Death of a Preacher

Preaching the word in North Korea, Pang Wha II, Presbyterian minister, felt the Communist wrath for the first time in 1945. World War II was barely ended when the Reds drove him from his little parish in Sinuiji at the Yalu. He moved southwest of Pusan. There, in 1948, a gang of South Korean Communists went after him. Hiding in his house, he listened helplessly as the rioters beat his wife for refusing to tell where he was. They beat her until her eyes grew blank, until she could remember nothing but would thenceforth sit all the day staring.

But later, a better thing happened. The World Council of Churches offered Pang a year's scholarship in the U.S. He headed for his brother's home near Suwon to tell him the wonderful news. The brother was away, and Pang settled down to wait. There, on the night of last Dec. 5, violence caught up with Pang again. As the story was pieced together later by Army investigators, a white U.S. Army lieutenant and three Negro G.I.s burst into the freezing mud-and-stick hut where Pang, his sister-in-law and her two children lay huddled on straw mats. They announced that they were searching for stolen U.S. goods--blankets, canteens and canteen cups. Pang placed himself before the woman and children, and, in halting English, objected to the search.

The lieutenant slugged Pang with his flashlight, then pistol-whipped him with a .45. Pang slumped to the floor, senseless. Rushed by a jeep to a Marine sick bay, then by helicopter to a hospital ship, Pang Wha II died four days later without regaining consciousness.

For six weeks nothing happened. The soldiers involved were Army engineers, attached to the Air Force, building a Marine base, and Pang had died on a Navy ship. "Nobody," explained an Army officer, "can decide who should hold the court-martial." The case might have outlasted the war had not the correspondent of a small Chicago monthly, Christian Life, mailed the story. The influential Christian Century picked it up, demanded that the Army "make sure this case is not whitewashed ... and that Washington fully recognizes the seriousness of this shocking affair."

Last week the Army, bestirred to action, announced that it would try a second lieutenant for "unpremeditated murder and unlawful entry."

As for Pang's dull-eyed and incoherent widow and their four children, they huddled in a 15-by-30-ft. tent, which they shared with three others in a Pusan slum. Cardboard stuffed along the sides blocked out some of the cold, but in the middle of the room a pan of water froze quite hard. At week's end nobody from the Army had called on the family; a spokesman explained that "no administrative procedures have been drawn" to handle this sort of thing.

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