A War Of Memories
50 years later, a former marine grapples with questions of murder--and an elusive search for the truth
Copyright 2003 Eric Longabardi / TeleMedia News Productions under license to U.S. News & World Report
SCOTT DEPOT, W.VA.--There are some things a man simply can't forget. For Carl Lamb, it's the image of bullet-riddled bodies piled one on top of another in the basement of a battle-scarred building in the middle of a burning hell called Seoul. The Marine Corps veteran can still see the bodies of the North Korean prisoners of war, he says, like it was yesterday, the memory of what he believes was an American war crime seared in his mind by years of nightmares and flashbacks. After all this time, more than half a century later, Lamb wants answers. But he has little hope, he says, that his government will ever give him any. "They couldn't deal with it back then," he says, "and they can't deal with it now."
Late one evening this July, Lamb talked about his 53-year odyssey and a gnawing sense that he will never know the truth. The neighbor's dogs had long ceased their plaintive howling, and the rabbits felt safe once more to hop between the old cars dying in the long grass outside his trailer home. Lamb is a big man with rugged features and hands the size of a basketball player's. The plywood floor creaked under his large feet as he sorted through his military records and the dog-eared photos of the marines he served with in Korea. He's 74 now, his memory sharp, and he speaks with the precision of a man fearful he will leave something out or be misunderstood.
Lamb's life isn't the stuff of a Norman Rockwell painting. Born dirt-poor in Arkansas, the teenage farm boy found his way into the nightmare of the Korean War, a kid soldier who finally made it back not quite whole--a wandering jobber who didn't suffer fools lightly, moved from place to place as the mood took him, all the while a grim image of death burned into his brain like a brand. To put it in its plainest terms, what turned Carl Lamb's life inside out, at least by his account, was murder--murder of the most coldblooded type. It was late September 1950, the circumstances a vicious street-to-street battle for Seoul, the South Korean capital. The bodies--naked POWs, their threadbare uniforms dumped unceremoniously on the floor beside them--were stacked in the basement of an old hotel, the Bando, Lamb believes. Who shot the North Koreans or why, Lamb doesn't know. He didn't see it happen. What he saw, he says, was the aftermath of the slaughter, and it made him sick--sick and angry.
U.S. News has attempted to piece together what happened on that terrible fall day in Seoul. The magazine's investigation did not corroborate all of the details of the incident Lamb described, but it turned up compelling evidence that prisoners were killed in Seoul. The magazine unearthed old court-martial records in which a marine testified that a sergeant with a machine-gun squad, a close friend, killed some North Korean prisoners. The sergeant belonged to Easy Company of the 2nd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment--the same outfit Lamb believes murdered the POWs he says he later saw. But there is no reference to the Bando in the testimony. Separately, U.S. News obtained a February 1951 Marine Corps "after-action" report that refers to the killing of North Korean prisoners by members of Easy Company. The report strongly suggests that the killings occurred during the battle for Seoul. Finally, several former Easy Company marines recall hearing of POWs being killed in a Seoul hotel. Some in Lamb's company who fought alongside Easy Company also confirm that he complained at the time about a mass killing of North Korean prisoners.
advertisement
