Korean War POW Wayman Simpson remembers the Korean officer who led the Tiger Death March, a brutal trek that claimed nearly 100 lives.
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Welcome to the StoryCorps podcast, I'm Katie Simon, filling in for Dave Isay this week. In this episode a story from a POW--Wayman Simpson Sgt. in the Korean War. He was captured in 1950 soon after fighting began. As a POW Simpson came under the command of a Korean officer nicknamed The Tiger, who led the prisoners on the brutal 9-day trek that claimed nearly 100 lives. The ordeal came to be known as the Tiger Death March.
On Halloween night in 1950, the Tiger took over. We nicknamed him The Tiger because he was so mean. The first thing he did was, we had 16 men, they were wounded in their legs and couldn't walk, and him and his buddies machine-gunned every one of them. We knew then we were in trouble. He shot a man a mile on the march.On (the) second day we asked him to slow the pace down. And you know what he said to us? Let them march till they die. He wasn't gonna give us any water that's the way he was going to kill all of us. But it started snowing the second day out, we ate the snow off again next to us. That's the way we got our water. We got up to a prisoner war camp 12 miles near the Siberian border. I had been in there a little over 38 months. We hadn't shaved, cut our hair, brushed our teeth, taken a bath or nothing. Now I had 2 holes in my left leg they weren't healed enough, no medical care. They stayed open wounds for 26 months. I finally poured boiling water in them and they healed up after that.
I weighed 77 pounds when I came home. That's pretty thin on a 6-foot-3 frame, you know? That's about the only way we can get by unless to joke about it. A lot of youngsters died since we come home because they couldn't turn it loose, they wouldn't, they just dwelled on it all the time, you know? I even make a joke about it, it don't worry me none. I just let it go.
Wayman Simpson at StoryCorps in Lawton, Oklahoma. Read more stories from the project in the first ever StoryCorps book, “Listening Is an Act of Love”, available now in bookstores.
Major support for StoryCorps is provided by AT&T, and by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The StoryCorps archive is housed at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. Tune in the StoryCorps broadcasts Tuesdays on NPR's news and notes and Fridays on NPR's morning edition. I'm Katie Simon, thanks for listening.
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