Korean War Pows Meet To Remember

The last time they laid eyes on each other, Yosh Tamaki and Elliott Sortillo were two young stick figures, clinging to life in a hellhole called Pyok Tong.

They were the lucky ones.

Imprisoned nearly three years during the Korean War, Tamaki and Sortillo watched more than 1,500 of their comrades die of exposure and starvation in a brutal camp near the Manchurian border.

Overshadowed by World War II and Vietnam, the Korean War has been shamefully overlooked as the so-called Forgotten War.

In the three years the war lasted, 1950-1953, nearly 37,000 Americans died and thousands more were captured or went missing. The fate of some 8,000 remains unknown.

“ They just died every day,” says Tamaki, 69, of his experience as a prisoner of war. “I remember my master sergeant. He didn’t last a month.”

“Why them and not us?” asks Sortillo, 66. “That’s a question that haunts us all.”

The reunion of these two former soldiers took place the other day in the lobby of Spokane’s Ridpath Hotel, where the Korean War Ex-POW Association is holding its annual national reunion. This gathering of 400 POWs and family members concludes today.

Sortillo, of Portage, Ind., is president of the organization. Tamaki is a Spokane resident. He is retired after working for 38 years in The Spokesman-Review’s composing and circulation departments.

At long last, the sacrifice of those who fought and died in the Korean War is getting some tribute.

“Korea was not a police action or a crisis or a conflict or a clash,” President Clinton told a crowd last month in a ceremony commemorating the Korean War’s 50th anniversary. “Korea was a war, a hard, brutal war, and the men and women who fought in it were heroes.”

Tamaki and Sortillo balk at such labels. But what better term do you bestow on such service and suffering?

Sortillo was a tough kid from Philly when he joined the Army in 1949. Too young at 15 to enlist, he had an uncle lie about his age.

Fresh out of high school in Honolulu, Tamaki was a gifted drummer who played with a number of marquee musicians. He enlisted in the Army to take advantage of the G.I. Bill.

Then came June 25, 1950. Communist-backed North Korean forces invaded the south. The United States persuaded the United Nations to sanction a multinational effort to rescue the south.

Suddenly, 5.7 million young Americans were headed for war.

“(Gen. Douglas) McArthur told us we’d be home by Christmas,” Sortillo says. “Of course, he didn’t tell us which year.”

Sortillo was captured Nov. 30, 1950. Tamaki was taken on New Year’s Day, 1951.

A forced march to Pyok Tong took three bitter months. Prisoners were fed little and often slept shivering in fields.

Being Japanese American, Tamaki was subjected to regular interrogations and beatings. “They hated the Japanese for what the Imperial army had done to Korea during World War II,” Tamaki says.

“I couldn’t make them understand I was American. One guard kept saying, `No American Japanese. Only white people.”’

At camp, prisoners got daily rations of cracked corn or millet. They also ate what soldiers dubbed “devil fish.” The fish was so rotten it had to be heavily salted to kill the maggots.

“I thought I was going to die,” Tamaki says. “People don’t realize what it was like, being in a North Korean prisoner of war camp.

“We were skin and bones.”

Prisoners couldn’t brush their teeth. “Every seam in your body was covered with lice,” Sortillo says.

“I still picture him as this young kid with peach fuzz,” Tamaki says of Sortillo. “He was the nicest looking kid in our group, probably because he was so young.”

They were freed in 1953 when the war ended in stalemate. The two friends went their separate ways.

Sortillo became a career soldier, serving in Vietnam.

Tamaki moved to Spokane to be trained to run a linotype machine. He and his wife, June, raised five daughters.

Sortillo married Sondra in 1960. They raised a son and a daughter.

The memories of Korea still haunt them, they say. But like other Korean War veterans, Tamaki and Sortillo never marched in protest or made an issue out of what they endured.

“We didn’t make a lot of noise,” Elliott says. “We just came home and melted back into society.”