The box-office hit “Ode to My Father” chronicles the life of a man who flees North Korea during the Korean War and sacrifices his life to support his family in South Korea during the tumultuous times that follow.
The film opens with a scene of the famous “Heungnam evacuation,” in which a total of 193 U.S. military and merchant cargo ships delivered about 105,000 U.S. and South Korean soldiers and 98,000 North Korean civilians to safety in the face of an onslaught of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, which had come to the aid of the North Korean communists.
Most Koreans old enough or with adequate history education know about the episode that took place in the days before the Christmas of 1950. But few are aware that the mass wartime evacuation would not have been successful without the efforts of some unsung heroes.
The film’s opening scene portrays one of these unsung heroes ― Dr. Hyun Bong-hak, who persuades a U.S. general overseeing the evacuation to take the fleeing North Korean civilians as well.
As depicted in the movie, Dr. Hyun, then a civil affairs adviser and translator for the commander ― Maj. Gen. Almond Edward ― makes an emotional appeal and the general finally orders his men to unload arms and other military equipment to make room for the refugees on the ship Meredith Victory.
The 139-meter Meredith Victory alone brought 14,000 North Korean refugees to Geojedo Island off the southern coast of the peninsula, earning a place in the Guinness World Records for “the largest evacuation from land by a single ship.”
Dr. Hyun was born in North Korea in 1922 during the Japanese colonial period and studied medicine at what is now Yonsei University College of Medicine and then in the United States. He came back to Korea three months before the start of the Korean War and participated in the war as a civilian adviser and eventually worked for Gen. Almond.
After the war, he went back to the U.S., where he taught before passing away in 2007 at the age of 86.
After the movie brought Dr. Hyun into the limelight, the government designated him “The War Hero of December 2014,” and his alma mater ― Yonsei University ― and members of the Society to Commemorate Dr. Hyun, held events in his memory in Seoul recently.
I had the pleasure of getting in touch with Dr. Hyun’s two daughters, Esther Kyongsun Hyun and Helen Kyungeun Hyun-Bowlin, who visited their fatherland to attend the events.
They visited Yonsei Medical School, Busan, Geojedo Island and the Demilitarized Zone. On Geojedo, they met Lee Kyung-pil, a veterinarian who was one of the five babies born on the Meredith Victory during the journey to Geojedo.
After the short “whirlwind trip,” as put by Esther, Dr. Hyun’s second daughter, they contributed an article to The Korea Herald, which we gladly published on Jan. 6.
The daughters recalled that when they were growing up in the U.S., their father brought home foreign students who did not have a place to go during the Christmas holidays. “Our father felt pity for families that were separated. He wanted future generations to remember the past and would have loved the movie ‘Ode to My Father,’” they wrote in the article.
It was through this article that I came to know of another unsung hero who made the Heungnam evacuation possible ― Col. Edward R. Forney. The Hyuns said that their father had received constant encouragement from the colonel and that they had met Gen. Almond several times together to persuade him.
The legacy of Col. Forney, who died in 1965, includes more than the Heungnam evacuation. He served as a military adviser to the South Korean Marine Corps after the war and played a crucial role in building it up as an elite military force. It was natural that the 1st Marine Division in Pohang designated a “Rd. Forney” in 2010.
It is heartening that we have not forgotten what the American soldier did for this country and that the American veteran’s descendants still cherish the Korean ties their ancestor formed more than 60 years ago.
Ned Forney, a grandson of the colonel, has visited Korea several times, most recently last month, when he was reunited with the two daughters of Dr. Hyun and veterinarian Lee. He met Dr. Hyun for the first time in 1998 at a Korea Society program in which Hyun spotted his name on the list of participants.
His son, Benjamin, is now studying at the Graduate School of International Studies at Seoul National University. The Korean War Memorial Foundation is assisting his study through scholarships for descendants of foreign Korean War veterans.
Getting to know about the two families, I thought that Dr. Hyun and Col. Forney would not have imagined that their offspring would get together some day, along with children of the people they saved.
Nor would they have thought that some of those who left Heungnam during the cold winter days would never see the families they left behind ― at least not yet.
By Chon Shi-yong
Chon Shi-yong is the chief editorial writer of The Korea Herald. He can be reached at sychon@heraldcorp.com. ― Ed.
