Word: ditches
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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SEOUL was all but dead. During the day, occasional bands of laborers trudged off to the north to work on the city's last-ditch defenses. The rest of the remaining population seemed to be mostly kids, some hawking U.N. and South Korean flags from sidewalk stands, others having the time of their lives propelling themselves about frozen pavements and ponds on little homemade sleds which they rode squatting on their haunches. Seoul's black-marketeers went imperturbably about their chores, blowing their whistles and semaphoring energetically with their hands whenever a jeep or oxcart hove into sight...
...through the streets, much of it directed at jeep thieves who worked steadily every night. Seoul's Capitol Club, where,, two weeks ago a plate of potato chips had sold for $2.50, was dark and deserted. In its stead, a few blocks away, stood Seoul's last-ditch nightspot, the Consolation Club, which advertised "Fifty Beautiful Women Fifty." Inside, a dozen odd bedraggled beauties gyrated round a scarred dance floor, their swirling Korean skirts revealing singularly unattractive expanses of olive-drab G.I. long Johns...
...writes with poetic affection for the countryside: "It was chalk country. Except where the trees stood in neat clumps upon the hills and where a belt of cornfields crept up among the contours, the turf and tilth were thin upon the rock. Cut this country anywhere in lane or ditch and it bled white...
...Communist terrorism. The Emergency is not getting any better. Every day or so another planter or soldier or constable is killed. Recently, bandits fired into a car in which a planter's daughter, aged 2½, was riding. They hit the driver and the car went into the ditch. Then the bandits came up, shot the little girl through the head at close range, killed the cook boy who tried to protect her. "Swine -just swine!" exclaimed a British official, and the planters were even more bitter...
...bullets from North Korean rifles. He did not even notice that the plane had been hit until the pressure gauge on the instrument panel began to fall off to zero, and he realized that one of the slugs had hit fuel lines. He managed to turn around and ditch the plane about a mile offshore in the sea. He remembers scrambling into the life raft and watching the plane sink slowly. "I gave it sort of a half salute." His main worry was what his plane captain would think when Ensign Tatum was reported missing. A British cruiser picked...