Korean War

Some U.S. fliers captured during the Korean War gave Soviet interrogators information on everything from troop sleeping times to battle tactics, according to documents held for decades in Russian secret files and newly released by the Pentagon. More than 200 airmen apparently were pumped about the latest weaponry. Their interrogation records surfaced as part of a U.S.-Russian investigation into the fate of unaccounted-for American POWs.

The U.S.-led United Nations Command on Wednesday returned the remains of two men believed to be Chinese who took part in the 1950-53 Korean War. Honor guards turned over the remains in two caskets to the North Koreans and Chinese in a ceremony at the truce village of Panmunjom, 35 miles north of Seoul.

Ten to 15 U.S. servicemen apparently taken prisoner during the Korean War may still be alive in North Korea and may be seeking to return home, according to an internal Defense Department report. The report, stamped "For Official Use Only," also says at least one of four U.S. soldiers who defected to North Korea in the 1960s may want to come back.

A bill that would authorize a Korean War Service Medal along with funding for three Navy projects in Ventura County was approved last week by the House of Representatives. The bill, co-sponsored by Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-Simi Valley), calls for a medal for members of the military who served in Korea after the war ended in 1953. It also provides $29.

Re "Veterans Revisit a Nation Worthy of Their Fight" (July 26), on the gratitude expressed to Americans by elderly South Koreans for our sacrifices in the Korean War and the indifference we met in the United States on our return: In November 1980, I parachuted into South Korea as a member of an Army Reserve Special Forces team. On the ground, a South Korean home guardsman noticed the 2nd Infantry Division patch on the right shoulder of my field jacket. He asked me if I had served during the war. When I told him I had, he said a few words to other Koreans grouped around a small fire that had marked our drop zone.

Hong Xuezhi, 94, a retired general who was a vice commander of Chinese military forces during the Korean War, died Monday of an illness, the official Xinhua News Agency announced. In 1989, near the end of his long career, he lost his post as deputy secretary-general of the Communist Party's Central Military Commission, reportedly because he opposed the use of the army to crush the Tiananmen Square democracy movement.

Chung Soon-Duk, the last communist guerrilla to be caught in South Korea, laments her "pathetic mess." She lost her right leg to a wound 40 years ago, and her left side is paralyzed from a stroke. She is hospitalized and needs a wheelchair to get around. Yet when she recalls her days as an "anti-American unification warrior," the 70-year-old woman brims with bravado. She belts out old rebel songs, pumping her arm -- the only limb she can use -- to the beat: "Comrades, shoulder your rifles.

Forty years ago today, Rik Yoshizawa landed in Korea. A young GI from East Los Angeles, he never forgot the brutal battle scenes he witnessed, although he rarely spoke about his war experiences in later years. But in May, he and another Korean War veteran set out on a cross-country bicycle trip to remind Americans about one of the nation's bloodiest wars and to drum up support for the International Korean War Veterans Memorial that has been proposed for Angels Gate Park in San Pedro.

Wanjoo Hyun introduces himself as a survivor. "I was in the first grade when the war began," Hyun, the 47-year-old owner of a restaurant in Orange, said last week as he visited an exhibit on the Korean War at the Korean Cultural Service in Los Angeles. "Even though I was very young, I remember most things about the war," he said, recounting how fighting took the lives of family members and reduced Seoul, his hometown, to rubble.

President Reagan's signature on a bill authorizing a Korean War memorial marks the end of a seven-year campaign by veterans of the conflict, who believe they have averted the pitfalls encountered by sponsors of the once-controversial Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The bill, signed earlier this week, calls for appointment of a special 12-member commission to choose the design and site in the capital.