Blood brothers – Frank McNally on the deaths of two young men, one Irish, in the Korean War

At an army museum near the Korean border last week, I read the moving story of Lee Woo-Geun, a 16-year-old boy soldier who died while defending South Korea against the communist North’s invasion in August 1950.

His short life is encapsulated in a letter he wrote to his mother the day beforehand, now enlarged into one of the museum’s keynote exhibits.

The teenager in third-year at middle school when he volunteered to take part in the Battle of Pusan Perimeter, a last-stand by UN forces (comprising mostly South Korean, American, and British troops) after all but that southeast corner of the country had been overrun.

And on the day he wrote to his mother, he had just killed “around ten” enemy soldiers with a hand grenade. But he was too frightened to exult in this:

Custer’s Last Tune – Frank McNally on the dubious history of the ballad Garryowen

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Drama and spirituality – Desmond O’Neill on Rossini’s Petite messe solennelle

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Dutch gold – Frank McNally on a weekend in idyllic Amsterdam

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Music of chance – John Fleming on his encounters with Paul Auster

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“Even now, as I am writing this letter, I can still hear the vast explosive roar. Though they were enemies, their legs and arms were dragged off. It was a cruel death. They are the enemies but also humans, and we are the same people: speaking the same language and sharing the same blood. I feel frustrated, and my heart is heavy.”

His beleaguered unit by then numbered “only 71″ and, as they defended a strategically-located girls’ school along one of the battle fronts, they were surrounded by communist forces, temporarily lying low but sure to attack again soon.

Between waves of fear, Woo-Geun fantasised about being back at home with his family, wearing “clean long-johns”, eating “lettuce-wrapped rice” and drinking cold water from a fountain “until my teeth feel numb”.

He promised his mother he would survive somehow. Then he broke off writing: “No! They are coming again. I’ll continue this letter later. Mother, goodbye, goodbye. Oh no, I won’t say goodbye. I’ll write to you again ...”

The letter was dated August 10th, 1950, and along with a blood-stained diary was found in his clothes after he died the following day. His story inspired the 2010 Korean movie 71: Into The Fire.

That film should not be confused with ‘71, the 2014 British thriller about an English soldier who, in the early years of the Northern Irish Troubles, finds himself trapped in republican West Belfast and struggling (a little improbably, I thought) to find a way out of its maze of side-streets.

But the story of Lee Woo-Geun also reminded me of the first Irish (military) victim of the Korean War, who died only days later in that same corner of the peninsula. And as it happens, he was from Belfast, originally, although he grew up in my hometown, Carrickmacross, near which he is now buried.

Thomas John Ward’s fate may have been indirectly affected by Ireland’s earlier Troubles. He was born near the Falls Road in 1926, but the family soon afterwards moved south to Monaghan, in the new Free State. He then emigrated from Carrick to the US as a 20-year-old in 1947.

I put the word “military” in brackets earlier because the first Irish person to die in the Korean War was a civilian religious missionary, Fr Anthony Collier.

Born in Clogherhead, Co Louth, Collier had been in Korea with the Columban Fathers since 1939. He was stationed at Chunchon, northeast of Seoul when on only the third day of the invasion, June 27th, 1950, he was murdered by the North Korean army.

Ward was perhaps always destined for army life. His father, also Tom, had been a US cavalry man during the first World War. But Tom jnr had just finished his military training when the Korean War broke out.

Within weeks, his infantry division, nicknamed the “Cacti”, landed at Pusan. Barely a month later, on August 22nd, 1950, he was killed in action, aged 23.

He was posthumously awarded the Purple Heart. And in a letter to his family, Gen Douglas MacArthur expressed the hope that they might derive some comfort from knowing he had given his life in defence of a “peace-loving people”.

At least 29 Irishmen died in the Korean War, mostly in British uniform. In 2003, on the 50th anniversary of the conflict’s ending, some of the Irish who had died in American uniforms were posthumously awarded US citizenship.

Vis his father, Ward had that already at the time of his death. Even so, after first being interred in Korea, his remains were repatriated to the land of his birth.

He is buried in Donaghmoyne, just north of Carrickmacross and close to another stubbornly persistent international border, albeit one now largely invisible and devoid of the barbed wire, barricades, and heavily-mined no man’s land still dividing the two Koreas.