but I wonder how many prisoners of war
might still be trapped in the North. This thought came to me because in the
article, it was stated that during the prisoner exchange at the end of the war,
the North only returned about 8,300 soldiers.
When a few elderly soldiers actually did
escape around 20 years ago, I found the stories they brought with them to be
highly implausible and strange. As it turns out, during their imprisonment, these
prisoners of war were encouraged to marry North Korean wives as means of
assimilation. I would’ve thought that these men would be secluded and kept away
from other people as a form of punishment. I guess not. To me, this shows how
unusual the North Korean Government can be.
It also worries me that there is not much
that there is not much the South Korean government can do to retrieve its
soldiers. It’s very sad for me to find out that in order to return home, these
pows must escape. And in a country as heavily-militarized as the North, this is
nearly impossible.
I hope that there will soon be a better way
to bring these soldiers back home to the South, where they belong.
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