이것이 전쟁이다! Ⅲ. Korea 1950 l 23 stunned question in his eyes. Either those pilots were hotrod jockies with jets or else we Americans were again directly involved in a killing war, and these had just killed. They were not hotrod boys. The score that Tuesday night stood at six North Korean planes knocked down, and these youngsters had accounted for three of them. Upon entering the squadron readyroom I noticed a young pilot sitting against the bulletin-board wall. Something in his face made me grab a quick picture. The next day I discovered quite by accident that he had shot down the first enemy plane of the Korean war. I still am not sure what I saw in his face and slouched body. Even as I turned away from shooting him and the other first killer pilots I became more aware of the big transport planes landing on the field. Two hangars on the edge of the field had been converted into giant reception centers with registration tables, chowlines and Red Cross units. Evacuees started flooding the place as the transports swung off the taxiways and stopped. Most of the people came out of Korea with little more than the clothes on their bodies. A few had extra coats. Many of the men carried shotguns, leftovers from the last duck season. During that one period of daylight on Tuesday, the 27th of June, over one thousand American and friendly nations’ citizens were evacuated, without the loss of a single life. By late afternoon the stream of transports had dwindled to a trickle then stopped completely. Every known American citizen had been evacuated from the zone of invasion. There must have been many prayers offered that night, blessing the men who flew into strange country time after time to bring them to safety. That evening after the two days of sunny skies and a calm moonlit night, the weather moved in, clouds came down and it began to pour. The operations room had noted our request for transport to Kimpo airfield near Seoul but no more flights were going in. It had fallen into North Korean hands. That made me wonder how the young South Korean pilots felt who had been brought over the day before in an emergency effort to teach them to fly
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