This is Jockel Podcast number 273 with Echo Charles and me, Jockel Wilink. Good evening, Echo.

Good evening.

I was with the Turks and we were heading south. The Chinese had entered the war a few days before.

They had kicked the ass of the entire 8th Army and we were on the run.

We had descended a spur of the ridge and were crossing the valley when we came to a village.

Everywhere you looked were the corpses of slaughtered Americans.

One, a captain of infantry, I had met back in Fort Lewis, was strung up by the wrists between two buildings.

His feet not quite touching the ground.

He raised his head slightly and his lips trembled as he tried to speak.

His strength lay in a pool of frozen blood beneath his feet.

I leaned my rifle against the wall and reached up to cut the ropes.

Water, he breathed softly, then coughed once the air gurgling through the blood and his throat.

I had heard it before from the coal miners back in Hermione.

They made no difference whether I cut him down or not. He was dead.

His chin sank to his chest and he swayed lightly like the thin frail branches of the willow trees next to the cemetery back home.

The men captured with him were hanging too.

Some between branches, some in doorways, one between two thick limbs of an ancient apple tree.

They had all been butchered the same way, stripped, then strung up like Christ on the cross.

Their stomachs had been sliced open and their guts pulled out to dangle down before them.

Blood, flesh, and guts were trampled in the snow everywhere.

The Turks glided silently from body to body, cutting each down and laying it to rest.

A bright Korean moon etched in silver the horror of the scene.

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