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96 chapter four The Starving Time Chapter Four ★★★ Most of the deaths occurred between the time we got to Camp 5 on January 18, 1951, and May or June 1951. As we entered Pyoktong from the east, we walked about a half a mile through the village and then we could see that we were at the highest point. Looking down we could see a peninsula. The river was frozen over, but you could see the ice, and it enveloped the land at the bottom and around each side.1 I am pretty sure Pyoktong had been a fishing village. Our destination was the area below the village. The camp boundaries were approximately four hundred yards wide and about six hundred yards long. It was our permanent camp. One boundary was the Yalu River, which almost encircled the land the camp was on. We could see Manchuria on the other side of the river. The town and camp were in a valley, starting at the east end, the direction from which we entered, and falling gradually to the Yalu River. The lower part of the town was part of the camp. There was no fence to separate the camp from the rest of the town, but there were some guards, and everyone knew the POWs were not allowed into the part of the town where Koreans lived. Some POWs did trade with some Korean civilians, but just a few, and it wasn’t easy. I never did do it. They had evacuated the lower part of the town for the prisoner-of-war camp. Standing in the middle of Camp 5 and looking west at Manchuria across the Yalu River, the ridges on my right and left were each about a hundred feet high and ran from the river to about the level of the middle of the town (Map 9). They had guards up on both ridges, along the whole length of them. To my rear were the main headquarters of the Chinese. To my right was a meeting building with a large room for showing propaganda movies and having speakers. It was, I think, the largest building in the camp or town. The only fence I remember was in the area near that building, running the starving time 97 from the town over to the ridge. Otherwise, there was no need for fences, since there were guards in the town at the eastern boundary of the camp, and the river and ridges served as natural barriers. There was an open field in the center of the camp at the lower end. It was about a hundred yards long and seventy or so yards wide. It was just an open area until POW labor cleared rocks and leveled and prepared it for the so-called parade ground and sports area. Compounds (groups of houses) were on both sides of that field and above it. At the middle of the western end of the peninsula was where the rations and later also firewood were brought in across the ice in winter and by boat in the summer. The one faucet in the entire camp was near the northern side of the parade ground about midway up the parade ground. There was a tall pole with a PA system speaker on it. As we marched down toward the river, they started putting men into rooms. I was put in a room in about the second row of buildings, in the third building in that row. It was still crowded, but not as bad as it had been in Death Valley. Instead of about twenty-five men in a room measuring about eight feet by ten feet, they were putting about twenty to a room the same size. In the late spring of 1951, after many deaths had occurred, they rearranged us, but I believe I stayed in the same room. We were housed in the homes of people who had been evacuated from the lower part of the town. The buildings were pretty similar to the ones in Death Valley, except that the houses in Camp 5 were usually arranged in groups of three or four, called compounds. They had the same kind of walls, floors, and heating systems. Some of the houses in Camp 5 had wood shingle roofs, but most had straw-thatched over mud roofs, like in Death Valley. The Chinese did try to improve sanitation from the time of our arrival at Camp 5. I think they...

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